Yashim sat forward. “Where did he want to go?”
The driver sucked his lip. “To an embassy, also. I thought maybe he was the same one.”
“He wanted to come here?”
“Some other one.” The driver looked bored.
“A different embassy?” Yashim spoke sharply.
The driver looked up at the ceiling. “I have had a busy day, efendi. I cannot remember everything. Another one.”
Yashim gritted his teeth and let a coin spin between his fingers.
“It was the Ingilstan house,” the driver remembered, brightening.
Yashim frowned. “The Ingilstan house?” Why the British embassy? “So this man—he was a Frank? And he asked for the Ingilstan house?”
“Yes.” The driver put out his palm. “With a woman.”
Yashim let the coin drop, and sat back. The driver’s answers surprised him. If Palewski was in danger from anyone, it had to be the Russians, or the Austrians, who would most wish to interrupt his diplomatic efforts. Someone might have taken the cab to the British embassy, and walked on from there. But with a woman, too?
“At the Ingilstan house, did you drive in through the gates?”
“Right to the door.” The driver grinned. “The man paid. The woman walked inside.”
“Other cabs at the port? Was anyone else waiting at the same place?”
The driver shook his head.
“And before you left—did you see anything strange? Hear anything?”
“No.”
Eventually, Yashim let him go.
He walked to the window. A bee clung to the glass, moving up and down the single pane. He opened the window and took a sheet of paper from the escritoire and guided the bee out into the open air.
Palewski had met his secret visitor at the port, with a cab waiting. Then someone had fired on them.
A gust of wind blew in through the open window.
Palewski had called him a prince. A real prince? How many princes were there? Yashim remembered what he had said to Natasha about the Ottoman aristocracy: but in Europe there must be dozens, hundreds of them—French, Russian, Austrian. An idea struck him and he turned to the bookcase.
It took him a moment to find the volume he wanted. Palewski had shown it to him once, a huge calf-bound book stuffed with slips of paper and scraps of aristocratic intelligence: the Almanach de Gotha, a prodigious work of genealogy and snobbery which listed, Palewski promised, the oldest families in Europe. Yashim had laughed at him: every family, he countered, was old.
He brought the book to the escritoire and thumbed through the pages, trying to work out how the entries were arranged. Palewski had said something about arms, and quarterings, going back centuries—to the time of Charlemagne, and the Byzantine emperors, in some cases. Doherty’s time, he thought inconsequentially: the time of real Latin.
There seemed to be hundreds, if not thousands of princes in the book: most of them long dead. Where was Palewski’s prince—and was he, too, dead? Was his name to be one of those written on a slip of paper, and dropped between the pages of the Almanach de Gotha—Prince So-and-so, b. Wittelsbach 1760; d. 1842—in Istanbul?
Yashim glanced up at the window.
He had not stayed with Palewski after the shooting. Either he had vanished into the city of his own free will—or he had been made to disappear.
He frowned, and went to find Marta. The kyrie, she said, was still asleep.
“He has a fever, efendi. His body is hot and dry. I would like the doctor to come back.”
“Send for him again. I’m going out, but I shall be back before dark.”
30
YASHIM made his way downhill to the Tophane landing, his mind a blank.
Istanbul was not a city where people disappeared easily. It was not like London, or Paris: not yet. Every street was inhabited by people who had lived there for generations, or given over to specific trades. Any stranger would be noticed, almost anywhere—particularly a foreign prince.
Almost anywhere except, perhaps, around the Tophane landing. If there was anywhere in the city where you could shoot a man, or lose one, it was here, where the crowds threw up strangers of every description: foreign sailors from all the corners of the Mediterranean and beyond, Maltese ruffians, Genoese officers, French sea captains, even Indians and Chinamen; smooth bankers from the Phanar district, or their peons; urchins, touts, hotel runners, dockhands and storekeepers; burly negroes, emaciated opium addicts, foreign tourists. And diplomats, of course.
