The Baklava Club: A Novel (Investigator Yashim)
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Authors: Jason Goodwin
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F
OR
A
NNA
Contents
I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space—were it not that I have bad dreams.
—
H
AMLET
1
T
HE
man lives, or the man dies. It is a matter of the weather.
Tonight he will live: because the sea is smooth like watered silk beneath a crescent moon, the ship’s wake fanning out like a tear. The ship makes little sound: it is a still Mediterranean evening, and the timbers barely creak. A sailor in the fo’c’sle coughs; overhead a sail flaps and spanks the mast.
The man leans at the rail, looking out to sea; and the assassin stands back a little, also watching the wake of the ship as it slowly widens and ripples and disappears toward the empty horizon. He watches the incessant production of the wake, and scarcely glances at the man he has come to kill. La Piuma, “The Feather.”
It would be easy tonight, the assassin thinks. A murmured conversation at the stern rail, a quick blow to the head. Man overboard. Then the assassin might raise the alarm.
But that won’t do. The Committee wants La Piuma to simply disappear.
Better to wait for a wind. Cloud cover, more noise, the pitch and roll of the ship.
La Piuma can sleep in peace another night. He will eat another meal of fish, boiled chicken, and fruit with cheese, and drink his wine. Coffee will be served in the morning, if that’s what he wants.
Would he fight for this day’s grace? the assassin wonders, moving away along the deck. La Piuma was as good as dead as soon as the ship set sail from Bari to Istanbul. Would he be grateful to live even for one more dull, eventless day at sea?
He would, the assassin considers; yet he cannot answer why.
2
L
ONG
October shadows were drawn across the yard as Yashim made his way to the Polish ambassador’s residence in Pera, the European quarter of Istanbul. He passed the rusted iron gates bearing the faded coat of arms of a vanished country, and mounted the steps to the front door.
At the end of a long, hot summer the wood was dry. The door opened easily under Yashim’s hand and he stepped into the gloom of the hallway. A figure was coming slowly down the great stairs.
“Good morning, Marta. Is the ambassador at home?”
“The lord is in the pantry.”
From her tone, Marta did not seem to think much of the lord’s presence in the pantry.
The residency had been built on a generous scale in the days when a Polish ambassador was a figure of substance in Istanbul, representing a vast commonwealth that stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea, its borders marching with those of the Ottoman Empire for hundreds of miles over marsh, black earth, rivers, and hills; a lively border distinguished by the exchange of fire, or amber for spice, as occasion required. Polish delegations to Istanbul, capital of the Ottoman Empire, had been magnificent affairs. One seventeenth-century pasha, viewing the Polish ambassador’s arrival, had drily remarked that he’d brought too many people to sign a peace, and too few to fight a war. Those days had vanished, like Poland itself. By 1842, Stanislaw Palewski still maintained, on Ottoman sufferance, the diplomatic status of his forebears: but Marta was his only retinue. His retinue liked to keep the pantry for herself.
“I’ll go through,” Yashim said.
The pantry was lit by a sash window that reached from floor to ceiling and overlooked the unkempt gardens at the back of the house. Palewski, in shirtsleeves and braces, was bent over a bench, fiddling with an assembly of rods and tubes. He had a rag in his hand and a smear of oil on his forehead.
Yashim stood in the doorway, watching his friend.
“Hullo, Yashim.” Palewski glanced up. “Has Marta sent you to clear me out?”
“Not yet. Mechanics?”
“Or art, Yashim. Just look at this.”
He tossed a dull metal tube across to Yashim, who caught it and turned it to the light.
“It’s a gun.” Yashim turned the barrel between his fingers, observing the damascene work beneath the tarnish. “Quite a piece.”
“Better, Yash. Can you read the gunmaker’s name?”
He hummed tunelessly while Yashim inspected the barrel more closely.
“Paris … Drouet?”
Palewski reached for the barrel and began rubbing it furiously with a rag. “Boutet, the finest gunmaker in France. Fowling piece. A three-foot barrel, and exceptionally light, no? Boutet’s genius. I don’t believe he made more than a dozen of these and I’ve found two here. If you don’t mind getting your hands dirty, you can polish up the other one. Truth is, I’d forgotten all about them. Seen enough guns by 1812 to think they were worth avoiding, I suppose.”
“And now?”
“Now, thanks to Midhat Pasha’s invitation, Yashim, I’ve discovered these beauties. Look at that dolphin on the trigger guard!”
