“Fixing a party?”
Yashim grinned and shook his head. “Looking for information.”
She raised a finger and wagged it at him.
“Darling, you know I never betray a confidence. A girl has her secrets. What kind of information?”
“I need a quick line on the gossip.”
“Gossip? Why on earth would you come to me?”
They both laughed.
“Men in uniform,” Yashim suggested.
Preen wrinkled her nose and made a moue.
“The New Guards, from the Eskeshir Barracks.”
“I’m sorry, Yashim, but the thought revolts me. Those tight trousers! And so little colour. To me they always look like a bunch of autumn crickets hopping to a funeral.”
Yashim smiled. “Actually, I want to know where they do hop. Not the men so much as the officers. Boys from very good families, I’m told. I wouldn’t bother you about the ordinary soldiers, Preen, you wouldn’t know about that. But the officers…”
He left it hanging. Preen raised her eyebrows and touched her hand to the back of her hair.
“I can hear the girls now. No promises, but I’ll see what I can do.”
[ 22 ]
The room was tiny, more like a cell, sparsely furnished with a pine footstool, a sagging rope bed and a row of wooden hooks, from which hung several large bags, bulking black in the yellow light. The room had no windows and smelt fetid and damp, a queasy amalgam of scent, and sweat, and the oil that smoked blackly from the lamp.
The person whose room it was moved swiftly towards the bags and fumbled at the neck of the smallest, groping around inside until their fingers closed on another, smaller bag which they proceeded to pull out, plucking at the drawstrings. The contents fell onto the mattress with a soft, metallic chink.
A pair of glittering black eyes stared with hatred at the jewels which glittered back. There was a golden chain bearing a dark lapis. There was a silver brooch, a perfect oval, set with diamonds the size of new peas. There was a bracelet—a smaller version of the gold chain, its clasp hidden beneath a ruby anchored to a silver roundel—and a pair of earrings. There was no doubting where the jewels had originated. On every face, painstakingly inlaid into the lapis, between the diamonds, over the ruby, that loathsome and idolatrous symbol, Z or N, zigzagging back and forth, crooked as the man.
That was the way it had all begun, for sure. It wasn’t easy to follow the exact steps—those Franks were cunning as foxes—but Napoleon had been the author of it all. What was it that the French kept pressing on the world? Liberty, equality, and something else. A flag with three stripes. There was something else. No matter, it was all lies.
That flag had fluttered over Egypt. Men like scissors had gone about scratching, scraping, digging things up, writing it all down in little books. Other scissor men, led by a half-blind infidel, had burned their ships within the shadow of the Pyramids, and Napoleon himself had run away, sailed off in the night. Then those infidels had marched and starved, thirsted for water and died like flies in the deserts of Palestine.
But that was only the beginning. You would have thought, wouldn’t you, that everyone would see the folly of the foreigners? But no: the Egyptians tried to be more like them. They’d seen how the French had gone about, behaving like the masters in the dominion of the sultan. They put it down to the trousers, to the special guns the French had left behind, to the way the French soldiers had marched and wheeled, fighting like a single body in the desert, even while they were dropping like flies.
New ways. New stuff which came out of little books. People always scribbling and scribbling, sticking their noses into books until their eyes went red with the effort. Pretending to understand the French gibberish.
Napoleon. He’d killed the French king, hadn’t he? Invaded the Domain of Peace. Thrown sand in the eyes of his own men and all the world. Why else could no one see what was going on? And these jewels—were we to sell ourselves for baubles?
Valuable as they are.
It was a pity that the girl had seen. That killing had been an unexpected duty, and dangerous. Perhaps an over-reaction. She might have seen nothing, understood nothing. Other things on her mind. A secret smile of triumph and expectation on her pretty face. Nothing like the bewilderment with which she fought for breath, seeing whose hands lay around her neck. The hands which had taken the jewels.
Ah, well, there were the others. In here it paid to act swiftly, without remorse.
A ball of spit landed on the lapis and began to trail slowly down the upright of the letter N.
[ 23 ]
Preen felt the ouzo scorch the back of her throat and then plummet like something alive into the pit of her empty stomach. She set the glass back on the low table, and selected another.
“To the sisters!”
A round of little glasses swayed in the air, chinked, and were tossed back by five raven-haired, slightly raddled-looking girls. One of them hiccupped, then yawned and stretched like a cat.
“Time’s up,” she said. “Beauty sleep.”
The others cackled. It had been a good evening. The men, silent while the kocek danced, had showed their appreciation in time-honoured fashion by slipping coins beneath the seams of their costume as they danced close. You couldn’t always tell, but the house had looked clean and the gentlemen sober. Some reunion, she never found out exactly what.
She liked her gentlemen sober, but after a performance she didn’t mind getting a little drunk herself. They’d asked the carriage to drop them off at the top of the street which led down to the waterfront, and teetered away into the dark until they reached the door of a tavern they knew. It was Greek, of course, and full of sailors. That in itself was no bad thing, Preen thought with a ghost of a smile, for as it happened there were two of them throwing surreptitious glances at them now and then, two young, rather handsome boys she didn’t know. Only fishermen from the islands, but still…
Two other girls decided to leave, but Preen thought she’d prefer to stay. Just her and Mina, together. Another drink, maybe.
She was having her second when the sailors made their move. They were from Lemnos, as she’d guessed, and they had shifted a big catch at the morning market, a little tight themselves on their last night in town and with money to spend. After a few minutes, Preen noticed the man’s sunburnt hand moving towards her leg. Go on! she smiled.
But out of the corner of her eye she saw a small, slightly hunchbacked man with a pockmarked face enter the tavern. Yorg was one of the port pimps, one of the weaselly crowd who accosted newly arrived seamen and offered them cheap lodgings, a visit to their sister or, if it seemed safe, a free drink at their place. Yorg’s place, of course, was a brothel where haggard girls from the countryside turned trick after trick, night after night, until they were either let loose on the streets or bumped off and dumped into the Bosphorus. They were part of the human detritus that floated around the docks and the men who sailed from them; their life expectancy was short.
Preen shuddered. Very gently she brushed away the hand which had just settled on her thigh, put a finger to the sailor’s lips and slipped past him, with a flash of an elegant waist. He’d hold, she thought. Right now, she had a little job to do.
A girl doesn’t like to break her promises.
[ 24 ]
There’s a section of Istanbul, right up under the city walls at the head of the Golden Horn, which has never been fully built up. Perhaps the ground is too steep for building on, perhaps in the days of the Byzantines it was forbidden to build so close to the palace of the Caesars; so it had lingered on into the beginning of the nineteenth century as a sort of ragged wilderness, planted with rocks and scrubby trees.