The Sultan's Seal: A Novel (Kamil Pasha Novels)

by Jenny White

  “So if it’s not apoplexy or opium, may Allah protect us, what else can it be?”

  “There’s one other possibility,” she says slowly, thinking her way toward the answer. “Tube flower.”

  “Tube flower? Isn’t that for colds?” Kamil has a vague childhood memory of inhaling steam from a cup of viscous yellow liquid to quell a cough.

  “Yes, it’s used as a cough medicine. The herbalists in the Egyptian Spice Bazaar sell it. But I’ve heard that drinking it makes people see and hear things that aren’t there, and can even cause death if it’s strong enough.”

  Kamil is surprised. “Why on earth would they sell something like that in the bazaar?”

  The midwife shakes her head at the ignorance of men. “You’re not supposed to drink it, just inhale or smoke it. You’d be surprised how many things in an ordinary household can cause death.”

  “That would make our job endless.”

  “It shows that people are not evil,” she responds, “and can resist temptation. Believe me, every house in this village has a motive for murder. All you need is a mother-in-law and daughter-in-law under the same roof. It’s a wonder tube flowers aren’t more popular.” She turns before Kamil can see the smile flit across her face.

  Her face is serious again when she bends down and picks up the dead woman’s hand. She examines the palms and fingers, looks at the intricate clasp of the gold bracelet. The limbs move reluctantly. Rigor mortis is finishing what the crabs left undone.

  “A lady. These hands have never worked the fields, scrubbed laundry, or labored in a kitchen. The nails are perfectly shaped, not cut straight across like those of women who must work in their households. They’re not torn, as they might be from a struggle. Indeed I see no marks on her that indicate she struggled. The skin is unmarked except for the effects of its passage through the strait.”

  She steps back and looks at the body.

  “Her hair is short. I don’t know the meaning of that. Among some minorities, women cut their braids when they marry. But there’s no wedding ring and no mark on her finger where it would have been.”

  She turns her head toward him.

  “She doesn’t appear to have been dead very long. The water has done little. I’ve seen fishermen and young boys who drowned in the Bosphorus and washed up in Middle Village. This young woman didn’t come very far.”

  Kamil shifts restlessly. He scans the room in vain for Michel’s bundle, where he might find paper and ink to take notes. It was a mistake to send him out before the midwife’s arrival.

  “Please continue. So you believe she drowned.”

  She pulls at the dead woman’s shoulders to turn the body. Kamil helps her. The cold, clammy texture and unnatural firmness of dead flesh shocks and disgusts him, as it always does.

  What is life, he wonders, when death can claim so much of what we are for itself? Here is the woman, whole, yet where is she who had thought, eaten, and perhaps laughed or wept the day before?

  At such moments, he wishes intensely that he could believe in the afterlife promised in Islam, the clear rivers and unending companionship. But he had not been able to believe in his youth, and now he believes in a future of science and progress, which is inevitable and eternal, but does not include him beyond his life span. A belief of little comfort to the weak in their flimsy barques, or to the strong when the unforeseen upsets the course upon which they have set their ships. Kamil has known both kinds of men and the immovable anchors of faith that give them the illusion of a steady harbor. They do not understand that they are still at sea and that the danger has not passed. Faith is an anchor in a bottomless sea.

  The midwife instructs Kamil to prop the body on its side. When she pulls down on the jaw, a stream of dark water spills from the mouth. She pulls the head forward and pumps the body’s arm. A pink froth bubbles at the lips.

  “Drowned. If she were already dead when she entered the water, she would not have breathed water into her lungs.”

  They let the body slide back onto the marble. Kamil is grateful to let go. His hands are clammy and he resists the temptation to thrust them into his pockets to warm them.

  The midwife points to a large mole on the dead woman’s right shoulder. “That might help to identify her.”

  She stands back, waiting for further instructions.

  “Thank you. You’ve been most helpful and highly observant.”

  She smiles thinly. He muses that this simple village midwife has more scientific acumen than many educated bureaucrats of his acquaintance. It’s a simple matter of reading the given evidence for data, not conjecturing on the basis of possible hypotheses.

