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

by Jenny White

  “As you command, Chief.” The policeman turned to go.

  “Rejep,” Omar called out again. “Make sure you write it all down. The magistrates like fat reports.” He winked at Kamil.

  They climbed out of the basement into the smoke that still filled the lobby. A crystal chandelier hung from the ceiling. Pieces of it lay splintered across the floor like a spill of diamonds. The tellers’ stations were behind cages of gilded wrought-iron bars. Bars that had kept no one out, Kamil noted grimly.

  Beside him, Omar huffed, “Why bother blowing anything up when you have the keys? If they hadn’t made all that racket, the theft might not have been discovered until morning.”

  “Probably they meant to kill the guards. They might have recognized them.”

  “Don’t you think blowing up the building is an exceptionally elaborate way to kill a few guards?”

  “Have you spoken to the surviving guard?”

  “He wasn’t in any condition to talk last night. They took him up to the Austrian infirmary. I hope he’s still alive. From what I saw, the burns looked bad.”

  The sun was rising, flushing the sky orange, as they strode up the hill to the Austrians. Nuns with broad white wimples tacked across the unpaved yard like sailboats, carrying baskets of laundry, buckets, and trays of food between the two-story wooden house that served as their residence and a former barracks they had turned into an impromptu infirmary. As one of the wimples moved inexorably in their direction, Omar fell a step behind Kamil and muttered, “Allah protect us.”

  “From what?” Kamil scoffed. “Nuns?”

  “Women,” Omar responded with a growl. Kamil smiled, knowing how much Omar, despite his gruffness, doted on his wife.

  “I am Sister Hildegard,” the nun announced loudly in passable Turkish, then paused to give her visitors the opportunity to state their business. She tilted her head to the side, which made the entire starched wing of her headpiece tilt as well. Another solid-looking expanse of starched linen extended over her bosom. Her robe was blotted with blood and other fluids.

  “Bulletproof,” Kamil heard Omar comment sotto voce behind him.

  Kamil explained that they were looking for the wounded bank guard. Sister Hildegard nodded once, then swung around and led them to the infirmary.

  A line of beds stretched down both sides of the cavernous stone room. Between the beds a row of coal-filled mangal braziers exuded warmth, but the room was still chilly. An iron chandelier holding dozens of oil lamps hung from the ceiling and cast delicate shadows across the walls, the beds, and their occupants. Kamil heard groans and the keening sound of someone crying. He felt a deep pity for the featureless forms wrapped in white bandages that inhabited the beds. A novice who was tending the braziers jumped to her feet when she saw Sister Hildegard.

  “Suzanna, bring our guests some tea,” Sister Hildegard told her.

  Kamil nodded toward the patients. “Have you identified the burn victims yet?”

  “Most of them. Their families heard about the fire and came to look for them. Those that didn’t find their loved ones here went on to the mortuary.”

  Omar clucked his tongue in disapproval. “Such needless pain. If you’re going to kill someone, just shoot them.” Sister Hildegard flashed him an unfathomable look.

  The bank guard’s body was invisible under a casing of bandages, but his face was burned red, the skin blistered along one cheek. His lips were black and his eyes squeezed shut. He seemed unaware that they were beside his bed.

  Omar leaned close to the guard’s face and said softly, “Fuat, tell us what you saw, so we can go get the bastards. I’ll bring you back their left ears.”

  The guard’s lips twitched. He opened his eyes and, after a few hoarse attempts, managed to speak in a whisper. Kamil leaned in to hear.

  “The bank closed at five. Just after dark, a carriage pulled up. Monsieur Swyndon came out of the bank with a man I hadn’t seen before. They took two big chests from the carriage and carried them inside, one after the other.”

  Omar threw Kamil a puzzled look. “Swyndon was there?”

  “Monsieur Swyndon is the comptroller. He often works late, so I didn’t think anything about it. About a half hour later, they carried the chests back out.”

