The Baklava Club: A Novel (Investigator Yashim) (15 page)

“Borodino.”

“Quite. Your friend’s a survivor. We’ll trust to that, and to these single-minded gentlemen,” he added, draping another leech onto a wound. The leech curved slightly, and stuck; Yashim shuddered, seeing it begin to pulse.

It was only after Millingen had gone, cheerfully suggesting that he should send his bill to the fool who’d let his gun off like that, that Yashim was able to question Marta, and Palewski had briefly regained consciousness.

The widow Baxi was at home, sewing, oblivious to the drama of the afternoon. Yes, she knew the driver of the cab, she had engaged him herself, and got a good price. She promised to send him to Yashim as soon as she could find him.

He arrived two hours later, as dusk was falling, sinister in the half-light, with his single eye and ingratiating leer. He volunteered nothing: everything had to be prised out of him, bit by bit. Yes, he had collected the efendi at the residency. He had ordered him to the port. No, the efendi had jumped out of the cab before they got there but he had carried out his agreement, nonetheless. He had been paid as far as the port, but not farther. Even so, he had waited for the efendi. Ten minutes? Maybe more. A long time, anyway, in the blazing heat.

“And the efendi did not return?”

The driver shrugged. “I waited a long time. Then some unbeliever came. Not the same one, maybe, but an unbeliever, like him. They are many, efendi, and it’s easy to get confused. He wanted the cab.”

Yashim sat forward. “Where did he want to go?”

The driver sucked his lip. “To an embassy, also. I thought maybe he was the same one.”

“He wanted to come here?”

“Some other one.” The driver looked bored.

“A different embassy?” Yashim spoke sharply.

The driver looked up at the ceiling. “I have had a busy day, efendi. I cannot remember everything. Another one.”

Yashim gritted his teeth and let a coin spin between his fingers.

“It was the Ingilstan house,” the driver remembered, brightening.

Yashim frowned. “The Ingilstan house?” Why the British embassy? “So this man—he was a Frank? And he asked for the Ingilstan house?”

“Yes.” The driver put out his palm. “With a woman.”

Yashim let the coin drop, and sat back. The driver’s answers surprised him. If Palewski was in danger from anyone, it had to be the Russians, or the Austrians, who would most wish to interrupt his diplomatic efforts. Someone might have taken the cab to the British embassy, and walked on from there. But with a woman, too?

“At the Ingilstan house, did you drive in through the gates?”

“Right to the door.” The driver grinned. “The man paid. The woman walked inside.”

“Other cabs at the port? Was anyone else waiting at the same place?”

The driver shook his head.

“And before you left—did you see anything strange? Hear anything?”

“No.”

Eventually, Yashim let him go.

He walked to the window. A bee clung to the glass, moving up and down the single pane. He opened the window and took a sheet of paper from the escritoire and guided the bee out into the open air.

Palewski had met his secret visitor at the port, with a cab waiting. Then someone had fired on them.

A gust of wind blew in through the open window.

Palewski had called him a prince. A real prince? How many princes were there? Yashim remembered what he had said to Natasha about the Ottoman aristocracy: but in Europe there must be dozens, hundreds of them—French, Russian, Austrian. An idea struck him and he turned to the bookcase.

It took him a moment to find the volume he wanted. Palewski had shown it to him once, a huge calf-bound book stuffed with slips of paper and scraps of aristocratic intelligence: the Almanach de Gotha, a prodigious work of genealogy and snobbery which listed, Palewski promised, the oldest families in Europe. Yashim had laughed at him: every family, he countered, was old.

He brought the book to the escritoire and thumbed through the pages, trying to work out how the entries were arranged. Palewski had said something about arms, and quarterings, going back centuries—to the time of Charlemagne, and the Byzantine emperors, in some cases. Doherty’s time, he thought inconsequentially: the time of real Latin.

There seemed to be hundreds, if not thousands of princes in the book: most of them long dead. Where was Palewski’s prince—and was he, too, dead? Was his name to be one of those written on a slip of paper, and dropped between the pages of the Almanach de Gotha—
Prince So-and-so, b. Wittelsbach 1760; d. 1842—in Istanbul
?

Yashim glanced up at the window.

He had not stayed with Palewski after the shooting. Either he had vanished into the city of his own free will—or he had been made to disappear.

