“Will he agree?”
“There are two things el Alemán has never held back from: favors to friends and pranks played on the powerful.”
23
The caïque bound for Üsküdar, propelled by four oars, was thin and pointed as a gondola. The Bosphorus looked like the Grand Canal of a vast rural Venice. The villages on the Asian shore were colored jewels, linked together by a chain of villas, yali, stilt-dwellings, wooden jetties. The dark water welcomed dozens of other fishing boats, as well as freighters, big merchant mahonas, a galley armed with cannon, feluccas, and punts that looked empty but concealed lovers busy swapping sweet endearments.
Once they had reached the opposite shore, the oarsmen moored the boat and we jumped out onto the uneven planks of the dock.
In the last light of day, the fishermen sat mending nets against upturned hulls. A group of children ran about between the waterside and the alleyways, and women pulled in the clothes they had hung out in the morning. No one paid us much attention.
We reached the house where I’d spent my first night in Constantinople. Don Yossef called Ismail’s name from outside without getting a reply, and then the Indian girl appeared on the terrace. “Ismail?” asked Nasi.
“Over there.” She stretched out her arm, pointing to a spot in the distance. “At the top of the street.”
A cluster of houses climbed the side of a hill. We set off, and when we were behind the dwelling I saw the red-bearded Arab leaning against a wall. Beside him there was a door, closed only by a piece of blue fabric.
“As-Salaam ’Alaykum,” he said, poking out first his chin and then his forehead.
“Wa ’Alaykum As-Salaam,” Nasi replied. “We’re looking for Ismail al-Mokhawi.”
He leaned inside, and the old man’s head appeared a moment later. He barely glanced at me, greeted Nasi, and asked us to wait. Then he disappeared into the house again.
“What’s happening?” Nasi asked the Arab.
The other man replied in a foreign accent, “A child has a high fever, and his parents have sent for Ismail.”
We waited for half an hour, until the curtain opened again and the old man re-emerged from the darkness, followed by a short, squat man. They exchanged a few words, then said good-bye.
“So you became a sawbones as well, down in Mokha?” Nasi asked.
“I just got old,” Ismail replied in Turkish. “These people think my advice lengthens your life.” He turned to me. “Good evening, Sior Cardoso.” I replied, and he introduced the red-bearded Arab to me: “This is my friend Ali Hassan al-Najib, the man who promised God he would convert me to the Mohammedan faith.”
The Arab greeted me again with a nod of the head. Ismail asked him to step into the house ahead of us, and warn the others that there were guests for dinner.
On the open terrain by the water we bumped into a fisherman who gave the old man a few big sea bream, and an old woman with her face veiled handed him a basket of apricots. Ismail thanked her, exchanged a few words and chased away a gang of begging children, pretending to run after them with his stick. Then he turned on his heel and we went into the house.
The old man knelt down on the carpet, beside the brazier that had warmed me too. He put a pile of cushions between his back and the wall and gestured to us to make ourselves comfortable. He pointed to the Indian twins: “These are Hafiz and Mukhtar. They come from the Malabar coast of India.”
Hafiz, the boy, said something to him in Arabic, and the old man thanked him, using the only word I knew in that language: “Shukraan.” Then he returned to Turkish: “I’m listening.” I realized that he spoke that language instead of Italian because his friends were there and he didn’t want to exclude them from our conversation.
“The other evening we were left with a question,” Nasi announced, also in Turkish. “It concerned the last letter my aunt wrote to you. Perhaps it won’t be the answer you’re looking for, but here it is. A few days have passed, and already your help would be invaluable to me.” With a gesture of his hand he attracted my attention. “Master Cardoso will tell you what it’s about.”
I was careful not to be caught off guard by this investiture, and talked about the bailiff’s letters, the Jewish doctor’s slippers, Sokollu’s intrigues, Traverso and his voyages. The German listened in silence. When I’d finished, Nasi made one last remark: “Manuel has done an excellent job, and to bring it to the best possible conclusion we need a gang of pirates to board Ashkenazi’s ship and put it off course. I remember that you used to keep company with certain people, and I know that you could find them again.”
Hafiz set down a tray with three steaming cups in the middle of the room. It was the drink I had heard them describe at Palazzo Belvedere: shells that looked like nuts, but with the flavor of coffee, left to infuse in boiling water.
We each took one, being careful not to burn our fingers. Ismail al-Mokhawi smoothed his white beard and cleared his throat.
“If I’ve understood correctly, it’s a matter of putting the Grand Vizier, his secretary and the Venetian bailiff in check all at once.” Nasi nodded, the old man burned his lips with kishir and started talking again. “Wouldn’t it be enough to denounce Traverso as a spy and have him captured by the janissaries on Ashkenazi’s ship before it left the harbor?”
“I don’t trust the janissaries, my friend. Sokollu could easily manipulate them, get rid of the evidence.”
“And yet,” Ismail remarked, “before I came here I was in Tiberias and I saw janissaries on every street corner. And your kingdom of Cyprus, won’t the janissaries and Selim’s troops be the ones to conquer it?”
This time Nasi spread his arms in a gesture of impatience. “And how could it be otherwise? We Jews, in the Ottoman Empire, can’t even go around with a razor blade. That’s why we need the Sultan and the janissaries. At least for the time being.”
I tried to work out what he could be talking about, but Ismail’s words started troubling me again.
“Isn’t that how it started, the enslavement of your people in Egypt? A Jewish dreamer who was a friend of the Pharaoh, covered with honors and prestigious duties? Then the Pharaoh died and the Jews were enslaved for four hundred years.”
The reference to Joseph hit me like a slap. A few days before, I myself had superimposed that image over Don Yossef, like a grid over a coded message, but I had stopped at the first lines, and the message I had drawn from it was totally different.
“I like it when you quote my people’s history,” Nasi replied. “Joseph was a man of God, but I hope to do as Judith did, when she went to Holofernes’s banquet and cut his head off. If you like, you could help me sharpen the sword.”
Nasi was playing a game of chance. I thought of the time, in the stinking cell in Ragusa, when I had thrown my rough dice and they had replied, “Live.” Here, every phrase from my mentor was a throw of the dice. Pause, check the result, roll again.
That last throw clattered away down the room, without giving any sign of stopping.
“Fine,” the old man said at last. “I just hope you have a firm grip on your sword.”
Nasi moved his hand up and down as if to say Give me time, have trust.
Ismail summoned Ali and the twins. He asked if they’d understood what we’d asked them to do, and added that we’d need a few days of research and may even have to leave the city.