The Baklava Club: A Novel (Investigator Yashim)

by Jason Goodwin

  Rafael glanced around again. Why not? He didn’t need to feel that he was being followed to keep his eyes open. He might run into someone he knew—that friend of Palewski’s, for instance, Yashim, who had shown them the ruined farmhouse. There would be questions, evasions, implications. Unforeseen complications. Better to buy his food and go, quietly.

  On the other hand, he’d promised Giancarlo an hour, and so far he’d spent barely ten minutes gathering everything they’d need.

  Rafael was drawn by the smell of roasting coffee to a small café that spilled out into a side street, close to the market. He did not mean to indulge himself. After all, Fabrizio was waiting, hungry, and it seemed disloyal to sit down, at peace, over a small aromatic cup filled with that rich and oily liquid, foaming at the brim. A little sugar in it, to calm him.

  But Giancarlo was canoodling with his mistress, and Rafael needed to kill time.

  He sat down on a stool, and the proprietor approached. But no sooner had Rafael made his order than he shot to his feet. Doherty! He had quite forgotten his promise to Fabrizio. What sort of wretch was he, to be thinking of his own comfort at a time like this!

  Of course, it would take him more than an hour to find Doherty, speak to him, and get back. What of it? Giancarlo would be grateful for all the time he got—and it wasn’t as if he’d be wasting their time, either.

  Nonetheless, he waited for his coffee, because he did not know how to cancel his order without a fuss. He fidgeted with the cup when it finally came, then drank it off in a single gulp.

  Giancarlo would not be pleased. After the hour with Birgit was up, Giancarlo would expect him back. He would have preferred to have the extra time in bed, with his girl. Rafael could see him pacing the apartment in a white fury …

  Rafael laid the cup back on the saucer with trembling fingers. Thank God he had stopped to think first.

  He took some money out of his purse and laid it on the table.

  Well, it would take him ten minutes to reach the apartment if he walked slowly. Maybe the hour would be almost up—and surely Giancarlo would understand that early was better, far better, than late.

  Then they could go together to the priest, if Giancarlo thought it was a good idea.

  64

  YASHIM wondered if he should return to Topkapi. Natasha would have had the news by now, crushing to her. He imagined her staring bleakly through the lattice, twisting her fingers.

  At the last moment he changed his mind. Who was he, after all, to intrude on her disappointment? To assume that she felt for him anything as much as he felt for her? As if the flowering of that shy, scarred Russian girl into a fierce lover, a bold and independent agent of her destiny, was in his gift. She’d found the man in him, stirred him, given herself to him—but how could she know how much that meant; how could he guess what it meant for her?

  “Do it.” She gave him what was hers to give: he was not like those terrible men in Siberia who demanded it.

  Natasha would come to him when she was ready: if she ever came at all.

  He went home. She was everywhere: on the bed, as the rickrack slipped slowly up her thighs; lying warm on the divan, drawing the curve of her hip beneath the quilt; standing beside him at the stove, amused, curious—beautiful.

  He dropped a cup on the floor and watched helplessly as it bounced and shivered into tiny fragments.

  He swept up the china, splashed his face in a basin of water, and washed his hands. Perhaps, he thought, she would come. She would send him a message and he would fetch her here.

  He sat quietly on the divan, and when he heard the tread on the stairs he almost blushed. But it was not—how could it have been?—Natasha. It was a chaush, with a note from the kadi informing him that an Italian had been arrested and jailed.

  65

  RAFAEL dragged his feet as slowly as he dared, and went into the house heavily, slamming the door.

  Ghika did not appear, so he went upstairs and knocked.

  When no one answered, he stood in an agony of indecision, before opening the door. “Ciao, Giancarlo! It’s me! Birgit, hello! I’m back.”

  He was relieved to see that they were in their room, and that the door was closed. He went to sit on the divan, and then decided that it was macabre to sit waiting silently for his friends to complete their amours, so instead he went to the wine cupboard and jingled bottles. He didn’t want wine himself, but Fabrizio had asked for some. He found a basket, and spent time carefully packing it with the food he had bought at market, and a couple of bottles.

