The Winter Thief (35 page)

“A
YALI!
H
OW WONDERFUL.”
Feride clapped her hands at the thought of her brother living in a seaside mansion. Sariyer was north of Bebek, where Yorg Pasha lived, and accessible only by boat, but she knew the wives of several pashas who summered in the area. The mansion Sultan Abdulhamid had given to Kamil had belonged to the late Sultan Abdulaziz’s daughter. When she married and moved to her husband’s mansion, the house on the waterfront had reverted back to the palace. “I’ve seen it,” Feride told Kamil. “It’s lovely, a huge place. Much too big for you,” she concluded with a smile.

Feride was already making plans to visit. Her daughters would love to be closer to the water. Their mansion in Nishantashou had a big garden, but nothing was better than being able to step directly from your terrace into a caïque on a moonlit night and picnic on the water. It would do Huseyin good too to get away from this house that had been his prison for so many months. After his visit to the palace, he had developed a painful cough and for a time had become so incapacitated that she had worried he might die. Now he was on the mend, although still weak. There had been no opportunity for the reconciliation she had planned with her husband, but the tension between them had disappeared, replaced by an awkward caution.

“You’d better put your name on the door, Kamil,” Huseyin joked. “Your sister is already arranging the furniture.”

She leaned over and kissed her husband’s brow, leaving her lips in place for a moment to feel the warmth of his skin against hers. He smiled in return and squeezed her arm, but she saw the hesitancy in his eyes. There was a smear of puckered pink flesh across his cheek. He still walked with a cane, and his body was seamed with scars. He had insisted on sleeping in a separate bedroom. He hadn’t understood her tears and protests over his doing so, she thought. Had she become his nurse and nothing more? Did he no longer wish her to see his body? Perhaps she should have acquiesced quietly, but she was determined to win her husband back.

She stood by her husband’s chair and wondered when, if ever, he would draw her onto his lap again.

T
HE MINISTER OF JUSTICE
, Nizam Pasha, fitted the torn scrap of paper against a page in Vera Arti’s passport. It was written in Cyrillic, with stamps and signatures, and at the bottom a translation in French. They were in his private chambers, sitting in armchairs before the minister’s desk.

Kamil handed the minister another document. “This is Vera Arti’s deposition, her account of being forcibly abducted by Vahid and kept in Akrep’s basement, along with the murdered woman, Sosi. The passport fragment we found confirms she was there,” Kamil continued. “And it gives credence to her claim that she saw Sosi also being held there and that the girl probably died there.”

“There’s no proof of where and by whom Sosi was killed,” Nizam Pasha corrected Kamil, “but this evidence is very indicative.”

“The girl feared for her life. Vera reported seeing wounds on Sosi’s hands of the kind documented by the autopsy, the same kind of wounds that I saw had been inflicted on Bridget, the British governess. They clearly were made by Vahid,” Kamil insisted. “These are the actions of a man with no respect for human life.”

“You think it was Vahid. But there’s no proof that he killed Sosi or anyone else. It could have been one of his men.”

It took all of Kamil’s willpower not to rise from his chair and smash something. It was as if all the violence of the past months had crept into him and now threatened to uncoil. But respect and protocol required him to remain seated in the presence of the minister and to hide his uneasiness. He needed Nizam Pasha’s help to hold Vahid to account for his cruelty. If not Vahid, then who was responsible for all the deaths in the Choruh Valley? He felt a deep personal grudge as well. Kamil hadn’t forgotten his four nights in Bekiraga Prison or Sakat Ali’s attempt on his life. If Omar hadn’t been awake to stop the Akrep agent, Kamil would be dead.

“This should be enough to exonerate you.” Nizam Pasha waved the documents in the air. “The Order of Honor alone will make this charge go away. The sultan isn’t in the habit of rewarding his subjects with the empire’s highest honor one day and throwing them in jail the next. You should take care, though. Vizier Köraslan has taken a special interest in you, first jailing you in that outrageous manner and then pushing for a trial. Aside from the fact that it’s an affront to our class, I don’t approve of officials from the palace messing about in the business of the courts. The vizier should stick to matters of state.” He pointed his pipestem at Kamil. “You’ve made a powerful enemy there, Kamil, but you seem to have a talent for that.”

“What about Vahid?” Kamil asked, trying to mask the desperation in his voice. “I want him punished.”

