The Baklava Club: A Novel (Investigator Yashim)

by Jason Goodwin

  The young kadi went very white when he saw the corpse.

  “This is a crime of Nazarenes,” he said, as the orderlies maneuvered the body onto the stretcher. “It is not in our imagination, such a violation of a woman. There is no way a Muslim could have done this.”

  Yashim, who had been looking for jewelry or money, stopped his search for a moment.

  “Say that again.”

  “A Muslim could not have done this. Many other crimes, yes. I have seen many bad things. But this kind of killing? I will not believe it.” He shrugged. “She was a Nazarene, and she died at the hand of one of her own. Come, we will leave this to the orderlies.”

  In the main room the kadi opened a window and stood looking out into the court.

  Yashim prowled the room, opening the drawers of the chest, running his fingers along the shelves. He could hear the men arguing in low voices through the door.

  “What are you doing, Yashim efendi?”

  “Looking for her jewels.”

  “She doesn’t need them anymore,” the kadi said. He gave Yashim a thin-lipped smile. “You saw her wear them?”

  “Once, yes.”

  “Probably the killer took them,” the kadi said. “Perhaps that was why she was killed.”

  “Ghika could have taken them.”

  “Ghika, the Italian men. All these sorts of people love money.” He stood at the window patting his hands together. “I have been wondering, Yashim efendi, if this is strictly any affair of mine. My concerns are with the faithful, not with Franks.”

  “But this is your district,” Yashim reminded him. “Your jurisdiction.”

  “These people, these unbelievers, come and go,” the kadi said. “I don’t mind telling you, this sort of inquiry doesn’t look good. It takes me away from my people, and gives them a—a—” He bunched his fingers together and shook them in the air. “A wrong association.”

  Yashim looked around from a stack of bottles. “You mean—you won’t investigate?”

  “It will be long, it will be in many languages I do not understand, among people for whom I feel—nothing. Do you see? On the one hand, I am a young kadi, at the beginning of my career. Who knows?” He looked up into the sky. “But on the other hand, the old ones watch me all the time. They think me inexperienced. They would think I am like the others of my age, who are Muslims on the outside but Franks inside. Those men who read Frankish books, and study how to dress and talk like giaours.”

  He leaned against the windowsill, silhouetted against the daylight where Yashim could not read the expression on his face.

  “In this business, this shocking business, the old men and my superiors would see only this. The giaour kadi! The young man who runs around for giaours! Sling the mud, that’s the proverb. Even if it doesn’t stick, the stain will remain.”

  Yashim stepped up to him. He had found nothing in the flat. “I understand that a kadi follows justice, above all else.”

  “Of course, of course, I was not forgetting justice. That’s what we all seek, isn’t it? But, Yashim efendi, among the giaours I am like a dog, who can bark but not talk.”

  He laid his hand on Yashim’s shoulder. Yashim sucked in his breath. “It’s sore. The inflammation.”

  “Yes, I forgot.” He dropped his hand but his voice remained soft and low. “I don’t say you are a Frank on the inside, Yashim efendi, because you’re not. You are a Muslim, and a Turk. I see that about you. But you know the ways of these sorts of people, hmm? Their talk, how they live, that sort of thing. Yes?”

  He put a hand to his breast and bowed, smiling. “So we will have the Franks arrested, and also this Ghika, as soon as any of them appear. This is my job, and no one will think me a giaour if I am swift, and act without favor. Let them go to prison. You, my friend, must gather the necessary evidence—keep it simple, I need hardly add, we don’t want the judgment to involve many hours, and foreign speeches. Simple evidence. If it’s the Greek, if it’s the Italian—pshht!” He shrugged. “One of them did it. Maybe all of them, together. You know how these people are, working together, plotting and such. So that way we are swift, and not afraid to show all men are equal. I’m glad we can do this.”

  “We work together,” Yashim echoed.

  “Exactly.” Either the kadi missed the irony in Yashim’s tone, or he preferred to ignore it. “I will provide men, to set a trap. If those giaours—those Franks, or the Greek, turn up here, my men will pounce.”

  “And if they don’t turn up?”