  “A corkscrew,” he muttered, and went to find one.

  Finally he sat on the divan and watched the shadows on the wall.

  After a while he frowned, and stood up. What he had taken for shadows were dark patches on the wall, like thin paint. He did not think he had ever noticed them before, and he wondered if the apartment was damp. But what nonsense! It had not rained in weeks. First imagining he could reach Doherty and please Giancarlo at the same time, and now—imagining damp! It was certainly a great deal of stress, abducting people in a foreign city.

  “Giancarlo! Giancarlo!” he waited. “Birgit?”

  He was beginning to notice other things, not just the splashes on the walls. Like the shiny patch by the door, and the flies clustered thickly on the windowpane.

  “Giancarlo!” Much louder now. The silence echoed in the room.

  He crept to the door and listened. Not a word. Not a giggle.

  Without hesitation he banged on the door. He felt rather frightened, but of what he could not say. There was no reply, so he turned the handle.

  And peered inside.

  In place of two satisfied lovers, what Rafael saw was an empty room. The smell of blood was in his nostrils before he could give it a name, or identify the sight. The mosquito net was tangled on the divan, in a mess of wound-up sheets and heavy stains, and a cloud of flies rose from a stain on the floor to buzz lazily around his head.

  “Oh my God!” Rafael took a step back, and whipped around. There was nobody there. No Giancarlo. No Birgit.

  He pushed open the door to his own room. Everything was in order, untouched.

  His eyes went wildly around the room again. Now he saw the shadows as blood, and in the shadows, blood: across the walls, even on the windowpane. In the silence he could hear the buzzing in his ears.

  Rafael stumbled to the door. He took the stairs three at a time, pursued by an eerie, meaning silence that fluttered at his back. He flung himself across the hall and wrenched open the door.

  Outside he stood bent, taking in lungfuls of the warm Istanbul afternoon, his face dissolving into painful tears.

  66

  FOR Leandros Ghika the day had begun badly, and grew much worse. Worse, in fact, than he could have ever imagined.

  His immediate impulse, on leaving his flat so abruptly, was to find somewhere to lie low for a few hours. Accordingly he went no farther than the second tavern he encountered, down toward the port, assuming that even a halfhearted search might reach as far as the first. He had money in his pockets for raki, and so he drank raki, touching it with water to make it cloud.

  The man, Yashim, had caught him off balance, that was certain. He’d looked like nothing but he’d noticed far too much. First the blood on his slippers, then the knife: it was just Ghika’s bad luck he’d seen it coming. He might have killed him—and then, if he’d kept his head, he could have dumped him in the upstairs room, the empty one that wasn’t already full of blood, and who was to say?

  He ground his teeth and sipped the raki, unable to draw his mind away from the might-have-been, the perfect crime that never was. Not that he was a killer, but if he’d ever needed to kill a man that was the time to do it. He could have cleaned his shoes, tucked away the jewelry properly, and gone out. Gone to the tarts, maybe, and worked up an alibi.

  No one would have pinned it on him. They paid their rent, didn’t they? He was a respectable landlord. Whoever had done that to the girl would
have been copped for killing Yashim, in the end.

  Maybe he’d have told them himself who did it.

  A very ugly job. Shook him to his spine when he saw how it was, with the girl like that, spread-eagled. Spread-eagled on the bed—the way he’d have liked it with her, if she’d been a bit more … well, alive. Even dead he’d had a look, and that part upset him more than he’d expected it could. Put him right off, with the shock.

  His hands had trembled as he took up all the stuff she wasn’t going to miss and the killer hadn’t bothered to pick up.

  And on top of that shock to a respectable landlord, this Yashim bursting in and getting warm with his eyes on the slippers, and the knife. It wasn’t fair. Not fair.

  He mustn’t overdo it. Sip it slow, stay sharp.

