The Baklava Club: A Novel (Investigator Yashim)

by Jason Goodwin

  “Unless it’s Napoleon’s,” Palewski retorted. “Let me look.”

  He handed his brandy to Natasha and turned the gun over in his hands. “Mine, of course. I don’t understand. Midhat sent it?”

  “Midhat?”

  Palewski frowned. “No, I give up. I thought perhaps I’d somehow mixed up guns, or left this behind and forgot. Memory might be a bit shaky, mightn’t it, after all the recent excitement? But this isn’t the one I took shooting. This one’s the dud. I never took it out.”

  “Someone did.” Yashim told Palewski about the giant who had returned it, and Balamian’s hunch that it had been used in the port attack. “He hasn’t caught up with the man who sold it yet. But I think he will.”

  “Gets what he wants, does he, this Balamian?”

  Yashim pulled a face. “I would hate to be the one keeping secrets from him. You say this is the gun with the faulty mechanism. I take it you don’t remember when you saw it last?”

  “Of course I do. Well, roughly, anyway. About a week ago.”

  “Was it locked away?”

  “Locked away? How would I know? I suppose so, yes.”

  Yashim frowned. “I’d better call Marta.”

  “Yashim, you’re babbling. Is he babbling, mademoiselle, or am I going mad?” Palewski laid the gun aside and took the brandy. “Nothing to do with Marta, bless her. Your idea, Yashim—I took it to the bazaar as you suggested, to a professional gunsmith. You do remember saying that?”

  “Yes, but I thought—”

  “Whatever I said, Yashim, I took it to the bazaar. To be quite honest, I was interested in what they might say. I saw old what’s-his-name? Man with the patch, Milosevic, knows a thing or two about guns. I just meant to get an opinion, but you know what those people are like. Whatever he knows about guns, he knows a lot more about selling stuff—including his impeccable repair service. Fact is, he’d hardly taken it into his grubby paws before it was all stripped down and lying in pieces on his bench. Quite impressive, for a man who had never seen a Boutet in his life. I swallowed it. Not the gun, I mean. His line. Told me he’d have it right in no time, without a scratch.”

  Yashim slumped back in his chair. “You kept a receipt?”

  “I took one, for what it’s worth. Not much, judging by the way it turned up in your friend Balamian’s big mitts. It’s in the escritoire, second drawer down.” He patted Natasha’s hand. “I’m afraid this must be all very dull, Mademoiselle Borisova. Not quite The Arabian Nights.”

  She glanced at Yashim, and smiled. “Oh, The Arabian Nights … But everything’s new to me.”

  Palewski closed his eyes, and when he opened them he was looking curiously at Yashim. “You’re right, mademoiselle. It’s all very exciting. I only wish I could share your dispassionate enthusiasm for new experiences. I haven’t been shot for twenty-five years.”

  “I’m sorry, I—”

  “No, no. Let me feel your hands. Why, they’re cold! Brrr. Would you like a fire?”

  Natasha shook her head. “The brandy is lovely. They’re warming up already.”

  Palewski turned his head. “Any sign, Yash? Maybe the drawer underneath.”

  Yashim was by the escritoire with a packet of papers in his hand and a frown on his face. “These letters—about some visitor of yours. Have they been lying here all the time?”

  “Hidden in plain view, Yashim. Old trick. I had dispatches once, for Moscow—this might interest you, mademoiselle—”

  “It’s all in here, is it?” Yashim broke in. “The seal’s broken.”

  “Never sealed it, Yash. It’s just an old envelope I used, put all the letters in it together. I’m sorry, Mademoiselle Borisova—”

  “They’re not—” Yashim checked himself. It was useless talking to Palewski now.

  His friend was wrong if he thought he had secured all the letters in the envelope. When Yashim returned to the drawer he found one lying loose at the bottom. Beneath it lay the receipt he’d been looking for, from Milosevic the gunsmith for a Frankish gun.

  He pulled out the chair and sat down, staring at the letters. He half-heard Palewski telling Natasha a story about riding on Moscow, years before: ordinarily, Yashim would have wished to listen, for Palewski was wary of telling old tales. “Shoot me if you ever catch me reminiscing,” he’d once told Yashim. “Dull as listening to somebody else’s dreams. Which is what reminiscence is, I suppose. Old men’s dreams.”

