The soup master’s breath was rapid.
“How is the guild house guarded after hours?”
“We employ guards. I myself sleep overhead.”
“How many guards?”
“Oh, two, maybe three.”
Yashim’s face remained expressionless.
“They have keys?”
“I told you, I sleep with the keys. They have the key to the main gate, of course—I give it to them at night and collect it back first thing in the morning.”
“May I see it?”
The master fished up the loop and ran his fingers through a bunch of keys. Finding the right one, he showed it to Yashim, who raised his eyebrows. It was another of the old-fashioned sort, something like a big comb of wood, with pegs of varying length for teeth.
“You say two or three guards. Do you mean two? Or do you mean three? Which?”
“Well, I—” the master broke off. “It depends.”
“On what? The weather? Their mood? What I see here is a place that runs by the book, yes? No deviation from routine, no innovation, no coriander in the soup. Right?”
The master lifted his chin.
“But when we come to the regulation of the night watch, you don’t know how many guards are employed. Two or three? Maybe it’s five. Maybe none.”
The master of the soup-makers’ guild lowered his head for a second. He seemed to be thinking.
“It’s like this,” he said slowly. “There are always enough guards. Sometimes it’s two, sometimes three, just as I said. They aren’t always the same men, night after night, but I know the bunch. I trust them, always have. We go back a long way.”
Yashim noticed something imploring in the man’s tone. He caught his eye.
“They’re Albanians, aren’t they?”
The master blinked. He looked steadily at Yashim. “Yes. What of it?”
Yashim made no answer. He reached out and took the master’s hand in his, and with the other he gripped the man’s sleeve and rolled it back. The master jerked away with an oath.
But Yashim had already seen what he had expected. A small, blue tattoo. He had not been quick enough to recognise the actual symbol, but there was only one reason why a man would carry a tattoo on his forearm.
“We can talk,” he suggested.
The master compressed his lips and closed his eyes.
“All right,” he said.
[ 17 ]
While he waited for the seraskier’s anger to blow itself out, Yashim questioned him about the discovery of the second corpse, asking for details about the position of the drain and the condition of the body. The effort of describing the way the corpse was trussed seemed to rob the seraskier of his temper, but he kneaded the back of a chair with his fingers, making it creak. Yashim wondered if he would sit down.
“I had thought,” the seraskier concluded bitterly, “that we might have got somewhere by now. Have we got anywhere?”
Yashim pulled at his nose.
“Effendi. I still do not understand how the men went missing. Did they go out together?”
“Yes, so I understand.”
“Where?”
The seraskier sighed. “That’s just it. Nobody seems to know. They came off duty at five. They went back to their dormitory and spent some time there—I know, because they overlapped with the men coming on for night duty.”
“Doing what?”
“Nothing much, apparently. Loafing on their bunks. Books, a game of cards, something like that. The last man out saw two of them playing cards.”
“For money?”
“I…I don’t know. Probably not. I hope not. These were good young men.”
“The man who saw them playing, was he the last man to see them at all?”
“Yes.”
“So nobody checks on people as they leave the barracks?”
“Well, no. The sentries are there to check people as they come in. Why should they check people going out?”
To help a man like me in a situation like this, Yashim thought. That was one reason; he could think of others. A question of order and discipline.
“Do the men generally go out, for whatever reason, in uniform?”
“Five or ten years ago, it was uncommon. Now we encourage the men to wear uniform at all times. It is better for the people of Istanbul to become acquainted with the new ways, and better for the men. It improves their morale.”
“And useful for you, too, to check on how they behave.”
The seraskier cracked a rare, dry smile.
“That too.”
“Would they visit a brothel? Did they have girls? I’m sorry, effendi, but I have to ask.”
“These men were officers! What are you saying? The men, yes, the ordinary men see women in the streets. I know about that. But these were officers. Of good family.”
Yashim shrugged.
“And there are good brothels, too, by all accounts. It doesn’t seem very likely that these four went and sat out the whole evening in a well-lit cafe, in their uniforms. That’s no way to go missing, is it? Instead, somewhere along the line, sometime in the course of their evening, their paths had to cross the path of their abductor. Their murderer. Somewhere—what? Murky, out of the light. In a boat, maybe. On a dark path. Or in some place shady—a brothel, a gambling saloon.”
“Yes, I see.”
“May I have your permission to interview the officers who shared their dormitory?”
The seraskier blew the wind between his teeth and stared down at the floor. Yashim had been here before. People wanted solutions, but they always hoped they could reach them without creating a fuss. The seraskier wanted to make a public announcement but was not, it seemed, quite ready to risk offending or alarming anyone. The forces of the padishah, he would aver, are working ceaselessly and with complete confidence to bring the perpetrators of this evil deed to light—and he wouldn’t mean a word he said.
“Effendi, either we must try to find out what happened, or there is no point in my proceeding with this case.”
“Very well. I will write you a chit.”
“A chit. Will that be enough, do you think? To talk, perhaps. In the murky place: will a chit hold out?”
The seraskier looked straight into Yashim’s grey eyes.
“I’ll support you,” he said wearily.
[ 18 ]
Yashim arrived early at the little restaurant beneath Galata Point and chose a quiet alcove which overlooked the channel of the Bosphorus. The Bosphorus had made Istanbul what it was: the junction of Europe and Asia, the pathway from the Black Sea into the Mediterranean, the great entrepot of world trade from ancient times to the present day. From where he sat he could watch the waterway he loved so much, the narrow sheet of gun-metal which reflected back the shape of the city it had built.
The water was as ever thick with shipping. A mountain of white sail rose above the deck of an Ottoman frigate which was tacking up the straits. A shoal of fishing smacks, broad-beamed and single- masted, held out under an easterly wind for the Sea of Marmara. A customs boat swept past on its long red oars like a scurrying water-beetle. There were ferries, and skiffs, and overladen barges; lateen-rigged cutters from the Black Sea coast, house-boats moored by the crowded entrance to the Golden Horn. Across the jostling waterway, Yashim could just make out tiskiidar on the opposite shore, the beginning of Asia.
The Greeks had called Uskiidar Chalcedon, the city of the blind. In founding the city, the colonists had ignored the perfect natural setting across the water, where centuries later Constantine was to turn the small town of Byzantium into a great imperial city which bore his name. For a thousand years Constantinople was the capital of the Roman empire in the east, until that empire had shrunk to a sliver of land around the city. Ever since the Conquest in 1453, the city had been the capital of the Turkish Ottoman empire. It was still officially called Constantinople, though most ordinary Turks referred to it as Istanbul. It remained the biggest city in the world.