The Baklava Club: A Novel (Investigator Yashim) (8 page)

“I know the story. But nobody knows about this business, I can assure you.”

“Hmm. I know a little now. Midhat Pasha knows, and your visitor, of course. I suppose he has servants? His valet will know. Fellow passengers, if he takes a ship. And the docks are full of informants.” The docks of Istanbul were full of men of all nationalities, and none.

He got up to study Palewski’s portrait of Jan Sobieski, the Polish king who had saved the Austrians at the walls of Vienna.

“And whatever you’re about,” he murmured, “the balance of power has not come about by sheer accident. It has to be maintained, like a clock.”

“It has been,” Palewski responded gloomily. “For more than twenty-five years, since the Congress of Vienna. They have a secret committee devoted to it.”

Yashim blew out his cheeks. “Sometimes secrets are revealed because people involved only see the secret, and forget that all the avenues that lead to it may be watched. A paper tossed into a basket. A regular appointment canceled. I’ve known secrets exposed by an inappropriate smile.”

Palewski held his glass to the light. “What do you take me for?”

Yashim laid his hand on Palewski’s shoulder. “Secrets are awkward bundles, and they can shift unexpectedly. I’ll go home now. I have an appointment with Mademoiselle Borisova tomorrow.”

At the door he looked back. Palewski had the glass pressed against his forehead, and Yashim felt a surge of affection for him. “Keep it all in your head,” he said.

And with that, he was gone.

14

I
F
Istanbul seemed to Yashim to have grown commonplace, another stop on the circuit of cities that ringed the Mediterranean, his day negotiating the streets with Mademoiselle Borisova should have taught him otherwise.

It was not, really, a city for visitors. Even in the heyday of the Grand Tour, when English milords completed their education by traipsing around the sights of Europe, painting, botanizing, scrutinizing architecture, and haggling for artworks to adorn their country seats, Istanbul was considered a far reach. The milords had no friends there, no letters of introduction; no painting masters would step forward eagerly to teach them the rudiments of perspective, no pashas opened their houses to them, no cicerones offered them sisters or daughters—and there was nothing to drink.

The sights themselves were hard to get at, if they were worth visiting at all. From the city walls to the Ayasofya, the former capital of the Byzantine empire was truffled with antiquities—but the western gentlemen had all read Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
which maintained that Byzantine architecture, like the civilization it represented, was effete, artificial, and corrupt. Gibbon’s judgment had prevailed over European opinion for a hundred years.

The milords wanted public spaces to stroll about in—those squares and
places
and piazzas, furnished with arcades and cafés, promenades and palm trees, that claimed to be the drawing room of Europe, or the Rotten Row of Italy, or the forums of the ancient world. Other cities called themselves the Paris of the East, or the Venice of the North, but no comparison, however well intentioned, could be offered to Istanbul. In the eyes of its inhabitants, Greek, Turkish, or Armenian, it was simply the center of the world.

But Natasha had the Orthodox Russian’s kinship with Byzantium, and its arts: she was Orthodox, and Istanbul remained the seat of Orthodoxy. Unlike the milords, she had one friend, and one powerfully placed. The valide sent her out with Yashim, making her promise to tell her about everything she did and saw, and providing Yashim with a firman that would act as a laissez-passer to palaces and mosques.

The milords avoided Istanbul, because there was no society and they wished to see and be seen. Mademoiselle Borisova certainly did not wish to be seen—she shrank from the sideways glances of the porters and the shopkeepers, or the franker stares of the Greeks; but Yashim was not sure that she wished to see very much, either. She walked through the Grand Bazaar without once turning her head, blinkered by her bonnet, and holding her parasol very firmly by its ivory handle, tightly furled, as if she meant to assassinate someone with it. Ayasofya she declared to be very big, which seemed scant reward for the difficulty of persuading the guardian—who did not read—to obey the valide’s firman when Yashim waved it under his nose. The Blue Mosque of Ahmet III brought her out in an attack of shivering; she complained that it was too cold. She, a child of Siberian winters!