“There’s no evidence to link him to any of the crimes. I’ll bring Madame Arti’s testimony to the attention of the vizier, but my guess is that he’ll succeed in explaining it away. After all, she’s a foreigner of the worst kind, a Russian.”

“Vahid and the vizier are covering for each other.”

“Of course. That’s life, Magistrate.”

Kamil felt a helpless rage twist inside him. This, he noted almost dispassionately, was how men are pushed beyond their natural boundaries to take violent measures. This is how a man feels when he kills the man who has dishonored him. He must find a way to hold Vahid accountable for what he had done.

“That solves the robbery as well, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, the bank robber, Gabriel Arti, was killed in the fighting. The guns from the confiscated shipment probably will never be retrieved.”

“And the stolen gold and jewels?”

“They disappeared in all the madness.”

The minister shook his head. “It’s a big loss. Eighty thousand British pounds. Perhaps Arti sent it abroad. I suppose we’ll never know. Allah be praised that the bank was insured. The managers didn’t even lose their posts. In fact, Mr. Swyndon has been promoted.”

Kamil couldn’t mention that he had found only half that amount in Trabzon. He had no idea what had happened to the rest of the money. In the larger measure of things, it didn’t seem to matter anymore. He had come face-to-face with an evil greater than lying, stealing, betrayal, or even, he thought wonderingly, murder. Three months ago, he would have argued on principle that one life was worth the same as many. Every unnecessary death, every killing was equally reprehensible. But that was before New Concord, before so many innocents had been trodden underfoot. Hundreds of people killed, and for what? As fodder for men’s ambitions. Whether that man was Vahid or Gabriel was immaterial. Or Kamil himself. Now he was being honored for all of it, he thought with despair—for his treason, theft, deception, subverting the army, and killing the sultan’s men, and for the loss of hundreds of lives that he had set out with hubris and naïveté to save, but had failed to do so. He had compromised everything he believed in and failed. An image flashed through his mind of Siranoush Ana’s daughter carrying her mother’s body on her back through the mountains, loyal beyond reason.

Kamil left the ministry of justice and turned down a narrow lane. He had no idea where it might lead, but he felt as though he couldn’t breathe. He walked faster until he finally broke into a desperate run, fleeing blindly through the winding lanes.

Omar found him hours later, sitting on the rocks beneath the spire of the Ahirkapi lighthouse. It was dark, and the Sea of Marmara spread out before Kamil like a black bowl. Every six seconds, a light slashed the darkness as a screen pulled by a weight rounded the crystal that cradled and refracted the lighthouse’s kerosene heart.

“C
AN’T YOU KEEP YOUR PERVERSIONS
at home?” Vizier Köraslan slammed his fist into the veneered tabletop, leaving a hairline crack. “Did you think no one would find out about your games in the basement?” He strode to the door, opened it, and slammed it shut again. Then he circled Vahid, who was standing in the middle of the carpet, eyes down, hands clasped before him. A thick bandage covered his right hand.

“I know everything. There is nothing I don’t know.” He grabbed Vahid’s arm and pushed back his sleeve, revealing a tortured field of old scars and new cuts.

Shocked, Vahid hurriedly pulled his sleeve back down. How could the vizier have known about his cutting? No one had ever found out, not since as a ten-year-old boy he had discovered the peace such regularly administered measures of pain could bring him. Deeply ashamed, he kept his eyes on the carpet. His wound beat in his hand like an anvil, but it was useless pain, runaway pain that did nothing to calm him.

Vizier Köraslan sat down in a satin-upholstered armchair and looked him over slowly. “They have proof that this girl was murdered in your headquarters. What do you plan to do about it?”

Vahid grasped on to this appeal to his competence. “One of my men has been charged with the girl’s murder.”

“You realize that everyone will know it was you who killed her.”

Vahid looked up. “Do you know that, Your Excellency?”

Taken aback, the vizier said, “Well, not directly, but from the evidence, it can be assumed.”

“You don’t know it,” Vahid told him, “and neither does anyone else. They can think whatever they like, but they don’t know.”

“It will damage you politically, nonetheless. Who would follow someone who makes an innocent man take the punishment for his own crimes”—Vizier Köraslan held up his hands—“whether he actually committed them or not?”

Vahid took a step closer to the vizier. “And what of your son, Your Excellency?”

