The Baklava Club: A Novel (Investigator Yashim)

by Jason Goodwin

  It was warm enough to go naked. She glanced briefly at the window, but the latticed shutters were firmly closed.

  “Der ligger i den hele nyere Udvikling en stor Tilbøielighed til—langtfra med Taknemmelighed at erindre sig de Kampe og Besværligheder, Verden har udstaaet for at blive til det, den er—om muligt endog at forglemme de Resultater, den i sit Ansigts Sved har erhvervet, for paany at begynde forfra, og i ængstende Forudfølelse af.”

  There was nobody about to hear, and it felt nice to hear Søren speaking their language in the deep, scholarly voice she gave him, as best she could.

  “Efter disse almindeligere Betragtninger, hvis inderligere organiske Forhold til vort Forehavende paa sit Sted vil, saa haabe vi, vorde Læserne klart.”

  As for Ghika, the landlord, he didn’t care if the woman spoke Sanskrit or Irish—though he would have preferred to hear her speaking in a higher, more girlish tone. It wasn’t really her voice he cared about, as he congratulated himself on taking the trouble to put his eye to the keyhole of the apartment.

  What he could see exceeded all his hopes and expectations: a young woman with breasts that quivered with every stroke of the brush, every stroke of the brush that caressed her long blond hair.

  She was quite alone now. Those men had gone.

  And the door, evidently, was unlocked.

  He put out his tongue to wet his lips, breathing heavily at the door.

  16

  “I wonder,” said the valide, touching her hair, “if we did quite right to ask her?”

  “We, hanum efendi?” It was a bit of a jump, even for Yashim, who knew how the valide’s mind could work.

  “Such a homely little thing. A real hen.”

  “Hanum efendi?”

  “So reticent,” she said. “I expected, from her letters, more joie de vivre. A little wit.”

  “This evening you will present Natasha to the ladies?”

  “You needn’t stay. It will be an undignified affair, sans doute. Old women clacking at her underwear and pinching her cheeks. In spite of everything, Yashim, I don’t think of you as—well, at least, it is not your place. But you may tell her that I will be ready to receive her in an hour.”

  He found Natasha in her apartment, sitting on the divan and still in her outdoor clothes. Only the bonnet lay beside her, its ribbons dangling.

  “Then I must dress,” she said wearily. “She wants entertainment—but I don’t dance the troika.”

  “At her age,” Yashim said quietly, “the valide has seen a great deal of the hot and cold of fate. Now, I think, she wishes to avoid melancholy.”

  Natasha tilted her head to one side. “If you say so.” Her voice was flat, bored. Why, it was as if Natasha Borisova had come all this way to turn the empire over in her mind, like a piece of china in the bazaar.

  “You have come with an object, I understand that,” he said, “but you are also the valide’s guest. Her first foreign guest, I believe. Perhaps you didn’t know that?”

  Natasha said nothing.

  “I just want you to understand that the valide has done something quite unusual. Of course she’s being watched by—everyone. The other ladies. The eunuchs. The gossips. That’s the nature of palace life. And you can make it easier for her to help you. I hope you don’t think I am being too crude.”

  She gazed at him levelly, for the first time. “It’s what we Russians understand,” she said heavily.

  She put out a hand and groped for the ribbons of her bonnet on the bed.

  Yashim took a step forward. “Mademoiselle Borisova—I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean … Please don’t cry.”

  The tears had sprung from beneath her closed eyes. “Oh, Monsieur Yashim, oh, oh, oh!”

  He spotted a pile of lace handkerchiefs and passed her one.

  “Forgive me. I thought—” He was about to say he thought she was dissatisfied, and that Istanbul gave her no pleasure, but she broke in first, wiping her tears away with her fingers.

  “I can’t dance!” She hiccuped through her tears, shaking her head. “Can’t sing! I know I am plain, and not elegant, and everyone wants me to be a beautiful princess who knows how to sing and be witty and I don’t know how … I don’t know … oh!”

  She went to the window and stood there, covering her face with her hands, her shoulders heaving.

