Whatever he expected, it was not that voice.
“You won’t remember me, Husrev Janovic. Why should you?” The stranger used the language of Husrev’s youth; the language of the mountains of Bosnia. “I saw you when you came to our village. Your village.”
Husrev’s hand moved slowly toward the little bell. “Our village?”
“Polje, Husrev. The family home.”
“You want money?” Husrev Pasha growled. “Or work? Why are you here?”
The man stepped closer. “I want vengeance, for the girl you stole.”
Husrev Pasha blinked hurriedly. “Girl? What girl?”
“Janetta. The woman you stole to be a sailor’s whore.”
“Janetta—?” The grand vizier frowned.
“My wife.”
Husrev’s yellow eyes flickered to the shadow that stood before him. “She will become a queen,” he said, slowly. “You are—what? A shepherd? What can you give that woman now?”
The man hesitated. Husrev Pasha’s hand closed around the bell.
“My wife is dead. She died. In a fire at the sailor’s house.”
“No, no.” Husrev Pasha lifted the bell and shook it.
The peal startled the man.
He saw his journey coming to nothing. His vengeance unappeased.
But he was swift with a knife. He had always been good with the knife.
Husrev Pasha caught the spark of metal in the light.
The man with the knife knew how to kill.
A weight caught him below the knees. He was a big man and he fell back, seeing the ceiling spin, and the raised knife in his hand—and then the room was full of voices.
He let the knife drop.
He could not remember if he had killed the pasha or not. He thought, after all his trouble, that he would feel something. Elation, or satisfaction. Even disappointment. Instead, he felt only very tired.
152
“A long time ago, when I was a boy, there was a man in the village who had the evil eye. He was not a bad man, Yashim. He was a good man. But bad luck attended him, everywhere. Cattle became sick when he looked them over. Women dropped things as he went by.” Husrev shrugged. “He stopped going to the church, because twice his presence made an icon fall. He carried bad luck with him. But you—you are lucky.”
Yashim rubbed his chin and contemplated the grand vizier.
“Perhaps it’s you who has the luck, Husrev Pasha,” he said. He had expected to find the vizier alone. Instead, he had heard the peal of the bell, and had hurled himself upon the deranged man. Now that the assassin had been taken away, the room was still. Husrev Pasha, he noticed, remained seated on the divan, just as he had been when the killer drew his knife.
“Tülin is dead,” Yashim said.
The heavy lids sank. “Tülin is dead,” Husrev repeated. He worked his jaw. “But I am the grand vizier.”
The silence hissed in Yashim’s ears.
“Tell me, Yashim. In the harem is a little girl—”
“Roxelana.”
“She is—well?”
“She is well. But not in the harem anymore.”
“Not?”
“Roxelana is on her way to Egypt.”
Husrev’s eyes were the color of old parchment.
“You will be making a report?”
“No. No, I will not be making a report. You have enough paper as it is.”
Something approaching a smile moved on the pasha’s lips.
“You are good, Yashim efendi. Thank you.”
153
PREEN took Kadri’s chin in her hand.
“What was it, darling? Theater life too dull?”
Kadri smiled, and ducked away. “Too exciting, maybe.”
“I was about to teach you to juggle,” Preen said, with mock reproach. “Juggling’s another whole two kurus a week.”
“I’m going to try it on my own,” Kadri said. “Will you give me a job when I’m finished at school?”
Preen waved a hand. “Oh, you’ll be on your way by then. Grand vizier by thirty.”
They both glanced at Yashim, who stood at a discreet distance pretending to read a playbill tacked to the wall, his hands clasped behind his back.
“Not my idea,” he announced, without turning. “The Great Kadri! The India Rubber Man!” He swept his hand across the playbill. “Dropped from a roof! Fired from a cannon! It’s safer than politics,” he added.
As they were leaving, he took Preen by the hand.
“That party,” he said. “Where you saw Fevzi Pasha—and the girl.”
“Hmm?”
“Husrev Pasha wasn’t there, too, by any chance?”
Preen frowned. “As a matter of fact—why do you ask?”
“I just wonder—I don’t know. Perhaps we all had Fevzi Pasha slightly wrong.”
“Wrong? The man’s a monster, Yashim.”
“Of course. Of course. I know that.”
She gave him a curious look. “You’re not going soft on him now, darling? I don’t know what it is about you and that man—if he’s not the devil, he’s got to be an angel. But that’s not the way it works.”
Yashim nodded. “I know. I met him—” He shrugged. “I suppose it was an impressionable age. Kadri’s got you, luckily.”
“Kadri, Yashim, is not a fool.” She smiled. “Go on. Take him back to the school.”
154
“IT’S too extraordinary,” the valide said. “I put the whole thing down to that wretched Kislar aga. The one you recommended, Yashim.”
Yashim shifted uncomfortably on the divan.
“Ibou was hardly to blame,” he said. “The dealer tricked him. Perhaps even the dealer didn’t know.”
