The Winter Thief: A Kamil Pasha Novel (Kamil Pasha Novels)

by Jenny White

  As soon as they left, Vera pulled the blindfold off and tried the door, but it was locked. On a small table beside the glowing stove was a glass of hot tea. She settled herself in the armchair and, warming her hands with the tea glass, tried to figure out who these men might be.

  Had Gabriel been detained and sent his allies to snatch her to safety moments before the police arrived to arrest her? She knew Gabriel had been right to worry about her carelessness and regretted acting like a child when what her husband had needed was a smart comrade-in-arms. She had struggled against the men, out of surprise and alarm, and dropped the pomegranate from her pocket onto the floor, although what message Gabriel could take from that she didn’t know. She checked her coat pocket for the tenth time. Except for a torn fragment, her passport was gone. It must have fallen out of her pocket with the pomegranate.

  The key turned in the lock. In spite of her coat and the proximity of the stove, she was shivering. The man who entered was tall, with an imposing head and a jutting nose. His cheeks were pitted with acne scars, partially hidden beneath a black, pointed beard and a precisely trimmed mustache. His hair was thick as an animal’s pelt, sleek and shiny. There was something military in his bearing, although his clothing was that of an ordinary civil servant. His movements were careful, tidy, as if minutely thought out. He stood just inside the door, staring at her with a slight tilt of the head as if he had recognized her and were trying to place her. He was not attractive, she thought, but there was a gross sensuality in his reddish lips, the too-luxuriant hair. She looked away, uncomfortable, and put the tea glass on the table, slowly and deliberately, as if not to disturb him.

  The man sat down in the chair facing hers and said something in Turkish. When she didn’t understand, he said, “Welcome, Lena,” in poorly pronounced Armenian. “My name is Vahid.” Behind a curtain of thick lashes, his eyes were dark amber. She could read neither concern nor threat in them, only a barely suppressed interest.

  It took her a moment to realize he thought her name was Lena Balian, the false name she had given the publisher. The kind old man would never have reported her name to the police, she thought. He must have noticed that she was being followed and asked his acquaintances to snatch her away to a safe place. Did these men work with Gabriel too? She didn’t think they were Armenian, despite Vahid’s few words of the language, so they must be socialists. Gabriel sometimes talked about the men supporting his mission in Istanbul. He had described one of the men as having a big face like a horse. Was this that man?

  She gave him a wavering smile. “Thank you.” She wasn’t sure for what.

  “You don’t like the tea?” He indicated her full glass.

  She shook her head yes. She liked the tea. She didn’t want to seem ungrateful. The intensity of his gaze made her anxious. Should she tell him her real name? She realized she had been playacting at politics. This now was real. She must make the right decision and not disappoint Gabriel again.

  “You were in danger, Lena. But you are safe here. And your friend, where is he?” the man asked, head cocked to the side, his eyes never leaving her face.

  What was she supposed to answer? She looked down at her hands.

  “We had hoped to bring him here as well. He’s also in danger.”

  Vera said nothing, thinking furiously. It nagged at her that he hadn’t said Gabriel’s name. Surely he knew him, one of the most famous socialist leaders in Europe. Vera began to shiver.

  “You are young, Lena,” Vahid said with a tight smile that was not reflected in his eyes. “Your friend appreciates you?” It didn’t surprise her that he didn’t know she and Gabriel were married. They had told only their close friends. She made a decision.

  “Which friend?” she asked. She saw the flash of anger but wasn’t prepared for the blow that knocked her from the chair. For a moment her vision went black. She crawled along the floor until her back was against the wall. Her mouth was filling up with blood.

  “You’re an intelligent girl, Lena. I know we’ll get along. You’ll see.”

  8

  AT FIVE O’CLOCK IN the morning, Yakup roused Kamil from his bed with a glass of strong tea. A gendarme waited in the entry hall to tell him that the rubble had been cleared from the front of the bank. It had stopped snowing. A thick fog wrapped the city in muslin and deadened all sound, so that the tick of their horses’ hooves on cobble was very loud.

