The Baklava Club: A Novel (Investigator Yashim) (24 page)

He stretched and the straw crackled underneath him.

The terms of his confinement had unquestionably improved. The more these buffoons thought about killing him, the easier those terms became. From the stool where they had bound him at first, he had graduated to a rough wall, and a beaten earth floor, and a heavy rope around his waist. It would not do: they saw that. They had thought long and hard about the problem: how to tie him in such a way that he could move about but not untie the knots himself .

It was he, Czartoryski, prince, diplomat, flower and hope of his unhappy nation, who had proposed the obvious solution.

“Why don’t you simply let me loose?”

Where could he run to—supposing that at his great age he still could run? The house was hardly well barricaded, but the windows were quite high, and he would make a fearful noise trying to climb out. Well, would he give them his word?

“I am prepared to give you my word, as a prince of Poland, that I will make no effort to escape.”

Face to face, hands in the open. No crossed fingers, no tricks. Czartoryski scorned the vulgarity. For a nobleman of his rank and lineage, only his oaths to God could be considered binding.

53

P
ALEWSKI
was wrong if he thought he had seen the last of Father Doherty. The cleric had even taken up position in his dreams. He was standing by the window and urging Palewski to stir himself because the streets were full of Orthodox bishops, baying for blood.

“Get up, man! It’s death! Death, I tell you! It starts with blood and ends with jostling in the street, so it does.”

Palewski woke up with a start, and it was the dream again, with Father Doherty wild-eyed at the end of the sofa, shaking Palewski’s feet and talking urgently of death and blood. Palewski closed his eyes, and then opened them with a start.

“Wha—what are you talking about? Where’s Marta?”

And Marta was there, close beside him, wringing her hands.

“It’s the priest, kyrie. He seems to be out of his mind.”

“Get me coffee, there’s a good girl. Don’t mind him. Just coffee, Marta. Quick as you can.”

“You must wake up, Palewski! Holy Mary and Joseph!”

Palewski inched himself upright against the arm of the sofa, and winced. “All right, Father. Sit down. Sit. Take a deep breath.”

Father Doherty sank his head almost between his knees: Palewski could see the nape of his neck, and his grimy collar. He hoped Marta would be quick with the coffee.

Doherty finally raised his head, with his fingers pressed against his eyebrows, and groaned.

“I went this morning to see the Italians, Palewski. Meaning to say goodbye, you know.” The idea seemed to dislodge him: he slid a hand to his mouth and heaved. “I—I—went in, up the stairs,” he continued, slowly, parsing his words like a patient child, “and…”

“What?” Palewski said sharply. For the first time he felt uneasy. “What, man?”

“I knocked.” Doherty’s eyes were wide as he made the gesture. “No answer. I pushed the door—it wasn’t locked—” He gulped. “There was blood all over the floor.”

“How could you tell?”

“I—I called out. ‘Who’s here?’ The blood was sticking on my shoes. And when I looked, it was everywhere. On the floor, on the walls. Everywhere. Like a shambles, man. An abattoir.”

Palewski looked horrified. “Go on.”

“I wanted to go in—but then I heard a noise. Clicks, like an insect or a door, or I don’t know what. God forgive me, I was afraid then. I can’t quite remember how I came out. I thought of you, Palewski. We have to do something.”

Palewski’s face was drawn. “I can’t move. We must get Yashim.”

Marta came in with the coffee for Palewski and his visitor.

“Unless you’d prefer something stronger?” Palewski said. But Doherty cradled the little cup in his hands.

“I followed the coffee,” Yashim announced from the doorway.

“Yashim—thank God. Get him a cup, Marta.” When the door had closed he said: “Father Doherty’s been to the Italians’ apartment. Blood, Yashim. On the walls, on the floor.”

“So much blood. I—I came away.”

“He heard some sort of clicking noise. He thought there was somebody in there.”

“Very well. Can you show me what you saw?”

Doherty took a deep breath. “I can show you the place. But—”

“I know the way. You don’t have to come in.”

At the front door they met Marta, who presented Yashim with a cup. Yashim took a gulp of the coffee, and steered the priest out into the street.

“What prompted you to go to the flat, Father?”

“I’m leaving Istanbul in a day or so. I hadn’t seen them in a while, and I wished to make my farewells. They are so foolish, Yashim. Foolish but still young.”

