An Evil Eye: A Novel Page 8

  Giuseppe Donizetti smiled, and gave the violins a deep nod. Really, they were not too bad. Not bad at all! What a sensation they would make in Milan—the loveliest orchestra in the world, belli di Bosforo! Each a flower, plucked from the waysides of the Caucasus—Ah, Giuseppe, Giuseppe! Lower your eyes, man! Concentrate on the score. For your own good health.

  He had tutored the young prince Abdülmecid, now the sultan, on pianoforte and violin—the youth lacked attack, perhaps, but he was competent and some of his compositions showed promise—but when the young sultan had first suggested that Donizetti Pasha should lead the ladies’ orchestra every week, the Paduan maestro had found his heart beating like a drum.

  “No man other than the sultan has ever stepped into his harem,” he had confided in a letter to his little brother. “I am to make history! Not only shall I meet the sultan’s ladies, but I am to direct them with my baton, every week!”

  To which his brother had replied with a dry warning. “I advise you, my dear brother, to read the contract carefully before you commit yourself. As I understand the harem rules, your baton may be the first thing to go if you accept such a position.”

  Donizetti Pasha had chuckled a little uneasily at the gibe. His brother, of course, took his own baton to the ladies of Paris and Naples without stint: it had been that way ever since his Lucia di Lammermoor had made him the darling of Italian opera. Giuseppe did not begrudge his younger brother his good fortune, either with the ladies or the stage: they had been born poor, and Giuseppe remained grateful for the attainments that had led him to a position of trust and honor within the Ottoman Empire. It was a snug billet, as a soldier might say; and he was a married man.

  In the event, his anxiety—and his brother’s warning—had proved unfounded. The sultan was as good as his word. Every Thursday, the girls of the orchestra assembled in the Grand Salon under the direction of the amiable Italian. They played minuets for him; they galloped into rondos; they beat the drum and scraped the string and blew the reed and fingered the stops for him; and if some of them believed themselves in love, why, Donizetti Pasha was far too short, and round, and twinkling on his toes to suspect such a thing.

  He was the only man, beyond family, that many of them had ever seen before. Portly and innocent; but a man.

  35

  YASHIM took his leave of the tutor at the gate.

  “Our best hope is that Kadri makes up his own mind to come back.”

  “I still don’t think it’s possible—”

  Yashim held up a hand. “Nor do I. Not really. But the window was unlocked. There’s a chance that he’s still here, of course. We may simply have to wait for our young friend to make himself known. Eventually, at least, he has to get hungry.”

  The tutor snorted. “He disgraces himself, and us. Nobody runs away from the palace school. It has simply never happened before. Damn Kadri!” And he stuffed his beard into his mouth and chewed on it, angrily.

  Yashim opened his mouth to speak, then shut it again.

  36

  ELIF and Melda burst into their room, giggling.

  “Ciao! Ciao! Ciao!” Elif waggled her fingertips and Melda laughed again.

  She reached up to remove the pin that fixed the shako to her glossy black hair and caught sight of the little girl crouched on the divan with her hands to her head, staring at them both with big, frightened eyes.

  “Hey, princess!” Melda laughed. “It’s only us.”

  Elif lunged forward, still waggling her fingers. “Boo!”

  Roxelana scrambled backward, with a look of unfiltered horror. “No! Go away!”

  “Oh, grow up, Roxelana,” Elif said irritably.

  Melda took off her hat and shook her head, and her long hair spilled down across her shoulders. She crossed to the divan and put her arms around the little girl, feeling her stiff bones.

  “It’s all right, princess. We’re back. Did you get frightened while we were away?”

  Roxelana blinked. She looked silently at Melda’s braided collar, and at the buttons of her tunic.

  Only later, when they were all lying together at night, did she say: “I don’t like that funny hat, Melda. I don’t like it when you wear those hats.”

  Melda gave her a squeeze. “It’s just for the orchestra. To make us look smart for the sultan.”

  Roxelana was quiet for a while. “I think they make you look … bad.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Go to sleep,” Elif murmured. “They’re just hats. Shhh.”

