The Baklava Club: A Novel (Investigator Yashim) (17 page)

“Yashim? You aren’t listening. You want to start now?”

“We’ll go together. Like old times.”

“What, I look older now? You said—”

“I’m older, Preen. You’re just the same.”

“Sweet,” she said. “I’m older, heavier, and I’ve got short hair. But you know? I cut more ice. Let’s go.”

35

M
ARTA
remembered the times she thought the kyrie would die.

Once he had been almost drowned, and once someone had wanted to kill them both, the kyrie and Marta. Marta remembered that warmly. She had saved them, so the kyrie had said, with her toe. Of course, it could not have been quite that way, but she liked to think of it sometimes.

He had even proposed to her. Not meaning it, of course, but thinking just of her toe. The kyrie! Earlier he had gone to Frangistan, to Venice. She had been lucky to have him back—and afterward she had thought that the danger had been not only death, but also maybe a woman.

The idea made her shudder.

When she first came to run his house, before she understood his ways, she often used to think he was dead. She’d come upstairs to find him sprawled in the armchair, with the lamp burning and the fire gone out, and his face pale as string cheese. He wasn’t breathing, and the room would be strewn with bottles and books—she thought the reading had killed him.

Twice she’d found him dead on the stairs. And he’d called her in the middle of the night—Marta, Marta!—convinced he was dying himself, after catching a fish bone in his throat. Cough cough, and a little blood.

Once, coming upstairs, she’d heard his fiddle playing break off, and the unmistakable sound of the kyrie dropping to the floor. She tossed the tea onto the steps and rushed in, only to find him scrambling across the furniture after a wasp, with the score in his hand!

Marta smiled. The kyrie was not for dying, she thought. He cheated it. He laughed at it. He was peppered with lots of little holes but the doctor said they weren’t too deep, and he had scars from long ago—saber cuts and bullet wounds.

She smiled, and let the tears squeeze from her eyelids. If he asked her to marry him she’d say yes, yes if—

Palewski’s eyelids fluttered. Marta lifted the sponge from his forehead and, without moving her eyes from his face, dipped the sponge into the bowl.

Palewski looked up. He saw Marta, and the nightmare about his guns dissolved, leaving a faint trace of cordite.

36

“L
ET’S
go to the tavern with musicians,” Preen suggested, as they came down onto the Tophane road. “It gives us something to look at.”

They stepped over a dog on the threshold and went down a few steps into a vault where the air was close and smelled of wine and sawdust. Half the tables were occupied, and in the corner a solitary musician was sliding his fingers up the frets of his baglama, rocking back and forth as he stared into his audience.

“A good musician,” Preen said, professionally. “He’s from the Cyclades. Syros, or Tinos.”

They crossed to the divan. Preen ordered wine, but when the waiter returned it was Yashim who paid.

“A shooting on the quay, this afternoon. Did you hear about it?”

The man clacked his tongue. “The tavern was closed.”

He went back to a wooden cubbyhole near the entrance, where he dropped the money into a box. He said something to a boy, and the boy picked up a crate and went out.

Preen took a sip of wine. “You were going to let me do the talking.”

“That wasn’t talking. More of a polite cough.” From his seat he could see the baglama player and the door. He saw the musician nod, and his tempo gradually picked up. The notes came faster and louder, and the conversation in the tavern rose in volume.

“I said he was good.” Preen had to lean in to be heard.

“Yes. And dutiful.”

Yashim nodded toward the door, its frame filled by a man almost as broad as he was tall; he had to turn his shoulders to scan the room. Without changing his expression he started forward and settled with surprising lightness onto the divan at Yashim’s side. His huge hands dangled between his thighs.

“You’re asking questions.” His voice was rough, with a lisp, like a file on board. Yashim took in the broken nose, the curiously absent eyes and blue-gray stubble from the top of his head to his chin.

“A friend of mine was shot. Maybe somebody died.”

“This is not a good place.” The prizefighter stood up and started for the door.

Yashim got up to follow. “You don’t have to come.”

Preen gave him an indignant look. “I was meant to ask the questions.”

The prizefighter plunged into the dark streets and Preen’s sandals flapped on the cobbles. After a few minutes the man stopped at a gate in the wall. He muttered something and the gate swung open onto a courtyard. Some men were squatting around a brazier but stood up as they came in.