They struck off downhill, into the warren of ill-made streets that led to the port.

“It’s not far. Not far at all. But this morning, coming up—with that behind me—it seemed to take hours. Oh, Jesus.”

When they arrived at the gateway to the courtyard, Yashim told Doherty to wait. Stillness reigned in the darkened hallway. Ahead, the stairs rose to a gallery that encircled the little backyard. Yashim went up slowly, keeping to the wall. He paused and glanced back over his shoulder.

Was it his imagination, or had the shadow widened a fraction beneath the hallway door?

At the top of the stairs he found the door shut. Yashim turned the handle: the catch clicked and the door swung open.

A cloud of flies rose from the floor, buzzed, and settled back.

A couple of low inlaid tables stood by a divan covered in a printed quilt. The cushions against the wall were arranged neatly, point upward, in a tidy row. A book lay facedown on the divan. It was unbound, but its title page was written in a language Yashim did not recognize. The author’s name was Kierkegaard, and Yashim remembered that Birgit had talked about him, in the woods.

Birgit and Giancarlo. Fabrizio and Rafael. He stood motionless in the silent room. He remembered them all from the picnic in the woods, Giancarlo stripped for swimming, pale and muscular as he stooped over Birgit on the grass and dashed the wet hair from his eyes; Fabrizio, wiry and dark, slipping into the water secretly, like an otter, shy of the girls watching; and Rafael beside them, smiling awkwardly because he had refused to swim, twirling his cap between his fingers. It was like an exquisite old miniature painting in his memory, flattened, foreshortened, each character in the picture taking up his or her particular space. Natasha’s dark head bent over Birgit’s fair one. Both girls laughing at a private joke, glancing at Rafael.

He crossed the room, hesitating between two doors. The one on the left opened into a small room with a single latticed window overlooking the street. Some clothes were folded neatly on top of a chest of drawers, men’s clothes, and on the divan opposite the window were two cushions less carefully positioned than the cushions in the main room. Rafael and Fabrizio? The window was shut but the room smelled fresh and clean.

The other room must have belonged to Birgit and Giancarlo. The boy used it for sleeping, and making love, presumably, but it was much more hers than his, a boudoir scattered with pots and bottles and all the girlish tools and devices Yashim recognized from the harem—tweezers, a small razor with its blade carefully tucked into the handle, a single pearl earring lurking behind a pot of cream. A mosquito net dropped to the divan from a wooden ring suspended from the ceiling, and the door of an old armoire bulged with pale striped skirts and white petticoats.

Birgit was there, but not the boy. Her neck was open in a wide smile of welcome, her bloody head flung back over the edge of the divan, her hair stiff and matted where it had cascaded to the floor beneath a waterfall of blood.

Yashim walked slowly around the divan. His lips were drawn into a downward curve that hollowed his cheeks; only with effort could he maintain his reluctant gaze. It was only ten feet from one side of the divan to the other, but to Yashim it was like ten miles, ten years, each step harder than the last.

He went next door and slumped to the floor, his back to the window, and for many minutes he sat wrapped in his own arms, wondering what he should do.

He would inform the
kadi
. A priest would be needed for the burial, which must happen within hours; but the
kadi
was the point of justice.

A
kadi
, a priest—and a consul, for the Italian boys. Where were they?

The blood on the walls was dry. He took a deep breath and went back into the bedroom and knelt by the divan, assessing the condition of the blood and the degree of movement in her limbs.

Father Doherty said he had heard a noise, as if someone was moving about. But Yashim was certain that Birgit was long dead when Doherty arrived. The nights were cooler now, and that affected the onset and the passing of rigor mortis. Maybe she had been killed last night.

Natasha had left her with Giancarlo around six o’clock, when she met Yashim and they went back to his flat. Rafael and Fabrizio were not at home.

He examined the front door. There was no sign of a forced entry: no broken wood, no splinters around the lock. Perhaps Birgit herself had opened the door to her killer. Suspecting nothing. Opening her door to someone she already knew.

She didn’t know many people in Istanbul.