  Through the mist, the bank looked undamaged. Across the street, the taverna was now just a blackened pile. Kamil walked up the cracked marble stairs into the bank. The gendarmes had set up scaffolding to keep the entryway from collapsing. It opened onto a high-ceilinged room decorated with blue tiles and lit by torches and lamps. Along a marble counter were the tellers’ cages and a woman’s section where the bank teller was obscured behind a wooden lattice. Benches ranged along two sides of the room. Except for the entrance, the bank seemed unscathed.

  The gendarme captain saluted Kamil, and Omar sauntered over. “About time. I’m almost ready for another breakfast.” He waved his hand around the room. “Not as bad as we thought.

  “The explosives were set at the entrance,” the captain explained. “It looks like a hasty job, meant more for show than damage.”

  “Was anything taken?”

  “We waited for you,” Omar announced, running his finger over his mustache. “The vault is downstairs. It’s open,” he added meaningfully.

  He led Kamil to an iron gate at the back of the lobby, beyond which narrow steps descended. Kamil pointed to a polished wooden slide that ran from the head of the stairs into the basement. “This must be where they send the bags of coin down to the vault.”

  “About ten years ago, they had a robbery here, an inside job,” Omar told him. “One of the clerks was sneaking into the reserves and replacing gold coins with silver. It was years before they noticed the adulterated bags. By that time he had stolen about eighty thousand British pounds. I heard that after that, they developed a new, foolproof security system. Wait until you see it.”

  At the bottom of the stairs a corridor led to a thick wooden door. It stood open, a key protruding from the lock.

  “This explains why the empire is bankrupt,” Omar said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “We don’t need a treaty to hand our wealth over to our European friends. They can just come in here, jiggle the lock, and take what they want.”

  They crossed the threshold and found themselves in a brick chamber with a vaulted roof, lined with shelves of ledgers. There was no gold.

  Omar pointed to two doors at the far end of the room, each behind a gate of iron bars. “Strong rooms. Well, at least that.”

  The outer barred gates could be opened with a key, but the strong room doors appeared to be of solid iron and had double locks. One of them was ajar. Kamil pushed it open and stepped inside. The air was musty and smelled of leather, ink, and old paper.

  The walls, floor, and ceiling were welded iron sheets. Wooden shelves held leather bags, chests, metal strongboxes, bundles of banknotes, and stacks of securities. One set of shelves near the door was bare, the floor littered with gold coins from a leather bag that had fallen and split open. Kamil picked up one of the coins and tossed it in his hand, then placed it on the shelf. “I wonder how much is missing.” Several European countries stored their assets in this bank.

  “I bet it won’t be pigeon shit. Do you think they were just run-of-the-mill thieves or that they’re going to use this money to raise hell? I’d put my money, if I had any, on raising hell. Why else the fireworks? Either way, our padishah is going to be very unhappy.”

  “‘Unhappy’ isn’t the word I would use.” Sultan Abdulhamid would assume a connection between the weapons smuggling and the robbery and put pressure on the minister of justice, who in turn would blame Kamil for not apprehending the smugglers in time to prevent the robbery. Kamil was certain Nizam Pasha would assign him this case as well. He often gave Kamil important cases with one hand and with the other und
ermined his ability to prosecute them, as if he couldn’t decide whether he wished Kamil to succeed or fail and so routinely prepared the way for both.

  “Can you imagine if they had gotten hold of the guns too?” Omar whistled. “It must be something big they’ve got planned.”

  “With this gold, they can buy ten shiploads of guns.”

  9

  IT WAS NEAR DAWN when Gabriel approached Bebek, a village north of the city on the Bosphorus shore. It had stopped snowing, and everything was muted by mist, the quiet punctuated by the raucous laughter of gulls. The muezzin called the faithful to prayer from a nearby minaret. A faint pink wash outlined the Asian hills on the far side of the strait, a band of tarnished silver against the black landscape. Gabriel came to a high wall and lifted a thick fall of ilex with numb hands, unmindful of the avalanche of snow this released onto his head and shoulders. He forced the gate and slipped into the barren garden of Yorg Pasha’s mansion.

