An Evil Eye (19 page)
T
HE valide watched the leaves settle in the court. Now and then a halberdier, head lowered and tresses fanning out across his cheeks, entered the valide’s apartment to tend the fire. It burned on a hearth beneath a high canopy that curved like folds of heavy linen; it emitted little heat. Sometimes the valide watched the soldier crossing the court, his steps heavy and cautious.
“Why doesn’t someone come to sweep the leaves away?” she murmured. “That is how it always was, before.”
Tülin bowed her head over her embroidery and sighed. “You are right, my valide. Of course they should sweep. Shall I send to the guardroom?”
The valide was silent for a long time, as if she were thinking of something else. But when she spoke it was to say: “No, there’s no need, I suppose. They are letting it all wind down. And soon we shall be gone, too.”
Tülin glanced up. “Hanum?”
“I told you, dear. The Kislar aga thinks I am needed at Besiktas.”
Tülin nodded vaguely. The valide had not, in fact, told her anything; but Hyacinth had.
“The girls are getting rather out of hand. The Kislar aga is a pantaloon.”
“And you are the valide still, hanum,” Tülin said simply.
The valide smiled. “Quite right. I don’t really wish to go, but all these dreadful old women … And the change would suit you, too.” She shivered. “Do you read French?”
“I regret not, valide.”
“No, no, of course you don’t. I’ve asked you that before. You’re a good girl, but I think you were not well brought up.”
Tülin’s needle paused over a stitch. “I’m afraid you must be right, valide. I can only make chocolate.”
“Astonishing.” The valide folded her cold fingers together, businesslike. “
That
you didn’t learn in Circassia.”
Tülin shook her head gently, and smiled. “I think it—it just came to me, valide.”
The valide gave a little grunt. “I’d like a glass of water.” She closed her eyes.
Tülin looked up. The cold made her mistress tired. She laid her sewing aside and quietly rearranged the pelisse. On her narrow feet the valide was wearing woolen boots.
Tülin gingerly poked the fire, so that a flame shot up. Then she opened a little tin and took out a pinch of incense, and tossed it over the logs.
Y
ASHIM’S
palinka
splashed in the glass.
“Fevzi Pasha has disappeared? How do you know?”
Palewski frowned. “I’m not entirely without resources, Yashim,” he said, stiffly. “Even I have my networks.”
“I only meant—” He faltered. “What does it mean, he’s disappeared?”
His friend hunched forward in his chair, wrapping his hands around his glass. “I’m not absolutely sure, Yashim. According to the monsignor, the Kapudan pasha was supposed to tour the islands. They never saw him, or the fleet.”
Yashim relaxed back into his armchair. “That’s not such a surprise. We were all supposed to think he’d taken the fleet to the islands, but in reality he was under secret orders to go south.”
“You know that?”
“I’m not entirely without resources. I have my networks.” He smiled. “Husrev Pasha told me as much.”
“Did he say, Yashim, that the fleet is in port, at Alexandria?”
“
Off
Alexandria,” Yashim corrected him. “It’s a show of force.”
“That’s not how it was described to me this morning.”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
“Who does? Your Kapudan pasha, Yashim, seems to have handed the Ottoman navy over to the Egyptians.”
“I don’t believe it.”
Palewski shrugged. “As you like. You may be right. Even Jesuits are fallible, after all.”
B
UT Palewski’s Jesuits, however fallible, proved right about Fevzi Pasha.
At nightfall an Ottoman cutter swept in beneath Seraglio Point to deliver a trembling lieutenant at the gates of the grand vizier’s offices.
“I have urgent intelligence for the grand vizier!” he cried. “I have news of the fleet!”
The old vizier listened impassively as the lieutenant outlined the series of events, but his face grew pale.
“He took the fleet into port?”
“Yes, my pasha. We were out on patrol, so we received no orders. He sailed into Alexandria, and there was nothing. No firing.”
Husrev Pasha wiped a hand across his face. “Your actions will not be forgotten, young man. You have a report in writing?”
The lieutenant produced his report, and Husrev laid it on the pile beside him.
“Tell me, lieutenant, how many men have you aboard your ship?”
“Fifteen, my pasha.”
“Good men? Loyal?”
“They strained every nerve to reach Istanbul. Unswerving, my pasha, in their devotion to the sultan’s service.”
“Your words gladden my heart. They know, then, what you have just told me?”
The lieutenant bowed. “They witnessed it. They were as stupefied as I was.”
“Of course.” Husrev’s fingers moved out for the bell. Reluctantly.
“Shall I bring the ship in now, my pasha?”
The pasha nodded thoughtfully. “Your cutter has not docked?”
“I’ve held her in the channel, awaiting your orders.”
Husrev’s fingers relaxed. “Rejoin your men. Isn’t there some flag to run up the mast when you have pestilence aboard?”
