The Janissary Tree (22 page)

"Except
for drunks, you can never tell who you'll meet, or why they're there. Everybody
has a story. I like stories," she had said.

Too
many of those stories ended like this, Yashim felt, soaking up your own vomit
in a cold doorway. Or head down in the mud, dead, like that crook-backed
brothel keeper he'd just seen, maintaining the tone of the neighborhood.

Hadn't
Preen mentioned speaking to a hunchback?

A
sleazy port rat who made her feel dirty.

Who
told her about the cadets meeting the Russian up at the Yeyleyi Gardens.

Her
informant.

And
down in the mud, freshly dead, a crook-backed pimp.

Not,
by any stretch of the imagination, the victim of a crime of passion. The blow
that fell too hard. The carving knife that simply came to hand.

No.
It had been a professional killing. Someone who killed with a length of
cord--and a wooden spoon.

Yashim
broke into a run.

56

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

EVERY
city has districts that teeter on the fringes of respectability, regardless how
close they lie to the moneyed and desirable center. However roomy the houses,
however convenient they seem, they are always tainted in some indefinable way
by the incessant passage of other people: people who take their lodgings by the
week, or even by the night; people who come and go, and may or may not come
back again, and whose purposes are too fleeting and too diffuse to be properly
understood. Nobody asks. Nothing is assumed. Services are paid for in advance,
and trust is at a premium. Prices are always a bit higher than elsewhere, but
the clientele are happy to save themselves a walk, or know no better, being
strangers.

Preen,
however, was something of a fixture, and paid rent accordingly. Her landlord
had nothing to complain of: he barely knew of her existence, being sent out to
a cafe where all day he played backgammon with other old fellows and was asked
back only if his wife needed to vet a new applicant or frighten a recalcitrant
lodger. Guarding her modesty, Preen's landlady conducted most of her business
by shrieking from behind a latticed screen at the foot of the stairs. There was
a small window people could use to pay her: they held the money by the hole and
she snatched it up. If she needed to take a look, she could press her eye against
the latticework. Her own room behind was fairly dark.

At
the moment she was watching a small black man struggling with a yoke, from
which hung two swaying china pots. Paying no attention to the eyes he knew were
watching him behind the screen, the man carried his burden past the door and
ran bowlegged into the court outside. The landlady followed his movements with
envy and irritation.

It
wasn't that the landlady wanted to haul slops to the drain every morning. It
was that the little black man she had engaged to perform the task knew
everything that was going on before she did.

The
slop carrier returned with his empty pots and set them down in a row beside the
others to dry. He faced the lattice.

"Three
gents in Number five. Eight not slept in, but it smell werry bad."

The
landlady sucked in her lips and pushed them out again. Number five was let for
the week, to a single gentleman. She'd have it out with him when they tried to
sneak out later on. As for Number eight, it wasn't the first time she'd stayed out
overnight. A bad smell was the reason she discouraged her tenants from bringing
food into the premises.

If
she had time, she thought, she'd go and get rid of whatever was festering in
Preen's room.

A
man came in at the door. She recognized him as a friend of Number eight.

She
rapped on the lattice with her knuckles.

"You
can save yourself the stairs," she croaked, in what she hoped was a kindly
tone. Number eight was her best tenant. "Gone out."

Yashim
squinted at the lattice.

"Gone
out this morning, you mean?"

It
was an unlikely idea. The slop carrier picked up a mop and began to poke it
around the corridor, grinning.

"Whatever,"
the landlady replied. "She's not there now. I can let her know you called,
efendi."

"Yes,
thank you. And give her this message, will you?" He tore a leaf from a little
notebook he carried, scribbled a few words, and folded it. The flap in the
lattice dropped down and a withered hand shot out to take the paper.

"It's
important she gets this as soon as possible," Yashim added. "You don't know
where she's gone?"

"I'll
see she gets it," the landlady said firmly.

Yashim
hesitated. Was there anything else he could do? He thought of going up to leave
a message in her room, but the crone at the lattice had the message, and the
black servant had already wetted the corridor floor ahead.

He
bid the lattice good day and went out into the street.

57

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

It
was already dark when Preen got back to her boardinghouse. Not that she had
done very much that day: the action had taken place last night, at a stag night
where alcohol had been served and Preen had agreed to take a drink herself,
after the dancing. It broke one of her cardinal rules, but even cardinal rules
are made to be broken, she'd thought, as one drink became two and the
groom-to-be asked her agitated questions about the wedding night.

So
she'd ended up staying over, sleeping late, and waking up with a hangover. The
other guests had left long since, taking the groom with them: she had a faint
recollection of hearing stifled laughter and groans in the early morning,
before she rolled over and went back to sleep. A very fat Armenian woman,
sniffing with disapproval, had made her some coffee, and she had spent the rest
of the day at the baths with a towel over her head.

She'd
stopped for a pastry on the way home, but the hangover had taken away her
appetite and she only nibbled at the corner before she asked the vendor to wrap
it. It was in her bag now, but really she only wanted to go upstairs and sleep.
She pushed the door, and her landlady rapped immediately on the lattice.

"Message
for you," she screeched. The flap dropped, and Preen saw her hand shoot out,
clutching a folded note.

"Thanks,"
she said. "May I have a light?"

"Urgent,
he called it. It was the gentleman friend of yours who came by the other day. Nicely
spoken. Here you are."

