The Winter Thief (5 page)

A
T FIVE O’CLOCK IN
the morning, Yakup roused Kamil from his bed with a glass of strong tea. A gendarme waited in the entry hall to tell him that the rubble had been cleared from the front of the bank. It had stopped snowing. A thick fog wrapped the city in muslin and deadened all sound, so that the tick of their horses’ hooves on cobble was very loud.

Through the mist, the bank looked undamaged. Across the street, the taverna was now just a blackened pile. Kamil walked up the cracked marble stairs into the bank. The gendarmes had set up scaffolding to keep the entryway from collapsing. It opened onto a high-ceilinged room decorated with blue tiles and lit by torches and lamps. Along a marble counter were the tellers’ cages and a woman’s section where the bank teller was obscured behind a wooden lattice. Benches ranged along two sides of the room. Except for the entrance, the bank seemed unscathed.

The gendarme captain saluted Kamil, and Omar sauntered over. “About time. I’m almost ready for another breakfast.” He waved his hand around the room. “Not as bad as we thought.

“The explosives were set at the entrance,” the captain explained. “It looks like a hasty job, meant more for show than damage.”

“Was anything taken?”

“We waited for you,” Omar announced, running his finger over his mustache. “The vault is downstairs. It’s open,” he added meaningfully.

He led Kamil to an iron gate at the back of the lobby, beyond which narrow steps descended. Kamil pointed to a polished wooden slide that ran from the head of the stairs into the basement. “This must be where they send the bags of coin down to the vault.”

“About ten years ago, they had a robbery here, an inside job,” Omar told him. “One of the clerks was sneaking into the reserves and replacing gold coins with silver. It was years before they noticed the adulterated bags. By that time he had stolen about eighty thousand British pounds. I heard that after that, they developed a new, foolproof security system. Wait until you see it.”

At the bottom of the stairs a corridor led to a thick wooden door. It stood open, a key protruding from the lock.

“This explains why the empire is bankrupt,” Omar said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “We don’t need a treaty to hand our wealth over to our European friends. They can just come in here, jiggle the lock, and take what they want.”

They crossed the threshold and found themselves in a brick chamber with a vaulted roof, lined with shelves of ledgers. There was no gold.

Omar pointed to two doors at the far end of the room, each behind a gate of iron bars. “Strong rooms. Well, at least that.”

The outer barred gates could be opened with a key, but the strong room doors appeared to be of solid iron and had double locks. One of them was ajar. Kamil pushed it open and stepped inside. The air was musty and smelled of leather, ink, and old paper.

The walls, floor, and ceiling were welded iron sheets. Wooden shelves held leather bags, chests, metal strongboxes, bundles of banknotes, and stacks of securities. One set of shelves near the door was bare, the floor littered with gold coins from a leather bag that had fallen and split open. Kamil picked up one of the coins and tossed it in his hand, then placed it on the shelf. “I wonder how much is missing.” Several European countries stored their assets in this bank.

“I bet it won’t be pigeon shit. Do you think they were just run-of-the-mill thieves or that they’re going to use this money to raise hell? I’d put my money, if I had any, on raising hell. Why else the fireworks? Either way, our padishah is going to be very unhappy.”

“‘Unhappy’ isn’t the word I would use.” Sultan Abdulhamid would assume a connection between the weapons smuggling and the robbery and put pressure on the minister of justice, who in turn would blame Kamil for not apprehending the smugglers in time to prevent the robbery. Kamil was certain Nizam Pasha would assign him this case as well. He often gave Kamil important cases with one hand and with the other undermined his ability to prosecute them, as if he couldn’t decide whether he wished Kamil to succeed or fail and so routinely prepared the way for both.

“Can you imagine if they had gotten hold of the guns too?” Omar whistled. “It must be something big they’ve got planned.”

“With this gold, they can buy ten shiploads of guns.”

I
T WAS NEAR DAWN
when Gabriel approached Bebek, a village north of the city on the Bosphorus shore. It had stopped snowing, and everything was muted by mist, the quiet punctuated by the raucous laughter of gulls. The muezzin called the faithful to prayer from a nearby minaret. A faint pink wash outlined the Asian hills on the far side of the strait, a band of tarnished silver against the black landscape. Gabriel came to a high wall and lifted a thick fall of ilex with numb hands, unmindful of the avalanche of snow this released onto his head and shoulders. He forced the gate and slipped into the barren garden of Yorg Pasha’s mansion.