He took her to see the new bridge across the Golden Horn: it reminded her of bridges she had crossed in Russia. He took her to the Galata Tower, and though Yashim admired her strength and fitness as she ran up the seven hundred steps to the top, she did not seem to admire the tower so very much, and responded to Yashim’s evocation of the Genoese city that had stood here once with something like a grunt. She exclaimed over the view, however, as Yashim pointed out the silhouetted mosques, and the outline of Topkapi Palace, where she was lodging; and she admitted that the effect of all the roofs, cascading down to the water’s edge on the Stamboul side, was pretty.

It was not easy, because of the wings of her bonnet, but every so often he would catch a glimpse of her face, lips compressed, her eyes dark and unrevealing, her chin tilted in a way that echoed the angle of her parasol.

He debated whether to take her to a pudding shop or to the French patisserie on the Grande Rue, and decided that she might be more comfortable in a Frankish setting. Once seated, she removed her bonnet, and began to make small circles on the table with her fingertip. Yashim gave his order, and waited for her to speak.

“Your people seem to live very well,” she said at length. “In the Grand Bazaar I saw—so many interesting things. So many cloths, and jewels, and pretty shoes.”

The remark surprised him: he had felt, at the time, that nothing interested her at all, that she saw nothing.

“You must tell me what you like, and I will buy it for you,” he said. The valide had slipped him a purse of gold coins and told him to spend it.

She moved uneasily on her chair.

“The bazaar is like a world of its own,” he said. “Everything in our empire is made there, or traded there. It has its own mosque, of course, and two bathhouses.” This was dull information, for a young woman; he tried again. “I used to go there for books, especially. The bookseller was a Greek, with one eye: he couldn’t read, but he knew just how much to charge. In the end he was murdered.”

That had caught her attention.

“Murdered? But why?”

Yashim leaned forward and began to tell a story, about a book that should have never been sold; about an archaeologist who came from France, and a corpse whose face was eaten by dogs as it lay in the street.
*
She gazed at the table as he spoke, like a schoolchild trying to understand a lesson; but when he thought she was bored, she said: Go on. So he told her also about the old sultan, who died, and about the cisterns and tunnels beneath their feet, and how he had once searched for treasure there. It was a long story.

“But in the end—you found it?”

“Yes, I found it. But it was not where I thought it was, and it was not what I thought it would be.”

His coffee grounds had dried in the cup.

“That was an interesting story,” she said. “I will not tell it to the valide.”

“Why not? She knows most of it, anyway.”

“She knows? But she—she…”

“She enjoys a good story. In fact—”

At that moment someone loomed over their table, and Yashim glanced up to see Compston of the British embassy, fingering his fair mustache.

“I say, Yashim efendi, what? Your coffee’s gone cold, haw haw.”

Yashim got to his feet and presented the newcomer: “Mr. Compston, Mademoiselle Borisova.” Natasha nodded and looked away.

“I gather your friend Palewski’s taken up shooting duck, efendi.”

Yashim gave a start.

“They’re rather in my line, ducks,” Compston explained. “We’re a Norfolk family,” he added, turning to Natasha. “Plenty of good shooting out there on the flats. I’d like to ask Palewski if I could join him some morning. I shouldn’t think he’d mind, do you, Yashim efendi? What sort of gun does he shoot?”

Out of the whir of thoughts racing through his head, Yashim brought out a name. “Boutet.”

Compston whistled. “Must be beauties. Heard about ’em, never seen one fired in anger, so to speak. Pater left me his Purdeys.”

Yashim recalled the make: the valide had once, to his astonishment, scored a bull’s-eye with one of a pair of Purdey pistols given to her by Sultan Abdülhamid.

“Along with his Hunter?”

“Here it is, and all thanks to you.” Compston fished the watch from his pocket, flipped it open, and snapped it shut again. “Well, must run! I don’t forget a good turn, Yashim efendi. Mademoiselle.”

He was gone, with a short bow.

“Who was that?” She didn’t sound very interested, and anyway, Yashim was thinking back to the warning he had given Palewski the previous night, and wondering what else Compston knew about.

Wondering who else might know about it, too.

15

G
IANCARLO,
Rafael, and Fabrizio left the apartment in the afternoon. Birgit stayed at home, pleading a headache.

