A Dead Man in Istanbul

by Michael Pearce

  Kaimakam? The police? No, no, said Ponsonby, things didn’t work like that in the Ottoman Empire. The police counted for nothing (that was a change, thought Seymour!). What did count was the bureaucracy. The kaimakam was the deputy of the local governor and in the Ottoman bureaucracy local governors counted for quite a lot. This one, more active than most, or, possibly, alarmed by the fact that the victim was European, had at once sent his deputy to the spot. The kaimakam had conducted an immediate investigation, although he hadn’t been able to achieve much because it was dark, and had then arranged for the body to be transported back to Gelibolu, where the governor had his offices and where ice was available.

  ‘Ice?’

  ‘The heat,’ said Ponsonby briefly.

  Clearly things were different here.

  Gelibolu, or Gallipoli as it was later known as, was a small fishing village. Perhaps it had been larger once and perhaps that accounted for the governor having his offices there. There were the remains of a castle at one end. The small houses of the village were like blocks which had fallen from its walls, square and single storey, except for a large house in the central square, which was where the mutaserrif, as the governor was called, lived and moved and generally had his being. Two armed soldiers stood outside the front door, uniformed but in bare feet. Around the corner in a small yard other barefooted soldiers were sitting in the shade.

  Inside the building the rooms were high and dark and cool. Seymour was beginning to understand now. In Istanbul you did not embrace the sun, you hid from it.

  The room they were shown to contained a desk behind which a grey-haired man was sitting. He had on a dark suit and was wearing a fez, the red, pot-like hat of the Ottoman official. The two men standing beside him wore fezzes too. The man behind the desk was the mutaserrif and the worried-looking man on his left was the kaimakam. The younger man on his right appeared to be some sort of interpreter.

  Ponsonby introduced him and the three men nodded gravely. Ponsonby asked if the kaimakam would explain, for Seymour’s benefit, what he had found when he had got to the beach. The kaimakam cleared his throat and began to speak. He spoke in Arabic, not Turkish. After a while he stopped and the interpreter translated it into English.

  By the time he had got there the beach was dark. There had been a moon but he hadn’t really been able to explore the place thoroughly until the next morning when he had returned, after depositing the body. Before moving the body he had marked off its position with stones so he had no difficulty in establishing the exact spot in which it had lain. There were also the bloodstains, of course.

  Cunningham Effendi appeared to have been shot just as he was standing up after completing his swim. In the twilight – so it had actually been twilight not night, thought Seymour – he would have presented a clear target.

  He had been able, he thought, to establish the position from which the shot had been fired. Further up the beach was an old boat and the kaimakam thought it likely that the gunman had taken cover behind that, resting the barrel of the gun on the woodwork. There were faint burn marks on the wood but, of course, they might have been caused on another occasion.

  The bullet was now being examined by experts but from the size of the wound the kaimakam thought it would be found to be of small calibre. There had only been the one shot. That, and the fact that the wound had been exactly in the middle of the forehead, inclined the kaimakam to believe that the person who had fired it was an expert marksman.

  There was also the obvious point that he must have known about the swim beforehand.

  After firing, he had probably retreated along the beach, taking advantage of the rocks that were lying there to give him cover, and then escaped up over the cliffs. No one, it seemed, had seen him. But that, the interpreter added drily, was not unusual in Turkey.

  Seymour asked if he might put a question: the beach, when he had seen it just now, appeared to be deserted. He assumed that it had been like that when Cunningham had landed. Who, then, had the boatman sent to fetch the kaimakam?

  There was a little flash of acknowledgement from the interpreter and he answered without waiting for the kaimakam. No place in Anatolia, he said, was so deserted as not to have small boys around, and they had emerged as soon as the boatman had pulled Cunningham ashore. They had volunteered their services at once, offering to guard the body while Mohammed went off to seek assistance. Mohammed, who had eight small boys of his own and knew about small boys, had declined the offer and sent three of them instead to fetch the kaimakam.

  Might not one of them have seen the assailant as he retreated, asked Seymour?

  Again there was the acknowledging flash from the interpreter. Yes, he said, and the kaimakam had indeed made enquiries, but without result. So far, said the interpreter, a trifle grimly, implying that there might be results to come.