  Palewski appeared to be laying out the disposition of troops in 1812, as the Corsican marched on Russia. Yashim frowned.

  “Forgive me,” he said. “There’s something I need to do—could you entertain Mademoiselle Borisova here for an hour?”

  “Don’t hurry back,” Palewski said.

  43

  AT the arms bazaar Yashim found men putting up the iron shutters, under the supervision of a stony-faced sheik leaning on a brass-tipped staff. Across the street, half a dozen brokers, or criers, drank their coffee. All day they had wandered the arcades of the bazaar, calling out prices on articles that had been pawned. By the entrance the hamals entitled to work at the bazaar were standing in a knot; farther off, leaning against the wall, or squatting in the dust, were a number of ill-fed Jews who picked up work as interpreters and runners.

  Yashim hurried inside. Like all bazaars it was a warren of alleyways and covered ways, bristling with antiquated muzzle-loaders, atavistic cannon, worn sabers, and curving knives—an armory that extended a near-mystical protection to the valuable treasure stored in basement safes. Istanbul’s fabled arms bazaar was more than a gallery of old weapons, blades, and guns: it was the city’s strongbox, too.

  Old people still called it the Jewel Bazaar, for it had been a jewel market long ago, built like a fortress to protect emeralds and rubies, turquoise and sapphires, from all the eastern mines. But the Ottomans treasured the jewels of war, too: encrusted daggers, octagonal-barreled carbines inlaid with ivory and ebony, scabbards of silver and velvet, etched powder horns. There were still emeralds and diamonds, but now they were part of an arms trade that valued beauty and utility together.

  In a city without locks, for the most part, people had started bringing their precious goods to the arms bazaar for safekeeping, or to put in pawn: at the bazaar you could always raise some cash.

  Yashim found Milosevic at his cubbyhole, closing the shutters.

  “Milosevic efendi?”

  “That’s me,” the gunsmith replied without turning around.

  “I have a receipt.”

  The gunsmith began taking in some fine old guns stacked against the wall, wiping them with a cloth. All along the passage men were closing their shops, and the air rang with the sounds of rifle stocks hitting the ground, and the clash of sabers as they were taken from the walls.

  “It would be better if you took a look at this receipt.”

  Milosevic sighed, and reached for the paper. “The ambassador’s gun?” He squinted at the paper. “Very fine piece, really priceless. A Frankish gun.”

  He nodded, almost to himself. “To be honest, no gunsmith in Istanbul could appreciate the craftsmanship better than me. They buy and sell guns like vegetables here. ‘Milosevic efendi, fix me this old gun, I beg of you.’ ‘Milosevic efendi, is this a good one?’ Pah! I do everybody’s work.”

  He looked down at the receipt and began to smooth its edges with his thumbs.

  “This, my friend, is no Montegrin jezail from your grandfather’s time, with an action made by the village blacksmith. Bam! Bam!” He mimicked a hammer thwacking onto the paper. “It’s a fine piece, delicate, many, many hours of work, and by an experienced artisan. Ah, well. The Franks, they win all the battles these days.”

  “Where’s the gun now?”

  “It’s in my workshop, efendi.” He gestured to a dark hole at the back of his shop. “You can’t expect a gun like that to be fixed overnight. Tell the ambassador that I am working on it, and I will call on him when it’s ready.”

  Yashi
m put a foot up on the step, and leaned forward. “I think it’s gone.”

  Milosevic looked baffled. “Gone? What do you mean?”

  “Three days ago it was used in an attempt to murder someone here, in Istanbul.”

  “It’s not possible.”

  The gunsmith turned and disappeared feet first through the hatch in the floor. After a few minutes his face reappeared, glistening with sweat.

  “I must talk to my son.”

  He clambered out of the hatch and brushed past Yashim.

  Yashim settled cross-legged on the mat in front of Milosevic’s shop. The gun had gone, and that was that. He was more concerned about the letters lying open in Palewski’s escritoire, for anyone to find. But anyone reading the letters could have seen the receipt for the gun, too.

  Milosevic’s son remembered the gun. He had been minding his father’s shop at the time. Someone came from the Polish embassy to ask about the gun that had lately been brought in. Young Milosevic could see that it was an expensive piece, and had made two assumptions, both of them, as it turned out, wrong.

