"You are the Official of the prison?" the monk asked, respectfully.
"I am the Captain of the Guard," the captain said.
"We are monks of the Simonite order," the monk told him. "We celebrate a sixteen-hundred-year-old ceremony: the Shriving of the Prisoners. Every year on Shrove Friday we go to a different prison and shrive those prisoners who are Christian, or those of other faiths who wish to be shriven. We ask three times to be admitted, and then pay the traditional gatekeeper's fee. We enter and shrive the pris-oners. Then we pay the Official of the Prison one of the gold medjidié for each prisoner we have shriven. Please, who is the Official of the Prison?"
The Captain of the Guard stroked his mustache. "I am," he announced finally. "You say you have an authority?"
The monk handed the parchment to the captain, who spread it open and studied it. "This is an authority to visit prisons in the service of your religious practice?" the captain asked.
"That is correct."
"It is signed by Sultan Bayezid II?"
"Correct."
"Four hundred years ago?"
"Just a trifle more than that."
"This is still good?"
"It has never been rescinded."
"You have, perhaps, something more recent?" the captain pleaded, seeing the promised gold dissolving before he had even a chance to taste it. "I cannot permit you to enter the Prison of Mustafa II on a four-hundred-year-old authority."
"Well, then," the monk said, reaching doubtfully into his robes, "there is this." He handed through the bars an official-looking document with etched red borders, stamped, sealed, notarized, embossed, impressed, and triply signed.
"Why, this is signed by the Grand Vizier, the Commander of Prisoners, and the Djerrah Pasha!" the Captain of the Guard said. "There'll be no trouble about your shriving the prisoners."
"Ah, well," the monk said, "if you prefer these recent signatures to that of a four-hundred-year-old sultan, so be it."
The captain shook his head. "You religious people," he said tolerantly. "Wait, I will get four guards to accompany you. We cannot afford any trouble. Some of these men are desperate."
"Very good of you," the monk said.
The captain called forth four guards and then opened the gate. "Enter," he said.
"May we be admitted?" the monk asked. "Didn't I just tell you to enter?" the captain said. "May we be admitted?" the monk asked.
"What's the matter, don't you understand Turkish?" the captain said. "Now, look—"
"May we be admitted?" the monk asked again.
A great light dawned on the gate guard. "Only if you pay the fee," he said, winking at the captain.
"Here you are," the monk said; "two gold medjidié."
"Enter," the gate guard said. "Ah!" the captain said.
-
The five monks entered the prison in a close group, with two guards in front of them and two behind. The captain led the group across the courtyard and into the corridors which housed the prisoners. Then he fell behind and watched as the group went from cell door to cell door calling in Turkish and Greek, "Are you Christian? Do you wish to be cleansed of your sins?" Occasionally the call was made in French and English, and if the captain thought that strange he said nothing. Every time a prisoner responded and the cell door was opened, he mentally added one more gold medjidié to the growing count.
Because the prisoners were bored and any activity was a welcome novelty, many of them conceived a sudden desire to be cleansed of their sins. The monks slowly worked their way down the corridor, stopping at door after door, shriving the damned. Devout Musselmen and Zoroastrians did not admit them, neither did the paranoid nor the catatonic, but most of the prisoners welcomed the monks and the diversion they represented.
Two or three of the monks would enter the cell when bidden by the prisoner and close the door behind them. The other monks would kneel outside the cell door and pray for the prisoner's soul. The monks spent between three and ten minutes inside each cell they entered.
For the first hour the guards kept a close watch on the monks, one of them going into each cell along with the shrivers; but as time passed and nothing remarkable happened, they relaxed their vigilance and grew bored, squatting together to talk when the monks entered a cell.
It was well along in the third hour before the Simonites reached Benjamin Barnett's cell. "Do you want to be cleansed of your sins?" came the call from the corridor.
Barnett, who had been dozing, woke with a start as the ghostly voice boomed through the celclass="underline" "Do you want to be cleansed of your sins?" this time in French. He looked around wildly before realizing that the voice came from someone with his mouth close up against the cell door.
"What do you want?" Barnett called.
There was a rattling and thumping, and the cell door opened to admit three men in brown robes who seemed to glide into the room joined at the shoulders. Barnett had a glimpse of another two kneeling in front of the cell before the door swung closed.
"Quick!" the nearest monk whispered in French. "Remove your garments!"
"What?"
"The Professor Moriarty sent us. Remove quickly your garments. We are to exit you from this place."
Without further discussion Barnett stripped off the few gray rags that the prison authorities had given him. "What are you going to do?" he asked. "I am chained to the wall."
"We have prepared ourselves for that eventuality," the monk told him. "However, we must hasten ourselves."
The three monks separated from each other, and an amazing thing happened; the monk in the middle silently folded up and collapsed until there was nothing left of him except a bundle of brown clothes on the floor.
Barnett gasped and took an involuntary step backward. He didn't know what he had expected to happen, but it surely wasn't this.
"Hush!" the monk on his left whispered sharply, putting his forefinger to his lips.
"Mon Dieu! but I am sorry," the other monk said. "I should have paused to realize how startling that would appear if unwarned."
"What happened to him?" Barnett demanded, pointing to the empty robes.
"Ah, but you see there was no 'him,' " the monk said. "He was merely simulated by wires in the robes artfully manipulated by my comrade here and myself. Now he and you are about to merge."
"No time for talk," the left-hand monk said, whipping a pocket razor out from his robes and twisting it open. "To work!"
The other monk took two small phials from inside his robes and handed one of them to Barnett. "This is a vegetable oil," he said. "Apply it to all parts of your beard and rub it in. This will facilitate the shaving of your face."
Barnett carefully and thoroughly anointed his three weeks of stubble with the oil while the monk stropped the razor on a small piece of leather sewn to his sleeve. Then he tested the blade on the back of his hand, nodded approval, and approached Barnett. "Move not your face," he warned.
Barnett held his face motionless while the monk artfully applied the razor. The other monk crouched on the floor and unstoppered his second phial. "Hold still your feet," he said.
"What are you doing?" Barnett demanded, trying to peer down his nose without moving his face.
"Applying oil of vitriol to the link connecting your foot to this chain," the monk told him. "It will take a few minutes. Hold still!"
Barnett kept completely still, from face to feet, and let the two monks work on him. When the one had finished shaving him he took a rag and spread grease over Barnett's face. "Darken your skin," he said. "Remove prison whiteness."
Two minutes later, Barnett, in brown robes, his face deeply concealed by the cowl, his feet in worn monk's sandals thoughtfully provided by his escorts, walked out of his cell. For another ten minutes, the group continued through the prison, chanting and praying and shriving. Then, the circle completed, they arrived back at the East Gate and paid the head tax to the Captain of the Guard, carefully counting out each gold medjidié into the palm of his hand.