The Baklava Club: A Novel (Investigator Yashim)

by Jason Goodwin

  There was no harm in feeding birds. On the contrary, it was a meritorious act, a kindness. Yashim heard a clapping of wings, and took a deep breath.

  Perhaps the man with the mustaches had limed the window sill?

  “Do you expect a reply, Yashim efendi?”

  A door opened on the court and a chaush in yellow livery jogged by, carrying a message. At the gate he saluted; the officers acknowledged him.

  Yashim had encountered cruelty before; had been its victim, when his mother was murdered and he had been pinned down, trapped struggling and screaming in the cave.

  He remembered the soft hiss of his mentor, years later: mentor, tormentor. “The eunuch.” He’d blotted out the cruelty, moved on; rebelled, finally.

  He swayed, as if he stood at the edge of a dark abyss.

  “Efendi? Are you all right?”

  Yashim blinked. Natasha’s story had dimmed his vision. He saw design in simple gestures, cruelty in gentle faces.

  “I’m sorry. What did you say?” There was the courtyard, in the sun, and here was a secretary.

  “I wondered if you expected any reply, Yashim efendi.”

  He saw a young man wearing the fez and the stambouline, with a gentian in his buttonhole. He was one of those modern young men, undoubtedly fluent in a foreign language, who had joined the service since Yashim’s day, without moving through the traditional palace schools. The gentian signaled ambition, Yashim suspected, rather than romance.

  “Possibly. I’ll wait.”

  When the secretary had gone, an old man in slippers and a fez emerged from a basement staircase onto the courtyard, dangling a tray of coffee cups from his finger. He crossed the courtyard and pushed open a door and disappeared.

  Yashim thought of Natasha’s bundle, of the grave she’d dug in the thawing ground.

  A thin gray lizard zigzagged down the pillar and sped off across the stones.

  “Yashim efendi? The pasha would like to speak to you.”

  He followed the young secretary upstairs, to the creak of his leather shoes.

  The secretary knocked at a door.

  “Come!”

  “Yashim efendi.”

  “Very good. You may leave us, Orhan.”

  The door closed. Midhat Pasha was standing by the window, erect in his black tailored coat, with tightly curled gray hair cut short and pince-nez on his nose. He looked at Yashim over them.

  Eventually, Midhat Pasha removed his glasses and tapped them on a paper he held in his hand.

  “Bad business, young man.”

  “Yes, my pasha.” Yashim was not sure how much he should reveal he knew. It was supposed to have been a perfect secret, but now …

  “Ambassador Palewski has been shot.”

  “Hmm?”

  “He had Prince—”

  But Midhat Pasha raised his hand, dangling the wire spectacles. “Tsk, tsk. If you know, so be it.”

  Yashim bowed. He had known Midhat Pasha for many years. Almost twenty years, when as an unhappy youth he had been taken into the palace school. Older than the others, wounded in body and in mind, he had found a friend in the pasha’s only son, a boy almost as reckless as himself. Yashim was the older boy, still working through the agony of his castration and his mother’s murder, but Bayezit at seventeen simply chafed against the demands of school life.

  He was not clever like his father, Midhat, who was carving out a career for himself in the palace administration. Nor was Bayezit by any stretch of the imagination beautiful, as his mother was said to be. He was strong as an ox, bored to tears by his lessons. Anxious, too, to live up to the example set by his illustrious father, who was already by then considered an expert on foreign affairs, and had pulled strings to enroll his son in the schools.

  “Can’t you help Bayezit at all?” Midhat had asked Yashim once, in exasperation. “He’s a lump of granite. Languages! Recital! Logic! They wash off him.”

  Yashim had repeated what Bayezit himself always told him, that he should like to be a soldier. Bayezit, Yashim had found, had all the military virtues. He had courage and immense physical strength, a well-developed sense of loyalty, and an openness that inspired confidence in the people around him. He had only to speak, and the other boys listened. They laughed at his efforts in class, but they respected his big hands, his honest judgments.

