The Baklava Club: A Novel (Investigator Yashim)

by Jason Goodwin

  Preen shivered. “What a gangster, darling! Did you see his eyes? His hair? Did you see his hair?”

  37

  GIANCARLO was beginning to feel like a gangster.

  “Shoot me, damn you, or let me go. You can’t keep a man like this!”

  Their prisoner seemed ready to believe in Fabrizio’s gun, pointing through the fabric of his jacket pocket, as the caïques went slowly up the Golden Horn.

  “Nobody would understand a word you said,” Fabrizio told him, truthfully. They counted on that. “But if you make a move, I’ll shoot you.”

  The trip seemed to interest their captive, who looked out at the dark silhouettes of the great mosques as they unfolded, one by one, in stately progression along the seven hills. Lights twinkled on the shore: old wharfs, a caïque stage, fishermen selling mackerel off the boats. Now and then Fabrizio caught a whiff of frying fish, and remembered that none of them had eaten all day.

  At Eyüp they walked in a huddle through the sleeping village. Dogs yanked at their chains, goats bleated nervously in their stalls, and the moon rose to show them the entrance to the woods.

  “I don’t understand you,” Czartoryski said. “Who are you? Pah! You’re well fed and flashily dressed. Kidnappers—with their own tailors!”

  That night they kept watch in turns, fastening the rope that encircled their captive’s waist to the wrist of the man awake. In the morning he had slept better than them, on a pile of straw. They moved his rope to a ring in the wall and gave him the stool, which was the only piece of furniture they could find.

  All through the day they took turns to watch him, while the other two went outside and argued. Once, Fabrizio went to Eyüp to buy some food, because of the three he looked most Turkish.

  The stool creaked. “It’s something—what, political? Nothing to say to that? Let me guess. Catholic hard-liners—knights of some fusty medieval order or another. The Golden Fleece. Malta? No, too young, and not grand enough. Knights of the Sacred Rose? No, I made that one up. Like you did, probably. I need to pee.”

  “Again?”

  “It’s my age. It comes with certain infirmities.”

  Rafael sighed in exasperation. He went forward and undid the cord that held Czartoryski’s leg to the ring in the wall, and led him outside.

  “Lovely bit of country, this,” Czartoryski said, as he unhitched himself. “Reminds me of Dante.” He began to recite:

  Già m’avean trasportato i lenti passi

  dentro a la selva antica tanto, ch’io

  non potea rivedere ond’ io mi ’ntrassi;

  ed ecco più andar mi tolse un rio,

  che ’nver’ sinistra con sue picciole onde

  piegava l’erba che ’n sua ripa uscìo.*

  He chuckled. “Purgatorio. Canto twenty-six, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “Twenty-eight,” Rafael said, in a surly tone.

  “Twenty-eight, is it? Well, you may be right.” He took a deep breath. “There. Shall we go in?”

  Rafael fastened him to the ring, and Czartoryski resumed his musings.

  “I don’t think of Dante and zealotry—or bigotry—in the same bracket, to be honest. Dante—the patrimony of all Italians, I should have said.”

  “Of course!” Rafael chimed in hotly. “He’s our national poet.”

  “And it’s people like you who prevent Italy from becoming a nation,” Czartoryski pointed out. “Just as you would smother Poland under a blanket of foreign occupation and repressive laws. In the name of what? Catholic stability? Some lost medieval dream of Christendom? Tchah! Your fantasies create half the suffering in this world. You make me sick.”

  He folded his arms and let his chin sink to his chest, eyes closed.

  “It’s not me who would smother anyone,” Rafael retorted; yet he felt confused. “It’s you. I am for freedom! It’s you and your people who keep Italy divided and oppressed.”

  But Czartoryski would not reply. He took several deep breaths through his nose, and settled his weight again, so that the stool creaked.

  Rafael folded his own arms and sat back moodily against the wall, chewing his lip.

  The man who should be dead wanted to sleep and he, Rafael, could not close an eye for a second! Why was Fabrizio such a fool—to throw away a single shot?