  He had a question of his own, which again he put without previous recourse either to the mutaserrif or to the kaimakam. It related to what exactly Cunningham had been doing.

  ‘I’ve told you,’ said Ponsonby wearily. ‘He was swimming the Straits.’

  ‘Like Leander, yes. And Lord Byron. A romantic gesture, yes, as you have assured me. There is one difficulty in that explanation, however. Both Leander and Lord Byron swam it in the opposite direction. Which was sensible of them. Since it was on the other side that Hero was.’

  ‘The other side?’

  ‘Yes. According to classical legend, Leander lived at Abydos. On this side of the Straits. And swam across every night to Hero who was living at Sestos. On the other side of the Straits. Now, Mr Ponsonby, you have told me – repeatedly – that Mr Cunningham was a good classicist. Cambridge, I think you said? And that his imagination was fired by the classics, so much so that he wished to repeat Leander’s feat. But if he was such a good classicist, and if this was so, why did he not swim in the opposite direction?’

  ‘Who was that man?’ asked Seymour, as they walked back to the felucca afterwards.

  ‘The terjiman?’

  ‘I thought at first he was just an interpreter.’

  ‘Well, he is. All senior officials who come into contact with foreigners have to have one. But they’re not just interpreters, they’re a sort of superior private secretary, drafting correspondence, liaising with Ministries, handling anything that’s political. They’re the Sultan’s man-on-the-spot. They assist the mutaserrif but in a way they also tell him what to do. Give him advice, at any rate. You can think of them as a sort of local Director of Political Affairs.’

  ‘I thought he was too bright to be just an interpreter.’ ‘Oh, Mukhtar is bright enough.’

  ‘He had, of course, a point,’ said Seymour, trying not to sound too accusing.

  Ponsonby did not reply for a moment or two. Then:

  ‘Look,’ he said. ‘I know it sounds odd. I know there are problems with it. But that’s what he told me. Cunningham himself. Not once but many times. And that’s what he told everyone else.’

  ‘This Leander story?’

  ‘Yes. He would go on and on about it. He said that it was about the one interesting thing that had ever happened in Istanbul. “But it didn’t happen in Istanbul!” I said. “It happened fifty miles away.” “Don’t be pedantic, Ponsonby,” he said. “It’s the curse of scholarship. What’s fifty miles between friends? As long as you’re not swimming it.”’

  ‘His interest was a scholarly one?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that,’ said Ponsonby doubtfully. ‘More, I would say, a disputative one. You see, we have these dinners at the Embassy, when the Old Man likes us all to be there. You know, like an Officers’ Mess Night. Well, of course, we’ve been doing it for years and we’ve said pretty well everything there is to say. So conversation is often, well, not as sparkling as it might be. And Cunningham got fed up. So he used to start arguments.’

  ‘And this was one of the arguments?’

  ‘Yes. He said that Leander’s was a celebrated feat and why weren’t we doing somethi
ng, as an Embassy, to celebrate it? Because, as an Embassy, retorted the Old Man, it’s not our job. There I disagree with you, sir, said Cunningham, and that was where the argument started.

  ‘The trouble was, he wouldn’t leave it. He returned to it at the next dinner. And the next. “Shut up, Cunningham,” we said. “This is getting to be as boring as our other conversations.” Well, this hurt him. You could see he was thinking it over, and I said, “Hello, this spells trouble.” And it did.

  ‘“It is boring,” he said, “because we don’t translate it into action.” What sort of action, we wanted to know? “Swimming across the Straits,” he said. Well, you can do that if you want to, we said, but . . .

  ‘We thought that would be the end of it but the idea seemed to take hold of him. He went round telling us how he was going to do it. How we were going to do it. “No, we’re not!” we said. He got annoyed and said we were faint-hearted and feeble. Just sane, said the Old Man, and he forbade us to do it. Not Cunningham, but the rest of us. “How would it look back at the Foreign Office if I said I’d lost all my staff attempting to swim the Dardanelles?” “You could come with us, sir,” said Cunningham. “Then if it went wrong, you wouldn’t have to report it.” “Thank you very much, Cunningham,” said the Old Man. “Why don’t you try swimming the Atlantic next time?”

