The Baklava Club: A Novel (Investigator Yashim)

by Jason Goodwin

  At the top of the hill he washed his eyes at the Fountain of Ahmet III before entering Topkapi Palace. The First Court, open to the public, was empty at this hour; he walked past the great planes to the High Gate, Topkapi, which had given its name to the whole sprawling complex of courts and kiosks, wrapped one within the other like so many Russian dolls, until they subsided down the far side of Seraglio Point and into the sea.

  At the gate, two Halberdiers of the Tresses stepped forward. He knew them both by sight.

  “Yashim, for the valide,” he murmured, drawing out the paper with a vermilion ribbon attached.

  The men stood back; he passed through to the Second Court.

  It was—or rather, had been—the court of imperial business, screened from the hubbub of the populace in the outer court, for as one approached the inner sanctum, the home of the sultan, the courts became exclusive. The Second Court was reserved for ministers of state—the pashas and viziers; only the sultan and his grand vizier were permitted to enter on horseback. To Yashim’s right stood the great kitchens, built by Sinan, massive tents of brick around their twenty central chimneys; only one smoked now. To his left lay the Hall of the Viziers, shuttered and still since the business of state had removed itself to the Sublime Porte.

  The palace was almost empty. The young sultan had taken his household off to Beşiktaş, where the viziers attended him in a room hung with heavy drapery and stuffed with French furniture, fragile gilded chairs, and a European rosewood table. In Yashim’s early days, Topkapi had hummed with the sound of running feet, messengers, scullions, page boys: through the murmur—which should never rise beyond the sound of wind in the grass, by imperial tradition—came those imperturbable pashas, for whom calm was an indication of rank; and formidably armed janissaries stood around the walls of the courts like statues, moving nothing but their eyes.

  All gone now. Only weeds growing in the paths, and birds nesting in Sinan’s chimneys. The Ottomans were unsentimental. In the nomadic spirit, Yashim reflected, Topkapi had been struck like a tent and the caravan moved on.

  Except, of course, for the valide, mother of the last sultan. She had no intention of leaving—alive.

  He found her in her apartments in the Court of the Valide. A checkerboard of sunshine drifted through the fretted wooden blinds and spilled across the flagstone floor. Yashim took off his shoes and crossed to the carpet.

  The valide was reclining on the divan that filled the window embrasure. She put down her coffee cup, and nodded.

  “Très bien, Yashim. Ask the girl to bring my writing box. And some coffee, if you like.”

  The valide’s handmaiden appeared in the doorway. Yashim asked for coffee, politely, and suggested the girl fetch the valide’s writing box.

  “Autumn,” the valide murmured, “I never liked it much. People say the color is good, but to me it speaks of death.” She gave an elegant shrug. “On Martinique it never troubled us.”

  Martinique, that tropical speck on the atlas, was where the valide had grown up.

  “But people died there, all the same,” Yashim reminded her.

  “Mais oui, Yashim. All the time. So, bring it to me.”

  She gestured to the girl for the box. It was a shallow rectangle, painted russet, and decorated with garlands; the valide laid it on her lap, and tilted the lid.

  She took a pair of silver spectacles from the box and put them on.

  Yashim mastered an urge to look inside the box. From here, he supposed, the valide managed her affairs, and wrote to her Parisian bookseller; for the valide, like any successful woman in the harem, possessed far more than jewelry and fine clothes. Sultan Abdülhamid, her sultan, had long since died; but in his lifetime he had vested his favorite with innumerable sources of revenue—bridge tolls and shop rents, the income from provincial farms, obscure taxes. As far as Yashim could remember, with the independence of Greece the valide had lost several useful taxes levied in Athens; she had protested in the strongest possible terms to her son, then Sultan Mahmut, who had made up the loss with a sizable interest in attar of roses from the Rhodopes.

  The valide took out a packet of letters done up in vermilion silk ribbon, and closed the lid sharply.

  “Et voilà.” She untied the ribbon, and spread the letters out on her box before selecting one. Not for the first time, Yashim found himself thinking that the valide would have made an excellent administrator. “This will interest you, I think,” she said. “Natasha Borisova. Her French is impeccable.”