  38

  YASHIM kindled a small flame in the stove, and heaped it with charcoal. He wrote a note to the Italians to tell them Palewski had had an accident and was confined to his bed.

  When he had folded the note he leaned out the window and gave a piercing whistle that brought a boy running out of the shadows.

  “Elvan,” Yashim called down, when he saw the boy’s face like a moon looking up at him. “Can you run an errand? Take this.”

  He gave an address, and let the folded note flutter down into the street below. Elvan caught at it, missed, picked it up from the ground, and sped off.

  Yashim turned back to the kitchen. He added charcoal to the fire, put on a pan, and rolled in a couple of lamb shanks, with a short drip of olive oil, to brown. Now and then he gave the pan a violent shake.

  He took the pencil and on a second sheet of paper wrote down everything he had learned about the attack.

  He glanced at the shanks, gave them another shake, and peeled an onion, chopping it fine. Holding the lamb back with a wooden spoon, he poured the fat into a bowl, then dropped a knob of butter between the shanks. It sizzled and he added the onions.

  He reached out for various small pots and took a couple of cinnamon sticks, a few cloves, and a big pinch of salt. He pounded peppercorns and allspice berries into his mortar, and scraped them up and stirred them into the pan. They began to catch. A ladleful of water calmed the pot. He added a scattering of sugar.

  From a flat basket on the side he selected four plump pomegranates, halved them on a board, and scraped the jeweled seeds into the mortar using a metal spoon. It was a fiddly job. He added a little more water to the pan, crushed the seeds under the pestle, poured the dark, tangy juice into the pan, gave it all a stir, and clapped on the lid. He moved the pan slightly off the coals, and went back to his paper, wiping his hands.

  Who knew? he wrote. Paris? Midhat/Porte? P.

  He put a ring around the last two names, then drew another line and wrote: Where is the prince?

  He sat back, tapping his teeth with the pencil. There was something else he wanted to add to the list, but it would not quite take shape.

  Yashim sighed.

  In the end he simply wrote: Visitors.

  39

  YASHIM found the valide in a bad mood.

  “Tiens, Yashim. I told you I wanted the girl entertained, and now you tell me you have to go chasing all over Istanbul for some imbecile who has taken a shot at your friend. It’s not as if he was dead, is it? And what I want counts for nothing.”

  She rubbed her fingertips together irritably.

  “Natasha enjoyed your déjeuner sur l’herbe. It sounds rather cosmopolitan to me.” She snapped her fingers at her shawl. “What are all these Franks doing in Istanbul, Yashim? It didn’t use to be like this.”

  The valide was right, of course. Yashim could think of a number of reasons why more foreigners were in Istanbul, starting with the opening of the Ottoman market to British goods. The sultan’s decree placing all his subjects, Muslim or otherwise, on the same legal footing had emboldened the merchants and the bankers and stimulated trade, and foreigners washed in with the tide.

  “Many people in Europe,” he said, “want change. Their own governments resist it. People look to the sultan to help them.”

  “Like our Natasha.”

  “Natasha. Palewski. Even those Italians feel more free here than at home.”

  “Hmm. I hope, for their sake, they don’t overestimate our patience. Istanbul is not London. But talk to Natasha,” she added. “I must think what I shall write to the tsar.”

  Yashim found Natasha asleep on the divan in her apartment, a book in her hand. He watche
d her for a while: her features were beautiful.

  He sat gently on the divan.

  “Natasha.”

  Not quite awake when her eyelids flickered open, she saw Yashim and smiled and let them close again.

  He put his hand on her arm. “Natasha.”

  She was awake in an instant. “Don’t!” She snatched back her arm. “Oh, it’s you, Yashim. I’m sorry—I was dreaming.”

  She sat up, and hugged her knees. Her hair was mussed up, and the side of her face was red where she had been lying on it.

  “A bad dream?”

  “I was at home,” she said slowly. “Only you were there, too. You were throttling Petovski. At least—then I woke up.” She smiled. “Saved you from the gallows, I expect.”

  “By waking up? Thank you. Who’s Petovski?”

