The Baklava Club: A Novel (Investigator Yashim) (3 page)

They burst into the flat. Giancarlo flung himself onto the divan, Fabrizio plucked out a bottle, Rafael lit a lamp. Birgit settled down and let Giancarlo slide an arm around her shoulders.

“And that Yashim—he’s what?” Rafael fiddled with his glasses and sat down on the only chair.

Giancarlo laughed, showing his strong white teeth. “A man like Farinelli, Rafael. Without the voice.”

“A castrato?” Rafael’s eyes were round.

Fabrizio flicked up his hand as if it held a knife. “
Toc!
They come in all kinds. Only our Pope likes the ones who sing too high.”

“The Pope takes them young,” Giancarlo said. “He cuts off their balls to sing ‘Ave Maria’—in a sweet voice,” he added, falsetto. “Pah! He cuts off their balls to stop them becoming men. It’s symbolic, no?”

“Of—?” Rafael looked stubborn.

Giancarlo waved a hand. “Political emasculation. He turns men into women and so he rules. What chance do we men have in Italy?”

“But Yashim doesn’t sound like a castrato.”

Fabrizio grinned. “No. And I know a man from Catania who was just the same. When his house collapsed in an earthquake, he was crushed down there, like that. He had five children already but after the accident that was it. No more. Poor man.”

“Poor man,” Giancarlo echoed.

Fabrizio wagged a finger and laughed. “Not so poor, because you know what? His wife was happy ever after—and so were all the beautiful virgins of Catania!”

“You mean he stopped pestering them?”

“Pestering? Are you out of your mind? He had them all! One by one, these lovely virgins came to him to be deflowered! They wished to discover the art of love, without any unfortunate consequences. They called him Dell’alba, the man of the dawn. The same as the fisherman who always takes his boat out first after the storm, to test the wind.”

Giancarlo laughed. “But the other men—why didn’t they kill Dell’alba?”

Fabrizio gave him a look of exaggerated surprise. “Kill him? They asked for his advice ever after—does she squeal? Is she clean? He knew every girl in Catania.”

Giancarlo leaned forward. “So when he was crushed—this accident. He lost his balls but he kept, you know, the other part?”

“Certainly. Just not in his trousers!”

Everyone laughed. Birgit chuckled and stood up. “I’m going to bed,” she said. “Don’t overdo it.” She stretched and yawned. “That Yashim—he’s a man, anyway.”

“Should I be jealous?” Giancarlo let her hand go.

“That depends,” she said lazily. “On how long you mean to stay up. Good night, all.”

She waved, and they chorused their good nights, and sat about smiling, like good friends.

5

Y
ASHIM
and Palewski dined together on Thursdays.

Yashim heard a tread on the stairs as he was dusting the pilaf with pepper and a sprinkling of finely chopped coriander.

“You’ve come alone?”

He had spent the afternoon preparing their ritual supper almost without thinking, like a participant at mass.

At the beginning, when Palewski had suggested that they take turns on Thursdays, Yashim had arrived at the residency to discover Marta exhausted and almost in tears, while the mahogany table in Palewski’s sepulchral dining room was spread with a feast fit for a conclave of Byzantine despots.

After that, by tacit agreement, Palewski came to Yashim.

Yashim enjoyed the preparations. On Thursdays he went early to market, and bought the finest ingredients his friend George could bring to his stall: tiny eggplants, peppers as long and curled as Turkish slippers, fresh white onions, okra, beans. Later, Palewski would come into the room, sniffing the air, surprising Yashim by his knack for guessing what he’d made for dinner. A chicken, perhaps, Persian style with walnuts and pomegranate juice; mackerel stuffed with nuts and fruits, and grilled; a succession of little mezes, soups, dolmas, or aromatic rice. Once he had brought a Frenchman to dine with them, too, and as a consequence a man had died—and Stanislaw Palewski had saved Yashim’s life.

“Alone?” Palewski echoed. He put a bottle of champagne on the table in Yashim’s tiny kitchen. “Certainly. Youth’s all right, but it never knows when to stop. Salvaged this one from the wreckage.”

“I assumed they would stay late.”

“In the end I went to bed. Marta tells me they were still at it in the small hours. I rather think she encouraged them to go.”

“Marta?”

