The Janissary Tree (30 page)

"Quite
true. Go on."

About
ten minutes later they identified the Stamboul Tower as a tekke.

"That's
good," Yashim said. "It proves the system is working."

"Pouf!
I'm glad you told me now."

The
last fold of the map brought out the Galata Tower and also the old tekke in the
Janissary headquarters, now buried beneath the Imperial Stables. As Eugenia had
predicted, they completed their comparison more quickly, for not only did the
city dwindle but much of it was covered with the palace and grounds above
Seraglio Point. They found nothing there to surprise them.

"It's
late," Yashim said. "I should go."

Eugenia
stood up and stretched, first on one foot, then the other.

"How?
Perhaps it hasn't occurred to you, but the embassy is locked at night. High
walls. Vigilant guards. A mouse couldn't get in--or out. Fortunately for me, you
are not a mouse."

With
a flourish she slipped the sash from her waist. Her peignoir swung open and she
gave a shrug of her shoulders and stepped from it.

"The
pleasure is all mine," Yashim said with a smile.

"We'll
see about that," she said and held out a hand.

82

***********

The
master of the Soup Makers' Guild took the ends of his mustache in either hand
and thoughtfully tugged on them.

Then
he picked up the ancient key that the guard had just returned and slipped it
back onto the big ring.

He
knew that the investigator from the palace had to be right: only the night
watchmen could have organized the theft. But why? It had to be some foolish
prank, he supposed. Maybe some sentimental ritual of their own. When he
explained that one of the cauldrons had gone missing, he had expected them to
look shifty and ashamed. He had expected them to confess. Confide. He had hoped
they would have confidence in him.

Only
they stared at him blankly, instead. Denied it all. The soup master had been
disappointed.

The
soup master began again. "I am not looking for punishment. Perhaps the cauldron
will be returned, and perhaps we need say no more about it. But"--he raised a
heavy finger--"I am troubled. The guild is one family. We have difficulties, and
we sort them out. I sort them out. It is what I do, I am the head of this
family. So when some outsider comes to tell me about problems I know nothing
about, I am worried. And also ashamed."

He
paused.

"A
snooping fellow, from the palace, comes to tell me something that has happened
in my own house. Ali--I'm getting through now, am I?"

He
had detected a flicker of interest--but it hadn't developed.

The
soup master pulled at his mustaches again. The meeting disturbed him. The men
weren't exactly insolent, but they were cold. The soup master felt that he had
run a risk for their sakes, giving them work when they were desperate, but
there had been no answering gratitude on this occasion.

He
stopped short of dismissing them, with an uneasy feeling that a wordless threat
had been issued. That he should mind his own business-- as if the theft of a
pot, and the subsequent denials, weren't his business entirely! But he could
not simply dismiss them now. If they suffered, he might suffer. He could be
accused of aiding and abetting the enemies of the Porte.

He
crammed his massive hands together, kneading his fingers.

Was
there no way of paying them back for their disloyalty? He thought of the
eunuch.

The
eunuch had some status in the palace.

The
soup master wondered how he could become better acquainted with that man.

83

***********

YASHIM
spent the morning visiting the three sites he had identified from the old map
the night before. He hoped that something would strike him if he searched with
an open mind.

A
tekke did not have to be large, but a big space might provide a clue. A tekke
did not, of itself, have to conform to any particular shape, yet a small dome
might suggest a place of worship. So would, perhaps, a stoup for holy water, or
a redundant niche, or a forgotten inscription over a doorway in a
corridor--little signs that might seem insignificant in themselves, but taken together
would help to point him in the right direction.

Failing
that, he could always ask.

The
first street he visited was only gradually recovering from the effects of a
fire that had burned so fiercely that the few stone buildings had finally
exploded. Some large, broken blocks still lay embedded in the ash that drifted
listlessly up and down the charred-out street. Some men were poking in the ash
with sticks; Yashim supposed they were householders, searching for their
savings. They answered him slowly, as if their thoughts were still far away. None
of them knew about a tekke.

The
second place turned out to be a small, irregularly shaped square just within
the city walls. It was a working-class district, with a fair number of
Armenians and Greeks among the Turkish shopkeepers whose little booths were
gathered along its eastern edge. The buildings were in poor repair. It was
almost impossible to guess their age. In a poor district, buildings tended to
be repaired and recycled beyond their normal life expectancy. Come a fire, and
people built afresh in the same style as their fathers and grandfathers.

Across
from the shops stood a small but sedate and clean mosque, and behind it a
little whitewashed house where the imam lived. He came to the door himself,
leaning on a stick, an old, very bent man with a straggling white beard and
thick spectacles. He was rather deaf, and seemed confused and even irritated
when Yashim asked him about the Karagozi.

"We
are all Orthodox Muslims here," he kept saying in a reedy voice. "Eh? I can't
understand you. Aren't you a Muslim? Well, then. I don't see what--we are all
good Muslims here."

He
banged his stick twice, and when Yashim finally got away he continued to stand
there on his threshold, leaning on his stick and following him through his
thick spectacles until he had rounded the corner.

From
the shopkeepers he learned that a market took place in the square every other
day. But as for any Sufi tekke, abandoned or otherwise, they only shrugged. A
group of old men, sitting out under a tall cypress growing close to the base of
the old wall, discussed the matter among themselves, but their conversation
soon moved on to memories of other places, and one of them began a long story
about a Mevlevi dervish he'd once met in Ruse, where he had been born almost a
century ago. Yashim slipped away while the men were still talking.