When they had gone, she loosened her stays and began to brush her hair at the mirror, putting one finger down on a book on the dressing table to keep it open. The book was a new one, written by a Dane named Søren Kierkegaard, and it seemed to be about the effect of religious convention on religious faith. It was called
On the Concept of Irony
.

Birgit found parts of it rather hard to follow, but she didn’t mind. She wanted to read a book in a language that none of the boys could understand and talk to her about—talk
at
her, perhaps, being the better term, for they were of an age, and sex, that made them recite their opinions, rather than discuss them. Søren Kierkegaard was her secret, her private friend. She found that he had a tendency to recite his opinions, too, but he did it in a language only she could understand.

There were parts of
On the Concept of Irony
she did not follow, but she accepted that as a sort of irony, too, and it made her smile. “People understand me so little,” Søren had written, “that they do not even understand me when I complain of being misunderstood.” She thought of him as Søren.

Birgit did not actually have a headache, but she craved a few hours of solitude, and she liked to brush her hair and read her book. Now and then she found herself wondering what Søren was like. She imagined him with flaming red hair, a long, beaky nose, and spectacles.

It was rather hot, and her stays stuck to her skin where she had loosened them, plucking at her stickily as she shifted on the chair and followed the cascade of yellow hair with firm downstrokes of the brush. The feeling grew into an irritation, until she stood up, slipped out of her dress, and released the fastenings one by one. She tossed corset and dress onto the divan, and went on brushing her hair, standing with Søren’s book between the fingers of her left hand.

It was warm enough to go naked. She glanced briefly at the window, but the latticed shutters were firmly closed.

“Der ligger i den hele nyere Udvikling en stor Tilbøielighed til—langtfra med Taknemmelighed at erindre sig de Kampe og Besværligheder, Verden har udstaaet for at blive til det, den er—om muligt endog at forglemme de Resultater, den i sit Ansigts Sved har erhvervet, for paany at begynde forfra, og i ængstende Forudfølelse af.”

There was nobody about to hear, and it felt nice to hear Søren speaking their language in the deep, scholarly voice she gave him, as best she could.

“Efter disse almindeligere Betragtninger, hvis inderligere organiske Forhold til vort Forehavende paa sit Sted vil, saa haabe vi, vorde Læserne klart.”

As for Ghika, the landlord, he didn’t care if the woman spoke Sanskrit or Irish—though he would have preferred to hear her speaking in a higher, more girlish tone. It wasn’t really her voice he cared about, as he congratulated himself on taking the trouble to put his eye to the keyhole of the apartment.

What he could see exceeded all his hopes and expectations: a young woman with breasts that quivered with every stroke of the brush, every stroke of the brush that caressed her long blond hair.

She was quite alone now. Those men had gone.

And the door, evidently, was unlocked.

He put out his tongue to wet his lips, breathing heavily at the door.

16

“I wonder,” said the valide, touching her hair, “if we did quite right to ask her?”

“We, hanum efendi?” It was a bit of a jump, even for Yashim, who knew how the valide’s mind could work.

“Such a homely little thing. A real hen.”

“Hanum efendi?”

“So reticent,” she said. “I expected, from her letters, more
joie de vivre
. A little wit.”

“This evening you will present Natasha to the ladies?”

“You needn’t stay. It will be an undignified affair,
sans doute
. Old women clacking at her underwear and pinching her cheeks. In spite of everything, Yashim, I don’t think of you as—well, at least, it is not your place. But you may tell her that I will be ready to receive her in an hour.”

He found Natasha in her apartment, sitting on the divan and still in her outdoor clothes. Only the bonnet lay beside her, its ribbons dangling.

“Then I must dress,” she said wearily. “She wants entertainment—but I don’t dance the troika.”

“At her age,” Yashim said quietly, “the valide has seen a great deal of the hot and cold of fate. Now, I think, she wishes to avoid melancholy.”

Natasha tilted her head to one side. “If you say so.” Her voice was flat, bored. Why, it was as if Natasha Borisova had come all this way to turn the empire over in her mind, like a piece of china in the bazaar.

“You have come with an object, I understand that,” he said, “but you are also the valide’s guest. Her first foreign guest, I believe. Perhaps you didn’t know that?”