Preen drew her scarf to her lips.

The gate fell shut behind them and Yashim heard a wooden bar being slid home.

The prizefighter turned. “Any knives? Weapons?”

Yashim raised his hands in a gesture of peace.

“Follow me.” He hesitated. “Not the lady. It’s a man’s place.”

Yashim and Preen exchanged doubtful glances.

“I am a man,” Preen explained, sweetly. “You can check if you don’t believe me.”

The big man’s eyes widened fractionally, and he shrugged. “Come.”

The door was swept back onto a damp corridor. Beyond the corridor they found themselves enveloped in fog.

“A steam room!” Preen exclaimed in surprise.

The steam cleared slightly, showing them a tiled and domed hammam. In the middle was a raised stone slab, and on the slab lay the hairiest man Yashim had ever seen.

He was black from head to foot, his body hair smooth and glistening like the fur of a giant otter. His head was cradled on a pair of massive forearms. Even lying down he looked huge.

He turned his head and looked at the new arrivals through the steam.

“You ask questions. What for?”

Yashim rubbed the steam from his forehead, and loosened his cloak.

“A friend of ours was shot at today, on the port road,” he said. “He was badly hurt. He was with a companion who seems to have vanished.”

The big man let his lids droop. “And you are?”

“I am Yashim. I work for the sultan and his household.”

The hairy man stretched out a hand and the attendant handed him a towel. He raised his head and rubbed it across his face and then, with a sucking sound, peeled his massive frame from the slab and swung his legs over the edge, where he sat working his huge head from side to side. Yashim felt the steam and sweat sliding down his back; his shirt stuck to his skin. The man rubbed his chest thoughtfully, making all the hairs start up.

“In the port, you say? I am a friend to the
kadi
who supervises the port of Istanbul—in an official sense. My name is Balamian.”

He got to his feet, bowed his head, curled his fingers loosely at his side, and the attendant swung a bucket of water and sloshed it over him. Yashim guessed the water was cold, but Balamian did not flinch as the water splashed onto his furry pelt, and only brushed the hair from his eyes with a pass of his hand.

“The
kadi
has many responsibilities, Yashim efendi. I help to regulate his affairs.” Balamian reached for a towel and tied it around his waist. “His affairs, and the affairs of the port. We settle the loading and the unloading of ships. Victualing crews, finding replacement sailors. I give work to the men. Help them if they are sick, look after their families. I know them all. I know the ships.” He paused. “And if anything happens in the port, I know that, too.”

“Anything?”

Balamian smoothed his hands over his head, like a bear washing itself.

“Eventually, everything.”

Yashim didn’t doubt him for a moment. Balamian was like a sultan, and power dripped from him like the steam on his beard.

“The port’s a busy place, Yashim efendi. Ships, men, coming and going. It takes an effort to control—and we don’t like violence.”

Balamian’s position, Yashim guessed, was founded on violence: those huge hands could crush a man as easily as they squeezed a sponge. He meant, of course, that he reserved the violence, or the threat of it, to himself.

He patted his face with the towel. “We will be in touch.”

The man with the face of a boxer led them back through the corridor and across the courtyard. The gate swung shut behind them and for several minutes they walked uphill without saying a word, the sweat slowly cooling on their backs. The streets were dark and empty, but now and then their way was lit by a crack of lamplight between closed shutters. Cats slipped across the cobbles. Overhead the stars were bright and cold.

Preen shivered. “What a gangster, darling! Did you see his eyes? His hair? Did you see his hair?”

37

G
IANCARLO
was beginning to feel like a gangster.

“Shoot me, damn you, or let me go. You can’t keep a man like this!”

Their prisoner seemed ready to believe in Fabrizio’s gun, pointing through the fabric of his jacket pocket, as the caïques went slowly up the Golden Horn.

“Nobody would understand a word you said,” Fabrizio told him, truthfully. They counted on that. “But if you make a move, I’ll shoot you.”

The trip seemed to interest their captive, who looked out at the dark silhouettes of the great mosques as they unfolded, one by one, in stately progression along the seven hills. Lights twinkled on the shore: old wharfs, a caïque stage, fishermen selling mackerel off the boats. Now and then Fabrizio caught a whiff of frying fish, and remembered that none of them had eaten all day.