  Midhat had set his heart on having his son in the same service, tripping along the corridors of power, following in his own footsteps—maybe giving him the support that only a son could provide. But Bayezit’s grades were shocking; even with Yashim’s help, sitting up at night going through his French vocabulary, slipping him answers in class, patiently taking him through the suras of the Koran until the words had mashed into a meaningless babble of sound: even with this encouragement, Bayezit had seemed likely to fail his graduation. Midhat had finally given way, and agreed to let the boy try soldiering.

  He joined a mounted artillery unit. In an army infested with appointees and placemen he had risen quickly on his own merits. He had the makings of a first-rate soldier when he was killed, three years later, struck by a ricochet when the Russians besieged the Shumla Pass in 1828.

  Hence the “young man”: in Midhat’s eyes, Yashim was the friend of a man who had never grown old. The boy who survived, too: he read it always in Midhat’s eyes.

  “Ambassador Palewski will pull through, inshallah,” he said. “No sign of the—other.”

  “What does that mean, no sign? You’ve been working on it?” Midhat Pasha sounded surprised. “Who instructed you?”

  “Palewski is a friend,” Yashim explained. “I didn’t need to be instructed.”

  “So this—ah, guest, whom we have been expecting,” Midhat murmured doubtfully, twirling his spectacles. “He never came?”

  Yashim read a flicker of hope in Midhat’s eyes. He shook his head. “He came, pasha. They were together, at the port. And then—then, Palewski took a shot. The guest disappeared.”

  “Disaster.” Midhat passed a hand over his eyes. “Disappeared, you say? Disaster. It’s very sensitive. For your friend, for us, for—the other one you mentioned.” He rubbed his fingers on the bridge of his nose, and began to mutter his thoughts: “Discretion, yes. Obviously. But speed. A quick solution, hmm?” He fussed with his thoughts aloud, it seemed to Yashim. “By Friday? You’ll need men.”

  Yashim shook his head. “If I need them I’ll ask for them. Right now, if there’s any chance of a solution, we must work in secret. The more noise we make, the worse the outcome might be. Don’t you agree?”

  “By Allah,” said Midhat, laying his spectacles on the desk, “this is a mess. Our own resources are limited. Carry on with your investigation, but report to me. I will consult with the sultan.” He sighed and shook his head. “Altogether, a mess.”

  Yashim bowed. It wasn’t a wholehearted endorsement, but it would do. Midhat Pasha said their resources were limited.

  Informers? Watchmen? Army officers? To search Istanbul for a vanished prince, who else did they really have, except Yashim?

  41

  AFTER they had wandered through the bazaar, out through the court of the Bayezit mosque and to the Süleymaniye, which rivaled Ayasofya, Yashim meant to give Natasha coffee. But when he smelled the meat sizzling on the spit he realized they were hungry, too.

  “Please sit down, effendi, hanum. Ayran? Umit—fetch ayran for our guests! Skewers—one, two, or three?”

  The cook picked up three skewers, threaded with tiny cubes of meat, and presented them across his arm, like swords.

  “How hungry are you, Natasha?”

  Natasha raised her eyebrows. “Is it lamb?”

  “Only the liver. Two?”

  The cook laid four skewers on the grill, jostled some others into better position, and whipped out three plates, which he began to pile with bunches of coriander and parsley.

  “Fresh salad! Fresh for you,” he declared cheerfully, putting an onion on his block. With a dozen swift str
okes he reduced the onion to dice, and swept them onto a plate. He split a lemon, drizzled it over the onion, and then scattered the plate with a handful of kirmizi biber, toasted pepper flakes.

  Yashim and Natasha watched quietly as their meal was assembled—the salad, the herbs, the tender pieces of lamb liver, the huge blanket of bread, thin and supple as fine leather, the ayran, a soothing yogurt drink. The liver was the speciality of the house—that is, there was no other: just liver, cut small and cooked with a hint of smoke.

  The man’s working rhythm soothed Yashim: it was part efficiency and part show, to reassure them and other passersby that the cookery was swift and well rehearsed. The plates came swooping to their table: the lamb, still sizzling on its spit, across a plate. Yashim began tearing at the thin bread, choosing morsels of meat and herbs, adding a pinch of onion, dabbing the little parcel into a dish of spicy red pepper flakes.

  Natasha watched him.

  “You eat too fast.”

