The Baklava Club: A Novel (Investigator Yashim) (30 page)

When Yashim presented his letter from the
kadi
, a guard picked up a bunch of enormous keys. Beyond the first door, heavily barred in iron, torches flickered in sockets on the walls. The busy firelight glinted against the walls. They descended a few steps and followed a corridor of raw stone leading deeper into the building, where the fetid stench made Yashim’s eyes water; but it was the sound that made his skin crawl. Groans and lamentations reverberated tonelessly through the vaults with a soughing, rhythmic quality, like wind in the trees or the rasp of waves on a shingle beach. Ceaseless, remorseless, the long, deep echo of centuries of oppression, injustice, and outraged innocence amplified and blended by the prison’s dripping lungs.

The miasma grew thicker as they penetrated to the farther cells. The clatter of their footsteps, the clank of the gate, or the jangle of keys seemed to lose their spark and drift into the backwash of monotonous grumbling, like the remorseless grinding of teeth, that filled the vaults. The stink of unwashed bodies, latrines, and disease blew over them as the turnkey unlocked an iron door, leading Yashim into a vaulted chamber, where a line of squat pillars was divided by heavy iron grilles. Between the pillars Yashim saw white fingers gripping the bars as the inmates struggled for air. Yashim put his cloak to his face to breathe.

“I can’t speak to him here. Fetch him to the guardhouse.”

The turnkey grinned and shook his head. “Here or nowhere, efendi. Move back!” He rattled his stave along the bars of the gate. “Move back!”

Yashim went in, and the gate clanged shut behind him. The impression of crowding lessened somewhat, for most of the prisoners were at the bars, but the light from the corridor was dim and the piers cast huge shadows across the cell. He peered into the dark. Prisoners were lying on the floor, others propped up listlessly against the far wall. Someone was praying, kneeling on the ground; another man ran senselessly from one side of the cell to another, weeping.

Yashim pushed farther into the cell. A man sitting by the back wall raised his arm to shield his face. Yashim took a step closer.

“So they got you, did they?” he said.

Ghika lowered his hand and looked at him through red-rimmed eyes, but said nothing. He was thinking that of all the bad luck he had suffered in the past day, this was perhaps the worst of all.

“You went back,” Yashim said.

Ghika shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Yashim considered him. It was hard to tell, but he thought he could detect the smell of liquor, sharp and sour.

“What are you in here for?”

Ghika averted his eyes. “Some bitch framed me, with the raki. Stole my clothes.”

“I see. Lost your slippers, too? No, that’s right. You left them at the house. With the jewels you stole, and the money in a hole in the floor.”

Ghika groaned. Tears squeezed out easily from between his eyelids. This wasn’t just bad luck, it was a nightmare. He could feel the executioner’s sword on his neck already.

“You can keep it, efendi,” he said. “It’s yours—but I beg you, leave me be.”

“Where’s the Frank?”

Ghika turned his eyes to the far end of the vaults, where Yashim saw a muffled figure cradling his knees. “He’s taken it badly,” he said, with a certain gloomy relish. “How could I tell he didn’t know?”

Yashim went over to Giancarlo, recognizing his fair hair. The face that looked up at him was covered in dried blood. Both his eyes were swollen; one was gummed shut, and his lip was split.

“Yashim!” he said thickly. “Thank God. It’s not true, is it, what Ghika says?”

“I’m really sorry, Giancarlo.” He squatted down and laid a hand on the man’s arm. “Birgit is dead.”

Giancarlo raised his puffy face again, and bared his teeth. “Dead? How? Why?”

Yashim told him.

Giancarlo seemed to wilt. He rocked back and forward, hugging his knees. “Ay! Ay! Ay! Is that—is that why I am here?” he asked at last. “Who would want—? You can’t think it was me?”

“The judge may. When did you last see her, Giancarlo? After the baths, with Natasha?”

“The baths?”

“When Birgit came back from the baths with Natasha, were you there?”

“I don’t remember.”

It was impossible to read any expression in that battered face. “Where did you go? What happened to the three of you?”

Giancarlo began to sob.

Yashim laid a hand on his shoulder. “Giancarlo, the judge thinks that you killed her, or one of your friends. It doesn’t look any better if you can’t tell me where you were.”

