“At that moment the door to his study opened and Mrs. Bora put in her head to call us to lunch. It was as delicious a meal as the one we’d eaten there the day before, but a much more somber one. Helen was quiet and looked tired, Mrs. Bora handed around the dishes with silent grace, and Mr. Erozan, although he sat up for a while to join us, was unable to eat much. Mrs. Bora made him drink a quantity of red wine, however, and eat some meat, which seemed to restore him somewhat. Even Turgut was subdued and seemed melancholy. Helen and I took our leave as soon as we politely could.
“Turgut saw us out of the building and shook our hands with all his usual warmth, urging us to call him when we knew our travel plans and promising us unabated hospitality on our return. Then he nodded to me and patted my briefcase, and I realized he was referring silently to the kit inside. I nodded in response and made a little gesture to Helen to tell her I’d explain later. Turgut waved until we could no longer see him under the lindens and poplars, and when he was out of sight, Helen put her arm wearily through mine. The air smelled of lilacs, and for a minute, on that dignified gray street, walking through patches of dusty sunlight, I could have believed we were on vacation in Paris.”
Chapter 37
“Helen was indeed tired, and I reluctantly left her to nap at the pension. I didn’t like her being alone there, but she pointed out that broad daylight was probably protection enough. Even if the evil librarian knew our whereabouts, he was not likely to enter locked rooms at midday, and she had her little crucifix with her. We had several hours before Helen could call her aunt again, and there was nothing we could do to arrange our trip until we received her instructions. I put my briefcase into Helen’s care and forced myself to leave the premises, feeling I would go stir-crazy if I stayed there pretending to read or trying to think.
“It seemed a good opportunity to see something else in Istanbul, so I made my way toward the mazelike, domed Topkapi Palace complex, commissioned by Sultan Mehmed as the new seat of his conquest. It had drawn me both from a distance and in my guidebook since our first afternoon in the city. The Topkapi covers a large area on the headland of Istanbul and is guarded on three sides by water: the Bosphorus, the Golden Horn, and the Marmara. I suspected that if I missed it, I would be missing the essence of Istanbul ’s Ottoman history. Perhaps I was strolling far afield from Rossi once again, but I reflected that Rossi himself would have done the same with a few hours of enforced idleness.
“I was disappointed to learn, as I wandered the parks, courtyards, and pavilions where the heart of the Empire had pulsed for hundreds of years, that little from Mehmed’s time was on exhibit there-little apart from some ornaments from his treasury and some of his swords, nicked and scarred from prodigious use. I think I had hoped more than anything to catch another glimpse of the sultan whose army had battled Vlad Dracula’s, and whose police courts had been concerned about the security of his alleged tomb in Snagov. It was rather, I thought-remembering the old men’s game in the bazaar-like trying to determine the position of your opponent’s shah inshahmat by knowing only the position of your own.
“There was plenty in the palace to keep my thoughts busy, however. According to what Helen had told me the day before, this was a world in which more than five thousand servants with titles such as Great Turban-Winder had once served the will of the sultan; where eunuchs guarded the virtue of his enormous harem in what amounted to an ornate prison; where Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent, reigning in the mid-sixteenth century, had consolidated the Empire, codified its laws, and made Istanbul as glorious a metropolis as it had been under the Byzantine emperors. Like them, the sultan traveled out into his city once a week to worship at Hagia Sophia-but on Friday, the Muslim holy day, not Sunday. It was a world of rigid protocol and sumptuous dining, of marvelous textiles and sensuously beautiful tile work, of viziers in green and chamberlains in red, of fantastically colored boots and towering turbans.
“I had been particularly struck by Helen’s description of the Janissaries, a crack corps of guards selected from the ranks of captured boys from all over the Empire. I knew I had read about them before, these boys born Christian in places like Serbia and Wallachia and raised in Islam, trained in hatred of the very peoples they sprang from and unleashed on those peoples when they reached manhood, like falcons to the kill. I had seen images of the Janissaries somewhere, in fact, perhaps in a book of paintings. Thinking about their expressionless young faces, massed to protect the sultan, I felt the chill of the palace buildings deepen around me.
“It occurred to me, as I moved from room to room, that the young Vlad Dracula would have made an excellent Janissary. The Empire had missed an opportunity there, a chance to harness a little more cruelty to its enormous force. They would have had to catch him quite young, I thought, perhaps to have kept him in Asia Minor instead of returning him to his father. He had been too independent after that, a renegade, loyal to no one but himself, as quick to execute his own followers as he was to kill his Turkish enemies. Like Stalin-I surprised myself with this mental leap as I gazed out at the glint of the Bosphorus. Stalin had died the year before, and new tales of his atrocities had leaked into the Western press. I remembered one report about an apparently loyal general whom Stalin had accused just before the war of wanting to overthrow him. The general had been removed from his apartment in the middle of the night and hung upside down from the beams of a busy railway station outside Moscow for several days until he died. The passengers getting on and off the trains had all seen him, but no one had dared to glance twice in his direction. Much later, the people in that neighborhood had not been able to agree on whether or not this had even happened.
“That sort of disturbing thought followed me from room to marvelous room throughout the palace; everywhere I sensed something sinister or perilous, which could simply have been the overwhelming evidence of the sultan’s supreme power, a power not so much concealed as revealed by the narrow corridors, twisting passages, barred windows, cloistered gardens. At last, seeking a little relief from the mingled sensuality and imprisonment, the elegance and the oppression, I wandered back outside to the sunlit trees of the outer court.
“Out there, however, I met the most alarming ghosts of all, for my guidebook located there the executioner’s block and explained in generous detail the sultan’s custom of beheading officials and anyone else with whom he disagreed. Their heads were displayed on the spikes of the sultan’s gates, a stern example to the populace. The sultan and the renegade from Wallachia were a pleasant match, I thought, turning away in disgust. A stroll in the surrounding park restored my nerves, and the low, red gleam of sun on the waters, turning a passing ship to black silhouette, reminded me that the afternoon was waning and that I ought to go back to Helen and perhaps to some news from her aunt.
“Helen was waiting in the lobby with an English newspaper when I arrived. ‘How was your walk?’ she asked, looking up.
“‘Gruesome,’ I said. ‘I went to the Topkapi Palace.’
“‘Ah.’ She closed the newspaper. ‘I am sorry I missed that.’
“‘Don’t be. How are things out in the big world?’
“She traced the headlines with a finger. ‘Gruesome. But I have good news for you.’
“‘You spoke to your aunt?’ I deposited myself in one of the sagging chairs near her.