  The guards were suspicious, but at Gabriel’s insistence they fetched Simon, the pasha’s secretary, who Gabriel had previously noted seemed never to sleep. Simon arrived in minutes, fully dressed in a crisp stambouline frock coat and tie. If he was surprised to see Gabriel, he gave no sign.

  Gabriel told him he had to see Yorg Pasha.

  “It’s six in the morning, Gabriel. The pasha isn’t available. Perhaps I can help you.”

  Gabriel considered making his request to Simon, but the matter was too important. “I need to speak with the pasha directly.” He didn’t trust either of them, but he had no one else to turn to.

  “That’s not possible. If this is in regard to business, I’m the one to speak to. The pasha doesn’t get involved in that sort of thing.”

  “It’s a personal matter,” Gabriel blurted out, unsure what other argument he could make to convince Simon.

  Simon looked at him oddly, perhaps with a glint of amusement. “You’ll have to tell me more if I’m to convince the pasha.”

  “Look, if this weren’t urgent, I wouldn’t have walked here in the middle of the night. All I want is ten minutes of his time. Please just tell him that.”

  Simon looked Gabriel over, considering. “Very well, I’ll tell him, but I promise nothing.” He pointed to Gabriel’s hands. “It looks like you have frostbite. I’ll send someone to look after that.”

  A servant arrived and brought Gabriel to a small marble bath, where he was instructed to place his hands into a basin of warm water. Gabriel’s entire body ached, but when he removed his hands from the water, the pain shocked him. Two of the fingers on his right hand had turned purple. The man returned with a lamp and looked over Gabriel’s hands. He pointed to the cuts on the fingers, which Gabriel had gotten from the brambles on his slide down the wooded hill, and explained in French, the shared language of foreigners in Istanbul, that if the cuts didn’t heal, he might lose those fingers.

  Brought to a room, Gabriel sat waiting, staring at his bandaged hands. The servant had given him laudanum to quell the pain, but the memory of it remained with him like the border of a large continent he was always just about to cross.

  He no longer trusted himself to know what to do. The room looked out over the Bosphorus, and as he stood there, the color of the sky gathered and thickened between the hills directly across the strait into a deep apricot stain so intense it seemed alive. A cat scrabbled to get in, but Gabriel was mesmerized by the glowing disk, still partially obscured by trees, that was rising from the Asian hills, increasing in brilliance until he was forced to look away.

  He pulled the curtains shut and went to lie on the bed. He tried to sleep but could not keep his eyes closed against the vertigo of visiting scenarios of his young wife in the hands of the secret police. He ceased to hear the scratching of the cat.

  Finally, a messenger came to tell Gabriel that Yorg Pasha would see him as soon as the pasha finished breakfast. While Gabriel waited, another scene played in his head. The chests filled with gold liras had been pushed up against his knees in the carriage, its leather window flaps drawn as it turned into Karaköy Square to mingle with the evening traffic. An enormous blast sounded behind them. He was tempted to open the flap but could not risk exposing himself. After they had passed through the wooded hills north of the city and were unloading the chests, he had asked his driver, Abel, about the explosion.

  “It was dark,” Abel responded. “I don’t know.”

  Abel was a member of the Istanbul cell. Gabriel planned to give him and his sister, Sosi, who had helped get the keys to the vault, enough money to disappear or travel to the commune in Karakaya. Once the chests were unloaded, Abel had taken him back to the city, dropped him off, and then disappeared. The carriage would be needed one more time—or so he had thought—to take him, Vera, and the gold to the ship that would transport them and their cargo to Trabzon. From there they would travel through the mountains to Karakaya.

  A decade of political organizing, his dream within reach, and he was lying in a gilded room wondering whether his moment of weakness in marrying Vera would destroy everything he had worked for.

  They had robbed the bank for gold to buy tools and building materials, livestock, more land, and rifles and pistols to replace those lost when their shipment of weapons from New York had been impounded in Istanbul’s harbor.

