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

by Jenny White

  But she refused his offer of marriage, saying her father wouldn’t allow it. He then talked to her father, a man who could have used a powerful son-in-law. Her father put him off, once saying she was too young, another time that he did not yet have the money for a dowry. Vahid understood that Rhea’s father was afraid to refuse him, and he took comfort in that small hope. Lately he had put pressure on her father to hasten his decision. One of the father’s warehouses had burned, ruining a season’s production. Vahid wondered if Rhea had guessed the origin of the fire. Could that have been the reason she had refused to see him the past two weeks? He pressed his thumb against the tine of the hairpin with such force that it buckled. He could master men, he thought, but whenever he reached for love, it was wrested from his grasp.

  He opened a drawer and took out a small, sharp, and pointed knife, a bottle, and a latched box. He rolled up his sleeve, revealing a swarthy arm seeded with scars like grains of rice. He pressed the tip of the knife to the skin just below the crook of his elbow and for a few moments let the sting penetrate like a balm. His heart beat faster. Lowering the blade, he increased the pressure ever so gently, until he broke into a sweat, his eyesight blurred, and a cascade of pleasurable feeling washed over him. He removed the knife. He was breathing rapidly and his heart pounded. Carefully averting his eyes from the line of blood, he took a piece of cotton from the box, poured on alcohol solution, and tied it to his arm with a cotton strip. He rolled up his sleeve, flexing his arm to feel the sting. He put on his jacket, slipped Rhea’s hairpin in his pocket, and left without a word to his assistant.

  12

  DESPITE THE EARLY HOUR, Kamil rode first to Feride’s house. He had to know whether Huseyin had come home. Deep shadows beneath Feride’s eyes revealed that she hadn’t slept. She was dressed in the same gown she had worn at dinner the night before. Elif sat beside her on the sofa and held her hand. Kamil thought Elif must have stayed the night. He imagined the steep streets of Galata, where she lived, had been made impassable by the storm.

  Two anxious servant girls waited just inside the door. Glasses of tea and a plate of breakfast chörek rested untouched on the table beside the sofa. A fire roared in the grate.

  “Kamil!” Feride jumped to her feet. “What are you doing here so early?” She turned to one of the servants. “Tea, and bring some breakfast.”

  “I can’t stay long, Ferosh.” Kamil could see the tension around her eyes. The furrow that had appeared between her eyebrows after their father’s death had deepened. “Is Huseyin here?”

  “Has something happened?” Her voice was steady, but he could hear her anguish moving like water beneath a thin sheet of ice.

  He wasn’t sure what to tell her. In truth he knew nothing. “Do you know where he went last night?”

  Elif stood also, her slight figure in a crumpled shirt and trousers. Her feet were bare. She looked at him questioningly, not wishing to upset Feride further by asking outright.

  Kamil indicated with a shake of his head that he didn’t know, but there was a moment of understanding between them. She took a deep breath and put her arm around Feride.

  “I think he has a mistress,” Feride said, her tone brutally frank, as she pushed Elif’s arm away.

  “Nonsense, Ferosh,” Elif countered. “You’re jumping to conclusions.”

  Feride looked unconvinced, the pain evident on her face, but she grasped Elif’s outstretched hand.

  With a look, Kamil tried to communicate to Elif his gratitude that she was there to support his sister.

  “Does he often stay out late, Ferosh?” Kamil asked. “Has he stayed away all night before?”

  “He’s rarely away in the evenings without telling me where he’s going. A few times, especially in the last month, but he’s never stayed away all night without letting me know.”

  “What’s different about the past month? Did something happen? Have you had unusual visitors?” Or a fight? Kamil wondered silently.

  Feride thought, then shook her head. “Nothing out of the ordinary. Huseyin’s friends come and go, but I know most of them.”

  The servants appeared and set down two trays of hot tea, freshly baked bread and pastries, cheese, olives, and honey.

  “Business people? Tradesmen? Servants?” Kamil didn’t know what he was searching for. An alternative to death, he supposed, as an explanation for Huseyin’s absence. A business deal, a mistress.

  “I wouldn’t know. My housekeeper handles all of that.”

