A Dead Man in Istanbul

A Dead Man in Trieste

Constable • London

First published in the UK by Constable,

an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd 2005

Copyright © Michael Pearce 2005

The right of Michael Pearce to be identified as the author

of this work has been identified by him in accordance with the

Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition

that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold,

hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover

other than that in which it is published and without a similar

condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication

Data is available from the British Library.

ISBN 1-84529-131-X

Printed and bound in the EU

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter One

‘You know Istanbul, I expect?’

‘Well . . .’

‘Fascinating place. Try the kebabs. There’s shish and doner, of course. But lots of others. Try adana kebab. Very spicy. Especially with eyes.’

‘Eyes?’

‘Dead men’s eyes. Sheep’s eyes, really, of course. Scrumptious! Try it.’

‘Yes. Yes. I will . . . Perhaps.’

About the only practical advice, actually, that they gave him. Just over a week later, in those leisurely days of 1911, he was sitting on the terrace of the British Embassy looking down on the dazzlingly blue waters of the Bosphorus, hearing the chink of ice in glasses, smelling the scent of roses and sweet peas, admiring the bougainvillea. Opposite him were Ponsonby and Rice-Cholmondely, members of the staff of the Embassy, Secretaries, he thought, although everyone here appeared to be a Secretary and none of them, as far as he could see, did any of the work that secretaries usually did. Cunningham had been a Secretary, the Second Secretary, he thought.

‘So . . .?’ he said encouragingly.

‘Swimming the Straits. Like Leander. To get to his beloved. Only in Cunningham’s case, of course, there wasn’t any beloved. I think.’

‘Lalagé?’ suggested Rice-Cholmondely.

‘I thought that was over?’

‘Leila?’

‘Well . . .’

‘Or Felicity?’

‘No, not Felicity.’

‘Oh, I don’t know . . . Ahmet, then?’

‘It’s possible, I suppose.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Seymour, who was not quite getting the picture, ‘are there
two
men dead?’

‘Two?’

‘This chap Leander . . .’

‘Oh, that was some time ago. If ever.’

‘Legend,’ explained Rice-Cholmondely helpfully. ‘Greek legend.’

‘Oh.’

Down at the Mile End police station they were not strong on Greek legend.

A slightly awkward pause. Then:

‘And Mr Cunningham, you say, was . . .?’

‘Swimming. The Dardanelles Straits. A romantic gesture. He wanted to repeat Leander’s feat.’

‘And Byron’s,’ put in Rice-Cholmondely. ‘Byron swam it, too.’

‘How wide are the Straits at that point?’

‘About a mile.’

‘Are you sure it was . . . I mean, couldn’t it have been cramp, or something?’

‘Cunningham was an excellent swimmer. Captain of swimming at Harrow.’

And that was . . .? Wait a minute. A posh school.

‘I see. Yes. Something else, then. Were there any boats around at the time?’

‘Oh, yes. Lots. This is, after all, the Straits of the Dardanelles. The main channel between Europe and Asia. Tankers, liners, cargo ships. Boats everywhere.’

‘Then mightn’t he have been run down? He would have been hard to see in the water, I would have thought.’

‘He had a flag.’

‘Flag?’

‘The Union Jack.’

‘Even so . . .’

‘In a boat. A little rowing boat.’

‘Ah! So he wasn’t alone?’

‘Someone was rowing it, naturally.’

‘Mohammed,’ put in Rice-Cholmondely. ‘The porter at the Embassy.’

‘Surely he saw what happened?’

‘My personal belief,’ said Ponsonby, ‘is that Mohammed is half blind. If not three-quarters.’

‘He would, however . . .’

‘Have seen an ocean liner? Possibly.’ Ponsonby seemed doubtful.

‘In any case,’ said Rice-Cholmondely, ‘if Cunningham had been ground under by an ocean liner, wouldn’t he have been, well, mashed up?’

‘And he wasn’t?’

‘There was only the bullet hole in the middle of his forehead.’

The Dardanelles? At least he knew where they were now. Not actually at Istanbul itself but fifty miles west along the narrow passage which ran from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, with Europe to the north and . . . call it Turkey, to the south. The Turks wouldn’t, of course. For them, at the time, it was the Ottoman Empire, which extended north of Istanbul too and they had been fighting for centuries to prove it. At the moment, however, they had been reduced to quite a small area north of Istanbul and most of what we would think of as Turkey was south of the Straits.

Put it another way, as the men at the Foreign Office had done before he left: to the north of the Straits was Europe and to the south was Asia. Istanbul was the meeting place between East and West.

And that, of course, was precisely the trouble.