  The name sounded familiar, but he couldn’t place it.

  The valide sighed. “And yet, Yashim, it is a kind of miracle that she writes good French. Natasha has never been to France. She was brought up in Siberia. Where it is always cold, and not at all à la mode.”

  She tapped the letter with her fingertip.

  “You were young when these events occurred, Yashim. Sergei Borisov was one of the conspirators who wanted to prevent Tsar Nicholas’s coronation in 1826. They knew that Nicholas was an autocrat, and they believed that Constantine, his older brother, would be a liberal tsar. So at the coronation they brought the people out onto the square in Saint Petersburg and demanded Constantine instead. They shouted ‘Constantine and Constitution!’”

  “I remember.”

  “I am told the common people thought Constitution was the name of Constantine’s wife,” the valide added with a smile. “However, the coup failed and Nicholas, as we know, became tsar. The ringleaders were hanged. Borisov and the others were condemned to death but their sentence was commuted to exile.”

  “The Decembrists.” He remembered now: the coup had been launched in December. “And Borisov?”

  “To Siberia, like the others.” She looked at Yashim over her spectacles. “Some have died, and some have received a pardon. But Borisov is still living in Siberia. Natasha is his daughter.”

  Yashim glanced at the letters on the writing box. “She—she has opened a correspondence with you, hanum?”

  The valide hesitated. “I was able to be of some assistance to an acquaintance of her mother’s,” she admitted. “The girl has written to me several times these last few years.”

  “What does she write about?”

  “Oh, Yashim—always the investigation!” The valide gave a tinkling laugh. “She writes what an intelligent young woman thinks will interest a sultan’s widow. I have not traveled, Yashim—at least, not since I was younger than Natasha.”

  At sixteen, Aimée Dubucq de Rivery had left her home on the tiny Caribbean island of Martinique to go to Paris, like many girls of her age and class. The Dubucq de Rivery were minor nobility, living as planters on their Caribbean estates. It was no place for a girl to find a well-connected husband. The expectation was that she would learn polite accomplishments in Paris and find a man; which, in a sense, she did. But she never went to Paris: her ship was captured by Algerian pirates and the young Aimée Dubucq du Rivery, with her fair hair and dazzling white skin, was sent to the sultan in Istanbul. Topkapi had been her home ever since.

  “She writes about Siberia,” the valide said. “The snow. The cold. Her mother’s death. She tells me about the natives who believe in spirits and never eat vegetables. Incroyable! She draws, too. Quite lovely little pictures.”

  And what, Yashim wanted to ask, does the valide write back?

  “In return, Yashim,” the valide said, unnervingly, “I tell her something about life.”

  She patted the letter, and closed her eyes.

  “To tell the truth, Yashim, I am actually a little nervous. At my age! But of course, I have been much alone.”

  “Nervous, hanum efendi?”

  “Like a debutante. It is not just the irregularity. She is young, Yashim. There is a difference in our experience.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Tiens, Yashim. Didn’t I say? Natasha will arrive this week.”

  Yashim almost choked on his coffee. “Arrive—here?”

  “Why not? She
is twenty-one, old enough to do as she likes. I invited her to stay.”

  “But hanum—the daughter of an exile? The consequences—”

  The valide was not quite frowning, but her expression had tightened.

  “You think I am unaware that my invitation might have consequences? Do you forget who I am? A valide’s acts always have consequences!”

  She placed her hands on the writing box, and drew back her shoulders.

  “I was a politician before you were born, Yashim, I would have you remember that. Natasha Borisova is looking for a pardon for her father. Others have had it. I intend that the tsar should grant him one.”

  Yashim opened his mouth to speak, but the valide silenced him with an upraised hand.

  “If you think the girl asked me for this, you’re wrong. Not in so many words. But I wish to meet her, and form my own opinion.”