  Popular fears can fatten fatally on the thinnest gruel, especially in times of insecurity. Like the present. The imperial treasury taken over by European powers as a result of the empire’s debts, wars on many fronts, and factions battling over what kind of government the empire should have—a parliament or undiluted power in the hands of the sultan. In every direction, the empire’s provinces are being clawed away by nationalists supported by Europe and Russia. The streets of Istanbul teem with refugees. Kamil doubts whether even a parliament could stem the bleeding of treasure, land, and people from the great, unwieldy body of the Ottoman state, the boundaries of which these days are as soft and indistinct as those of Fat Orhan at the Turkish bath.

  Change creates anxiety, Kamil muses, in high places and low. An anxious populace is eager to be distracted by dark fairy tales. This midwife will keep her sense, though.

  She sees the approval in his eyes and smiles again, genuinely this time.

  “I would like you to do me one more favor,” he adds. “Ask in the village whether anyone knows this woman, or has heard or seen anything unusual. If so, send a messenger to the magistrate’s headquarters directly, and I will send my assistant to speak with you.” He assumes that, like most of the population, she is unable to read or write.

  “We will thank the messenger,” he adds, politely skirting any open discussion of money. “One more thing. You will not mention”—he pauses and gestures toward the body—“the condition of the deceased.”

  She agrees and bows her head slightly. She pulls on her outer garments and leaves.

  Kamil is alone with the corpse. The body has not yet begun to decompose. It gives off a wet, empty smell.

  A sudden movement just outside the circle of light startles him.

  “Michel! How long have you been there?”

  “I came in right after she began her examination. I sent the police off to find out what they can. I’ll talk to the residents myself later. I thought you might need me here instead.”

  Kamil is simultaneously aware that Michel had disobeyed him, but, as if he could read Kamil’s mind, had instead done what Kamil had silently wished.

  “Yes, of course,” he agrees reluctantly, aware that somehow he has lost, but unsure in what game.

  “I’ve been in the next room, taking notes. The rooms echo. I could hear her perfectly in there. What a perceptive crone, eh?” he says admiringly. “She saved us a lot of examination.”

  “Yes, she was very good. We should check with the merchants in the bazaar to see whether they remember who recently bought dried tube flowers.”

  “You know, the Istanbul Sephardim tell about drops used by their Spanish ancestors to make their eyes seem black and large; they call the substance belladonna, beautiful woman. I wonder if it’s the same as our humble tube flower.”

  Michel walks over to the body, a small bowl in his hand. With a sudden movement, he turns the body onto its side and presses on its chest. A thin stream of liquid spurts from its mouth into the bowl.

  Michel examines the liquid. “I’ll be able to tell from this whether she drowned in salt water or fresh.” He eyes the leather bag of tools still lying at the head of the corpse. “I could check the contents of her stomach.”

  “I think we can’t afford to do anything before contacting the foreign embassies. If this is on
e of their nationals, they won’t want us to return a carved-up body.”

  “Yes, you’re quite right.” Michel looks disappointed.

  “Give me the cutters.”

  Kamil snaps the necklace chain. He works at the clasp of the bracelet and pulls it off. Opening the pendant, he hands it to Michel.

  “There is a tughra inside.”

  Michel turns the pendant over in his hand and examines it from all sides. “And some other markings. Do you know what they are?”

  “I don’t.”

  “She has some connection to the palace, then?”

  “Perhaps. I wonder. Eight years ago, an Englishwoman was found dead just north of here at Chamyeri. A governess at the palace, Hannah Simmons. They found her floating in a pond. She’d been strangled.” He frowns. “I don’t suppose there’s a connection.”

  He doesn’t mention that the victim’s name stuck in his mind because the superintendent of police for Beyoglu was removed from office by the minister of gendarmes—the man who had replaced his father—because he had failed to find the murderer. Kamil had perused the file on the murder when new at his job, but decided not to reopen the case. Too many years had gone by and it was not politically expedient to try to solve an unsolvable crime, especially one that involved members of the powerful foreign community and the sultan’s palace. Now here is another young foreign woman dead, this time on his watch. He stiffens his posture to hide his anxiety and his excitement.

