The Winter Thief (4 page)

T
HE WINDOWS
of Kamil’s villa glowed invitingly as he rode up the drive, wrapped against the icy wind in a heavy wool coat and a kalpak of Persian lamb. His cook and housekeeper, Karanfil, made it a point to place lamps near the windows when he was out, a habit she had developed when he was a child and sentimentally kept up now that he was a grown man. He could see the elegant silhouettes of his orchids on the sills, the long sprays of flowers preening in the limelight. He would have to remind Karanfil again not to put the lamps so close to the delicate blooms. He looked forward to one of her meals and to an hour in his winter garden before returning to the problem of finding the guns.

The firearms meant that something unusual was brewing, something that could tear at the belly of the empire, already made vulnerable through massive debt to European banks and loss of territory in decades of wars and revolts. The Ottoman state had created a stable system, fairer than most, that allowed every subject to participate, regardless of faith. Ottoman laws respected people’s differences and accommodated them. None of those who broke away and founded their own nations could say the same, Kamil thought. These new states on the empire’s receding fringes were cradles of blood in which nothing grew but hatred. The streets of Istanbul were crowded with refugees from massacres committed by people newly freed from the Ottoman system of law, acting with impunity or, worse, with a nod from their national leaders. Kamil was determined to keep the center strong, serving the empire like his father and grandfather, who had both been governors.

Karanfil’s son, Yakup, who acted as Kamil’s manservant, ran from the house and took hold of the bridle before Kamil could dismount. Yakup’s ascetic, high-boned face was grim.

“I was just about to fetch you, pasha. Chief Omar sent for you. Someone blew up the Ottoman Imperial Bank. A taverna next door burned down. There are many dead.”

Kamil turned his horse and galloped back through the gate. He was surprised to receive the summons from Omar. The bank was located in the Karaköy district. Omar was the police chief of Fatih, on the other side of the Golden Horn.

Half an hour later, he slowed to maneuver through the traffic that thronged the steep, winding streets even at this late hour. Below him, he could see a black funnel of smoke twisting upward and expanding into a ghostly white cloud lit from below. He descended to Karaköy Square, where horse-drawn carts, porters, pedestrians, handcarts, and peddlers jostled one another, churning the snow into a brown paste. He spurred his horse through the crowd of onlookers until he heard Chief Omar’s familiar, booming voice, then dismounted, giving his horse to one of the constables.

Black smoke boiled into the night. There was a cacophony of screaming, shouting, and the crack of smoldering wood. The confusion was fitfully illuminated by men running back and forth with torches. A crowd of onlookers was gathered at the end of the street, barely held back by a handful of policemen. Others were at work carrying people from the wreckage. Italian nuns, their lips moving in prayer, watched from the rectory windows of Saint Peter’s Church, directly behind the bank.

Two fire brigades pumped water from their portable tanks onto the taverna. One group of firemen had relayed a long hose into the Golden Horn and was pumping water from the harbor. Despite the cold, the firemen were shirtless and their bodies gleamed with sweat in the torchlight. Kamil wet his handkerchief and held it over his mouth and nose.

He identified himself to one of the policemen, who led him to the area between the bank and the burning taverna. The bank, a three-story granite building, was still standing, the coat of arms on its façade blackened but undamaged, although the entrance had been smashed into rubble. Across the lane, the timber shell of the restaurant glowed red like a backlit stage set. Occasionally a man emerged from the wreckage or disappeared inside. Istanbul’s firemen were as famous for their physical prowess as for their almost foolhardy bravery.

Kamil saw the charred bodies lying on the pavement and stopped in horror. Some were still alive. Cracked, bloody hands grasped feebly at the air. As he watched, two firemen brought out the naked body of a woman, her face burned beyond recognition. They laid her on the ground and ran back to the fire. A woman in a black charshaf checked her pulse and then draped a sheet gently over the body. The woman’s veil had fallen away from her face and Kamil saw that she was old, her chin covered in tribal tattoos, her teeth bared with tension. Men carried the wounded to carts lined up at the narrow crossroads. Kamil took hold of one of the victims and helped carry him to a cart already crowded with other victims. Viscous fluid seeping from the wounds stuck to Kamil’s hands. He fought down nausea.

“Where are they taking them?” Kamil asked a bystander as the cart began its way uphill.

“Probably the nuns,” the man responded, his eyes held by the flames. “That’s the closest place.”

