The Abyssinian Proof (2 page)

Isaak pulled his wool cloak tighter around his shoulders. It was time to fetch his mother. His wife would have to accompany him to the gynaeceum, the women’s quarters, as men were not permitted. He knew his father would be on the ramparts with their emperor. At that moment, he realized with anguished certainty that he would never see his father again.

Isaak embraced his son and leaned down to kiss his daughter. She turned her cheek away in pique, so Isaak let his fingers linger in her curls.

Michael kissed his mother’s hand and pressed it to his forehead.

“Come now,” Isaak said gruffly. “Enough time for that later.” He reached for his wife’s hand and drew her into the darkness. They felt their way through the tunnel, then crept noiselessly out of the crypt and through the garden into the lane.

They ran through the dark streets toward his mother’s house near the land walls. These massive fortifications, constructed in the fifth century, had withstood Turkish onslaughts in the past, as they had those by Huns, Avars, Russians, Saracens, and other invaders for a thousand years. But Isaak had heard of a new weapon fashioned for the Turks by a Frenchman, a cannone as long as five men laid head to foot, that they said could cut through walls like a scimitar through flesh. As they approached, they encountered more and more people running in the opposite direction.

A man stopped them and said urgently, “It’s started. You have to turn around.” As he ran off, he called over his shoulder, “We’re all going to the cathedral.”

A terrible cry rose from beyond the city walls, from the throats of eighty thousand men set loose. Isaak grabbed his wife’s hand and they began to run. An unearthly thunder smashed the air and, a few moments later, a great blast of exploding masonry. The screams of men tore the night. Behind them, the bells of the ancient cathedral of Hagia Sophia, the church of the Divine Wisdom, began to toll.

K
amil Pasha woke with a start. As he got up from the armchair, papers cascaded from his lap onto the floor. He must have dozed off. The lamp was lit. The clock on the mantel said three in the morning.

His manservant, Yakup, stood in the doorway balancing a glass of tea on a tray. “No word yet.”

“What’s taking them so long?” Kamil complained as he picked up the files from the floor and stacked them on his desk. He stopped for a moment to examine a rose-colored bloom that had appeared on the potted
Cephalanthera rubra
sitting beside the files. It was one of dozens of orchids scattered about the rooms of his villa. A passionate collector, Kamil had had a winter garden built onto the back of the house for his more delicate varieties.

Kamil went next door to his bedroom. He poured water from a pitcher into a china bowl and stood for a moment, hands splayed on the cool marble of the washstand, frowning into the mirror. The lamplight accentuated the lean angles of his face and the tired smudges beneath his eyes. He looked like a ruffian with his unruly hair and mustache, black stubble, and dour expression. They say a man’s fate is written on his forehead, he reflected, examining the lines that scored his brow. Perhaps it was just a map of where that man has been. He smacked the flat of his hand against the marble and turned away. A map would imply the existence of a Mapmaker, he thought grimly. No God worth his salt would work with such flimsy materials.

Kamil dipped a tinned copper mug into a jar of spring water and drank it down, then went back to his study. He pushed open the window and leaned out. A slick of moonlight spread outward from the Beshiktash shore at the base of the hill. Beyond the strait hulked the black hills of Asia. The moon was high and the night too bright for subterfuge. Had their target spotted the gendarmes following him?

Kamil was a magistrate in the new secular courts, responsible for investigating and prosecuting crimes, especially those that could potentially undermine the state. He oversaw an area stretching from the Old City all the way north to the fishing villages and summer konaks of the wealthy nestled into the European side of the Bosphorus. These days, the mood in the city was as brittle as tinder. Muslim refugees from the embattled Balkan provinces had been teeming into the city, thousands of them with harrowed faces and tattered clothing, clogging the lanes with bullock carts, and bearing tales of massacres. The municipalities and charitable foundations were overwhelmed.

To make matters worse, valuable objects were disappearing at an alarming rate from mosques, churches, and synagogues throughout the empire. Two days ago, an icon of the Virgin Mary that the Christians believed had miraculous powers had disappeared from the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate. Christians and Jews had begun to accuse the sultan’s government of orchestrating the thefts in order to undermine their communities, as if the disappearing antiquities were phantom limbs and they feared in this way that they might vanish entirely.

Then, this afternoon, the spark had been struck that could set all of Istanbul aflame. A man had ridden up to a carriage that was carrying an aide to the Ottoman governor of Macedonia and, before the guards could react, had leaned inside and shot him in the head. The man had galloped off, but one of the guards followed and alerted the gendarmes, the military police attached to the governor’s office. That had set in motion an elaborate trap, the jaws of which were about to close around the assassin and his co-conspirators.