Yashim shook his arm. “Come on, man! Where were you all, while Birgit was dying in your own room? Why did you ever leave her alone?”

Prisoners were staring at him, shuffling closer.

Giancarlo’s shoulders heaved.

“You must talk to me,” Yashim said grimly, “or it’s a judge who can’t understand a word you say, and wants you hanged.”

He waited. Then he stood up wearily, and picked his way back to Ghika.

“Five minutes,” he said. “I’ll give you five minutes to tell me everything. Lie to me, and the charge against you becomes murder and assault. I’ll know if you’re lying, Ghika, like I knew yesterday. Tell me the truth and I will even leave your money in its hole. Don’t waste time,” he added, because Ghika had begun to grovel, pawing his feet.

Ghika gabbled through it all, the girls coming back from the baths, Yashim in the hall, then silence; he had not heard a thing upstairs. No one came, and no one went. He thought it odd. He went upstairs in the morning to see if the girl needed anything—he glanced anxiously at Yashim, as if he was afraid his lie would be detected—and couldn’t raise her. He’d gone inside.

“Why?”

“I—I just wanted to see if she was all right.”

“Why shouldn’t she have been?”

Ghika began to sweat. Yashim made to get up.

“No—no, efendi. I’m not lying, it’s just, well…” He wiped his nose with the back of his hand, and sniffed. “I liked to look at her sometimes, efendi.”

“Look at her? How?”

A flicker of a grin, bashful but unmistakable, passed over Ghika’s face. “I saw her sometimes, twice, through the crack in the door. Taking her things off. She had such—”

“All right. You hoped to see her naked. So you went in.”

“In, and stepped on that blood.”

Everything else was as Yashim had suspected. Once Ghika had got over the shock of finding her, he’d stolen whatever he could see lying about, reasoning that whoever had murdered her might have done the same.

“Who did it?”

He looked at Yashim with big eyes. “I don’t know, efendi. I honestly couldn’t say.”

Yashim stood up, and shouldered his way through the crowd. Giancarlo was still huddled over his knees, but he was shaking as if he had a fever.

“Who would kill Birgit?”

“As things stand it looks like you, or one of your friends. That’s why you’re here, Giancarlo. Where have you been?”

Giancarlo shook his head.

“You’re thinking of protecting someone, is that it? All the way to the gallows? It’s not like that here, Giancarlo. Executions are messy.”

Arrests, too, he thought, looking at Giancarlo’s battered face. Someone reached out from the dark and tugged at Yashim’s cloak. “Efendi! Help me!”

Giancarlo turned his head aside.

“Who would kill her? Do you know?” Yashim paused. “Birgit’s dead, and nothing is going to bring her back. But why should you protect her killer?”

“I am innocent, please. Efendi!” He felt another tug on his cloak. He was acting as a magnet in that hot, stuffy cell: a figure from outside, a breath of air and hope. Yashim did not glance around.

“I need your help, Giancarlo. For Birgit’s sake.”

“For pity’s sake!” Another ragged voice whined at his elbow.

Giancarlo’s lips moved, but the words were drowned by begging voices.

“A feather?”

Giancarlo gave a feeble nod. “La Piuma.”

Yashim could make no sense of it. Someone shoved against him and he put out a hand to keep his balance: the floor was slick with damp. More people were drifting back from the bars to implore Yashim to listen.

Giancarlo would tell him almost nothing—and everyone else wanted to tell him everything.

“Come.” He grabbed Giancarlo’s arm and dragged him to his feet.

But it was getting harder to move. Dozens of men drifted around them, thrusting their hands toward Yashim, pawing at his shoulders, twisting his cloak in their fingers. Their murmurs and entreaties became a roar, hemming them in, gathering thickly between Yashim and the gate.

Clutching Giancarlo by the arm, Yashim pressed through the crowd and reached the gate.

The guard saw him and rattled his stick along the bars. “Get back! Stand back!”

But the crowd was too big, too blind, too pressing to move back. Yashim dragged Giancarlo in front of him, took hold of the bars, and braced his arms. Giancarlo stood in the little pocket Yashim had made. But the press was insistent. Yashim felt a body molding to his back. His turban slid forward. His arms shook.

“Get back, there! Away from the bars!”