“They’re taking the wounded to a church?” Kamil wiped the palms of his hands on his trousers, but they remained sheathed with soot and blood.

“Austrians.” The man’s eyes were red, and tears streaked his face, from smoke or weeping. Kamil couldn’t tell. “They set up an infirmary during the last cholera outbreak. Right up there”—he pointed—“below the tower. They might be taking them elsewhere too. It isn’t very big.”

An empty cart pulled up. Kamil and the men worked quickly, since every touch seemed to cause the wounded great pain. Kamil forced himself to be calm. He thought of the orchids in his summer garden, his mind walking along the pebble-filled trays, listing one Latin name after another—
Acineta hrubyana, Cephalanthera rubra, Orchis lactea
,
Orchis pinetorum
—while his hands grasped slippery limbs, the victim’s lungs too burned to moan, but his eyes wild with pain.

When all the wounded had been taken away and the remaining bodies checked, wrapped in sheets, and stacked in carts, Kamil washed his hands thoroughly in a bowl of warm water the old woman brought him. Then he slumped down against the side of a building.

After a few minutes he became aware of a familiar voice and caught sight of Chief Omar arguing with a man in uniform, presumably the chief of the Karaköy police district. When he saw Kamil, Omar, black from head to foot with soot, but looking smug, came over.

“The Karaköy police will survey the neighborhood,” he announced. “They’re good at that; they know everybody. We’ll do the hard thinking, of course. Good thing I happened to be in the area.” He grinned. “I’ll share the credit with them, naturally.” His teeth were glaringly white against his dirty skin. He was a big, barrel-chested man with a thick neck, an overly loud voice, and doleful brown eyes that expressed undisguised pleasure at being in the thick of things.

Kamil stood and faced Chief Omar. “What the hell is going on?” he asked in a hoarse, cracked voice, angry at the police chief’s levity. He wondered if Omar’s experience as a soldier had hardened him to such carnage. Kamil hoped he would never think of any death as less than the highest tragedy.

“The most damnable thing,” Omar exclaimed. “There was an explosion at the bank. The fire spread across the street. Eighteen dead so far. Four of them bank guards, the rest were in the restaurant. A fast fire.” He gestured at the smoldering ruin. “Most in the taverna died. One bank guard survived. Don’t know if anyone else was inside the bank. It was closed.”

“Well, we had better find out.” Kamil surveyed the pile of rubble that had been the bank entrance, then bent over and heaved a length of marble facing to the side. The physical effort helped him regain some semblance of control over his emotions. He and Omar’s men worked by the light of torches in a pall of acrid smoke. The clap of bricks landing and the coughs and curses of the policemen mingled with the shouts of the fire brigade next door and the sound of wood settling. Half an hour later, a contingent of heavily armed gendarmes arrived from the direction of Karaköy Square. Kamil had called in the military police to guard the bank, just as they were guarding the ship carrying the guns.

Kamil paused to give instructions to the gendarme captain, who then ordered the soldiers to surround the building and to help clear the rubble. They wouldn’t be able to go inside until the debris was cleared and the building stabilized.

“This will take all night,” Omar said, disgusted. “We might as well go home. What’s that up there?” he asked, pointing to the raised carving on the wall.

“This used to be the residence of the French ambassador a hundred or so years ago. I think it’s his coat of arms.”

“They told me the building belongs to Saint Peter’s Church. Isn’t that Italian?”

Kamil raised his hands in helpless surrender, unable to decode the twisted strands of property relations in this, one of the city’s oldest districts.

Kamil asked the gendarme captain to send for them when the bank was considered safe to enter. As he and Omar walked to the stable where their horses were kept, they passed the imam from a nearby mosque and a Greek Orthodox priest huddled deep in conversation, presumably deciding where to take the bodies that couldn’t be identified. The taverna was owned by Christians.

“Did you find out anything from the ship’s crew?” Kamil asked Omar.

“The barrels were loaded in New York, but I think the crew didn’t know there were guns in them. There were a lot of barrels on board, most of them full of salted fish just like the manifest says. The recipient in Istanbul gave a fictitious name, so we couldn’t trace him.” He coughed and spit out black phlegm, then gestured over his shoulder at the demolished bank. “Do you think the same people did this?”

