The Baklava Club: A Novel (Investigator Yashim) (34 page)

Yashim ran over and put his arms around her. “Someone’s shooting. Are you—”

The question died on his lips. Her hand was clamped to her cheek, and through her fingers a welling black flood was spreading across her hand.

She looked at him with her big dark eyes, frightened and inquiring, and tried to speak. But only a jumble of sounds fell from her lips.

“Don’t speak.” He smoothed her hair. “You don’t have to speak.”

“Ya-Yachim.”

He heard the blood in her voice. Nothing was clear to him, only a sudden bright light that flashed in at the window, illuminating the broken spars, the body of Rafael still warm on the floor, the woman in his arms.

A thunderclap sounded behind them, and the house shook.

“Ra—ch—ael. Fael.”

“Rafael? You didn’t need to—it’s when I knew.” His fingers searched her hair, to find that hollow spot on the back of her neck. He rubbed it, gently.

Natasha let her hand drop from her cheek. The side of her face had been shot away.

She reached up and placed her palm on his cheek.

“Uv. I—uv. You did it.”

“Love?” He thought of Birgit and the boys and Doherty, who’d died.

Her fingers slipped back around his ear, pulling at it, drawing it around. “For you. Uv. Y-Ya-chim.”

He looked down at her ruined face. Everything that was whole was still impossibly beautiful: her nose, her arched brows; a little scar on her lip that still cast a tiny shadow.

Her eyes welled up, and in her tears he saw the bright flash again, and the sparkling white trace that lit up the whole sky.

Yashim slipped his knee beneath her back, to hold her up, and cradled her head in his arms.

“Once there was a girl,” he began. “She lived…”

“Stop.”

Yashim looked down. She blinked.

There was a bang, and a sudden wind, and something fell from above in a flurry of old straw and crashed onto the floor. Natasha’s fingers brushed Yashim’s lips. Her eyes never left his face.

“A beautiful girl,” Yashim whispered. “Who did terrible things for love.”

“Father. You.” Her head swayed. “Did you—?”

“Did I—?”

Her eyelids fluttered, and her chest convulsed.

“Before—and after, Natasha. I loved you.” A tear rolled down his cheek. “I love you.”

She closed her eyes. Yashim cradled her in his arms, holding her wounded face against his breast, staring at those dark brows, the tender bows of her eyelashes, the narrow bridge of her nose and the nostrils. She was alive, so alive against his leg and beneath his arms that he could imagine she was only sliding gently into sleep.

Once he thought crazily that her eyes were opening again. But it was only the light of the flames that licked across the broken roof.

He felt her shiver, for a moment, in his arms, and he rolled her head onto his chest and looked up at the lamp that was still glowing on the window ledge. A clump of burning sticks fell to the ground. Still Yashim did not move.

“The gunners have found their mark,” he said aloud. “I don’t know why.”

And for some reason he thought of the old
kadi
, with his scrap of yellow paper.

“Of course,” he murmured. He bent and kissed her brow. The clerk, with sixty-six pieces of silver! He’d sold the secret of Czartoryski’s visit—and Midhat found out. The Italians didn’t kill Abdullah Ozgem. Natasha didn’t kill him. He was dead as soon as Midhat Pasha guessed.

Midhat, always so anxious not to be overheard, discovered there had been a leak right there, in the ministry—just as Yashim had warned him.

Midhat’s reaction would be to stop the leak—and erase the evidence that it had ever occurred. He knew Yashim might uncover the trail. So he had Ozgem killed.

A plausible attitude to take, if the reputation of your ministry needed to be protected. Close down the whole operation. Czartoryski, the Italians—once they were gone, there was nothing, actually, to show that anything had happened. Czartoryski might never have arrived. Ozgem dead, a detail. The rest was anecdote.

There would have been a nest of foreign vipers in a farmhouse, plotting; but now wiped out. They’d murdered a girl. And Czartoryski nowhere to be found.

And outside, from among the trees, Midhat Pasha was finishing the job.

Yashim stroked Natasha’s hair, and marveled at the chiseled beauty of her face as another rocket raced into the air.

