[ 88 ]
Stanislaw Palewski opened his mouth to groan, as he did every morning when he woke up. But the groan did not come.
“Ha!”
The events of the night before had returned to him with unexpected clarity.
He wriggled his toes and they appeared obediently at the foot of the bed, poking out from beneath the duvet he had long ago adopted, in the Turkish fashion. His toes looked very dirty, until he remembered how he had blacked them with a brush.
He recalled the execrable champagne that he had been about to punish the previous evening. Doubtless some sharp French house had unloaded a bushel of the bad vintage on the unsuspecting Porte, charging top whack and confident that they would not be exposed. After all, who could complain? Not the Turks, who weren’t supposed to drink the stuff. And the guests were hardly likely to make a fuss.
All the same, Palewski thought, he didn’t get champagne every day, and he could have drunk rather more if that stiff-necked Russian hadn’t been so clumsy.
He grinned.
Tossing his drink over Prince Derentsov had been, he thought, a gifted manoeuvre. But swabbing it down afterwards, to ensure the maximum discomfort, was little short of inspiration.
What did it matter if afterwards he got a dressing-down from the sultan himself? The Russian had almost certainly fared worse—it was he who laid down the challenge, after all, and broke the sultan’s injunction. Palewski had merely responded as a man of honour must.
He and the sultan had had an interesting discussion, too. Surprisingly frank and friendly, and all because he had spilt his drink and wore a dastardly but inordinately well-contrived apology for the Sarmatian finery of his distant predecessors.
The sultan liked the coat. He had recalled, with Palewski, the old days which neither of them had ever known, but which both of them imagined tinged with a glamour and success that neither Poland nor the empire had ever rediscovered. And the sultan had said, in a voice that sounded suddenly weary and unsure, that all the world was changing very fast.
“Even this one.”
“Your Edict?”
The sultan had nodded. He described some of the pressures that now forced him to make changes in the running of his empire.
Military weakness. The growing spirit of rebellion, openly fostered by the Russians. The bad example of the Greeks, whose independence had been bought for them by European Powers.
“I believe we are taking the right steps,” he said. “I am very positive about the Edict. But I understand, also, that there will be enormous difficulties in persuading many people of the need for these changes. Sometimes, to tell you the truth, I see opposition everywhere—even in my own home.”
Palewski was rather touched. The sultan’s home, as they both knew, contained about 20,000 other people.
“Some will think that I am going too fast. Just a few may think that I have gone too slowly. And sometimes even I am afraid that what I am trying to do will be so misunderstood, so mangled and abused, that in the long run it will be the end of…all this.” And he gestured sadly at the decorations. “But you see, Excellency, there is no other way. There is nothing else we can do.”
They had sat in silence together for some moments.
“I believe,” Palewski said slowly, “that we must not fear change. The weight of the battle shifts here and there, but the hearts of the men who fight in it are not, I suppose, any weaker for that. I also believe, and hope, that you have acted in time.”
“Inshallah. Let us hope together that the next round of changes will be the better for us—and for you.”
And he had thanked the ambassador again for listening to him, and they shook hands.
As the sultan left to visit the Russian prince, he had turned at the door.
“Forget the incident this evening. I have forgotten it already. But not our talk.”
Unbelievable. Even Stratford Canning, the Great Elchi as the Turks liked to call him, who helped prop up the Porte against the pretensions of the Russians, would have swooned with pleasure if the sultan had spoken to him so sweetly.
Palewski—who normally took mornings one thing at a time -clasped his hands behind his head on the pillow, grinned, wriggled his toes, pulled the bell rope for tea, and decided that the first thing he would do today was pay a visit to the baths.
And later, it being a Thursday, he would dine with Yashim.
[ 89 ]
As the lid swung up on well-oiled hinges Yashim took a cautious peek inside.
The light was dim, and the interior of the chest in shadow, but even so Yashim could recognise something that was as prosaic as it was unexpected.
Instead of the dead cadet he dreaded, a stack of plates.
Beside the plates lay a tray of rather finicky little glasses, turned on their rims to keep out dust. Next to them, a metal goblet covered with what proved to be a folded strip of embroidered cloth. And a book.
Yashim picked it up. It was the Koran.
Otherwise the chest was empty, and smelled of polish.
Yashim smiled, a little grimly.
They’re getting the caterers in, he said to himself. For a feast.
A Karagozi bacchanal.
He closed the lid quickly and made for the stairs. Halfway up he found himself swallowed in darkness and began taking the stairs two at a time, surging out of the spiral and across the chamber he had come in by, not caring that his flying feet raised a cloud of dust as he slewed over the floor. Out on the parapet he yanked the door closed, hooked the chain, and leaned back against the wall, breathing heavily. From where he stood he could look down into the branches of the elegant cypress tree.
How is it, he asked himself, that I can be frightened by a set of crockery?
Because, he thought, this time I’ve got it right. Three bodies turn up, close by three tekke. This would be the fourth. Established on the site of the Janissaries’ greatest triumph—the Conquest of Constantinople.
And the body was yet to come.
[ 90 ]
The first person Murad Eslek saw when he strolled into the cafe for his breakfast was Yashim effendi, the gentleman he had rescued from the tanners.
Yashim saw him grin and wave. He murmured something to a passing waiter, then he was sitting down beside Yashim and shaking hands.
“You’re well, inshallah? How’s the foot?”
Yashim assured him that his foot was getting better. Eslek looked at him curiously.
“And I believe you, effendi. Forgive me, but you seem like a watered rose.”
Yashim bowed his head, remembering the hours he and Eugenia had spent sheathing the sword last night. He thought of her gasping, flinging back her beautiful head and baring her teeth with frantic lust, almost overcome—as she had whispered to him—by the discovery of a man who could do more than feed her appetite: who could, in the hours they played together, awaken a hunger she had never known before. He hadn’t slept a wink.
He hadn’t slept too much the night before, either, the night that he’d dropped Preen’s assailant into the bubbling vat at the tannery. Since then he’d been constantly on the move—that second time to the Russian embassy, sending Palewski to the party to buy him time, pounding the streets in search of a tekke which meant nothing to anyone but him and—who? All the time his mind had been turning over the possibilities, tracking back over his encounters of the past week, looking for something he could take a grip on.
All the time trying not to think about what had happened last night. The pain, and the desire. The torment he had been powerless to resist.
He’d see what his friend Eslek could do to help him, and then he’d go to the hammam to revive. To wash away the dust of the Kerkoporta Tower. To ease his aching limbs, to dissolve his thoughts, and contemplate the presence of the demon he had fought so long and so hard to control.