“Midhat Pasha’s invitation?”
“Duck. Snipe. Sure you won’t take a rag?”
“Midhat Pasha has asked you to go shooting?”
“We call it wildfowling. I was about to send him my regrets when I remembered the old gun cupboard in the cellar. Marta produced the key.”
“And when you opened the cupboard—”
“When I opened the cupboard I found this sublime pair. Someone has left them in a shocking state. There’s rust and fouling in the breech of this one, and of course the stocks need oiling.”
Yashim picked up one of the wooden stocks, slim and fine-curled, almost like a bird in flight.
“There are a couple of good gunsmiths in the arms bazaar.”
“I’ll see how I do first.” Palewski squinted down the barrel. “This one’s barrel seems perfect, but there’s something wrong with the lock.”
Yashim nodded. “I know the feeling.”
Palewski laughed. Yashim had something wrong with his firing mechanism, too. He was a decade younger than his friend, well built, dark, with curious gray eyes and a face that lit up with a smile: but Yashim was a eunuch.
“Let’s have tea.” Palewski threw down his rag. “Marta!”
Upstairs, in the more familiar surroundings of Palewski’s drawing room, Yashim took a window seat and gazed out through the wisteria.
“Tea!” exclaimed Palewski, rubbing his hands. “You know, Yashim, I’m really looking forward to this shoot. It’s thirty years since I went fowling. Almost forty since I did it for love.”
He approached his bookcases and began to rummage across the spines. “My father gave me my first gun when I was ten years old. It was a German muzzle-loader. He used to take me out really early in the morning, still dark, in the frost. We went for duck on the ponds, mostly, with an English retriever. Once I shot a red kite, which made him furious. I had to draw it until my arm ached. We used the feathers to make flies for fishing—and I caught a trout.”
He smiled at the memory. “He wanted me to understand nature, not just kill it. Those early starts, they were a sort of communion. William Paley says that’s the way to approach God, seeing the world as its creator had made it. Learning its secrets. Nature’s innocent,” he added, gesturing at the books. “But these represent the world we’ve made out of our ambitions and our lies. All man’s clever, devious things.”
He darted on a book, and then another.
“Izaak Walton.” He laid a book on the window seat. “
The Compleat Angler
. Cornerstone of Anglicanism. And this—private printing, Saint Petersburg. Sergei Aksakov.”
“A Russian?”
“Of course. Anglican, Russian, aborigine—they feel the same. I believe in that God, Yashim, who made ducks fly at their hour, and the birds fall silent just before light, and the water and what lies beneath it. The God I used to see when I was ten years old, lying in the dark in a punt with my father, waiting for the dawn.”
“And you want to see Him again? With the pasha.”
Palewski ran his fingers through his hair. “Odd, isn’t it? But yes. Midhat Pasha’s invitation brought it back to me. And then the guns showing up like that. I’d forgotten we had ’em. Made me feel like a boy again—no, that’s not it. Just gives me the feeling I had once, when I was a boy. It’s in the smell of those old fowling pieces, too. Grease and metal.” He flicked through the books. “As if everything fits again.”
Yashim looked out through the window. Could he, he wondered, feel like a boy felt ever again? Like the boy he had been? He rubbed his leg, as if the twinge of jealousy he’d felt had surfaced there.
“You should get the guns looked over.” He stood up. “I should go. You’re expecting people.”
Palewski cast him a quizzical look. “Do stay, Yashim. How the devil did you know?”
Yashim laughed. “My dear friend, at this hour you would usually offer me a little something—a digestif?—and instead you ask Marta to bring this excellent tea, which leads me to suppose that you are saving yourself. You’re covered in soot and oil, but you have made no preparations for a bath. I see no tub by the fire, no hot water. Therefore it seems unlikely you mean to go out.”
Palewski arched his eyebrows. Yashim placed his fingertips together. “So, you are receiving. But not an Ottoman—like your new hunting companion, Midhat Pasha. He may deal with foreign affairs but he remains an Ottoman gentleman. He’d take your appearance as a gross insult. So not him, or one of his kind. And not dinner. Even Marta would not have allowed you to take over her pantry had you asked someone to dine here. I saw no more evidence of cooking than of preparation for a bath. If not an Ottoman, then what? A Frank, or Franks. But they are either not quite
bon ton
, as the French say, or—”