  The kadi waved a hand. “I’m sure they will. By all means look for them if you can. Meanwhile, I’ll put two men in downstairs.”

  The orderlies emerged from Birgit’s room with the stretcher.

  “Take it down,” the kadi said. He turned to Yashim. “I’ll have her sent to the Catholic cemetery beyond Taksim.”

  Yashim wondered if Birgit was a Catholic. He had a vague idea that the Danes were mostly Protestant, like other northerners. Doherty might know, if indeed it mattered where you were buried, or how the rites were observed, once you were dead.

  It would matter to her people, he supposed. Her mother and father, the brothers and sisters she might have left behind, a family which no one in Istanbul knew anything about; friends and neighbors in a faraway country.

  They followed the stretcher bearers downstairs. Birgit’s corpse was covered by a sheet.

  “I’ll start by looking through Ghika’s room,” Yashim said.

  The kadi nodded, and hurried out.

  It took Yashim less than a minute to find the jewelry: it had been carelessly thrust under the mattress of the divan. There were several silver bangles, a string of pearls, and an earring that matched the one he had found upstairs, which Ghika must have missed. If Ghika had killed her he would have had time to hide the jewelry somewhere safer.

  When he had pocketed the jewels he scanned the room again. He had found a bottle under the divan, and he set it upright on the small table. Otherwise there was little furniture, nowhere to hide anything. He squatted down and patted the floorboards one by one. In the far corner, beyond the grimy window, he felt movement.

  The board lifted easily. The nails had been cut off on the underside, and in the cavity below, Yashim found several hundred silver kuruş, wrapped in a dirty cloth. He put it back where he had found it, let the dingy curtain fall back into place, and went out, closing the door.

  56

  “CZARTORYSKI was lifted off the street,” Yashim explained as he sat with Palewski in the drawing room. “Birgit, who is romantically attached to the boy who wants to overthrow the Pope, has been murdered. The boys have disappeared.

  “Is there any connection? That’s what I can’t make out. On the face of it, yes, obviously: Czartoryski and the Italians are liberals, whose common target is the settlement made at Vienna almost thirty years ago. A settlement that locks both their countries in an iron grip.

  “But then, as you said yourself, the Italians aren’t really serious, are they? What did you call them? The Baklava Club?”

  Palewski acknowledged the remark with a mirthless snort. “And Birgit didn’t care about politics.”

  “Birgit, no.” Yashim ran his fingers through his hair. “I was such an idiot to provoke Ghika. He’s the only one who could possibly say what happened last night. I—I was enraged, sickened. Stupid.”

  “It’s done, Yashim. And Ghika will come back. For the money.”

  “I hope you’re right. He’ll need to drink.” He told his friend about the bottle beneath the divan.

  “Revolting,” Palewski said. “I hate drunks. It’s what puts me off Doherty.”

  “You were the one who befriended him.”

  “Mea culpa. And I introduced him to the Italians.”

  “Yes. He liked them.”

  “Liked them? Doherty’s one of those who’ll go anywhere for a swig. They had the champagne.”

  “And why is he in Istanbul?”

  “As far as I can make out h
e’s come to ransack the Patriarchal Archives. Hunting for old documents. I have a hunch, based on speculation, prejudice, and various hints he’s dropped, that he’s looking for anything that might bolster the Pope’s claim to territorial dominion in Italy. Something like the Donation of Constantine, only more plausible.”

  Yashim looked blank.

  “You never came across the Donation of Constantine? Big thing in its day. The emperor Constantine divided the Roman Empire into an eastern and a western empire, when he founded his own capital here, at Constantinople. The city of Constantine.”

  “I know all that.”

  “So, several centuries later the popes found themselves struggling against the German emperor to be top dog in Europe, arguing over which of them had the right to appoint the bishops and collect the tithes. The Vatican produced a musty old parchment showing that Constantine had handed Europe—the western Roman empire—over to the popes. That was the Donation of Constantine. It shut the Germans up, for a few moments. It wasn’t until the fifteenth century, when it was all old hat anyway, that Lorenzo Valla proved it was a forgery. He analyzed its Latin, and it wasn’t current in the fourth century. Good bit of detective work, in fact. Egg on the pontifical tiara, and all goes quiet.”

