The Janissary Tree (25 page)

"No,
no, you're perfectly right. I'd be grateful, really. But you've done so much
for me this evening, I don't want to take you out of your way"

Eslek
shook his head. "Almost there," he said.

At
the door of the hammam they parted with a handshake. Yashim had murmured--and
Eslek had protested.

"Drop
it, efendi. You came out all right for us on the night of the fire. I've got a
wife and kiddies up the street what know as you did a grand job for them. I was
going to swing round and see you--Sign of the Stag, you said, right?--and thank
you proper. My advice is, don't go messing with them tanners anymore. They're
dirty, efendi, and it ain't just the fat."

Yashim
was grateful for the baths. Eslek was right: they were clean. The proprietor, a
sallow old Armenian with a weary and intelligent face, even agreed to send a
boy to fetch clean clothes from Yashim's landlady while Yashim sluiced away the
colored grease that had sunk between his toes and the miasma of shit that clung
to his skin. All the time he fought not to remember what he knew.

Yashim
unwound his turban and scooped water over his hair.
Preen was dead.
He
concentrated on his surroundings. When the attendant offered him a bar of soap,
it smelled, he noticed, of Murad Eslek. He touched his left cheek: tomorrow
he'd have a black eye. He continued to use the scoop, rhythmically ladling the
hot water over his head, massaging the soap into his scalp, behind his ears,
over his aching neck. His ribs were bruised where the assassin had plunged
against him on Preen's corridor.
And Preen was dead.
Yashim jerked his
head up, to watch the attendant bringing him a basin of cold water for his
scalded foot. There was nothing he could do about his knee. It looked red and
felt sore. It would heal.

He
forced himself to remember the chase throwgh the alleys. Palewski had told him
once how Napoleon had entered Italy, winning battle after battle with the
Austrians, until he had felt that the earth itself was flying under his feet. He
had felt the same, pursuing the man who had killed the hunchback, through the
inclined alleys of Istanbul. Pursuing the man who killed Preen.

He
had not been able to save the assassin, that was true. Otherwise he could have
made him talk. To have learned--what? Details, names, locations.

Even
now, he could not decide whether the killer had been aware of what was
happening when he had struggled to cut the rope that bound him to the derrick. Yashim
had been hoping to inch him back, away from the boiling vat. Had the killer
known where he was? Was it suicide? Yashim was pious enough to hope it was not.

Yet
he could not rid himself of the idea that the killer, like himself, understood
that they were both at an end of the same rope: bound for minutes in perfect
mutual understanding. He wanted us both to go together, Yashim suspected.

All
he had really learned, instead, was how the third cadet to die had been boiled
so that all his bones were clean. And that, he reasoned, was something he could
have guessed. After all, the soup master had already told him how the
Janissaries had come back to Istanbul, taking jobs that were out of the way. Watchmen.
Stokers.
Tanners.
He remembered the scarred and blackened face of the
man who knocked him down.

Was
it for this that Preen had died?

Yashim
squeezed his hair.

Preen was dead.

And
why was the assassin so determined to die?

What
was there, apart from the threat of justice, that made a man decide to die
rather than talk?

Yashim
could think of only two things.

One
was fear.

The
other was faith: the martyr's death.

He
pulled back suddenly, gasping for breath, his eyes stinging.

Preen
had died alone, for nothing, in the dark.

Wise
and wayward, loving and forever doomed, she died because of him.

He
had asked her to help.

It
wasn't that. Yashim whined, teeth bared, his eyes screwed up tight, knocking
his head against the tiled wall.

He
had never properly taught her to read.

68

***********

The
morning dawned bright. On the street, Stambouliots congratulated one another on
the reappearance of good weather and expressed the hope that the gloom that had
settled over the city in the last week might finally be lifted. Optimists
declared that the spate of murders seemed to have come to an end, proving that
the message from the imams had worked.

Pessimists
predicted more fog ahead. Only the fatalists, who in Istanbul number hundreds
of thousands, merely shrugged their shoulders and said that, like fire and
earthquake, God's will would be done.

Yashim
made his way down early to the cafe on the Kara Davut. The proprietor noticed
that he was limping, and without a word offered him a cushioned divan off the
pavement where he could still enjoy watching the doings on the street.

When
he had brought the coffees, Yashim asked, "Is there anyone who could take a
message for me, and fetch an answer? I'd ask your son, but it's pretty far."

He
gave the address. The cafe proprietor frowned and turned down his mouth.

"It
is time," he said gruffly. "Mehmed can go. Eh, hey! Mehmed!"

A
little boy of about eight or nine bounced out of the back of the shop at his
father's shout. He bowed solemnly and stood looking at Yashim with his big
brown eyes, rubbing one foot against his other leg.

Yashim
gave him a purse and carefully explained where to go. He told him about the old
lady behind the lattice. "You should knock. When she answers, present my
compliments. Give her the money, and tell her these are--expenses--for the lady
Preen, in room eight. Whatever she says, don't be frightened. Remember what you
are told."

The
boy nodded and darted through the door, where a small crowd had gathered to
watch a dervish perform his dance on the street. Yashim saw the boy dive
unhesitatingly between the folds of their cloaks, and so away, down the street.
A funeral errand, he thought; the father would not be pleased.

"A
good boy," he said guiltily. "You should be proud."

The
father gave a noncommittal wag of his head and started polishing glasses with a
cloth.

Yashim
took a sip of coffee and turned to watch the performance in the street.