  A visitor in the harem? It was normal for foreign ladies, the wives of ambassadors, an Egyptian begum, perhaps, to visit and pay their respects to the sultan’s ladies. They would come for a few hours, talk stiffly over coffee, examine one another’s dresses and jewels, and then graciously depart.

  But to have a visitor! A foreign woman—as a sort of houseguest? It was unprecedented.

  “How long will she stay, hanum efendi? Where will she live?”

  The valide waved a careless hand. The bangles tinkled. “Oh, a few weeks, I don’t know. Perhaps I will be better able to judge once we have met her.” She took off her spectacles. “I rely on you, Yashim. For once, I hope you have no gruesome murders to occupy your time…? But of course the dead can wait. For a young woman, the harem has some fascination, no doubt; but after a few days she will be strangled by ennui. The old ladies,” she added pointedly. “They will devour her.”

  Ever since the unmarried ladies of her late son’s household had been permitted to retire to Topkapi, the valide had complained of being beset by old women. “Like children, Yashim,” she had remarked. “Like very, very old children.”

  Some were barely half the valide’s age, as they both well knew.

  “You wish me to—?” Yashim left the sentence half-finished, unable to conjecture what, exactly, the valide would wish.

  “Don’t be stuffy. Entertain the girl, Yashim. She’s not a Muslim, nor a slave. If Mademoiselle Borisova wishes to go out, then you must be her chaperone. Show her interesting things—the bazaar. Ayasofya. Caïques. Justinian’s Pedestal, or whatever it is.”

  Yashim inclined his head. “Justinian’s Pedestal” was a confection of the valide’s. She had, of course, no experience of the city in which she had lived for so many years. Topkapi was her home, and the walls of the palace framed her horizon; at most she would have been taken for an outing on the Bosphorus, to the sweet waters of Asia or Europe, to picnic on the grass.

  “As I have seen so few of these things, Yashim, Natasha can act as my eyes. She writes well about Siberia, as I mentioned. Now, when she arrives I want you to collect her from the ship. Bring her here, avec ses bagages.”

  She spoke with a certain relish: in some respects the valide was not so unlike her companions. She, too, would want to examine the bagages.

  “A young person will do me good. The girls here are all so dull—or they wish to murder me,” she added, referring to a recent episode from which she had made a perfect recovery.* “Never, I find, both together.”

  “Inshallah,” Yashim responded. He hoped that Natasha Borisova would not be one of those intelligent women who wound up wanting to murder the valide.

  She gathered up the letters, knocked them together against the lid of the box, and tied them up with the ribbon.

  “Enough planning, Yashim. You can see to the rest of it.” She put the packet of letters back into the box and pushed it aside. “Now,” she said, “I will have a little sleep. It is all quite an excitement, n’est-ce pas?”

  7

  LEANDROS Ghika listened to the tramp of feet on the stairs outside and smiled, a little sourly, in the near dark. The feet meant lodgers, and lodgers meant money. But it also meant damage and repairs, which cost; and worry.

  He passed his hand across the ulcer in his stomach; then he put another sunflower seed into his mouth and cracked it between his teeth.

  The woman had been a mistake. Three men was enough, and the woman was a complication even if she was married to one of them. He spat the shell onto the floor. And that was by no means certain, was it? Ghika had not thought, when they took the place, to look for a ring; but he was fairly sure he had not noticed one; and Ghika was a man to notice things.

  He put out his hand and mechanically retrieved another seed from the bowl.

  For the woman, they paid extra. Three men with a woman—it wasn’t right. And they’d paid up, too—so they knew that as well as he did.

  His ulcer twinged: he should have asked for more. They would have paid. He had looked them over, and seen at once that they could afford to pay. Well-made, well-fed boys, and the girl—well; plump as a partridge, and pink and blond like something from a sultan’s harem, like the women he could dimly remember when there had been money at home and his mother took him visiting in the neighborhood. He had spent hours playing with buttons on stiff-backed chairs while soft and beautiful wives with starched coiffures and necklaces of lucky coins received them in rooms draped with figured silks and decorated with icons. The women smoked chibouks scented with applewood. Another life, before his father died.