When news of the assassination spread, a crowd of Muslims, their numbers swelled by desperate refugees, had gathered outside the Aya Sofya Mosque, still revered by Christians as the Byzantine cathedral of Hagia Sophia, and threatened to burn it to the ground. They were met by an equal crowd of Christian men. In the resulting melee, ten people had been killed.

Kamil glanced at the message from the minister of justice lying on his desk. It appointed him special prosecutor charged with seeing that the entire situation be brought under control as quickly and as quietly as possible, and gave him full charge of the military operation.

The last thing the government wanted was to arrest Christians in broad daylight. Disguised military agents had followed the assassin to identify his co-conspirators, and those involved would be arrested at the same time, silently and efficiently, so none could warn the others. When the assassin had settled in for the night, Kamil would lead the gendarmes in extracting him from his lair. The man would be brought to the ministry and then disappear. For all the Christian community knew, he might have escaped abroad. Kamil preferred not to think about what would happen to him; the man had shot a government official and there would be justice.

As soon as the assassin was captured, Kamil would focus on the thefts, the tinder feeding the fear and resentment. It wouldn’t take much for the city to literally burn. If an angry mob torched a neighborhood and the fire spread, as it had many times before, it would engulf large parts of a city still mostly built of wood. He had confidence in the military police and didn’t wish to get in their way, so he was now forced to wait for their signal.

He got up and fetched the stack of files from his desk. The reports described missing gold and silver vessels, icons, illuminated manuscripts and books, massive silver candleholders, and even ancient tiles pried from the walls of mosques. He pulled out a drawing of the icon of the Virgin Mary, no larger than his hand, that was missing from the Patriarchate. The sketch showed Mary looking out calmly at the world, while the baby Jesus, his right hand slung around his mother’s neck, stared intently into her face as if willing her to do something. The theft of this icon had raised the level of tension more than any other as, he supposed, the Christians believed their divine protection had thereby been revoked.

The thefts appeared to be the work of an organized ring. Many of the objects appeared on the market in Europe, out of range of the Ottoman police, just weeks after being stolen, despite strict new antiquities laws and closer customs inspections. Kamil had spent the evening reading the reports, looking for a pattern. He despaired of the shoddy investigations carried out by the police. No systematic questioning of possible witnesses, no collection of more than the most rudimentary evidence. If the culprit hadn’t dropped a knife or a calling card at the scene, the police generally found nothing of interest.

The churches in Beyoglu, the foreigners’ section of Istanbul, belonged to the embassies and were well guarded. These thefts were from Istanbul’s Old City, a jumble of districts inhabited by Greeks, Jews, and Muslims. Especially hard hit were the neighborhoods of Fatih and Balat, a tangle of crumbling houses, gardens, tumbledown ruins, and small villas that extended along the banks of the Golden Horn up to the old Byzantine city walls.

Kamil knew who the recipients of the antiquities were—the same people in whose drawing rooms he had seen displayed Greek busts and sections of Roman friezes when he studied law and criminal procedure at Cambridge University in England four years ago. Europeans had fallen in love with some romantic image of the Orient, short of actually embracing its people. Really, it was more of a lust, Kamil thought, that required an unlimited parade of objects to satisfy. But who was stealing these objects and how were they getting to Europe? There was something deeply disturbing about these particular thefts, as if his own home had been violated.

Yakup returned and held out a starched white shirt. The servant was tall and wiry, with high cheekbones and alert, almond-shaped eyes under brows that arched like bows across his forehead. He reminded Kamil of a Seljuk, one of the thirteenth-century Turkish tribesmen whose faces still bore traces of their Asian ancestry. Kamil had seen drawings of them in a collection of miniatures in the library of his friend Ismail Hodja, a learned Sufi sheikh and leader of the Nakshibendi order. Yakup’s father had been a Tatar.

Kamil slipped on the fresh shirt, then picked up a string of amber beads from his desk. “These belonged to my grandfather and probably to his father.” He held them up to the lamp, where the beads glowed like miniature hearths. “If I sold them, I’d probably get only a few kurush for them. But they’re worth more to me than almost anything else I own.”

“I know what you mean, bey,” Yakup responded. “It’s as if when you touch it, your fathers are speaking to you. Like a bell ringing and you can feel the vibration, even if you can’t hear the sound.”

“That’s it exactly. You’re a poet, Yakup.” Kamil laid the beads aside, pulled open the top drawer of his desk, and took out a Colt revolver, a box of bullets, and a holster. He pushed the files aside and placed the revolver on the desk. “Is there anything passed down in your family that speaks to you like that?” He strapped the holster around his waist.

“People like us don’t have a history, pasha,” Yakup responded, using Kamil’s hereditary title.

