The Janissary Tree (23 page)

Preen
landed in a bruised tangle, her face pressed against the corridor floor. Her
right arm throbbed. For a few seconds she did not move, hearing only the sound
of blood pulsing in her head and the gasp of her own breath. In the darkness it
sounded shockingly loud.

But
then came a muffled crack behind her on the stairs, close to her feet, like the
sound of someone testing his weight on a wooden step.

The
sound of someone joining her in the dark.

Somebody
was coming down the stairs, from her own room.

With
a convulsive jerk, she pulled up her legs and somersaulted out into the
corridor. As her weight fell upon her arm, a jolt of pain seared upward through
her shoulder into her neck and she opened her mouth to scream.

But
the sound died on her lips.

60

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

YASHIM,
mounting the stairs two at a time, heard the crash of Preen falling backward,
and at the top of the stairs he grabbed the wall and swung himself around the
corner into the corridor. The darkness disoriented him. He heard another
movement in the passage and shouted, "Preen!"

Without
hesitation, he took two steps into the dark. Only two--but they saved his life. He
had got no farther when he was smashed backward with a force that seconds
earlier would have catapulted him down the stairs. He felt a savage blow to his
face and the breath knocked out of his lungs as he was hurled back against the
wall.

Two
things flashed through his mind as he retched for air. One, that he was already
too late. The assassin had been with Preen, and she was dead. Another, that the
killer who had struck him and who was at this very moment flinging himself down
the darkened stairs, flight by flight, was not going to get away easily.

He
put out a hand and gripped the banister. The movement seemed to let air back
into his chest; another brought him to his feet. For a moment he stood,
heaving, and then with an oath he plunged down the stairs.

He
reached the corridor on the ground floor and tore out of the entrance into the
street, where he swiveled and glanced about. A black man he recognized from the
morning lay sprawled in the dust, still holding two chamber pots aloft in
either fist and staring at him with utter bewilderment. He jerked his head and
swung a pot over his shoulder. Yashim began to run.

There
were still many people about, and while it was hard to see how many, or where
they were until he was almost upon them, because it was very dark, something in
the way people shrank back at his approach told Yashim that he was on the right
track. A man runs through a crowd, he thought, and the crowd instinctively
expects another, on his trail: quarry and hunter, the pursued and the pursuer,
old as man himself, older than Istanbul. A picture of two snakes swallowing
each other's tails swam in his mind. He ran.

He
reached the corner of the street and plunged left, guided by a sharp rage and
an instinctive urge to climb, to take to the higher ground. Figures shrank away
at his approach. At a corner lit by the torches of a coffeehouse he caught
sight of people turning their heads back to focus on him and he thought: I'm
closing. But the streets were narrowing again. At a junction of three
alleyways, he almost paused and almost lost his way: but then a faint something
in the air, a sickly-sweet trace he had smelled before but couldn't identify,
gave him the lead he sought and, ignoring a well-lit empty alley and another he
thought he recognized as a cul-de-sac, he plunged down the darkest and the
meanest of them all. Whether he was trailing by instinct, or magic, or by signs
he could not even pause to decipher--a faint incline, a preference for the dark
over the light, an unreasoned and unexamined knowledge of the difference
between a street and a dead end that he had imbibed, as it were, from years of
living in Istanbul-- he did not know: had he stopped to think he would have
stopped altogether, for the breath was flying to his lungs like an angry
lizard: he could feel its scales upraised, its scrabbling claws.

He
swerved to the wall and flung out his hand to meet it and stood for a few
seconds, breathing heavily. Ahead, lights flickered and glittered red in the
darkness, a string of little street shrines lit by candles glowing behind the
colored glass. He guessed where he was. And at that moment he realized, too, where
he was going.

And
he ran on with such a fierce, formless, and glowing conviction that at the next
alley he swerved suddenly to the right and almost knocked a man to the ground.

It
was a glancing blow, shoulder to shoulder, but it made the man wheel, and as he
wheeled, Yashim turned his head and caught sight of his face. It contained, he
saw, a whole range of expressions--anger, confusion, and a spark of sudden
recognition.

"The
fire!" the man cried out, almost with a laugh.

Yashim
waved an arm and sped on, but the man was at his back. "Efendi!"

Yashim
recognized the voice. And at that very moment the alley made a sudden shallow
curve and a light was burning at its far end: and right in his line of sight he
caught a glimpse of what he already knew had been in his mouth all along, like
the tail of a snake: a fleeting glimpse of a man who disappeared.

A
voice came from behind: "I saw him! Let's go!"

Yashim
glanced sideways as the other man, fresh to the chase, loped up at his
shoulder.

"Murad
Eslek!" he said, panting. Yashim remembered the street on fire, the man black
with soot who grinned and shook his hand.

Reaching
an alley that offered a choice to run right or left, Yashim hesitated. He
seemed to have lost his sense of direction: Eslek's sudden appearance confused
him. He was aware that he had been running for a long time. He sensed he was
very close, but he felt his own anger and confusion, pounding heavy footed down
an ordinary alleyway in Istanbul. What he had taken for inspiration had
suddenly resolved itself into commonplace: it had become no more than
coincidence.

"The
tanneries!" Yashim gasped. The scent had both eluded and directed him for what
seemed like hours. He had smelled it the moment Preen's killer made explosive
contact with him at the head of the stairs. It had drawn him along the streets,
sucked him instinctively into alleyways, urged him left and right and now,
within sight of his prey, it enveloped him.