  Easier said than done, though—hadn’t it all gone wrong? Instead of the perfect murder, he had the perfect fuckup—this Yashim only winged, when he knew about the slippers and would probably take only a few moments to prove it about the jewels. It’d look like Ghika had killed her for them. Worth more than all the rent. Five hundred kuruş, easily. He could kiss that goodbye. Yashim’d probably just take the jewels himself.

  He paid for his drink and went out. When he reached his own street he stayed in the shadows and watched. There was no one about. He was good at watching, and he gave it ten minutes.

  Had he given it five, and made a dash for the money under the floorboards right then, he would have got away with it, as he constantly reminded himself later on.

  After ten minutes, just as he had decided that the coast was clear, two watchmen with staves came up the street and passed within six feet of where he was standing. They went into the house, and they didn’t come out. Ghika waited for an hour, then two. He was tired, and the raki had begun to give him a thirst.

  Everything that happened to Ghika after that was a consequence of that first mistake. Had he waited just a few minutes less, and got his money out of its hiding place, he could have paid the tarts.

  As it was, they knew him. They knew him and he knew them and he took one and bedded down with her in a stinking little hole where the stains on the mattress reminded him of the girl who was murdered and made him break into a sweat. He fucked the tart; it would have looked odd otherwise. But it looked odder when he suggested staying, sleeping even, so he could do it over again later on. Ghika, twice in one night? He had to order some raki at their price, and drink it, too, to convince her it was worth her while.

  After that he tried to make the night last, stay awake, keep her going. He ordered more raki. It cost more after hours, she said, and he ordered it anyway, at fifteen kuruş the bottle, watching the puzzled frown on her ugly tart’s face. Then she said it was time to do it and of course Ghika couldn’t with the raki in him, and that screwed-up suspicious face peering down at him over her flat tits and sunken yellow belly. He remembered the lovely girl who was dead but whatever he said made the ugly one more angry and red so he took the rest of the bottle between his teeth and passed out.

  Which was when she found out that he didn’t have any money.

  She’d called the pimp. Together they went through Ghika’s pockets. For the liquor alone the bill amounted to twenty-five kuruş.

  The pimp took Ghika’s jacket and trousers, and the new slippers, and put them to account. The woman went to sleep. They would turn a profit, but it involved hassle. So the pimp and his chum carried Ghika through the streets and laid him facedown on the port road with an empty bottle tucked into each armpit, and left him there.

  The imam who called the morning prayer found him exactly as he had been left, and not long afterward the night watchmen flung him on a hand truck, and took him to the nearest jail.

  Ottoman justice was notoriously swift, but Ghika missed his appointment with the kadi that morning and went to the back of the queue. Swift as justice was, it was seldom quite as swift as the desire of anyone in an Ottoman holding jail to receive it. Ghika missed it because he was not awake to demand it; which turned out to be an advantage—if not to him, then to Yashim.

  67

  TOPHANE, on the Pera shore of the Bosphorus, was a tough area surrounding the old arsenal where the Ottoman navy built ships, and once imprisoned the galley slaves condemned to row in them; it was notorious for its grog shops and brothels and rowdy gangs of foreign sailors who stumbled through its narrow streets, searching for women and liquor and violence.

  Embedded in the hillside, the ancient Tophane jail seemed as much a geological formation as a building raised by human hands: a vaulted cavern that exuded the scent of sweat and stale air, like an entrance to the underworld; sailors in liquor felt the chill and passed with averted faces, lowering their voices. The jail had been in continuous use since Byzantine times; parts of it had sunk below the level of the street; its grime-coated carapace was haphazardly punctured by iron grilles through which a feeble light, and less fresh air, percolated into the holes beneath.

  When Yashim presented his letter from the kadi, a guard picked up a bunch of enormous keys. Beyond the first door, heavily barred in iron, torches flickered in sockets on the walls. The busy firelight glinted against the walls. They descended a few steps and followed a corridor of raw stone leading deeper into the building, where the fetid stench made Yashim’s eyes water; but it was the sound that made his skin crawl. Groans and lamentations reverberated tonelessly through the vaults with a soughing, rhythmic quality, like wind in the trees or the rasp of waves on a shingle beach. Ceaseless, remorseless, the long, deep echo of centuries of oppression, injustice, and outraged innocence amplified and blended by the prison’s dripping lungs.