  The guard closed his eyes again and breathed heavily. “I was lucky,” he said, his voice straining. “I didn’t inhale the fire. I threw myself to the side. What about my mates?” His eyes focused on Omar’s. No one responded and Fuat closed his eyes again. “Kismet,” he whispered. “Allah knows everything.” A tear trickled from beneath his eyelid. Omar and Kamil looked away.

  After a few moments, the guard continued. “The chests looked heavier going out, so our captain offered to help, but Monsieur Swyndon said no.”

  Kamil picked up a glass and, holding the guard’s head up, dribbled water between his lips.” What did the stranger look like?”

  “Tall. He had a cap on and a scarf around his face, so I couldn’t see much. He wore regular shoes, not for the snow. I thought he was a customer. Only the very poor or the very rich walk around in shoes in the snow, poor men because they have nothing else, rich men because their feet never touch the ground.”

  Omar chuckled. “I’ll have to remember that. I bow before your philosophical mastery.”

  The guard looked up at Omar to see if he was making fun of him, then, satisfied that the chief was genuinely impressed, stretched his scabbed mouth into a rictuslike grin.

  “Then what happened?” Kamil prompted him.

  “They went back inside. Then the stranger came out and left in the carriage. The driver was in and out too, helping carry the chests and other stuff.”

  “What other stuff?” Omar asked.

  “He went in with two heavy bags.”

  “Did he bring them out again?”

  The guard thought for a moment. “I don’t remember.”

  “So Swyndon stayed in the bank?”

  “I didn’t see him come out, but there’s another door down the street. Haraf was guarding it, but he got caught in the explosion.” Kamil saw the guard struggle to contain his emotion. “He had come over to ask me if I would be his son’s sponsor at his circumcision. That’s the last thing I remember.”

  Omar took down the guard’s address and the names of the other guards and promised to notify their families.

  They walked down the row of beds toward a table where the novice had placed a tray of tea and pastries. “Well, now we have our top official robbing his own bank,” Omar announced.

  They passed a shelf lined with blackened objects, scorched and scarred by fire. Each was neatly labeled with a number tied on with string. Kamil stopped, intrigued, and called Sister Hildegard over. “What’s all this?” he asked.

  “Those are things we found on the patients. It helps family members identify them. Do you have any idea what this is?” She reached into a cabinet, pulled out a partially melted object, and handed it to Kamil. “You can see why I keep it out of sight.” Kamil cradled the medal in his hand. It was a gold starburst decorated with diamonds. A bit of scorched blue ribbon still clung to the back.

  “Allah protect us,” he said in a soft voice. It was an order just like the one Huseyin had been wearing for Elif’s portrait.

  “Do you recognize it?” Sister Hildegard asked, picking up the alarm in Kamil’s voice.

  “It’s a royal order, but I’m not sure which kind. My brother-in-law, Huseyin Pasha, has one. But I’m sure he’s not the only one who does.” Sultan Abdulhamid used royal orders to reward the loyalty of his top men. “There’s no number attached to this.”

  “We found it in one of the carts that had carried both dead and wounded. It’s heavy. It must have slipped off the body. We have no idea who it belongs to.” She added, with a sympathetic look, “I’m sorry. Was your brother-in-law injured?”

  “I don’t know.” Kamil was already walking back toward the row of bedsteads, followed closely by Omar. In the first bed,
the patient’s breathing was labored, each breath accompanied by a faint bubbling sound. Of the face, Kamil could see only the eyes, closed in sleep or exhaustion.

  “We know who this man is. But three are unidentified,” the nun explained, “the ones with a green or red cloth tied to the bed. The red one is a woman. But several more seriously injured patients were moved to another hospital with special facilities. The foreign embassies already took their people away.” She shrugged. “They think their medicine is better.”

  “Where?” Omar asked.

  “The German hospital, probably.” Sister Hildegard rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands and Kamil saw that they were red with exhaustion. “Oh, you mean the badly injured ones,” she said. “Eyüp Mosque hospital. They have a burn specialist there.”