Doggedly,
feeling the weight on his feet for the first time, Yashim trotted left at a
junction of mean alleys. Even in the darkness he could see that the walls
around him were not continuous. Here and there a dim glow told him that he was
passing a dwelling of some sort, but for the most part he moved in darkness
where the lane bled out into scrub, and goats and sheep were tethered and
corralled into flimsy yards. He heard them shift, with a low tinkle of bells;
once he stumbled into a gate where the lane curved. His companion had long
since dropped away: his quarry was nowhere to be seen. Nowhere to be sensed.

The
reek of the tanneries had blotted him out.

61

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

THE
first thing Yashim noticed, after the stench he was forced to suck down into
his heaving chest, was the light.

It
rose in eerie columns from the vats into which the animal skins were lowered
for boiling and dyeing. Against a forest of flickering torches, each vat threw
out a spume of colored vapor, red, yellow, and indigo blending and slowly
dissolving into the darkness of the night air. The air stank of fat and burned
hair and worst of all the overreaching odor of dog shit used to tan the
leather. A vision of hell.

A
hell into which Yashim's quarry had disappeared.

Yashim
dropped to one knee and took a careful look around.

He'd
heard about the tanning yard, and smelled it, too, but this was the first time
he had seen it with his own eyes. A high wall enclosed about an acre of ground
in which, crammed together, almost touching at the rim, the vats lay embedded
in a raised floor of clay and cement, which glinted greasily in the torchlight
and allowed the tanners to walk between them and stir their bubbling contents
with a long pole. Molded of clay, lined with tiles, each vat was about six feet
across. Here and there crude derricks had been set up for hauling the heavy bundles
of wet skins in and out of the dyes, and at the junction of each four vats, in
a space that resembled a four-pointed star, circular iron grilles had been
fixed, Yashim imagined, to feed air to the flues that ran underneath. Several
of these grilles were visible from where he stood.

Of
the assassin there was no sign, but Yashim knew that he was there, somewhere,
hidden behind the lip of one of the vats, perhaps, or standing motionless
against the shadowed walls. Yashim knew almost nothing about the killer, except
that he could operate in the dark: it was in the dark that he had launched
himself against him, in darkness he had killed Preen, in the night he had
stolen in to garrote the hunchback. The dark, Yashim thought, is this man's
friend.

He
scanned the tannery again. It was surrounded by high walls: only at the farther
end across the dancing glow of color could he see other darkened doorways. He
did not think the killer had found time to reach them.

Yashim
shifted focus to look at the vats closest to him. The colors in the steam were
less vivid, perhaps because of the way the light caught them; it was only
farther out, as the pillars of steam overlapped, that they showed a rainbow
iridescence. Some of the nearer vats appeared to be empty.

Yashim
edged closer on bended legs, holding up the skirt of his cloak. He stepped out
onto the clay. It was surprisingly slippery, beaded with droplets of steam and
fat, and he moved cautiously, planting his feet with elaborate care. He could
feel the heat from the vats but, yes, there were empty vats among them. They
were drained, he now saw, by means of a wooden bung attached to a chain that
ran up the inside of each vat and was secured by a metal loop at the rim. He
had a vision of the killer dropping down into one of them: like the soldier
lying dead in the cauldron at the stables, days before.

He
reached into his cloak and unsheathed the little dagger at his belt. For a
moment its blade glinted fiercely in the weird light, and then dulled as the
vapor that filled the air condensed on the cold metal. He held it out, the
handle beneath his thumb and nestling into his curled fingers, using it like a
pointer.

He
put one foot on top of the grating, feeling a rush of hot air up his leg; he
tried it with his weight and felt the grating rock, with an almost
imperceptible metallic sound. He pushed again, a little harder. Again the same
slight yielding to pressure, but this time the metal grille gave a distinct
knock against the frame.

Yashim
stepped back and crouched down to inspect the grating. It was about twenty
inches in diameter, set with rounded iron bars two inches apart. He raised his
head, considering. There had been so little time to hide. Crouched in one of
the empty vats, the killer would be caught like a bear in a pit: it would be
only a matter of time before Yashim found him, and then...

He
put out his hand and pushed the far side of the grating, watching it rock very
slightly away from him. It was not properly bedded at one side, and by rocking
it to and fro he worked out the pivotal point. Yashim ran his fingers along the
edge and gave a grunt as he felt a small twist of cloth no bigger than a
fingernail that protruded from the joint.

He
stood up and stepped back, carefully, to take a flaming torch from a bracket in
the wall. Once more he scanned the tannery, but nothing moved. By the grating
he knelt down and thrust the torch against the grille.

Tunnels.
These grilles had to be more than air vents: they must also act as access
points to a network of tunnels for the tanners to feed the fires that boiled
the water in the vats. The killer could have dropped down here into the
tunnels: in his haste, though, a corner of his sleeve must have caught in the
joint as he replaced the grille overhead.

It
has already been said that Yashim was reasonably brave: but that was only when
he stopped to think.

Without
a moment's reflection, he heaved up the grille and swung his legs into the
pipe. The next moment he was crouched at its base, about five feet below,
peering in astonishment at what was revealed by the flickering light of his
torch.

62

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

The
assassin hung for a moment on all fours, to catch his breath. Strong: yes, he
was very strong. But the running was for a younger man, perhaps, a man in
training. He had not trained that way for ten years.

Move,
he told himself. Crawl away from under the grating. For the first time in
forty-eight hours he felt tired. Jinxed.

The
mission had failed. He had waited for hours in that room, focusing on the door.
Once or twice he had tried the latch, to see how long it took for the door to
swing open. Darkness had come: his element.