  She was slow to reply.

  “Our jailer. My parents despised him.”

  “Then I’m glad I throttled him.”

  She gave a little shiver. “He was a fat old man who came around to check that we didn’t have too much comfort, or that we had enough bread. To find out what we were reading, and dig around in our correspondence. He sent reports to the tsar. My father said he was just a minor functionary and the tsar never read anything he wrote. It just went to an office in Moscow and after a while they threw it all away. But of course, he decided everything about us.”

  “I see. It’s a shame to let him into your dreams, too.”

  She looked at him long and hard. “He’s not the only one, Yashim. I can’t—I can’t always keep them out.” She swallowed. “So. He used to bring me sweets, and try to sit me on his knee. I thought he was trying to find out things about my parents, hoping I’d tell him something he could use in his report. He’d pin me to his fat knees and pinch my cheeks.

  “I didn’t tell him anything, ever.” She bit her lip. “I used to wriggle to get away, until I found—that is, I thought—well, he liked that.”

  “Did your parents know?”

  She shook her head. “It began around the time my mother died. But once, Petovski and my father had a scene, a real row. It was about the sweets—and he’d asked me for things in return. My father told him to get out and never come back. But he did. We couldn’t stop him.”

  There were tears in her eyes.

  “Petovski said that I was grown up, and that from now on he had to interview me properly. I had to go alone.”

  She shook her head and stood up abruptly, and walked over to the window.

  “He’d given me so many sweets and I should give him something back.” She put her hand on the lattice, and spread her fingers. “What could I do? He said if I didn’t do what he wanted, he’d have Father sent back to the mines. And he could. Maybe he was nothing to the tsar, but in Irkutsk? It made me sick. There was nothing I could do except try not to let my father know. I was afraid he’d get angry again, and endanger himself. Maybe he’d have killed Petovski. I don’t know.”

  She was wiping her fingers, pulling them through her other hand.

  “Yashim, I’m sorry. It must have been the dream.”

  “Go on.”

  “Petovski had a yellow house outside the village, and an old woman who cooked and cleaned for him. But when I knocked it was Petovski himself who opened the door. He had put something in his hair, to make it shiny, and a sprig of heather in his buttonhole. The woman wasn’t there—he said it was her afternoon off.

  “It was just a log house, really, with a room on either side of the hall and a kitchen and scullery out at the back. He had a fire going in the bedroom, and a table with some tea things. Some cake. He said it was cozy, and he took away my muff, and my coat, and my hat. He told me he’d buy a little house and make me the mistress of it, and he would come and see me just as if we were married. He said it would be good for my father, and he would see to it that he was more comfortable and had the books he wanted, and French wines, and everything.

  “I said I couldn’t live on my own, and that we couldn’t be married. Something like that. So he said—” She swallowed. “He said it didn’t matter. Because we”—she began to dissolve into tears—“we could always have an interview there, at his house, when the cleaning woman was out.”

  “Interviews.” Yashim put a hand to her shoulder. She drew back and took a breath.

  “Interviews—without any talk. And then, afterward, he talked. He talked to say I mustn’t tell. I didn’t mean to, because it was so disgusting. Every week I had to go. After a while he stopped bothering to give me cake.” She clasped her hands together in front of her, and straightened her arms. “It’s not over.”

  “You mean—he still…?”

  “I mean, the story. I don’t know why, but I want to tell you. I have never been able to tell anyone else, before you.” She paused, and gazed at her hands in her lap. “The shame, Yashim. You try to block it out, but it’s not like that. The lie—the horror—they say it gets under your skin but it is your skin. You can’t block it out without hiding yourself. It’s like being locked out of the world.”

  “I know,” Yashim said, gently. “I know exactly.”

  “My whole body crawled with what Petovski did, and I kept it a secret. My father never guessed that anything was wrong, even though Petovski did do some of the things he promised—more fuel, sugar, that sort of thing. No French wines.” She gave an unhappy smile. “Every week … Sometimes he drank. Sometimes he was so drunk I would just leave him and come home. He wasn’t very important, he was just a little man.”