“Pouf! A dealer always knows. It’s his business, Yashim. Like horses, like girls. She must have had a crooked pedigree. I never much liked her myself. Valide this, valide that. And desperate to get to Besiktas, of course. I saw that straightaway. But I enjoyed her magic. It reminded me of Martinique.”
“Martinique?”
“Where I grew up. Chickens. Trances. We called it voodoo. Brought back happy memories.”
“She denied you water,” he said. “She pushed Hyacinth over the parapet, too. It wasn’t magic.”
The valide waved a hand, and her bangles chinked.
“It’s always magic, if you want.” She shrugged. “Talfa believes in it. So did the girl you brought here—Melda. What happened to her friend?”
“Elif believed she was pregnant,” Yashim said. “She thought Donizetti Pasha had given her a baby.”
The valide clapped her hands together. “That’s it, Yashim.” Her face was serious. “He is round, like a mushroom—but she was very young. He twirled a mustache. He caught her eye.”
“Tülin gave her something,” Yashim said. “A potion.”
The valide shivered. “It was very cruel,” she said.
“Melda believed it, too. She believed she had a secret that was too dangerous to reveal.”
“Tsk, tsk.” The valide shook her head. “These girls from Circassia! It is the mountains, Yashim. It makes them stubborn, and leaves them ignorant.”
“And this—” Yashim gestured at the walls. “This harem …”
“Encourages them to be silly, too. I know it, Yashim. Almost alone of all the women who come here, I have the benefit of an education. Ne t’en souviens-tu pas? Between you and me, Yashim, it’s like catching snowflakes. They have desires, hopes, plans, secrets. And they wear them on their faces, like maquillage.”
“And die, as a result?”
“Of course. Death is a secret, like any other.”
She touched a hand to her cheek, and smoothed it back.
“Tell me, Yashim, what did you make of our friend Monsieur Gautier?”
“‘Everything that is beautiful is useless,’” Yashim quoted. “It seemed insincere.”
“Very silly,” the valide agreed. “It could have been written by one of our girls.”
“If any
of them knew how to write,” Yashim pointed out.
“Or understood French, Yashim.”
ALSO BY JASON GOODWIN
Fiction
The Janissary Tree
The Snake Stone
The Bellini Card
Nonfiction
A Time for Tea:
Travels Through China and India in Search of Tea
On Foot to the Golden Horn:
A Walk to Istanbul
Lords of the Horizons:
A History of the Ottoman Empire
Greenback:
The Almighty Dollar and the Invention of America
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For a recipe for the Greek fishermen’s stew with tomatoes , go to my website at www.jasongoodwin.net.
Western writers tend to imagine the harem as a perfumed bathhouse full of naked odalisques. In fact it was much more like an old-fashioned girls’ boarding school, run as a department of the civil service; the baths may have been hot but the food was usually cold. Having been brought up with four sisters, a mother, a stepmother, grandmothers, and innumerable aunts and great-aunts, it took no great leap of the imagination to people the harem of Abdülmecid. My thanks and love to them all.
I drew on several excellent accounts of harem life, including Leyla Saz Hanimefendi’s memoir The Imperial Harem of the Sultans (from which I borrowed the Ceremony of the Birth); Arabesque, the 1944 memoirs of HRH Princess Musbah Haidar; and Douglas Scott Brookes’s invaluable The Concubine, the Princess and the Teacher: Voices from the Ottoman Harem, from which I took the terrible engine.
While An Evil Eye is a work of fiction, Fevzi Ahmet happens to be a real person who rose to be Kapudan pasha and did make the astonishing career move with the Ottoman fleet described in this book.
Thanks to Richard Goodwin for his own patient and indulgent reading; to Sarah Crichton at FSG and Julian Loose at Faber for forbearance and wise comment; to Charles Buchan and Sarah Chalfant at Wylie; to Krista Kaer for taking Yashim (and me) to Estonia.
As for the harem, my wife, Kate, is as trenchant a critic as the valide herself: I am grateful for all her suggestions. Harry, my youngest son, is among other things a skillful and prolific writer. I do my best to discourage him from pursuing that path, but he comes up with wonderful ideas and I plan to steal some of them for the next Yashim story. Especially the banditry.
This one, meanwhile, is for him.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jason Goodwin fell under the spell of Istanbul while studying Byzantine history at Cambridge University. Following the success of his book A Time for Tea: Travels Through China and India in Search of Tea, he made a six-month pilgrimage across Eastern Europe to reach Istanbul for the first time, a journey recounted in On Foot to the Golden Horn: A Walk to Istanbul.
He later wrote Lords of the Horizons: A History of the Ottoman Empire, described as “a work of dazzling scholarship” in The New York Times Book Review. His books featuring Investigator Yashim have been translated into more than forty languages; the first, The Janissary Tree, won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Novel in 2007. He lives with his wife and their four children in Dorset, England.
