The Janissary Tree

by Jason Goodwin

  When he was ready, he put a hand on one of the chains that stretched out of the vats and yanked on it.

  Then he dived for another, and another, pulling with all his might.

  And somewhere in the distance, as if from underground, he heard a scream.

  64

  ****************

  The assassin saw the first bung disappear.

  Ten years before, he had watched a wall collapse on top of him and counted that moment an eternity.

  Now, for an eternity, he made no sound.

  For an eternity he scrambled for an explanation.

  And he rolled aside only when the bung was replaced by a black tube of scalding fat and water, which exploded onto the brick.

  It ricocheted onto his back, the hot fat clinging like needles.

  And he screamed.

  Spouts of heavy boiling dye erupted all around him. The culvert he lay in was suddenly filled with swirling liquid. In terror, he plowed his hands into the steaming torrent and fought his way to an opening. He reached up, placed his scalded hands on the grating, and heaved.

  And as he dragged himself up out of the vent, he scarcely noticed the coiled rope that cinched very tight against his burning ankles.

  65

  ****************

  YASHIM lunged on the counterweight and had the satisfaction of seeing the assassin swept from his feet. But as the slipknot ran up against the pulley, the arm of the derrick swung heavily toward him and the rope went slack. Yashim lunged farther backward to regain his hold, but at that moment the rope bearing the assassin’s weight kicked between his hands, almost knocking him off his feet: the rope sped through his palms and he found himself suddenly scrabbling against the sweaty slope. He kicked with both feet: his left leg slithered off the edge and his foot touched boiling water. He jerked it back with a gasp and went down on his side.

  Flailing to regain a foothold on the slimy surface, Yashim saw the rope slowly oozing through his fingers, slick with grease. He made a lunge with his left hand and caught the rope, tight as a bar, a few inches higher up, hauling hand over hand until he was able to get into a crouch. For a moment he felt his sandals skating on the greasy floor, so he leaned back to balance the weight. Everything had happened so fast that when he finally looked up he could make no sense of what he saw.

  A few yards ahead of him, something like a giant crab was working its pincers in a jet of pinkish steam.

  Bound at the ankles, upside down, the assassin’s legs were opening and closing at the knee. His tunic had fallen over his head, but his arms were flailing upward from the cloud of cloth, struggling to take a grip of his own legs. The hem of the tunic floated in a bath of dye. He was suspended directly over a boiling vat, where the derrick had carried him the moment it felt the weight of his body against its arm.

  Yashim dragged at the rope and hauled himself upright, but the moment he slacked his hold on the rope, the assassin dropped. Yashim hauled back, wrapping a length of rope around his waist and leaning back over the vat behind him.

  I can’t let go, he thought.

  The flailing man’s legs opened again. What was he doing? Yashim cast a glance over his shoulder: he was hanging out over a roiling tub of evil-smelling liquid. He could see the skins rolling over and over. He needed to keep his weight balanced there, keep his feet set against the rim of the vat, move them along the greasy ledge, and gradually bring the rope up hard against the derrick.

  Then he saw what the man was trying to do: with a knife in his hands he was lunging upward, scissoring his legs to close the distance, lunging at the knot with the blade.

  He didn’t know where he was.

  If the rope severed, the assassin would dive into the dye.

  Yashim, meanwhile, was also hanging out over a vat of poisonous, boiling liquid. Only the assassin’s weight was keeping his feet on the rim of the vat.

  And at any moment the rope would whip through the block and Yashim would plunge backward into the boiling broth.

  They were balanced.

  The rope gave a thud and sagged a quarter of an inch.

  Yashim tightened his grip. He glanced across the pillars of purple and yellow and saw that the dark doorways at the far end of the tanneries were growing wider.

  A knot of men detached themselves from the darkness of the door and began loping across the glistening surface of the tanneries toward him.

  And from the direction they came, and the way they moved, Yashim did not think that they looked very friendly.

  66

  ****************

  The rope gave another jerk and Yashim scrabbled to keep his balance on the edge of the vat. His right foot lost its hold, and for a moment he swung out over the scum. To regain his footing he had to pay out more rope until he was almost horizontal. He could feel the heat on the back of his neck and the weight of the liquid seeping into his cloak.

  It was not so much a decision as an instinct that made him haul savagely on the rope to regain his footing. The response of his human counterweight brought him momentarily upright: the assassin dropped, and as the bundle hit the boiling water, his legs convulsively scissored for the last time as the rope finally parted. Yashim floundered, his arms sawing the air while the assassin continued his descent into the vat. Regaining his balance, Yashim was in time to see one hand fling itself out of the pot before it sank into the churning water.

  He had no time to consider what had happened. Avoiding the slippery surface between the vats, the men from the doorway were now fanning out into two lines around the edge close to the walls, to cries of “Block him!” and “Close the entrance!” Yashim began to scramble back in a zigzagging diagonal line toward the gate at the corner by which he had come in. But he had to move cautiously, while the others, farther from the edge of the vats and with the wall to help them, were closing in.

