The Baklava Club: A Novel (Investigator Yashim)

by Jason Goodwin

  “Yes, George. What was it?” Fizerley unfolded from the billiard table, where he had been practicing his cueing. “You must remember. You and Fusspot played it all winter. Head-something, wasn’t it? A funny name.”

  “Gentleman to see Mr. Compston.” The footman spoke from the door. Compston leaped to his feet, overturning the flimsy card table.

  “Absolutely!”

  When he was gone, Eliza turned to her cousin. “Why won’t he remember the name? Do you?”

  “Yes, Eliza, but wild horses won’t drag it from me. Keep trying George.”

  George had stepped into the vestibule.

  “Yashim efendi! What a relief!”

  Over the years, a friendship of sorts had sprung up between Yashim and the young Englishman. Yashim knew Compston as a good-natured ass; Compston, in turn, saw Yashim as a jack-in-the-box, popping up when least expected. Both, to some extent, had moderated their first impressions. Yashim had been surprised to discover that Compston spoke fluent Russian, while Compston had learned to rely not only on Yashim’s cleverness, but on his kindness, too.

  “Someone took a cab here from the port this afternoon. A gentleman with a lady, I understand.”

  Compston looked slightly wary. “Oh yes?”

  Yashim had been wondering whether he should let word of the attack on Palewski spread. Now he decided to keep it quiet.

  “Do you know who they might have been?”

  Compston had a vivid recollection of the cab, and the way he had pinched it from under the nose of the man who’d hired it to wait. But surely Yashim efendi had more important things to do than track down cab snatchers? “That is—it was me. I was with Miss Day. Fizerley’s cousin, um. She was awfully tired, and hot.”

  “You? But it was waiting for someone else, wasn’t it?”

  Compston remembered Miss Day stamping her pretty foot. “I felt it was, ah, an emergency. A sort of life-and-death matter, so to speak.”

  “I want to know if you saw, or heard, anything odd, while you were there. Anyone hanging about, for instance. Another cab, perhaps? Maybe someone you wouldn’t have expected to see, down at the port.”

  Compston could think of nothing. “No other cab, that’s for sure. We were darned lucky to persuade that one—take it, I mean.”

  “Is this Miss Day?” said Yashim, looking over Compston’s shoulder.

  “Yes, indeed. Miss Elizabeth Day. Yashim efendi, an old friend. Yashim is asking about the cab we took this afternoon.”

  Eliza returned Yashim’s bow with a curtsy. “I had no idea our plain doings were of such interest, Mr. Yashim efendi. However, if it’s the condition of the horse you’re concerned with, I can assure you that I have seldom beheld worse. And I’ve seen the horses on Grafton Street. Quite shocking.”

  But Yashim was not interested in the state of the horse.

  “I couldn’t be expected to know what was or was not out of the ordinary, having only just arrived in the city,” Eliza pointed out. “However, I admit I am unused to—scrutiny.”

  “Being looked at? I am sorry, I’m afraid that for many people in Istanbul a Frankish woman is still a rare sight.”

  “But not for a—what do you call ’em?—a Frank, I’ll be bound.”

  Yashim frowned in puzzlement. “A Frank?”

  “A young man, Mr. Yashim efendi. I caught sight of him as I was feeling the nose bag. Chaff, it was all chaff! But it was just as well that Mr. Compston said the right thing to the driver. As indeed you did, Mr. Compston. I was ready to dissolve.”

  Yashim found her words hard to follow. “My apologies, mademoiselle. You mentioned scrutiny.”

  A little crimson rose to Eliza’s cheeks. “I noticed a young man peering out from the alley across the street, and he was looking.”

  “Looking? At you?”

  “Not just. I’m afraid I’m making far too much of it, now. It wasn’t important. I feel silly, mentioning it. He was just there, looking. And then, well, he wasn’t.”

  “Oh no,” Compston murmured. “Not silly, at all.”

  “What was he looking at, Miss Day?”

  “Oh, just me and the carriage, and Mr. Compston, I suppose. He was young, about Mr. Compston’s age.” She tilted her chin. Her ringlets bounced. “A bit taller, possibly. I couldn’t tell you if he was dark or fair. But does it matter, anyway?”

