“Marta, when we’re out of this-?”
There was total silence in the cellar.
“Kyrie?” Her voice sounded cold.
Palewski swallowed. He’d been about to say something else, but he was warned now. “When we’re out-you won’t forget?”
125
“ It might be here,” Yashim murmured, running his hand across the beaten iron surface of the gate. “The question is how to get in.”
Kadri stepped back into the roughly cobbled street and glanced up. A thin crescent moon hung in the black sky, and by its feeble light he assessed the wall.
“Let me take the rope, Yashim efendi.”
Kadri slipped off his shoes and slung the rope across his shoulders. He approached the base of the wall and raised his hands, feeling for a hold.
Kadri climbed swiftly, barely pausing to establish his grip on the stones: he swarmed up the wall as though it were covered in net. He had learned in boyhood that falling took time, and effort, so he moved fast instead, fingers and toes loosely flexed. Yashim saw him pause when he reached the projecting tiles, then whip out and over the eaves like a snake.
A moment later, Kadri was peering down into the inner court, formed in the ditch that separated the double walls of Genoese Pera. The walls themselves were velvety with soot from the forges, and by the time Kadri had descended, more cautiously, he was black from head to toe.
He went to the gate and called to Yashim through the latch.
“I’m in.”
A street dog rose from the shadows and gave two hollow barks, before settling down.
Yashim passed a candle through the little opening. “The watch is coming. I’ll be back in ten minutes.”
He melted into the darkness of a side alley, waiting for the familiar tap-tap of the watchman’s staff on the cobbles. When it did not come, he waited another few minutes before he went back to the gate. There he smelled charcoal, and the faintly acidic odor of cut metal. A nearby dog whimpered and whinnied in its sleep. Yashim listened for sounds in the courtyard and heard nothing. He moved from one foot to the other, feeling the cold, so that when Kadri spoke close to his ear he jumped.
“Three tunnels,” Kadri whispered urgently. “One’s small, more like a pipe. It goes in about twenty yards and then bends up sharply.”
“Maybe drainage,” Yashim suggested. “What about the other two?”
“The first one could just be some sort of cellar-it hardly slopes at all, and the air is musty. But it’ll take time to explore them both.”
“There isn’t much time,” Yashim pointed out. “The second tunnel?”
“Lower than the other one. It doesn’t seem to go upward but it smells fresher inside.”
“I’m sure that’s the one,” Yashim urged, with a confidence he didn’t really feel. Istanbul was a honeycomb of tunnels, cisterns, and holes in the ground; blanked-off cellars, disused waterways, the foundation arches of Roman buildings. Where they ran, or how they were linked, nobody knew. They composed a dark mirror image of the city above, an impress of the centuries that had passed since Constantine first planted his standard on the banks of the Bosphorus and named the city for himself.
A sound at his back made Yashim turn his head. Kadri melted from the gate, noiselessly; but still Yashim stood, ears cocked, listening.
A dog detached itself from the base of the wall and crept a few yards along the street toward Yashim, where it sat and scratched its fleas. It stuck its muzzle on its paws, and went back to sleep.
Dogs did not willingly shift about at night, Yashim thought.
126
Marta said: “How shall we use the broken glass?”
“I was rather counting on you to come up with an idea.”
He heard her sigh. “I have,” she said.
She carefully drew the shard of glass toward her, with her toes.
She tucked her foot beneath her. Her fingers were cold; her feet were cold; she did not feel the glass in her fingers until the blood ran.
Palewski heard her give a gasp.
“Are you all right?”
“I have a knife, kyrie.” He heard the triumph in her voice, and said nothing.
At the same moment he heard the sound of the cellar door swinging open.
127
Kadri had gone about thirty paces into the tunnel before the ground dropped away.
The breeze was faint, but it flowed steadily up the tunnel at his back. Carefully shielding the candle, he moved to the side of the tunnel and held the flickering flame out of the wind. He was standing halfway up a vaulted chamber thickly festooned with cobwebs that hung from the ceiling in hanks, spinning in the breeze. He shuddered, and peered down.
He wriggled forward on his belly.
128
A shape broke from the shadows down the street. It was not the shape of a dog, but of a man.
Yashim edged to the side of the gate and put up his hand to feel the stones. His fingers found a crevice and his arm tightened.
Had the moon been any brighter, Yashim might have recognized the bow-legged walk of Akunin; had he stopped to watch, he would have seen Shishkin step out from a doorway farther up the street, blocking his escape.
But Yashim did not stop to watch. With a sudden grunt he dragged himself up on his fingertips and scrabbled for a foothold on the wall.
Everything Kadri had told him about climbing vanished from his mind as he dug his toe into a crack and reached up.
The man on the street started to run.
Like Kadri, Yashim moved quickly, barely pausing to check his holds, using vertical fissures as well as horizontal, flinging hand over hand and using his feet to flail upward against the rough surface of the wall.
Akunin reached the base of the wall and lunged: Yashim felt fingers close around his ankle. He was gripping the stones above with one hand, the other searching wildly for a hold as he tried to break the pressure rapidly increasing on his ankle. But he could feel his fingers slipping from the stone and with it his balance beginning to move, driving his body away from the wall.
His free hand found a crevice between the stones and clutched at it: but it was almost too late.
Akunin held tight and dropped his weight behind his arm.
129
Marta and Palewski froze as they listened to a heavy tread descending the cellar steps.
Two thoughts ran through Palewski’s mind. The first, that one of the men had been sent to kill them. Or that the sound of the breaking bottle had brought him down to check.
About the first possibility, he could do nothing-unless Marta could pass him the shard of broken glass.
Palewski felt Marta’s hand close around his wrists, searching for the cord.
The man stopped. Then they heard him tramp upstairs again, and the door closed.
Palewski climbed slowly from the pillar, flexing his fingers.
Marta laid a hand on his arm. “They are coming back.”
He cocked his head, and heard the sound of someone scraping nearby. He tightened his fingers around the glass and put Marta behind him, covering her with an outstretched arm.
In the dark they strained their ears.
Palewski frowned, incredulous.
One of his favorite pieces was Chopin’s tiny mazurka, the prelude in A major. He had practiced it all summer, with fairly good results.
It didn’t sound too bad right now, whistled by Kadri between his teeth, from the far end of the cellar.
130
Yashim felt the savage yank on his foot. Rather than tumble to the ground, he used his outward-falling momentum to spin in the air. Akunin had stepped back, face raised. He received the full weight of Yashim’s knee on the bridge of his nose.