  They stared abstractedly at the food, but no one made a move to take anything.

  Elif spoke up. “The vintner came a few weeks ago.”

  “He comes once a month to take Huseyin’s wine order,” Feride said dismissively.

  Elif looked as if she might say something more but closed her mouth.

  “Tell me more, Elif,” Kamil coaxed.

  “They were in Huseyin’s study and…”

  “Really?” Feride exclaimed. “But he always sees tradesmen in the receiving room at the side of the house. What were they doing in his study?”

  “Huseyin was trying to convince him of something, but I didn’t hear what. I thought the man said the name Rhea. You were out, Feride, and I had come back for some painting supplies I left behind. I noticed the vintner’s carriage when I left, so I assumed it was him.” She shrugged. “But maybe it was someone else.”

  “Rhea.” Feride rose and walked to the window. She held aside the drapes and stared out into the gray shimmer of the day. “Rhea,” she repeated. “I’ll get hold of the vintner and find out what this is all about. They’re all the same, those Greeks,” she said, her voice breaking. “The women have no shame.”

  “You’re upset,” Elif responded, taking her arm. “I may have been mistaken. They might have been talking about a new type of grape.”

  Feride went to the desk in the corner of the room and picked up a piece of paper. “I sent a messenger to Doctor Moreno’s house. You remember him, don’t you, Kamil? He was a friend of Baba’s. They used to play chess together. He’s a surgeon at Yildiz Palace now. I thought he could find out whether Huseyin had been held up at the palace.” She handed Kamil a note. “Here’s his response. I know it doesn’t look good for me to be chasing my husband across the city, but I have to know.” She closed her eyes and shook with the effort of keeping her emotions under control, then opened them again. “Doctor Moreno is discreet.”

  Kamil remembered Doctor Moreno, a tall Jewish surgeon with graying locks that hung like women’s curls down either side of his face. He had long, graceful fingers that picked up a chess piece with as much delicacy as a scalpel. Moreno’s note said that he hadn’t seen Huseyin for several days and knew nothing about a business meeting the night before. He placed himself at Feride’s service and said he would make some inquiries and come by in the morning, but that she shouldn’t worry.

  Kamil wondered at the cavalier way men treated one another’s disappearances. It was as if every man was assumed to have a secret life and was expected to disappear into it from time to time without having to account for his absence. He hoped Feride was right. The tragedy of Huseyin’s keeping a mistress was nothing compared with his own worry.

  “Where does Huseyin go during the day?” Elif asked.

  “I don’t know. I suppose he must have an office at the palace. Do you know, Kamil?” Feride turned to him, a puzzled frown on her face. “I never realized until today how little I know about what Huseyin does when he isn’t at home.”

  Kamil wasn’t surprised. Muslim men of Huseyin’s class never sullied their hands directly with commerce but guided the acquisition of wealth and power by Christian and Jewish merchants from the lofty heights of a bureaucratic admiral’s bridge. They did business with the help of many informal agreements rarely recorded or shared with their fellows, and certainly not with their wives. “He has an office in the Great Mabeyn,” he said. “That’s the building at the palace where the sultan meets with his staff and visitors.” K
amil had seen Huseyin’s enormous office and staff, appreciably larger than his own, but had little idea what exactly his brother-in-law did there. Perhaps the gold medal had belonged to another loyal subject of the sultan’s, Kamil thought, and it was premature to tell Feride about the fire. His momentary relief left him ill at ease. He knew he didn’t believe it.

  Kamil took a sip of tea and encouraged Feride and Elif to eat something and then sleep until Doctor Moreno arrived. They both looked haggard. He saw in Elif’s face the shadows that had been there when she had first appeared on Huseyin’s doorstep after her harrowing escape from Macedonia.

  Neither woman had any appetite, and Kamil left them sitting on the sofa, waiting. What he wanted to do was ride directly to Eyüp and check the hospital for Huseyin. Composing himself with difficulty, he spurred his horse toward the bank official Swyndon’s house instead.