  Kamil stood over one of the beds marked with a green cloth and regarded the swaddled figure that lay there. Thick black hair curled from the head. The figure was slim, even under the carapace of bandages. The man in the adjacent bed was too short to be Huseyin. The coals in the braziers hissed. The smell of carbolic barely masked the stench of pus, blood, and urine.

  “May I keep this?” Kamil asked Sister Hildegard. “If it’s not my brother-in-law’s, I’ll return it.” The nun nodded her assent, and Kamil slipped the medal into his pocket.

  Omar followed him out into the cold. “Do you want me to go to Eyüp with you?”

  Kamil shook his head no. They waited for the stableboy to bring their horses.

  Omar tucked his hands under his arms and stamped his feet against the cold. His breath formed a white cloud before his face. “Swyndon either went along with the robbery and took off, or he was coerced and then eliminated. But then where’s his body?”

  Kamil tried to focus on what Omar was saying, but his mind was full of Feride’s anguish if she learned that Huseyin was either dead or so terribly injured that he had been unable to tell anyone who he was. “We couldn’t get into the second strong room,” Kamil suggested.

  “You mean you think the manager might be in there?” Omar was skeptical. “That makes no sense.”

  “Why not? What better way to get rid of a witness?”

  “For all the thieves knew, the bank would just unlock the door the next day and let him out. And if he’s dead, why bother locking him up?”

  “You have a point,” Kamil admitted.

  “Better to check, though. Thieves aren’t always the smartest of Allah’s creations.”

  THE AUSTRIAN infirmary was just a few blocks above the bank, so they instructed the stableboy to follow with their horses and waded down the hill through ankle-deep snow. Kamil saw movement behind the windowpanes as residents peered into the street. The air felt scrubbed clean by the storm. The stove fires had died out during the night, so the noxious smog had dissipated. Istanbul’s chilled inhabitants, fresh from sleep, were stacking kindling and smudging their hands with coal and ash, shivering until the new fires caught, and gazing in wonderment out their windows at the accumulated snow. Snowstorms weren’t unknown in Istanbul, but they were rare.

  When they reached the bank, Kamil shouted at the gendarme captain to bring some men to the vault. Kamil picked up a brass weight from a scale, pushed it through the bars of the gate, and banged on the door of the locked strong room. “Hello,” he called out in English. “If you’re in there, make a sound.” He waited but heard nothing. He knocked again and repeated his message. Again they waited, and again there was only silence.

  Omar shrugged ostentatiously. “He’s long gone. We give the Franks salaries the size of Mount Ararat and still they rob us blind. Europeans are about as trustworthy as weasels in a larder.” Seeing Rejep come down the stairs, he asked, “Have you got the addresses?”

  “Yes, Chief.” He handed Omar a piece of paper. “I found out about the keys too. The central cashier has the key to the main vault and the barred gates. The assistant director and the comptroller each have one key to the double locks on the strong room doors. You need all three keys at the same time to get into the strong rooms.”

  “Fine,” Omar grumped. “but have you got anything useful?”

  “There’s only one set of keys,” Rejep added triumphantly.

  “Well, fuck a donkey,” Omar exclaimed. “Can you imagine? One of the managers wanders out the door with his key and falls into the Bosphorus and suddenly the entire gold reserves of the empire and half a dozen countries are unavailable.” His voice was thick with incredulity. “If that’s not crazy, then call me a donkey’s whore.”

  They contemplated the locked strong room. “What do you think?” Kamil asked the gendarme captain.

  “It would take a long time to break through that door by force,” the captain concluded. “It would practically take a military operation. It would be better to get a locksmith, although I don’t know anyone with experience in opening doors like this.”

  “Or a safecracker,” Omar said, smiling broadly. “I know just the man.” He sent Rejep to fetch him.

  Within half an hour, Rejep returned, leading a man who reached only up to Kamil’s chest. Despite his short legs and odd gait, he moved swiftly. A large growth on his back bent his head at an angle, but his face was handsome and confident. He wore a padded jacket and a leather satchel hung from his belt.

  “Hagop, my good friend”—Omar beamed—“we need your peerless skills.”

  “Well, Chief, we meet again. What do you have this time?”

