An Evil Eye (6 page)
I
N the far-off mountains, a shepherd prepared himself for death. He had lived many summers, but now he felt no warmth from the sun and he knew his time had come.
The shepherd explained everything to his son about the sheep, and the new lambs, and the standing corn.
He said nothing, however, about the feud. Of the dishonor that could only be cleansed with blood.
He blessed the boy, and turned his face to the wall.
“
I
T seems we have two options.” The grand vizier raised his heavy lids. “Instinctively I would prefer to do nothing.”
Yashim coughed politely. “The Russians almost certainly know what happened.”
The vizier blew through his nostrils. “Your little friend on the boat.”
“If he was working for them—”
The vizier waved a hand. “Yes, yes. You know the situation with Russia is delicate. We have certain treaties, certain … obligations.”
Yashim knew how heavily the Russians pressed upon the empire. For decades they had advanced steadily south, dislodging the Ottomans from the northern coast of the Black Sea. Tartary was theirs, and the Crimea, too. Their navy now cruised in what had been an Ottoman lake, the Black Sea. That was humiliation enough; but then the Egyptians had attacked.
In 1836 Mehmet Ali Pasha’s well-trained Egyptian army swept up the Mediterranean coast. Sidon, Acre, Beirut, had all fallen to the overmighty vassal of the sultan, who had appealed in desperation to the only power capable of protecting Istanbul.
The tsar and his generals had been only too happy to assist. The Russians had moved closer to Istanbul—and politely withdrew when the danger was past.
“Meanwhile,” the vizier added, “we have lost one sultan, and gained another.”
He stared at Yashim as he might stare at a spot on the wall, thinking.
The silence extended. One minute. Two minutes.
“You will inform the Russians,” the vizier said finally. His eyes regained their focus and he gave Yashim a rare, and rueful, smile. “Perhaps that will be the last decision I make.”
“I hope not, my pasha,” Yashim replied.
T
HE day promised to be hot.
At the café Yashim folded his legs and sat on the divan, facing the street. The café owner nodded and slapped a brass jug on the coals.
Yashim watched the street slide by.
A few minutes later, the café boy brought Yashim his coffee, and a note. He drank the coffee.
The note was in French.
A cab is waiting at the end of the street. Take it.
Yashim glanced up. His eyes met the eyes of the Sufi across the way. Close by, a man was sweeping the road with a long besom broom. A stout woman went past in the opposite direction, holding a huge turnip like a lantern in her outstretched arm. The houses opposite were shuttered, but one was merely latticed on the upper floor. An Armenian peddler with a mule sauntered down the street and stopped at the café as if uncertain whether to ply his trade here or move on. His glance fell on Yashim and rested there a moment.
Take it
. No threat, no promise. No explanation, either.
Yashim gestured to the boy. “Who brought the note?”
“It was a ferenghi, efendi. We did not know him.”
“A tiny man?”
The boy looked surprised. “Bigger than me, efendi. Not small.”
Yashim got to his feet. Whoever had sent the note would have had time to set up. It lay to him to restore the balance and surprise them.
There would be a man on the street, maybe two. One to watch, one to follow. Keeping an eye on him—and on each other, too.
Yashim glanced left before turning right down the street. He picked out the stop man immediately: he was outside the Libyan bakery ten yards down the lane, eating a pastry—and eating it very slowly, Yashim imagined.
In Pera you could stand on the street for hours, window-shopping, watching the crowds, and no one would give you a second glance—but Kara Davut was a traditional
mahalle
. On Kara Davut, people tended to know one another by sight; strangers were uncommon. Strangers with nothing to do but watch the road were so rare as to be objects of curiosity.
The stop man had found something to do. Now he would be finishing his
corek
and tailing Yashim. He would be ten, maybe fifteen yards behind. Unworried as yet, because Yashim had responded to the note according to plan, and was moving in the right direction.
It was three hundred yards to the end of the road, where the cab was waiting. Like most streets in the district, Kara Davut was neither straight nor level: it rose toward the middle, then dropped steeply in a series of shallow steps that slanted around the hill. The steps were an impediment to wheeled traffic, but a boon to the porters, who plied their trade all over Istanbul.
There were bound to be two men to ensure that Yashim was in view at all times.