  “I thought the gun was in for cleaning,” he said. He was stubborn on this point. He could not explain why he was so sure, except to say that the gun had lain alongside two others, modern types, which he himself had accepted for an overhaul the day before.

  Besides, the man who called was a Frank. As he kept repeating, the gun was a Frankish piece that belonged to a Frank. “With an ambassador, do you need a receipt?” he asked, with aggressive naïveté. He had parted easily with the gun.

  Yashim’s efforts to get a description of the man were largely in vain. Milosevic junior could not remember much about him, not at this distance in time, though he’d certainly never seen him before. Five days? You say only, but that’s a long time in this business. It’s a busy place. Young? He was not old, he was sure of that. As to the color of his hair, or his height, or the shape of his face, it was—with a shrug—normal. About medium height. He might have been fair or dark. Perhaps more dark than fair. A Frank.

  Didn’t Yashim know what a Frank looked like?

  “He’s young,” Milosevic said. He pinched the young man’s flabby biceps. “At his age, it’s all here—and not there,” he added, giving the young man a playful, but apparently rather painful, cuff on his ear. Young Milosevic shook his head and wondered if that would be all.

  “I’m busy, all the time. Like I say.”

  Yashim dismissed him and declined an offer to drink coffee, to Milosevic’s evident relief. “Nothing like this has ever happened before. I am trying to pass on my methods, and my skills, but it takes time. He’s not a bad boy, efendi. I have to say, in the end, I take some reassurance from your words.”

  “What words?”

  “You say someone tried to use the gun. It would not work, so that is good, no? Maybe Allah himself has chosen us to be the instrument of the criminal’s frustration. Allah be praised.”

  “Praise to him,” Yashim replied.

  Milosevic took this as an encouraging remark. “And better still, you have recovered the weapon. So in the end, no harm and a little good has been done, you see. It is kismet, is it not? We are merely made to submit.”

  Yashim had an impulse to poke the man in the eye. “I wish you joy of your son,” he said, thinking up half a dozen better retorts before he had reached the gates of the bazaar.

  44

  GHIKA sprawled fully dressed on the pallet bed, one side of his face pressed into the gray sheet. Two empty bottles lay on the floor, a broken glass and an empty jug, but the room no longer smelled of aniseed. It smelled of sour alcohol, like Ghika’s ragged breath: alcohol, and decay. A thin wire of drool spun from his lips to the sheet. Each time he snored, the wire shivered.

  It had been a night of drink, and fuddled memories of a girl with white-gold hair and breasts that curved like apples above a slender waist. The drink had brought her closer, at first, until he could almost touch her skin; but after that, it was only the drink.

  He opened his eyes. The pale daylight jabbed at them with knives; they seemed to bleed, red rimmed, filigreed with broken veins.

  Ghika groaned and wiped the side of his face with his hand. After that he lay still for several minutes, sliding back into a dreamless sleep to resurface again and again on waves of nausea.

  At long last he began to move. Very slowly he levered himself into a sitting position, one foot striking the bottle, which rolled under the bed. He groaned again, then belched. He swallowed some vomit, and clutched his chest as the bile burned. His ulcers whined.

  When he finally stood up he gave a grunt and flung himself back down on the divan, his leg in the air. A piece of glass was sticking out of the sole of his foot. He took a swipe at it, grimacing with self-pity, and managed to dislodge the fragment but cut his finger. He put it in his mouth.

  Ghika stumbled, trembled, groaned, and cursed as he floundered around the room, searching for water and sucking his wounded finger.

  At the sight of the raki bottle he pulled a face. The bottle winked back. Ghika stiffened and pursed his lips in disapproval. There was no call for such familiarity, not with Leandros Ghika. Respectable family, the Ghikas. Owned the whole house. Lost the furniture. Father dead.

  He dropped the pile of glass onto a table and picked up the bottle and set it on the table next to the glass. The other one, he remembered, had rolled under the bed.

  Going down there made his head hurt. He groped for the bottle, and pulled it out.

  It was not a bottle of raki. It was another shape. He stared at it stupidly for a few moments, then sniffed it. It smelled of starched coiffures and silk drapes and applewood chibouks. There was a little amber liquid at the bottom, too, and he drank that. It tasted of brandy. He mastered an urge to vomit, and felt slightly better.

