The Janissary Tree (32 page)

The
sultan liked the coat. He had recalled, with Palewski, the old days that
neither of them had ever known but that both of them imagined tinged with a
glamour and success that neither Poland nor the empire had ever rediscovered. And
the sultan had said, in a voice that sounded suddenly weary and unsure, that
all the world was changing very fast.

"Even
this one."

"Your
edict?"

The
sultan had nodded. He described some of the pressures that now forced him to
make changes in the running of his empire. Military weakness. The growing
spirit of rebellion, openly fostered by the Russians. The bad example of the
Greeks, whose independence had been bought for them by European powers.

"I
believe we are taking the right steps," he said. "I am very positive about the
edict. But I understand, also, that there will be enormous difficulties in
persuading many people of the need for these changes. Sometimes, to tell you
the truth, I see opposition everywhere--even in my own home."

Palewski
was rather touched. The sultan's home, as they both knew, contained about
twenty thousand other people.

"Some
will think that I am going too fast. Just a few may think that I have gone too
slowly. And sometimes even I am afraid that what I am trying to do will be so
misunderstood, so mangled and abused, that in the long run it will be the end
of--all this." And he gestured sadly at the decorations. "But you see,
Excellency, there is no other way. There is nothing else we can do."

They
had sat in silence together for some moments.

"I
believe," Palewski said slowly, "that we must not fear change. The weight of the
battle shifts here and there, but the hearts of the men who fight in it are
not, I suppose, any weaker for that. I also believe, and hope, that you have
acted in time."

"Inshallah.
Let us hope together that the next round of changes will be the better for
us--and for you."

And
he had thanked the ambassador again for listening to him, and they shook hands.

As
the sultan left to visit the Russian prince, he turned at the door, and with a
wave of his hand, he said, "Forget the incident this evening. I have forgotten
it already. But not our talk."

Unbelievable.
Even Stratford Canning, the Great Elchi as the Turks liked to call him, who
helped prop up the Porte against the pretensions of the Russians, would have
swooned with pleasure if the sultan had spoken to him so sweetly.

Palewski--who
normally took mornings one thing at a time--clasped his hands behind his head on
the pillow, grinned, wriggled his toes, pulled the bell rope for tea, and
decided that the first thing he would do today was pay a visit to the baths.

And
later, it being a Thursday, he would dine with Yashim.

89

***********

As
the lid swung up on well-oiled hinges, Yashim took a cautious peek inside.

The
light was dim, and the interior of the chest in shadow, but even so Yashim
could recognize something that was as prosaic as it was unexpected.

Instead
of the dead cadet he dreaded, a stack of plates.

Beside
the plates lay a tray of rather finicky little glasses, turned on their rims to
keep out dust. Next to them, a metal goblet covered with what proved to be a
folded strip of embroidered cloth. And a book.

Yashim
picked it up. It was the Koran.

Otherwise
the chest was empty and smelled of polish.

Yashim
smiled, a little grimly.

They're
getting the caterers in, he said to himself. For a feast.

A
Karagozi bacchanal.

He
closed the lid and made for the stairs. Halfway up he found himself swallowed
in darkness and began taking the stairs two at a time, surging out of the
spiral and across the chamber he had come in by, not caring that his flying
feet raised a cloud of dust as he slewed over the floor. Out on the parapet he
yanked the door closed, hooked the chain, and leaned back against the wall,
breathing heavily. From where he stood he could look down into the branches of
the elegant cypress tree.

How
is it, he asked himself, that I can be frightened by a set of crockery?

Because,
he thought, this time I've got it right. Three bodies turn up, close by three
tekkes. This would be the fourth. Established on the site of the Janissaries'
greatest triumph--the Conquest of Constantinople.

And
the body was yet to come.

90

***********

THE
first person Murad Eslek saw when he strolled into the cafe for breakfast was
Yashim efendi, the gentleman he had rescued from the tanners.

Yashim
saw him grin and wave. He murmured something to a passing waiter, then he was
sitting down beside Yashim and shaking hands.

"You're
well,
inshallah
? How's the foot?"

Yashim
assured him that his foot was getting better. Eslek looked at him curiously.

"And
I believe you, efendi. Forgive me, but you seem like a watered rose."

Yashim
bowed his head, remembering the hours he and Eugenia had spent sheathing the
sword last night. He thought of her gasping, flinging back her beautiful head,
and baring her teeth with frantic lust, almost overcome^--as she had whispered
to him--by the discovery of a man who could do more than feed her appetite: who
could, in the hours they played together, awaken a hunger she had never known
before. He hadn't slept a wink.

He
hadn't slept too much the night before, either, the night that he'd dropped
Preens assailant into the bubbling vat at the tannery. Since then he'd been
constantly on the move--that second time to the Russian embassy, sending
Palewski to the party to buy him time, pounding the streets in search of a
tekke that meant nothing to anyone but him and--who? All the time his mind had
been turning over the possibilities, tracking back over his encounters of the
past week, looking for something he could get a grip on.

All
the time trying not to think about what had happened last night. The pain and
the desire. The torment he had been powerless to resist.

He'd
see what his friend Eslek could do to help him, and then he'd go to the hammam
to revive. To wash away the dust of the Kerkoporta Tower. To ease his aching
limbs, dissolve his thoughts, and contemplate the presence of the demon he had
fought so long and so hard to control.

Murad
Eslek looked up from his coffee to see the expression on Yashim's face.

"You
all right?"

Yashim
smoothed it away.

"I
need your help. Again," he said.

