They descended a flight of stairs and came out into the arcade. A man wielding a shiny cleaver looked up as they appeared, his eyes streaming with tears. His cleaver fell and rose automatically on a peeled onion: the onion stayed whole until the man swept it aside with a stroke of the blade, and selected another from the basket hanging at the side of the block. Mechanically he began to chop and peel it. Not once did he so much as glance down at his fingers.
Now that, Yashim thought with admiration, is a real skill. The onion man sniffed and nodded a greeting.
The master entered a corridor and began fumbling at his belt for keys. At length he felt what he was looking for and drew it out on a chain. He stopped in front of a thick oak door, banded with iron, and placed the key into the lock.
“That’s a very old key,” Yashim remarked.
“It’s a very old door,” the master replied sensibly. Yashim almost added: “And none the worse for that,” but decided against it. The lock was stiff; the master winced and the key slid sideways in the slot, depressing the necessary pins. The door opened lightly.
They were in a large, low-ceilinged room, lit by an iron grating so high up in the opposite wall that a portion of the ceiling had been sloped upwards to meet it. A few dusty rays of the winter sun fell on a curious collection of objects, ranged in shelves along the side walls. There were wooden boxes, a stack of scrolls, and a line of metal cones of varying sizes whose points seemed to rise and fall like the outline of a decorative frieze. And there, at the back of the hall, stood three enormous cauldrons.
“All our old weights,” said the master. He was looking lovingly at the metal cones. Yashim repressed his impatience.
“Old weights?”
“Every new master sees to it that the guild weights and measures are renewed and re-confirmed on his appointment. The old ones then are stored here.”
“What for?”
“What for?” The master sounded surprised. “For comparison. How else can any of us be sure that the proper standards are being kept? I can place my weights in the balance and see that they accord to a hair’s breadth with the weights we used at the time of the Conquest.”
“That’s almost four centuries ago.”
“Exactly, yes. If the measures are the same, the ingredients must also be the same. Our soups, you understand, are not merely in conformability with the standards. They are -1 do not say the standard itself, but a part of it. An unbroken line which comes down to us from the days of the Conquest. Like the line of the house of Osman itself,” he added, piously.
Yashim allowed for a suitably impressed pause.
“The cauldrons,” he suggested.
“Yes, yes, that is what I’m thinking about. There seems to be one missing.”
[ 15 ]
The seraskier sat on the edge of the divan, staring down at his shiny leather riding boots.
“Something will have to be announced,” he said finally. “Too many people know what’s happened as it is.”
The workmen had been too scared to touch the obstruction in the drain once they knew what it was. Leaving it still concealed across the mouth of the drain, they had fled downhill to inform the caretaker of what they had found. The caretaker informed the imam, who was at that moment setting out to climb the minaret to call the morning prayer. In a hurry, not quite knowing what to do, the imam sent the caretaker to track down the morning watch: the old man could hear the sound of the prayer breaking out all over the city as he scurried through the streets.
There is no God but God, and Mohammed is His Prophet.
By dawn light, a group of men could be seen milling about the drain. One of them had been sick. Another, hardier, braver or more desperate than the rest for the night watch’s proffered sequins, had manipulated the grotesquely misshapen corpse out of the drain and onto the cobbles, where it was finally bundled onto a sheet, wrapped and hoisted onto a donkey cart that went slipping and swaying down the slope to the Nusretiye, the Mosque of the Victory.
The workman who had made the discovery had already gone home, to sleep off his horrors or sluice them away in the vivid warmth of the baths. His mate, better shielded from the shock, remained to enjoy his moment with the crowd. Already his story, somewhat improved from its first rendition, was being retailed with appropriate embellishments among latecomers to the scene, and within the hour several versions of events were circling through the city. By lunchtime these stories were so finely rounded that two of them were able to actually pass each other without the slightest friction, leaving some people to believe that it had been a day of oddities in which an Egyptian sphinx had been dug up out of the foreshore while in Tophane a nest of cannibals had been surprised at their gory breakfast.
The seraskier had intercepted the rumours considerably earlier. He heard that a man, very possibly one of his missing recruits, had been found in bizarre circumstances close to the Mosque of the Victory. He sent to the mosque for more information, and learned that the body had been put into an outhouse normally used by some of the workers on the site. He dispatched a note to Yashim, who was at that moment eating his borek in the cafe on Kara Davut Sokagi, suggesting they meet at the mosque, and rode over to see.
Thoroughly shaken and repelled by the condition and appearance of the naked corpse, he had returned to his apartments to find Yashim—in a state of ignorance and unconcern—examining the spines of the military manuals and regulation books that filled the bookshelves opposite the divan.
The seraskier became very angry.
[ 16 ]
The master of the soup-makers’ guild had been angry with Yashim, too. The fact that the stranger knew more about the missing cauldron than he did seemed to him in some degree sinister.
“Is this some kind of a joke?” he demanded furiously, when his eyes had—rather superfluously, Yashim thought—devoured the store-room in a fruitless search for the enormous missing cauldron. After all, you could hardly conceal a cauldron the size of an ox behind a few scrolls and hand-weights. At the same time Yashim felt sorry for the master: such a thing, he was almost certain to say, had never happened before in all the history of the guild. Now it had happened on his watch: a theft.
“I can’t believe it. I have the key.” He held the key up and stared at it, as if it might suddenly break down and confess to illicit behaviour. Then he shook it angrily. “This is highly irregular. Twenty-four years!” He glared at Yashim. “I’ve been here twenty-four years.”
Yashim shrugged amiably.
“Do you keep the key with you all the time?”
“In the name of God, I sleep with my keys!” the master snapped.
“You might update the lock.”
The master cocked his head and leaned slowly towards Yashim.
“You say you come from the palace,” he growled. “What is this? You are some inspector?”
Yashim nodded slowly. This is a man, he thought, who feels easy with power. He glanced again at the master’s hands. The massive fingers were loosely curled.
“You could say that.” More briskly he added: “When did you last come in here?”
The soup master drew breath through his nose, and as he exhaled Yashim wondered what he was considering: the answer to the question? Or whether to answer the question?
“I don’t know,” he said finally. “About a month ago. Maybe more. Nothing was missing.”
“No. Who guards the place at night?”
In Istanbul it was always people who mattered. Who you knew. The balance of favours.