The Baklava Club: A Novel (Investigator Yashim) (2 page)

He paused, in thought. “Or they are young,” he said finally. “Yes, that would explain the lack of formality.”

“A lady, perhaps?”

Yashim shook his head. “You would not have suggested I stay. No young lady.”

Palewski leaned back against the sideboard, and crossed his legs carelessly. “As it happens, you’re wrong. I think it very likely that there will be a young lady.”

“Hmm. But not alone. Which demonstrates beyond doubt that your party will be composed of Franks, like yourself. Students? They will excuse your informality, even the oil on your face, because you can offer them an evening of wine, and song.”

“Why would I want such a thing?”

Yashim smiled, and lowered his eyes. “Because, my dear old friend, you have been thinking of the past. Of your own youth, with the guns, shooting duck and all that. You are in that sort of mood.”

“Ouf.” Palewski left the window and went to the sideboard. “Let’s have that digestif, Yashim.”

3

I
T
seemed to Yashim that there were six of them, at least, after the front door banged and the young people raged upstairs and surged into Palewski’s drawing room, making a noise like porters with iron-shod trolleys on the cobbles of Galata Hill.

“Ciao, Palewski! Fratello! Conte Palewski! Permesso?”

Then Palewski was surrounded, shaking hands, bowing at the young lady, and welcoming a tall fair youth who carried half a dozen bottles of champagne.

When the hubbub had abated, Yashim was surprised to count only four visitors in the room.

“Miss Lund, may I present my esteemed friend Yashim? Yashim, Miss Lund.”

The men had not noticed that Palewski already had a visitor. Miss Lund sank a graceful curtsy and smiled at Yashim with enormous blue eyes. She was a very pretty girl, with almost white blond hair held up in a bun, her shoulders covered with lace.

“It is a pleasure, Signor Yashim,” she said, in an accent Yashim could not quite place. Only, the accent did not matter, for Yashim could place her immediately, instinctively, the way a sipahi cavalryman judged horseflesh, or Palewski knew his guns.

“We brought you some baklava, Count Palewski.” A flat box swung from her finger by a loop of raffia. “Giancarlo says it goes well with champagne! I think these are the best sort—but perhaps you will judge, Signor Yashim?”

Yashim smiled. He was an intimate of the harem, and he knew women. When he saw the inclination of the plump shoulder, the trace of laziness around the bright blue eyes, he had recognized something in Miss Lund’s ease that reminded him of the
gözde
.

A
gözde
: yes, he would swear she was that. No door was closed to Yashim, as it was to half the population of the city, screened by tradition and law into discrete spaces. Selamlik was the man’s world, at the gate; harem, the sanctuary. In the imperial harem lived many women who as slaves of the sultan’s formed the sultan’s private household. Some of them the sultan barely knew by sight, and some more he would know by name; but they all served him, in their way. They washed his shirts, arranged his kaftans, played him music, and blushed at his approach. A few—a very privileged few—would have the honor of amusing him in bed. These girls were
in his eye
, as the saying went: the
gözde
, whose particular task was to bear the sultan a child—a son—and so ensure the continuation of the House of Osman, which had ruled the empire now for six centuries, making it the oldest royal line in Europe, and perhaps the world.

If Miss Lund was the
gözde
, it did not take Yashim long to guess who, in this room, performed the duties of a sultan.

Palewski introduced his friends in turn. Giancarlo was the tall one, who would turn heads in an Istanbul street: fair-haired and broad-shouldered, he looked well-fed and well-bred, with a high forehead and prominent cheekbones. His nose was big and his teeth flashed very white when he laughed. He laughed often, and then his eyes went to Miss Lund as though they shared a secret joke of their own.

Rafael looked older, but probably wasn’t: maybe it was the spectacles, or the short, dark hair that was already thinning a little. He shook Yashim’s hand and looked to the ground with a smile.

Fabrizio was a head shorter than Giancarlo but beautifully formed on a small scale, with a head of glossy black curls and a neatly waxed mustache. He was impeccably dressed. He had flung off a cape when he entered the room, to reveal a shirt of dazzling whiteness and trousers creased like knives.

Yashim inclined to them all, and smiled: they were the very group he had predicted, young, foreign, and eager for an evening of champagne.

Giancarlo flung himself into an armchair and let his long legs fly upward. “
Allora!
I am not in love with the ladies of Pera, Palewski!”