91

***********

An
hour before dusk, Stanislaw Palewski joined a group of men spluttering with
indignation at the doors of the Hammam Celebi, one of the better baths of the
city on the Stamboul side.

It
stood at the bottom of a hill, below a network of crowded alleyways whose
relatively generous width suggested that this was, all the same, a prosperous
district, neither so crammed that its houses almost jettied into their
neighbors across the street, nor so grand that they were hidden behind walls,
but a district of well-to-do merchants and administrators who liked to saunter
down the streets in the evening and sit discussing the day's news in the
numerous cafes and eating houses. It was not far, in fact, from the Kara Davut,
and it was with the idea of stopping for a bath en route to Yashim's Thursday
dinner that Palewski had crossed the Golden Horn by caique, with two bottles of
the bison grass tucked very chill, and snug in their wrappings, into the bottom
of his portmanteau.

The
Hammam Celebi was unexpectedly closed for cleaning. Disappointed bathers
clutched bags of clean linen and fulminated gloomily against the management.

"They
are saying to come back in one hour, or even two!" a man with an Arab headcloth
complained. "As if I should spend my evening running up and down hills carrying
clothes like a peddler!"

Another
man added, "And as if this wasn't Thursday!"

Palewski
pondered this oracular argument. But of course: tomorrow was a holy day for rest
and prayer, to be tackled unspotted, at least on the outside. Thursday night
was always busy at the baths.

"Forgive
me interrupting," he said politely. "I don't quite understand what the matter
is."

The
men turned to look him up and down. If they were surprised or displeased to
find a foreigner--and a ferenghi, to boot--with a plain intention of entering
their bath, they were certainly too well mannered to let it show. And when it
came to bathing, the procedure was, by long tradition, a democratic one. The
hours for men to use the hammam were hours when they could be used by all men,
infidel or believer, foreigner or Stambouliot.

A
third frustrated bather, a man with a small paunch and a few gray curls peeping
from his turban, politely offered Palewski an explanation. "For some reason
none of us can fathom, the bath people have taken it into their heads to clean
out the hammam in the middle of a busy evening, instead of at night."

A
fourth man spoke up, quietly. "It may be some sickness. It has never happened
before. Perhaps we should be praising the bath manager, instead of being so
angry. We should take their advice and return in a short while. As for carrying
our linen about, there are many decent cafes in the district where one could
easily while away the time. Is it not so?"

The
group slowly dispersed. Palewski couldn't tell if they still meant to return,
after the last man had raised the possibility of disease. He thought, probably,
yes. The Turks, after all, are fatalists. Like me.

That
the baths could be closed down because of sickness surprised him more than the
probability that everyone would come back in spite of it.

He
wondered what to do. On the one hand, he had been looking forward to rubbing
the blacking off his feet. On the other, though the delay might not make him
late for Yashim, he was not yet quite as fatalistic as the Turks in the matter
of disease.

He
decided to sit and have a coffee somewhere, keeping an eye on the hammam. If it
reopened, and the signs were good, he could choose whether to go in. If not, he
would simply go on to see his friend at the appointed time and save his feet
for the pump later. Or tomorrow morning, more likely, he remembered, thinking
of all the vodka in his bag.

He
turned, walked a short way up the hill, and chose a coffee shop from where he
could watch the door of the hammam without moving his head. He could even look
across the dome of the baths, and over the roofs behind, to watch the sun set
into the Sea of Marmara, gilding the rooftops and the minarets, the domes, and
the cypress trees.

92

***********

ESLEK
had picked up fast, Yashim thought. He had not refused payment, to his relief:
the task was crucial, too important to be carried out as a favor. He'd had his
favor already, anyway. It was time to make returns.

He
slipped off his clothes and handed them to the attendant, shuffling into a pair
of wooden clogs to protect the soles of his feet from the hot stone. Inside the
hot rooms of the hammam, the floors were always dangerously slippery. Naked
except for a clout around his hips he clip-clopped through the door into a
large domed chamber filled with steam. The dome was supported on squinches that
created semicircular niches around the walls, where one could sit by a flowing
spout of hot water that ebbed away downhill to the drain in the center,
scooping up the water to clean one's body to the very depths of one's pores.

Yashim
stepped gratefully into the steamy room. He set his feet apart, arched his
back, and stretched until the joints in his shoulders cracked. Then he ran his
fingers through his black curls and looked around for somewhere to sit. He took
possession of a niche and sat on a small low bench with his back against the
wall and his long legs stretched out in front of him. For several minutes he
did not move, allowing himself to absorb the heat, feeling his sweat begin to
run. At last he bent forward and picked up a tin scoop at his feet.

He
stretched out an arm to fill the scoop and very slowly tipped the water over
his head. His eyes were closed. He loved the way the water sought out runnels
through his hair and trickled, like soothing fingers, down his neck. He did it
again. He heard a man laugh. He smelled the animal scent of clean skin. After a
few more minutes he picked up a bar of soap and began to lather himself
completely, beginning with his feet, working his way up his body to his face
and hair.

He
continued to pour the water over his head and shoulders. Eventually he began to
wash the soap away, from top to toe, working at his skin with his fingers,
watching the way the hairs on his legs followed the course of the water. It
always reminded him of Osman's dream, the dream in which the founder of the
Ottoman dynasty had seen a great tree, whose leaves suddenly trembled and then
aligned, as if in a wind, pointing a myriad of sharp points toward the Red City
of Byzantium. Finally he gave his feet a thorough kneading with his thumbs,
then stood up and crossed to the raised platform in the center of the room.