  The commune’s proximity to the Russian-Ottoman border was a risk. The Russians might try to extend their territory again, as they had only a decade earlier. At the end of that war the Ottomans had ceded Artvin, which was less than a day’s travel from Karakaya and the commune. Gabriel and the settlers thought that the unstable dirt tracks winding through the mountains in place of roads and the vertiginous drops and long screes on either side would keep away the Russians with their heavy artillery. Still, the hundreds of pioneers that Gabriel envisioned for New Concord needed enough firepower to hold off a battalion of invading infantry.

  The Russians weren’t the only danger. Without gold, without weapons, the community would starve or, defenseless, be slaughtered by the Ottoman authorities, who would feel threatened by a system with no privileged leaders and no distinction between rich and poor. None of the members of the commune were peasants, although several had grown up in the countryside and others had studied modern agriculture and animal husbandry. All would receive weapons training. If they got through the first year, word would spread, and as more people joined them, the commune would become self-sustaining. He had an image in his mind of white homespun cloth drying on a line before the restored walls of the monastery. He saw his sister lift one of the sun-soaked sheets and walk through into shadow.

  Gabriel rose from the bed and moved the curtain aside. The light reflecting from the snow blinded him momentarily, but then he saw that the morning was well advanced. There was no sign of the cat. The gold was out there, he thought with satisfaction, just a few meters away beyond the frozen garden. When he first arrived in Istanbul, Gabriel had asked Simon’s permission to store some supplies in the pasha’s vast stables. After the robbery, he had simply added the chests from the bank, well camouflaged, to the jumble of other chests and supplies he was accumulating for his trip to the east. As long as the gold was safe and within reach, there was a future.

  Gabriel tried the door to the room, but it was locked. He balled his fists and pounded on it, ignoring the pain that blazed through his hands, but there was no response. There was still Vera. He had to find his wife.

  10

  OMAR TRIED THE DOOR to the second strong room, but it was locked. “Well, at least they didn’t rob this one.”

  “I wouldn’t make that assumption,” Kamil corrected him. “They could have gone in and then locked the door again. They appear to have had the keys. None of the doors were forced.”

  Omar nodded.

  “We’ll need an account of what’s stored in these rooms,” Kamil told him. “I’m surprised there aren’t already bank officials here. Weren’t they notified?”

  “I was busy with the fir
e, getting people out. Maybe the Karaköy police sent word.” He called over one of his men. The policeman was young, with the face of a much older man. His eyes were serious and attentive. “Rejep, go ask Chief Muzaffer where the bank officials are.”

  “The keys to this room might still be here,” Kamil suggested, looking around. He set two of the gendarmes to search the bank systematically. They came back with handfuls of keys taken from various offices. None of them fit.

  Rejep returned, red-faced. “Chief, Chief Muzaffer said to tell you…” He hesitated, and Omar bellowed at him, “Just tell me what that rat-faced excuse for a policeman said. I’m not going to kill the messenger.”

  “Yes, Chief,” Rejep rattled off. “He said that if you want to be the cook, you have to also peel the onions.”

  Omar turned back to Kamil and translated. “No one has told the officials, although you’d think they could smell their bank burning even in the suburbs. Rejep, find out who the top officials are and where they live.”

  “Just a minute,” Kamil interjected. “The central cashier is a Frenchman named Montaigne,” he said. “The comptroller is British. Swyndon is his name, I think. There’s a third official, a German, but I don’t know him.” He had met the bank officials several times at social events. Kamil remembered Montaigne as a narrow-eyed man who tippled champagne. Swyndon had a leonine head and a loud voice. He generally could be found in a gathering holding forth on some obscure subject, like the best way to hunt tigers, and tended to be the center of attention of a group of admiring ladies.

  Omar gave Kamil a surprised look, as if he had suddenly remembered that Kamil was a pasha and not a simple ex-soldier like himself. “The addresses,” he reminded Rejep.

  The policeman began to move off, but Omar called him back. “And keep track of what the Karaköy police find out. Talk to the neighbors and people in the restaurants around here yourself. Find out what they saw.” He explained to Kamil, “I only trust my own sources.”