The Janissary Tree (15 page)

"Do
I regret them? No. But I mourn them, Yashim. Alone in this city I mourn them,
because they were trie soul of this empire, for good and ill. With them, the
Ottomans were unique. Proud, strange, and--in a way-- free. The Janissaries
reminded them of who they were and what they wished to be. Without them? Very
normal now, I'm afraid. Too normal: even the memory of the Janissaries is
blotted out. And the empire can't jig along with this normality, I think, for
very long. It's too thin, too brittle, without memory. Being able to
remember"--that's what makes a people. It's the case for us Poles, too," he
added, suddenly morose.

He
swept into an armchair and was silent, brooding with a hand across his eyes. Yashim
took a sip of his tea, found it cool, and drained the cup.

"I'm
sorry," he said. "I shouldn't have bothered you."

Palewski
slowly raised his head. "Bother me, Yashim. Bother as much as you want. I'm
only the ambassador, what do I know about anything?"

Yashim
had a boyish urge to get up and go away. "I wondered about the bones," he said,
"because they were so clean. How many days have they had--six? How do you strip
the bones of a man clean in such a short time?"

"Well,"
Palewski murmured, "you boil him."

"Mmm.
And whole, too--in a huge pot. There isn't a mark of a knife on the bones."

Palewski
poured more tea. He noticed that his hand was trembling.

"Think
of the smell," Yashim was saying. "Someone would be sure to have noticed."

"Yashim,
my friend," Palewski protested. "Are there any aspects of this mystery that
don't involve cookery? I feel we may have to suspend our Thursday evenings
until this is all over. I'm not sure I'm up to it."

Yashim
seemed not to have heard.

"The
way the bodies appear, it's almost as if they're signaling their reach--first at
the new stables above Aksaray, then way over the Golden Horn in Galata, near
the Mosque of the Victory. Finally, today, we get one at the very gates of the
bazaar. Corpses materializing out of thin air--and another to come," he added. "Unless
we get there first."

"You
could do that only if--what?--there was some sort of pattern. Something about
each of those locations that suits the murderer, however far apart they are. Delivering
corpses all around the city, and even to Galata, has to be more difficult than
just letting them bob up in the Bosphorus."

Yashim
looked up and nodded. "But for some reason the killers think the added
difficulty is worthwhile."

"A
pattern, Yashim. You need to get hold of a decent map and plot the points."

"A
decent map," Yashim repeated flatly. It was many years since anyone had
attempted to make a good map of Istanbul.

Palewski
knew that as well as he did.

"All
right, what else do you have?"

"One
Sufic verse. May or may not be relevant. One uniformed Russian," Yashim
replied.

"Ali.
A Russian. Now that I can help you with."

Yashim
told him what Preen had discovered about the decorated fifth man.

"Order
of Vasilyi, I shouldn't wonder. Only awarded for battlefield experience, but
it's not immensely high grade. You wouldn't wear it if you could get something
grander."

"Which
means?"

"Which
means that your boy is probably a good soldier but not a grandee. Fourth-rank
aristocracy, or lower. Could be a career soldier."

"In
Istanbul?"

"Attached
to the embassy. There's no other explanation. I'll find him for you right now."

Palewski
unwound himself from his armchair and dug about in a low shelf. He dragged
several copies of
Le Moniteur,
the Ottoman court gazette, back to his
seat and began flicking through the pages.

"It'll
be in here--who's come, who's left, who's presented his credentials at court. Look,
new boy at the British embassy, American charge d'affaires upscaled to consular
rank, Persian emissary plenipotentiary received, blah blah. Next one. New
Russian trade agent, wrong line of country, departure of French consul--Ali,
wish I'd gone to that party--et cetera, no. Next. Here you are. N. P. Potemkin,
junior attache to the assistant attache of military affairs presents his
credentials to the viziers of the court. Pretty lowly. Not full accreditation.
I mean, he never got to see the sultan."

Yashim
smiled. Palewski's own reception by the sultan had been the high point of his
otherwise stillborn diplomatic career. As well as making a story that Palewski
told in the driest way possible.

By
a quirk of history, the Polish ambassador was maintained in Istanbul at the
sultan's expense. It was a throwback to the days when the Ottomans were too grand
to submit to the ordinary laws of European diplomacy and would not allow any
king or emperor to claim to be the sultan's equal. An ambassador, they
reasoned, was a kind of plaintiff at the fount of world justice rather than a
grandee vested with diplomatic immunity, and as such they had always insisted
on paying his bills. Other nations had successfully challenged this conception
of what an embassy was about; the Poles, latterly, could not afford to. Since
1830, their country had ceased to exist when the last parcel, around Cracow,
was gobbled up by Austria.

The
stipend the Polish ambassador received didn't seem to cover the cost of
maintaining the embassy itself, Yashim had observed, but it allowed Palewski at
least to live in reasonable comfort. "We talk of Christian justice," Palewski
would explain, "but the only justice that Poland has ever received is at the
hands of its old Muslim enemy. You Ottomans! You understand justice better than
anyone in the world!" Palewski would be careful not to complain that the
stipend he received had not changed for the last two hundred years. And Yashim
would never say what both of them knew: that the Ottomans continued to
recognize the Poles only to irritate the Russians.

"So
it seems," Yashim mused, "that junior attache Potemkin springs into a coach
with four of the brightest New Guard cadets--and they're never seen alive
again."

Palewski's
eyebrows shot up. "Meet a Russian--disappear--it's a common phenomenon. It
happens all the time in Poland."

"But
why would they meet a Russian official in the first place? We're practically at
war with Russia. If not today, then yesterday and probably tomorrow."