  Yashim bowed his head. “Among the Ottomans, Natasha,” he said, “princesses, like pashas, are not only born: they are made. It’s not like Russia or France, where everyone defers to ancient families. The only ancient family in the whole Ottoman Empire is the family of Osman bey, the founder of the dynasty. The greatest princess that ever lived was Roxelana, the wife of Suleyman the Magnificent. She was Russian like you, captured in some raid across the Don. No aristocrat by birth, and she certainly spoke no French.”

  She shrugged miserably.

  “And you don’t have to win a sultan’s heart, either.”

  She pulled a rueful face. “It’s just as well.”

  Without her bonnet, now that Yashim could see her face properly, she was not bad-looking, with those sloping eyes and high cheekbones.

  “Who knows? In another age…” he said gently, and smiled. She glanced around and blinked.

  “The valide asked you here, Natasha, because she liked the girl who wrote her those letters. Not some princess poised to wield her charms: women like that, remember, have surrounded the valide all her life. She saw through them all, long ago. Your letters are clever, and funny. You draw beautifully. You wrote to her in your own voice, not with the affected lisp of some Circassian beauty.”

  “Are they so affected, then?” She almost smiled.

  “Terribly. Lisping is the fashion, and mincing, and speaking in a sort of high-pitched trill. And a lot of malice underneath, believe me. Flint, beneath the honey.”

  He drew her down onto the divan, to sit beside him, and held her hand.

  “I wrote to no one else,” she said, with a sharp intake of breath. “It was Prince Volkonsky’s idea.”

  “Prince Volkonsky?”

  “He was one of those who came to Siberia with us. I was very young then—too young to remember life before, really. To begin with, my father had to work in the mines. We lived in the mine village, twenty-seven of us. I didn’t see him very often. My mother cared for all the children, with an old Siberian woman who lived there. My little brother died when he was five. I wanted to explain to the tsar what had happened, but we were not allowed to write to the tsar, or the tsarina, of course. So Uncle Sergei—Prince Volkonsky—said I should write a letter to the Ottoman sultana instead.”

  “Why the sultana?”

  “In the stories, you see, it is always a tsar and a sultan. Moscow and Constantinople.”

  “Yes. In our stories, it is the same. A tsar, a sultan, and a wise fool, like Mullah Nasreddin.”

  “Everyone used to tell those stories. My father came back very weak from the mines. We were all sent to live at Irkutsk then. Some of the families were rich, so they built an opera house, and had soirees. The governor used to come. We all spoke French to confuse the spies and the soldiers—and for the sake of my mother and her friends. I wrote to the sultana—the valide—in French, and did those drawings for her.”

  “And she wrote back.”

  “Oh yes! At Christmas she sent boxes of lokum, and when I was fifteen she began to send me shawls, and flowery material for making a dress. I make my own dresses,” she added, with a touch of artless pride.

  “And your mother?”

  “It was very hard for her. She could have stayed in Saint Petersburg, you see. We all could—except Father. But she came with him, and she and some of the other wives signed documents that declared them officially dead because they chose voluntary exile in Siberia. When Igor died…” She blinked. “And she died four years ago. A real death. She told me to take care of my father. Many others have been pardoned, Monsieur Yashim. But I fear the tsar has forgotten us.”

  Yashim s
queezed her hand. He had treated her exactly as she described—as a rare Russian princess, representing everything that he, as an Ottoman, feared and admired about the old Russian enemy. When he showed her the sights, she hardly knew whether to be impressed or even interested: she supposed that a sophisticated princess would have seen it all before.

  “Remember, the valide has promised to do what she can, so there is nothing you need to do or worry about while you are here.”

  They sat in silence for a moment. “Sometimes I wish I’d never written those letters.” She turned her head. “I’d better dress,” she said. “Do I look awful? All horrid and red?”

  He shook his head. “You look better, Natasha. You should go out in a while and meet the ladies. It will be very correct and rather formal, no doubt, although I warn you, they’ll want to examine every detail of your wardrobe, down to your stays. But soon we’ll have a picnic, out in the country. No more city sights, just sun and the open air. How’s that?”

  17

  FABRIZIO drummed his fingers nervously on the table.

