The Janissary Tree

by Jason Goodwin

  They were in a large, low-ceilinged room, lit by an iron grating so high up in the opposite wall that a portion of the ceiling had been sloped upward to meet it. A few dusty rays of the winter sun fell on a curious collection of objects, ranged in shelves along the side walls. There were wooden boxes, a stack of scrolls, and a line of metal cones of varying sizes whose points seemed to rise and fall like the outline of a decorative frieze. And there, at the back of the hall, stood three enormous cauldrons.

  “All our old weights,” said the master. He was looking lovingly at the metal cones. Yashim repressed his impatience.

  “Old weights?”

  “Every new master sees to it that the guild weights and measures are renewed and reconfirmed on his appointment. The old ones then are stored here.”

  “What for?”

  “What for?” The master sounded surprised. “For comparison. How else can any of us be sure that the proper standards are being kept? I can place my weights in the balance and see that they accord to a hair’s breadth with the weights we used at the time of the Conquest.”

  “That’s almost four centuries ago.”

  “Exactly, yes. If the measures are the same, the ingredients must also be the same. Our soups, you understand, do not merely conform with the standards. They are—I do not say the standard itself, but a part of it. An unbroken line that comes down to us from the days of the Conquest. Like the line of the house of Osman itself,” he added, piously.

  Yashim allowed for a suitably impressed pause.

  “The cauldrons,” he suggested.

  “Yes, yes, that is what I’m thinking about. There seems to be one missing.”

  15

  ****************

  The seraskier sat on the edge of the divan, staring down at his shiny leather riding boots.

  “Something will have to be announced,” he said finally. “Too many people know what’s happened as it is.”

  The workmen had been too scared to touch the obstruction in the drain once they knew what it was. Leaving it still concealed across the mouth of the drain, they had fled downhill to inform the caretaker of what they had found. The caretaker informed the imam, who was at that moment setting out to climb the minaret to call the morning prayer. In a hurry, not quite knowing what to do, the imam sent the caretaker to track down the morning watch: the old man could hear the sound of the prayer breaking out all over the city as he scurried through the streets.

  There is no God but God, and Muhammad is His Prophet.

  By dawn light, a group of men could be seen milling about the drain. One of them had been sick. Another, hardier, braver, or more desperate than the rest for the night watch’s proffered sequins, had manipulated the grotesquely misshapen corpse out of the drain and onto the cobbles, where it was finally bundled onto a sheet, wrapped, and hoisted onto a donkey cart that went slipping and swaying down the slope to the Nusretiye, the Mosque of the Victory.

  The workman who had made the discovery had already gone home, to sleep off his horrors or sluice them away in the vivid warmth of the baths. His mate, better shielded from the shock, remained to enjoy his moment with the crowd. Already his story was being retailed with appropriate embellishments among latecomers to the scene, and within the hour several versions of events were circling through the city. By lunchtime these stories were so finely rounded that two of them were able actually to pass each other without the slightest friction, leaving some people to believe that it had been a day of oddities in which an Egyptian sphinx had been dug up out of the foreshore while in Tophane a nest of cannibals had been surprised at their gory breakfast.

  The seraskier had intercepted the rumors considerably earlier. He heard that a man, very possibly one of his missing recruits, had been found in bizarre circumstances close to the Mosque of the Victory. He sent to the mosque for more information and learned that the body had been put into an outhouse normally used by some of the workers on the site. He dispatched a note to Yashim, who was at that moment eating his borek in the cafe on the Kava Davut, suggesting they meet at the mosque, and rode over to see.

  16

  ****************

  The fact that the stranger knew more about the missing cauldron than he did seemed in some degree sinister to the master of the Soup Makers’ Guild.

  “Is this some kind of a joke?” he demanded furiously, when his eyes had—rather superfluously, Yashim thought—devoured the storeroom in a fruitless search for the enormous missing cauldron. After all, you could hardly conceal a cauldron the size of an ox behind a few scrolls and hand weights. At the same time Yashim felt sorry for the master: such a thing, he was almost certain to say, had never happened before in all the history of the guild. Now it had happened on his watch: a theft.

  “I can’t believe it. I have the key.” He held the key up and stared at it, as if it might suddenly break down and confess to illicit behavior. Then he shook it angrily. “This is highly irregular. Twenty-four years!” He glared at Yashim. “I’ve been here twenty-four years.” Yashim shrugged amiably.

  “Do you keep the key with you all the time?”

  “In the name of God, I sleep with my keys!” the master snapped.

  “You might update the lock.”

  The master cocked his head and leaned slowly toward Yashim.

  “You say you come from the palace,” he growled. “What is this? You are some inspector?”

  Yashim nodded slowly. This is a man, he thought, who feels easy with power. He glanced again at the master’s hands. The massive fingers were loosely curled.

  “You could say that.” More briskly he added, “When did you last come in here?”