“She doesn’t mind my reading at all hours, thinks it goes with being a kyrie. Noisy boys are another matter. Marta doesn’t like Birgit much, either.”

“She’s not Italian, like the others.”

“She’s a Dane. A beautiful, sleepy Dane, Yashim. Something of a rarity in these parts.”

He twisted the wire off the bottle; Yashim slid two tea glasses toward him.

“Of course, I was much the same in Cracow at their age. Up all night talking about revolution, emancipating the serfs, giving power to the people, all that old stuff. In my day it was Saint Simon and Locke. Now it’s some Jew in London, Marx, good journalist—and Owen.” The cork popped and Palewski poured the wine. “The boys raised a row loud enough to get them kicked out of the Papal States. Or maybe they just took a warning and ran. Papal agents lurking in every café and hiding in boudoirs. It’s a rotten little country, and the Pope’s just as bad as they say. Fiercely reactionary, like all of Metternich’s creatures.”

“The Habsburg minister? He’s behind the Pope?” Yashim thought: we Ottomans allow ourselves to get out of touch.

“Metternich was the architect of the Congress of Vienna in 1814, Yashim: present—the tsar, the Austrian emperor, the German princes, and Frederick of Prussia, a lot of frightened old men getting together to put a stop to the next Napoleon—and to keep the lid on revolution. All reactionary and afraid. Pope Gregory is their father confessor. Can’t stand change. Instead of
chemin de fer
he calls railways
chemin d’enfer
—the road of the devil. Won’t have any railway lines in his little Papal States.”

“Your Italian friends, Giancarlo and the others—they want to abolish them, do they?”

“They want to dissolve the Papal States, unite the Italian kingdoms, and create a constitutional monarchy. It should keep them pretty busy.” Palewski laid his head on one side. “I can’t say I blame them. I’m an ally, naturally, as a thorn in the side of the Metternich system, still holding out for Poland. With the help of you Ottomans.” He raised his glass. “Thank you very much.

“But whether they have the steel, I don’t know. It takes more guts to be an exile than you might guess. More than they know yet. And to keep to an idea—well. It isn’t easy. The champagne runs out, after a while.”

“So for them it’s just a game?”

Palewski blew out his cheeks. “For them it’s like a club, with honey and pistachios. The baklava club—they’ll probably end up making their peace and going home. In twenty years they’ll have joined the civil service and be judges on the bench, with paunches and ambitious wives, and this will be an interlude they’ll scarcely be able to remember. Giancarlo, the tall one, will come into his estates and settle down as quiet as any Tuscan gentleman. He pretends to be a man of the people but he’s an aristocrat, obviously.”

“And Birgit?”

“Oh, Birgit will be all right. She goes along but she doesn’t have much time for all their nonsense, as you must have noticed. Maybe she’ll stick with that Giancarlo—but I wouldn’t bet on it. She’ll smile at someone and before you know it she’ll be married to a fat little councillor and have four children, all in her sleep.”

“So you don’t think they’re dangerous, at all?”

“Here, in Istanbul? No more than a crate of puppies.”

Yashim smiled and nodded. The street dogs of Istanbul pupped quietly in corners, in doorways and stairwells; someone usually found them, and fed them, and put the puppies in a box, where they lay scratching their fleas and nipping at one another’s tails.

6

P
ALEWSKI
did not stay late. He was up again in the dark, grabbing the satchel Marta had made up for him. It contained, among other things, the Polish sausage he liked, and a package of baklava. He attended to the contents of his flask himself, with a mixture of brandy, sugar, and water.

He made his way by starlight to the Ortaköy quayside, and was on the water before the muezzins called the morning prayer. The low chants keened across the Bosphorus as he sat huddled in the caïque, cradling the good Boutet wrapped in an oilcloth.

He had been up for hours and already had bagged three mallards by the time Yashim emerged from the café on Kara Davut. Dressed formally in a fresh turban, a brown cloak, white chemise, loose breeches, and a pair of soft leather boots, he carried an invitation that had been brought to his door by an imperial
chaush
the previous afternoon. The formality of the invitation had surprised him. He was on easy visiting terms with the valide; he had wondered for a moment if, perhaps, her mind was wandering. He made his way to the waterfront and took a caïque down the Golden Horn.