“Indeed.” Palewski took some glasses from the sideboard and set them up.

“Very ugly, and their mustaches bigger than the men’s. You haven’t noticed?”

“As you may know, Pera was a Genoese colony before the conquest,” Palewski observed. “The ladies you object to are descended, in the main part, from the original colonists. Your compatriots.”

Fabrizio smiled, showing a fine row of little white teeth. “Giancarlo is all for Italian unity, in principle. But the Genoese? When you get down to it, Giancarlo’s Italy barely stretches from Lucca to Viareggio, by the sea. It excludes a village near Carrara, and even certain houses in Lucca, I believe.”

They burst out laughing, Giancarlo laughing hardest of them all. Yashim listened, mystified by their private jokes. Carrara? Some houses in Lucca?

Palewski popped a cork and filled the glasses. “I feel just the opposite. When Poland rises from the ashes, I want her to reunite with Lithuania, and have East Prussia thrown in for good measure. All or nothing!”

“To the great Commonwealth of Poland Lithuania!” cried Giancarlo, raising his glass.

“To a united Italy!” Palewski rejoined.

“Death to tyrants!”

“Down with the Inquisition!”

Miss Lund settled quietly beside Yashim on the window seat. She took a sip of champagne and glanced over the rim of her glass.

“Politics,” she murmured. “The
boys
find it exciting.” She had very pretty little ears, Yashim noticed, decorated with bouncing corkscrew curls. She blinked. “And you, Signor Yashim, are you a passionate politician, too?”

Yashim thought of Palewski with his new toy and his memories of punts and ducks on the Polish lakes, and of these youths, with their noisy enthusiasms. It was all boys, and boyhoods, this evening. “Perhaps,” he said, “I was never quite young enough.”

Miss Lund chuckled. “The ambassador is not—so young.”

Palewski was leaning against the mantelpiece, glass raised, expounding something to the young men.

“Enthusiasm for his cause may keep him young, all the same. Politics.”

It was Miss Lund’s turn to pull a face. Yashim gave her a sympathetic smile: “United Italy?”

“Oh yes, in spite of what Fabrizio says. They’re all mad for it, Giancarlo most of all. That’s why we’ve come to Istanbul.”

“To unite Italy? You seem to be a long way from home.”

She misunderstood him. “I’m Danish,” she said. “You can call me Birgit. Don’t forget that my ancestors probably sailed up here a thousand years ago, to do business with the Byzantine emperor.”

“Or to join the Varangian Guard.”

“The Varang—? Remind me, please.”

Yashim told her about the Viking warriors who had formed the imperial bodyguard in Byzantine times. “But Palewski knows much more about it than me. Fair-haired giants, he says, with double-edged axes.”

“Hmm. Do you think Giancarlo could be a Varangian, Signor Yashim?”

“I’m sure—you at least could rely on him, Miss Lund.”

She glanced away, with a pleased smile.

“And you, signor?”

“I suppose you could say,” Yashim replied thoughtfully, “that I am a sort of nineteenth-century Varangian.”

She laughed. “And who do you guard, Signor Yashim?”

He would have said that his role was to protect the sultan’s household and his empire; but then a cork popped, and a boy was shouting across the room.

“Birgit! Drink up and have another!” Giancarlo sprang from the armchair and took up the bottle.

Rafael laid a hand on his arm. “She doesn’t need—”

Giancarlo shook him off with an impatient shrug. “Birgit’s all right. These northerners can drink—eh, Palewski? Fabrizio’s the one we ought to watch.” He stood behind Fabrizio’s chair and circled his shiny curls with the bottle. “Sicilian blood.”

Fabrizio glanced up, his exquisite little face a perfect mask. Giancarlo swung the bottle toward the window and advanced on Birgit.

Yashim stood up, smiling. “Your friend was saying that you are in Istanbul to unite Italy? You’ll forgive me, we Ottomans are sometimes out of touch…”

“Of course.” Giancarlo hesitated, then lowered the bottle. “Birgit—Signor Yashim—some champagne?”

Birgit shook her lovely head, and laid a hand on her glass. “But I see you have opened the baklava, Giancarlo?”

“Baklava? Of course. Forgive me.” He returned with the box. “I like the green ones best!”

“They are pistachio, no?” Birgit’s hand hovered over the honeyed treats. “Will you explain, Signor Yashim?”

He glanced into the box. “These are pistachio, and these are made with walnut. This one is made with the same thin dough, as fine as a rose petal, shredded first and then baked. They smell very good. Where did you get them?”