  ‘Well, he couldn’t seem to let it go. He would go on and on about it. He pestered everyone to at least row the boat across for him, but we all refused. Even Jarman, who had rowed in the Oxford–Cambridge Boat Race. “It’s lunacy,” he said. So in the end Cunningham had to get Mohammed to do it. Which was probably even greater lunacy.’

  Chapter Two

  There was, in fact, to be an Embassy dinner that evening.

  ‘You are, of course, invited,’ said Ponsonby. ‘It will give you a chance to get to know people.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Seymour. ‘I look forward to it.’

  ‘I wouldn’t look forward too much,’ said Ponsonby. ‘It’s nothing very special.’

  ‘Anything I should know?’

  ‘I don’t think so. It’s pretty ordinary. Black tie, of course.’

  ‘Black tie?’

  ‘Your man not put it in?’

  ‘Well . . .’

  ‘I expect you left in a bit of a hurry. Don’t worry! Been in the same situation myself. We’ll fix you up with something.’

  He studied Seymour critically.

  ‘Tell you what,’ he said. ‘You’re about the same size as Cunningham. He won’t be needing his now. You don’t mind, do you? Wearing his clothes?’

  ‘Well, no . . .’

  ‘Come along, then.’

  They went to Cunningham’s room. Cunningham had not one but two dinner suits. Seymour tried one on.

  ‘Perfect,’ said Ponsonby. ‘Now let’s have a look for a shirt and tie.’

  That was more difficult. Seymour’s neck was thicker than Cunningham’s.

  ‘Hold on!’ said Ponsonby, and dashed off. He returned with a dress shirt.

  ‘Jarman’s,’ he said. ‘He’s got a spare. This will do for you.’

  He left Seymour to do his dressing. Seymour used the opportunity to go over the room. There was nothing of much interest in it. In fact, everything was curiously impersonal, as if Cunningham had lived his life largely out of it. One thing was obvious, however: Cunningham had had money. The shoes alone would have taken care of Seymour’s salary for a year.

  There was little, though, of personal interest: a few knick-knacks, some invitations, a family photograph or two. Stuffed away in a drawer, as if it didn’t count, was a large, carefully posed – all suits and moustaches – team photograph of the Embassy staff. There were Ponsonby and Rice-Cholmondely and this, he supposed, was the Old Man himself, sitting in the centre.

  Which was Cunningham, he wondered? He turned the photograph over and looked at the back, where the names were carefully written in copperplate.

  So this was Cunningham: a tall, slim figure in the back row, with fair hair and strikingly good looks. If his aunt had looked like that even Seymour could understand her cutting a swathe through Society. But something else, too: a slightly detached, sceptical look, as if all this – the posing, the photograph, the suggestion of team spirit – was in some way beneath him, as if he was lending himself for the moment to something he had no sympathy with or much interest in.

  The dinner was all that Seymour disliked: everyone dressed up, flunkeys at every elbow (‘Can I recommend the mint sauce, sir?’), cut glass on the polished table, arcane ritual (‘The other way, I think, old chap,’ as he passed the port), banal conversation – he could understand Cunningham rising in rebellion.

  Sitting there in Cunningham’s dress suit, he felt increasingly out of place. The clothes fitted in but not him. Listening to the conversation, the shared references (they all seemed to have been at school with one another, gone to the same universities, known the same people), he felt very much out of it.

  At one point he overheard a conversation that, he was pretty sure, was about him.

  ‘. . . Leander . . . Didn’t know . . .’

  ‘Didn’t know?’

  ‘Never heard of him.’

  ‘Not a classicist, then.’

  ‘Clearly.’

  Slight pause.

  ‘Cambridge?’

  ‘Afraid not.’

  ‘Well, Oxford . . .’

  ‘Not even Oxford.’

  ‘Surely not . . . London?’

  ‘I don’t think he went to university at all.’

  ‘Really? Educated privately?’

  ‘He’s a policeman.’

  ‘Good Lord! What’s he doing here?’

  A good question, thought Seymour.

