An Evil Eye: A Novel Read online

“Hmmph.” The valide sounded unconvinced. “It felt somewhat different, at the time.”

  “And Rose? You were going to tell me about her, too.”

  The valide gave a little shrug. “Rose? She crossed to France the following year, but not—it would seem—under the protection of God. She reached Paris. Some time later, she married a Beauharnais. Rather minor nobility, Tülin, but I have no doubt her father was delighted. He was a great drunkard, and practically a bankrupt.”

  “I understand.”

  The valide went on to sketch the principal events in Rose’s life, including her meeting with Napoléon. The great French commander renamed her Joséphine, and had her crowned as empress in Notre Dame.

  “Eventually, my dear, he cast her off in favor of a stout Austrian princess. Quite a humiliation. Which goes to show, I believe, that we Ottomans manage these affairs with greater tact. More discreetly, at least, within the harem. Poor Rose.”

  “Did she never see the emperor again?”

  “Never, I believe. She was pretty, in a rather common way. But she lacked something, I suppose.”

  “What did she lack?”

  “Rose lacked—address.” The valide took Tülin’s chin in her hand, and smiled. “You are very sweet, Tülin. You listen very well, and it’s not everyone who knows how to listen. But sometimes, do you know? I think there’s more going on in that head of yours than meets the eye. I don’t think you entirely lack address yourself.”

  Tülin dimpled, and bowed her head. “The valide thinks too much of my modest abilities. I wish only to amuse you, and keep you from feeling … bored.”

  “Well, Tülin, that is an excellent ambition.” The valide’s eyes narrowed. “And what, my dear, do you propose?”

  51

  “NEVER mind about the sandwich,” Yashim said. “I’ll buy another.”

  He smiled as the boy got warily to his feet.

  Yashim smiled. “You won’t run away when my back’s turned, will you?”

  The fisherman eyed them both suspiciously as they returned to his boat.

  “You owe me for the mackerel,” he said accusingly, as though it had been Yashim who had made it vanish.

  “Here I am again; and we’ll have two more, if you please.”

  Yashim paid for the sandwiches and led the way along the shore. After a hundred yards or so they found a small jetty and he invited Kadri to sit down.

  “As good as any kiosk in the palace,” Yashim remarked comfortably, swinging his legs over the water. He liked the view over Pera, especially at night, when the streets were lit and the lights from the new apartment buildings sought their reflection in the still water. The outline of the old Genoese fire tower was distinct against the stars.

  Yashim watched from the corner of his eye as Kadri tore into the mackerel with the appetite of a boy who hadn’t eaten all day. He was small but well proportioned, dark-skinned, with clear dark eyes and a shock of black hair that stuck out in comical tufts around his face.

  “Have the other one,” Yashim suggested, holding out the untouched sandwich.

  He could see the pale disk of Kadri’s face in the dark, but not his expression.

  “Thank you,” the boy said. “I have eaten.” And then he added, “Thank you for the sandwich, efendi.”

  “Take it, I’m not hungry,” Yashim said.

  After a decent pause, Kadri’s hand came out and took the sandwich.

  “I expect you’re wondering who I am,” Yashim said. “My name’s Yashim. Your tutor called me in to find you. It’s the kind of thing I do.”

  “You find people?” There was a tone of disbelief in Kadri’s voice. “I didn’t know there was such a job.”

  “No, well. I don’t live entirely on that kind of work, to tell the truth.”

  “Because people don’t disappear often enough?”

  “That, or I can’t find them often enough.”

  The boy’s laugh was pleasant and unforced. “You found me, though, efendi.”

  “I knew where you’d go.”

  “In the whole of Istanbul? How?”

  “Because it’s the same place I went when I ran away from the palace school myself.”

  The boy was quiet for a moment. “You, efendi? You ran away?”

  Yashim smiled ruefully in the dark. Kadri had been about to say something else—surprise that he’d been to the same school. Like the cadet at the gatehouse.

  “Do you want to go back?”

  “I—I don’t know, Yashim efendi. When I was hungry, I thought about it. But really I just wanted to get away. Or …”

  Yashim imagined his face, screwed up with the effort to express what he felt.