“Not very far from here.” She gave some directions and Yashim nodded. “He’s very good.”

“I love the way he picks them out, in sheets, with his knife. And this one,” she added, taking a bite, “is my favorite.”

Giancarlo nodded. “Italy is divided, Signor Yashim. It’s time that Italy belonged to her people, the Italians. Not Austria. Not Piedmont or the two Sicilies. And first we have to deal with the Pope.”

“The Pope?”

“I am—or was—a Catholic, Signor Yashim. The Pope should be a man of God but not a despot. He cannot serve two masters.”

“These boys, Yashim, think the Pope is in a fix,” Palewski said. “On one hand, he’s the vicar of Christ, the conscience of the church, our Holy Father—a sort of Catholic Grand Mufti, whose fatwas are called encyclicals. On the other hand—”

“The other hand is dyed in the blood of the people!” Fabrizio burst out.

“Well, certainly. On the other hand he is the temporal ruler of that swath of Italy known as the Papal States, consisting of Rome, naturally, and lands to the north of Rome, and Giancarlo’s beloved Tuscany, or parts of it. Whatever his virtues as a priest, Yashim, as a ruler he is a reactionary idiot.” Palewski drained his glass. “After the 1830 uprising, when the Poles fought against the Russian occupation, we looked to Gregory for support. A word would have carried weight. Yet Gregory was the first to condemn us. Our Holy Father took the side of the Orthodox oppressors against the Catholic Poles, and blamed the insurrectionists for ‘disturbing the peace.’”

“Gregory is a tyrant!” Fabrizio said. “He is ruthless—but weak. And being weak, he relies on the Austrians to enforce his rule.”

Rafael, the shy one, nodded. “We stand against arbitrary oppression and the corruption of power.”

Yashim spread his hands: “Why Istanbul?”

It was Giancarlo who answered. “Don’t you see? We’re free men here. Italy crawls with papal spies—it’s the same in France. Superstitious clerics, credulous informers. Russia? Habsburg territories? They scent revolution, and they all work together, signor. When a continent is poisoned by lies, truth must be an exile,” he added, waving his hand dramatically. “So we come east, for freedom. Where else could we go?”

“You could have tried England,” Yashim pointed out. “As Voltaire did.”

Giancarlo looked blank. “England? Why, yes…”

Rafael butted in: “It’s just another system—”

To Yashim’s surprise, Birgit spoke up from the window seat. “It’s too cold for them, Signor Yashim. If a cloud enters the sky their mothers make them wear a scarf!” She laughed, daring them to contradict her. “And none of the Italians in England have class. They are organ-grinders or dancing masters. They sell gelati,” she added, drawing out the word as if it appealed to her.

Giancarlo flushed. “That’s not true, Birgit. We don’t care if a man is a crossing sweeper or a duke, as long as he’s with the people.”

“Aha.” Birgit yawned lazily. “But I’m right about the weather.”

“There are no spies here,” Giancarlo said, appealing to Yashim. “Nobody in Istanbul cares about the Pope. We breathe free air, beyond the reach of the Inquisition.”

“And what will you do from here, to deal with the Inquisition?”

Giancarlo caught a glance from Rafael, and returned him a dismissive shrug. “We have to change people’s ideas, and break through this—this crust of feudalism that has formed across the country. My country.”

Birgit ambled across to the sofa and lay down.

“And our voices have to be heard,” Rafael added. His eyes shone. “That’s why we have to stay free.”

“It reminds me of that old joke,” Palewski put in. “The drunken man who searches for his wallet, under a lamppost.”

They all looked at him, expectantly.

“They ask him if he remembers dropping it here, and he says no, he dropped it somewhere farther down the road. So they ask him, ‘Why are you searching here?’ And he says, ‘Because the light is better under the lamppost.’”

Everyone laughed. Only Birgit was silent. Her eyelashes fluttered and her chest gave a slight heave.

She had fallen asleep.

4

T
HEY
made quite a row, of course, going back to their flat through the silent streets, waking up dogs, puzzling the night watchmen. Their landlord, Leandros Ghika, heard them banging up the stairs, and scowled.

Fabrizio raised a fist. “That Palewski—he is one of us!”

“A splendid fellow, Fabrizio, I heartily concur. He likes freedom.”

“He likes champagne.”

“Champagne is freedom! We should liberate it all!”