He supposed it had always been like that, even in the days when the Ottomans maintained a haughty disregard for the Frankish kingdoms and empires that had not, as yet, fallen under their sway. At the height of the Ottoman Empire’s power the mix would have been different—more north Africans, no doubt, drawn from the corsair kingdoms of the southern Mediterranean, pirates in all but name and always consummate seamen, as the Turks never could hope to be; Egyptian crews who manned the great grain barques that fed the largest city in the world. He thought of the taverns clustered around the port, and of the people who frequented them.
The cab had waited by a clump of willow trees. Palewski had brought his man back toward the trees. Was that when he was shot? Or was it earlier, on the way from the Tophane gate?
Yashim found the trees without difficulty and he cast about while the light held, examining angles, retracing his steps on the town side of the street, peering up alleyways and into courtyards, searching for the place where a man might conceal himself with a gun. He imagined Palewski taking his friend’s arm with his right, placing himself on the left; it was the natural thing. Palewski on the town side, the prince by the water, walking northeast—Palewski peering into the shade to make out the cab … Palewski half-turning … he’d have seen the cab was already gone.
A shot.
A shot. Or maybe two. Yashim leaned back against the walls of a wharf, trying to piece things together from a few scattered phrases—and Millingen’s observations. Once or twice he attracted the curiosity of passersby, shoremen or sailors or little boys, but traffic had slackened. Finally, still uncertain what he was really looking for, he returned to the clump of trees and squatted down, dangling his hands between his knees.
31
“I lost him, Yashim.”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
Palewski picked fretfully at his sheet. “I took precautions to keep it secret. But somehow they were waiting for him.” He sighed. “And don’t say what you want to say, because it’s true and I don’t want to hear it.”
“You should have brought me in?”
Palewski stared gloomily at his friend. “The whole Polish diaspora will call me an idiot. Or a traitor. At times like this, a wise man looks around for someone else to blame, but I can’t see a soul. Just one self-styled ambassador playing with guns and secret messages like a twelve-year-old boy. Lemon juice!”
“Lemon juice?”
“Oh, you know, Yash. Invisible ink, secret codes.”
“You could blame Midhat Pasha.”
“I’m trying, Yash. We set this up together.”
“Had you fixed a meeting with the sultan?”
“The sultan, his ministers, the whole works. For Friday. Midhat was briefing them. New policy slant in European affairs. Active and respectable. Something to entice the British and the French. What I mean is, impressive. And the prince had the authority to make it stick.”
“Prince Czartoryski.”
Palewski turned his head sharply, and winced. “Did—did I say so?”
Yashim pulled out a piece of paper. “‘The members of this family,’” he read, “‘bear the title Prince Czartoryski (Serene Highness). Voivode of Podolia. Grand Dukes of Lithuania. Chancellor of Lithuania.’ Here. ‘Adam Jerzy, Prince Czartoryski, Duke von Klewán and Zuków. Born in Warsaw on January fourteenth, 1770. Married, in Radzyń on September twenty-fifth, 1817, Anna, Princess Sapieha-Kodenska, born St. Germain-en-Laye, 1798.’ That Prince Cza
rtoryski.”
“Yes.” Palewski sank deeper into his pillows as if crushed. “That one.”
“Not a very old family, if it’s any consolation,” Yashim remarked, folding up the notes he had taken from the Almanach de Gotha a few minutes earlier.
“They are as close as we come to a Polish royal dynasty,” Palewski muttered.
“Very well. We have three days.”
“To do what?”
“Find him.”
Palewski put his fingers to his temples, and sighed. “I had him, Yash. I had him by the arm and we were going to the cab. Then I saw the cab roll away. I shouted. He told me not to excite myself and then—then there was an explosion. A gun.” He stared at the lamp. “We won’t find him. Not now. He was the target. They could pepper me with shrapnel any day of the week, Yashim, so obviously it wasn’t me they were after. You think they’d fire on us unless they meant to kill him?”