She had tried to bring him home. Oh, she was a murderess, and a highly accomplished liar, and it probably didn’t mean a thing but there, just for a moment, Yashim had glimpsed the longed-for place, and felt on his face the winds of home.

80

P
ALEWSKI,
breathing heavily, staggered through the trees.

The gunners hardly saw him coming through the smoke.

“What the hell’s going on? My friend’s down there!”

Midhat turned his sad eyes on him. “That’s the first I’ve heard of it, Your Excellency. Yashim, I believe, is still at Eyüp. This is an operation to clear out a nest of vipers and revolutionaries.”

Palewski goggled at him. “You—imbecile! You’ve got Yashim, Czartoryski, and the Russian girl down there. Stop this bombardment at once! Send in your men.”

“I do not believe in exposing men to unnecessary risk,” the pasha replied. “My own son died at Shumla Pass because commanders took unnecessary risks.”

“Your son? I don’t believe this.” Palewski simply stared. Midhat looked away.

“Stop the guns this minute, or you will have a Polish ambassador to account for, Midhat Pasha.”

Palewski stepped away and began to walk, very slowly, downhill through the moonlight.

He could see the farmhouse at the bottom of the valley. Half its roof was gone, and from the other end bright orange flames were licking from beneath the tiles.

Palewski’s attention was focused on a lamp that glowed in the window of the ruined farmhouse like a beacon, improbably small and hopelessly faint. It reminded him of the fire on his hearth, and Yashim dropping into his favorite armchair.

Palewski’s chest hurt, but he didn’t care. The grass under his feet was wet with dew: it made a swishing noise as he walked.

The light of the lamp was fading. The flames had taken hold of the roof, and their orange light lurched sickeningly at the window, now advancing, now backing into darkness. The lamp still burned, but against the leaping sheets of flame it dwindled.

He was halfway there. A rocket sizzled up, over his head. It blazed with a bright white flame, banishing the shadows around the farm. Palewski dropped his stick and began to run.

The blood from his wounds seeped through his shirt, but it was warm, and his feet flew over the grass, over the molehills and the tussocks, toward the lamp that burned and flickered in the window.

“Yashim! Yashim!”

The rocket dropped from the sky like a ballerina making a descent en pointe.

Palewski raised his hand to shield his eyes from the glare as it sank toward the farm. He seemed to be really flying now, as he had flown when his heavy brigade rode against the Russians at Borodino, the way his feet had flown as he rushed across the parquet to where Irina was waiting for him, long ago, and longer still, further back, down the long, great winding stairs at home, to his father standing in the hall …

He remembered those moments, and for Palewski they fused into a single, tiny flickering goal in the darkness beyond, a single moment that was, and would always be, the one small point at which a human heart can aim.

And the flash of the rocket lit up the smile on his face.

Epilogue

S
TEAM
rose from the bath, in front of a crackling log fire. The shutters were drawn—with some difficulty, for they were old and slightly warped by sun and rain—and fresh candles twinkled in the pier glass.

Beside the bath, on a low inlay table, stood a tumbler of brandy and a book, taken at random from the shelves.

Prince Adam Czartoryski lay back in the bath and reflected that never, in these last twenty years, had he felt so well.

Respite from a diet of creamy sauces, salty stocks, and twelve elegant courses every night had done wonders for his digestion. He had lost some weight and livened up his musculature, taking cold dips in the pool. Apart from a mild anxiety that he might at any moment be called to his death, he had enjoyed a carefree week. For the first time in twenty years, he whistled in his bath.

The boy had it coming, anyway. When Czartoryski had stumbled on the old well, covered with a few rotten planks, the whole scheme had dropped into his mind complete and in an instant.

“I wonder,” he had said, “since we have no food, if we shouldn’t try drinking water from the well.”

They’d gone to look. Czartoryski had peered over the edge and muttered that it looked dry. Fabrizio had peered, too, and Czartoryski pushed him in.

Tomorrow promised to be an interesting day—lunch with the sultan, and a discussion of his favorite schemes: a new European order, and a settlement for exiled Poles on the shores of the Bosphorus. A safe haven. It might be called something like Adampol, after him.

