The rower fixed a weak lantern to the prow and took up the sculls, pushing the caïque away from the landing stage with a practiced sweep of his arm. Like an arrow, the lacquered vessel hissed through the water. Yashim let his eyelids sink shut.
The air was warm. Across the water, murmurs and snatches of conversation drifted lazily from the landing stage. The dogs barking on Galata Point sounded close by. Yashim felt the rhythmic tug of the sculls; the water trickled on the hull beneath his head. The rower spoke, but not to him, and there was a faint lurch, a stillness, an absence of the familiar sound. A ripple caught the caïque and rolled it minutely. Yashim opened his eyes.
The caïque had stopped moving. Very dimly against the lantern light the rower could be seen, his shoulders stilclass="underline" he seemed to be resting on his sculls. The lights of the city traveled slowly around behind his head, like the lights of a fairy carousel. Yashim liked that explanation. For the moment, he could not think of another.
He blinked a few times. The silent boatman, he reasoned, was waiting for him to speak.
A light on the shore snuffed out. When it reappeared on the other side of the boatman’s black silhouette, it dawned on Yashim that Istanbul was not spinning; rather the caïque itself was turning gradually with the current.
“What’s the matter?” he finally said.
The rower didn’t move. Instead another voice close by replied: “Nothing is the matter, efendi. In a moment, if you likes, you continues with your journey. You are good man, I am sure.”
Yashim felt the hairs on his neck prickle. “What do you want?”
“Yes, yes. A good man.” The caïque trembled slightly. In the dark, Yashim realized, another caïque had pulled alongside. “You do not like to have some things what belongs to other mans, no?”
The voice was coming from somewhere behind his head. Yashim was awake now, his mind working fast to construct a picture of his situation. He saw it, as it were, from above: if his rower was leaning on the oars, still spread above the water, the other caïque must have come in beside him, unless its oars were shipped. He had a feeling that the anonymous voice in the dark was too close for that. Which made it likely that the two boats were stern-to-stern: he had only to reach out and he would encounter—what? The speaker’s hand on the rim of his caïque. The knuckles bent over the gunwale.
“Whassat? What’ya talking about?” He hoped he sounded drunk.
“I talks about a book, mister. Is little. Black. Is not belong to you, you understand? But we make it all right. Give me the book, and go your ways.”
Yashim’s hand went to his chest. Lefèvre’s book was not there.
“Who are you?” he said thickly.
“Please. The book, only.”
The caïque gave a little lurch, and there was a metallic click. Something winked momentarily in the darkness.
“What worth your life, efendi?”
It would be very soon. There was little time.
Yashim sat up. He put his hand out for support and brushed against the man’s fingers where they clutched the rim of his caïque.
When one is getting into a caïque held firmly against a fixed landing stage or piling by the oarsman, it is possible to stand up for a few seconds.
In open water, when there is nothing to steady the boat and the oarsman is unprepared, you do not have seconds. You have maybe one.
Yashim stood up.
He stepped forward and stamped down, hard.
There was a crack, and the caïques dipped together. As the hull of his caïque flipped upward, Yashim took a step back and kicked himself off into the water.
He flicked the water out of his eyes and released his cloak, letting it float. He brushed the white turban from his head: it could catch the faint light, and he let it go. With his head above the water, he concentrated on staying afloat as silently as possible while three men floundered, cursing, close at hand. Yashim took the hem of his cloak in his teeth and paddled gently backward; the cloak would protect him and give him warning if someone tried to grab him in the dark.
He could hear the men more clearly now. One of them was cursing: perhaps the man whose hand he had trodden on. Another was lamenting the loss of his oars. Someone eventually told him to shut up.
With their caïques gone, the men would have to strike out for the shore. The Pera side was slightly closer; they would probably swim that way. Yashim went on quietly paddling until he heard them splashing, and then he released the cloak and turned onto his front. He swam breast stroke, not trying to fight the current that was bearing him slowly down toward the Bosphorus.
About twenty minutes later, a pair of barefooted chairmen enjoying a quiet smoke outside the New Mosque were surprised to be hailed by a man who squelched toward them out of the darkness. It was a shame the man was so wet, but he doubled their usual fare to the Fener baths. Business had been pretty quiet all evening.
47
THE curtains of muslin and silk brushed together, stirred like a breath by the night air. Sometimes he could see a tiny diadem of stars through a chink close up by the rail, and it came and went, came and went, the way people did when you were dying, looking in to observe the progress of death, to render a report on the invisible struggle; all that was left. The sultan wondered if this was the way all men died, alone, in doubt, troubled by memories.
He listened to the breath in the room, the woman’s breathing, the shush of the muslin against the silk. This would, of course, go on: the world would breathe without him. His own breath was less; it made no sound; he barely moved. Now that a great sleep was drawing close, he no longer needed sleep. The rehearsals were over.
Out on the water, something splashed. The Bosphorus was full of fish. He imagined himself gliding with them, their cool, metallic bodies holding level, the moonlight refracted through the surface of the water, cold and silvery, and the fish glinting like the stars.
He swam with them easily, borne along by the current and an effort that was minute, imperceptible. Hadn’t they always been there, too? Waiting for him—or perhaps not him, especially: for anyone who was ready to come, that night, any night.
He looked ahead; it seemed that his eye skimmed like a shearwater across the dark ripples, zigzagging between the headlands where the hill ridges dropped to the water’s edge.
On to where the straits opened out into the restless sea.
48
MARTA half turned with the tray in her hands and nudged the door open with a sway of her hip. Inside, the room was almost dark, and only a thin crack of light between the shutters showed that the morning was well advanced. Palewski’s room smelled strongly of candle wax and brandy, a smell that Marta associated with her employer and which she had never learned to properly dislike. The table, she knew, would be piled with books and glasses, so she set the tray down on the floorboards and went to open the shutters she had closed on Palewski and his studies the night before.
Daylight poured into the room, and the bedclothes stirred and groaned.
Marta tugged at the window frame and succeeded in opening it about two inches at the top. For a few moments she stood looking out into the yard. Suela, the Xanis’ daughter, was sweeping the ground with a little besom broom; Shpëtin, her brother, played silently in the dirt, rolling a ball to and fro. Marta sighed.
She cleared a space on the chair by the bed, moved the tray to it, and set about collecting the bottles and glasses, returning the candlesticks to the mantelpiece. She was very careful not to disturb any of the books scattered around the bed. The ambassador was a magnificent scholar, after all. Night after night he wearied himself looking into those books of his, and she knew better than to let her carelessness spoil his work. What made his work all the harder was that he possessed so many books, more than anyone had ever seen in their life, so that finding the thing he needed was a real chore.