“I don’t know. Dr. Millingen—”
“That sawbones!”
“Dr. Millingen thought you’d had a hunting accident. He picked a dozen pellets out of your back this afternoon. Who’d use a gun like that for an assassination?”
“At point-blank range—”
“Possibly. Fire once, wing the pair of you. Reload, step forward. Coup de grâce, at point-blank range.” Yashim paused. “It’s not an empty street.”
He thought fleetingly about the cab, rattling away. He got up and stood with his arms folded at the foot of the bed. “Where does he live, this Czartoryski? Where did he come from?”
“Paris. He’s an exile, like the rest of them. The exile. I said his family was the closest we have to Polish royalty? Well, Adam Czartoryski is the leader-in-exile. His Essay on Diplomacy is our Bible, really. He’s related to everyone, on almost every side of the equation—Russians, Germans, everyone. He has the Hôtel Lambert, on the Île Saint-Louis.”
Prince Czartoryski was not just some aristocratic patriot, playing cloak and dagger with the European powers, and Yashim was beginning to understand the depth of Palewski’s anguish. “If Poland was liberated, he’d become king?”
Palewski shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said petulantly. “If not king, he’d be the broker, at any rate. Oh God.” He groaned.
“There’s no body.” Yashim did not want Palewski to yield to despair. “Would the Russians try this? The Austrians?”
“Either. Both. There’s a committee that watches over European affairs like a hawk, pouncing on the slightest hint of change or rebellion. Russia’s foremost. Austria behind. Prussia benefits, though this isn’t really the Prussian style.” He sighed. “All Metternich’s old gang, from the Congress of Vienna. An agreement signed almost thirty years ago, Yashim, which froze the map of Europe into despotisms, and sold out Poland. The list of signatories is pretty long on the final treaty.”
“And they still have an interest in maintaining the arrangements.”
“Some more than others, no doubt. But yes, on the whole, the people whose voices were heard at Vienna govern Europe today. The Pope was there: he got his Italian states back,” he added bitterly. “A lot of blood had been shed to liberate them in the first place. A drop or two of it was mine.”
“Czartoryski’s arrival here would have upset them?”
Palewski nodded. “He came to explain to Midhat Pasha and his people what an alternative Europe might be like, and how the Ottomans could benefit from championing it. That would have sent alarm bells ringing all over Saint Petersburg.”
“He lives in Paris,” Yashim said, feeling the agitation in his friend’s voice. “Why not kill him there?”
“Paris? You don’t assassinate a man in Paris.”
Yashim ignored him. “There’s one reason they might try to kill him here instead. But it doesn’t apply in this case—so I begin to hope he isn’t dead.”
Palewski gave him a disgusted look, and said nothing.
“For an assassination, Paris would do as well as Istanbul. But for a public execution, Istanbul is better. Killers anonymous, and Czartoryski dead? It shows the Ottoman Porte conspiring with the architect of European revolution. That would throw the Porte onto the back foot. We would be forced back into our diplomatic shell—averse to taking any more risks, shy of tampering with the established order. Meanwhile, a warning is sent around Europe: don’t underestimate the reach of the Powers—or the determination of that committee. Isn’t that it?”
“Possibly.” Palewski looked wary.
“Then where’s the body? Why not leave him dead in the street—display it to the world? If Czartoryski were dead, we should have heard about it. If they didn’t leave his corpse, then I hope they have him, alive. But I don’t know why.” He paused. “I hope he’s still here.”
“Why—why can’t they just kill him, and be done?”
But Yashim shook his head. “I found him just now, in the Almanach de Gotha. I mean to find him here. In Istanbul.”
32
“WHY can’t we just kill him and be done?”
Rafael’s question hung in the air. It was more a plea than a question: a question addressed to their consciences.
Why couldn’t they just kill him?
They all knew why. On the docks, a few yards off, he had been—what? A pair of black trousers and a coat, with a hat on top, like something produced by an opera buffa costume department, with the label of villain pinned to his back.