  The soup master drew breath through his nose, and as he exhaled, Yashim wondered what he was considering: the answer to the question? Or whether to answer the question.

  “I don’t know,” he said finally. “About a month ago. Maybe more. Nothing was missing.”

  “No. Who guards the place at night?”

  In Istanbul it was always people who mattered. Whom you knew. The balance of favors.

  The soup master’s breath was rapid.

  “How is the Guild House guarded after hours?”

  “We employ guards. I myself sleep overhead.”

  “How many guards?”

  “Oh, two, maybe three.”

  Yashim’s face remained expressionless. “They have keys?”

  “I told you, I sleep with the keys. They have the key to the main gate, of course—I give it to them at night and collect it back first thing in the morning.”

  “May I see it?”

  The master fished up the loop and ran his fingers through a bunch of keys. Finding the right one, he showed it to Yashim, who raised his eyebrows. It was another of the old-fashioned sort, something like a big comb of wood, with pegs of varying length for teeth.

  “You say two or three guards. Do you mean two? Or do you mean three? Which?”

  “Well, I—” the master broke off. “It depends.”

  “On what? The weather? Their mood? What I see here is a place that runs by the book, yes? No deviation from routine, no innovation, no coriander in the soup. Right?”

  The master lifted his chin.

  “But when we come to the regulation of the night watch, you don’t know how many guards are employed. Two or three? Maybe it’s five. Maybe none.”

  The master of the Soup Makers’ Guild lowered his head for a second. He seemed to be thinking.

  “It’s like this,” he said slowly. “There are always enough guards. Sometimes it’s two, sometimes three, just as I said. They aren’t always the same men, night after night, but I know the bunch. I trust them, always have. We go back a long way.”

  Yashim noticed something imploring in the man’s tone. He caught his eye.

  “They’re Albanians, aren’t they?”

  The master blinked. He looked steadily at Yashim. “Yes. What of it?”

  Yashim made no answer. He reached out and took
the master’s hand in his, and with the other he gripped the man’s sleeve and rolled it back. The master jerked away with an oath.

  But Yashim had already seen what he had expected. A small blue tattoo. He had not been quick enough to recognize the actual symbol, but there was only one reason why a man would carry a tattoo on his forearm.

  “We can talk,” he suggested.

  The master compressed his lips and closed his eyes.

  “All right,” he said.

  17

  ****************

  THOROUGHLY shaken and repelled by the condition and appearance of the naked corpse, the seraskier returned to his apartments to find Yashim—in a state of ignorance and unconcern—examining the spines of the military manuals and regulation books that filled the bookshelves opposite the divan.

  While he waited for the seraskier’s anger to blow itself out, Yashim questioned him about the discovery of the second corpse, asking for details about the position of the drain and the condition of the body. The effort of describing the way the corpse was trussed seemed to rob the seraskier of his temper, but he kneaded the back of a chair with his fingers, making it creak. Yashim wondered if he would sit down.

  “I had thought,” the seraskier concluded bitterly, “that we might have got somewhere by now. Have we got anywhere?”

  Yashim pulled at his nose.

  “Efendi. I still do not understand how the men went missing. Did they go out together?”

  “Yes, so I understand.”

  “Where?”

  The seraskier sighed. “Nobody seems to know. They came off duty at five. They went back to their dormitory and spent some time there—I know, because they overlapped with the men coming on for night duty.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Nothing much, apparently. Loafing on their bunks. Books, a game of cards, something like that. The last man out saw two of them playing cards.”

  “For money?”

  “I—I don’t know. Probably not. I hope not. These were good young men.”

  “The man who saw them playing, was he the last man to see them at all?”

  “Yes.”

  “So nobody checks on people as they leave the barracks?”

  “Well, no. The sentries are there to check people as they come in. Why should they check people going out?”

  To help a man like me in a situation like this, Yashim thought. That was one reason; he could think of others. A question of order and discipline.

  “Do the men generally go out, for whatever reason, in uniform?”

  “Five or ten years ago, it was uncommon. Now we encourage the men to be in uniform at all times. It is better for the people of Istanbul to become acquainted with the new ways, and better for the men. It improves their morale.”

  “And useful for you, too, to check on how they behave.”

  The seraskier cracked a rare, dry smile. “That too.”

  “Would they visit a brothel? Did they have girls? I’m sorry, efendi, but I have to ask.”

  “These men were officers! What are you saying? The men, yes, the ordinary men see women in the streets. I know about that. But these were officers. Of good family.”

  Yashim shrugged. “And there are good brothels, too, by all accounts. It doesn’t seem very likely that these four went and sat out the whole evening in a well-lit cafe, in their uniforms. That’s no way to go missing, is it? Sometime in the course of their evening, their paths had to cross the path of their abductor. Their murderer. Somewhere—what? Murky, out of the light. In a boat, maybe. On a dark path. Or in some shady place—a brothel, a gambling saloon.”