  “That was the body found on the scholar’s property above Chamyeri. It made for a lot of gossip at the time,” Michel remembers.

  “That’s right. Ismail Hodja’s house.” The lesser details in Hannah Simmons’s file had been shouldered aside by the continual press of new cases.

  He ponders the young woman on the platform. “Just a coincidence, probably. She could be Circassian or from the Balkans. They’re often yellow-haired with light-colored eyes. Anyway, Chamyeri is quite a ways north of Middle Village.”

  “Not that far by water. The current is powerful there. A corpse thrown in at Chamyeri would end up at Middle Village in no time at all. If the killer is the same person, then either he lives in that area or is a frequent visitor. One has to know the Bosphorus to navigate it or to wander its shores at night. The wild dogs alone would keep people away.”

  “I can’t imagine it has anything to do with Ismail Hodja,” Kamil responds firmly, his eyes following the cones of light as they descend from the dome and pierce the body on the belly stone. He is distressed by how quickly the surgeon accepted a link between the two murders. “The hodja’s reputation is impeccable.”

  And there was no one else at his house who would come into question. The details in Hannah Simmons’s file were jostling at the gates of Kamil’s memory. The hodja’s sister was a recluse, his niece a mere child at the time. There were only a few servants; not a large household.

  “Anyway, the body was found in the forest behind his house, near the road, I believe. So it could have been anyone. Still,” he muses aloud, “I wonder whether it would be worthwhile to talk to the hodja or his niece.”

  Michel doesn’t answer. Kamil turns to find him still holding the pendant and staring intently at the body.

  Michel turns and asks in a carefully neutral voice, “Do you want me to wrap this up?” He indicates the pendant in his hand.

  “The cross and bracelet too. I’ll take them with me.” Pointing his chin at the body, “We don’t even know who the woman is. She appears to be foreign, so I’ll begin with the embassies.”

  Michel hands him the small bundle. He lays his cloak over the cold belly stone, sits on it, and takes out his sketching materials.

  “But first I’ll go home to change,” Kamil adds companiably.

  Michel doesn’t look up, but begins drawing the body.

  Kamil watches Michel’s head bowed over the paper, fascinated by the creation emerging from beneath his stick of charcoal. He reflects about how little he knows of Michel’s personal life, other than that he is unmarried and lives with his widowed mother in the Jewish quarter of Galata, and the story of their shared history. They spend time together in coffeehouses and clubs discussing everything under the sun, but Michel never opens to Kamil the private book of his life.

  He and Michel attended the same school and knew each other by sight, but belonged to different circles. Michel, whose father had been a dealer in semiprecious stones, won a scholarship to attend the prestigious imperial school at Galata Saray. Children of wealthy Muslims, Jews, Armenians, Greeks, and other sons of the far-flung empire bowed their heads together over texts in history, logic, science, economy, international law, Greek, Latin, and, of course, Ottoman, that convolution of Persian, Arabic, and Turkish. It was not social class, religion, or language that separated Michel and Kamil in school, but the nature of their interests.

  Soon after becoming magistrate, while Kamil was walking up the narrow streets toward his office, a man got up from a stool outside a coffeehouse and approached him. Kamil recognized the flamboyant colors of his old schoolmate’s clothing and his wrestler’s glide. That evening, they sat together in the coffeehouse and, over narghiles of apple-cured tobacco, exchanged news of their activities since graduation. Michel was finishing his training in surgery at the Imperial School of Medicine. Kamil was among the young men chosen for training in France and England as magistrates and judges in the newly introduced European-style secular courts that had shouldered aside the religious courts of the kadi judges. Michel had volunteered his services to Kamil, who eventually sponsored his appointment as police surgeon. Michel’s intimate knowledge of the neighborhood had helped Kamil solve several cases. Michel also introduced him to the Grand Bazaar, a city of tiny shops all under one roof, surrounded by a warren of workshops—hundreds of establishments, some no bigger than a man’s reach, owned by men of all the empire’s faiths. Michel’s father and two generations before him had been merchants there.