He took a sip of Palewski’s brandy and picked up the book.

And as he peered a little closely at the letters—for his sight was not quite what it had been—he heard the front door bang, and light footsteps on the stairs, and a woman calling out in fear, or triumph. It was hard to tell.

“Kyrie! Yashim efendi! You—you are home!”

And he heard the murmur of men’s voices, and the sound of their footsteps as they crossed the hall below.

GLOSSARY

Alhamdulillah—thank God

baglama
—a Turkish stringed instrument

chaush
—a page, errand boy

cicerone
—a guide (Italian)

Circassian
—i.e., from the Caucasus, the homeland of many harem women

corek
—a pastry

Decembrists
—Russian mutineers of December 1825

divan
—an Ottoman daybed

efendi
—sir, gentleman

firman
—an imperial order

Frank
—a Christian from western Europe

gelato
—ice cream in Italian

giaour
—disparaging term for unbeliever, a Christian

gözde
—a concubine, sleeping with the sultan

hamal
—street porter

hammam
—Turkish bath

hanum efendi
—madam

imam
—a Muslim teacher, attached to a mosque

inshallah
—God willing

jezail
—long-barreled musket

kadi
—an Ottoman magistrate

kismet
—fate

köçek
—a transvestite male dancer

kuru
ş
—Ottoman coin

lokum
—Turkish delight, a sweet confectionary

medrese—a Muslim school that is often part of a mosque

milord
—literally “my lord,” a wealthy English traveler

mullah
—a Muslim leader

Nasreddin
—a foolish mullah, dispenser of folk wisdom

Nazarene
—i.e., from Nazareth, a Christian

Nasdrovie
—Russian toast

oka
—a Turkish weight of about one pound

pasha
—a title, minister of state

Patriarch
—head of the Orthodox church

raki
—aniseed-flavored alcohol

salaam alaikum
—God be with you

saturno
—a priest’s hat

sipahi
—Ottoman cavalryman

stambouline
—Ottoman frock coat

Stambouliots
—inhabitants of Istanbul, also Istanbullu

Sublime Porte
—literally, High Gate, the name given to Ottoman government; shortened to the Porte

sufi
—holy man

Sultan Abdülhamid
—the valide’s husband

Sultan Mahmut II
—her son

Sultan Abdülmecid
—her grandson and reigning sultan

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

W
HEN
I let slip my initial anxiety that Yashim might not survive this novel, some of his admirers took to my website at www.jasongoodwin.info to protest: their humanitarian instincts, along with wise editorial advice from Julian Loose in London and Sarah Crichton in New York, turned the scales in Yashim’s favor.

Kate, my wife, used her forensic erudition and a red pencil to heal narrative and psychological flaws in the story. Richard Goodwin encouraged our hero to reveal aspects of his physiology that had not been previously exposed. Sarah Chalfant and Charles Buchan at the Wylie Agency have been exemplary Yashimites, while my Estonian editor, Krista Kaer, arranged the world premiere of
The Baklava Club
in its Estonian translation; my thanks also to Juhan Habicht, my translator, and to Ott Sandrak and the Tallinn Headread festival.

Istanbul’s role as a safe haven for European exiles and malcontents first struck me when I was researching
Lords of the Horizons: A History of the Ottoman Empire
, but with
The Baklava Club
already written, Professor Norman Stone reminded me of the many years Garibaldi himself spent in Constantinople. Thanks to him, and to Ömer Koç for friendship and hospitality. I am grateful to Edward Impey and Mark Murray-Flutter of the Royal Armouries for telling me about old guns, and to Enrico Basaglia for checking my blunders in matters Italian; while Emin Saatçi and John Scott—the editor of the world’s finest magazine,
Cornucopia
—led me imaginatively through a duck shoot on the Çekmece lakes, formerly a wild region of marsh and water crossed by Sinan’s beautiful bridge. Any subsequent errors are mine.

The female characters in this book seem to be mad, bad, or dangerous to know. My daughter, Anna, to whom this novel is dedicated, is quite unlike them. Except in her beauty. And her energy of spirit. This book is for her.