  Brandy was too expensive for Ghika. He must have stolen it, he reasoned. From the men who kept the whore upstairs, the woman who shamelessly bared herself …

  He enjoyed that thought for a while. He’d stolen the brandy, found her alone in the room, alone … asleep … she’d been asleep, down on the divan the way he’d woken up just now, but naked … her rump … that’s it … buttocks … he parted her thighs and she stirred. Quick! Pressing her nape down onto the bed, he fumbled with his trousers … she was writhing now, yes … Not like those stolid lumps at the whorehouse but white and lithe and bucking—presenting her perfect rear, a little higher, that’s it … In! She was tight, and alive … He gave her little screams to scream, and then he stifled them with his hand on her neck as he pressed her down into the pillows.

  He wiped his hand across his face. It was a dream. It hadn’t been like that. One of the men—someone had given him the bottle. He could vaguely remember being outside in the corridor. A noise. The men, and someone—someone else.

  “Wha—wha’s going on?”

  After that he couldn’t remember. But it didn’t matter. He’d liked the dream.

  45

  IN time, everything and everyone drifts through a port. The merchandise, silver, bills of trade and exchange that justify its existence. Men, of course: stevedores, dockers, lightermen, merchants, inspectors, tax collectors, and sailors of every creed and color. There are port rats and prostitutes. Altogether they bring news—gossip from the hinterland, prices from abroad, new jokes, the latest disasters.

  So although the body was not discovered in the port, Balamian got to hear about it almost as soon as the kadi, in whose jurisdiction the man had died. It did not concern him directly, but he remembered Yashim, who had been brought to see him in the baths, and sent his man.

  Yashim had left his stew to simmer and gone down to Kara Davut to find the quince man coming up the road with a basket on his back loaded with big yellow quinces, set off against sprays of bright green leaves. The man solemnly unhitched his basket and helped Yashim choose four hard quinces, each with its spray of leaf.

  Back home, Yashim sliced each quince in half and cut out t
he cores. He pared them into slices, dropping them into the pan before they had time to brown. He ladled a little more water into the pan and set the lid on.

  He put the bright leafy sprigs in a small vase, and put it on the windowsill.

  He barely had time to settle on the divan and pick up the sheet of observations before there came a knock on the door. He opened it and recognized the huge man from the tavern, unsmiling.

  “The boss gave me a message,” he said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder. “They found a man dead, below the Frankish cemetery. Looks like he fell.” He shrugged, expansively. “The boss thought he might be yours.”

  Yashim knew exactly where the man meant: the old Catholic cemetery beyond Taksim, beyond the pest hospital and the old walls of Pera, where the ground shelved steeply down to the shores of the Bosphorus.

  “Thank you–and please, thank Balamian efendi for his solicitude. Is anything known about the man who fell?”

  “That’s the message.” He stuck a finger in his ear and worked it there, glancing around the flat. His enormous feet shuffled on the rug. Yashim raised his eyebrows.

  “It’s where the Franks go, don’t they, when they die? The old Genoese place. I went up myself once, as a kid.”

  With that unexpected confidence, the big man gave a short bow and clumped off down the stairs.

  Yashim glanced around his apartment. He checked his stew: the water was barely simmering, so he decided to leave the fire in, and let it die down of its own accord. He slipped his cloak off a peg, folded it over his arm, put on his shoes, and followed the messenger down into the street.

  At the Balat stage he engaged a caïque as far as Karaköy at the mouth of the Golden Horn; experience had taught him that rowers preferred their own stretch of water. From Karaköy he took another, gliding up the Bosphorus past the Tophane arsenal, and the port, which Balamian seemed to control, until they reached a small stage west of the sultan’s palace at Beşiktaş.

  It was well after noon, and the sun was hot on his back as he began to climb toward the Frankish cemetery. The land here was broken into a series of ridges, sometimes reinforced by masonry, and the buildings that had grown up on each broad shelf. The lane wound between them without direction. To his right the sloping ground above Dolmabache was dotted with the cypresses that always marked an Ottoman graveyard, fluting skyward like natural minarets. Many of its headstones were centuries old, veering crazily through neglect, smoothed to illegibility by years of wind and rain, some deliberately smashed in the rage that followed the destruction of the Janissaries almost sixteen years before. But the Frankish cemetery above was older still, consecrated when Pera was a Genoese colony battening on the Byzantine trade.