  “Was it perhaps his cab you were taking?”

  Eliza looked perplexed. “His cab?”

  “I’m afraid the cabbie was waiting for someone, Miss Day,” Compston murmured. “But dash it, Yashim, what’s all this about? Tall Franks, popping their heads out of alleys to admire Miss Day, what? Could happen any day of the week!”

  Clumsy as it was, Eliza’s expression showed recognition of the compliment. “I didn’t think of that,” she replied, more seriously. “I don’t think, now, he was waiting for the cab. He was just, there, you know. Looking out. Do you play cards?”

  But Yashim did not play cards; not that evening, at any rate.

  “How odd,” Eliza said musingly, when he had gone. “I didn’t know you’d stolen the cab. Did you do it for me?”

  “Needs must when the devil drives,” returned Compston, gruffly. “And the very devil was driving, don’t you know. One eye. Horns, probably.”

  Eliza smiled. “And what was the name of the game you played last year?”

  “The French might call it tête de merde,” Compston said.

  Miss Day tucked her arm through his. “Thank you, Mr. Compston. You do have the makings of a very fine diplomat. My own cousin wouldn’t tell me, and I think it odious bad manners for a man not to tell. Don’t you?”

  34

  COMPSTON, Fizerley, and his cousin Eliza were already in bed when Yashim arrived at the theater farther down the Grande Rue.

  The lights, he saw, were doused. Earlier in the evening the torches would have blazed in their sockets, to attract the attention of passersby in a city that was generally unlit at night. The torches had been Yashim’s idea. In most parts of Istanbul they would have been a hazard but Pera, the European quarter, had been rebuilt in stone and brick since the last great fire swept out the old wooden buildings.

  Preen had been quick to see the benefit. “Incredible, Yashim. So simple—and so successful! A little fire attracts the men like dogs in camp.”

  He knocked, and Mina let him in. Like Preen, Mina had started her career as a köçek, one of the young boys whose feminine and suggestive dances had taken her to weddings, parties, and other, more intimate gatherings along the Bosphorus. The köçek belonged to a long tradition of ladyboy entertainers, whose origins were uncertain; perhaps Egyptian, and possibly familiar to the Byzantines, too.

  Preen was no longer in her first youth, and it was Yashim who had encouraged her to establish the theater. It was not respectable, but it was secure.

  “Hello, darling.” Preen lay on a divan, drinking tea. “I’m afraid the pashas have all gone home.”

  “Pashas?”

  “As if. Two snoring Russians, from a ship. What’s your trouble?”

  Yashim took a place on the divan.

  “Tea? Mina.”

  Mina brought him a glass of mint tea, and Yashim sipped it gratefully. Preen watched him for a few moments.

  “You can go, Mina. Leave the lamp on the stairs.”

  Mina closed her books, in which she had being doing the evening’s accounts, and yawned.

  “Big silence, and a big problem,” Preen said when they had heard Mina close the front door. “Yours, I hope. I am not interested in the despise and fall of the Ottoman Empire.”

  Yashim smiled. When Palewski had suggested she perform Byzantine tableaux for philhellenistic tourists, Preen said the old stuff was too dull. Palewski had patted his ten-volume set of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall and challenged her to find a dull paragraph.

  He’d been forced to give in. “I think you have to read it through,” he’d protested. “What you need is Suetonius.”
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  Preen took her tableaux from sources more calculated to interest sailors and porters: tragic murders, suggestive abductions, harem quarrels.

  “Something of both,” Yashim said, at last. “Palewski was shot in the street, at Tophane.”

  “You are saying it like that because he is all right?”

  “He’s hurt, but the wounds aren’t serious, Alhamdulillah.”

  “You frightened me, Yashim.” She gave his arm a push. “So tell me.”

  He left out nothing, not even the fact that Palewski had been meeting someone very important. “The prince has disappeared.”

  “The prince?”

  “Very secret, Preen. No tableaux.”

  “Of course, darling. It’s not all business. Where do we find him?”

  “Remember the time you trawled the port taverns for me? The Janissary time?”