Yashim resisted the urge to glance around.
The second man did not, really, have to masquerade. Provided he stayed reasonably close to the cross street, on the steps, he would simply seem to be waiting for someone to come down. He need not try to be part of the
mahalle
at all, in which case he would not see Yashim until he was perhaps halfway down the stairs. Thirty yards.
Yashim glanced ahead: light traffic, no crowd.
He leaned into the rise in the street. Several people passed him in the opposite direction, tradesmen and apprentices on errands, two veiled women with sloshing pails of water from the pump, three schoolboys heading for the
medrese
, casting about for any diversion. Ahead, a
simit
seller with his tray balanced on his turban came over the rise.
Yashim let the man come close, then flinched.
“I don’t owe you a penny!” he exclaimed, flinging up his arm. “You’ve got the wrong man!”
With his left hand he snatched out and grabbed the bewildered
simit
peddler’s shirt.
The man put up his hands, instinctively.
Behind Yashim, the people strolling had stopped and turned. Not quite a crowd, but more than enough to make it hard for the stop man to see exactly what was going on.
Yashim grabbed the peddler’s hand and dragged himself back. The peddler spun, off balance. The tray tilted.
Two dogs, apparently asleep in a doorway, rose with surprising agility and dashed forward.
The buns spun from the tray.
“My
simit
!” the peddler cried. A dog caught a
simit
in midair, while the schoolboys darted at the ground.
An old man stepped out of his shop and made to catch the tray.
Twelve yards back down the street, the stop man flung his
corek
to the ground with an exclamation of surprise, and broke into a run.
It was no time for caution.
His quarry had disappeared.
A
T the back of the shop was a curtain, and behind the curtain a flight of wooden steps.
At the top Yashim flipped the catch on the back window, pushed the casement, and vaulted out.
It wasn’t much of a drop, because the house was built into the slope. Dodging the laundry lines, he raced along the alley. It ended in a wall. There was a water butt against the wall, and Yashim was soon over the top.
He glanced back.
The elderly shopkeeper was leaning out of his window, shaking his fist, and someone—his pursuer—was trying to get past him. The shopkeeper turned and seemed to begin arguing.
Where Yashim’s wall touched the backs of the houses on the higher street there was a latticed window, without glass. Yashim aimed a kick at the casement catch.
It broke, and as the window swung inward Yashim followed headfirst.
The three women in the room were unveiled. Their sewing froze in their laps. They stared at Yashim openmouthed as he swept through, scattering apologies.
Downstairs he found the street door bolted from inside, and a moment later he was mingling with the morning crowd making its way toward the junction.
The cab was there, drawn up beneath the steps.
Yashim sprang onto the box and fished a coin from his belt.
“If you don’t mind,” he said, dropping the money into the driver’s palm, “we can take the ferenghis home together.”
A
KUNIN, the stop man, sat slumped in the corner of the cab, chewing his nails. His companion sat on the bench opposite, humming tunelessly to himself and staring at the blind drawn across the window. Whenever the cab lurched he put out his hand and steadied himself against the dry leather seat.
At the Egyptian bazaar the driver hitched his reins and brought the cab rolling to a halt.
Yashim jumped off the box and made his way to the entrance of the bazaar, where he leaned back against a pillar amid a crowd of shoppers and porters and watched the two men descend from the cab. They paid the driver and made their way to the gate to the water stairs. Yashim followed, to see them settle in silence into a caïque, which shot off from the stage.
Yashim turned away to find a coffee shop where he could complete his breakfast; twenty minutes later he returned to the landing stage and took a caïque himself.
“To Therapia,” he said. “The Russian residency.”
P
RINCE Alexander Petrovich Galytsin was called Alexander, after the tsar; Petrovich, after his father; and Galytsin, after the family estate outside Moscow. In Istanbul, where he served as military attaché to the Russian embassy, he was better known as the Fox.
He sat at his desk with his collar unbuttoned and stared unblinking at the two men who stood before him.
“You lost him,” he said quietly.
The man who had hummed hung his head and mumbled something into his beard.
“Speak up, Shishkin.”
“We—we didn’t give ourselves away, your highness.”