Kamil stopped and stared at the crowd in the square, livid that they were carrying on as if Armageddon hadn’t just happened a block away. He could feel Omar watching him and knew the gruff ex-soldier understood. “A shipful of illegal weapons and an attack on the Imperial Bank in the same week? I doubt it’s a coincidence,” Kamil said in a quiet voice.

V
ERA WAS EXPECTING
someplace cold and dark, not this comfortable armchair in a warm room hung with kilims. After Gabriel left, two men had burst into the room and, after a brief struggle, thrown a greasy blanket over her head, carried her out, and pushed her into a carriage, where the blanket was replaced by a blindfold. It had taken no more than a moment; she couldn’t even remember their faces. After a long ride, they emerged and walked along a gravel path—the snow had been cleared, and she could hear the delicate crunch of stones beneath her feet—and down a flight of steps into this room. The men politely asked her to remove her boots. They had taken them away and in their stead given her slippers that were too small.

As soon as they left, Vera pulled the blindfold off and tried the door, but it was locked. On a small table beside the glowing stove was a glass of hot tea. She settled herself in the armchair and, warming her hands with the tea glass, tried to figure out who these men might be.

Had Gabriel been detained and sent his allies to snatch her to safety moments before the police arrived to arrest her? She knew Gabriel had been right to worry about her carelessness and regretted acting like a child when what her husband had needed was a smart comrade-in-arms. She had struggled against the men, out of surprise and alarm, and dropped the pomegranate from her pocket onto the floor, although what message Gabriel could take from that she didn’t know. She checked her coat pocket for the tenth time. Except for a torn fragment, her passport was gone. It must have fallen out of her pocket with the pomegranate.

The key turned in the lock. In spite of her coat and the proximity of the stove, she was shivering. The man who entered was tall, with an imposing head and a jutting nose. His cheeks were pitted with acne scars, partially hidden beneath a black, pointed beard and a precisely trimmed mustache. His hair was thick as an animal’s pelt, sleek and shiny. There was something military in his bearing, although his clothing was that of an ordinary civil servant. His movements were careful, tidy, as if minutely thought out. He stood just inside the door, staring at her with a slight tilt of the head as if he had recognized her and were trying to place her. He was not attractive, she thought, but there was a gross sensuality in his reddish lips, the too-luxuriant hair. She looked away, uncomfortable, and put the tea glass on the table, slowly and deliberately, as if not to disturb him.

The man sat down in the chair facing hers and said something in Turkish. When she didn’t understand, he said, “Welcome, Lena,” in poorly pronounced Armenian. “My name is Vahid.” Behind a curtain of thick lashes, his eyes were dark amber. She could read neither concern nor threat in them, only a barely suppressed interest.

It took her a moment to realize he thought her name was Lena Balian, the false name she had given the publisher. The kind old man would never have reported her name to the police, she thought. He must have noticed that she was being followed and asked his acquaintances to snatch her away to a safe place. Did these men work with Gabriel too? She didn’t think they were Armenian, despite Vahid’s few words of the language, so they must be socialists. Gabriel sometimes talked about the men supporting his mission in Istanbul. He had described one of the men as having a big face like a horse. Was this that man?

She gave him a wavering smile. “Thank you.” She wasn’t sure for what.

“You don’t like the tea?” He indicated her full glass.

She shook her head yes. She liked the tea. She didn’t want to seem ungrateful. The intensity of his gaze made her anxious. Should she tell him her real name? She realized she had been playacting at politics. This now was real. She must make the right decision and not disappoint Gabriel again.

“You were in danger, Lena. But you are safe here. And your friend, where is he?” the man asked, head cocked to the side, his eyes never leaving her face.

What was she supposed to answer? She looked down at her hands.

“We had hoped to bring him here as well. He’s also in danger.”

Vera said nothing, thinking furiously. It nagged at her that he hadn’t said Gabriel’s name. Surely he knew him, one of the most famous socialist leaders in Europe. Vera began to shiver.

“You are young, Lena,” Vahid said with a tight smile that was not reflected in his eyes. “Your friend appreciates you?” It didn’t surprise her that he didn’t know she and Gabriel were married. They had told only their close friends. She made a decision.

“Which friend?” she asked. She saw the flash of anger but wasn’t prepared for the blow that knocked her from the chair. For a moment her vision went black. She crawled along the floor until her back was against the wall. Her mouth was filling up with blood.

“You’re an intelligent girl, Lena. I know we’ll get along. You’ll see.”