  “We’d like you to crack this strong room.” Omar pointed at the locked door.

  Hagop coughed. “You want me to rob the Ottoman Bank?”

  Omar looked offended. “Of course not. We’re all representatives of the law here.”

  Hagop glanced at the policemen and gendarmes standing around the room. “Whatever you say, Chief.” He opened his satchel and spread out a variety of mysterious tools. He inserted a thin piece of metal into the lock of the barred gate, and within moments a latch clicked and the gate swung open. Hagop then turned his attention to the strong room door. He ran his fingers over every crease and rivet, then spent some time examining the lock. He finally turned to Omar. “This won’t be easy, but I can do it. The same deal?”

  “Same deal.”

  Kamil wondered what kind of regular deal a police chief would have with a safecracker, but he had learned that some things about Omar he was better off not knowing.

  Hagop asked for more lights. “Bring me some water, then get out,” he commanded. “I’ll tell you if I need anything else.”

  OMAR AND Kamil went outside to reclaim their horses. The morning sun had burned through the mist and the destruction was more evident. Crowds of curious onlookers milled about the street. A few men were picking through the charred remains of the taverna.

  Omar called over one of the gendarmes. “Get those men out of there before they break their legs.

  “There’s one thing I don’t understand,” Omar said, placing a restraining hand on the neck of Kamil’s horse. “If you need three keys to get in, where did Swyndon get the other two?”

  “That’s what I’m hoping he’ll tell us.”

  11

  VAHID SANK INTO THE leather chair in his new office. Akrep occupied a large stone villa near the outer perimeter of Yildiz Palace, not far from the forest. He treasured the thick walls, the solitude, the secluded corners of his new realm. Mounted on the wall behind him was a matching backdrop to the chair, the framed leather padded and tufted into large diamonds like a quilt. He understood the need for certain trappings to induce respect and obedience. He had had most of the other furniture removed so that the high-ceilinged room seemed even more imposing. Two straight-backed chairs were placed before his desk for visitors.

  In a locked room in the basement he kept a bloody sword. Vizier Köraslan’s only son had stabbed his best friend with it in an act of rage over a woman. Vahid had spirited the friend’s body away, and it was later discovered in the Belgrade Forest, where presumably the young man had been robbe
d and set upon by bandits. Vahid had arranged for some bandits to be killed by the police, just to put the minds of the city’s inhabitants at rest, as the forest was a favorite spot for outings. Vahid had also let the grateful vizier know that the bloody murder weapon with his son’s insignia was in a safe place and that he had paid a witness to the murder to be quiet. That the witness didn’t exist was immaterial. It was the perfect solution. Vizier Köraslan could continue to lie to himself about the nature of his vicious son, and Vahid had been promoted and given this building to run Akrep.

  Vahid instructed his assistant not to disturb him. He brought out Rhea’s hairpin and placed it on his desk. The tines were silver, shaped to conform to the head. It was crowned with a spray of rubies, each framed in gold and attached by a tiny chain to the crest. He held it up against the light so that the rubies spilled from the comb like a sparkling waterfall. An expensive pin. How had Rhea acquired it? Her father owned vineyards on the Aegean coast and sold his wine by the barrel. He knew Rhea was—had been—her father’s favorite, but he was unlikely to give the youngest of his six children a valuable ruby ornament. It was the sort of thing you gave a wife. He thought about his own father, who had never given his mother a kind word, much less a gift.

  Vahid ran his fingers over the tines. He should have been the one to give Rhea this gift. Instead, just like his father, he had demanded everything but given her nothing. She would have married him if he had given her jewels like this. Women always responded when you gave them what they wanted. But he had never been able to understand what it was that Rhea wanted.

  “I respect you, sir,” she had said in a voice so warm that he was convinced she liked him. They met every Saturday afternoon in the private room of a café overlooking the Golden Horn. There she let him touch her golden hair, the shafts of it flexible between his fingers. He held her dimpled hand with its translucent pink nails. Once she let him guide her trembling head onto his shoulder. Her hair smelled of lemons.