A jogging donkey-cart blocked his progress as he walked back to his lodgings. The driver looked round and raised the handle of his whip in acknowledgement, but the alleys were too narrow to let him by, and Yashim was forced to drag his feet, smouldering with impatience. At last the cart turned into his own alley, and at that moment Yashim saw a man loitering, about halfway down. His outfit of scarlet and white indicated that he served as a page of the interior service of the palace. He was looking up the other way, and Yashim slipped back into the alley he’d come from.
He leaned against the wall and considered his position. The seraskier had given him ten days: ten days before the great Review that would show the sultan at the head of an efficient, modern army that could match anything the empire’s enemies could put into the field against it. Four days had already gone, and time seemed to be running out: there was the question of the upcoming murder, Palewski’s well-founded observation that he needed to get his hands on a good map, and the problem of the Russian attache, Potemkin. But there was the strangling at the palace, too, and the valide’s lightly couched threat that he had better find her jewels if he ever wanted another French novel. Well, he did want another: but Yashim wasn’t naive. Novels were the least of it. Favour. Protection. A powerful friend. He might need that any day.
He wasn’t ungrateful, either. The palace had discovered—and then allowed him to exercise—his particular talents, the same way that for hundreds of years the palace had selected and trained its functionaries to exploit their natural gifts.
Apart from the sultan himself, and the palace eunuchs, he was the only man who could take up an invitation to enter the women’s quarters. The only man in the whole empire who could come and go at will. And when the palace turned to him for help it was his duty to oblige.
But that put him in a difficult position. He was engaged by the seraskier: the seraskier had called him in first.
A killing in the harem was bad. But what he was dealing with outside looked worse.
For the fourth cadet, time was running out.
But why?
Why now?
He took a deep breath, pulled back his shoulders, and walked around the corner into his street.
[ 35 ]
The Dresser of the Girls looked beseechingly at Yashim, then at the Kislar Agha, the chief black eunuch, who was spreading his considerable bulk across a chaise longue. Neither the Dresser or Yashim had been invited to sit.
Yashim privately cursed his impetuosity. He’d been taken into the palace just when the Valide Sultan took her evening nap, and the Kislar Agha had swiftly taken control. The Kislar Agha never slept. When Yashim had told him what he had to say, he had sent immediately for the dresser.
That was how the system worked, Yashim knew. Everyone had their own ideas about the imperial harem, but essentially it was like a machine. The sultan, pumping a new recruit in the cohort of imperial concubines, was simply a major piston of an engine designed to guarantee the continuous production of Ottoman sultans. All the rest—the eunuchs, the women—were cogs.
Christians viewed the sultan’s harem quite differently. Reading his way through some of the valide’s favourite French novels, it had slowly dawned on Yashim that westerners, as a rule, had an intensely romantic and imaginative picture of the harem. For them it was a honeyed fleshpot, in which the most beautiful women in the world engaged spontaneously at the whim of a single man in salacious acts of love and passion, a narcotic bacchanal. As though the women had only breasts and thighs, and neither brains nor histories. Let them dream, Yashim thought. The place was a machine, but the women had their lives, their will and their ambition. As for the hints of lascivious-ness, the machine simply let them off as steam.
The dresser was a case in point. He was something like a squeezed lemon, a sour and fussy creature, black, skinny, forty-five, meticulous about detail, with all the spontaneous effervescence of a dripping tap. The dresser’s tasks ranged from preparing the gozde, or chosen girl, for a sultan’s bed to buying their underwear. His staff included hairdressers, tailors, jewellers and a perfumier, whose own job involved, among other things, crushing and grinding scents, blending perfumes to suit the sultan’s taste, preparing soaps, oils and aphrodisiacs, and overseeing the making of the imperial incense. If anything went wrong, the dresser was the one to take the blame: but he always had lesser functionaries he, in turn, could kick.
“A ring, dresser,” the Kislar Agha was saying. “According to our friend here, the girl wore a ring. I do not know if she was wearing it when the unfortunate circumstance occurred. Perhaps you will tell us.”
The slight annular depression on the dead girl’s middle finger which Yashim had noticed before the Valide Sultan had interrupted his inspection of the body had interested him at the time. For all her finery and precious jewels, it had been the missing ring which recalled, however fractionally, her existence as a living person, with thoughts and feelings of her own. Perfectly engineered for the task she was never destined to perform—flawless, beautiful, perfectly accoutred, bathed and perfumed—had she nonetheless prepared to approach the sultan’s bed with the tiniest trace of an imperfection, a cold, white indentation on the middle finger of her right hand: the faint imprint of a choice?
Was the ring removed at the time of her death, or even later?
The dresser glanced at Yashim, who watched him without expression, arms folded patiently across his chest. The dresser gazed upwards, drumming his fingers nervously against his closed lips. Yashim had the impression that he already had the answer they wanted. He was trying to control his panic and work out the probable consequences of what he was about to say.
“Indeed. A ring. Just the one. She did wear the ring.”
The Kislar Agha tugged at his earlobe. He turned a bloodshot eye on Yashim, who said: “And the Page of the Chamber found the body. Can we talk to him?”
The Page of the Chamber, whose task was to lead the gozde to the sultan, was produced: he knew nothing about a ring. The Kislar Agha, who had been next on the scene, gave Yashim his answer only by a slight lowering of his eyelids.
“She was laid out in the bridal chamber, just as you saw her.”
“By -?”
“Among others, the dresser.”
The dresser could not remember if the ring had been missing then.
“But you might have noticed if it had been gone?” Yashim suggested.
The dresser hesitated.
“Yes, yes, I suppose that would have struck me. After all, I arranged her hands. Put like that, effendi, it’s obvious that she was wearing the ring when she—ah—she—”
“She died. Can you describe it?”
The dresser swallowed.
“A silver ring. Not of account. I’ve seen it quite often. Different girls wear it, pass it around. There are a lot of small pieces like that, not very special, that belong to the women in general, as it were. They wear them for a bit, tire of them, give them away. Frankly, I consider those sort of trinkets as beneath my notice -unless they are ugly, or spoil a composition, of course.”
“And you let her wear this ring to attend the sultan?”
“I thought it more prudent that she should keep the ring, than have an unsightly mark on her finger. I didn’t mention it.”
The dresser turned and twisted involuntarily from side to side.
“I did right, chief, didn’t I? It was only a ring. It was clean, silver.”
The Kislar Agha fixed him with a stare. Then with a shrug and a wave of his hand, he dismissed him from the room. The dresser backed out, bowing nervously.