He frowned, and went to find Marta. The kyrie, she said, was still asleep.

“He has a fever, efendi. His body is hot and dry. I would like the doctor to come back.”

“Send for him again. I’m going out, but I shall be back before dark.”

30

Y
ASHIM
made his way downhill to the Tophane landing, his mind a blank.

Istanbul was not a city where people disappeared easily. It was not like London, or Paris: not yet. Every street was inhabited by people who had lived there for generations, or given over to specific trades. Any stranger would be noticed, almost anywhere—particularly a foreign prince.

Almost anywhere except, perhaps, around the Tophane landing. If there was anywhere in the city where you could shoot a man, or lose one, it was here, where the crowds threw up strangers of every description: foreign sailors from all the corners of the Mediterranean and beyond, Maltese ruffians, Genoese officers, French sea captains, even Indians and Chinamen; smooth bankers from the Phanar district, or their peons; urchins, touts, hotel runners, dockhands and storekeepers; burly negroes, emaciated opium addicts, foreign tourists. And diplomats, of course.

He supposed it had always been like that, even in the days when the Ottomans maintained a haughty disregard for the Frankish kingdoms and empires that had not, as yet, fallen under their sway. At the height of the Ottoman Empire’s power the mix would have been different—more north Africans, no doubt, drawn from the corsair kingdoms of the southern Mediterranean, pirates in all but name and always consummate seamen, as the Turks never could hope to be; Egyptian crews who manned the great grain barques that fed the largest city in the world. He thought of the taverns clustered around the port, and of the people who frequented them.

The cab had waited by a clump of willow trees. Palewski had brought his man back toward the trees. Was that when he was shot? Or was it earlier, on the way from the Tophane gate?

Yashim found the trees without difficulty and he cast about while the light held, examining angles, retracing his steps on the town side of the street, peering up alleyways and into courtyards, searching for the place where a man might conceal himself with a gun. He imagined Palewski taking his friend’s arm with his right, placing himself on the left; it was the natural thing. Palewski on the town side, the prince by the water, walking northeast—Palewski peering into the shade to make out the cab … Palewski half-turning … he’d have seen the cab was already gone.

A shot.

A shot. Or maybe two. Yashim leaned back against the walls of a wharf, trying to piece things together from a few scattered phrases—and Millingen’s observations. Once or twice he attracted the curiosity of passersby, shoremen or sailors or little boys, but traffic had slackened. Finally, still uncertain what he was really looking for, he returned to the clump of trees and squatted down, dangling his hands between his knees.

31

“I lost him, Yashim.”

“It wasn’t your fault.”

Palewski picked fretfully at his sheet. “I took precautions to keep it secret. But somehow they were waiting for him.” He sighed. “And don’t say what you want to say, because it’s true and I don’t want to hear it.”

“You should have brought me in?”

Palewski stared gloomily at his friend. “The whole Polish diaspora will call me an idiot. Or a traitor. At times like this, a wise man looks around for someone else to blame, but I can’t see a soul. Just one self-styled ambassador playing with guns and secret messages like a twelve-year-old boy. Lemon juice!”

“Lemon juice?”

“Oh, you know, Yash. Invisible ink, secret codes.”

“You could blame Midhat Pasha.”

“I’m trying, Yash. We set this up together.”

“Had you fixed a meeting with the sultan?”

“The sultan, his ministers, the whole works. For Friday. Midhat was briefing them. New policy slant in European affairs. Active and respectable. Something to entice the British and the French. What I mean is,
impressive
. And the prince had the authority to make it stick.”

“Prince Czartoryski.”

Palewski turned his head sharply, and winced. “Did—did I say so?”

Yashim pulled out a piece of paper. “‘The members of this family,’” he read, “‘bear the title Prince Czartoryski (Serene Highness). Voivode of Podolia. Grand Dukes of Lithuania. Chancellor of Lithuania.’ Here. ‘Adam Jerzy, Prince Czartoryski, Duke von Klewán and Zuków. Born in Warsaw on January fourteenth, 1770. Married, in Radzy
ń
on September twenty-fifth, 1817, Anna, Princess Sapieha-Kodenska, born St. Germain-en-Laye, 1798.’ That Prince Czartoryski.”