Kamil stopped and frowned at Yakup. “But your father was a water carrier, wasn’t he? He had a profession like anyone else.” Like Kamil, most Ottomans used only their given names, adding titles and descriptions to separate Ali the Water Carrier from Ali the Pasha, Grocer Ali from Bosnian Ali. Names passed away with their owners; they didn’t accumulate history.

“Great families have histories and their possessions become steeped in them, like baklava in sugar. My father’s water skin, on the other hand, rotted and we threw it away. Almost everything in our house was passed along to other families when our need for it was done. It’s not the same thing, my pasha. That’s how it always was and that’s how it always will be.”

Astonished, Kamil said, “I never knew you were such a fatalist. Come on, Yakup. You don’t really believe that, do you?”

Yakup shrugged, his face betraying only a stolid attentiveness, although Kamil thought his eyes sparkled with repressed humor, perhaps even a trace of mockery.

“Your history, my history, it’s all the same, Yakup,” Kamil said, reaching for the jacket Yakup held out. He picked up the beads and regarded them thoughtfully. “You’re right about possessions soaking up history, though. Every object contains a story about who made it, who owned it, and what happened to it. The older it is, the richer the story.”

“My father always said, ‘For the lean ox, there is no knife.’ If you’re poor, no one can take anything away from you.”

Kamil slipped the beads into his jacket pocket and turned to face Yakup. “Your father came from the Crimea, didn’t he?”

“Twenty-five years ago, after the war with Russia. The Cossacks killed his parents, but they missed me and my mother. After the war, he tried to start over, but they told him his land was owned by Russians now. They suspected him because he was a Muslim and he was afraid they were going to arrest him, so my parents joined some other Tatar families and migrated here. My father wasn’t even religious,” he added. “He just wanted to work.”

“Your parents were very brave.” Kamil pulled on his boots, instinctively checking for the long, slim blade secreted in the shaft of one of them.

Yakup shrugged. “They didn’t have much to leave behind. All their wealth was walking beside them on the road.”

Kamil picked up his revolver and dropped a bullet into the chamber. It made a satisfying click when he rotated it. There was a rap at the entry door and Yakup hurried downstairs to answer it. He reappeared with a gendarme captain, who bowed formally and introduced himself. The soldier was young and held himself with easy confidence.

“Welcome, Captain Arif. What news?” Kamil finished loading his gun and snapped it shut.

“Pasha, we have him,” the captain said, standing at attention.

Kamil slipped the revolver into his holster, and pocketed a leather bag of extra ammunition. “Let’s go then.”

The last stage of the operation slid into place.

T
HE PRIEST STOOD
outside the door of a shabby cottage, in an isolated corner of Balat. The house was wedged between the ruins of a Byzantine foundation and a small brick warehouse that backed onto the water. Across the lane, in the dark recesses of an alley, Kamil watched as the priest embraced a man who was standing inside the darkened entrance, then handed him a basket. When the priest had gone, a light appeared behind the closed shutters. The moon now rode low in the sky and the night was dark enough to conceal the platoon of soldiers surrounding the house. Others would be waiting for the priest at his residence.

Kamil lit a cigarette to keep himself warm, careful to keep the glowing tip hidden within the palm of his hand. Captain Arif came to stand beside him, an immaculate Peabody-Martini repeating rifle slung over his shoulder. Kamil offered him a cigarette.

“I thank you, Magistrate,” Captain Arif said in a low voice. “Perhaps later. My men are in position.”

“Good.” Kamil smoked and thought about the best way to proceed. They had learned that the suspect’s name was Marko and he was a member of a group calling itself the Macedonian Revolutionary Organization. He was fifteen years old.

Kamil glanced at the rifle on the captain’s shoulder, threw down his cigarette, and began to walk across the lane toward the cottage.

The captain chased after him. “What are you doing, pasha?”

“I’m going to talk with him.”

The captain stopped. “What do you mean talk to him?”

“I’m going to reason with him.”

“With all respect, pasha, you don’t know what weapons he has in there.”

“You’re not responsible for me, Captain Arif.” Kamil assured him, “I’m armed.”

The captain didn’t look reassured. “Please, pasha. At least let me go in with you.”

“Stay just outside the door. I’ll call you if I need you.”

The captain nodded reluctantly and whispered instructions to an aide.

Kamil knocked. When there was no answer, he knocked again. He could hear someone moving behind the door.

“Who is it?” The voice was indistinct, but sounded young.

A boy, Kamil thought. They’ve sent an army to capture a boy.

“Marko, my name is Kamil Pasha. I’d like to speak with you. I guarantee that no harm will come to you while I’m with you.”