“Yes.”
“What is your husband’s name?”
This might be a trick to get Gabriel’s name from her. “Ivan Balian.”
She felt his arm tighten around her shoulder. “Is he here in Istanbul?”
“No, in Moscow.”
“You are here alone, Lena? How can that be? It’s very dangerous for a woman alone in a strange city. Anything can happen.”
He stood, towering over her. “I’ll see that those men are punished. They won’t bother you again.” He clicked open a silver cigarette case and offered it to her.
She wiped her eyes on her sleeve and took a cigarette. “Thank you, Monsieur Vahid.”
“Vahid.” He lit the cigarette for her. His smile showed a line of perfect white teeth beneath his mustache. “You may call me that.”
“Thank you, Vahid.” Vera forced herself to look at his face and smile back. The aromatic smoke in her lungs intoxicated her.
“I will send more water.” He removed the pin from her hair and put it back in his pocket.
When Vahid had gone, the key once more turned in the lock, Vera realized she still had no idea who he was or what he wanted from her. She was sure he was interested in Gabriel, but she wouldn’t lead Vahid to him. She had no idea where Gabriel was now, but perhaps Vahid didn’t know that. If she convinced him that she had no useful information, would he let her go? She knew the answer. She would be the lure to bring Gabriel out in the open. Her only option was to get out first.
22
Kamil thought about those moments in the hospital hallway all the way back to Eminönü. Elif had once told him the story of her husband’s death, how Ottoman soldiers had come to the house and shot him because he had a Slavic name, how he had taken days to die, while their neighbor, a surgeon, had refused to treat him. The families had been best friends. They had bought her husband’s paintings, their children had played together.
When her husband finally died, Elif told Kamil, she had made a funeral pyre of his paintings, stolen the neighbors’ carriage and horses, and, taking her young son, set out for Istanbul. Armed and dressed as a man, she had made her way through lawless territory until her carriage was stolen. Then, watching her son be killed by bandits, she had lost whatever remained of the woman she had been.
Kamil had met her soon after she arrived in Istanbul at her cousin Huseyin’s door. Under Feride’s calm attention and Huseyin’s firm hand, Elif had slowly come back to life. She was painting again and had found a teaching position at the Academy of Fine Arts. But when she moved into her own apartment, it seemed as though she no longer needed or wanted Kamil’s companionship.
Now he felt he had been given a second chance. Despite the tragedy of Huseyin’s disappearance, Kamil felt full of joy as his horse cantered through the streets of Fatih, down the hill to the Eminönü waterfront, and across the bridge to the Ottoman Imperial Bank.
It had taken Hagop most of the day to defeat the vault. The door stood wide open, the lock seemingly undamaged. Omar was inside and grimaced when he saw Kamil. “I hate it when I’m wrong, especially when that means you’re right.”
“Swyndon was in there?”
“Banged up, but able to talk. They took him to the German hospital. He said a man came to his office yesterday afternoon and showed him his daughter’s gold bracelet.”
“How did he know it was hers?”
“He had it made for her, set with turquoises.”
“Do you remember?” Kamil prompted him. “The child said Sosi had taken her bracelet.”
“The man told Swyndon that he had an accomplice at his house and if he didn’t open the strong room, the kid would be dead by the time he got home.”
“Probably a bluff.”
“But as effective as if it weren’t. What parent would take the chance? Swyndon told him that he couldn’t open the door without the keys kept by the other managers, and the guy held out the keys.”
“Someone stole the keys and replaced them with fakes. Sosi again? I bet we’ll find the other two managers’ nannies also had a mysterious friend with access to the house. How was Swyndon wounded?”
Omar sniggered. “You could say he beat himself up. He tripped and hit his head on the metal shelf, knocked himself out. There, you can see the blood on the edge.”
23
Gabriel moved quickly and soundlessly through the lanes of the Kurtulush district until he came to a small cottage ringed by a garden wall. The papery trunks of poplar trees in the garden glowed in the slanting afternoon light. His driver, Abel, and Abel’s sister, Sosi, lived in this cottage with their aging father, an irascible man who was blind in both eyes. Gabriel had visited them before.
He planned to confront Abel about the explosion at the bank. What on earth did he hope to gain, Gabriel wondered, by attracting the attention of the secret police? There must be a reason, he told himself. Perhaps it could be explained as the excesses of immature, would-be revolutionaries, but he was furious at their lack of discipline. They had ruined the entire mission. As had he, he reminded himself ruefully. Still, he wanted an explanation.
The blue-painted door was ajar. Gabriel pushed it open and went inside. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the gloom, but he could already smell the blood and feces. Abel, dead, was naked and tied to a chair, his body livid with bruises, cuts on his arms and round burn marks, probably from cigarettes, on his genitals. Gabriel stepped on something and jumped back. On the floor were two of the man’s fingers, neatly severed at the joint.
Gabriel’s mind flashed back to Sevastopol, his sister’s broken body, the pink quilt stained with her blood, the fingerless woolen gloves the men had heedlessly left behind, their hands hot with stolen life. Gabriel moaned and dug his fists into his eyes until the vision receded and he was once again inside his skin, in this Istanbul room with Abel’s body.
That’s when he saw Abel’s father hiding inside the quilt cabinet, his milk-white eyes staring and his mouth slack with shock. “Sosi?” the old man whispered, trembling.
“Not Sosi, but a friend,” Gabriel reassured him. “Where is Sosi?”
“He took her.”
“Who did?” But Gabriel could find out nothing more from the terrified old man. Was it the secret police? Gabriel wondered. They would be after him and the gold. Abel knew where the gold had been stored. He must have told them. He had no reason to protect Gabriel. If the secret police knew that the gold was at Yorg Pasha’s mansion, then the old man was in danger as well.
Given Abel’s inexplicable perfidy at the bank, though, Gabriel realized there could be interests at play about which he knew nothing at all. Still, the young man’s brutal murder shocked him, and he worried about Sosi. He had met her when she delivered the keys to the vault she had stolen from the bank managers. He knew what happened to women taken by the secret police. Vera. Sosi. He fled the house, moving surreptitiously through the lanes of Kurtulush to Father Zadian’s church.
24
The meager afternoon light barely lit the parlor where Mrs. Swyndon sat on the sofa, clutching a glass of whiskey. She was dressed in a floral gown that seemed oddly out of season. Her hair was swept up into two gray wings held back with combs.
“We have good news about your husband, Mrs. Swyndon,” Kamil said.
“Yes, one of your men told me.”
Kamil and Omar exchanged a puzzled look. “Who?” Kamil asked.
“The man from the police,” Mrs. Swyndon said, outraged. “Don’t you know your own people? Is this some kind of joke you play on foreigners?”
“I’m sure there’s an explanation,” Kamil said in a tone of voice he used for calming skittish horses. “We’re glad that you received the good news.”
“Would you please describe the man who was here?” Omar added.