  “It can’t go on,” he murmured at last. “Waiting, waiting, not a word. I don’t have money.” He flushed.

  Giancarlo shrugged. “It is like the ambassador said: patience.”

  “All right for you,” Fabrizio pointed out. “You have funds, and a woman. You can stay here as long as you like. What I don’t understand is why we hear nothing. Maybe our friends have been jailed? Why don’t they write?”

  “We agreed that correspondence should be kept to a minimum, Fabrizio. You know that. When La Piuma has instructions—”

  “Every day we come and drink coffee, and jump when the waiter nods at us. I’m sick of it.”

  Rafael frowned. “You would rather be sitting in a papal cell, crumbling a little bread? No? Come on, Fabrizio. Here you are a free man, and when our people need us, they will call. Then, perhaps, you will find life too exciting.”

  “Are you saying I’m a coward?”

  “No more of that,” Giancarlo said sharply. “Rafael is simply saying the truth—that the moment will come, and we shall all be tested. We should be prepared.”

  Fabrizio flashed him a look of concentrated scorn, but he kept his mouth shut and his hand reappeared on the table.

  “Let’s play backgammon.”

  They played for an hour or so. Giancarlo won two games, Rafael won another. Fabrizio lost to both of them and sat with his arms folded, scowling at the board.

  Finally they signaled to the waiter. Giancarlo put some coins on the table.

  “For you,” the waiter said as he swept them up. He dropped a note onto the table and went away.

  Giancarlo glanced about and covered the note with his hand. His heart thumped.

  “So.”

  Fabrizio had sat up; Rafael looked from Giancarlo to the paper.

  “We’ll leave now,” Giancarlo said. “As if nothing has happened.”

  Each of the young men stood up, feeling the weight of everyone’s eyes. Now that it had arrived, they each felt clumsy and conspicuous. Giancarlo felt the ground heave as he crumpled the note and put it into his pocket.

  They walked in solemn silence to the end of the street, where Giancarlo reached into his pocket and drew out the note.

  “Aha! The young revolutionaries!”

  They all started. Around the corner had come the most astonishing figure they had seen all day, as out of the melee of men in turbans, robes, frock coats, and fezzes came the Irish priest, Doherty, beaming in his black saturno hat, cape, and dog collar, and clutching a pile of books.

  “Will you look out for me now, lads! These books are beginning to go!”

  Fabrizio was the first to recover his wits. He grabbed at Father Doherty’s pile of books and spooned them back toward the priest’s chest.

  “Ouf! I thought you might actually take them from me, young man! Maybe spare a fellow the rigor mortis that dusty old tomes generally induce,” he added, with cheerful outrage.

  “Of course, Father.” Fabrizio let the pile slide into his arms.

  Giancarlo gave him an exasperated look. “We’re in a bit of a hurry, Father, forgive us.”

  Father Doherty was waving his arms and flexing his fingers, and did not appear to have heard.

  “It’s my Calvary, if I might make so bold, and to be sure, I’d not blaspheme.” He turned to Giancarlo. “I find a stack of books to be a wonderful protection for a man walking abroad in this city. Idolaters and infidels they may be, but the meanest beggar of the Balkans has respect for the written word. And when I say respect, I mean only to say that these books—treatises and whatnot, written by pious men, and pious women, too, I don’t doubt, for let’s not forget the holy ladies, gentlemen, moved by a passion for Christ like Teresa of Avila, bless her and keep her—that these books, I say, might prove to be singularly unenlightening, were the aforementioned beggar to lay his hands upon them, God forbid, and attempt the reading of them. And for why?”

  It was a rhetorical question, for which he put out his hands and adopted an expression of absurd surprise. Giancarlo and Rafael stood as if turned to stone: only little Fabrizio wheeled slightly under his burden.

  “For the fact that they are all written in a language that strives for—nay, might have seemed to have—achieved universality, but which not one of them could possibly understand! Not a Greek, for sure, nor a Turk, neither. No, gentlemen, I make so bold as to asserver that in all Istanbul there may be no more than a handful of gentlemen like yourselves capable of comprehending the simplest Latin text.”