  After dinner they went out on to the terrace to take their coffee. The scent of jasmine was heavy in the air. Far away below them the Bosphorus sparkled in the moonlight.

  Rice-Cholmondely was sitting next to him. Seymour had chosen to sit there because Rice-Cholmondely had seemed to be asleep and Seymour could do with less conversation. Suddenly, however, Rice-Cholmondely stirred.

  ‘Damned shame about Cunningham,’ he said.

  Seymour murmured sympathetically.

  ‘We’ll miss him.’

  ‘I’m sure, yes.’

  ‘Used to bat No. 3. In the Embassy side. We don’t play often, of course. Mostly against the Australians. But they’re good, and without Cunningham we could be in trouble. You could always count on him for a few runs.’

  ‘Hmm. Yes. Really?’

  ‘You don’t play, yourself, by any chance?’

  ‘Not much,’ said Seymour, which was overstating it heavily.

  ‘Pity.’

  He lapsed back into silence.

  Seymour was thinking about going to bed when suddenly Rice-Cholmondely stirred again.

  ‘Why don’t we go to the theatre?’ he said.

  ‘Theatre?’ Seymour glanced at his watch. ‘Isn’t it a bit late for that?’

  ‘Not at all, old boy. They start late out here. Cunningham and I always used to go down after an evening like this. To restore balance. That’s what Cunningham used to say. Lalagé especially.’

  Lalagé? Wasn’t that one of the names that Ponsonby had mentioned?

  ‘Seems a good idea,’ he said.

  They took the Embassy landau down to the Galata Bridge, where they left it, with strict instructions to the driver to await their return.

  Unexpectedly the driver demurred.

  ‘All on my own?’ he said.

  ‘Of course on your own!’ said Rice-Cholmondely. ‘Do you expect me to hold your hand? What the hell’s wrong with you?’

  ‘It’s night,’ said the driver, and nodded his head significantly.

  ‘I know it’s night. What’s the matter with you, Ibrahim? It’s never bothered you before.’

  ‘They come out at night,’ said the driver reluctantly.

  ‘What the hell’s the matter with you? Who come o
ut at night?’

  The driver looked around him.

  ‘The Carneficers,’ he whispered. ‘The Fleshmakers.’

  ‘Bollocks!’

  ‘It’s true!’ the driver insisted. ‘People have seen them.’

  ‘Nonsense!’

  ‘And found the bodies.’

  ‘What absolute tripe!’ said Rice-Cholmondely. ‘A man like you, Ibrahim, believing such rubbish!’

  Ibrahim shuffled uneasily but stuck to his guns.

  ‘People talk, Effendi. And the story gets around.’

  ‘It’s just a story, Ibrahim. The Fleshmakers have been dead a hundred years. At least. Two hundred, three hundred.’

  ‘People say they’re back.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake! Ibrahim, there are no Fleshmakers! They’ve been dead a long time. Have you ever seen a Fleshmaker? No, and neither have I. And that’s not surprising because there aren’t any.’

  ‘People have seen the bodies.’

  ‘Look, there are always bodies around in Istanbul. What makes you think the Fleshmakers have anything to do with it?’

  The driver studied his feet.

  ‘Ibrahim, let’s have some sense, please.’

  ‘Bowstrings,’ muttered the driver.

  ‘Bowstrings? For Christ’s sake, anybody can use a bowstring.’

  ‘There aren’t any bowstrings today,’ muttered Ibrahim.

  ‘Well, then –’

  ‘But people have been strangled by bowstrings. That means they’ve come back. In the Sultan’s hour of need.’

  ‘The Sultan’s hour of need? What rubbish! The Sultan’s not in need. And if he was, he wouldn’t be summoning back the Fleshmakers. Because they’re dead, Ibrahim, dead! And they’ve been dead for a long time.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s their ghosts,’ said Ibrahim. ‘Perhaps it’s their ghosts that have come back.’

  ‘Ibrahim, I’m surprised at you. You, a sensible, mature man! A driver to the British Embassy! Entertaining such ideas as this!’

  ‘They come out at night, Effendi,’ insisted the driver doggedly. ‘That’s why no one sees them. And why I don’t like being left on my own.’