  “Yes, I see.”

  “May I have your permission to interview the officers who shared their dormitory?”

  The seraskier blew the wind between his teeth and stared down at the floor. Yashim had been here before. People wanted solutions, but they always hoped they could reach them without creating a fuss. The seraskier wanted to make a public announcement but was not, it seemed, quite ready to risk offending or alarming anyone. The forces of the padishah, he would aver, are working ceaselessly and with complete confidence to bring the perpetrators of this evil deed to light—and he wouldn’t mean a word he said.

  “Efendi, either we must try to find out what happened, or there is no point in my proceeding with this case.”

  “Very well. I will write you a chit.”

  “A chit. Will that be enough, do you think? To talk, perhaps. In the murky place: will a chit hold out?”

  The seraskier looked straight into Yashim’s gray eyes. “I’ll support you,” he said wearily.

  18

  ****************

  YASHIM arrived early at the little restaurant beneath Galata Point and chose a quiet alcove that overlooked the channel of the Bosphorus. The Bosphorus had made Istanbul what it was: the junction of Europe and Asia, the pathway from the Black Sea into the Mediterranean, the great entrepot of world trade from ancient times to the present day. From where he sat he could watch the waterway he loved so much, the narrow sheet of gunmetal that reflected back the shape of the city it had built.

  The water was as ever thick with shipping. A mountain of white sail rose above the deck of an Ottoman frigate tacking up the straits. A shoal of fishing smacks, broad beamed and single masted, held out under an easterly wind for the Sea of Marmara. A customs boat swept past on its long red oars like a scurrying water beetle. There were ferries, and skiffs, and overladen barges; lateen-rigged cutters from the Black Sea coast, houseboats moored by the crowded entrance to the Golden Horn. Across the jostling waterway, Yashim could just make out Scutari on the opposite shore, the beginning of Asia.

  The Greeks had called Scutari Chalcedon, the city of the blind. In founding the city, the colonists had ignored the perfect natural setting across the water, where centuries later Constantine was to turn the small town of Byzantium into a great imperial city that bore his name. For a thousand years, Constantinople was the capital of the Roman Empire in the east, until that empire had shrunk to a sliver of land around the city. Ever since the Conquest in 1453, the city had been the capital of the Turkish Ottoman Empire. It was still officially called Constantinople, though most ordinary Turks referred to it as Istanbul. It remained the biggest city in the world.

  Fifteen hundred years of grandeur. Fifteen hundred years of power. Fifteen centuries of corruption, coups, and compromises. A city of mosques, churches, synagogues; of markets and emporia; of tradesmen, soldiers, beggars. The city to beat all cities, overcrowded and greedy.

  Perhaps, Yashim sometimes reflected, the Chalcedonians hadn’t been so blind, after all.

  He had half expected the Albanian to stay away, but when he looked up there he was, massive and grim, hitching his cloak. Yashim gestured to the divan, and he sat down, pulling a string of amber prayer beads from his shirt. He counted about a dozen with a massive thumb, looking straight at Yashim.

  “Ali Pasha of Janina,” the soup master said. “The name means something to you?”

  Ali Pasha was the warlord who by guile and cruelty had built up a semi-independent state in the mountains of Albania and northern Greece. It was fourteen years since Yashim had seen his head displayed on a pillar at the gates of the Seraglio.

  “The Lion,” Mustafa rumbled. “We called him that. I soldiered in his army—it was my country. But Ali Pasha was foxy, too. He gave us peace. I wanted war. In 1806 I went to the Danube. That is where I joined the corps.

  “The Janissaries?”

  The soup master nodded. “As a cook. I was already a cook, even then. To fight—it’s not so much for a man. For an Albanian, it’s nothing. Ask a Greek. But cooking?” He grunted with satisfaction.

  Yashim clasped his hands and blew into them.

  “I am a man of tradition,” the soup master continued, still slowly sliding the prayer beads under his thumb. “For me, the Janissaries were the tradition. This empire—they built it, didn’t they? And it is hard for an outsider to unde
rstand. The Janissary regiment was like a family.”

  “Every regiment says that.”

  The soup master shot him a scornful look. “They say that because they are afraid and must fight together. That is nothing. There were men in the corps I loved because they could handle a falcon, or make poetry, better than anyone in the world before or since. Believe me. There was a brave fighter who trembled like a leaf before each battle but fought for ten. We looked after each other, and we loved each other—yes—they loved me because I could make them food anywhere, the same way we loved the cobbler who would see us shod even when he had nothing but bark and pine needles to work with. We were more than family. We had a world within a world. We had our own food, our own justice, our own manner of religion. Yes, yes, our own manner. There are various ways to serve God and Muhammad. To join a mosque is one way, the way of the majority. But we Janissaries were mostly Karagozi.”