  AFTER KAMIL had left, Feride excused herself and went to her dressing room. There she opened an almost invisible door, painted white to match the wall. It led to a small, oddly shaped room that appeared to have been added by the architect of the mansion without a thought to function. Feride closed the door behind her. This was her space, where she could take off the social mask she was required to wear. The servants entered only to clean and keep the mangal coals alive so the room was always warm. Its single window looked out onto the top of a chestnut tree. She settled into a high-backed armchair. A footstool and a small table were the only furniture in the room. She watched the pink-breasted doves huddle on the ledge by the warmth of the slightly open window.

  She thought about the early days of her marriage. She had seen Huseyin twice at formal meetings set up by their families after he had made his intentions known. She had agreed, even though she had two other suitors. What was it about Huseyin that had attracted her? He had rudely looked directly into her eyes and then smiled. What had he seen there? She was shy, and people had mistaken that for submissiveness, an attractive quality in a bride. Only Huseyin had seen what she needed, when she herself hadn’t known. She blushed when she remembered their first weeks after the wedding, the mad dashes about the rooms. He had laughed and licked her up and down like a cat, and finally she had turned on him and bitten him with her small teeth. They had laughed until tears came. After that Feride had ceased to be quite so afraid, as long as Huseyin was beside her.

  She tried to imagine her husband licking another woman’s skin, but the image remained indistinct, a flickering shadow that presaged a darkness she knew she couldn’t bear. Worse was the thought that he would leave her, push her aside for a second wife. Or that he would die. For a brief moment, she considered that it would be better for him to die than to reject her, but at that the darkness descended. There was a frantic burst of flapping at the window as the doves fled, leaving behind a soiled windowsill.

  13

  KAMIL LEFT FERIDE’S HOUSE in Nishantashou and rode the short distance to the Swyndons’. He passed a small army of servants wielding shovels and brooms, clearing the streets of snow. Omar got out of a waiting carriage, and they walked together up the drive to Swyndon’s house. It was set on a hill in a terraced garden rimed with snow and afforded a spectacular vista of the Bosphorus glittering in the morning sunlight.

  Inside, the view was quite different—heavy draperies, a clutter of waxed furniture, and dark oil paintings. Mrs. Swyndon was a heavy-boned Englishwoman with beautiful gray eyes that regarded Kamil steadily while she absorbed the news of the robbery. Kamil’s English had the burnished pronunciation he had learned at Cambridge University, with an Oriental lilt.

  “My husband didn’t return home last night,” she confirmed. “That’s all I can tell you.”

  Except for tightening her grip on the wool shawl around her shoulders, Kamil thought she showed little reaction to the news that her husband had been seen at the bank during the robbery but was now missing.

  An English neighbor, fetched by Mrs. Swyndon’s servants, arrived. When she entered the room, as if on cue, Mrs. Swyndon began to cry, effectively dismissing the men. They got up to leave. As they retreated down the stairs, Omar commented, “My wife would never mourn me like that.”

  “She’d be grateful to be rid of you.”

  Omar smiled.

  At the base of the stairs, a plump, red-cheeked girl of about seven stared at them from behind the skirts of a frightened-looking nanny.

  While Omar waited at the end of the hall, Kamil stopped and asked the nanny her name.

  “Bridget, sir.” Her face was that of a woman in her early twenties, but she was very short, barely taller than the child, and her frame so shrunken within her woolen gown that Kamil wondered if she was ill.

  “And who is this?” Kamil smiled at the child, who disappeared behind Bridget.

  “Alberta, sir.”

  Kamil sat on a damask-covered slipper chair, bringing the level of his head closer to the nanny’s. “Are you English, Bridget?”

  “Yes, sir. From Canterbury.”

  “How long have you been in service here?”

  “Two years, sir.”

  “Have you noticed anything unusual in the house over the past month? Visitors? Any tensions?”

  The young woman colored and looked down. “I’m sure I can’t say, sir.”

  “Now, Bridget, you know that Mr. Swyndon has gone missing, so anything you tell us might help us find him. I’m sure no one would see anything disloyal in that.”

  “No visitors other than the usual, sir. The missus’s friends and then the families that come for dinner.”

  “Anyone coming to see Mr. Swyndon?”