  Several tanners were already at the gate when Yashim came past the grating he had first descended. He reached down and scooped up the grille in his left hand, like a shield; in the other he fingered the short-bladed knife. But he knew already that the gesture was futile. The men at the gate were hunched over their own knees, bowlegged, waiting for a fight. And the others, sensing their chance, had left the wall to approach him across the vats.

  He whirled around. A man at his back lunged, and Yashim whipped him across the face with the knife. Another man closed, and Yashim plunged the grille against him like an iron glove, knocking him back. Turning, he saw that the gate was infested with men: there was no escape in that direction.

  He sensed a movement and turned, a little too late. He had only time to see a face blackened with rage before he felt a stunning blow over his right eye and he fell to the ground. He stuck out the knife blindly and waited for the man either to run upon it or dodge in and grapple with him, but when nothing happened he rolled around to raise the grating as a shield.

  Just in time to see the black-faced man wheeled to the right by a tug on his arm. The man who was tugging ducked, rose like a fish, and crashed his skull deftly against the black-faced assailant’s nose. The assailant dropped, and the man who had delivered the blow turned to Yashim and grinned.

  “Let’s get you the fuck out,” he said.

  67

  ****************

  It was said that the battle—they called it only a brawl—continued long after Murad Eslek had helped Yashim punch, kick, and slash his way out of the tanneries and into the silent darkness beyond.

  As they groped their way down the alleys, small lights glowed behind shutters overhead. Now and then a door banged. Away in the distance a dog began to bark. Their footsteps echoed softly on the cobbles, thrown back by buildings asleep and at peace. A cold wind carried the smell of damp plaster and the lingering scent of the evening’s spices.

  “Phew! You stink, my friend,” said Murad Eslek, grinning.

  Yashim shook his head.

  “If it hadn’t been for you,” he said, “there’d have been nothing
left to smell. I owe you my life.”

  “Forget it, efendi. It was a good scrap, and all.”

  “But tell me, how—” Yashim winced. Now that the excitement was over, his scalded foot was beginning to smart.

  “Easy enough,” Eslek replied. “I sees you running like a demon—maybe you got robbed, or something. But when you started in for the tanneries it didn’t look so good—I mean, they’re rough, them guys. That’s when I started to think you were going to need some heavy artillery. So I whipped back and raised the boys. I went around a couple of cafes. Put the word out. Dingdong up the tannery? No problem. Why, when we came and saw what trouble you were in, the lads moved in like donkeys on a carrot. Lovely job.”

  Yashim smiled. They were back in the city now. The streets were empty and it was too late, he thought, to get a bath. Eslek seemed to guess his thoughts.

  “Me, I’m in transport. We work nights, efendi. Cover the markets—veg, mainly, and small livestock. I was going in there when we ran into each other again. There’s a hammam we use, open all night, which you as a gentleman might not know about. It’s small, yes, but I reckon it’s clean. Leastways save you going back and stinking up your own gaff. No disrespect,” he added hurriedly, “but them tanneries don’t half get into your skin. It’s the fat.”

  “No, no, you’re perfectly right. I’d be grateful, really. But you’ve done so much for me this evening, I don’t want to take you out of your way”

  Eslek shook his head. “Almost there,” he said.

  At the door of the hammam they parted with a handshake. Yashim had murmured—and Eslek had protested.

  “Drop it, efendi. You came out all right for us on the night of the fire. I’ve got a wife and kiddies up the street what know as you did a grand job for them. I was going to swing round and see you—Sign of the Stag, you said, right?—and thank you proper. My advice is, don’t go messing with them tanners anymore. They’re dirty, efendi, and it ain’t just the fat.”

  Yashim was grateful for the baths. Eslek was right: they were clean. The proprietor, a sallow old Armenian with a weary and intelligent face, even agreed to send a boy to fetch clean clothes from Yashim’s landlady while Yashim sluiced away the colored grease that had sunk between his toes and the miasma of shit that clung to his skin. All the time he fought not to remember what he knew.

  Yashim unwound his turban and scooped water over his hair. Preen was dead. He concentrated on his surroundings. When the attendant offered him a bar of soap, it smelled, he noticed, of Murad Eslek. He touched his left cheek: tomorrow he’d have a black eye. He continued to use the scoop, rhythmically ladling the hot water over his head, massaging the soap into his scalp, behind his ears, over his aching neck. His ribs were bruised where the assassin had plunged against him on Preen’s corridor. And Preen was dead. Yashim jerked his head up, to watch the attendant bringing him a basin of cold water for his scalded foot. There was nothing he could do about his knee. It looked red and felt sore. It would heal.