The guards were suspicious, but at Gabriel’s insistence they fetched Simon, the pasha’s secretary, who Gabriel had previously noted seemed never to sleep. Simon arrived in minutes, fully dressed in a crisp stambouline frock coat and tie. If he was surprised to see Gabriel, he gave no sign.

Gabriel told him he had to see Yorg Pasha.

“It’s six in the morning, Gabriel. The pasha isn’t available. Perhaps I can help you.”

Gabriel considered making his request to Simon, but the matter was too important. “I need to speak with the pasha directly.” He didn’t trust either of them, but he had no one else to turn to.

“That’s not possible. If this is in regard to business, I’m the one to speak to. The pasha doesn’t get involved in that sort of thing.”

“It’s a personal matter,” Gabriel blurted out, unsure what other argument he could make to convince Simon.

Simon looked at him oddly, perhaps with a glint of amusement. “You’ll have to tell me more if I’m to convince the pasha.”

“Look, if this weren’t urgent, I wouldn’t have walked here in the middle of the night. All I want is ten minutes of his time. Please just tell him that.”

Simon looked Gabriel over, considering. “Very well, I’ll tell him, but I promise nothing.” He pointed to Gabriel’s hands. “It looks like you have frostbite. I’ll send someone to look after that.”

A servant arrived and brought Gabriel to a small marble bath, where he was instructed to place his hands into a basin of warm water. Gabriel’s entire body ached, but when he removed his hands from the water, the pain shocked him. Two of the fingers on his right hand had turned purple. The man returned with a lamp and looked over Gabriel’s hands. He pointed to the cuts on the fingers, which Gabriel had gotten from the brambles on his slide down the wooded hill, and explained in French, the shared language of foreigners in Istanbul, that if the cuts didn’t heal, he might lose those fingers.

Brought to a room, Gabriel sat waiting, staring at his bandaged hands. The servant had given him laudanum to quell the pain, but the memory of it remained with him like the border of a large continent he was always just about to cross.

He no longer trusted himself to know what to do. The room looked out over the Bosphorus, and as he stood there, the color of the sky gathered and thickened between the hills directly across the strait into a deep apricot stain so intense it seemed alive. A cat scrabbled to get in, but Gabriel was mesmerized by the glowing disk, still partially obscured by trees, that was rising from the Asian hills, increasing in brilliance until he was forced to look away.

He pulled the curtains shut and went to lie on the bed. He tried to sleep but could not keep his eyes closed against the vertigo of visiting scenarios of his young wife in the hands of the secret police. He ceased to hear the scratching of the cat.

Finally, a messenger came to tell Gabriel that Yorg Pasha would see him as soon as the pasha finished breakfast. While Gabriel waited, another scene played in his head. The chests filled with gold liras had been pushed up against his knees in the carriage, its leather window flaps drawn as it turned into Karaköy Square to mingle with the evening traffic. An enormous blast sounded behind them. He was tempted to open the flap but could not risk exposing himself. After they had passed through the wooded hills north of the city and were unloading the chests, he had asked his driver, Abel, about the explosion.

“It was dark,” Abel responded. “I don’t know.”

Abel was a member of the Istanbul cell. Gabriel planned to give him and his sister, Sosi, who had helped get the keys to the vault, enough money to disappear or travel to the commune in Karakaya. Once the chests were unloaded, Abel had taken him back to the city, dropped him off, and then disappeared. The carriage would be needed one more time—or so he had thought—to take him, Vera, and the gold to the ship that would transport them and their cargo to Trabzon. From there they would travel through the mountains to Karakaya.

A decade of political organizing, his dream within reach, and he was lying in a gilded room wondering whether his moment of weakness in marrying Vera would destroy everything he had worked for.

They had robbed the bank for gold to buy tools and building materials, livestock, more land, and rifles and pistols to replace those lost when their shipment of weapons from New York had been impounded in Istanbul’s harbor.

The commune’s proximity to the Russian-Ottoman border was a risk. The Russians might try to extend their territory again, as they had only a decade earlier. At the end of that war the Ottomans had ceded Artvin, which was less than a day’s travel from Karakaya and the commune. Gabriel and the settlers thought that the unstable dirt tracks winding through the mountains in place of roads and the vertiginous drops and long screes on either side would keep away the Russians with their heavy artillery. Still, the hundreds of pioneers that Gabriel envisioned for New Concord needed enough firepower to hold off a battalion of invading infantry.