The vizier’s face flushed red. He rose to his feet. “You backstreet scum, you son of a whore. You dare threaten me?”

Iskender is the whore’s son, Vahid wanted to cry out. I am the good son. He stood unmoving, glaring at the vizier.

Perhaps having noticed something unpleasant in Vahid’s eyes, the vizier stopped shouting and was regarding the Akrep commander with disgust. “I should never have gone along with your stupid scheme. You told me the troops would wipe out a small group of socialists that no one cared about. Instead they ran loose and massacred entire villages that had nothing to do with the Henchak revolt you sold me. Now I know why you disappeared. You went to lead them yourself, and undoubtedly to engage in more of your unpleasant digressions.” Vizier Köraslan’s mouth screwed up in distaste. “The Franks are looking for any excuse to invade. By allowing such madness, you gave them the pretext to come in and help the embattled Armenians. If Kamil Pasha hadn’t stepped in to save the refugees and if I hadn’t sent reporters and photographers east to make sure the world knew about it, it could have been a disaster. I was a fool to trust you.”

“You’ve never trusted me, Your Excellency,” Vahid pointed out reasonably. “We had an arrangement that until now has suited us both.”

“You said you’d increase my influence with the sultan, and instead now he suspects me. You were going to sideline Kamil Pasha, and now he’s a hero. Why? Because you enjoy giving pain and you don’t know when enough is enough.”

Vahid smelled the old man’s must emanating from the vizier’s mouth. It reeked of death. He, on the other hand, was young, vital, untouchable. When Vizier Köraslan was deposed, he, Vahid, would be promoted to be the head of the Teshkilati Mahsusa. He would build a secret service for the sultan that would deprive all his enemies of air. He would be the guardian of the empire. Not the sultan, not this vizier, not his father’s favored son.

“You go too far,” the vizier said, visibly unsettled by the smile on Vahid’s face and no doubt remembering that Vahid held evidence linking his son to murder. “You are mad.”

“No, Your Excellency. I am not.”

Vizier Köraslan stared at him a moment and seemed to come to a decision. “Get out,” he said.

Surprised, Vahid hesitated, then turned and left the room.

A
FTER
V
AHID
had gone, the vizier called in his secretary and asked him to summon Nizam Pasha and Kamil Pasha. “Tell them to bring the file on the Armenian girl’s case.”

The two men were surprised to be summoned. Vizier Köraslan listened to the pasha’s evidence that placed Sosi in Akrep’s basement. He further surprised them, saying, “I have absolutely no doubt that Vahid committed this murder and probably others. He is an unscrupulous character who has been clever enough to pin the blame for his misdeeds on others. Why, he’s even tried to blackmail me with trumped-up evidence against my son. We cannot have a scoundrel of this magnitude commanding a force like Akrep. That institution will be shut down and replaced by a more efficient secret service, and I want Vahid arrested and charged with murder and treason.”

“Treason, Your Excellency?” Nizam Pasha inquired.

“Kamil Pasha, did you not witness Vahid leading a group of bandits in the massacre of innocent civilians in the east and attacking your imperial troops that were protecting the population?” Without waiting for Kamil, who seemed at a loss for words, the vizier answered his own question. “That, gentlemen, is treason.”

V
AHID TENDERLY STRAIGHTENED
the tine of Rhea’s hairpin, then put it in his pocket. It took only a short time to walk from Akrep headquarters across the grounds of Yildiz Palace to Huseyin Pasha’s office in the Great Mabeyn.

The secretary announced him and then asked him to wait until Huseyin Pasha had finished his meeting. Vashid paced impatiently. After half an hour, several well-dressed men emerged, followed by their secretaries and a scribe. Finally Vahid was shown into an office more luxurious than his own. He strode in, his eyes seeking the man he had sworn to kill, the one who had stolen Rhea from him and caused her death.

The sight of Huseyin’s scarred face brought back memories of Rhea’s charred body on the sidewalk. He started when he saw Kamil standing by the open French doors. Vahid smelled the cloying scent of lilacs enter with the breeze. An invisible bee buzzed insistently as the two men glared at each other.

“Selam aleykum, Vahid.” The note of satisfaction in Kamil’s voice caused Vahid more concern than the hostility. His wound began to throb.

“Aleykum selam,” he answered cautiously. He hadn’t expected to ask about Rhea in front of Kamil and wondered if he should return another time.