  “So it was just a piece of wishful thinking?”

  “Yes. Unless, of course, Constantine did make the donation, and the Vatican just couldn’t prove it.”

  “Because they couldn’t put their hands on it?”

  “Exactly. And there have always been rumors that other forms of the donation do exist, confirming the Pope’s control of western Europe. They can’t be in the Vatican Library, obviously, or we’d have heard about them. After 1054, of course, the schism between the Catholic and Orthodox churches was irrevocable. The Orthodox church would have kept anything to the popes’ advantage to themselves. The Greeks hate a schismatic more than an infidel. ‘Better the sultan’s turban than the bishop’s miter,’ as they always said.”

  “It’s very ancient history, though,” Yashim said dubiously. “This donation.”

  “Don’t underestimate its importance. A foolproof donation would come in rather handy, when the Pope’s being assailed by all those liberals—like Giancarlo and his friends—who think he should concentrate more on God and less on Tuscany and Rome. That, I suspect, is why Doherty is in Istanbul. He’s ferreting among the Latin documents in the second library of Christendom, after the Vatican. The Patriarchal Archives.”

  “He’s found what he wanted, then. Isn’t he going back to Rome?”

  Palewski nodded.

  “When did he arrive?”

  “Three weeks ago. Shortly before the fourteenth. He reminded me of the date at the time, celebrating the Christian victory at Lepanto—it’s actually in the mass,” Palewski said thoughtfully.

  “A lot has happened in those three weeks,” Yashim said. His glance fell on Palewski’s writing desk. “He sat there, you know, writing you a note. The Italians were all here—and all your Czartoryski letters were in the desk. The whole plan.”

  “Bah! He’s just an old drunk. And he’s an Irishman, Yashim. He sympathizes with the Poles.”

  Yashim stood up. “I need to think,” he said. “I’m going to walk.”

  Palewski called him just as he was going out the door. “Yashim! You can’t walk around like that. You’re covered in blood, and your shirt’s torn.”

  Yashim looked down at his shirt, as if seeing it for the first time. “All right. I’ll go home and change.”

  57

  YASHIM’S landlady put her head out the door as Yashim went by.

  “There’s a gentleman waiting for you, efendi. A kadi. I said he could go in, I hope you don’t mind.”

  “It’s all right,” Yashim said. “Would you bring me some hot water, hanum efendi? I need to wash.”

  He went upstairs, expecting to find the young kadi with new information. Perhaps he had changed his mind, and wanted the case? It was more likely he’d decided to drop it altogether.

  But when he reached his flat, it was not the young, ambitious man who sat on the divan fingering his prayer beads, but the old kadi from Taksim.

  Yashim greeted him politely, and offered him coffee.

  “No, thank you, efendi,” the old man said peaceably. “I just came by to hear your thoughts. If you will forgive me. I’m not used to this sort of work.”

  He noticed the blood on Yashim’s sleeve and raised his eyebrows. “You, on the other hand, seem very experienced.”

  “You’re right,” Yashim said, with a slight bitterness. “Murder, again. Someone tried to get me, too.”

  “I am sorry.”

  Yashim gave him a wan smile. “Would you mind, kadi, if I washed my arm? I need to change.”

  “Not at all. Perhaps we can talk in the meantime.”

  There was a knock on the door and the landlady came in with a brass jug. “Water for you, Yashim efendi. Kadi.” She put the jug by the washstand. “What is that? Blood? Your shirt is ruined. Tsk, tsk. Come, give it to me. I’ll see what we can do with it.”

  She helped him off with the shirt: Yashim found he could not lift his arm above his head.

  The old kadi peered at his wound. “It’s a nasty cut. You should have a stitch.”

  Widow Matalya nodded. “He’s right, Yashim efendi. I’ll come back with some things. Like the old days,” she added cheerfully, thinking of her husband, the sipahi cavalryman.

  Yashim poured the water into the washstand and began to sluice his arms.

  “I’m afraid I haven’t given the case much thought,” he confessed. “His shoes were good, but there are too many cobblers in the city. I did wonder if the paper might throw up some sort of lead.”

