The Baklava Club: A Novel (Investigator Yashim) (6 page)

Brought to her apartment, Natasha had unpinned her bonnet. Her straight black hair was neatly parted in the center and tied into a bun at the back. “It’s so strange,” she said, looking curiously around the room. She ran her hands over the tiled walls and plumped down on the divan, putting her eye to the lattice. “I was never in a palace before,” she added, unsmiling, leaning back on her hands.

“It’s not like other palaces, perhaps,” Yashim explained. He told her something of its history, of how the harem quarters had been built up slowly, over the centuries, while kiosks and pavilions were added to the seraglio, the private quarters of the sultan. “He doesn’t live here anymore. He moved to a Frankish palace, along the Bosphorus.”

“A Frankish palace! I like this one.”

A maidservant had come in, bowing. Yashim introduced her, and explained that she knew a few words of Russian. She was a Circassian: Natasha’s eyes had narrowed slightly.

“Well, she was the best I could find,” the valide commented when Yashim had finished telling her about her guest’s arrival. “I’ve forgotten her name, but she’s been here some years already. And what did you discuss?”

“The weather, her journey.” Her replies had been brief; he had supposed, among other things, that she was tired. “And you a little, of course, hanum efendi.”

“You thought she needed to be
prévenu, hein
?”

“I sensed that she was interested, hanum efendi,” Yashim answered carefully.

“And you said I was old and bored, and wanted company? That I was charming, but could still bite?”

Yashim had not, in fact, said quite as much. He laughed. “I brought her to the apartment, to settle in and rest.”

The valide’s brows arched. “And the old women—did they crowd around?”

“I told them that your guest needed to rest.” Even they had wilted slightly before Natasha’s stare.

“I doubt that will put them off, Yashim. They will pull her
bagages
to pieces, and insist that she disrobe to show off her stays. I do not entirely blame them. In my day, even European fashions were more free. After the revolution in France, I understand, the girls wore white chemises.
Charmante!
You will bring her to me in the morning, and we shall discuss everything.”

She dismissed Yashim by closing her eyes and leaning back into her cushions.

Outside in the court, he wondered if he should look in on Natasha Borisova once more; but he remembered her cool expression and decided that Mademoiselle Borisova would have no need of his help this evening.

There was time before dark to see Palewski, if he hurried.

12

“I
T’S
not a collection you have, Palewski. It’s a disease.”

The priest patted one of Palewski’s bookcases.

“I recognize the symptoms myself, by way of being a fellow sufferer, somewhat. I palliate the torment, Palewski, by a strict diet of incunabula and manuscript, the latter preferably illuminated. A regimen of perpetual Latin, classical where I can find it, but church Latin still does for me. I recommend the practice, sir.”

Palewski chuckled. “Just the approach my own father took. Of course we lost it all after the Partition, and I didn’t have the heart to start afresh. You’d have appreciated the collection.”

Doherty lowered his head. “Speaking as a friend, if I may, I sympathize with your loss—although to be perfectly honest nothing excites the collector in me more than the thought of a library being broken up.” He took a sip of champagne and licked his lips. “But that’s as may be. What have we here?”

He took down a commentary on Juvenal. It had been written some seventy years ago, by a relative of Palewski’s, and before long they were discussing the value of commentaries, the merits of early Venetian typefaces, the translation work done in Toledo in the thirteenth century, and the influence of Arab thinkers on Thomas Aquinas. Since neither Palewski nor his guest saw any good reason to shy from considering how many angels might dance on the head of a pin, the hours flew by comfortably.

Palewski was delighted to discover that Father Doherty was working in the Patriarchal Archives, poring over thousand-year-old deeds, scriptures, and texts with a view to drawing up a comparative register. The Vatican Library, to which Father Doherty had privileged access, was famously well stocked, but a huge amount of material—especially material relating to the early history of the popes—was evidently missing.

“We know it, Palewski. Everything at the Vatican points to the existence of documents somewhere else. A correspondence, for example, of which only one side remains. A trail of reference that goes cold, a chain that falls apart, some document of which only fragmentary quotations survive. I’ll not deny you, there’s more in the Vatican itself than any man knows, and yet—the burning of the library at Alexandria! The wretched conflagration of parchment and vellum that attended the sack of Constantinople in 1204! Not to mention the Viking raids, in my own country, and the rest of the Isles—Dublin and Lindisfarne, Glasgow and Iona! It makes my flesh creep to think of it all.”