  In the cave, Yashim thought: in the cave, where cruelty met innocence and innocence was lost, there had been shame, and self-disgust at so much damage inflicted by little men.

  “I found that out. One day I came for my interview and when he opened the door he looked quite frightened. Instead of taking me into his bedroom, we went into the parlor, and there was a fire in there and he introduced me to two other men who were standing by it. They weren’t as old as he was, and they were better dressed.

  “‘Some vodka, Lev Ivanovich,’ the tall one said. He snapped his fingers and Petovski’s hands were shaking so much he spilled the drink on the tray.

  “One of the men drank the vodka, and then he said: ‘So this is your little secret, Petovski. Eh?’

  “Petovski was cringing in front of these men, and all I could think was that he’d been discovered, and would be punished.”

  Natasha had slipped into a monotone, staring straight ahead of her.

  “That was not their idea.” She shrugged. “The men were by the fire, and Petovski was trembling and groveling. In Siberia, everything is down to rank. Where you live, your pay, your chances of promotion, everything lies in the hands of your superiors. I don’t know how they found out about me—maybe they saw me visiting, or maybe he talked, Petovski. He was so often drunk.”

  She took a deep breath.

  “The man who had drunk the vodka, not the tall one, ordered me to undress. I didn’t understand. I wanted them to rescue me. I stood stock still until Petovski slapped my face and began to unfasten my buttons. ‘You do anything the gentlemen ask,’ he said. And then the tall one kicked him, and told him to go out to the scullery and wait.”

  Natasha looked at Yashim. “They never went to the bedroom, never took me there. And Petovski never touched me again. But every week I went to the—the interview. Sometimes one, sometimes both of them. Every week. I had to hide it, as if there were two Natashas, the one who looked after her father and taught at school, and another one, who went to those men…” She trailed off, biting her lip.

  “But after a few months I started to look ill. Even my father couldn’t help noticing. He got me goat’s milk, and eggs and meat. He did portraits, little sketches, for people in return. And after a while I started to look better. My skin grew clear, my hair was shiny again. I even put on some weight—I had become very thin, you see.

  “My father was pleased. He said the eggs did me good, and I believed it, too.”
r />   Natasha stared for a long time at the wall, without speaking. At last she said: “Am I frightening you, Yashim?”

  “Yes. Go on, if you want.”

  “You are the only person I have ever told.”

  “Your uncle Sergei?”

  “He had gone. They’d all gone. There was only my father, and it was easy to deceive him. I had been deceiving him for a year, or more. But of course, in the end, I found out what to do.”

  “You were pregnant.”

  She nodded, slowly. “One of them said he liked it like that. He liked me to be pregnant. But the tall one was angry. They argued about it. In front of me, as if I were a piece of furniture.”

  She twisted her fingers together. “There were old women in the villages—my father used to speak with them, about the flowers and the plants. They knew everything about them. For the spirit. And for the body.”

  She glanced up at Yashim. Her eyes were hard and her jaw clenched.

  “Even that—it was something else to hide. I don’t mean just the pain, because that was nothing. It passes. I mean—the ground was too hard. For three months I kept the bundle of cloth hidden in the outhouse. In the spring I dug a hole and buried it in the yard.”

  Yashim put out his hands. “Natasha.”

  She looked uncertainly at his hands and then, very deliberately, slowly, she lifted her own, and placed them on his. He felt them shaking. His thumbs slid across her fingers.

  They stood there, silently, holding hands.

  “Have you—escaped now?” Yashim asked at last.

  She shrugged. “The valide asked me to Istanbul.”

  “You must have—” he hesitated. “You must have many dreams.”

  She closed her eyes, and moved imperceptibly closer to him. “My dream, Yashim, is not to dream anymore,” she said.

  40

  YASHIM waited by a pillar, looking out over the cobbled yard of the Sublime Porte. Two officers in uniform stood to attention by the gates in the full glare of the sun. Several windows were open overhead; from one of them a man with long mustaches was scattering crumbs for the pigeons on the windowsill.