  He forced himself to remember the chase throwgh the alleys. Palewski had told him once how Napoleon had entered Italy, winning battle after battle with the Austrians, until he had felt that the earth itself was flying under his feet. He had felt the same, pursuing the man who had killed the hunchback, through the inclined alleys of Istanbul. Pursuing the man who killed Preen.

  He had not been able to save the assassin, that was true. Otherwise he could have made him talk. To have learned—what? Details, names, locations.

  Even now, he could not decide whether the killer had been aware of what was happening when he had struggled to cut the rope that bound him to the derrick. Yashim had been hoping to inch him back, away from the boiling vat. Had the killer known where he was? Was it suicide? Yashim was pious enough to hope it was not.

  Yet he could not rid himself of the idea that the killer, like himself, understood that they were both at an end of the same rope: bound for minutes in perfect mutual understanding. He wanted us both to go together, Yashim suspected.

  All he had really learned, instead, was how the third cadet to die had been boiled so that all his bones were clean. And that, he reasoned, was something he could have guessed. After all, the soup master had already told him how the Janissaries had come back to Istanbul, taking jobs that were out of the way. Watchmen. Stokers. Tanners. He remembered the scarred and blackened face of the man who knocked him down.

  Was it for this that Preen had died?

  Yashim squeezed his hair.

  Preen was dead.

  And why was the assassin so determined to die?

  What was there, apart from the threat of justice, that made a man decide to die rather than talk?

  Yashim could think of only two things.

  One was fear.

  The other was faith: the martyr’s death.

  He pulled back suddenly, gasping for breath, his eyes stinging.

  Preen had died alone, for nothing, in the dark.

  Wise and wayward, loving and forever doomed, she died because of him.

  He had asked her to help.

  It wasn’t that. Yashim whined, teeth bared, his eyes screwed up tight, knocking his head against the tiled wall.

  He had never properly taught her to read.

  68

  ***********

  The morning dawned bright. On the street, Stambouliots congratulated one another on the reappearance of good weather and expressed the hope that the gloom that had settled over the city in the last week might finally be lifted. Optimists declared that the spate of murders seemed to have come to an end, proving that the message from the imams had worked.

  Pessimists predicted more fog ahead. Only the fatalists, who in Istanbul number hundreds of thousands, merely shrugged their shoulders and said that, like fire and earthquake, God’s will would be done.

  Yashim made his way down early to the cafe on the Kara Davut. The proprietor noticed that he was limping, and without a word offered him a cushioned divan off the pavement where he could still enjoy watching the doings on the street.

  When he had brought the coffees, Yashim asked, “Is there anyone who could take a message for me, and fetch an answer? I’d ask your son, but it’s pretty far.”

  He gave the address. The cafe proprietor frowned and turned down his mouth.

  “It is time,” he said gruffly. “Mehmed can go. Eh, hey! Mehmed!”

  A little boy of about eight or nine bounced out of the back of the shop at his father’s shout. He bowed solemnly and stood looking at Yashim with his big brown eyes, rubbing one foot against his other leg.

  Yashim gave him a purse and carefully explained where to go. He told him about the old lady behind the lattice. “You should knock. When she answers, present my compliments. Give her the money, and tell her these are—expenses—for the lady Preen, in room eight. Whatever she says, don’t be frightened. Remember what you are told.”

  The boy nodded and darted through the door, where a small crowd had gathered to watch a dervish perform his dance on the street. Yashim saw the boy dive unhesitatingly between the folds of their cloaks, and so away, down the street. A funeral errand, he thought; the father would not be pleased.

  “A good boy,” he said guiltily. “You should be proud.”

  The father gave a noncommittal wag of his head and started polishing glasses with a cloth.

  Yashim took a sip of coffee and turned to watch the performance in the street.

  The dervish danced in the space defined by a ring of bystanders, who every now and then had to stand aside to let someone in or out of the cafe, giving Yashim a glimpse of the performer. He wore a white tunic, white puttees, and a white cap, and he flexed his hands and legs in time to some inner melody, his eyes closed. But the dancer was not entranced: from what Yashim could see, it looked like one of the simpler dances of the seeker after truth, a stylized rendition of Ignorance searching for the Way.

  He put up a hand to rub his eyes and gave an involuntary yelp. He’d forgo
tten the bruising.

  A fire station. Another tower. His exploration of the files in the Imperial Archives had been inconclusive, to say the least. The references to fire towers had been too scanty to work on: they did not signify anything either way. All you could say was that fire towers existed; Galata, Beyazit. Everyone knew that. Perhaps he’d been reading in the wrong book.

  If only he could get hold of that helpful young Sudanese. Ibou.

  He’d gone looking for evidence of a fourth tower. He hadn’t found any.

  Perhaps there wasn’t one.

  What if the fourth location wasn’t a tower at all?

  But if there wasn’t a tower, what was he looking for?