“Pestilence, my pasha?”
Husrev waved a hand. “Typhoid. The plague. A yellow flag? I’ve seen it.”
“The yellow flag is used for ships in quarantine, my pasha.”
“That’s it. Take your cutter, anchor in the Marmara roads, and fly that flag. Don’t let a soul on or off your ship. I’ll see that you get supplied. And rewarded, too.”
Light broke on the young lieutenant’s face. “We are loyal men.”
“Your loyalty is not questioned. Do exactly what I have said.”
When the young lieutenant—what was his name?—had gone, the grand vizier sat for a few minutes rubbing his eyes and pondering the news he had just heard.
He rang a bell.
“Send to the palace at Besiktas. Inform the sultan—wake him, if necessary—that the grand vizier has summoned the divan. A matter of urgency. His presence would be—advisable.”
Years ago—in another century, another life—Husrev Pasha had spent a summer with his uncle, driving a mule train across the Balkans. The tracks were bad, often blocked by falls of stone and scree, so that young Husrev had been sure they would have to turn back. His uncle, though, had simply stamped up to the rockfalls and let his eyes wander over the mountainside, probing the ground with his stick. “The road is blocked? Then we must turn the blockage into our road,” he used to say. Eventually he would wave his nephew to come on with the lead mule.
That was how Husrev came to Sarajevo, and was recruited into the army.
Now, as he sat contemplating this new obstacle in his way, he leaned over and cracked his huge knuckles, one after another, holding his hands close to his belly.
The fleet was gone. Out of a clear blue sky, if the lieutenant was to be believed, Fevzi Pasha had simply turned over his command to the Egyptians.
And I am an old Bosniac who fears the sea.
Husrev’s position—perhaps his very life—hung in the balance. It counted for nothing that the decision to deploy the fleet had been taken by the late sultan. Fevzi’s defection was a blow to the empire’s pride, not to mention the public purse—and it had happened on his watch.
Worst of all, Fevzi’s defection left Istanbul defenseless against an invader.
Husrev snorted through his nose, like a seal blowing air. The Russians had been here before. Who could say that they would not come again?
The Ottomans were afraid of Russia. She pressed against their borders, roamed their seas, bullied them, protected them and took her price. Russia’s designs on Istanbul itself—Constantinople, the jewel in the Orthodox crown—were an open secret.
Husrev cracked his knuckles again.
He rang the bell. His uncle was long dead. “I want to see Yashim,” he said.
Then he glanced up.
Yashim was already there.
O
UT in the roadsteads of the Sea of Marmara the cutter strained at its anchor, meeting each swirl of the current with an almost imperceptible swing of its stern. A lantern burned at its bows; another swung from a lanyard by the mainmast, describing circles that slid shadows across the decks. Now and then a mast creaked, and the rigging gave a soft boom whenever the wind died.
The lieutenant had not yet returned when an oar splashed close to the ship, followed by a low whistle.
A rope ladder dropped from the cutter’s side, and the approaching caïque slid into the deep shadow beneath the rail.
A man moved out into the light on deck. He was visible only in silhouette, and then the lantern took its turn and the darkness dropped and the man disappeared into the dark, taking the ladder rung by rung.
An oar scraped against the wooden hull of the cutter. The rigging hummed in the breeze, and the caïque’s hull hissed against the current. It was barely a sound; and the oars dipped noiselessly into the water.
When the lamplight circled to the rail again, the deck was as empty as before.
“
C
OME in, Yashim.” The grand vizier tossed his papers aside and sat staring at Yashim. “Very bad news.”
“Fevzi Ahmet Pasha has stolen the fleet.”
Husrev raised his eyebrows. “You’ve heard? But I myself have only received the news in these last few minutes.”
“According to the Jesuits, the Kapudan pasha sailed to Egypt and handed the fleet to the khedive,” Yashim said. “They have a network.”
The old vizier closed his eyes. “Do you or the Jesuits know why?”
Yashim hesitated. He was no longer bound by his sense of honor, now that Fevzi Pasha had defected. “In Saint Petersburg, ten years ago, he gave Batoumi away. At the time, I thought he had made an error of judgment. Now I’m not so sure.”
“You think he took a bribe?”
“It’s possible, isn’t it?”
The grand vizier cracked his knuckles together. “Possible. Possible. I should have seen it coming, Yashim, when his dispatch failed to arrive. You should have told me. Who knows what Fevzi Pasha may do for them? Who controls the destiny of the empire, if not the Russians? For a century, they have pushed us farther and farther back. On the Black Sea. In the Balkans. The Greek debacle was a Russian affair.”
“And the Russians benefit from this defection, too.”
“The Russians?”
“The Egyptians gain a fleet—and can contemplate an attack on Istanbul, if they dare to make one. But that wouldn’t be certain. In the meantime, with Istanbul defenseless, Fevzi’s defection gives the Russians an excuse to offer us their protection, as they did before.”
