The men took off her coat, then pulled at her dress. Despite the pain still shooting through her head, she tried to remain calm. Afraid they would rip it and leave her nothing to wear, she unbuttoned the dress herself. When they pulled down her stockings, she fought blindly for a moment, then relented when she realized how insignificant and feeble her resistance was.
Vera woke up on the floor. Her back and legs were stiff, and her neck hurt. It was completely dark, a blackness so thick she felt for a moment that she couldn’t breathe. Her disorientation lasted a full minute until she fought down her panic and began to remember.
Gabriel, she thought, anguish like bile in her mouth. Gabriel must never know. The men had used only their hands, but she felt as violated and humiliated as if they had done the rest. Worse than the physical damage, her memory of her wedding night had been perverted. She would never be able to undress before her husband again, to lie with him and bear his touch without these men’s hands sliding alongside his. When she looked up at him, it would be their lust-glazed eyes and obscene lips she would see.
Then she leaned over and vomited. She reached up to wipe her mouth, but jerked back in pain when she touched her bruised face. Her tongue felt swollen in her parched mouth. Where was she? Her palms rested on a carpet. Was she back in the original room? She struggled to her feet and shuffled cautiously forward into the dark. They must have taken the lamp, or perhaps it had gone out. She had no sense of the passage of time.
She remembered the room in flashes of color. There had been a chair beside the stove. The stove. She focused her eyes in the dark and finally saw the faint glowing eye of the stove like a distant pulsing star. Using that to orient herself, she inched her way across the room, edging each foot forward gingerly, until her knee encountered the chair. Her slippers were lost, her feet cold. There had been a small table with water. She almost tipped over the carafe, but caught it in time and slaked her thirst, ignoring the pain of flexing her mouth. Worse things could happen. Worse things had happened to her comrades, worse things happened to peasants all the time. She was a soldier in the fight against injustice. For once the words struck a chord in her and didn’t just seem like a callow wish.
She shivered and blew at the embers through the slots of the stove. The fire swelled and shed enough light so she could see herself. Her dress and coat were unbuttoned, and her stockings sagged between her legs where they had been inexpertly drawn up. Once she had adjusted her stockings beneath her skirt and buttoned her coat, she felt calmer, as if she had gathered and smoothed her heart beneath her fingers and the circumstances of this room were now encompassed and controlled. Sitting in the circumference of the fire’s eye, Vera considered what she needed to do.
16
Kamil and Omar left the carriage at the police station in Fatih and continued on horseback to the district of Eyüp to look for Huseyin. The Eyüp Mosque was located at the inland tip of the Golden Horn where two rivers spread through meadows to replenish the estuary. They found themselves in a broad expanse of kitchen gardens now heaped with hay against the frost. In the distance, the stately cypress groves of the Eyüp cemetery fenced off the sky.
“Let’s hope he’s here,” Omar said.
“It’s worth a try. But he could be in any of the hospitals or infirmaries.” Or he could be dead, Kamil thought.
“If he’s not here, I’ll get my men to look in all of them,” Omar assured him.
The mosque and its complex of buildings were enormous compared with the poor structure that served the Austrian nuns in Galata. Kamil and Omar left their mounts at a hostlery and took a shortcut through the cemetery, where for some reason the snow had not accumulated, as if the ground were hot with decay. The sour smell of the soil permeated the air. After several wrong turns, they found the hospital, a broad-backed stone building of great age set within a garden. Kamil breathed in the scent of herbs, growing in a sheltered spot. He recognized sprigs of salvia and melissa, round mallow leaves, spikes of purple foxgloves, and the hard brown capsules of opium poppies. He brushed against a low shrub, causing it to release a scatter of black berries. He identified it as Atropa belladonna, or deadly nightshade. Rose hips gleamed red on the spiky remains of stems.
Inside the building, the wards were neatly lined with beds, but except for the patients, the hospital seemed strangely deserted. They found the director’s office, a small whitewashed room with a desk almost obscured by stacks of books and ledgers. A window looked out onto the herb garden. The coals in the brazier were gray and gave off only a meager warmth. Behind the ledgers sat a thin man wearing a tunic with greasy sleeves, his hair a limp fringe beneath his fez. His face was furrowed as if the padding of flesh beneath his skin had melted away.
“We’re looking for a victim of the bank fire,” Kamil said.
The director glared at them. “Do you think this is a hotel where we register guests? If they want to tell us who they are, that’s their business. If their relatives come to pay, that’s even better. But in the meantime I have fifty-eight patients, one man who claims to be a physician but is nothing more than the imam’s nephew, and five lazy orderlies. If you want to figure out which one is your friend, they’re in Ward Three.” He shouted for an orderly.
“We’ve been rude not to introduce ourselves,” Kamil said. “This is Omar Loutfi, chief of the Fatih police, and I am Magistrate Kamil Pasha.”
“You think that impresses me,” the director answered belligerently. “You have no idea what I have to do to keep this place running. Don’t come in here holding your titles over me. I’ll quit. It would be the best thing I ever did for myself.”
“I’ve been appointed by Sultan Abdulhamid as special prosecutor in charge of investigating the fire at the bank.”
At the mention of the sultan, the director grew wary.
“I heard you have a special treatment for burns here,” Kamil continued. “What exactly do you do?”
“We alternate exposure therapy with topical application of silver nitrate, zinc oxide when we can get it, and collodium. Mostly we try to determine the toxin that is poisoning the body and draw it out. We administer laudanum for pain, and once the patient can eat, we provide a nourishing diet to build up his life force. Depending on the severity of the case, we also use baths and surgical treatments. We’ve had some good outcomes with skin regeneration. Pressure bandages seem to inhibit scarring.”
“That’s very impressive. Can you do that with so few staff members?”
“You see my point,” the director shouted, half rising from his chair. “I can’t. I just can’t do it all. Tell our padishah please that we need more staff, not more patients!” He collapsed back into his chair.
“I’ll see what I can do,” Kamil promised. “In the meantime, we’re looking for Huseyin Pasha. We think he might be among the victims from the bank fire.”
“I have fifty-eight patients and you’re looking for a pasha,” the director muttered. He barked at the orderly who had appeared at the door and went back to his paperwork without another glance at Kamil and Omar.
“You’d think being attached to a mosque would sweeten his spirit,” Omar grumbled as they followed the orderly through frigid corridors and courtyards in the centuries-old building.
When they found Ward Three, it turned out they had reached an impasse. Three patients were Huseyin’s general height and weight, but unrecognizable behind their bandaged faces. Their eyes were closed, the flesh around them scraped and charred. Kamil tried speaking to each of them, but only one opened his eyes. They were hazel; Huseyin’s were brown. The other two appeared insensible.