A sudden pain made Yashim gasp, as the turnkey smashed his stick against the bars. The crowd wailed and roared. Giancarlo was braced against the gate, and Yashim was being squeezed, tighter and tighter. Quite suddenly his arms gave way and the weight of the throng drove him up against Giancarlo, who slammed into the bars.

Yashim was suffocated. All around men screamed and gasped. At Yashim’s elbow a small man with a shaved head closed his eyes; Yashim saw his chin drop; in seconds he had slipped down under the throng, which jammed up to take his place. It was like watching a man drown.

Yashim had been close to death before, and he knew how it came in a wave of lassitude and longing. The screams and gasps had subsided to a ringing in his ears and he no longer fought for breath. The pain in his chest, and his smashed finger, had become something else: the glow of dying embers, or an abstract physical sensation that kept him anchored to the world. Everything was growing dark.

68

R
AFAEL
walked with giddy steps through the streets, his scalp creeping.

Whatever had happened at the flat, it was not the revolution. It was something dark, intimate and disturbed. But then it seemed to Rafael that the revolution had a tendency to darken as soon as words gave way to deeds. The blood congealing on the floor, and on the divan, and across the walls, had been splashed there by their revolutionary acts: of that, Rafael was certain.

The others thought of him as a Jew; he knew that, and avoided thinking about it. He was not, strictly speaking, Jewish. He attended a Christian school, and went to mass until, at the age of seventeen, he lost his faith. After that, it had been a short step to revolutionary ideas.

And yet, blood had been spilled on the ground—and Rafael, who had never seen blood before, knew that it cried for vengeance.

He walked on. Ahead of him, a column of children filed along the road behind an elderly mullah. They were walking two by two, holding hands and chattering merrily. A trip to a mosque, Rafael thought vaguely. He dropped back, disturbed by their gentle, happy prattle until the children streamed through iron gates into the courtyard of a little mosque.

His steps carried him past the railings, and he looked in. A dozen shaven-headed little boys, no more than seven or eight years old, all elbows and missing teeth, were making free of the small courtyard, racing around an old almond tree that had already begun to shed its leaves.

Rafael trailed slowly past a pillar and stopped by the railings. A boy was swinging on the lowest branch of the almond tree, and the old mullah had come out of the mosque to tell him off. The boy jumped to the ground, landed in a squat, and raced away. The mullah said something and turned and went inside.

The boy called to his friends and he began to play the mullah. He wagged his finger at them. He stroked his long beard. He felt a twinge in his back and began to hobble across the courtyard on an invisible stick, wagging his head.

The other boys laughed.

As quickly as the mullah had been assembled he was dissolved, and a new character took his place. Three or four boys lined up, the mullah—stick and beard and wagging finger all forgotten—gave a shout, and then they were off, pounding around the sides of the court, their little elbows pumping, heads up, feet flashing on the cobbles. They swept past Rafael watching at the railings. Once around was not enough! Again!

Another boy joined in, and they made the tiny circuit—but who had won? The argument collapsed almost as soon as it had begun. An armlock, a push, then everyone wanted to see what another little boy was looking at on the trunk of the tree. A lizard, maybe—Rafael couldn’t see. All he could see was a knot of small heads, gravely inspecting the bark, voices low.

The mullah was back. He stood at the doorway and clapped his hands. The boys pulled away reluctantly from the tree, one by one, and began to form a line.

The little boy who had been a mullah, an athlete, and a zoologist was the last to drag himself away. As he finally went to join the others, he caught Rafael’s eye.

Rafael smiled.

The little boy looked at him blankly. Then he slowly pointed two fingers, steadied them on his other arm, cocked his hammer thumb, and fired a shot—
pfui!
—that struck Rafael through the heart.

69

T
HE
turnkey hoisted the torch from its bracket and brought it close to the bars above his head. It was worse than he’d thought—every man in the cell seemed to be pressing toward him in a horrible lump of criminal flesh.

It was the light—the glowing embers of the pain, as Yashim imagined it—that saved his life. For as the torch rose above their heads, Yashim glimpsed the outline of the massive piers, and the narrow ledge around them from which the vaults sprang.

Before the press could swallow him he made a final effort, reaching up as he felt his chest compressed. His fingers met an iron bar. The metal was rough and wet, but it afforded him a slight grip, and with a heave that almost wrenched his shoulder apart he managed to struggle an inch or so higher, above the heads of the crowd.