“Yes.” Palewski sank deeper into his pillows as if crushed. “That one.”

“Not a very old family, if it’s any consolation,” Yashim remarked, folding up the notes he had taken from the Almanach de Gotha a few minutes earlier.

“They are as close as we come to a Polish royal dynasty,” Palewski muttered.

“Very well. We have three days.”

“To do what?”

“Find him.”

Palewski put his fingers to his temples, and sighed. “I had him, Yash. I had him by the arm and we were going to the cab. Then I saw the cab roll away. I shouted. He told me not to excite myself and then—then there was an explosion. A gun.” He stared at the lamp. “We won’t find him. Not now. He was the target. They could pepper me with shrapnel any day of the week, Yashim, so obviously it wasn’t me they were after. You think they’d fire on us unless they meant to kill him?”

“I don’t know. Dr. Millingen—”

“That sawbones!”

“Dr. Millingen thought you’d had a hunting accident. He picked a dozen pellets out of your back this afternoon. Who’d use a gun like that for an assassination?”

“At point-blank range—”

“Possibly. Fire once, wing the pair of you. Reload, step forward. Coup de grâce, at point-blank range.” Yashim paused. “It’s not an empty street.”

He thought fleetingly about the cab, rattling away. He got up and stood with his arms folded at the foot of the bed. “Where does he live, this Czartoryski? Where did he come from?”

“Paris. He’s an exile, like the rest of them.
The
exile. I said his family was the closest we have to Polish royalty? Well, Adam Czartoryski is the leader-in-exile. His
Essay on Diplomacy
is our Bible, really. He’s related to everyone, on almost every side of the equation—Russians, Germans, everyone. He has the Hôtel Lambert, on the Île Saint-Louis.”

Prince Czartoryski was not just some aristocratic patriot, playing cloak and dagger with the European powers, and Yashim was beginning to understand the depth of Palewski’s anguish. “If Poland was liberated, he’d become king?”

Palewski shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said petulantly. “If not king, he’d be the broker, at any rate. Oh God.” He groaned.

“There’s no body.” Yashim did not want Palewski to yield to despair. “Would the Russians try this? The Austrians?”

“Either. Both. There’s a committee that watches over European affairs like a hawk, pouncing on the slightest hint of change or rebellion. Russia’s foremost. Austria behind. Prussia benefits, though this isn’t really the Prussian style.” He sighed. “All Metternich’s old gang, from the Congress of Vienna. An agreement signed almost thirty years ago, Yashim, which froze the map of Europe into despotisms, and sold out Poland. The list of signatories is pretty long on the final treaty.”

“And they still have an interest in maintaining the arrangements.”

“Some more than others, no doubt. But yes, on the whole, the people whose voices were heard at Vienna govern Europe today. The Pope was there: he got his Italian states back,” he added bitterly. “A lot of blood had been shed to liberate them in the first place. A drop or two of it was mine.”

“Czartoryski’s arrival here would have upset them?”

Palewski nodded. “He came to explain to Midhat Pasha and his people what an alternative Europe might be like, and how the Ottomans could benefit from championing it. That would have sent alarm bells ringing all over Saint Petersburg.”

“He lives in Paris,” Yashim said, feeling the agitation in his friend’s voice. “Why not kill him there?”

“Paris? You don’t assassinate a man in Paris.”

Yashim ignored him. “There’s one reason they might try to kill him here instead. But it doesn’t apply in this case—so I begin to hope he isn’t dead.”

Palewski gave him a disgusted look, and said nothing.

“For an assassination, Paris would do as well as Istanbul. But for a public execution, Istanbul is better. Killers anonymous, and Czartoryski dead? It shows the Ottoman Porte conspiring with the architect of European revolution. That would throw the Porte onto the back foot. We would be forced back into our diplomatic shell—averse to taking any more risks, shy of tampering with the established order. Meanwhile, a warning is sent around Europe: don’t underestimate the reach of the Powers—or the determination of that committee. Isn’t that it?”

“Possibly.” Palewski looked wary.

“Then where’s the body? Why not leave him dead in the street—display it to the world? If Czartoryski were dead, we should have heard about it. If they didn’t leave his corpse, then I hope they have him, alive. But I don’t know why.” He paused. “I hope he’s still here.”

“Why—why can’t they just kill him, and be done?”