  “Hmm. I was younger, Yashim.”

  “You don’t look any older.”

  “You want to ask if anyone heard shots?”

  “Heard a shot. Saw something.” He thought of Miss Eliza Day, and her mysterious Frankish admirer. Tall, like Palewski, but young. He remembered her blush. A handsome man? Perhaps. Not that she could remember … perhaps she had been constrained by Compston’s presence. A tall, handsome young man.

  “Yashim? You aren’t listening. You want to start now?”

  “We’ll go together. Like old times.”

  “What, I look older now? You said—”

  “I’m older, Preen. You’re just the same.”

  “Sweet,” she said. “I’m older, heavier, and I’ve got short hair. But you know? I cut more ice. Let’s go.”

  35

  MARTA remembered the times she thought the kyrie would die.

  Once he had been almost drowned, and once someone had wanted to kill them both, the kyrie and Marta. Marta remembered that warmly. She had saved them, so the kyrie had said, with her toe. Of course, it could not have been quite that way, but she liked to think of it sometimes.

  He had even proposed to her. Not meaning it, of course, but thinking just of her toe. The kyrie! Earlier he had gone to Frangistan, to Venice. She had been lucky to have him back—and afterward she had thought that the danger had been not only death, but also maybe a woman.

  The idea made her shudder.

  When she first came to run his house, before she understood his ways, she often used to think he was dead. She’d come upstairs to find him sprawled in the armchair, with the lamp burning and the fire gone out, and his face pale as string cheese. He wasn’t breathing, and the room would be strewn with bottles and books—she thought the reading had killed him.

  Twice she’d found him dead on the stairs. And he’d called her in the middle of the night—Marta, Marta!—convinced he was dying himself, after catching a fish bone in his throat. Cough cough, and a little blood.

  Once, coming upstairs, she’d heard his fiddle playing break off, and the unmistakable sound of the kyrie dropping to the floor. She tossed the tea onto the steps and rushed in, only to find him scrambling across the furniture after a wasp, with the score in his hand!

  Marta smiled. The kyrie was not for dying, she thought. He cheated it. He laughed at it. He was peppered with lots of little holes but the doctor said they weren’t too deep, and he had scars from long ago—saber cuts and bullet wounds.

  She smiled, and let the tears squeeze from her eyelids. If he asked her to marry him she’d say yes, yes if—

  Palewski’s eyelids fluttered. Marta lifted the sponge from his forehead and, without moving her eyes from his face, dipped the sponge into the bowl.

  Palewski looked up. He saw Marta, and the nightmare about his guns dissolved, leaving a faint trace of cordite.

  36

  “LET’S go to the tavern with musicians,” Preen suggested, as they came down onto the Tophane road. “It gives us something to look at.”

  They stepped over a dog on the threshold and went down a few steps into a vault where the air was close and smelled of wine and sawdust. Half the tables were occupied, and in the corner a solitary musician was sliding his fingers up the frets of his baglama, rocking back and forth as he stared into his audience.

  “A good musician,” Preen said, professionally. “He’s from the Cyclades. Syros, or Tinos.”

  They crossed to the divan. Preen ordered wine, but when the waiter returned it was Yashim who paid.

  “A shooting on the quay, this afternoon. Did you hear about it?”

  The man clacked his tongue. “The tavern was closed.”

  He went back to a wooden cubbyhole near the entrance, where he dropped the money into a box. He said something to a boy, and the boy picked up a crate and went out.

  Preen took a sip of wine. “You were going to let me do the talking.”

  “That wasn’t talking. More of a polite cough.” From his seat he could see the baglama player and the door. He saw the musician nod, and his tempo gradually picked up. The notes came faster and louder, and the conversation in the tavern rose in volume.

  “I said he was good.” Preen had to lean in to be heard.

  “Yes. And dutiful.”

  Yashim nodded toward the door, its frame filled by a man almost as broad as he was tall; he had to turn his shoulders to scan the room. Without changing his expression he started forward and settled with surprising lightness onto the divan at Yashim’s side. His huge hands dangled between his thighs.