  “Or to be somewhere else, for a change?”

  “That’s it, efendi. I just wanted to go into the streets. The ordinary streets.”

  “And the ordinary rooftops, I imagine.”

  “You know?” Kadri almost gasped.

  “I think so,” Yashim said. “I guessed, when I saw the window on the landing.”

  The boy leaned forward and put his chin in his hands.

  “I think, Yashim efendi, that you find your people every time.”

  Yashim laughed. “I try, Kadri. In the meantime, it’s getting late. If you aren’t going back immediately, we’re in danger of running out of options for the night.”

  “Where will we go?”

  Yashim was getting up. “I have an idea. Come.”

  52

  A single lamp burned low on an inlaid table, and above it a lozenge of incense drifted its heavy scent into the air.

  Pembe lay against the pillows quite still, her eyes motionless, her hands folded placidly on her breast.

  The girl neither saw the lamplight nor smelled the perfume in her nostrils. Her thoughts wandered down the cramped, dark corridors of her own small past, and into the ruins of her future.

  In the past she could see a man in a sheepskin hat. Her father greases his carbine with mutton fat. A woman stoops to drag the stones from a patch of ground: when she straightens she is beautiful; she turns a wisp of her hair in her fingers and tucks it back beneath her kerchief and the hair is streaked with gray.

  The girl remembered the first time she saw the sea. A ship. She thought they were both beautiful. The sun glittered on the water as it rose, lighting her path: a road strewn with flashing jewels.

  Jewels around her neck; perfume between her breasts, and the tinkling of the bangles that she wore around her ankles. The path had glittered and she had smiled, knowing she was beautiful like the sea. Of course she had been chosen. Unafraid, warming the prince with that smile and the unblemished beauty of her white limbs.

  There was to be a boy. His first. Her precious charge. For him she would be the man who oiled a gun, the woman who picked stones: unremitting, watchful, no fool. But she would be the khadin, too, first of them all, with honor and wealth and a world at her command. One day, at the end of the glittering road, valide.

  Instead of which, an evil day brought her a girl. Nothing—and worse than nothing. A monster. Freak. A cursed thing, which had lived only a few days.

  The door opened slowly and she saw the aga come in.

  He tiptoed to the divan. She swayed as his weight settled, but she did not blink or move her hands.

  Her mind picked among the pathways: something that stood between her and the light. A dark form. Not a man. Not a beast.

  It was a woman, and Pembe’s heart burned with a desire for revenge.

  When she spoke, the aga did not recognize her voice. “I know who did this to me.”

  Ibou glanced nervously around the room. “It is the will of God, Pembe. It should strengthen you.”

  The girl turned her head and spat.

  “It happened after she came,” she went on. “When she beheld me with her eye. I felt it on me, but then I was not afraid.”

  “Nonsense,” Ibou replied. He patted her hand.

  The girl’s lips peeled back. “Talfa.” She spat th
e name through bared teeth. “She was jealous. Because I was young and beautiful, and was growing with a child. She wished to kill me in her heart.”

  “The lady Talfa?” The aga glanced uneasily at the door. “You are alive, by the will of God.”

  Her head sank back onto the pillow. “No, aga. No. I am dead already.”

  53

  THE Polish ambassador to the Sublime Porte sat at his drawing room window and willed a breeze to rustle the wisteria. It was infernally hot, as hot as any summer Palewski had known in Istanbul.

  He reached out for the slender green bottle at his elbow and rolled it gratefully around his forehead. The residency cellars were very deep, and very old, and impervious to the temperatures outside. He sighed and put the bottle down again.

  A flying beetle whizzed past his nose and flung itself with a ping! at the glass mantle of the oil lamp. Palewski reached forward and in one swift motion caught the insect in his hand. He moved the book from his lap, leaned out the window, and hurled the beetle into the night air.

  As he did so, he noticed two figures slip between the iron gates below and approach the front door.

  “We aren’t buying anything tonight, thank you!” he shouted down to them.

  “It’s me, Yashim! May we come in?”

  “You? Well then, yes. Come in! I mean—wait. I’ll have to unlock the doors first,” he added, a little more loudly.

