At the top of the hill, she retrieved her charshaf and put it on so she would look somewhat respectable, wiping her blood-smeared hands on its ample folds. The dogs had disappeared, so she emptied her skirt of the stones, keeping one in her fist, more a talisman against harm than a weapon. She hurried through the vineyard, then along the path to the farmer’s cottage, now clearly visible in the morning light. She knocked. There were voices behind the door, but no one answered.
She knocked again and called out, “Selam. It’s your guests from last night.”
“Go away,” the man yelled. “You’re evil djinns. We know you now and won’t open our doors again.”
Feride pounded on the door using the stone. “We need help. Two of our friends are wounded. They’ve had an accident. Please help us. I will pay you.” But there was no response. The stone slipped from her hand.
As she stepped back, the hem of her charshaf swept over the cat. It was lying in front of the farmer’s door, a blood-encrusted gap at its throat. The sight of the lifeless body threatened to tip Feride into hysteria. No wonder the farmer refused to open the door.
She peered into the dark interior of the stable adjoining the house and rejoiced when she saw a donkey. There was no cart, but she found a stack of large wool grain bags and some rope. She loaded a dozen bags onto the animal and led it through the vineyard to where Elif waited beside Doctor Moreno and Vali.
The two women layered the long, heavy grain sacks to make a padded stretcher, then tied Vali and Doctor Moreno on and hitched it to the donkey. In this way, they made their way laboriously downhill, the sacks catching on the grape stocks and threatening to overturn, until they reached the road leading to the port area. Despite the thick wool pads on which the men lay, the road was full of bumps and loose stones that Feride was sure caused the wounded men pain.
They attracted curious and sometimes disapproving stares from the few passersby out this early. They must make a strange sight, Feride thought, a blond foreign man and a Muslim woman in a soiled cloak and veil, pulling two wounded men behind a donkey. If anyone was hunting for them, they wouldn’t have to look far. By breakfast, the whole town would be talking about them.
One of the locals must have alerted the imam of a nearby mosque, who huffed his way up the hill toward them. Two small boys ran behind him, their thin legs churning up dust.
“Selam aleykum.”
“Aleykum selam,” Feride responded.
“You are in need of assistance,” the imam said, exposing brown teeth. “May I help?”
“We were fallen upon by bandits, and these two men were injured defending us. One is a doctor, the other, my driver. Another of our party lies dead in the vineyard above, having valiantly resisted these criminals. Two of the bandits escaped. Several others lie vanquished in the dirt. We need immediate medical care for these men, the best that can be had, and I would like to send a message to our people in the city.”
Feride’s upper-class intonation and vocabulary hadn’t escaped the imam, who sent the boys scurrying off with messages.
“Honored hanoum, I’ve sent a boy to fetch the doctor from the Valide hospital and a cart. If you will come to the mosque, my wife will be pleased to make you comfortable and your travel companion can rest and change into a clean robe.” He looked curiously at the blond foreigner.
Feride declined his invitation, saying they preferred to remain with their wounded companions. Elif had again become unresponsive.
While the imam sent off for stools and refreshments to be brought to them, Feride hovered over the two wounded men, neither of whom had regained consciousness. She swallowed a sob that had begun to rise in her throat. She wished Kamil were here. Her brother would know what to do. She tried not to think of Huseyin. The sight of so much death today had made her husband’s likely death seem real for the first time. Perhaps she was chasing a ghost and risking the lives and sanity of her dearest friends for nothing. Had she really wished Huseyin to be dead rather than to leave her for another woman? The thought filled her with shame and an inchoate fear that by thinking it, she had brought it about.
45
By the time Kamil reached Üsküdar, it was early afternoon. It had taken him two hours to ride back to his house in Beshiktash, which was the closest point across the Bosphorus from Üsküdar, and for his boatman, Bedri, to row him and his servant, Yakup, across the strait. They came armed with knives and pistols. He also had sent word to Omar. Feride might well be staying with friends in Üsküdar. But his conversation with Yorg Pasha and his meeting with Vahid had raised his level of caution, and he felt inexplicably tense. If he were indeed a dog, Kamil thought, his hackles would be raised.
Upon arriving in Üsküdar, they hired a carriage and drove up the hill to the Valide Mosque. Kamil instructed Bedri to wait by the carriage while he and Yakup went inside. Instead of a doorkeeper, a policeman opened the gate and challenged them to identify themselves. When Kamil told him he was the magistrate of Beyoglu, the chastened policeman ushered them into the courtyard and hurried to fetch the director.
Kamil noticed two other policemen standing guard in front of a padlocked door.
“Find out what’s going on here,” he told Yakup in a low voice. The tall, impeccably dressed servant sagged into the posture of a defeated workingman and twisted his sash around to expose its plain cotton lining. He then lifted his fez and ran a hand through his hair, making it stick out wildly. His weapons concealed inside the folds of his wide trousers, he loped off in the direction of the kitchen, following the smell of freshly baked bread.
The director of the Valide Mosque hospital, a thin man with a meager frizz of hair jutting from beneath his fez, hurried over, trailed by the worried-looking policeman.
“Kamil Pasha, selam aleykum. Welcome to our hospital,” the director said, holding out his hand.
“Aleykum selam.” Kamil shook his hand and looked around curiously. “Why are there so many policemen here?”
The director looked flustered. “We had some suspicious visitors last night and then, Allah protect us, two murders,” he added in a low voice.
“Who?” Kamil’s voice caught. Were Feride and Elif dead?
“The doorkeeper and a patient.”
Kamil breathed again. “And the visitors?”
“That’s the odd thing.” He led Kamil to a table in a small winter garden, heated by a stove, and bade him sit, then summoned a servant to bring cups of coffee. “The wife of Huseyin Pasha turned up last night, accompanied by a doctor from the palace and a Frankish man. She told me her husband had been badly burned and was missing. For some reason, she thought he was here. I told them we had no burn patients, but they looked around the wards anyway. There was a man with his face bandaged, and she thought for a moment it was her husband, until I explained that the patient was a local merchant with facial eczema, which we were treating with a sulfur poultice.”
“Where are they now?” Kamil broke in impatiently.
“They spent the night here, and the next morning we found the doorkeeper and the man with eczema dead. The police were summoned, of course. They suspected the visitors of having something to do with the murders. I told them it was absurd to think that a distinguished hanoum or the doctor could have had anything to do with it. The foreign man, I can’t say. There was something odd about him.” He stood and took up a watering can.” On the other hand,” he continued, eyeing the soil in each pot before adding a calibrated stream of water, “the patient who was killed was the man the hanoum had mistaken for her husband. Surely there’s something important in that.” He turned toward Kamil, the half-empty can dangling from his hand. “It’s as if they meant to kill Huseyin Pasha.” He put down the can and sat again, waiting silently while an orderly placed a cup of coffee before each man.