  The kadi nodded. “I’m glad you say so. It took me much longer to think of that.” He took a notebook from his pocket and shook a scrap of paper from its leaves. He smoothed it on his knee. “You wouldn’t believe how much paper there is in Istanbul. I took it to the stationers’ bazaar, as a matter of fact. Rag, they call it. Yellow rag.”

  “It’s common?”

  The kadi wagged his head slowly. “Yes and no. For people who so respect the written word, we don’t make very much paper. We have beautiful paper for imperial firmans, Korans, and works of calligraphy, it’s true, but the ordinary types of paper mostly come from abroad.”

  “Like this yellow rag?” Yashim dried himself on a towel, dabbing it gently around the wound.

  “Strangely enough, no. This is made in the Meander Valley, by a Greek. To make a lot of paper you need to build a big mill by a river, and put a great deal of money into it. This Greek, Anton Staviopolis, came over from Chios after the troubles there. Now he makes many kinds of paper, including this yellow rag.”

  The widow Matalya pushed the door open. “Now, Yashim efendi, I will sew you up.”

  Yashim sat on the edge of the divan, where the light was best. “It’s interesting, kadi. But I don’t see that it gets us too far, knowing only the maker.”

  The kadi tilted his head. “As a matter of fact, it gets us farther than you might imagine. They don’t sell this paper in the bazaar. Do you know why, Yashim efendi? It’s contracted.”

  “Contracted?”

  “This will sting, efendi. Hold tight.”

  “Yes, contracted. I will talk to him, hanum, and keep his mind off the stitching. Staviopolis found a market for his paper before he built his mill. He talked to people here in Istanbul, and they gave him a good idea. A special paper, a single buyer, and all contracted. That’s what it means. Someone signs a contract, and pays him money before he even starts making paper. Maybe even before he has built his mill! That must be how these businessmen operate, I suppose.”

  Widow Matalya pursed her lips, and drove the needle through Yashim’s skin.

  “Very likely,” Yashim said. “So who buys his paper? Ow.”

  “Two more,” said the widow.

  “Can you guess? Who uses a lot of paper these
days?”

  Yashim squeezed his eyes shut: the stitching hurt. But the old kadi was right—the questions kept his mind off the pain. “I’d have said the newspapers. Or the Porte?”

  The kadi nodded. “But there are many newspapers, and only one government. Staviopolis persuaded the Porte to buy his paper instead of some foreign make. But it wasn’t cheaper. Do you know how he managed it?”

  “I daresay he sent the officials some boxes of mastic, and a lifetime’s supply of lokum.” Mastic, the raw ingredient of Turkish delight, was the bedrock of Chios’s prosperity.

  The kadi chuckled. “Maybe. But he also promised the Porte that in return for money and some tax advantages, which would allow him to set up his mill, he would ensure that the paper was specially made for them. How would they know he was telling the truth? He’d make it yellow. Nobody but the government could use that color.”

  “There,” said the widow Matalya. “It’s done. I had to make the stitches quite big, but you should have come to me sooner. Now we must keep the wound clean.”

  “Yellow rag,” Yashim murmured, as his landlady began to loop his arm in bandage. “Which suggests your clerk worked for the government. That makes sense. Of course, there’s a lot of government these days. All those new departments.”

  The kadi wagged a finger. “When those new departments were created, Staviopolis thought they would use his paper, too. Some of them did. Some of them didn’t. Perhaps he couldn’t get them enough mastic?” The kadi chuckled. “Some of them insisted on having their own supply. The so-called Department for Religious Affairs, for instance, uses green paper. Quite a respectful touch. Staviopolis himself provides it.”

  Yashim smiled: the Department for Religious Affairs was heartily despised by traditionalists. “You could write an essay on the subject.”

  “Perhaps I will. An essay on the absurdity of human vanity. Yes, that might amuse someone. In the meantime, the yellow paper is still used exclusively by the older offices of state. The office of the grand vizier. The office of the foreign ministry.”

  Yashim felt a surge of admiration for the old kadi, who had done such patient footslogging.