“What is this place?” I asked the old Armenian shopkeeper wonderingly as he placed another tray of gold bracelets on the counter before me.
“This is the oldest part of the bazaar, chère hanoum,” he explained proudly. “It’s where all the most valuable things in the bazaar are kept. It’s fireproof and at night, after the gates are locked, it’s patrolled by guards.” He pointed at the catwalk high up under the roof. “This is as safe as any bank in Europe.”
Next door, the Frankish woman was trying to bargain with the shopkeeper, who suddenly no longer understood English. Leaving Violet to pay for the gold bracelet I had chosen, I entered the silver shop.
“Can I help you?” I asked her.
She turned and I was caught up in the startled gaze of her blue eyes. She seemed to see directly into my own, as if through a window. We smiled at the same time and, without another word, turned to the shopkeeper. I did not have much worldly experience, but I had good nerves, and soon the Frankish woman had her silver necklace at less than half the price the shopkeeper had at first demanded.
“Thank you,” she said when we had stepped back into the lane. “My name is Mary Dixon.”
22
Kamil finds Halil cleaning his tools inside a shed at the back of the garden. By the flickering light of an oil lamp, Kamil sees a single low room. Halil looks up from the bench. His eyebrows are so dense and wiry that his eyes are almost invisible. The front of the room is stacked with neatly organized garden implements and tools.
To Kamil’s question, he answers, “Yes, bey. I found some clothes. It’s true. And I burned them.”
“Why did you do that?”
“They were women’s clothes, bey.”
“What difference does that make?”
“Who knows what went on with those clothes? In the woods. It wasn’t fit for anyone else to wear them. So I burned them.”
As an afterthought, Halil adds, “Why? Did someone complain they were missing?”
“No, but it’s possible that they belonged to someone who was killed recently.”
“Killed.” It is a statement, not a question. With his good hand, he absentmindedly strokes the stumps of his missing fingers.
Kamil wonders how much he knows about Mary Dixon’s murder. Surely the villagers all know.
“Where did you find them?”
“By the pond.”
“Show me, please.”
Without a word, Halil merges into the afternoon shadows outside the door and leads the way through the garden. The air is heavy with bees. They pass the pavilion and climb over the ruined wall into the loamy gloom of the forest. The pond lies behind a screen of rhododendrons.
“There.” He points behind a group of moss-covered boulders.
Climbing carefully over the slippery stones, Halil points to a narrow cleft. “Pushed inside.”
Kamil slips on a patch of wet moss and catches himself on a bush, swinging nearly to his knees as the branches give way under his weight and others flail at him. He hangs there for a moment, breathing heavily, before pulling himself upright.
He goes over the ground carefully, sweeping aside the leaves, but too much time has passed for there to be any sign of a struggle. Beneath a top layer of crisp brown leaves is a slick wet mulch of debris from previous years. He kneels beside the boulders and peers into the crevice. Deep inside the rock there is something light. He reaches in gingerly, but emerges only with scraped, muddy fingers. He takes off his jacket and rolls up his sleeve. This time, he forces his entire arm into the cleft. His fingers touch cloth. He snags it with the tips of his fingers and carefully pulls it out. It is a woman’s blouse. He scours the area systematically and discovers inside a hole, at shoulder height in the trunk of a tree, a pair of women’s lace-up shoes. Put there by someone who knows this forest well, he thinks. If the clothing is Mary Dixon’s, it would be a concrete link between her death and Chamyeri. Another link is Mary’s pendant. It fits into Hannah’s box, and Hannah was killed here. Mary and Hannah, linked by the sultan’s seal and a scrap of verse.
The shores of the pond are preternaturally still, except for a clearly etched ripple at the far end of the metallic water where it is fed by a spring. Kamil imagines Hannah Simmons floating in the black water, her clothes billowing about her. He looks at the slippery moss and layers of dank leaves with distaste.
His arms and face scraped and his trousers covered in mud, he returns to the city with the blouse and shoes wrapped in an oilcloth.
Michel carefully cleans the mud from the shoes and places them on the shelf in Kamil’s office next to the folded blouse and the items found in the sea hamam. Kamil stands for a few moments before the neatly displayed items as before a shrine. He is reminded that most things we choose to care about are fleeting. To dispel the melancholy that had begun to settle on him, he turns to Michel and suggests, “Shall we go to the coffeehouse? I think we’ve earned a rest.”
“I have a better idea,” Michel counters. “Let me take you to a very special eating house I know. Their Albanian liver is delicious. And the owner’s daughter is too,” he adds, laughing.
23
Some days after Papa and I fought over Amin Efendi’s marriage proposal, he invited his political friends to a soiree at our house. Aunt Hüsnü and I were to appear in Western dress and greet the guests, entertain them at dinner, and then withdraw, leaving them to discuss politics. I had listened to them before. On the evenings when Papa had guests, I moved quietly through the dark corridors and took up a position in a chair in the next room where I could hear their discussions. Servants are invisible even in the light, so Violet found reason to hover in the halls and warned me if anyone approached my hiding place. This rarely happened, though, since the men did not feel free to move through my father’s house, lest they trespass into the private realm in which women dwelled. We were only appropriate when on display. Otherwise, we were dangerous and forbidden fruit.
The men arrived, along with their wives. The women, stiff and uncomfortable in their unaccustomed corsets, adjusted the pearlseeded and embroidered veils that framed their open faces. They were dressed in the latest Paris fashion. The women’s eyes were lowered, whether from modesty or embarrassment was hard to gauge. They flocked toward Aunt Hüsnü and me, away from the men, and greeted us effusively, as if we had rescued them from a shipwreck.
Amin Efendi politely greeted all the women together, but his eyes locked onto mine. I was embarrassed and looked away, hoping no one had noticed. I could not imagine him as my husband. I could not imagine a husband in any case. I thought of my cousin Hamza. I thought of Papa’s exasperated voice behind closed doors. That was all I knew of men and husbands.
We walked in two flocks, men and women, to the parlor. The women clustered together on one side of the room. The men broke into twos and threes and thus took up more space, but did not move beyond the sofas, an unacknowledged boundary.
I heard the doors to the room creak on their hinges, and I heard the men’s voices in the room falter, then increase in volume. I turned to see Hamza standing inside the door. At first I didn’t recognize him. It had been seven years since the day he gave me the sea glass and went away, leaving me alone at Chamyeri. I had heard he was in Europe. His features were sharper, as if drawn by a knife. The thick curls I remembered were slicked back against the sides of his head. Permanent lines creased the space between his eyebrows, giving him a seriousness that I found intimidating. He looked leaner and more vital, like a spirited horse whose every small movement is a barely contained shorthand of great power.