The Russians weren’t the only danger. Without gold, without weapons, the community would starve or, defenseless, be slaughtered by the Ottoman authorities, who would feel threatened by a system with no privileged leaders and no distinction between rich and poor. None of the members of the commune were peasants, although several had grown up in the countryside and others had studied modern agriculture and animal husbandry. All would receive weapons training. If they got through the first year, word would spread, and as more people joined them, the commune would become self-sustaining. He had an image in his mind of white homespun cloth drying on a line before the restored walls of the monastery. He saw his sister lift one of the sun-soaked sheets and walk through into shadow.

Gabriel rose from the bed and moved the curtain aside. The light reflecting from the snow blinded him momentarily, but then he saw that the morning was well advanced. There was no sign of the cat. The gold was out there, he thought with satisfaction, just a few meters away beyond the frozen garden. When he first arrived in Istanbul, Gabriel had asked Simon’s permission to store some supplies in the pasha’s vast stables. After the robbery, he had simply added the chests from the bank, well camouflaged, to the jumble of other chests and supplies he was accumulating for his trip to the east. As long as the gold was safe and within reach, there was a future.

Gabriel tried the door to the room, but it was locked. He balled his fists and pounded on it, ignoring the pain that blazed through his hands, but there was no response. There was still Vera. He had to find his wife.

O
MAR TRIED THE DOOR
to the second strong room, but it was locked. “Well, at least they didn’t rob this one.”

“I wouldn’t make that assumption,” Kamil corrected him. “They could have gone in and then locked the door again. They appear to have had the keys. None of the doors were forced.”

Omar nodded.

“We’ll need an account of what’s stored in these rooms,” Kamil told him. “I’m surprised there aren’t already bank officials here. Weren’t they notified?”

“I was busy with the fire, getting people out. Maybe the Karaköy police sent word.” He called over one of his men. The policeman was young, with the face of a much older man. His eyes were serious and attentive. “Rejep, go ask Chief Muzaffer where the bank officials are.”

“The keys to this room might still be here,” Kamil suggested, looking around. He set two of the gendarmes to search the bank systematically. They came back with handfuls of keys taken from various offices. None of them fit.

Rejep returned, red-faced. “Chief, Chief Muzaffer said to tell you…” He hesitated, and Omar bellowed at him, “Just tell me what that rat-faced excuse for a policeman said. I’m not going to kill the messenger.”

“Yes, Chief,” Rejep rattled off. “He said that if you want to be the cook, you have to also peel the onions.”

Omar turned back to Kamil and translated. “No one has told the officials, although you’d think they could smell their bank burning even in the suburbs. Rejep, find out who the top officials are and where they live.”

“Just a minute,” Kamil interjected. “The central cashier is a Frenchman named Montaigne,” he said. “The comptroller is British. Swyndon is his name, I think. There’s a third official, a German, but I don’t know him.” He had met the bank officials several times at social events. Kamil remembered Montaigne as a narrow-eyed man who tippled champagne. Swyndon had a leonine head and a loud voice. He generally could be found in a gathering holding forth on some obscure subject, like the best way to hunt tigers, and tended to be the center of attention of a group of admiring ladies.

Omar gave Kamil a surprised look, as if he had suddenly remembered that Kamil was a pasha and not a simple ex-soldier like himself. “The addresses,” he reminded Rejep.

The policeman began to move off, but Omar called him back. “And keep track of what the Karaköy police find out. Talk to the neighbors and people in the restaurants around here yourself. Find out what they saw.” He explained to Kamil, “I only trust my own sources.”

“As you command, Chief.” The policeman turned to go.

“Rejep,” Omar called out again. “Make sure you write it all down. The magistrates like fat reports.” He winked at Kamil.

They climbed out of the basement into the smoke that still filled the lobby. A crystal chandelier hung from the ceiling. Pieces of it lay splintered across the floor like a spill of diamonds. The tellers’ stations were behind cages of gilded wrought-iron bars. Bars that had kept no one out, Kamil noted grimly.

Beside him, Omar huffed, “Why bother blowing anything up when you have the keys? If they hadn’t made all that racket, the theft might not have been discovered until morning.”

“Probably they meant to kill the guards. They might have recognized them.”

“Don’t you think blowing up the building is an exceptionally elaborate way to kill a few guards?”

“Have you spoken to the surviving guard?”

“He wasn’t in any condition to talk last night. They took him up to the Austrian infirmary. I hope he’s still alive. From what I saw, the burns looked bad.”

The sun was rising, flushing the sky orange, as they strode up the hill to the Austrians. Nuns with broad white wimples tacked across the unpaved yard like sailboats, carrying baskets of laundry, buckets, and trays of food between the two-story wooden house that served as their residence and a former barracks they had turned into an impromptu infirmary. As one of the wimples moved inexorably in their direction, Omar fell a step behind Kamil and muttered, “Allah protect us.”