  Kamil pauses under the arched doorway leading out of the hamam, the polite formula of parting dying on his lips, unwilling to intrude on Michel’s concentration.

  Kamil turns and makes his way through the echoing antechambers. He stops at a basin, turns the metal cock all the way open, and rubs his hands together under the cold water. There is no soap, but he feels less polluted. He shakes the excess water off his hands and strides out of the gloom. At the threshold, he is momentarily felled by the brightness of the world.

  His hands still chilled, he mounts his horse and winds his way up past the village and into the forest. Here, the morning sun filters softly through the trees. Birds chirrup madly; the shrill calls of young children fall through the air like knives.

  When he reaches the road beyond the forest, he spurs his horse to a gallop.

  2

  When the Lodos Blows

  Every morning, my dayi, Ismail Hodja, put a soft-boiled egg in his mouth and sat without chewing, eyes lowered, until the egg was gone. It was not until I was in my twenties that I understood. Anticipation is the brilliant goad to pleasure. But at the time, I was only a child of nine, transfixed at the breakfast table. Ismail Dayi always ate the same breakfast: black tea in a tulip-shaped glass, one slice of white franjala bread, a handful of black, brine-soaked olives, a chunk of goat’s cheese, a small bowl of yoghurt, and a glass of whey. In that order. Then the egg, which lay peeled and shivering in a cobalt blue saucer, blue-white and glinting with moisture. Its broad end was slightly raised, the yolk casting a sickle-moon shadow. My uncle ate his breakfast slowly and methodically, without speaking. Then he reached for the egg with two long, slim fingers. His fingers indented the pudgy waistline of the egg as he lifted it, quivering, to his mouth. He deposited it carefully on his tongue, taking care not to brush it with his teeth. Then he closed his lips around the egg and, eyes lowered, sat until it had magically disappeared. I saw him neither chew nor swallow.

  During this time, Mama was in the kitchen, rinsing the plates and topping up the doubl
e boiler in which the tea brewed. We did not have live-in servants in Ismail Dayi’s house and Mama herself prepared our breakfast before the cook and her assistant arrived for the day. When I would ask Mama, “Why does Ismail Dayi keep the egg in his mouth?” she would look away and busy herself.

  “I don’t know what you mean. Don’t ask silly questions, Jaanan. Drink your tea.”

  Ismail was my mother’s brother. We lived in his house because Papa had taken a second wife, and Mama had moved out of our big house in Nishantashou, where Papa lived now with Aunt Hüsnü.

  Ismail Dayi’s house was two stories high, its smooth wooden flanks painted rust red. It was set in a garden on the shore of the Bosphorus just outside the village of Chamyeri. Behind the house, a forest of plane trees, cypresses, and oaks painted the steep hills. The house was set on the narrow stage of the shore in front of this towering green backdrop. Before us, the broad band of the Bosphorus glittered with light, its currents twining and coiling like a living creature. Sometimes the water threw up arcs of dolphins trailing aquatic rainbows. The colors of the water changed constantly in response to forces I still do not understand, from oily black to bottle green and, on rare magical days, to a translucent pastel green so clear that I felt if I looked long enough, I would see the bottom. On days of such clarity, I lay on the warm stones of the shore wall and let my head hang over the edge, looking for quicksilver sprays of anchovies. Below them I imagined the cool, heavy bodies of bigger fish turning and slipping through the liquid light. The shifting sands beneath uncovered the pale moon faces of dead princesses, eyes closed, lips slightly parted in fruitless protests against their fate. The gold thread of their brocaded gowns weighed them down. Their delicate hands lay, palms up, pinned to the sand by enormous emerald and diamond rings. Their black hair streamed in the current.

  On cold days, I lay reading on the cushioned divan in the garden pavilion. It was a one-room structure with tall windows looking out over the water. Stacks of mattresses and quilts were kept ready for visitors who preferred to sleep there on hot nights. In winter, wooden shutters protected it against the wind and a brazier provided warmth and heated water for tea, although hardly anyone went there once the weather turned chill.