  37

  YASHIM picked his way through the marketplace, where a few street dogs scavenged among the litter of husks and hulls, rinds and squashed fruit.

  George was still there, swinging baskets of summer vegetables onto a handbarrow.

  “Why yous comes so late, eh? Yous buying cheap today, efendi? Like beggarmans?”

  Yashim shrugged. “I’m looking for a boy. Run off from school.”

  “Maybe he finds himselfs a good job.” George picked up an empty basket and began slinging eggplants, tomatoes, zucchini, and garlic into it. He dragged a handful of parsley from a bunch in a clay pot and stuffed it into the basket. “I am sorry that you loses this boy, Yashim efendi, but today”—he put his hand on his chest and smiled—“today, I finds a boy.”

  “A boy? Where?”

  George laughed. “Eleuthra, my daughter, she gives me a big grandson this morning. A Hercules, Yashim efendi! Big like this.” He measured out a giant baby between his huge hands, and spat to one side the way you did when you heaped praise upon one so young and defenseless.

  Yashim smiled. “I’m glad for you, and for your daughter. May God bless the child.”

  George thrust the basket of vegetables at Yashim. “This is for yous. As my friend.”

  When Yashim got home, he put the vegetables on the table and went over to the divan. He knelt down and reached under the quilt until his hands closed on a small box, which he took to the window.

  George was forever giving Yashim his vegetables for nothing because Yashim had saved his life; but the weight of his obligation was becoming so burdensome that Yashim was almost tempted to buy elsewhere, on the sly. The trouble was that George always brought the youngest and freshest produce to market. Some people sold vegetables, and some grew them: George did both.

  Yashim picked through the coins in the box. They turned up in the bazaar from time to time: Byzantine bezants from the days of Greek dominion, Persian silver from the reign of Shah Abbas, crude rubles from the early Russian tsars. Sometimes a gypsy, sitting over his tiny lamp with his tweezers and pliers, would open his little sack of metalware and pull out a coin from a distant era or a faraway place.

  His fingers closed around a sliver of pure gold, a Persian daric from the age of Darius, found by a caïquejee in shallow water. It had come out of the water as bright and clear as it had gone in, two thousand years before—or so the goldsmith who had weighed and priced it had said.

  Now he put it on the shelf. He would give it to George’s grandson. It was, he hoped, a lucky coin. He would have a little box made for it, to stop them from punching a hole in it and having the boy wear it around his head.

  He went back to the kitchen and began sorting the vegetables from the basket. He did it slowly, turning each one in his hand as though looking for blemishes, letting his thoughts settle.

  A boy was loose in Istanbul. It was not a disaster. For a quick-witted young man, Istanbul was a very interesting place; a hospitable place, even, Yashim reflected.

  When the tutor said no one had ever run away from the palace school, Yashim had not tried to contradict him. But one hot afternoon, near the end of his last year in the school, Yashim had walked out of the gates and down the hill to the Grand Bazaar.

  Yashim’s father had sent him to the palace school because he could think of nothing else that might assuage the agony of his condition. So Yashim had been older than the other boys: already, in most respects,
a man. Loose in the city, he had walked at random all that day, and spent the night curled beneath a caïque upturned on the shore. In the morning the caïquejee had found him there, fast asleep, and given him breakfast. A day later Yashim returned to the school. The old lala, his tutor, made no comment—he seemed to think he’d gone to Eyüp, to the tomb of the Companion of the Prophet.

  But a few days later he had been introduced to Fevzi Ahmet.

  Yashim took two eggplants, topped and tailed them with his paring knife, and sliced them lengthwise. He laid the slices on a plate and sprinkled them with salt.

  Three weeks ago, in the dying days of Sultan Mahmut’s reign, a Russian agent had visited Chalki. Evidently not for the good of his health. Not for the good of his immortal soul. He came because Fevzi Ahmet, the Kapudan pasha, lived on the island.