  Yashim grinned in the dark. He knew perfectly well that the Polish residency was scarcely ever locked; there was no point, as Palewski often remarked. The old-fashioned mansion had declined over the years, so that a child might have climbed in through the slipping sashes, or popped the bolts on the garden door. But it was sensible to keep up appearances.

  Palewski shot the bolts on the front door, and in the lamplight Kadri saw a man of about fifty-five, with curling gray hair and a loose cravat. Very tall, he was wearing a plum-colored waistcoat with unmatched buttons, long trousers, and a pair of worn velvet slippers.

  “Come in, by all means,” he said, “and bring your friend. Is it late? I rather think Marta must have gone to bed.”

  Yashim stepped into the hall, and Kadri closed the door behind them. Yashim made introductions.

  “Capital! Splendid! Are you hungry? Well, never mind. It wouldn’t do to go hungry.” He glanced at Kadri. “I was always hungry at that age. There’ll be cheese and things in the pantry. You go on upstairs, Yash, and take your young friend with you.”

  With that he turned and went off down a corridor, leaving his visitors in total darkness.

  Yashim chuckled. “I know the way. Mind the stairs—best keep to the side, the carpet can be a bit loose.”

  They groped their way up the stairs and reached the drawing room, where their eyes grew sufficiently accustomed to make out the low shapes of the armchairs and the fainter oblongs of the open windows.

  Kadri sniffed the air. “It smells different,” he said. “I like it, though.”

  It smelled, Yashim thought, of beeswax and old books. “I like it, too,” he announced to the dark.

  They heard Palewski coming upstairs, and finally the lamp came into the room.

  “Sorry to leave you in the dark. I forgot.” He put the lamp on a sideboard and lowered a tray down beside it, laden with a wedge of white cheese and a bowl of olives.

  “Best I could do,” he added, waving Kadri toward the tray. “Someone must be raiding the pantry in the night.” He paused. “Me, I suppose. Help yourselves.”

  He picked up a spill from the mantelpiece and lit it at the oil lamp. Soon the room glowed in the light of several lamps and a few candles strategically placed in front of the mottled pier glasses that stood between the windows.

  Kadri’s eyes were round with interest as the unfamiliar room sprang into view, moving from the violin on the sideboard to the fireplace armchairs and the shelves that lined the farther wall.

  “I’m afraid the books are a bit of a muddle,” Palewski explained. “Trying out a new arrangement. Found a curious treatise on Roman law, never seen it before. Moldy stuff, well past its best. Turns out my father wrote it. Do sit down.”

  He gestured to the armchairs. Yashim took the one he liked, with the stuffing coming out of the seat; Kadri, slightly bemused, settled for the arm of the other.

  “I didn’t know the palace boys were allowed out,” Palewski remarked cheerfully.

  Kadri’s head sank. “No. It is forbidden.”

  Palewski glanced over at Yashim, who gave an almost imperceptible shrug.

  “Kadri has just run away, for a while,” he said.

  Palewski nodded, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “Do have some more cheese, Kadri. As for you, Yashim, let me find you a glass.”

  “What is that?” Kadri pointed to the green bottle that Palewski had just picked up.

  “Glad you asked. Late vintage Riesling.” He poured some into a stemmed glass and handed it to Yashim. “Not the usual stuff, Yashim. Piesporter—southern bank of the Moselle,” he added, leaning an elbow on the mantelpiece and holding his own glass up to the light. “Spätlese—noble rot, Kadri. Bishop of Fulda, I recall. Von Bibra. Heinrich? Helmuth? Plums, figs, late summer, all that sort of thing. I ran into a whole case of the stuff at Macarios’s, God knows how. He thought it was some sort of German beer.”

  Kadri looked surprised. “It is alcohol?”

  Palewski raised an eyebrow. “Slate and sunshine, Kadri. It’s late summer in the mountains—green mountains, where it rains early in the year.” He drew Kadri’s attention to a colorless bottle standing on the sideboard. “That, young man, is alcohol.”

  “It is forbidden,” the boy said, primly.

