Yashim shrugged slightly. The seraskier tilted his chin and snorted through his nose.
“But we have a problem,” he said. Yashim continued to gaze at him: it was a long time since he had been woken in the dead of night and summoned to the palace. Or to the barracks. He glanced out of the window: it was still dark, the sky cold and overcast. Everything begins in darkness. Well, it was his job to shed light.
“And what, exactly, does your problem consist of?”
“Yashim Effendi. They call you the lala, do they not? Yashim Lala, the guardian.”
Yashim inclined his head. Lala was an honorific, a title of respect given to certain trusted eunuchs who attended on rich and powerful families, chaperoning their women, watching over their children, supervising the household. An ordinary lala was something between a butler and a housekeeper, a nanny a’nd the head of security: a guardian. Yashim felt the title suited him.
“But as far as I understand it,” the seraskier said slowly, “you are without attachment. Yes, you have links to the palace. Also to the streets. So tonight I invite you into our family, the family of the New Guard. For ten days, at most.”
“The family, you mean, of which you are the head?”
“In a manner of speaking. But do not think I am setting myself up as the father of this family. I would like you to think of me, rather, as a kind of, of—” the seraskier looked uneasy: the word did not seem to come easily to him. Distaste for eunuchs, Yashim knew, was as inbound amongst Ottoman men as their suspicion of tables and chairs. “Think of me—as an older brother. I protect you. You confide in me.” He paused, wiped his forehead. “Do you, ah, have any family yourself?”
Yashim was used to this: disgust, tempered with curiosity. He made a motion with his hand, ambiguous: let the man wonder, it was none of his business.
“The New Guard must earn the confidence of the people, and of the sultan, too,” the seraskier continued. “That is the purpose of the Review. But something has happened which might wreck the process.”
It was Yashim’s turn to be curious, and he felt it like a ripple up the back of his neck.
“This morning,” the seraskier began, “I was informed that four of our officers had failed to report for morning drill.” He stopped, frowned. “You must understand that the New Guard are not like any other army the empire has seen. Discipline. Hard work, fair pay and obedience to a superior officer. We turn up for drill. I know what you are thinking, but these officers were particularly fine young gentlemen. I would say that they were the flower of our corps, as well as being our best gunnery officers. They spoke French,” he added, as if that concluded it. Perhaps it did.
“So they had attended the engineering university?”
“They passed out with top marks. They were the best.”
“Were?”
“Please, a moment.” The seraskier raised a hand to his forehead. “At first, in spite of everything, I thought like you. I supposed they had had some adventure and would reappear later, very shamefaced and sorry. I, of course, was ready to tear them into strips: the whole corps look up to those young men, do you see? They set, as the French say, the tone.”
“You speak French?”
“Oh, only a very little. Enough.”
Most of the foreign instructors in the New Guard, Yashim knew, were Frenchmen, or others—Italians, Poles—who had been swept into the enormous armies the Emperor Napoleon had raised to carry out his dreams of universal conquest. Fifteen, ten years ago, with the Napoleonic Wars finally at an end, some of the more indigent remnants of the Grande Armee had found their way to Istanbul, to take the sultan’s sequin. But learning French was a business for the young, and the seraskier was pushing fifty.
“Go on.”
“Four good men vanished from their barracks last night. When they did not appear this morning, I asked one of the ban-jee, the cleaners, and found out that they had not slept in their dormitory.”
“And they’re still missing?”
“No. Not exactly.”
“What do you mean, not exactly?”
“One of them was found tonight. About four hours ago.”
“That’s good.”
“He was found dead in an iron pot.”
“An iron pot?”
“Yes, yes. A cauldron.”
Yashim blinked.
“Do I understand,” he said slowly, “that the soldier was being cooked?”
The seraskier’s eyes nearly bulged out of his head. “Cooked?” He echoed weakly. It was a refinement he had not considered.
“I think,” said the seraskier, “you should just come and take a look.”
[ 4 ]
Two hours later, Yashim had seen just about all that he wanted to see for one morning. For any number of mornings.
Summoning a lantern bearer, the seraskier walked him eastwards through the empty streets, following the city’s spine towards the imperial stables. Outside the Beyazit Mosque torches flickered in the dark; they passed the Burnt Column close to the entrance to the Grand Bazaar, now shuttered and still, holding its breath as it guarded its treasures through the night. Further on, near the Sehzade Mosque above the Roman aqueduct, they ran across the night watch, who let them go when he saw who it was. Eventually they reached the stables. The stables, like the Guard itself, were new. They had been erected close below the ridge, on the southern side, on an area of ground which had been vacant since the suppression of the Janissaries ten years before, when their vast and rambling barracks had succumbed to bombardment and conflagration.
They found the cauldron, just as the seraskier had described.
It stood in a corner of one of the new stables, surrounded by bedding straw and lit by large, globular oil lamps suspended on heavy chains from the tie beam way overhead. The horses, the seraskier explained, had been removed.
“It was the horses’ disturbance that brought the matter to light,” he added. “They do not like the smell of dead men.”
Yashim had not realised when the seraskier described it that the cauldron was so very big. It had three short legs and two metal loops on either side for handles; even so Yashim could barely see over the top. The seraskier brought him a mounting stool, and Yashim climbed it to look inside.
The dead soldier was still in his uniform. He was coiled in a foetal position at the bottom of the pot, just covering the base: his arms, which were tied at the wrist, were drawn up over his head making it impossible to see his face. Yashim stepped down and brushed his hands automatically, though the rim of the pot was perfectly clean.
“Do you know who he is?”
The seraskier nodded. “Osman Berek. I took his pocket book. You see…”
He hesitated.
“Well?”
“I am sorry to say, the body has no face.”
Yashim felt a chill of disgust.
“No face?”
“I…I climbed in. I turned him just a little. I thought I would recognise him, but—that’s all. His face has been hacked off. From below the chin to above the eyebrows. It was done, I think, at a single blow.”
Yashim wondered what force was needed to sever a man’s face from his body at a blow. He turned around. “The cauldron is always here? It seems an odd place for it.”
“No, no, the cauldron came with the body.”
Yashim stared.
“Please, effendi. Too many surprises. Unless you have more?”
The seraskier considered. “No. The cauldron simply appeared overnight.”
“And nobody heard or saw anything?”
“The grooms heard nothing. They were asleep in the lofts.”