  Perhaps he came to spy on the Kapudan pasha. Perhaps Fevzi Ahmet found him in his garden, or rifling his papers. Time was short; the fleet about to sail. He killed the Russian with his bare hands, disposed of the corpse in the monastery well, and left.

  But if Fevzi Pasha had caught a spy—why would he try to conceal the body? Why, above all, would he not try to inform the grand vizier?

  If Fevzi Pasha wanted the death to remain secret, the dead man must mean more to him than he wanted anyone to know.

  38

  IT took Yashim less than two hours to reach Chalki. He crossed in a hired felucca because he did not want to be observed, landing at a small fishermen’s jetty about half a mile from the main quay.

  The fishermen he found mending their nets told him that Fevzi Pasha had bought the konak about three years before. He had made himself unpopular with the islanders by forbidding them to use the rocks down by the shore below the house; he claimed that he and his household—his women, the fishermen assumed—required absolute privacy. This in spite of the high walls that surrounded the konak and its gardens.

  “You’d have to pile those rocks one on top of another to look over that wall,” one fisherman remarked. “Perhaps he’s afraid someone wants his money.”

  “I wouldn’t mind seeing it,” another added. “He doesn’t spend it around here, leastways.”

  “Too right. What, a couple of fellows to do his garden?”

  “Never sends to the market, either.”

  “That’s right. Only a little market, kyrie, not like what you’d see in the city. But it’s money for the islanders. Muslims here, as well as Christians, but he won’t use them. Everything from stores, I’m told.”

  Yashim took a good look at the pasha’s house and grounds. The estate stretched to about three acres, enclosed by an eight-foot wall topped with overhanging tiles, built to take advantage of every natural slope; even from the hillside it was impossible to see over it. There were two gates, the lesser one approached by a narrow mule track.

  Yashim could hear dogs barking within the walls.

  Later in the afternoon, while he was drinking tea in a small café along the shore, he again met the fisherman who cooked with tomatoes, and he took advantage of the license of the islands to invite him for a drink.

  For a Muslim to sit with a Christian, openly drinking ouzo—even if the Muslim gentleman stuck to his tea—would have been unthinkable in most parts of Istanbul itself. Perhaps, in a dark Tophane tavern where foreign sailors regularly loitered for their billets, such a meeting would just have been possible; but here on the island—that place for romantic assignations, as Palewski had said—the rules seemed to be more relaxed. Yashim sipped his tea while his new friend watered his raki and drank it, flushed and happy, at Yashim’s expense.

  Within an hour, Yashim had found out how to get into the pasha’s garden.

  “But not dressed like that, if you’ll forgive me, kyrie,” the young man ventured, with a charming smile. Then some of his confidence seemed to evaporate, because he added, “You’ll have to wear some of Dmitri’s things,” and scowled, as if the reality of what he had agreed to do had just struck him.

  “Let’s talk to Dmitri, then, my friend.” Yashim stood up. The young fisherman got slowly to his feet, punching his fist into his palm.

  “My trouble, kyrie, is that I talk too much.”

  39

  AS Dmitri predicted, the gate opened as the distant bells of the monastery rang for vespers.

  “I’ve brought my mate again,” Dmitri said, jerking his thumb.

  Yashim put a finger to the brim of his hat. The doorkeeper let them through the gate and closed it after them, shooting two bolts before he walked away.

  “I’ll be back in an hour,” he said gruffly, over his shoulder.

  Dmitri picked up a watering can from beside the gate. “You can take the mattock,” he said.

  Yashim swung the mattock over his shoulder and followed the gardener to the well, set back behind a hedge of prickly pears and a drooping willow tree. He laid the mattock down, and glanced over the prickly pears.

  Across a courtyard, neatly paved in a geometric pattern of small stone blocks, a tilted apple tree was laden with small fruit. Just beyond it stood a fine konak, with spreading eaves and whitewashed walls.

  The shutters on the ground floor were closed.

  Beyond the konak was another door, which belonged to a small lodge, or guardhouse, built up against the wall.