  “It is certainly forbidden to boys,” Palewski agreed. “Like running away from school.”

  Kadri smiled shyly, and lowered his eyes.

  “Kadri didn’t exactly run,” Yashim pointed out. “He jumped.”

  Kadri’s eyes flickered toward Yashim.

  “He got out through a window. The window,” Yashim added, “was thirty feet above the ground.”

  “Ah. The old knotted sheet routine,” Palewski murmured, approvingly.

  “No sheets were missing.”

  “A ledge.”

  “No ledge.”

  Palewski cast his eyes at the ceiling. “Wings?”

  Yashim shrugged. “Sometimes the impossible is the only possibility.”

  Kadri looked away and bit his lip; he lifted his chin slightly, instincts of pride and reserve warring in his expression.

  “I couldn’t work it out,” Yashim said, “until I caught you, in the tree.”

  The boy looked around and smiled.

  “Your tutor said you could run. He didn’t tell me you can jump as well. It’s a talent, Kadri.”

  “But not one recognized by the school, perhaps,” Palewski interjected.

  Kadri scratched his burred head. “Before Hamdi Bey took me I lived in the mountains, efendim. On my own, I mean. There was an earthquake when I was in the fields. My family was at home. My uncle wanted to take me in, but he—that is, we—” He swallowed. “He was a hard man. I survived in the mountains. I didn’t want to be caught.”

  “Good for you,” Palewski said.

  “There were stones, and columns, and rocks.” Kadri shrugged. “I lived like a goat.”

  “But thirty feet …”

  Kadri grinned. “It’s not so far across the gap to the other side.”

  “But still ten feet, at least. And the lane between the refectory and the mosque is even wider, I imagine.”

  “I can run and jump,” the boy repeated. “It’s mostly about knowing how to land, I think.”

  “And from the mosque?”

  “I used the minaret, Yashim efendi. It’s small, like a tree. I swung around it, onto the wall, and off the wall onto the rooftop beyond. I didn’t even break a tile.”

  “Scuttling across the rooftops? What fun!” Palewski raised his glass in salute. “
And how, if I may ask, did you two find each other?”

  Yashim laughed. “Kadri found my sandwich.”

  Palewski raised an eyebrow, and Yashim explained.

  “I just put myself in the right place,” he added finally. “The palace school takes you up and up, and away from the world. It’s like climbing beyond the tree line.”

  “With better views, in the end,” Palewski said.

  “Oh, certainly. That’s what they tell you, in so many words: work hard, and one day you’ll get to turn around and have your view. Maybe it’s over a province you govern, or an army at your command. It could be the empire, when you get made grand vizier.” He glanced at Kadri. “But sometimes you want to stop climbing, and straining, and getting above everyone.”

  Kadri pursed his lips thoughtfully.

  “You make up your mind to come off the mountainside for a while,” Yashim continued. “And you run down—like a stream.”

  “Yes, Yashim efendi! You go down, you’re right. In the valley there’s life, there’s people …”

  “Funny, isn’t it?” Palewski said. “I always wanted to run away to school. Any school. Jolly boys, ghastly masters with pretty daughters, pranks in the dormitories. Instead I had tutors at home, and my father’s thoughts on Roman law and the Czartoryskis, who thumbed out their daughters like playing cards.” He looked thoughtful. “But I’d rather have been a mountain goat, like Kadri.”

  Yashim looked into his wine. “I was wondering,” he began, “whether you could put Kadri up here, for a while. If Kadri agrees.”

  “Here? Why not? Be delighted. I’ll tell Marta right away.” He made for the door, then stopped. “Bit late. Tell her in the morning. I’m afraid you might have to bunk down somewhere …” He waved a hand vaguely toward the ceiling.

  Kadri’s swarthy face had reddened. “I would not wish to be a burden,” he said.

  “No burden at all. We can discuss Roman law and drink up this case of Riesling,” Palewski said amiably. He peered at the boy. “Or rather, not, of course.”

  Kadri lowered his eyes.

  “When you ran away from the school, Yashim efendi—I mean, tonight I met you and Palewski efendi. You have both been so—so kind, and generous. But …”