“But it brings you to Istanbul?”

Doherty nodded, and poured another glass. There were still various important papers and manuscripts, he explained, which might—just might, at that—be found to have survived in the Patriarchal Archives. As recently as 1453, when the Turks seized the city, an Orthodox bishop had borne some priceless manuscripts away to Rome, and left hints about the treasures that he’d left behind. Finally, almost for the first time in centuries, Vatican officials had reached an agreement with their Orthodox counterparts, and Doherty had been sent by the Vatican librarians to take a look.

“Not that it’s easy to do so, Palewski. There’s Brother Agapios, for one thing.”

“Brother Agapios?”

“The very same.” The Irishman took a stand next to Palewski’s bookshelves and announced: “Brother Agapios!” He stooped, folded his hands, and slowly allowed his head to revolve, suspiciously, along the spines.
“A chained library? We don’t need a chained library here. My name, schismatic, is Agapios.”

He straightened up, grinning. Palewski nodded, uneasily.

“To be sure, to be sure. I like the man!” Father Doherty pulled out a handkerchief, and mopped his forehead. “Admire him.” He swayed slightly beside the shelves. “I understand him, to tell the truth.”

“It has been four centuries, and a little more, since the Ottoman conquest of Istanbul, Father. Not always easy for the Patriarch—or his librarians—to steer a safe course. At times sultans would have cast them all to the flames, and their books, too.”

“Four centuries, and a little more,” Doherty echoed. “And a Brother Agapios every generation, I’ve no doubt.”

He came over and sat on the chair Yashim liked, and stared at the ceiling.

“You’re young at this, man.”

“Young?” Palewski lowered his feet to the floor. “Young at what?

“Endurance.”

Palewski bent forward and tilted his glass until the champagne touched the brim. “Poland, you mean?”

Doherty meant Poland, but it was Ireland he spoke about.

“Will you endure when they’ve driven you to the marshes? When they desecrate your churches, will you endure? When your professors and your priests have been driven from pillar to post, starved, beaten, and deprived of a living? Tell me how you think about endurance when your children take instruction in the hedgerows, and the wisest man in Leinster gathers his audiences in a ditch—a ditch! With a boy to be peeping out for the redcoats! Say it again, my friend, when you see the language beaten out of them, afraid to speak to their own sires in their own tongue.”

Palewski bowed his head. “Even if it comes to that.”

He watched the bubbles rise in his glass. There was a speech he could make, too, but instead he said: “We have greater hopes than you might imagine.”

Doherty was silent.

“Ireland is isolated—but the whole continent of Europe is poised for change.”

Doherty blew out his cheeks. “That’s what they said about Napoleon—but he didn’t pull Poland’s chestnuts out of the fire, man.”

“No—I don’t look to the French. They follow their own interests.”

“But you’ll not have change without them,” Doherty said. “That’s what history tells us. Who else is there?”

Palewski swung the bottle and refilled the glasses. “Credit where it’s due—at least the French gave us champagne! Tell me more about the Patriarchal Archives.”

Doherty gave an enormous sigh, and began to describe the stacks, loaded with ancient books. “Very much in my line, Your Excellency, for there’s barely a printed book of any worth among them. My Greek’s a little rusty, to tell the truth, but I can see that their Greek texts are a pretty crude affair, neither well made (they send to Venice for the better sort), nor interesting from a theological point of view. But it’s a rare treasure trove of manuscripts—some bound, some loose, organized by the devil himself, I take it. That’s what makes Brother Agapios so indispensable—he’s the only one who knows where the things are. And he does it all by touch.”

“By touch?”

“God’s truth. The man’s blind as a bat.”

Palewski leaned back in his armchair, smiling. Every now and then he got the urge to reshelve his own voluminous collection of books, according to some new principle that had occurred to him: size, perhaps, or subject, or author. But touch—that was a new one. He turned the idea over in his mind, and was still musing when the front door banged and the sound of footsteps rang busily on the staircase outside.