  A dozy blackbird sang in the apple tree. Otherwise the courtyard was perfectly still. A huge fig drooped its man hands from the southern wall, and from it arose the hum of drowsy bees; the cobbles below were stained and spotted by dropped fruit.

  A pair of swallows worked the intervening air.

  As if to dispel a dream, Yashim brushed a hand through the air above his head, and approached the konak across the dry cobbles.

  40

  AT this hour of the day when the sun slanted almost horizontally across the landscape, you could sometimes make out dark forms behind the latticework that protected the upper windows of every Ottoman house. Men spoke of glimpses of a pretty hand, or a pair of liquid eyes, to which imagination attached the figure of a houri from Paradise. Yashim ducked under the pears and walked quickly across the courtyard to the back door.

  My name is Yashim: I am a lala from the palace, he could say. We have been concerned for your safety while the pasha is away.

  Nobody answered his knock. He listened. No footsteps; no whispers.

  Yashim tried the shutters. They were fastened from the inside, but overhead was a balcony facing away from the church and toward the hills. With a swift glance around, he shinned up from the shutter to the balustrade.

  A lattice door pierced by a thousand little openings was shut fast by an inside hook. Yashim slipped a knife from his belt and slid the blade into the jamb. It clicked against the hook and the door swung free.

  He stood, breathing heavily in the doorway.

  Once before he had entered a harem like this, by stealth. He’d been looking for a man hiding among the petticoats—and Fevzi Ahmet had been waiting for him downstairs.

  Now it was Fevzi’s house. Fevzi’s harem.

  He stepped through the doorway.

  “Ladies! Ladies! I am Yashim, a lala from the palace! Come out, and do not be afraid!”

  41

  FEVZI Ahmet, coming into the guardroom. Pulling off a pair of gloves.

  He spits.

  “Nothing. A time waster.”

  “Perhaps I could talk to him? I’ve been wondering—perhaps he doesn’t realize what he knows?”

  Fevzi pours himself a glass of tea. “No. There’s no point, Yashim.”

  “Never give up—you say that yourself, Fevzi efendi.”

  The bloodshot eyes. “There’s no point. He’s already dead.”

  42

  THERE was no reply to Yashim’s call; he knew he had not expected one. He slipped off his shoes and stood at the head of the stairs, gazing at the doors that led off the upper landing and wondering where to begin. There was a faint smell of starch and roses.

  The house was an o
ld country villa built by some Greek merchant, with wide, scrubbed oak boards, walls of planked and polished cedar, and a plaster ceiling decorated a long time ago with a painted motif of flowers. Here and there the ceiling needed repair.

  Gingerly he tried a door. It swung back onto what might have been an apartment for one of Fevzi’s ladies, but when Yashim stepped cautiously inside he was reminded of a linen merchant’s warehouse. Even in the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul, the greatest emporium on earth, with its fourteen miles of covered alleys, its workshops and restaurants and cafés and hammams, Yashim would have been surprised to find such a collection of printed cotton quilts, hammam towels and sheets. In teetering piles on the divan, spilling onto the rugs on the floor, stacked against the walls, were pantaloons, with frills, and pretty striped chemises; handkerchiefs and pattens with cotton sides; yards of muslin of a fine grade, and bolts of cloth—blue, green, a deep indigo, patterned cotton, figured silks.

  Out on the landing he stopped to listen. The silence rushed in his ears.

  He pushed the door to the room that overlooked the entrance.

  In the corner, a narrow pallet lay rolled up on the floor. Otherwise the room looked empty. The shutters were closed in the room beyond, and Yashim stood for a while on the threshold to let his eyes adjust to the slatted shade.

  Two blue eyes were staring at him across the room.

  He stumbled back, shocked: it was a child. He looked again. Its eyes were fixed on him, under a cascade of light brown hair.

  His heart was thumping as he crossed the room. It was only a doll, a ferenghi doll nestling in shavings packed into a cardboard box. The lid of the box lay beside it, as if someone had lifted it to take a peek; on the lid were the words A. DAUMIER—JOUETS—COSTUMES—POUPÉES and beneath, in smaller type, an address in Paris.