  He pulled out a handkerchief and began to mop his forehead. “And so, shall we move out of the street?”

  “I’m afraid we’ve just left the café,” Giancarlo explained. “And now, if you’ll forgive us, we must be getting home.”

  “Home—there’s a handsome word! Home! Manna! That’s the thing—the very word falls like manna in the desert to a lonesome priest in a city of idolaters and infidels! Well, come on then!” he roared cheerfully, linking arms with the two men who had arms free. “Home it is! And I’ll be thinking, my welcome lads, that it’s none too far from here?”

  It was a curious procession that wound up the road—the infuriated Fabrizio, weighted with his books, bringing up the rear; Father Doherty talking at the top of his voice and clasping two reluctant young men to his sides. Giancarlo’s expression, on account of his height, was invisible to the priest.

  Doherty was right that home was not far away. In five minutes they came to the door of Ghika’s place, where they met Ghika himself coming down the stairs with a sly look on his face.

  “Just took up a note for you, efendim,” he said, rubbing his hands together. “Arrived just now. I wasn’t aware that there was anybody home, so I took the liberty—”

  “Birgit!” Giancarlo exclaimed involuntarily. “Why, diabolo, my wife’s up there!”

  “I didn’t disturb her, that’s sure.” Ghika felt an urge to prolong the conversation: the newcomer was a priest of some sort, and he wanted to look closer.

  “Disturb her?” Giancarlo felt cold: he dashed past the priest and took the stairs three at a time.

  “Birgit? You’re asleep?”

  He raced into their room and saw Birgit asleep, seminaked on the bed. He dragged at the note in his pocket, and tore it open.

  Alea iacta est. The Rubicon is crossed. The time is coming. Be prepared. There will—

  Cursing as he heard the rest of them enter the apartment, he crumpled the note into his fist and thrust it back into his pocket.

  Birgit was lying very still—and very alluring, with her neck thrown back, her breasts exposed to the slatted sunshine that fell low through the lattice.

  Alea iacta est. The Rubicon is crossed. The time is coming!

  He felt a rush of blood: he wanted to leap at the bed, rip up her petticoats, and plunge himself into Birgit’s warm, yielding body. The Rubicon! Somewhere in his mind he saw her as a sleeping Europe, pale and full of
love, tender and directionless: he as a Hannibal, a dark avenger, a liberator—bruising her with his merciless attack, his thighs between hers—

  But then, there was the priest.

  He dragged the door closed, shoulders drooping, and turned back to the unwelcome guest.

  18

  “PLEASE,” Doherty said. “You’ve had a note.”

  Giancarlo jumped. “A note—what?”

  “The letter your man delivered just now? I know just how important these things are, when you’re abroad and far from home. Don’t let me stop you from reading it, while I take the weight from my feet.” Doherty sank onto the divan and removed his saturno. “Please, don’t trouble to make tea now. That’s the weight taken off, there.” He patted the cushions happily. “But what can a man do to take the weight off his mind, at the end of a long, hard day, now? Heh-heh!”

  Giancarlo scanned the apartment for the note that Ghika had delivered, and found it propped up against the fireplace.

  “I expect you’re all dying to know what’s in it,” he declared, with a sort of vicious sarcasm that was lost on the priest. “Shall I open it? Very well. Now,” he said, tearing the envelope, “the Rubicon is crossed.”

  He gave Rafael a significant look.

  “My, my, the Rubicon, is it? Who knows but what it might be merely a tailor’s bill, Giancarlo, or is it an invitation?”

  Doherty chuckled amiably, waving a hand as though it should hold a glass. Giancarlo glanced through the note, and laid it aside.

  “Oh, oh! A bill!”

  “It’s not a bill. It’s an invitation, to a picnic lunch.”

  “Who from?” Fabrizio asked, and bit his tongue.

  “Yashim.”

  “The ambassador’s friend?” Doherty suggested, while Giancarlo scowled at Fabrizio.

  “Any friend of the ambassador’s must be a good man,” the priest declared. “The ambassador is a very good man, himself, a gentleman and a scholar. Am I right, young Rafael? He gives his friends fine hospitality, in a dry country.”