“From what?” Kamil scoffed. “Nuns?”

“Women,” Omar responded with a growl. Kamil smiled, knowing how much Omar, despite his gruffness, doted on his wife.

“I am Sister Hildegard,” the nun announced loudly in passable Turkish, then paused to give her visitors the opportunity to state their business. She tilted her head to the side, which made the entire starched wing of her headpiece tilt as well. Another solid-looking expanse of starched linen extended over her bosom. Her robe was blotted with blood and other fluids.

“Bulletproof,” Kamil heard Omar comment sotto voce behind him.

Kamil explained that they were looking for the wounded bank guard. Sister Hildegard nodded once, then swung around and led them to the infirmary.

A line of beds stretched down both sides of the cavernous stone room. Between the beds a row of coal-filled mangal braziers exuded warmth, but the room was still chilly. An iron chandelier holding dozens of oil lamps hung from the ceiling and cast delicate shadows across the walls, the beds, and their occupants. Kamil heard groans and the keening sound of someone crying. He felt a deep pity for the featureless forms wrapped in white bandages that inhabited the beds. A novice who was tending the braziers jumped to her feet when she saw Sister Hildegard.

“Suzanna, bring our guests some tea,” Sister Hildegard told her.

Kamil nodded toward the patients. “Have you identified the burn victims yet?”

“Most of them. Their families heard about the fire and came to look for them. Those that didn’t find their loved ones here went on to the mortuary.”

Omar clucked his tongue in disapproval. “Such needless pain. If you’re going to kill someone, just shoot them.” Sister Hildegard flashed him an unfathomable look.

The bank guard’s body was invisible under a casing of bandages, but his face was burned red, the skin blistered along one cheek. His lips were black and his eyes squeezed shut. He seemed unaware that they were beside his bed.

Omar leaned close to the guard’s face and said softly, “Fuat, tell us what you saw, so we can go get the bastards. I’ll bring you back their left ears.”

The guard’s lips twitched. He opened his eyes and, after a few hoarse attempts, managed to speak in a whisper. Kamil leaned in to hear.

“The bank closed at five. Just after dark, a carriage pulled up. Monsieur Swyndon came out of the bank with a man I hadn’t seen before. They took two big chests from the carriage and carried them inside, one after the other.”

Omar threw Kamil a puzzled look. “Swyndon was there?”

“Monsieur Swyndon is the comptroller. He often works late, so I didn’t think anything about it. About a half hour later, they carried the chests back out.”

The guard closed his eyes again and breathed heavily. “I was lucky,” he said, his voice straining. “I didn’t inhale the fire. I threw myself to the side. What about my mates?” His eyes focused on Omar’s. No one responded and Fuat closed his eyes again. “Kismet,” he whispered. “Allah knows everything.” A tear trickled from beneath his eyelid. Omar and Kamil looked away.

After a few moments, the guard continued. “The chests looked heavier going out, so our captain offered to help, but Monsieur Swyndon said no.”

Kamil picked up a glass and, holding the guard’s head up, dribbled water between his lips.” What did the stranger look like?”

“Tall. He had a cap on and a scarf around his face, so I couldn’t see much. He wore regular shoes, not for the snow. I thought he was a customer. Only the very poor or the very rich walk around in shoes in the snow, poor men because they have nothing else, rich men because their feet never touch the ground.”

Omar chuckled. “I’ll have to remember that. I bow before your philosophical mastery.”

The guard looked up at Omar to see if he was making fun of him, then, satisfied that the chief was genuinely impressed, stretched his scabbed mouth into a rictuslike grin.

“Then what happened?” Kamil prompted him.

“They went back inside. Then the stranger came out and left in the carriage. The driver was in and out too, helping carry the chests and other stuff.”

“What other stuff?” Omar asked.

“He went in with two heavy bags.”

“Did he bring them out again?”

The guard thought for a moment. “I don’t remember.”

“So Swyndon stayed in the bank?”

“I didn’t see him come out, but there’s another door down the street. Haraf was guarding it, but he got caught in the explosion.” Kamil saw the guard struggle to contain his emotion. “He had come over to ask me if I would be his son’s sponsor at his circumcision. That’s the last thing I remember.”

Omar took down the guard’s address and the names of the other guards and promised to notify their families.

They walked down the row of beds toward a table where the novice had placed a tray of tea and pastries. “Well, now we have our top official robbing his own bank,” Omar announced.

They passed a shelf lined with blackened objects, scorched and scarred by fire. Each was neatly labeled with a number tied on with string. Kamil stopped, intrigued, and called Sister Hildegard over. “What’s all this?” he asked.