‘It’s the old Eastern Question all over again,’ the man at the Foreign Office had said.

‘Eastern Question?’

‘There will, of course, be war.’

‘War?’ said Seymour, startled. How was it he hadn’t heard about this?

‘Unless, somehow, we can resolve the present difficulties.’

‘Unlikely,’ said the older man. There had been two of them in the room, an older man and a younger one. ‘With the Russians being so bloody-minded.’

‘It’s not them I’m worried about,’ said the younger man. ‘It’s the Germans.’

‘Well, they’re not easy, either, I agree.’

‘The fact is,’ explained the younger man, ‘the Ottoman Empire is about to collapse.’

‘The sick man of Europe,’ said the older man.

‘If it is in Europe.’

‘Sick, anyway. Indeed, about to expire.’

‘So the Great Powers are, well, manoeuvring for position.’

‘Queuing up to go in,’ said the older man.

‘Russia?’ suggested Seymour supportively.

‘Of course! But we can’t have that, can we, old boy? Think of India!’

‘Germany?’

‘Can’t have that, either. Think of Persia!’

‘Yes. Yes, I see.’

‘The fact is, old boy, we’ll have to do it ourselves.’

‘Do?’

‘Go in. In the interests of stability.’

‘What about the Turks?’

‘The Turks?’

‘If you’re going in –’

‘What’s it got to do with them?’

‘Well, isn’t it their country –’

‘But that’s the whole point! If they can’t look after their own interests we have to do it for them. That’s
why
we’re going in.’

‘Of course. Yes. I see. Of course!’

‘If we are going in,’ said the younger man.

‘The fact is,’ said the older man, ‘it’s all very delicately balanced.’

So delicately balanced, it soon became clear, that they didn’t want someone else going in and disturbing it. Someone like Seymour.

‘Do we
have
to send a policeman out?’ asked the older man.

‘I’m afraid so. The Prime Minister –’

‘What does
he
know about it?’

‘Oh, absolutely nothing. But I’m afraid it’s a question of having to yield to superior force.’

‘Lady C., you mean?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Well, of course, that does make a difference. What a pity that dammed man had to be her nephew!’

‘Look, who is this Lady C.?’ he had asked when he had got back to the police station.

The chief inspector had regarded him wonderingly.

‘He hasn’t heard of our Sybil!’ he said to the sergeant.

‘He’s too young,’ explained the sergeant. ‘And too simple.’

‘Shall we help him?’

‘It’s our duty to help the ignorant.’

‘
Who
is she?’ demanded Seymour.

‘Take your mind back, lad, some thirty years.’

‘Difficult,’ said the sergeant, ‘because you was just a baby in a perambulator.’

‘And a gorgeous young redhead was blazing a trail through High Society. Closely and admiringly followed by the newspapers and the entire population.’

‘Lady C.?’

‘Just so, son.’

‘But how –’

‘The hand that rocks the cradle rocks the throne,’ said the sergeant sententiously, and inaccurately.

‘Is she a Royal or something?’

‘“Cradle” is the key word.’

‘Ah! She had a baby?’

‘She didn’t actually have one. Not at the time. But everyone thought she was going to. And they all thought it might be theirs.’

‘Who are “they”?’

‘Fast Eddie.’ The then heir to the throne. ‘Slippery Nick.’ The present Prime Minister. ‘And Lionel.’

‘Lionel?’

‘The Archbishop of Canterbury.’

‘What,
all
of them?’

‘And a few others, son. Didn’t I say she blazed a trail? “Blaze”, as on trees. Cut slices off. To show where you’ve been.’

‘Hmm.’

‘I think he’s beginning to get the picture, sir,’ said the sergeant, ‘though it’s a sad thing to have to spoil a young lad’s innocence.’

‘So this chap Cunningham would be the son –’

‘Let us not go too deeply into the question of fatherhood, or the nation will fall apart. In any case, the son bit came a few years later. When she retired and got married. To a man who was just the Governor of the Bank of England, a peer of the realm, and –’

This, Seymour had to admit, was impressive form.

‘No, no. Cunningham is Lady C.’s
nephew
. Or so they say. She is just his aunt. And, like any good aunt, she wants to know what happened to him. And she says that if she doesn’t get to know, she’ll sell her story to, oh, three or four popular newspapers. With the owners of which, as it happens, she also appears to have been on intimate terms.’

‘So that’s why the Foreign Office

‘Yes, son, yes. Now you’ve got it. And the important thing for you to bear in mind, as you sit idly in the Turkish sunshine, sipping a good malt and watching the blue waves lisp and crisp against the shore, is that if you get it wrong, it won’t just be me who descends on you from a great height, but the whole bloody Government –’

‘And the Press,’ said the sergeant.