  Yashim considered this. “I’m sorry. It’s force of habit,” he admitted. “On the street, at least, I take my rhythm from the cook.”

  “He’s fast.”

  “And methodical.”

  Natasha wrapped a morsel of lamb the size of a hazelnut in a sheet of bread and put it in her mouth.

  “You forgot the salad.”

  She nodded with her mouth full, and almost laughed.

  “Try it like this.”

  He made her a parcel of lamb and onion and coriander. “Is chili too hot?”

  “I can try,” she said.

  He sprinkled a little chili over the meat, and passed her the wrap.

  “I suppose Saint Petersburg, or Paris, is like this, too,” she said, gesturing along the street. “Ordered, and methodical.”

  “I don’t know Paris, but rhythm and order governs Istanbul, at any rate. From the kebab vendors to the water carriers.”

  “And those caïquejees bringing their boats to the landing stages without a bump.”

  “And imams watching the sky for stars, to time the call to prayer.”

  Natasha nodded, and bit into her food. “It’s better like this. Delicious.”

  After a moment, she said: “I don’t know why it doesn’t all go haywire, though. So many people, all having to do the right thing, at the right time.”

  Yashim smiled. “From time to time, it does, almost.” He told her about the eerie days that followed the elevation of a sultan, when time seemed to stop in its tracks. “Everything gets confirmed by the new sultan, bit by bit. The army and the guilds and the old taxes. And after a while, it resumes its normal rhythm. City life goes on.”

  He thought of Palewski, falling to the ground in a hail of shot. “It closes up again, like the tide,” he said.

  “A dog barks, the caravan moves on. It’s a Russian proverb.”

  “An Ottoman one, too! It ürür, kervan yürür.”

  “Sobáka lájet, a karaván idjót,” Natasha murmured. “But where does it go, Yashim? The caravan?”

  Her eyes met his.

  “I don’t know,” he said slowly, gazing at her. “Down the old road, I suppose. The well-worn track, year in, year out, that leads to—to the same place.”

  After a moment she lowered her eyes, and smiled.

  “The city of domes and spires, whose very streets are paved with gold.”

  Yashim had felt, for a moment, the tug of the caravan on the road itself.

  “Natasha—”

  But as he glanced toward her, a movement between the tables caught his eye.

  It was the hands he saw first: those huge, loose fingers curled around a length of burlap which the prizefighter was carrying at his waist. Yashim recognized his heavy shaven head, his rounded ears, and the lumbering delicacy of his tread. He seemed to swell into view, like a balloon: like a djinn, uncorked from his bottle.

  Yashim raised his head.

  The prizefighter stood like an ox, surveying the scene with bland disinterest. What he thought of Yashim’s entertainment, or of his Russian guest, could not be said: he might have been looking at a crate of fish, or a wrestling opponent. For Yashim was sure the man was a wrestler: he had the wrestler’s dainty way of standing, small feet, legs slightly bowed, deep chest.

  “They told me I would find you here,” he said.

  Natasha looked up in astonishment. Yashim nodded.

  “So you found me. There’s a message?”

  The man raised his hands. “I brought the gun.”

  It took Yashim a moment to grasp what he meant. “You brought a gun here?”

  The man gave that sound which Yashim had interpreted as a signal of amusement. “You weren’t at home, efendi.”

  “I’m sorry, Natasha. Where did you get this—gun?”

  “Some joker thought he could make trouble. He won’t no more.” The man’s features tightened very slightly in what Yashim suspected might be an effort at a smile. “He was had, efendi. The gun don’t work. Lovely to look at. It fires wide. He should have checked afore he started.”

  “Started what?”

  “Boh! Little guy, being tough. Nothing to do with you, efendi. We says, where d’you get it? Asked him a number of times, efendi.” He paused.

  “Very patient of you.”

  The big man gave an amused huff. “He remembered better in the end, he’d bought it off a man in the tavern. He’s promised us an introduction but it looks like the fellow’s gone off somewhere. How it came to be doing the rounds we’ll find out. The boss thought you’d want to see the gun.”

  “I am indebted to him,” Yashim replied. “What makes your boss think this is the piece?”

  The big man scratched a protuberant ear. “It’s logical, he says. There’s guns and there’s guns, efendi. This is one of ’em. Never seen its like.”

