“You did us a favour, my friend,” the other man said. He looked like a ghost, his face blanched by the dust. “Murad Eslek, me.”
Yashim grinned.
“Yashim Togalu.” Not Yashim the eunuch. “At the sign of the Stag, Kara Davut.” And then, because it was true, he added: “The debt is all mine.”
The note of cultivation in his voice caught the man by surprise.
“I’m sorry, effendi. In the dark…all this dust…I did not—”
“Forget it, friend. We are all one in the sight of God.”
Murad Eslek grinned, and gave Yashim the thumbs up.
[ 44 ]
Yashim stirred his coffee mechanically, trying to identify what still bothered him about the night’s events.
Not the fire itself. Fires were always breaking out in Istanbul -though it had been a close-run thing. What if he had left the window shut—would the smell of smoke have reached him in time? He might have gone on sleeping, oblivious to the jagged screen of flame dancing its way towards his street: roused when it was already too late, perhaps, the stairwell filled with rolling clouds of black smoke, the windows shattering in the heat…
He thought of the crowd he’d seen that morning, the women and children standing dazed in the street. Dragged from their sleep. By God’s mercy they, too, had woken up in time.
A phrase of the Karagozi poem leaped into his mind. Wake them.
The spoon stopped moving in the cup.
There was something else. Something a man had said.
Janissary work. To think we used to get the Janissaries from the Beyazidiye Pound to do this for us.
A Janissary fire-brigade had been stationed close to the Beyazit Mosque, the first and perhaps, in its way, the greatest of the mighty mosques of the sultans: for even Sinan Pasha, the master architect whose sublime Suleymaniyye surpassed Aya Sofia, acknowledged that the Beyazit Mosque had shown the way. But it wasn’t the mosque which mattered: it was its position. For the Beyazit Mosque straddled the spine of the hill above the Grand Bazaar, one of the highest points in Stamboul.
A unique vantage point. So unique, in fact, that it was selected as the site of the tallest and perhaps the ugliest building in the empire: the Fire Tower which bore its name. The bag of bones had been discovered only yards away.
And there had been another Janissary watch, across the city, operated from the Galata Tower. The Galata Fire Tower. High over the drain which held the nauseating corpse of the second cadet.
And at the Janissaries’ old centre of operations, the old barracks now razed and replaced with the imperial stables, there’d been a tower which Yashim could still vaguely recall.
Palewski had suggested that there could be a pattern to explain the distribution of the bodies—so if each body had been placed in the vicinity of an old fire-station, a Janissary fire-watch, a tower…Yashim probed the idea for a moment.
Fire had always been the Janissaries’ special responsibility. It had become their weapon, too. People were roused from their beds by the firemen’s tocsin. Wake them.
Where, then, had the other fire-station been? There were to be four corpses. There had to be four fire-stations. Four towers.
Perhaps, Yashim thought fiercely, he might still be in time.
[ 45 ]
The Kislar Agha had the voice of a child, the body of a retired wrestler and weighed eighteen stone. No one could have guessed his age, and even he was not completely sure when he had crawled from his mother’s womb beneath the African sky. A few pounds of unwanted life. Another mouth to feed. His face was covered in dark wrinkles, but his hands were smooth and dark like the hands of a young woman.
It was a young woman he was dealing with now.
In one of those smooth hands he held a silver ring. In the other, the girl’s jaw.
The Kislar Agha dragged the girl’s head sideways.
“Look at this,” he hissed.
She closed her eyes. He squeezed his hand tighter.
“Why—did—you—take—the—ring?”
Anuk squeezed her eyelids shut, feeling the stabbing tears of pain. His fingers had caved in on the soft part of her mouth and she opened it suddenly very wide. His fingers slipped between her teeth.
She bit down hard. Very hard.
The Kislar Agha had not screamed for many years. It was a sound he had not heard himself since he was a little boy in a Sudanese village: the noise of a piglet squealing. Still squealing, he brought his left hand up between her legs, sagging slightly for a better grip. Don’t mark the goods.
His thumb searched for the gate. His fingers stretched and encountered a tight bunch of muscle. His hand clamped shut, with iron force.
The girl gave a gasp and the Kislar Agha pulled himself free. He put his sore fingers under his armpit, but he did not let go.
He wriggled his fingers and the girl jerked her head back. The Kislar Agha pressed harder. The girl felt herself being pressured to roll aside, and she obeyed the pressure.
The eunuch saw the girl flip over and fling out her arms to meet the ground. He gave a sudden pull with the pincer of his hand.
Panting now, he dropped to his knees and began to fumble at the folds of his cloak.
He’d forgotten all about the silver ring.
He remembered only the need for punishment, and the itch for pleasure.
[ 46 ]
Preen had found it hard to believe what the imam seemed to be saying. A revival of the Janissaries? New Guard cadets found murdered in despicable ways?
She picked up a pair of tweezers and began to pluck her eyebrows.
She wondered, looking into the mirror, if the imam’s message had anything to do with the information she had brought her friend Yashim.
Murder.
Her heart skipped a beat.
Today she would take the line ever so slightly higher: she could always heighten the curve with kohl. She began to hum.
Nothing she’d heard in the mosque had anything to do with Yashim, or her, or that disgusting pimp.
She worked briskly with a practised hand along the arch of her brow, watching herself in the mirror.
But Yorg could be involved in anything. With anyone.
She’d only peddled a little ordinary gossip. It was nothing.
Though Yashim had been pleased. Gold dust, he called it.
But Yashim wouldn’t tell. She moved her hand and began on the other eyebrow.
Yorg would tell. Yorg would tell anything, if he was paid enough.
Or frightened enough.
Preen sucked in her breath. The idea of Yorg being afraid was, well, scary.
She lowered her tweezers and snapped up a piece of kohl between their jaws. Carefully she started to thicken the line.
What would Yorg do, she wondered, if he heard about the murdered soldiers? Not at mosque. The Yorgs of this world heard nothing at mosque. They wouldn’t even go.
But if he heard, and started putting two and two together?
The kohl wavered. The face in the mirror was very white.
He’d squeal, for sure.
[ 47 ]
Fire-officer Orhan Yasmit cupped his hands around his mouth and blew into them. It had been a filthy morning, not just because it was damp and cold but because the mist made it almost impossible for him to work properly. Who could spot a fire in this miasma? He could scarcely see across the Golden Horn.
He stamped a few times to warm up, then crossed the tower to the southern side and peered gloomily down towards the Bosphorus. On good days, the Galata Tower presented him with one of the finest views the city could afford, almost three hundred feet up above the Golden Horn, across to Stamboul with its minarets and domes, south to the Bosphorus and Uskiidar on the farther side—sometimes he could actually see the mountains of Gule, purple in the distance.