She
means Yashim, Preen thought, as she took the candlestick. As usual, the candle
was only a stub: the landlady was careful with things like that. She wondered
if she should turn around and try to find Yashim right away: she certainly
wasn't going to be able to read the note, but she didn't want the landlady to
know that.

Perhaps,
if she hadn't been standing at the foot of the stairs with the candle, she
would have gone to look for Yashim. Or if the landlady hadn't added, in what
passed for a confidential undertone, that she'd be grateful if everyone would
remember not to take food upstairs--the smell in her room had disturbed the
help.

Preen
climbed the stairs slowly. At this time of year there was a perpetual draft in
the old house and the stubby candle needed shielding. On the second floor she
turned left down a low corridor past two doors, both shut and silent within, to
reach the tiny, crooked flight of stairs that led to her own door. Gradually
she mounted, following the sharp twist she never liked because it somehow put
her at odds with the rest of the house, shutting her in. She glanced up and saw
the door. In the narrow stairwell the shadows flickered like a troop of wild
monkeys.

She
stopped and sniffed. There was a smell, just as the landlady had said. For the
first time she wondered what it might be. Perhaps a rat had died under the
floorboards. She shuddered and put out her finger.

And
that was something else she didn't like about those stairs, about that door:
having to reach into the dark hole to finger the latch on the inside.

It
was like sticking her finger into a dark mouth.

58

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

YASHIM
had returned to the Imperial Archives after leaving his message with Preen's
landlady. In daylight, with a weak winter sun filtering through the high
windows, the place looked more ordinary, the atmosphere flatter. There was
another reason for the change, too. Several archivists were in attendance, but
Ibou the Sudanese boy was not among them. The Library Angel, Yashim thought.

The
head archivist was a mournful fellow with drooping mustaches, not a eunuch but
a superannuated graduate of the palace school.

"The
divan is in session," he explained gloomily. "Come back this afternoon."

But
Yashim did not want to come back that afternoon. "This is urgent," he said.

The
archivist stared at him with sad eyes. He looked infinitely put-upon, but
Yashim suspected he was merely lazy.

"Help
me now. You can break off if any orders come from the viziers' council."

The
archivist nodded slowly, blowing out his cheeks. "Put your request in writing. We'll
see what we can do."

Yashim
leaned his elbows on the reading desk and chewed at a pencil. Eventually he
wrote, "Istanbul fire towers. Location details." And then as an afterthought he
added, "Summaries of renovation/maintenance costs 1650-1750," as being more
likely to turn up what he wanted to know.

The
archivist acknowledged the paper slip with a brief grunt but made no effort to
read it. It lay on his desk for more than twenty minutes while he thumbed
through a quarto volume of figures and Yashim paced to and fro by the entrance.
Eventually he picked it up, glanced at it, and rang a bell.

His
subordinates moved in imitation of their master's ponderous ennui, shaking
their heads and glancing up at Yashim now and then as if they suspected he had
come merely to try their patience. At long last one of them disappeared into
the stacks. He was gone about an hour.

"Nothing
specific on location. There are two volumes of accounts, which refer to the
fire service in general. They straddle your stated time frame. Do you want to
see them?"

Yashim
mastered an urge to pull the man's nose.

"Yes,
please," he said evenly.

The
archivist shuffled off. He came back with two surprisingly small books, smaller
than Yashim's own hand, bound in blue cloth. The older book, which roughly
speaking covered a period from the beginning of the seventeenth century to
1670, was quite badly worn, and the signatures that bound the pages together
were so badly rotted that pages slipped from position in clumps, threatening to
slide out of the covers altogether.

The
archivist frowned. "I'm not sure we can allow you to examine this one," he
began.

Yashim
exploded. "I haven't waited all morning to be told I'm incapable of keeping a
few pages of a book in order. I'm going to look at the book here, on the bench.
Not fan it about, or shake it, or chuck it in the air."

Yet
the books proved to be a disappointment. After half an hour, Yashim had turned
up only three references, two dealing with the Stamboul tower, which had burned
down twice, and the other referring only in the vaguest way to the fire towers,
without numbering or naming them. Entries had been made in the books by many
hands, which made the business of deciphering some of the older entries in
particular both exacting and frustrating.

It
was while he was trying to make out an entry written in particularly antiquated
script that Yashim suddenly thought of his message to Preen. He had written it
clearly enough, and if she followed his advice she would probably be safely
tucked up in some corner of the cafe in the Kara Davut, waiting for him and
challenging the men to stare. That thought made him smile, but the smile died
suddenly.

He
had written Preen a warning, making his instructions clear. Stifling the
poetics of the written word, exaggerating the loops of his script, he'd written
a few lines that anyone could read, even a child.

Even, but only.

Only
a literate child.

59

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

PREEN
poked her finger into the little black hole in the door and crooked it, feeling
upward for the slim wooden latch.

She
felt it resting against the edge of her nail, and clicked it up. As the door
swung open, a sudden draft, laden with the unpleasantly sweet smell of rotten
meat, snuffed out the candle in her hand. She gave a small cry of dismay and
stepped backward in the dark.

The
swinging door struck against the side wall. At the same moment, Preen felt
something brush across her face, with a whirr like an insect against her skin. She
jerked her head back, stumbled, and lost her footing on the top step of the
darkened stairs. She fell with a crash, ricocheting off the back wall and
plunging sideways down the narrow stairs.