“
Ciao, Palewski! Sta bene?
Here we are again, and—ah!”

Giancarlo swiveled to the little priest, who inclined his head politely.

Palewski’s first thought, when he heard the familiar rumpus on the stairs, was that the timing was poor; but he had underestimated the priest’s affability and the Italians’ natural good manners. When Doherty finally understood why the boys were in Istanbul, he only smiled and cocked his head, and observed that modern politics were not in his line.

“By modern, now, I mean anything that occurred after the Schism of 1054,” he added, with a twinkle in his eye. “No doubt about it, that’s why I get along so well with my Orthodox brethren. After all, I am only a parish priest,” he reminded them, “with the soul of a librarian.”

Giancarlo laughed. “We have no argument with libraries!”

“But they should be open for the people,” Rafael added, solemnly. “Even at the Vatican.”

“Especially there,” Giancarlo retorted. He glanced at Birgit but she was smiling out the window.

“Mary and Joseph!” Father Doherty cried. “But you touch me on the raw, my dear fellows! I’m all for the people, love them and bless them. But”—he wagged a finger—“but it’s not to say I want a library at the very mercy of all the dust, dirt, and sneezes of Christendom! My dear fellows, just consider the mayhem and the destruction that would ensue, should all the world’s scholars and wasters descend in a body on those priceless documents and books! I speak as a scholar, not as a politician, of course.” He half-turned to Palewski. “The ambassador has the old disease, as well as me. Bibliomania!”

“Incurably,” Palewski murmured.

“There’s manuscripts in the Vatican that would fall apart if you so much as breathed on ’em! It’s not a library—it’s a record of civilization itself!”

“A part of one civilization,” Rafael corrected him, holding up a finger.

“Oh, my darlin’ boy—you’d find stuff from all your other civilizations in there, too. To whom, might I ask, did the Great Cham write, when he wanted to speak to Christendom? To whom did the sultan here in Istanbul address himself—or the Great Mogul, or the Khans of Bulgaria? There’s letters in that Vatican Library, let me tell you, written in scripts that are dead and forgotten everywhere else—written on bark and in blood, dear men, letters from vanished civilizations, testaments to worlds and lands that are buried beneath the desert sands, or deluged beneath the waves for their iniquities, no doubt. How—how did the great Charlemagne sign his name, do you know?”

Giancarlo shrugged. Palewski bent forward: “With an
X
.”

“That’s right! With an
X
. It’s on the deeds, preserved in that great library! Not a library at all, but a hidden world, a preserved testament to the history of mankind in Europe—and beyond! I’ll have another glass, yes, why not. I’m enjoying myself.” Father Doherty twinkled as the wine flowed, and even Rafael, dark and solemn, could not resist a smile. He was not quite ready to give up the fight, though.

“What about the Index? The books His Holiness thinks are too dangerous, that we are too weak to read?”

Father Doherty gave one of his cheerful winks. “Oooh, now, the Index. I’ll tell you something about it, if you like. There’s books in there that would make your flesh creep, and books that would make you laugh, and nine out of ten aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on, God’s honest truth. Drivel, flattery of princes, praise of the Seven Sins, the production of weak and disordered minds.”

“Galileo Galilei? Dante? Savonarola?”

But Doherty wasn’t having that. “And who’s to stop you reading them, if you’ve a mind to do it? There, you’re an educated man, and you’ve read these books, no doubt…”

Palewski’s eyes wandered toward the window, where Birgit sat and gazed pensively at the wisteria that drifted up the wall. He joined her, leaving the others still talking around the fireplace. She turned her head toward him, smiling her slow Danish smile.

“I thought Istanbul would be—different,” she said. “But really, it’s the same. A priest, the boys talking, champagne. The ambassador.”

“The ambassador’s not different?”

Her eyes flickered. “Maybe. Unusual.”

“Istanbul has become more unusual since you came,” Palewski said.

“How do—oh!” She took his meaning, and blushed. “I wear a headscarf in the street.”

Palewski shook his head. “If it were only your hair…”

Birgit gave a low laugh. “That I am traveling with these boys? Is that what you mean?”

It was Palewski’s turn to blush. “I didn’t mean—that is, it’s something else about you, unknown in Istanbul. An independence, perhaps.”