‘And the Church, so don’t think you can get away from it just by dying. Good luck, son! And watch your balls because the Sultan’s Janissaries will have their scimitars out in a flash if you do anything naughty.’

And now here he was in Istanbul, and he
was
sipping a good malt, and he
was
watching the blue sea, although from up here on Pera Hill he couldn’t exactly hear it lisp and crisp. The British Embassy was on the brow of the hill and there were other legations stretched across the summit more or less in a line, commanding a beautiful outlook over the Bosphorus. Here in the European quarter the houses were spread out and there were trees everywhere. The Embassy itself was particularly well supplied with them. On one side the grounds touched those of the new Hotel Royal, which was where he was staying. Not his choice – it was where the Embassy had put him, and he devoutly hoped that they were the ones who were going to be paying.

‘A room with a view, sir?’

Well, yes. Away to the south the shimmering Sea of Marmara with the Archipelago leading into it, and, beyond, the Dardanelles forming the narrow channel to the Mediterranean. To the north, around the corner, the long stretch of the Bosphorus, teeming with steamers and cargo vessels of all kinds, and turning away in quite a different direction until it ended in the narrow entrance to the Black Sea. And then, going off at yet another tangent, was the Golden Horn, the huge harbour of Constantinople. And of Istanbul, too, which was the same place, only the Greeks called it Constantinople and the Turks called it Stamboul. He was beginning to realize that this was significant.

Up here on the heights the houses were stone. Down there, in the little, dark, crowded streets by the Galata Bridge, they were wooden. On his way up to the Embassy that afternoon he had gone through them. They had been full of people: street sellers trying to sell him peanuts and roses and sweets, beggars putting out their hands for bahkshish, men in vests and skull caps lounging in the doorways, veiled, dark-gowned women in bare feet with bread ringlets round their arms, children, everywhere. He had been assailed by smells: the sweet scent of jasmine and roses, mixed with the less sweet smell of donkey dung; the more exotic smells of sandalwood and incense; and, for some reason, strongly, the smell of new leather.

The smells and the people disappeared as he climbed the hill towards the Olympian heights of the Embassy. Descend, Seymour, descend.

Which is what he did the next morning. Back down the hill, past a dismal graveyard, all dark cypresses and ruined tombs. Everywhere among the tombs there were what appeared to be milestones, only with a turban carved on top: the emblem of an entombed pasha, the cavass said. Sometimes it was surrounded by a host of little pillars: the pasha’s wives and children, grouped in a kind of mortuary harem.

The cavass was a splendid figure, dressed in a close-fitting jacket covered with gold lace and with a gloved hand resting always on the richly chased dagger at his belt. More for show than for substance, Seymour judged. The cavass sat up on the box beside the driver. One of them would have done, thought Seymour, and he didn’t really need the carriage either; but Ponsonby had assumed and the Embassy insisted. Lowly, Seymour might be but while he was here he was to be treated as one of the Embassy, and that meant not walking but riding, and with a cavass as escort. A cavass, he guessed, was a sort of orderly, and there were a lot of them.

Through the narrow cobbled streets at the bottom of the hill and then out on to the Galata Bridge, its boards creaking, the wooden joints heaving up and down showing the water underneath. There was a steady stream of traffic across the bridge and they joined the queue of fiacres, landaus, carts, horses and donkeys squeezing past the shapeless women and strutting effendis with their clerks holding an umbrella over their head. Then out on the other bank and down to the quays with their mixture of Western and Oriental craft, small steamers, large dhows, fishing boats and feluccas.

‘A felucca, I think,’ said Ponsonby, ‘if we are going to visit the scene of the crime.’

Seymour, not for the first time, felt let down by antiquity. So this was the famous Hellespont? The legendary Straits of the Dardanelles, across which this chap, Leander, not to mention Cunningham, had swam? Why, it wasn’t much more than a ditch. He could swim it himself.

If he had been daft enough to try. Even while he was watching, three steamers, a tanker and a warship of some sort, together with a host of Oriental sailing boats, went by. The distance wasn’t the problem, nor, as far as he could see, the currents. No, the real danger was of being run down by a boat.

Especially at night. Which is when Cunningham, apparently, had swum it. Night! In the darkness! More romantic, Ponsonby had said. And, anyway, that was how it had been in the legend. Leander, a youth living at Abydos, a village on the shore, more or less where they were standing now, would swim across every night guided by Hero’s lamp. Hero was a priestess at Sestos, on the other side, which was probably the reason for his going at night. It wouldn’t look good to be seen going there on a regular basis, her a priestess, too!