“Oh, wonderful.” Galytsin picked up a stiletto letter opener and balanced it between his fingers. “Now you take me for an idiot, too. Stand up.” Akunin had buckled at the knees. “I told you to take him by surprise, discreetly. You delivered the note. Three hundred yards on a dead-end street, and you lost him. And somehow you didn’t give yourselves away? Which of you took the decision to abort the mission?”
The two men stared at their feet. At last Akunin said miserably: “It was me, your highness. It’s—it’s how we were trained.”
Galytsin stared at the man. “At least you did that part right,” he said. In affairs of this kind, the crucial thing was not to disclose yourself.
“He didn’t see us, your highness. He couldn’t know who we are.”
Galytsin placed the point of the knife on his blotter and twisted it slowly. “You are dismissed, for now.”
The men bowed, touching their forelocks, and backed out of the room. Prince Galytsin’s eyes were fixed on the little hole he had bored in his blotter with the paper knife.
His secretary entered. “A Turkish gentleman, your highness. He says he is from the Porte, and wishes to speak to you.”
“What’s his name?”
“Yashim, your highness. He has no appointment.”
An expression appeared on the prince’s face that the secretary could not interpret. “Send him in.”
“With no appointment?”
Galytsin raised his eyes. The secretary disappeared.
He laid the letter opener on its leather rack and took a fresh sheet of paper from the holder.
He wrote a few words across the top of the page, and laid down his pen.
“Yashim, your highness.”
Yashim paused in the doorway. Galytsin was known to him by name, but they had never met.
“You expected me earlier, I believe.”
Galytsin looked at him curiously. “The invitation was a little clumsy. My apologies. Please, do sit down.”
Yashim settled on the hard chair.
Galytsin hesitated. “I am at your disposal, monsieur.”
Yashim inclined his head. “I come from the grand vizier, your highness. Two days ago, at the monastery of Hristos on the island of Chalki, the monks discovered the body of a man. It is possible that he was a Russian. Fair-haired, big, early middle age, with a long scar on his face between the mouth and the ear. Someone disposed of him in the monastery well, where he was found. He may have been in the well for some weeks. His neck was broken, although the condition of the body makes it impossible to tell if he was dead before he was thrown into the well.”
The prince’s expression was impassive. “What makes you believe he was a Russian?”
“There were other signs, your highness.”
“I should hope so.” Galytsin waved a hand. “What you have told me is hardly conclusive. Fair hair? A scar? Why, it covers half the world.”
Yashim reached into his waistcoat and brought out a silk handkerchief.
“This is perhaps more specific,” he said. He dangled the handkerchief over the desk, and something dropped onto the prince’s blotter.
Only Galytsin’s eyes moved. “What is this?”
“The man had a brand, on his inner arm,” Yashim explained. “Something you might recognize.”
Galytsin touched the withered skin with the tip of his letter knife, and glanced up at Yashim.
“Well?”
“A …
Totenkopf.
” Yashim frowned with the effort of remembering the unfamiliar word. He spoke many languages, but German was not among them. “A death’s-head.”
Galytsin skewered the flap of skin with his knife. “If, as you say, the man was a Russian,” he began, lifting the blade, “the circumstances are peculiar.”
The flap of skin trembled on the tip of the knife.
“I do not think that Greek monks make a habit of murdering Russians.”
“That was my impression,” Yashim agreed. “But you are in contact with the monastery?”
Galytsin smiled. “The tsar naturally feels sympathy for our coreligionists, the orthodox faithful, wherever they may be,” he said drily.
He leaned aside and dropped the flap of skin into the wastepaper basket.
“Thank the grand vizier for advising me of the unfortunate occurrence. Perhaps you will do me the favor of keeping me informed?”
Yashim got to his feet, and bowed. “I am sure the grand vizier would wish it.”
Galytsin flipped a hand carelessly. When Yashim had gone, he summoned his secretary.
“I want Yashim watched. If Akunin and Shishkin fail me again, I will have them cashiered and sent to Siberia. Make quite sure they understand.”
He sat for a few moments longer, his pale hands folded neatly on the desk.
Galytsin was not a man given to endure disappointment for long. Smaller minds could be frustrated by little setbacks like these; but Galytsin took the longer view.
When you were playing for empires, even a setback could be an opportunity.