Palewski
put up his hands in a gesture of ignorance. "How can we know? They were selling
secrets? They all met at the gardens, by chance, and decided to make a night of
it?"

"No
one meets anyone at the gardens by chance," Yashim reminded him. "As for
selling secrets, I get the impression that it's us who need their secrets, not
the other way around. What could the cadets be selling--old French trigonometry
tables? Details of cannon they probably copied off Russian designs in the first
place? The name of their hatter?"

Palewski
scowled and thrust out his lips.

"I
think that's enough tea," he said thoughtfully. "The penetration of arcane
mysteries requires something stronger."

But
Yashim knew the consequences of following Palewski's well-meaning advice. So he
made his excuses and left.

34

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

YASHIM
walked quickly away to the Pera quay on the Golden Horn and crossed by caique
to the Istanbul side. A jogging donkey cart blocked his progress as he walked
back to his lodgings. The driver looked around and raised the handle of his
whip in acknowledgment, but the alleys were too narrow to let him by, and
Yashim was forced to drag his feet, smoldering with impatience. At last the
cart turned into his own alley, and at that moment Yashim saw a man loitering,
about halfway down. His outfit of scarlet and white indicated that he served as
a page of the interior service of the palace. He was looking up the other way,
and Yashim slipped back into the alley he'd come from.

He
leaned against the wall and considered his position. The seraskier had given
him ten days before the great review that would show the sultan at the head of
an efficient, modern army that could match anything the empire's enemies could
put into the field against it. Four days had gone. It was already Sunday, and
time seemed to be running out: there was the question of the upcoming murder,
Palewski's well-founded observation that he needed to get his hands on a good
map, and the problem of the Russian attache, Potemkin. But there was the
strangling at the palace, too, and the valide's lightly couched threat that he
had better find her jewels if he ever wanted another French novel. Well, he did
want another, but Yashim wasn't naive. Novels were the least of it. Favor.
Protection. A powerful friend. He might need that any day.

He
wasn't ungrateful, either. The palace had discovered--and then allowed him to
exercise--his particular talents, the same way that for hundreds of years the
palace had selected and trained its functionaries to exploit their natural
gifts.

And
when the palace turned to him for help, it was his duty to oblige.

But
that put him in a difficult position. He was engaged by the seraskier: the
seraskier had called him in first.

A
killing in the harem was bad. But what he was dealing with outside looked
worse.

For
the fourth cadet, time was running out.

He
took a deep breath, pulled back his shoulders, and walked around the corner
into his street.

35

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

The
dresser of the girls looked beseechingly at Yashim, then at the kislar agha,
the chief black eunuch, who was spreading his considerable bulk across a chaise
lounge. Neither the dresser nor Yashim had been invited to sit.

Yashim
privately cursed his impetuosity. He'd been taken into the palace just when the
valide sultan took her evening nap, and the kislar agha had swiftly taken
control. The kislar agha never slept. When Yashim had told him what he had to
say, he had sent immediately for the dresser.

That
was how the system worked, Yashim knew. Everyone had his or her own ideas about
the imperial harem, but essentially it was like a machine. The sultan, pumping
a new recruit in the cohort of imperial concubines, was simply a major piston
of an engine designed to guarantee the continuous production of Ottoman
sultans. All the rest--the eunuchs, the women--were cogs.

Christians
viewed the sultans harem quite differently. Reading his way through some of the
valide's favorite French novels, it had slowly dawned on Yashim that
Westerners, as a rule, had an intensely romantic and imaginative picture of the
harem. For them it was a honeyed fleshpot in which the most beautiful women in
the world engaged spontaneously at the whim of a single man in salacious acts
of love and passion, a narcotic bacchanal. As though the women had only breasts
and thighs, and neither brains nor histories. Let them dream, Yashim thought.
The place was a machine, but the women had their lives, their will, and their
ambition. As for the hints of lasciviousness, the machine simply let them off
as steam.

The
dresser was a case in point. He was something like a squeezed lemon, a sour and
fussy creature, black, skinny, forty-five, meticulous about detail, with all
the spontaneous effervescence of a dripping tap. The dresser's tasks ranged
from preparing the
gozde,
or chosen girl, for a sultan's bed to buying
her underwear. His staff included hairdressers, tailors, jewelers, and a
perfumer, whose own job involved, among other things, crushing and grinding
scents, blending perfumes to suit the sultan's taste, preparing soaps, oils,
and aphrodisiacs, and overseeing the making of the imperial incense. If anything
went wrong, the dresser was the one to take the blame: but he always had lesser
functionaries he, in turn, could kick.

"A
ring, Dresser," the kislar agha was saying. "According to our friend here, the
girl wore a ring. I do not know if she was wearing it when the unfortunate
circumstance occurred. Perhaps you will tell us."

The
slight annular depression on the dead girl's middle finger, which Yashim had
noticed before the valide sultan had interrupted his inspection of the body,
had interested him at the time. For all her finery and precious jewels, it had
been the missing ring that recalled, however fractionally, her existence as a
living person, with thoughts and feelings of her own. Perfectly engineered for
the task she was never destined to perform--flawless, beautiful, perfectly
accoutred, bathed, and perfumed--had she nonetheless prepared to approach the
sultan's bed with the tiniest trace of an imperfection, a cold, white
indentation on the middle finger of her right hand: the faint imprint of a
choice?

Was
the ring removed at the time of her death, or even later?

The
dresser glanced at Yashim, who watched him without expression, arms folded
patiently across his chest. The dresser gazed upward, drumming his fingers
nervously against his closed lips. Yashim had the impression that he already
had the answer they wanted. He was trying to control his panic and work out the
probable consequences of what he was about to say.