For them, he had become the fine point of the machine of assassination they had constructed with cold attention to detail, the motive no warmer than a coiled spring in its housing, the emotion no louder than the ticking of cogs. The object of their labors was only a rivet that needed to be tapped neatly into place, firing pin to percussion cap.
But then the shot went wide and the revolutionaries were left with a machine they could not mend, as useless to them as a steam engine to a Bedouin. They hurried their intended victim away, only to discover that he was not made of rivets: he breathed, he wept, he spoke. He was thirsty, bewildered, frightened like them. And angry.
His anger confused them most.
“How dare you!”
Later: “I don’t know what you hoped to achieve by this disgraceful charade, but it would be better for you to abandon it immediately. Do you have any idea who I am?”
They did not want to hear. They marched him to the cellar of the house, where Ghika had stored their trunks, and locked him in. But first they buttoned his coat on back to front, so that he could not move his arms, and tied his shoelaces together. That was Fabrizio’s idea.
“If you make a sound, we will kill you,” Fabrizio said. Forgetting for a moment, perhaps, that they meant to kill him anyway.
Upstairs the postmortem began; except that there had been no death.
Birgit had gone to visit Natasha at Topkapi, to goggle at palace life, so they could speak freely.
“There was something wrong with the gun,” Fabrizio explained. “It misfired, I’m positive.”
“Where is the gun now?”
“You brought it back.” Fabrizio looked surprised.
“Me? I was helping to carry the man. The gun was your responsibility. Did you leave it downstairs?”
“Cazzo! I thought someone had it.”
They were all breathing heavily. Giancarlo broke the silence.
“Rafael, you go and fetch it.”
They squabbled about that. Giancarlo said he could not go, because he was tall and recognizable, and because he needed to think. Fabrizio had better stay, too, he had already messed up once—twice, if you counted the bad shot.
“It misfired!”
“Whatever you say.”
Rafael went. In his heart he knew the gun would be gone already, so when he arrived at the port he did not find it. He did not look very carefully: he just walked by, with a sideways glance, and saw that it was not there. Then he went back.
“You searched for it? Cazzo! Fabrizio—did you carry it across the road? Did you look
under the trees, Rafael?”
“Of course I did.” Rafael was lying and the others suspected it. But they were all tired, and frightened and confused.
Giancarlo produced the note he had written for La Piuma while Rafael was out. “Bird dispatched. We must tell him something. Anything is better than silence.”
“It’s a lie.”
“For the moment. He’s as good as dead, anyway.”
Each of them had a vision of the man in the cellar, raging, buttoned up in his frock coat. “How dare you!”
Had they killed the man, shot him dead on the pavement in the sun, they would have felt no remorse, only the satisfaction of a job well done, loosening another stone in the edifice of papal tyranny. Because they had not killed him, they were frightened and ashamed and full of guilt. As assassins they could have exonerated themselves, or so they each told themselves, quietly, privately. As men innocent of murder they felt all the weight of their guilt and their crime pressing down on them.
The crime, a murder, was yet to be performed.
“Why can’t we just kill him and be done?”
33
“AND seven! I win.”
“Fact is, Miss Day, I’m under instructions to let you, you know. It’s what we fellows call diplomacy.”
Eliza laughed. “Mr. Compston, I had no idea you sparkled as a wit.” She let him gather up the cards.
“Another game, Miss Day?”
“I don’t think so, not unless you know any new ones.”
“Oh!” Compston’s face brightened. “We had a fellow here last year, Rushford. Dreadful man, and a proven cheat, though up till then he had us playing a rather good game. At least, that is … I’m not sure I can remember the rules.”
“Oh, come on. What was it called?
Compston blushed. “D’you know, I can’t say. I—I can’t remember what we called it.”
Shithead, as he had just remembered.
“Well! It must have had a name, Mr. Compston. Rummy? Or racing demon? What was it?”
The Baklava Club: A Novel (Investigator Yashim) Page 12
