He stood there for a minute, just watching them, serenaded by the sound of their gentle breaths. Then he pulled away and padded over to the master bedroom.
He peered in from the doorway. His eyes had adjusted to the faint light from the hallway, and, although the room was dark, he was relieved to find that Nisreen was fast asleep as well. It was good that she’d been able to; Ramazan had little doubt of the torment she must have felt all day because of Azmi’s execution. Her face was facing his way and he stood there, contemplating her.
Even in torment, she was gorgeous; there was no doubt about that. Even asleep, when her face was sunken into the pillow and her mesmeric almond eyes weren’t on display, when the aura she radiated was at rest, she was still bewitching.
Gorgeous, clever, capable, and a great mother: he was a lucky man, and he knew it. Too lucky maybe—he often wondered about how he’d lucked out when, ten years ago, their parents had arranged their marriage. He was twenty-four and she was just shy of twenty. Not so much those first few years, when he was still in that optimistic, upbeat bliss of a new marriage, babies, young children, a career on the rise. But with time he couldn’t escape the notion that he was punching above his weight. Way above. It was painfully evident at dinner parties and at other social encounters: she more than held her ground and appeared more accomplished, and charismatic men were irresistibly drawn to her. To her credit, she never played games, never led any of them on, never gave them the slightest opening. She was unfailingly respectful and loyal toward her husband. But he could sense the malaise growing inside her, the apathy, the dissatisfaction. He could feel her slipping away. They hadn’t discussed it outright, only tiptoed politely around it, and when they had, she’d always assured him that things were fine. But he still saw it in her face every morning and every night before he turned out the lights.
The situation around them wasn’t helping; in fact, it was accentuating their divide. Nisreen’s friends were courting disaster. As a lawyer at the vanguard of reform for women’s rights, Nisreen had already been skirting the periphery of trouble, and that was before she’d started defending journalists and academics who had been yanked out of their homes or protesters who had been hauled off the streets. This worried Ramazan; at times, he tried to find some comfort in the fact that his brother was in the secret police, but he wasn’t sure how much that would help if things ever got ugly.
She was getting sucked into the spiraling unrest, and he feared for her safety, but he also knew there wasn’t much he could do about it. Nisreen was a conscientious wife and mother, to be sure. But she was also a woman of strong convictions and a fighter. She was animated by a flame that he could never fully grasp, let alone match. And the more he played it safe and stayed out of the troubles swirling around them, the more he excused himself from any invitations to join in any form of protest, the more he could see the chagrin darken her face.
As he stood there, the serenity he’d felt from seeing his children drained away, supplanted by a roiling anxiety about what the future held for him and Nisreen.
He wasn’t ready for bed. He made his way back to the front of the apartment, past the family living room and the sala, the more elegant, formal sitting room that was used for entertaining guests, and entered his study at the front of the apartment. This was his sanctuary. Given the work he did, Ramazan needed to have other interests to distract him from the strain, stress, and even the occasional boredom of his job. Several of the anesthesiologists he knew felt the same way. One of his closest colleagues was a volunteer doctor for the ambulance service in his spare time. Some were avid sportsmen; others were real polymaths: musicians, authors, painters. Ramazan was a train buff, as attested to not only by the large table that stood proudly in the middle of the room housing his model railroad, an elaborate set that he had spent years building, but also by the model trains lining his bookshelves.
He padded around the table and opened a corner cabinet, from which he dug out a bottle of yeni raki, the more distinctively bitter raki that was distilled from sugar-beet alcohol, and poured himself a tall glass.
Alcohol was still, of course, banned for Muslims across the empire, but its prohibition had ebbed and flowed over the centuries, depending on who was in power. Some sultans, like Süleyman the Magnificent, were excessively puritanical. He had decreed that drunks were to be punished by having molten lead poured down their throats. His son Selim II, however, was an unrepentant hedonist who repealed his father’s ban, claiming that while the prohibition on alcohol was righteous and wise, it was only meant for the common folk and not for the more refined upper tiers of society who knew how to drink in moderation.
In the palaces and across the empire, water, coffee, tea, and fruit juice were the only approved drinks for Muslims and the only ones consumed publicly. Privately, things were different. The Zaptiye turned a blind eye to what took place in the privacy of people’s homes; they only swooped in and arrested offenders when things got out of hand or when political winds required a face-saving display.
Drink in hand, Ramazan edged over to the balcony doors and looked out. Illuminated minarets, taller than any building across the cityscape by decree, poked the dark sky, the slow blinking of the lights at the top of their finials hypnotic and soothing. In the distance, the dome of the Mehmediyye Mosque, exquisitely lit up, slumbered in splendor. On that warm summer night and under an unusually luminous crescent moon, one could be forgiven for imagining the city as a beacon of tranquility. The menace that loomed over its citizens was nowhere in sight, but Ramazan, like anyone else who was up this late, knew it was there. It had merely slunk back into the shadows, waiting for the next opportunity to strike.
He finished his drink and poured himself a second glass. He was tired, but he wasn’t sleepy. A strange current was rippling through him. His mind was too fired up, captive to both the concern over his wife and the curiosity about his mysterious patient.
He checked his watch. It was twenty past two.
He wasn’t ready for bed. He retrieved his mobile phone and, ignoring a silent scream of warning deep within him, pulled up the pictures he’d taken of the stranger’s tattoos.
9
One by one, Ramazan enlarged the pictures for a closer look.
Written that way, back to front, the words tattooed on his patient were hard to read. He wondered about that. The obvious answer was that they’d been done that way so the stranger could read them while looking at himself in a mirror. Ramazan thought of a further reason: it made them harder for a casual observer to read. Which was useful if one had something to hide.
He stepped out to the foyer and held the phone so it faced the mirror above the side table. He studied the photograph. The words were easily readable now. There were several names and dates—“Dorde Petrovic, Visevac, 16/11/1762”; “Alexander Ypsilantis, Istanbul, 12/12/1792,” and others—but he didn’t recognize any of them. He pulled up another photograph. More names, plenty of them—“François-Marie Arouet / Voltaire,” “Rousseau,” “Napoleon,” and others—alongside places and numbers that looked like more dates from some distant, centuries-far future, all of which meant nothing to him either. He flicked to the next shot. More unintelligible gibberish with lines like “3NG / 1diatomite / min sod carb.”