“Me, I’m in transport. We work nights, effendi. Cover the markets—veg, mainly, and small livestock. I was going in there when we ran into each other again. There’s a hammam we use, open all night, which you as a gentleman might not know about. It’s small, yes, but I reckon it’s clean. Leastways save you going back and stinking up your own gaff. No disrespect,” he added hurriedly, “but them tanneries don’t half get into your skin. It’s the fat.”
“No, no, you’re perfectly right. I’d be grateful, really. But you’ve done so much for me this evening, I don’t want to take you out of your way.”
Eslek shook his head.
“Almost there,” he said.
At the door of the hammam they parted, with a handshake. Yashim had murmured—and Eslek had protested.
“Drop it, effendi. You came out all right for us on the night of the fire. I’ve got a wife and kiddies up the street what know as you did a grand job for them. I was going to swing round and see you—sign of the Stag, you said, right?—and thank you proper. My advice is, don’t go messing with them tanners any more. They’re dirty, effendi, and it ain’t just the fat.”
Yashim was grateful for the baths. Eslek was right: they were clean. The proprietor, a sallow old Armenian with a weary and intelligent face, even agreed to send a boy to fetch clean clothes from Yashim’s landlady while Yashim sluiced away the coloured grease that had sunk between his toes and the miasma of shit that clung to his skin. All the time he fought not to remember what he knew.
Yashim unwound his turban and scooped water over his hair. Preen was dead. He concentrated on his surroundings. When the attendant offered him a bar of soap it smelled, he noticed, of Murad Eslek. He touched his left cheek: tomorrow he’d have a black eye. He continued to use the scoop, rhythmically ladling the hot water over his head, massaging the soap into his scalp, behind his ears, over his aching neck. His ribs were bruised where the assassin had plunged against him on Preen’s corridor. And Preen was dead. Yashim jerked his head up, to watch the attendant bringing him a basin of cold water for his scalded foot. There was nothing he could do about his knee. It looked red, and felt sore. It would heal.
He forced himself to remember the chase through the alleys. Palewski had told him once how Napoleon had entered Italy, winning battle after battle with the Austrians, until he had felt that the earth itself was flying under his feet. He had felt the same, pursuing the man who had killed the hunchback, through the inclined alleys of Istanbul. Pursuing the man who killed Preen.
He had not been able to save the assassin, that was true. Otherwise he could have made him talk. To have learned -what? Details, names, locations.
Even now, he could not decide whether the killer had been aware of what was happening when he had struggled to cut the rope that bound him to the derrick. Yashim had been hoping to inch him back, away from the boiling vat. Had the killer known where he was? Was it suicide? Yashim was pious enough to hope it was not.
Yet he could not rid himself of the idea that the killer, like himself, understood that they were both at an end of the same rope: bound for minutes in perfect mutual understanding. He wanted us both to go together, Yashim suspected.
All he had really learned, instead, was how the third cadet to die had been boiled so that all his bones were clean. And that, he reasoned, was something he could have guessed. After all, the soup master had already told him how the Janissaries had come back to Istanbul, taking jobs that were out of the way. Watchmen. Stokers. Tanners. He remembered the scarred and blackened face of the man who knocked him down.
Was it for this that Preen had died?
Yashim squeezed his hair.
Preen was dead.
And why was the assassin so determined to die?
What was there, apart from the threat of justice, that made a man decide to die rather than talk?
Yashim could think of only two things.
One was fear.
The other was faith: the martyr’s death.
He pulled back suddenly, gasping for breath, his eyes stinging.
Preen had died alone, for nothing, in the dark.
Wise and wayward, loving and forever doomed, she died because of him.
He had asked her to help.
It wasn’t that. Yashim whined, teeth bared, his eyes screwed up tight, knocking his head against the tiled wall.
He had never properly taught her to read.
[ 68 ]
The morning dawned bright. On the street, Stambouliots congratulated one another on the re-appearance of good weather, and expressed the hope that the gloom which had settled over the city in the last week might finally be lifted. Optimists declared that the spate of murders seemed to have come to an end, proving that the message from the imams had worked. Pessimists predicted more fog ahead. Only the fatalists, who in Istanbul number hundreds of thousands, merely shrugged their shoulders and said that, like fire and earthquake, God’s will would be done.
Yashim made his way down early to the cafe on Kara Davut. The proprietor noticed that he was limping, and without a word offered him a cushioned divan off the pavement where he could still enjoy watching the doings on the street. When he had brought the coffees, Yashim asked: “Is there anyone who could take a message for me, and fetch an answer? I’d ask your son, but it’s pretty far.”
He gave the address. The cafe proprietor frowned and turned down his mouth.
“It is time,” he said gruffly. “Mehmed can go. Eh, hey! Mehmed!”
A little boy of about eight or nine bounced out of the back of the shop at his father’s shout. He bowed solemnly and stood looking at Yashim with his big brown eyes, rubbing one foot against his other leg.
Yashim gave him a purse, and carefully explained where to go. He told him about the old lady behind the lattice. “You should knock. When she answers, present my compliments. Give her the money, and tell her these are…expenses—for the lady Preen, in room eight. Whatever she says, don’t be frightened. Remember what you are told.”
The boy nodded and darted through the door, where a small crowd had gathered to watch a dervish perform his dance on the street. Yashim saw the boy dive unhesitatingly between the folds of their cloaks, and so away, down the street. A funeral errand, he thought; the father would not be pleased.
“A good boy,” he said, guiltily. “You should be proud.”
The father gave a noncommittal wag of his head and started polishing glasses with a cloth.
Yashim took a sip of coffee and turned to watch the performance in the street.
The dervish danced in the space defined by a ring of bystanders, who every now and then had to stand aside to let someone in or out of the cafe, giving Yashim a glimpse of the performer. He wore a white tunic, white puttees, and a white cap, and he flexed his hands and legs in time to some inner melody, his eyes closed. But the dancer was not entranced: from what Yashim could see, it looked like one of the simpler dances of the seeker after truth, a stylised rendition of Ignorance searching for the Way.
He put up a hand to rub his eyes and gave an involuntary yelp. He’d forgotten the bruising.
A fire-station. Another tower. His exploration of the files in the Imperial Archives had been inconclusive, to say the least. The references to fire-towers had been too scanty to work on: they did not signify anything either way. All you could say was that fire-towers existed; Galata, Beyazit. Everyone knew that. Perhaps he’d been reading in the wrong book.
If only he could get hold of that helpful young Sudanese. Ibou.
He’d gone looking for evidence of a fourth tower. He hadn’t found any.