  She looked puzzled. “Mr. Swyndon doesn’t do any business here, sir.”

  Alberta darted out from behind the nanny’s skirts and blurted out, “But you had a visitor!”

  Bridget looked alarmed. “You weren’t to tell anyone, Alberta. You promised.”

  Alberta looked at her defiantly, then turned her back.

  Near tears, the nanny told Kamil, “I’m not allowed visitors here, you see. I could lose my post if Mrs. Swyndon found out. But sometimes”—she wiped her eyes—“it just gets lonely.”

  “Who was this visitor? A friend?”

  “A local girl. She came by selling sweets—I do so have a weakness for them. She spoke some English and when she said she’d like to learn more, I agreed to help her. I offered to come to her house on Monday afternoons, which is when I have time off, but she told me her brother wouldn’t permit a stranger in the house. So she came here.”

  “How often?”

  “Once a week. On my half day off. We went up the hill there.” She pointed. “There’s a small orchard. But when the weather got cold, we stayed in my room.”

  “I’m going to tell,” the little girl announced. “She took my bracelet.”

  Bridget crouched down to the child, stroked her hair, and said in a soothing voice, “Albie, darling, you don’t want to do that. If I go, who will take care of you? Can anyone else take care of you like I do?”

  The girl shook her head no, offering up part of her victory.

  “Thank you, Albie.” Bridget kissed her cheek and stood up, holding the girl’s hand in her own. “We’ll find your bracelet. I’m sure you just left it somewhere. You’re always playing with it.”

  “I’m sorry to have caused you any trouble,” Kamil said sincerely, touched by the young woman’s tenderness toward this difficult child. It was not the first time he wondered whether he was cut out for fatherhood if this is what it entailed. He adored his nieces, but it was Feride who dealt with the spirited girls day after day.

  “It’ll be all right, sir. Albie’s a good girl, aren’t you, Albie?” She beamed at her charge, the smile lighting up her face so that she seemed almost pretty.

  “May I ask your friend’s name and where she lives?”

  “Sosi. She said she lived in…it sounded like Bangali.”

  “Pangalti?” It was a nearby district populated mainly by Christians. The Frenc
h Catholic Cemetery, a Protestant cemetery, a Greek Orthodox school, a synagogue, and an Armenian church were all within sight of one another. Sosi was an Armenian name. It was probably an innocent friendship. Nevertheless, he’d set a watch for the girl.

  THEY FOUND Montaigne and Hofmeister, the other two officials, inspecting the damage at the bank and watching Hagop suspiciously as he worked on the lock to the second strong room. The captain of gendarmes stood between them and the scowling safecracker. When the officials saw Kamil, they demanded that he stop the break-in. Kamil ignored them and asked instead where Swyndon was. They didn’t know, nor did they know how he could have opened the other strong room without all three keys. After some argument, during which Kamil pointed out that the keys no longer locked anything in, each man gave Kamil his key. Neither of them turned in the locks.

  14

  WHEN THE MESSENGER CAME again to say that the pasha was with his family and wouldn’t be long, Gabriel could no longer contain his anguish. He stormed past the servant into the hall leading toward Simon’s office, beyond which he believed lay the pasha’s private quarters. Guards with drawn swords rapidly converged on him, and, too exhausted to fight, he slumped against the wall. The guards accompanied him back to his room.

  He took another draught of laudanum to ease the pain in his hands and lay on the bed. He was awakened by a peremptory knock on the door and the sound of the key turning. Simon walked in and announced that the pasha would see him. Gabriel glanced at the window. Judging by the light, he guessed it was nearing noon.

  When Gabriel entered Yorg Pasha’s receiving room, he was momentarily disconcerted by the painted creatures and forest scenes on the silk-paneled walls. In the flickering light of the fireplace, the animals seemed to roam through the foliage. Gabriel turned his attention to Yorg Pasha, seated in a velvet armchair. Although the man’s face sagged and the backs of his hands were knotted with veins, Gabriel had the impression of immense strength. It was the first time they had met. Until now all of Gabriel’s dealings had been with Simon, who stood at the pasha’s shoulder.