  The miasma grew thicker as they penetrated to the farther cells. The clatter of their footsteps, the clank of the gate, or the jangle of keys seemed to lose their spark and drift into the backwash of monotonous grumbling, like the remorseless grinding of teeth, that filled the vaults. The stink of unwashed bodies, latrines, and disease blew over them as the turnkey unlocked an iron door, leading Yashim into a vaulted chamber, where a line of squat pillars was divided by heavy iron grilles. Between the pillars Yashim saw white fingers gripping the bars as the inmates struggled for air. Yashim put his cloak to his face to breathe.

  “I can’t speak to him here. Fetch him to the guardhouse.”

  The turnkey grinned and shook his head. “Here or nowhere, efendi. Move back!” He rattled his stave along the bars of the gate. “Move back!”

  Yashim went in, and the gate clanged shut behind him. The impression of crowding lessened somewhat, for most of the prisoners were at the bars, but the light from the corridor was dim and the piers cast huge shadows across the cell. He peered into the dark. Prisoners were lying on the floor, others propped up listlessly against the far wall. Someone was praying, kneeling on the ground; another man ran senselessly from one side of the cell to another, weeping.

  Yashim pushed farther into the cell. A man sitting by the back wall raised his arm to shield his face. Yashim took a step closer.

  “So they got you, did they?” he said.

  Ghika lowered his hand and looked at him through red-rimmed eyes, but said nothing. He was thinking that of all the bad luck he had suffered in the past day, this was perhaps the worst of all.

  “You went back,” Yashim said.

  Ghika shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Yashim considered him. It was hard to tell, but he thought he could detect the smell of liquor, sharp and sour.

  “What are you in here for?”

  Ghika averted his eyes. “Some bitch framed me, with the raki. Stole my clothes.”

  “I see. Lost your slippers, too? No, that’s right. You left them at the house. With the jewels you stole, and the money in a hole in the floor.”

  Ghika groaned. Tears squeezed out easily from between his eyelids. This wasn’t just bad luck, it was a nightmare. He could feel the executioner’s sword on his neck already.

  “You can keep it, efe
ndi,” he said. “It’s yours—but I beg you, leave me be.”

  “Where’s the Frank?”

  Ghika turned his eyes to the far end of the vaults, where Yashim saw a muffled figure cradling his knees. “He’s taken it badly,” he said, with a certain gloomy relish. “How could I tell he didn’t know?”

  Yashim went over to Giancarlo, recognizing his fair hair. The face that looked up at him was covered in dried blood. Both his eyes were swollen; one was gummed shut, and his lip was split.

  “Yashim!” he said thickly. “Thank God. It’s not true, is it, what Ghika says?”

  “I’m really sorry, Giancarlo.” He squatted down and laid a hand on the man’s arm. “Birgit is dead.”

  Giancarlo raised his puffy face again, and bared his teeth. “Dead? How? Why?”

  Yashim told him.

  Giancarlo seemed to wilt. He rocked back and forward, hugging his knees. “Ay! Ay! Ay! Is that—is that why I am here?” he asked at last. “Who would want—? You can’t think it was me?”

  “The judge may. When did you last see her, Giancarlo? After the baths, with Natasha?”

  “The baths?”

  “When Birgit came back from the baths with Natasha, were you there?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  It was impossible to read any expression in that battered face. “Where did you go? What happened to the three of you?”

  Giancarlo began to sob.

  Yashim laid a hand on his shoulder. “Giancarlo, the judge thinks that you killed her, or one of your friends. It doesn’t look any better if you can’t tell me where you were.”

  Yashim shook his arm. “Come on, man! Where were you all, while Birgit was dying in your own room? Why did you ever leave her alone?”

  Prisoners were staring at him, shuffling closer.

  Giancarlo’s shoulders heaved.

  “You must talk to me,” Yashim said grimly, “or it’s a judge who can’t understand a word you say, and wants you hanged.”