The
dervish danced in the space defined by a ring of bystanders, who every now and
then had to stand aside to let someone in or out of the cafe, giving Yashim a
glimpse of the performer. He wore a white tunic, white puttees, and a white
cap, and he flexed his hands and legs in time to some inner melody, his eyes
closed. But the dancer was not entranced: from what Yashim could see, it looked
like one of the simpler dances of the seeker after truth, a stylized rendition
of Ignorance searching for the Way.

He
put up a hand to rub his eyes and gave an involuntary yelp. He'd forgotten the
bruising.

A
fire station. Another tower. His exploration of the files in the Imperial
Archives had been inconclusive, to say the least. The references to fire towers
had been too scanty to work on: they did not signify anything either way. All
you could say was that fire towers existed; Galata, Beyazit. Everyone knew
that. Perhaps he'd been reading in the wrong book.

If
only he could get hold of that helpful young Sudanese. Ibou.

He'd
gone looking for evidence of a fourth tower. He hadn't found any.

Perhaps
there wasn't one.

What
if the fourth location wasn't a tower at all?

But
if there wasn't a tower, what was he looking for?

The
second verse of the Karagozi poem came to his mind.

Unknowing

And
knowing nothing of unknowing,

They
seek.

Well,
here he was. Unknowing, searching. And the refrain?

Teach them.

All
well and good, he thought, but teach them what? Enlightenment? Of course, it
would be that. But it meant nothing to him. As the poem said, he didn't even
know what he didn't know. He could go around in circles like this forever.

So
who were these other people, the people who were supposed to teach? Teachers,
simply. Imams, for example, dinning the Koran into their restless little
charges with the cane.
Ferenghi
gunnery instructors, perhaps, trying
to explain the rules of mathematics to a fresh-faced batch of recruits. And at
the madrassas, the schools attached to city mosques, clever boys learned the
rudiments of logic, rhetoric, and Arabic.

Outside
on the pavement, the dervish had finished his dance. He pulled a cap from his
belt and passed through the cafe, soliciting alms. To everyone who gave him
something, he put out a hand and murmured a blessing.

Out
of the corner of his eye, Yashim saw the proprietor watching with folded arms. He
had no doubt that had the man been a simple beggar he would have shooed him
away, maybe with a coin, but a dervish--no, the babas had to be given respect
because they showed people the way. The path to a higher truth.

The
dervishes were teachers of higher truths.

The
Karagozi, also, were teachers of their Way.

Yashim
hunched his shoulders, trying to concentrate.

He'd
had that verse in his head, recently.
Unknowing they seek. Teach them.
And he had said--or perhaps it was just a thought--that he must be a slow
learner.

Where
was it? He had an impression that he had, after all, learned something then. He
had thought of that verse, and heard something useful. But the time and place
eluded him.

He
shut his eyes. In his mind he groped for an answer.

A slow learner
. Where had he thought that before?

His
mind was blank. Try again.

He
had guessed that there were four towers. Old Palmuk, the fire watcher, had
denied it.

Then
he remembered. It wasn't the old man; it was the other one, Orhan. It was Orhan
who had told him about the towers as they stood on the parapet of the Galata
Tower, in the fog. He'd described the tower that was lost and how they raised
the Beyazit tower to compensate. The old tower had burned, he'd said: along
with the tekke. A tekke, like the one downstairs.

So
both towers had been furnished with a Karagozi tekke. He couldn't yet be sure
about the fire tower at Beyazit, but a tekke was certainly where the truth was
taught, as the Karagozi perceived it.
Unknowing they seek. Teach them.
And the tekkes in the fire towers were, coincidentally, the earliest tekkes in
the city.

"I've
had the whole thing back to front," Yashim announced. He stood up abruptly and
saw a dervish blinking, smiling, putting out his cap for alms. The dervish's
cap swam under his nose.

Yashim
walked out.

The
dervish stretched out both his arms in blessing. In his cap he had seen a whole
silver sequin.

69

***********

"CHARMANTE! Tout a fait charmante!
If I were younger, my dear, I would be
positively jealous."

Eugenia
blushed slightly and curtseyed. There was no doubt in her own mind that the
valide, who was reclining against cushions scattered around a window seat, must
have been ravishing herself. With the soft light at her back, she had the easy
poise of a beautiful woman. And the cheekbones to go with it.

"I
am so glad we were able to persuade you to come," the valide continued, without
a hint of irony. She raised her lorgnette and peered at Eugenia's dress. "The
girls will think you quite
a la mode"
she pronounced. "I want you to
sit here by me, before they come to devour you. We can talk a little."

Eugenia
smiled and took a seat at the edge of the divan.

"It
was so kind of you to invite me," she said.

"Men
don't think it, but there is so much we women can arrange,
n'est-ce pas?
Even from here.
Tu ne me crois pas?"

"Of
course I believe you, Valide."

"And
you Russians are very much in the ascendant these days. Count Orloff, your
husband's predecessor, was a good friend to the empire during the Egyptian
crisis. He had a very plain wife, I understand. But no doubt they were very
happy together."

Eugenia's
eyes narrowed a fraction. "She was a Voronsky," she replied.

"Believe
it or not," the valide said, "I have never been impressed by the claims of old
family. Neither I nor my dear childhood friend Rose were precisely Almanach de
Gotha. We were clever, and that counts for much more. She became empress. Her
husband Napoleon, of course, came from nowhere at all. The Ottomans, I'm
delighted to say, have no snobberies of that kind."