“If you have something to say,” Huseyin snapped, “let’s hear it, or don’t waste my time.”

Kamil shut the door and came to stand beside his brother-in-law.

“These have been trying times.” Vahid began in a neutral tone, wishing Kamil would leave.

“The times have certainly been treacherous for Armenians,” Kamil agreed in a hard tone, “and for socialists. In fact, for a lot of ordinary, innocent people. Their graves line the road from the Choruh Valley to Trabzon. But you know that, don’t you? You put them there.”

Kamil’s tone was sarcastic, but Vahid was satisfied to hear the anguish beneath the magistrate’s words. Undermining Kamil emotionally and morally was almost better than killing him outright. The cruelest death was the slow rot of self-doubt.

“I’m amazed to hear you criticize His Highness’s decision to send troops to put down an armed rebellion,” Vahid responded, “but what else can one expect from a traitor?”

Kamil stepped toward him, but Huseyin pulled him back. “There’s no point,” he told Kamil.

A man who can be baited, Vahid thought, smiling inwardly. Passion made men weak.

“Do you deny that you ordered Ottoman soldiers to fire on the sultan’s troops?” Vahid asked. “And this charade about using your own fortune to help the refugees,” he scoffed. “No funds have been withdrawn from your bank. Nothing was sold to account for the sudden, mysterious appearance of forty thousand British pounds in gold and several large emeralds in your hands in Trabzon. Did you steal them? Perhaps from the Ottoman Imperial Bank?”

“You are a mass murderer,” Kamil responded in a cold voice. “Worse than that, you are a man who kills for a calculated reason, as if he were slaughtering pullets to sell at market. Did you get what you wanted? Were the deaths sufficient to get you promoted?”

“I don’t answer to you,” Vahid said offhandedly, and turned to Huseyin. “I want to know something.”

“What?”

Vahid wondered if the men were armed. He presumed Kamil was. He reached into his pocket and saw Kamil’s hand slip inside his jacket. Vahid slowly withdrew Rhea’s hairpin. The magistrate’s hand emerged empty.

Vahid placed the pin on a small table by Huseyin, then watched jealously as he picked it up. The sight of the precious artifact in Rhea’s lover’s hand was unbearable. He felt a desperate need to pierce his own skin until all the poison had run out.

“My wife’s hairpin!” Huseyin exclaimed. “Where did you get this?”

No wonder Rhea wouldn’t marry him, Vahid thought. She had already married this bastard. “Rhea was your wife?”

“Of course not,” Huseyin exclaimed. “Rhea was a young girl I was trying to help.” He dropped the pin on the table. “You harassed the poor girl. If it weren’t for you, she’d still be alive.”

“That’s a lie,” Vahid snarled. “She died because of you. You brought her to that taverna.”

“How dare you insinuate anything. Rhea was like my daughter.”

Vahid snatched up the pin and held it in Huseyin’s face. “Is this what a father gives his daughter?”

“Her fiancé asked me to buy something special for her. What business is it of yours?”

“What fiancé?”

“I ask you again, what business is it of yours? You did your best to destroy her life. I won’t let you destroy her reputation after her death.” Huseyin hobbled to the door and held it open. “You’ve caused enough tragedy for us all. Leave now.”

Overcome by confusion and an inchoate rage, Vahid slammed the door shut behind him.

Turning to Kamil, Huseyin explained, “Rhea’s father asked me to get rid of Vahid’s unwanted attentions. They were making it difficult for the girl to get married. Vahid threatened her father.”

“He misunderstood your relationship, but that explains why he was trying to kill you and why his men attacked Feride.” Kamil frowned and pressed his fist against his mouth. The thought of Vahid harming Feride made him want to finish the job he had left undone. He would have gone after him if he hadn’t already laid a satisfyingly malicious snare for the Akrep commander.

“What a viper,” Huseyin exclaimed. “We have to do something about him. Imagine the damage he could do if he were promoted to head up the new secret service?”

“It’s been taken care of,” Kamil answered, his jaw tight. He had come to Huseyin directly from Vizier Köraslan’s office, but Vahid had arrived before he could tell Huseyin about the meeting. Better even than shooting off Vahid’s other hand was the thought of the man shivering in the special cell Omar had reserved for him at Bekiraga Prison, where Vahid would wait, perhaps for a long time, for his trial.