At Eyüp they walked in a huddle through the sleeping village. Dogs yanked at their chains, goats bleated nervously in their stalls, and the moon rose to show them the entrance to the woods.

“I don’t understand you,” Czartoryski said. “Who are you? Pah! You’re well fed and flashily dressed. Kidnappers—with their own tailors!”

That night they kept watch in turns, fastening the rope that encircled their captive’s waist to the wrist of the man awake. In the morning he had slept better than them, on a pile of straw. They moved his rope to a ring in the wall and gave him the stool, which was the only piece of furniture they could find.

All through the day they took turns to watch him, while the other two went outside and argued. Once, Fabrizio went to Eyüp to buy some food, because of the three he looked most Turkish.

The stool creaked. “It’s something—what, political? Nothing to say to that? Let me guess. Catholic hard-liners—knights of some fusty medieval order or another. The Golden Fleece. Malta? No, too young, and not grand enough. Knights of the Sacred Rose? No, I made that one up. Like you did, probably. I need to pee.”

“Again?”

“It’s my age. It comes with certain infirmities.”

Rafael sighed in exasperation. He went forward and undid the cord that held Czartoryski’s leg to the ring in the wall, and led him outside.

“Lovely bit of country, this,” Czartoryski said, as he unhitched himself. “Reminds me of Dante.” He began to recite:

Già m’avean trasportato i lenti passi

dentro a la selva antica tanto, ch’io

non potea rivedere ond’ io mi ’ntrassi;

    
ed ecco più andar mi tolse un rio,

che ’nver’ sinistra con sue picciole onde

piegava l’erba che ’n sua ripa uscìo.
*

He chuckled. “
Purgatorio
. Canto twenty-six, if I’m not mistaken.”

“Twenty-eight,” Rafael said, in a surly tone.

“Twenty-eight, is it? Well, you may be right.” He took a deep breath. “There. Shall we go in?”

Rafael fastened him to the ring, and Czartoryski resumed his musings.

“I don’t think of Dante and zealotry—or bigotry—in the same bracket, to be honest. Dante—the patrimony of all Italians, I should have said.”

“Of course!” Rafael chimed in hotly. “He’s our national poet.”

“And it’s people like you who prevent Italy from becoming a nation,” Czartoryski pointed out. “Just as you would smother Poland under a blanket of foreign occupation and repressive laws. In the name of what? Catholic stability? Some lost medieval dream of Christendom? Tchah! Your fantasies create half the suffering in this world. You make me sick.”

He folded his arms and let his chin sink to his chest, eyes closed.

“It’s not me who would smother anyone,” Rafael retorted; yet he felt confused. “It’s you. I am for freedom! It’s you and your people who keep Italy divided and oppressed.”

But Czartoryski would not reply. He took several deep breaths through his nose, and settled his weight again, so that the stool creaked.

Rafael folded his own arms and sat back moodily against the wall, chewing his lip.

The man who should be dead wanted to sleep and he, Rafael, could not close an eye for a second! Why was Fabrizio such a fool—to throw away a single shot?

38

Y
ASHIM
kindled a small flame in the stove, and heaped it with charcoal. He wrote a note to the Italians to tell them Palewski had had an accident and was confined to his bed.

When he had folded the note he leaned out the window and gave a piercing whistle that brought a boy running out of the shadows.

“Elvan,” Yashim called down, when he saw the boy’s face like a moon looking up at him. “Can you run an errand? Take this.”

He gave an address, and let the folded note flutter down into the street below. Elvan caught at it, missed, picked it up from the ground, and sped off.

Yashim turned back to the kitchen. He added charcoal to the fire, put on a pan, and rolled in a couple of lamb shanks, with a short drip of olive oil, to brown. Now and then he gave the pan a violent shake.

He took the pencil and on a second sheet of paper wrote down everything he had learned about the attack.

He glanced at the shanks, gave them another shake, and peeled an onion, chopping it fine. Holding the lamb back with a wooden spoon, he poured the fat into a bowl, then dropped a knob of butter between the shanks. It sizzled and he added the onions.