By
late morning he had reached the third, and last, of the possibilities suggested
by Eugenia's map, a tight knot of small alleys in the west of the city where it
had been impossible to pinpoint, with any degree of accuracy, either the street
or building the tekke had appeared to occupy.

Yashim
wandered around, defining a kind of circuit that he spent more than an hour
exploring. But these narrow streets, as always, yielded little: it was
impossible to guess what was going on behind the high blind facades, let alone
imagine what might have taken place there fifteen or a hundred years before. It
was only at the last minute, when Yashim was ready to give up, that he accosted
a ferrety man with a waxed mustache who was stepping out of a porte cochere,
carrying a string bag.

The
man jumped when Yashim spoke.

"Who
do you want?" he snapped.

"It's
a tekke," Yashim began--and as he said it he was struck by an idea. "I'm looking
for a Sufi tekke, I'm not sure whose."

The
man looked him up and down.

"Doesn't
it make a difference?" He seemed genuinely surprised. "They aren't all the
same, you know."

"Of
course, I understand," Yashim said peaceably. "In this case, I'm looking for a
particular old tekke... I'm an architect," he added wildly.

He
had spent the morning asking people if they remembered a Karagozi tekke. He had
supposed that a redundant tekke could become anything from a shop to a tearoom.
It hadn't occurred to him until now that the most likely fate for an abandoned
tekke was to be adopted by another sect. A Karagozi tekke would become someone
else's.

"An
old tekke." The man swung his nose left and right. "There's a Nasrani tekke in
the next street. They've only been there ten years or so, but the building's
very old, if that's what you mean."

The
Karagozi were banned ten years ago.

"That,"
said Yashim, smiling, "is exactly what I mean."

The
man offered to show him to the place. As they walked along, he said, "What do
you make of all these murders, then?"

It
was Yashim's turn to jump. A street dog got up from a doorway and barked at
them.

"Murders?"

"The
cadets, you must have heard. Everyone's talking about them."

"Oh,
yes. What do you think?"

"I
only think--what everyone says. It's something big, isn't it? Something about to
happen." He put his hand into the air as if feeling it with his pursed fingers.
"I keep rats."

"Rats."

"Do
you like animals? I used to keep birds. I loved it when the light fell on their
cages in the winter. I kept them hanging, outside the window. The birds would
always sing in the sunlight. In the end I let them go. But rats, they're
clever, and they don't mind a cage. Plus I let them out, to run. You can see
them stop and think about things.

"I've
got three. They've been acting strangely these last few days. Don't want to
come out of their cages. I take them out, of course, but they only want to hide
somewhere. If it was just one, I could understand. I get times when I don't
want to see people, too, just want to stay at home and play with my pets. But
all three, just the same. I think they feel it, too."

Yashim,
who had never liked rats, asked, "What is it? What do they feel?"

The
man shook his head. "I don't know what. People muttering, all closed up. Like I
said, something's happening and we don't know what. Here you are, the tekke."

Yashim
looked around in surprise. He had passed the low, windowless box earlier. It
looked like a warehouse or a storeroom.

"Are
you sure?"

The
man nodded briskly. "There might be no one there, but they seem to be around in
the evenings. Good luck." He waved the string bag. "Got to pick up some food
for the rats," he explained.

Yashim
gave him a weak smile.

Then
he knocked hard on the double doors.

84

***********

"Yes,
Karagozi." The man continued to smile gently.

So
this is it, Yashim thought. At the same time he looked about him with sudden
curiosity. Was it here, then, that the Janissaries had indulged in their
bacchanalian rites? Bibbing, and women, and mystic poetry! Or something more
prosaic, like a chamber of commerce, where business deals were fixed up and the
soldiers who had become traders and artisans talked about the state of the
market and what they could squeeze from it.

There
was nothing superficially sacred about the place. As it stood, it could easily
have been the warehouse that Yashim had originally mistaken it for, a plain,
whitewashed chamber lit by high windows, with an oak table running down the
middle and benches on either side. A banqueting hall, say. The walls were
freshly whitened, but they seemed to have been painted once, to judge by the
cloudy images he could still make out behind the lime.

"The
walls were decorated?"

The
tekke master inclined his head. "Very beautifully done."

"But--what,
sacrilegious?"

"To
our minds, yes. The Karagozi were not afraid to make representations of what
God has created. Perhaps they were able to do this with a pure heart. Yet those
who believe as I do would have found them a distraction. I cannot say that this
is why we had them painted over, though. It was more driven by a concern to
return to the old purity of the tekke."

"I
see. So wall painting was introduced into Karagozi tekkes more recently? It
wasn't the original idea?"

The
tekke master looked thoughtful.

"I
do not know. For us, the Karagozi occupation was an interlude we preferred not
to commemorate."

Yashim
looked up at the coffered ceiling.

"Interlude?
I don't quite understand."

"Forgive
me," the tekke master said humbly. "I have not made myself clear, so perhaps
you are unaware that this was a Nasrani tekke until the time of the Patrona
Rebellion. The Karagozi grew very strong at that period, and they needed more
space, so we gave it over to them. Recent events," he added, with the usual
circumspection, "allowed us to reacquire the building, and the pictures were
covered, as you see."