“We can hardly refuse, in view of the Egyptian threat,” Husrev Pasha growled. “We have no fleet. It seems that Fevzi Pasha has played the sides against the center—his defection leaves us with no choice. It seems we must call on the Russians.”
“Just as they intend,” Yashim objected.
“What choice do we have?” the grand vizier interrupted. “We called on them before. They came—and they left. Perhaps they will do so again.”
Yashim shook his head. “Last time we had a fleet, and Mahmut was sultan. Our request for protection took the Russians by surprise. This time, we’re playing into the Russians’ hands. Galytsin has been planning this for some time.”
He thought of Fevzi Pasha’s empty house—the house of a man scaling down; preparing to cut loose. It was so obvious now. He should have understood—it fitted with the Russian papers, the missing report.
The old vizier took a deep breath. “The longer we wait, the weaker we will become. The Egyptian fleet cannot move until the spring. If we talk to the Russians now, we can still negotiate, ask for guarantees. By springtime, we will be talking with a loaded gun at our heads.”
Yashim made no reply. The old pasha was not talking to him—he was merely thinking aloud.
The image that arose in Yashim’s mind was of the tutor at the palace school, stuffing his beard into his mouth.
“Give me two days.”
Husrev Pasha glanced up. “Two days?”
“Before you speak to the Russians.”
Husrev Pasha stared at him. “I must talk to the sultan, and to the viziers. I’m afraid I cannot see what you can do, Yashim efendi. But two days?” Something like a smile appeared on his fleshy lips. “Very well.”
T
HE village of Ortaköy straggled out to nothing in a few hundred yards. Spiked with the wintry stems of Judas trees and hibiscus, the cliffs advanced toward the shore, and Yashim could see the road climbing its flank, deserted except for an unlit bullock cart that strained noiselessly against the gradient, laden with broom from the upper slopes.
He pushed on down the track. Certain details returned to him: the angle of a tree hiking its branches above the water; a tilted Roman milestone half sunk in furze; a long view of the Bosphorus where it slipped away between two promontories, Asian and European, etching the outline of the castle at Rumeli Hisar against the gray sky.
He had forgotten the little row of fishermen’s shacks opposite the
yali
. They were built of wood and tile, single-story houses resting on massive foundations of uncut stone. Their view of the Bosphorus was uninterrupted, over the sunken wattle wall and the lurching gateway where he had said goodbye to Fevzi Ahmet years before, and shivered in his furs.
The
yali
itself was gone. Yashim pushed against the wooden gate, overgrown with the brown tendrils of a summer past; he shoved with his shoulder and felt the grasping shoots break as the gate slowly wheeled back.
Yashim wondered how Fevzi Ahmet had come by the
yali
. Armenian merchants, Greeks in the banking line, privileged governors who sojourned for a season in the capital when their own gubernatorial
konaks
sweltered in provincial deserts: these were the men who took
yali
, owned them or borrowed them, with landing stages at the water’s edge and shady gardens for their ladies to sit in through the hotter months.
Yashim sometimes dreamed of a
yali
himself, a small wooden house where the water would bounce light onto the ceiling and he would fish with a line; Palewski had said it was the Greek in him. But that was only in the summer months, when Yashim’s small apartment in Balat could be stifling and the breeze failed to lick through the open window. In the winter, the
yali
lost their charms. Even a
yali
a few miles along the Bosphorus could be cut off by storms and ice, no closer to Istanbul than the Rhodopes or the mountains of Anatolia. Mountain houses were snug and solid, while in winter, the airy
yali
revealed their drafts; damp seeped into their floors; cold sank through their walls. Shuttered and forlorn, the
yali
of the Bosphorus sat out the snows until the spring returned: the trees put out their leaves for summer shade, the cold retired, the damp was cleared by a few days’ sun and the passage of air through rooms that had been locked for months.
But Fevzi Pasha had clung to his
yali
throughout the year: Yashim had seen the smoke rising from the chimney. And now it was gone, hollowed out like a candle in its socket, only a few charred timbers pointing wickedly toward the sky.
Yashim went along the path to where he had once stood by the front door. The building was already returning to the soil. Weeds had sprouted and withered in the ash. He stirred the ashes with his foot and dislodged a sour, acrid smell.
He took a step back. Mrs. Satzos had been right: there was always a thread to be unraveled in a man’s life; a question you could ask about this house whose answer would lead ten years down the line to a Kapudan pasha sailing his fleet into the harbor at Alexandria. A question about a pile of charred wood that would explain his treason.
The day was cold and overcast. Yashim turned his back on the ruins and walked on to the next village. The fishermen had erected tiny platforms, like crows’ nests, between an arrangement of poles, and between the platforms hung nets of heartbreaking length, straining the current for fish.