  “You’re asking questions.” His voice was rough, with a lisp, like a file on board. Yashim took in the broken nose, the curiously absent eyes and blue-gray stubble from the top of his head to his chin.

  “A friend of mine was shot. Maybe somebody died.”

  “This is not a good place.” The prizefighter stood up and started for the door.

  Yashim got up to follow. “You don’t have to come.”

  Preen gave him an indignant look. “I was meant to ask the questions.”

  The prizefighter plunged into the dark streets and Preen’s sandals flapped on the cobbles. After a few minutes the man stopped at a gate in the wall. He muttered something and the gate swung open onto a courtyard. Some men were squatting around a brazier but stood up as they came in.

  Preen drew her scarf to her lips.

  The gate fell shut behind them and Yashim heard a wooden bar being slid home.

  The prizefighter turned. “Any knives? Weapons?”

  Yashim raised his hands in a gesture of peace.

  “Follow me.” He hesitated. “Not the lady. It’s a man’s place.”

  Yashim and Preen exchanged doubtful glances.

  “I am a man,” Preen explained, sweetly. “You can check if you don’t believe me.”

  The big man’s eyes widened fractionally, and he shrugged. “Come.”

  The door was swept back onto a damp corridor. Beyond the corridor they found themselves enveloped in fog.

  “A steam room!” Preen exclaimed in surprise.

  The steam cleared slightly, showing them a tiled and domed hammam. In the middle was a raised stone slab, and on the slab lay the hairiest man Yashim had ever seen.

  He was black from head to foot, his body hair smooth and glistening like the fur of a giant otter. His head was cradled on a pair of massive forearms. Even lying down he looked huge.

  He turned his head and looked at the new arrivals through the steam.

  “You ask questions. What for?”

  Yashim rubbed the steam from his forehead, and loosened his cloak.

  “A friend of ours was shot at today, on the port road,” he said. “He was badly hurt. He was with a companion who seems to have vanished.”

  The big man let his lids droop. “And you are?”

  “I am Yashim. I work for the sultan and his household.”

  The hairy man stretched out a hand and the attendant handed him a towel. He raised his head and rubbed it across his face and then, with a sucking sound, peeled his massive frame from the slab and swung his leg
s over the edge, where he sat working his huge head from side to side. Yashim felt the steam and sweat sliding down his back; his shirt stuck to his skin. The man rubbed his chest thoughtfully, making all the hairs start up.

  “In the port, you say? I am a friend to the kadi who supervises the port of Istanbul—in an official sense. My name is Balamian.”

  He got to his feet, bowed his head, curled his fingers loosely at his side, and the attendant swung a bucket of water and sloshed it over him. Yashim guessed the water was cold, but Balamian did not flinch as the water splashed onto his furry pelt, and only brushed the hair from his eyes with a pass of his hand.

  “The kadi has many responsibilities, Yashim efendi. I help to regulate his affairs.” Balamian reached for a towel and tied it around his waist. “His affairs, and the affairs of the port. We settle the loading and the unloading of ships. Victualing crews, finding replacement sailors. I give work to the men. Help them if they are sick, look after their families. I know them all. I know the ships.” He paused. “And if anything happens in the port, I know that, too.”

  “Anything?”

  Balamian smoothed his hands over his head, like a bear washing itself.

  “Eventually, everything.”

  Yashim didn’t doubt him for a moment. Balamian was like a sultan, and power dripped from him like the steam on his beard.

  “The port’s a busy place, Yashim efendi. Ships, men, coming and going. It takes an effort to control—and we don’t like violence.”

  Balamian’s position, Yashim guessed, was founded on violence: those huge hands could crush a man as easily as they squeezed a sponge. He meant, of course, that he reserved the violence, or the threat of it, to himself.

  He patted his face with the towel. “We will be in touch.”

  The man with the face of a boxer led them back through the corridor and across the courtyard. The gate swung shut behind them and for several minutes they walked uphill without saying a word, the sweat slowly cooling on their backs. The streets were dark and empty, but now and then their way was lit by a crack of lamplight between closed shutters. Cats slipped across the cobbles. Overhead the stars were bright and cold.