At the Eminönü stage he tipped the caïquejee and started uphill, past the Mosque of the Valide: another valide, another sultan’s mother, who had built the mosque on the water’s edge with money she received from harbor dues at Piraeus. The reigning valide had not yet endowed a mosque. Perhaps it was time to speak to her about this: she was not young, after all.

At the top of the hill he washed his eyes at the Fountain of Ahmet III before entering Topkapi Palace. The First Court, open to the public, was empty at this hour; he walked past the great planes to the High Gate, Topkapi, which had given its name to the whole sprawling complex of courts and kiosks, wrapped one within the other like so many Russian dolls, until they subsided down the far side of Seraglio Point and into the sea.

At the gate, two Halberdiers of the Tresses stepped forward. He knew them both by sight.

“Yashim, for the valide,” he murmured, drawing out the paper with a vermilion ribbon attached.

The men stood back; he passed through to the Second Court.

It was—or rather, had been—the court of imperial business, screened from the hubbub of the populace in the outer court, for as one approached the inner sanctum, the home of the sultan, the courts became exclusive. The Second Court was reserved for ministers of state—the pashas and viziers; only the sultan and his grand vizier were permitted to enter on horseback. To Yashim’s right stood the great kitchens, built by Sinan, massive tents of brick around their twenty central chimneys; only one smoked now. To his left lay the Hall of the Viziers, shuttered and still since the business of state had removed itself to the Sublime Porte.

The palace was almost empty. The young sultan had taken his household off to Be
ş
ikta
ş
, where the viziers attended him in a room hung with heavy drapery and stuffed with French furniture, fragile gilded chairs, and a European rosewood table. In Yashim’s early days, Topkapi had hummed with the sound of running feet, messengers, scullions, page boys: through the murmur—which should never rise beyond the sound of wind in the grass, by imperial tradition—came those imperturbable pashas, for whom calm was an indication of rank; and formidably armed janissaries stood around the walls of the courts like statues, moving nothing but their eyes.

All gone now. Only weeds growing in the paths, and birds nesting in Sinan’s chimneys. The Ottomans were unsentimental. In the nomadic spirit, Yashim reflected, Topkapi had been struck like a tent and the caravan moved on.

Except, of course, for the valide, mother of the last sultan. She had no intention of leaving—alive.

He found her in her apartments in the Court of the Valide. A checkerboard of sunshine drifted through the fretted wooden blinds and spilled across the flagstone floor. Yashim took off his shoes and crossed to the carpet.

The valide was reclining on the divan that filled the window embrasure. She put down her coffee cup, and nodded.

“
Très bien
, Yashim. Ask the girl to bring my writing box. And some coffee, if you like.”

The valide’s handmaiden appeared in the doorway. Yashim asked for coffee, politely, and suggested the girl fetch the valide’s writing box.

“Autumn,” the valide murmured, “I never liked it much. People say the color is good, but to me it speaks of death.” She gave an elegant shrug. “On Martinique it never troubled us.”

Martinique, that tropical speck on the atlas, was where the valide had grown up.

“But people died there, all the same,” Yashim reminded her.

“
Mais oui
, Yashim. All the time. So, bring it to me.”

She gestured to the girl for the box. It was a shallow rectangle, painted russet, and decorated with garlands; the valide laid it on her lap, and tilted the lid.

She took a pair of silver spectacles from the box and put them on.

Yashim mastered an urge to look inside the box. From here, he supposed, the valide managed her affairs, and wrote to her Parisian bookseller; for the valide, like any successful woman in the harem, possessed far more than jewelry and fine clothes. Sultan Abdülhamid, her sultan, had long since died; but in his lifetime he had vested his favorite with innumerable sources of revenue—bridge tolls and shop rents, the income from provincial farms, obscure taxes. As far as Yashim could remember, with the independence of Greece the valide had lost several useful taxes levied in Athens; she had protested in the strongest possible terms to her son, then Sultan Mahmut, who had made up the loss with a sizable interest in attar of roses from the Rhodopes.

The valide took out a packet of letters done up in vermilion silk ribbon, and closed the lid sharply.

“Et voilà.”
She untied the ribbon, and spread the letters out on her box before selecting one. Not for the first time, Yashim found himself thinking that the valide would have made an excellent administrator. “This will interest you, I think,” she said. “Natasha Borisova. Her French is impeccable.”