The guard’s lips twitched. He opened his eyes and, after a few hoarse attempts, managed to speak in a whisper. Kamil leaned in to hear.
“The bank closed at five. Just after dark, a carriage pulled up. Monsieur Swyndon came out of the bank with a man I hadn’t seen before. They took two big chests from the carriage and carried them inside, one after the other.”
Omar threw Kamil a puzzled look. “Swyndon was there?”
“Monsieur Swyndon is the comptroller. He often works late, so I didn’t think anything about it. About a half hour later, they carried the chests back out.”
The guard closed his eyes again and breathed heavily. “I was lucky,” he said, his voice straining. “I didn’t inhale the fire. I threw myself to the side. What about my mates?” His eyes focused on Omar’s. No one responded and Fuat closed his eyes again. “Kismet,” he whispered. “Allah knows everything.” A tear trickled from beneath his eyelid. Omar and Kamil looked away.
After a few moments, the guard continued. “The chests looked heavier going out, so our captain offered to help, but Monsieur Swyndon said no.”
Kamil picked up a glass and, holding the guard’s head up, dribbled water between his lips.” What did the stranger look like?”
“Tall. He had a cap on and a scarf around his face, so I couldn’t see much. He wore regular shoes, not for the snow. I thought he was a customer. Only the very poor or the very rich walk around in shoes in the snow, poor men because they have nothing else, rich men because their feet never touch the ground.”
Omar chuckled. “I’ll have to remember that. I bow before your philosophical mastery.”
The guard looked up at Omar to see if he was making fun of him, then, satisfied that the chief was genuinely impressed, stretched his scabbed mouth into a rictuslike grin.
“Then what happened?” Kamil prompted him.
“They went back inside. Then the stranger came out and left in the carriage. The driver was in and out too, helping carry the chests and other stuff.”
“What other stuff?” Omar asked.
“He went in with two heavy bags.”
“Did he bring them out again?”
The guard thought for a moment. “I don’t remember.”
“So Swyndon stayed in the bank?”
“I didn’t see him come out, but there’s another door down the street. Haraf was guarding it, but he got caught in the explosion.” Kamil saw the guard struggle to contain his emotion. “He had come over to ask me if I would be his son’s sponsor at his circumcision. That’s the last thing I remember.”
Omar took down the guard’s address and the names of the other guards and promised to notify their families.
They walked down the row of beds toward a table where the novice had placed a tray of tea and pastries. “Well, now we have our top official robbing his own bank,” Omar announced.
They passed a shelf lined with blackened objects, scorched and scarred by fire. Each was neatly labeled with a number tied on with string. Kamil stopped, intrigued, and called Sister Hildegard over. “What’s all this?” he asked.
“Those are things we found on the patients. It helps family members identify them. Do you have any idea what this is?” She reached into a cabinet, pulled out a partially melted object, and handed it to Kamil. “You can see why I keep it out of sight.” Kamil cradled the medal in his hand. It was a gold starburst decorated with diamonds. A bit of scorched blue ribbon still clung to the back.
“Allah protect us,” he said in a soft voice. It was an order just like the one Huseyin had been wearing for Elif’s portrait.
“Do you recognize it?” Sister Hildegard asked, picking up the alarm in Kamil’s voice.
“It’s a royal order, but I’m not sure which kind. My brother-in-law, Huseyin Pasha, has one. But I’m sure he’s not the only one who does.” Sultan Abdulhamid used royal orders to reward the loyalty of his top men. “There’s no number attached to this.”
“We found it in one of the carts that had carried both dead and wounded. It’s heavy. It must have slipped off the body. We have no idea who it belongs to.” She added, with a sympathetic look, “I’m sorry. Was your brother-in-law injured?”
“I don’t know.” Kamil was already walking back toward the row of bedsteads, followed closely by Omar. In the first bed, the patient’s breathing was labored, each breath accompanied by a faint bubbling sound. Of the face, Kamil could see only the eyes, closed in sleep or exhaustion.
“We know who this man is. But three are unidentified,” the nun explained, “the ones with a green or red cloth tied to the bed. The red one is a woman. But several more seriously injured patients were moved to another hospital with special facilities. The foreign embassies already took their people away.” She shrugged. “They think their medicine is better.”
“Where?” Omar asked.
“The German hospital, probably.” Sister Hildegard rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands and Kamil saw that they were red with exhaustion. “Oh, you mean the badly injured ones,” she said. “Eyüp Mosque hospital. They have a burn specialist there.”
Kamil stood over one of the beds marked with a green cloth and regarded the swaddled figure that lay there. Thick black hair curled from the head. The figure was slim, even under the carapace of bandages. The man in the adjacent bed was too short to be Huseyin. The coals in the braziers hissed. The smell of carbolic barely masked the stench of pus, blood, and urine.
“May I keep this?” Kamil asked Sister Hildegard. “If it’s not my brother-in-law’s, I’ll return it.” The nun nodded her assent, and Kamil slipped the medal into his pocket.
Omar followed him out into the cold. “Do you want me to go to Eyüp with you?”
Kamil shook his head no. They waited for the stableboy to bring their horses.
Omar tucked his hands under his arms and stamped his feet against the cold. His breath formed a white cloud before his face. “Swyndon either went along with the robbery and took off, or he was coerced and then eliminated. But then where’s his body?”
Kamil tried to focus on what Omar was saying, but his mind was full of Feride’s anguish if she learned that Huseyin was either dead or so terribly injured that he had been unable to tell anyone who he was. “We couldn’t get into the second strong room,” Kamil suggested.
“You mean you think the manager might be in there?” Omar was skeptical. “That makes no sense.”
“Why not? What better way to get rid of a witness?”
“For all the thieves knew, the bank would just unlock the door the next day and let him out. And if he’s dead, why bother locking him up?”
“You have a point,” Kamil admitted.
“Better to check, though. Thieves aren’t always the smartest of Allah’s creations.”
The Austrian infirmary was just a few blocks above the bank, so they instructed the stableboy to follow with their horses and waded down the hill through ankle-deep snow. Kamil saw movement behind the windowpanes as residents peered into the street. The air felt scrubbed clean by the storm. The stove fires had died out during the night, so the noxious smog had dissipated. Istanbul’s chilled inhabitants, fresh from sleep, were stacking kindling and smudging their hands with coal and ash, shivering until the new fires caught, and gazing in wonderment out their windows at the accumulated snow. Snowstorms weren’t unknown in Istanbul, but they were rare.
When they reached the bank, Kamil shouted at the gendarme captain to bring some men to the vault. Kamil picked up a brass weight from a scale, pushed it through the bars of the gate, and banged on the door of the locked strong room. “Hello,” he called out in English. “If you’re in there, make a sound.” He waited but heard nothing. He knocked again and repeated his message. Again they waited, and again there was only silence.
Omar shrugged ostentatiously. “He’s long gone. We give the Franks salaries the size of Mount Ararat and still they rob us blind. Europeans are about as trustworthy as weasels in a larder.” Seeing Rejep come down the stairs, he asked, “Have you got the addresses?”