  The Frankish woman was soft, like them. A different creature from the women he knew best now, those bundles of bones and sores and stinking mouths he resorted to when he felt the urge.

  And when he had the money. Well, he had the money now. But had also, he discovered, lost the urge.

  He listened. There was a woman’s laughter coming down the stairs. It made him wince just to think of it, the attention it attracted. Priests, imams—and always someone to run off and complain. The ulcer flared, as he knew it would. It wasn’t worth the money. What was it that the Jew who lived on the corner used to say? What was money if you didn’t have your health. Your health, and your family.

  Ghika rubbed his nose. Perhaps the Jew was wrong. If you had a pain in the stomach, and no one to run around for you—then you did need the money. Money, most of all.

  He waited for the sharp, slicing pain below his ribs to subside, then he got to his feet and opened the door to the stairs. He’d go up and have a word with the rich boys—and have a look at that woman, too.

  See if she really wore a ring.

  Have another look at her white blond hair.

  8

  THE cart that had met Palewski at the waterfront rolled to a halt by the bridge, and Palewski climbed down stiffly, cradling his Boutet, to stamp his feet on the solid earth.

  To the east, the dawn made a thin pale rim against the black land. The cart moved off, creaking, across the bridge, and Palewski leaned on the parapet, wondering how long he would have to wait, listening to the gurgling of frogs in the reeds below. It was a sound that, like the feel of the narrow fowling piece, carried him off to another time in another country, and he had drifted into a reverie when a hand took him by the shoulder, and he jumped.

  “Salaam alaikum,” a voice murmured.

  “Salaam alaikum. You surprised me.”

  A low chuckle. “We hunters have to move quietly, am I right? Come, the punt’s below.”

  Palewski followed his near-invisible companion off the bridge and into the reeds. The punt showed as a dark length jutting into the water, on which the faintest glow was just visible. It wobbled as the two men climbed aboard. A third man Palewski had not seen pushed off: a small hunched figure in the bow, stealthily laying a paddle over the side.

  Palewski sat behind his companion as the boat glided silently out over the water. A mist lay over the surface, scarcely a foot high, and Palewski had the odd impression that he was gliding through time as well as space, into some region of the mind where all the lakes and cre
eks he had ever shot—the ice-bound chasms of the Lithuanian forests, the great soft-edged lakes of Podolia, the marsh flats of the Baltic coast—glinted mysteriously in the early dawn.

  Above them loomed the dark span of the bridge, across which Ottoman armies had marched each year into Europe, a thick black line against the bluer darkness of the western sky.

  “And so, Ambassador?” The voice in his ear was very low.

  Palewski shifted his length, and eased his gun out of its wrapper. “He’s coming, Midhat Pasha efendi,” he murmured, scarcely moving his lips. “I have had word that he has already left Paris.”

  “Marseille?”

  “Brindisi.”

  A ripple trickled along the hull, so close to Palewski’s ear that he almost shivered. In spite of his clothing he felt the cold; he squeezed his fingers.

  “Everyone will know.”

  “He’s taken every precaution. In Marseille he would be watched, but in Brindisi? Even their resources are limited.”

  The pasha grunted. The punt nudged against the reeds, and the boatman rested his paddle on his knees. In the stillness, Palewski heard the familiar whir of wings overhead: two mallards, he thought. There was a splash as they settled on the lake.

  “His coming here is still a risk.” Midhat Pasha was looking along his gun. “I have heard of the committee they still maintain, the 1814 Committee. Like it or not, they have kept the peace—among themselves.”

  “Solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant,” Palewski murmured. “They make a desert and they call it peace. Tacitus.”

  “Hmm?”

  “The Committee’s job is to protect its members,” Palewski whispered. The sky had lightened almost imperceptibly. “It has done you no good. Since 1814 you have lost Serbia and Greece, and nobody lifted a finger. Then Algeria, and Egypt, of course. Your empire is fraying at the edges, pasha.”

  “We make reforms, to treat Christians the same as Muslims. They will bind us together, inshallah.”