“Those are things we found on the patients. It helps family members identify them. Do you have any idea what this is?” She reached into a cabinet, pulled out a partially melted object, and handed it to Kamil. “You can see why I keep it out of sight.” Kamil cradled the medal in his hand. It was a gold starburst decorated with diamonds. A bit of scorched blue ribbon still clung to the back.

“Allah protect us,” he said in a soft voice. It was an order just like the one Huseyin had been wearing for Elif’s portrait.

“Do you recognize it?” Sister Hildegard asked, picking up the alarm in Kamil’s voice.

“It’s a royal order, but I’m not sure which kind. My brother-in-law, Huseyin Pasha, has one. But I’m sure he’s not the only one who does.” Sultan Abdulhamid used royal orders to reward the loyalty of his top men. “There’s no number attached to this.”

“We found it in one of the carts that had carried both dead and wounded. It’s heavy. It must have slipped off the body. We have no idea who it belongs to.” She added, with a sympathetic look, “I’m sorry. Was your brother-in-law injured?”

“I don’t know.” Kamil was already walking back toward the row of bedsteads, followed closely by Omar. In the first bed, the patient’s breathing was labored, each breath accompanied by a faint bubbling sound. Of the face, Kamil could see only the eyes, closed in sleep or exhaustion.

“We know who this man is. But three are unidentified,” the nun explained, “the ones with a green or red cloth tied to the bed. The red one is a woman. But several more seriously injured patients were moved to another hospital with special facilities. The foreign embassies already took their people away.” She shrugged. “They think their medicine is better.”

“Where?” Omar asked.

“The German hospital, probably.” Sister Hildegard rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands and Kamil saw that they were red with exhaustion. “Oh, you mean the badly injured ones,” she said. “Eyüp Mosque hospital. They have a burn specialist there.”

Kamil stood over one of the beds marked with a green cloth and regarded the swaddled figure that lay there. Thick black hair curled from the head. The figure was slim, even under the carapace of bandages. The man in the adjacent bed was too short to be Huseyin. The coals in the braziers hissed. The smell of carbolic barely masked the stench of pus, blood, and urine.

“May I keep this?” Kamil asked Sister Hildegard. “If it’s not my brother-in-law’s, I’ll return it.” The nun nodded her assent, and Kamil slipped the medal into his pocket.

Omar followed him out into the cold. “Do you want me to go to Eyüp with you?”

Kamil shook his head no. They waited for the stableboy to bring their horses.

Omar tucked his hands under his arms and stamped his feet against the cold. His breath formed a white cloud before his face. “Swyndon either went along with the robbery and took off, or he was coerced and then eliminated. But then where’s his body?”

Kamil tried to focus on what Omar was saying, but his mind was full of Feride’s anguish if she learned that Huseyin was either dead or so terribly injured that he had been unable to tell anyone who he was. “We couldn’t get into the second strong room,” Kamil suggested.

“You mean you think the manager might be in there?” Omar was skeptical. “That makes no sense.”

“Why not? What better way to get rid of a witness?”

“For all the thieves knew, the bank would just unlock the door the next day and let him out. And if he’s dead, why bother locking him up?”

“You have a point,” Kamil admitted.

“Better to check, though. Thieves aren’t always the smartest of Allah’s creations.”

T
HE
A
USTRIAN
infirmary was just a few blocks above the bank, so they instructed the stableboy to follow with their horses and waded down the hill through ankle-deep snow. Kamil saw movement behind the windowpanes as residents peered into the street. The air felt scrubbed clean by the storm. The stove fires had died out during the night, so the noxious smog had dissipated. Istanbul’s chilled inhabitants, fresh from sleep, were stacking kindling and smudging their hands with coal and ash, shivering until the new fires caught, and gazing in wonderment out their windows at the accumulated snow. Snowstorms weren’t unknown in Istanbul, but they were rare.

When they reached the bank, Kamil shouted at the gendarme captain to bring some men to the vault. Kamil picked up a brass weight from a scale, pushed it through the bars of the gate, and banged on the door of the locked strong room. “Hello,” he called out in English. “If you’re in there, make a sound.” He waited but heard nothing. He knocked again and repeated his message. Again they waited, and again there was only silence.

Omar shrugged ostentatiously. “He’s long gone. We give the Franks salaries the size of Mount Ararat and still they rob us blind. Europeans are about as trustworthy as weasels in a larder.” Seeing Rejep come down the stairs, he asked, “Have you got the addresses?”