The Janissary Tree (10 page)

"Boys'
night," she said, without looking around. "You're lucky to find me.

"Business
is good?"

"Never
better. There. How do I look?"

"Eye-catching."

She
turned her head this way and that, following her reflection in the mirror.

"Not
old?"

"Certainly
not," said Yashim quickly.

Preen
put her fingers to her cheek and gently pushed the skin up. She let it drop,
and Yashim saw her look at him in the mirror. Then she smiled brightly and
turned to face him.

"Fixing
a party?"

Yashim
grinned and shook his head. "Looking for information."

She
raised a finger and wagged it at him. An enormous ring studded with cut glass
winked in the light: one of the brash confections of the bazaar called "burst
neighbors" for the envy they were supposed to inspire. "Darling, you know I
never betray a confidence. A girl has her secrets. What kind of information?"

"I
need a quick line on the gossip."

"Gossip?
Why on earth would you come to me?"

They
both laughed.

"Men
in uniform," Yashim suggested.

Preen
wrinkled her nose and made a moue.

"The
New Guards, from the Eskeshir Barracks."

"I'm
sorry, Yashim, but the thought revolts me. Those tight trousers! And so little
color. To me they always look like a bunch of autumn crickets hopping to a
funeral."

Yashim
smiled. "Actually, I want to know where they
do
hop. Not the men so
much as the officers, Preen. Boys from very good families, I'm told."

He
left it hanging.

Preen
raised her eyebrows and touched her hand to the back of her hair.

"I
can hear the girls now. No promises, but I'll see what I can do."

22

***********************

The
room was tiny, more like a cell, sparsely furnished with a pine footstool, a
sagging rope bed, and a row of wooden hooks from which hung several large bags,
bulking black in the yellow light. The room had no windows and smelled fetid
and damp, a queasy amalgam of scent and sweat and the oil that smoked blackly
from the lamp.

The
person whose room it was moved swiftly toward the bags and fumbled at the neck
of the smallest, fingers groping around inside before closing on another, smaller
bag, that they proceeded to pull out, plucking at the drawstrings. The contents
fell onto the mattress with a soft, metallic chink.

A
pair of glittering black eyes stared with hatred at the jewels that glittered
back. There was a golden chain bearing a dark lapis. There was a silver brooch,
a perfect oval, set with diamonds the size of new peas. There was a bracelet--a
smaller version of the gold chain, its clasp hidden beneath a ruby anchored to
a silver roundel--and a pair of earrings. There was no doubting where the jewels
had originated. On every face, painstakingly inlaid into the lapis, between the
diamonds, over the ruby, that loathsome and idolatrous symbol,
Z
or
N,
zigzagging back and forth, crooked as the man.

That
was the way it had all begun, for sure. It wasn't easy to follow the exact
steps--those Franks were cunning as foxes--but Napoleon had been the author of it
all. What was it that the French kept pressing on the world? Liberty, equality,
and something else. A flag with three stripes. There was something else. No
matter, it was all lies.

That
flag had fluttered over Egypt. Men like scissors had gone about scratching,
scraping, digging things up, writing it all down in little books. Other scissor
men, led by a half-blind infidel, had burned their ships within the shadow of
the pyramids, and Napoleon himself had run away, sailed off in the night. Then
those infidels had marched and starved, thirsted for water, and died like flies
in the deserts of Palestine.

But
that was only the beginning. You would have thought, wouldn't you, that
everyone would see the folly of the foreigners? But no: the Egyptians tried to
be more like them. They'd seen how the French had gone about, behaving like the
masters in the dominion of the sultan. They put it down to the trousers, to the
special guns the French had left behind, to the way the French soldiers had
marched and wheeled, fighting like a single body in the desert, even while they
were dropping like flies.

New
ways. New stuff that came out of little books. People always scribbling and
scribbling, sticking their noses into books until their eyes went red with the
effort. Pretending to understand the French gibberish.

Napoleon.
He'd killed the French king, hadn't he? Invaded the Domain of Peace. Thrown
sand in the eyes of his own men and all the world. Why else could no one see
what was going on? And these jewels--were we to sell ourselves for baubles?

Valuable
as they are.

It
was a pity that the girl had seen. That killing had been an unexpected duty--and
dangerous. Perhaps an overreaction. She might have seen nothing, understood
nothing. Other things on her mind. A secret smile of triumph and expectation on
her pretty face. Nothing like the bewilderment with which she fought for
breath, seeing whose hands lay around her neck. The hands that had taken the
jewels.

Ali,
well, there were the others. In here it paid to act swiftly, without remorse.

A
ball of spit landed on the lapis and began to trail slowly down the upright of
the letter
N.

23

****************

PREEN
felt the ouzo scorch the back of her throat and then plummet like something
alive into the pit of her empty stomach. She set the glass back on the low
table and selected another.

"To
the sisters!"

A
round of little glasses swayed in the air, chinked, and were tossed back by
five raven-haired, slightly raddled-looking girls. One of them hiccuped, then
yawned and stretched like a cat.

"Time's
up," she said. "Beauty sleep."

The
others cackled. It had been a good evening. The men, silent while the
kdfek
danced, had showed their appreciation in time-honored fashion by slipping coins
beneath the seams of their costumes as they danced close. You couldn't always
tell, but the house had looked clean and the gentlemen sober. Some reunion, she
never found out exactly what.

She
liked her gentlemen sober, but after a performance she didn't mind getting a
little drunk herself. They'd asked the carriage to drop them off at the top of
the street that led down to the waterfront, and teetered away into the dark
until they reached the door of a tavern they knew. It was Greek, of course, and
full of sailors. That in itself was no bad thing, Preen thought with a ghost of
a smile, for as it happened there were two of them throwing surreptitious
glances at them now and then, two young, rather handsome boys she didn't know. Only
fishermen from the islands, but still...