Copyright © 2011 by Jason Goodwin
All rights reserved
SARAH CRICHTON BOOKS
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
www.fsgbooks.com
Designed by Cassandra J. Pappas
eISBN 9781429958875
First eBook Edition : March 2011
First edition, 2011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Goodwin, Jason, 1964–
An evil eye : a novel / Jason Goodwin.—1st ed.
p. cm.
“Sarah Crichton books.”
1. Yashim (Fictitious character : Goodwin)—Fiction. 2. Detectives—Turkey—Istanbul—Fiction. 3. Eunuchs—Fiction. 4. Defectors—Fiction. 5. Women—Turkey—Fiction. 6. Harems—Fiction. 7. Istanbul (Turkey)—History—19th century—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6107.O663E94 2011
823’.92—dc22
2010039938
Jason Goodwin’s Investigator Yashim Series
* * *
The Janissary Tree
Winner of the Edgar® Award for Best Novel
This first book in the investigator Yashim series is a richly entertaining tale, full of exotic history and intrigue.
It is 1836. Europe is modernizing, and the Ottoman Empire must follow suit. But just before the Sultan announces sweeping changes, a wave of murders threatens the fragile balance of power in his court. Who is behind them? Only one intelligence agent can be trusted to find out: Yashim, a man both brilliant and near-invisible in this world, an investigator who can walk with ease in the great halls of the empire, in its streets, and even within its harems—because, of course, Yashim is a eunuch. His investigation points to the Janissaries, who, for four hundred years, were the empire’s elite soldiers. Crushed by the sultan, could they now be staging a brutal comeback? And can they be stopped without throwing Istanbul into political chaos?
To read an excerpt, and for more information, click here
www.picadorusa.com/thejanissarytree
The Snake Stone
Detective, polyglot, chef, eunuch: Investigator Yashim returns in this evocative Edgar® Award-winning series set in Istanbul at the end of the Ottoman Empire.
Istanbul, 1838. In his palace on the Bosphorus, Sultan Mahmud II is dying and the city swirls with rumors and alarms. The unexpected arrival of a French archaeologist determined to track down lost Byzantine treasures throws the Greek community into confusion. Yashim Togalu is once again enlisted to investigate. But when the archaeologist’s mutilated body is discovered outside the French embassy, it turns out there is only one suspect: Yashim himself. As the body count starts to rise, Yashim must uncover the startling truth behind a shadowy society dedicated to the revival of the Byzantine Empire, encountering along the way such vibrant characters as Lord Byron’s doctor and the Sultan’s West Indies-born mother, the Valide. With striking wit and irresistible flair, Jason Goodwin takes us into a world where the stakes are high, betrayal is death—and the pleasure to the reader is immense.
To read an excerpt, and for more information, click here
www.picadorusa.com/thesnakestone
The Bellini Card
Detective, polyglot, chef, eunuch: Investigator Yashim returns in this Edgar® Award-winning series…
Istanbul, 1840. The young sultan Abdülmecid believes that Gentile Bellini’s vanished masterpiece, a portrait of Mehmet the Conqueror, may have resurfaced in Venice. But it’s not Yashim, our eunuch detective, who takes a ship across the Mediterranean. Instead, it’s his Polish ambassador friend, Palewski, disguised as an American art dealer.
What begins as a simple inquiry soon turns into a murderous game of deception and suspense, played out among the faded palazzi and sluggish canals of the decaying city. Dealers, forgers, and aristocrats become fatally involved, as the search for the Bellini portrait uncovers a threat to the stability of the Ottoman throne, and the peace of Europe.
To read an excerpt, and for more information, click here
www.picadorusa.com/thebellinicard
An Evil Eye
From the Edgar Award–winning author of The Janissary Tree, The Snake Stone, and The Bellini Card comes the fourth adventure of the famous investigator Yashim.
When the admiral of the Ottoman fleet defects to the Egyptians, Yashim attempts to uncover the man’s motives. But Fevzi Pasha is no stranger to Yashim: it was Pasha, in fact, who taught the investigator his craft years ago. He is the only man whom Yashim has ever truly feared: ruthless, cruel, and unswervingly loyal to the sultan. What dark secret has led his former mentor to betray the Ottoman Empire?
While unraveling Pasha’s curious history, Yashim is drawn ever deeper into the closed world of the sultan’s seraglio, an intimate household populated by the young ruler’
s women, children, slaves, and eunuchs. It is a well-appointed world dominated by fear, ambition, and deep-seated superstitions—a lap of luxury where talented girls hold sway in the ladies’ orchestra.
But as the women of that orchestra inexplicably grow ill and die, Yashim discovers that his investigations into the admiral’s defection have their roots in the torturous strictures of the sultan’s harem, where every secret is sacred: a place where the normal rules are suspended and where women can simply disappear.
To read an excerpt, and for more information, click here
www.fsgbooks.com/anevileye
An Evil Eye: A Novel Page 27