Once again he had an image of the the picnic. A tableau: Giancarlo and Birgit, and the two boys, the dark Sicilian and the solemn intellectual, and Natasha, all laughing under the trees, unaware that within days one of them would be dead. He blinked. It was not, he sensed, quite the right picture. Natasha and Birgit, the dark and the fair; and the three boys. He saw himself standing at the edge of the pool, looking back. Paintings dissolved when you stepped up close; the picnic scene was touched by dark strokes he had not noticed on the day: shadows under the trees, the dark empty windows of the ruined house. Doherty’s hat on the grass.

There was a knock on the door and Yashim jumped.

“Yashim?”

“I’m coming, Father. We must go back to Palewski’s.”

“Palewski’s, yes. That’s a good idea. I’ll—I’ll go now, then. You can catch me up.”

Yashim let him go. There would be a priest, but perhaps it would not have to be Doherty.

He opened the door quickly, and called after him.

“Yes?” Doherty was on the stairs.

“When you came in up here, earlier—how far did you come?”

He could see the white moon of Doherty’s face in the gloom of the hall.

“Well, I—I just stepped in. One step, ah, maybe two? Enough to—you know. Is there someone, well, is anybody there?”

“I’ll join you at the residency.”

He moved to the wall and watched the priest go out. He stood, watching, for several minutes.

At last he closed the door behind him and went downstairs and pushed at the door in the hallway. It opened easily and he went inside.

The room was dirty. The walls were a muddy yellowish gray, and a gray muslin, thick with dust, hung across the window. The air smelled stale.

Someone stirred on the divan.

“Who are you? You can’t come in here.” A tuft of black hair and then a face appeared above the blanket.

“My name is Yashim. Are you the caretaker?”

“I’m the landlord. It’s my house.”

“What’s your name?”

“Ghika. It’s my house. You’ve come to see the Franks?”

“Are they here?”

Ghika rubbed his face. “I don’t know. Take a look, if you’re so interested.”

Yashim heard the hesitation. “I’ve been up already.” He took a step farther into the room.

Ghika propped himself up on one elbow.

“Earlier,” Yashim said, “you saw the priest?”

“What if I did? You don’t scare me.”

“Upstairs scared me.”

The man’s slippers were just inside the door, where he kicked them off. Yashim bent down and picked one up. “But it didn’t scare you.”

“Scare me, scare you, I don’t know what you mean. You can put my slipper down.”

But Yashim did not put it down. Ghika, who saw everything, barely saw him move; but he felt the blow between his ribs, and the wrench as Yashim took him by the hair.

His head snapped back and he gasped.

Yashim wiped his mouth for him, on the sole of the slipper.

“Taste it, Ghika?” he hissed. “Blood.”

He flung him back onto the divan.

“That’s the blood from the floor upstairs. You knew she was alone?” Yashim knew he was starting the wrong way, but he didn’t care. Fury possessed him: the good girl dead, the flies buzzing, and this creeping lizard who pattered through pools of blood in his slippered feet.

His fury almost made him miss the knife.

Ghika put up his hand to rub his neck. His hand dropped and something just caught the light as the blade whirled through the air. Yashim swiveled automatically, mechanically, too late to stop the point from sinking into his arm. A moment earlier, the target had been his heart.

Quick as a lizard, Ghika was off the divan and swept past Yashim on his way to the door. Yashim gripped the hilt of the knife with a curse and pulled it out, delicately, trying not to rip the skin.

He heard Ghika’s feet pounding across the hall. Shame swept over him, rooting him to the spot. He heard the crash of the door. He looked at the knife in his hand.

And felt the hot sting of the stab wound in his arm, and saw the blood welling up between his fingers as he clutched his sleeve.

54

Y
ASHIM
advanced grimly into Palewski’s drawing room. All the way back he had been working out how he should break the news, but now he had no clever ways, no gentleness.

“Birgit is dead.”

“Oh, Christ.”

“Somebody cut her throat.”

Palewski turned pale. “Birgit? Why”—and then he noticed Yashim’s arm. “You’re bleeding.”

Yashim shrugged his waistcoat off and let it slide to the floor. “Marta’s coming. I’ll be all right.” He didn’t want to look at Palewski. His arm felt numb.

Doherty rose from a window seat. “You’re hurt?”

“Get the brandy, Doherty,” Palewski said. “Come here, Yash. Let’s get that shirt off.”