Outside, the light, such as it was, was fading; inside, it had never, apparently, risen. Palewski wondered briefly whether sunlight had penetrated to this spot at all in the past fifteen hundred years: the sunken doorcase, he had long suspected, was early Byzantine work, and he had no reason to imagine that the dark wooden handrail, to which he was now clinging as he swung blindly but unfalteringly upstairs, was anything but Byzantine itself, like the stone of the house, and the window embrasures, and the very probably Roman vaulting overhead.
At the head of the stairs he paused to catch his breath and analyse the peculiar mixture of fragrances seeping through the lighted crack at the foot of the door in front of him.
Yashim the eunuch and Ambassador Palewski were unlikely friends, but they were firm ones. “We are two halves, who together become whole, you and I,” Palewski had once declared, after soaking up more vodka than would have been good for him were it not for the fact, which he sternly upheld, that only the bitter herb it contained could keep him sane and alive. “I am an ambassador without a country and you—a man without testicles.” Yashim had considered this remark, before pointing out that Palewski might, at a pinch, get his country back; but the Polish ambassador had waved him away with a loud outbreak of sobs. “About as likely as you growing balls, I’m afraid. Never. Never. The bastards!” Soon after that he had fallen asleep, and Yashim had employed a porter to carry him home on his back.
The impoverished diplomat sniffed the air and adopted a look of cunning sweetness which was entirely for his own benefit. The first of the smells was onion; also chicken, that he could tell. He recognised the dark aroma of cinnamon, but there was something else he found it hard to identify, pungent and fruity. He sniffed again, screwing his eyes shut.
Without further hesitation or ceremony he wrenched open the door and bounded into the room: “Yashim! Yashim! You raise our souls from the gates of hell! Acem Yahnisi, if I’m not mistaken—so like the Persian fesinjan. Chicken, walnuts—and the juice of the pomegranate!” he declared.
Yashim, who had not heard him come up, turned in astonishment. Palewski saw his face fall.
“Come, come, young man, I ate this dish before you were weaned. Tonight let us give it in all sincerity a new and appropriate name: The ambassador was out of humour, and now is delighted! How’s that?”
He presented the bottles to his host. “Still cold, you feel! Marvellous! One day I shall take a light and go down into that cellar and find out where the icy water comes from. It may be a Roman cistern. I shouldn’t be surprised. What a find!”
He rubbed his hands together while Yashim, smiling, handed him a glass of vodka. They stood for a moment looking at one another, then tossed back their heads simultaneously, and drank. Palewski dived on the mussels.
It was going to be a long evening. It was a long evening. By the hour of the dawn prayer, Yashim was aware he had just nine days left.
[ 7 ]
The Street of the Tinsmiths ran slightly above and to the west of the Mosque of Rustem Pasha, itself half-buried in the alleys and back-doubles which surround the southern entrances of the Grand Bazaar. Like most of the artisans’ quarters, it consisted of a narrow funnel of open workshops, each no bigger than a very big wardrobe, where the smiths worked with forge, bellows and hammers over the standard articles of their trade: tin pots, little kettles, weakly hinged or plainly lidded boxes of every size and shape, from the tiny round tins used for storing kohl and tiger balm to banded trunks for sailors and the linen trade. They made knives and forks; they made badges and insignia; spectacle frames and ferrules for walking sticks. Every one of them worked at a specialism, rarely if ever straying from, say, the remorseless production of amulets designed to contain a paper inscribed with the ninety-nine names of God to, for example, the perpetual manufacture of pin boxes. These were guild rules, laid down hundreds of years before by the market judges and the sultan himself, and they were broken only under very special circumstances.
Would the manufacture of an enormous cauldron, Yashim wondered, constitute a special circumstance?
The tin market was not a place for the crowds who infested some of the other industrious highways of Istanbuclass="underline" the food markets, the spice bazaars, the makers of shoes. Even the Street of the Goldsmiths was more busy. So Yashim walked along easily in the middle of the street, and attracted few glances. Once the smiths had satisfied themselves that he was a stranger, they thought no more about him: they hardly cared to notice if he was rich, poor, fat or thin, for no man alive was likely to bring them any greater profit than the modest profit they enjoyed by the terms of their guild membership. No one was going to stop by and offer to buy—at a wild price—any of their humdrum manufactures. The regulations of the guild were fixed: there was a quality, and a price, neither more nor less.
Yashim knew all this. For the moment he merely watched. Most of the smiths worked in the opening of their shops, closest to the light and air and away from the smoky furnaces which blazed in the background. From here, tapping incessantly with their hammers, they slowly pushed out a succession of little products. He glanced up: the usual arrangement of latticed windows overhead advertised the dwelling places of the men, their wives and their children. The apprentices, Yashim thought, would sleep in the shops.
He took a turn into a courtyard and looked back. Up an alley thick with rubbish, the upper storeys were approached by rickety staircases leading, in every case, to a mean doorway hung with a faded strip of carpet, or a blanket cut into ribbons against the flies. Which left, he imagined, the flat roofs where the women could go in the day to get some air, unobserved. And at night, who used those roofs? Enough people, he supposed: you could never be sure. With a shrug he dismissed a faint idea and returned his inspection to the courtyard.
The sound of hammers beating against the tin was fainter here: it broke upon the courtyard like the musical note of frogs tinkling in a nearby lake. Few smiths were working in the alcoves of the courtyard itself: it served, instead, as a caravanserai where tin merchants brought the raw materials of the trade and sold it, at need, to the smiths outside. Here were piled thick sheets of tin in apparently random shapes; and their owners sat among them on low stools in quiet contrast to the arrhythmic tintinnabulation of the street beyond, sipping tea and telling their beads. Now and again one of them would make a sale; the tinsmith cut the sheet, the tin merchant weighed it out, and the smith carried it away.
Yashim wandered out for a last look. The bigger objects -lanterns, in the main, and trunks, were being assembled on the ground outside the shops. But Yashim was satisfied that nowhere, either inside or out, was there a place where a cauldron with a base big enough to fit a man could be discreetly built.
Someone, he thought, would have seen.
And that person, he thought, would have been legitimately puzzled. Why, in the name of all things holy, should anyone want to make a cauldron out of tin?
Of such a size, too! The biggest cauldron anyone had seen since—when?
Yashim froze. All around him the tinsmiths beat out their meaningless bird-like paean to industry and craftsmanship, but he no longer heard. He knew, in a flash, when that moment had been. Ten years before. The night of 15 June 1826.