  He hefted the burlap tube. To Yashim it now looked conspicuously like a gun. He glanced at the cook, who was busy at his chopping board.

  “It’s light, some Frankish make,” the man said. “Maybe not so old, not like some of them old Janiss—” he stopped short, automatically swallowing the forbidden idea “—them old army guns you find in the bazaar. Lovely pieces, good range, even though they are old—but some people find them hard to fire, I’m told.”

  “Give it to me.” Yashim glanced anxiously around.

  The big man propped the sacking against the low table. Just like a gun, Yashim thought.

  “Thank you. Thank you, very much.” He gestured to the food on the table. “Can I offer you—?”

  The big man shook his head. “Not that it doesn’t all look very nice, efendi.” And he gave one of those tight faces that Yashim read as a smile, and which seemed to include the idea of his lovely companion, as well as the bread and lamb, cooling on its spit. Perhaps Natasha thought so: she turned a radiant smile on the visitor.

  “A dog barks, Yashim,” she said, when the man had clumped off down the street. “A man bearing a package? Highly mysterious.”

  Yashim seemed not to have heard her. She reached out and touched his sleeve.

  “And where does the caravan go now?”

  He looked up. “It goes, Natasha—” He paused. “There’s a friend I’d like you to meet. Or are you tired?”

  “Not at all. We Russians chirp like crickets all summer, didn’t you know that? And I’d like to meet your friend. Just first explain the mystery.”

  “As we go along, I will.” He stood up and put some money on the table. He would tell her everything that had happened to Palewski, omitting only the story of Czartoryski.

  “Woof!” She laughed. “Let’s go.”

  42

  “THE ambassador is in the drawing room, Yashim efendi. We made up a divan. He wanted to be moved.”

  “We’ll go up and surprise him,” Yashim said. “But in a few minutes I may need you, Marta.”

  “I am here, efendi,” she said simply.

  Yashim led Natasha upstairs. At the top he knocked.

  “It’s
me, Yashim. I’ve brought Natasha Borisova. Natasha, Count Palewski.”

  “Come in, do. It’s an honor, Mademoiselle Borisova. The famous Russian guest! Forgive me for not getting up. Yashim has told me quite a lot about you.”

  He was lying against the sofa cushions, wrapped in a dressing gown that Yashim recognized as the silk-embroidered coat he’d once persuaded the ambassador to wear to a palace reception—as he recognized the slight lisp that Palewski acquired when he drank spirits.* A quilt lay over his legs. He held out his hand over the back of the sofa.

  “Count Palewski,” Natasha murmured, touching her hand to his. She removed her bonnet and laid it on a chair. It seemed to Yashim that she was extravagantly pretty.

  “Do come and sit down. There’s not much room, Mademoiselle Borisova, but you may sit on my legs if you don’t mind. I can only offer you brandy or warm beer, and I recommend the brandy. It’s not as good as the stuff that wretched Doherty siphoned up this afternoon, but it is cognac. Do fetch glasses from the cupboard, Yashim, there’s a good fellow.”

  He winced as he moved his legs to let Natasha sit down. “Thank God, a pretty face—and conversation. No, don’t worry. Not my legs that hurt.” He let Yashim refill the glass that he held on his chest. “Nasdrovie!”

  “So Doherty was here again?”

  “Came to drink my brandy, I suspect. Gave me a lecture on Orthodoxy to cover up his obvious alcoholic designs. Marta aside, I haven’t seen a truly Christian face all day. Doherty and Dr. Millingen bleating about scars.”

  “I sent the boys a note,” Yashim said.

  “Yashim told me what happened,” Natasha said. “It must have been very frightening.”

  “’S nothing, my dear,” he said airily. “Line of duty and such. But what’s that?”

  He strained forward from his pillows, looking at an object Yashim had stood on the fireside rug.

  “Recognize this?”

  “It’s the Boutet. Finest fowling piece that ever came out of France,” he explained to Natasha. He ignored her look of surprise, as she glanced at Yashim. “Why did you fetch it up here, Yash?”

  “I didn’t. This gun was delivered to me about an hour ago. Natasha and I were having lunch. You’re sure it’s yours?”