Two
other girls decided to leave, but Preen thought she'd prefer to stay. Just her
and Mina, together. Another drink, maybe.

She
was having her second when the sailors made their move. They were from Lemnos,
as she'd guessed, and they had shifted a big catch at the morning market, a
little tight themselves on their last night in town and with money to spend. After
a few minutes, Preen noticed the man's sunburned hand moving toward her leg. Go
on! she smiled.

But
out of the corner of her eye she saw a small, slightly hunchbacked man with a
pockmarked face enter the tavern. Yorg was one of the port pimps, one of the
weaselly crowd who accosted newly arrived seamen and offered them cheap
lodgings, a visit to their sister or, if it seemed safe, a free drink at their
place. Yorg's place, of course, was a brothel where haggard girls from the
countryside turned trick after trick, night after night, until they were either
let loose on the streets or bumped off and dumped into the Bosphorus. They were
part of the human detritus that floated around the docks and the men who sailed
from them; either way, their life expectancy was not long.

Preen
shuddered. Very gently she brushed away the hand that had just settled on her
thigh, put a finger to the sailor's lips, and slipped past him, with a flash of
an elegant waist. He'd hold, she thought. Right now, she had a little job to
do.

24

****************

There's
a section of Istanbul, right up under the city walls at the head of the Golden
Horn, which has never been fully built up. Perhaps the ground is too steep for
building on, perhaps in the days of the Byzantines it was forbidden to build so
close to the palace of the Caesars. So it had lingered on into the beginning of
the nineteenth century as a sort of ragged wilderness, planted with rocks and
scrubby trees.

If
you knew where to look, you could find men living there--and sometimes women,
too--but it was unwise to poke about too diligently. Some of the denizens of
this patch were more often abroad by night than by day, and at any hour an air
of resigned criminality hung about the tired trees and the little caves and
crannies where some of the city's rubbish had been carefully drawn up to form a
dismal kind of shelter. Huts, shacks, and bus-tees artfully constructed by a
shadowy people who had somehow slipped through the net of charity--or the
hangman's noose.

Now
and again the city authorities would order a sweep-out of the hillside, but
invariably most of its inhabitants would appear to have crept away, unseen. The
sweeps turned up a lot of rubbish, which was burned at the foot of the ravine,
sometimes a corpse, a starving feral dog or someone too far removed from the
world to do more than stare, with unseeing eyes, at this emanation of men from
a city they had long since lost and forgotten. The noisy men, armed with long
sticks, would finally depart; the hill dwellers would silently sift back, and
the creation of shelters would begin again.

Someone
was now fumbling very slowly down the ravine, moving patiently and carefully
from rock to rock. There was a little moon, but a heavy rolling bank of cloud
blotted it out entirely for minutes at a stretch, and in one of those dark
interludes the figure stopped, waiting, listening. "All quiet?"

The
answer came in a whisper. "All quiet."

Two
men groped past one another in the dark. The newcomer dropped feetfirst into a
shallow cave, squatted on his haunches, and leaned his back against the wall.

Minutes
later the cloud parted. The moonlight showed the man all he needed to see. A
little opium box, propped against the wall. A dark pile of what he knew to be
the uniforms. And at the back of the cave two men, trussed and gagged. The head
of one was tilted back, as if he was asleep. But the eyes of the other man were
flaring like the eyes of a terrified animal.

The
newcomer glanced instinctively at the little box, grateful at least that the
choice was made.

25

****************

YASHIM
threw back his head as the moonlight came streaming through a break in the
clouds. It seemed to him, as he stood with both hands touching its bark, that
the tree was taller than he remembered: the black and twisted limbs corkscrewed
upward overhead, a nest of branches so thick and so high that even the
moonlight struggled to break through between them.

The
Janissaries had chosen this tree as their own. Some happy instinct had led them
to adopt a living thing, in a part of the city that was stiff with monuments to
human grandeur. Compared to this massive plane tree, Topkapi seemed cold and
dead. To his left, Yashim could make out the black silhouette of the palace
erected long ago by a vizier who thought himself to be all-powerful, before he
was strangled with the silken bowstring. To the north lay Aya Sofia, the great
church of the Byzantines, now a mosque. Behind him stood the Blue Mosque, built
by a sultan who beggared his empire to have it done. And here was this tree,
quietly growing on the ancient Hippodrome, generous with its shade in the heat
of the day.

Nobody
had tried to blame it for what it had come to represent: the jeering power of
the Janissary Corps. That, Yashim reflected, was never the Turkish way. The
same instinct that prompted the Janissaries to adopt the tree made the people
reluctant to do away with it now that the very name of the Janissaries was
consigned to oblivion. People liked trees, and they disliked change: the
Hippodrome itself was proof of that. A few steps away stood an obelisk with
incised hieroglyphs, which a Byzantine emperor had brought from Egypt. Farther
on, a massive column erected by some Roman emperor long ago. There was also the
celebrated Serpent Column, a bronze statue of three green twining serpents that
once stood at the Greek temple of Apollo at Delphi. The serpents' heads were
missing now, it was true: but Yashim knew that the Turks could hardly be blamed
for that.

He
smiled to himself, remembering the night in the Polish residency when Palewski,
drunk and whispering, had revealed to him the astounding truth. Together they
had peered by candlelight into the depths of a vast and elderly armoire, where
two of the three heads that had been a wonder of the ancient world lay on a
pile of dusty linen, practically untouched since they were snapped off the
column by some reveling youths in the Polish ambassador's suite a century ago. "Too
dreadful," Palewski had murmured, shuddering at the sight of the brazen heads. "But
too late now. What's broken is better not mended."