The clerk examined the telegram and then smiled politely. He had a gold incisor. "English?" he asked, making it sound like a disease.
"It's in the Royce Telegraphers' Code," Barnett explained. "Look, I've got a translation here in this notebook."
"Return Monday, effendim" the clerk said, straightening his tie and adjusting his fez. "The ambassador will be here then. I must close the office."
"But the sea trials start Saturday!"
The clerk shrugged and closed the window.
Barnett now had no choice but to go to the Sublime Porte in Stamboul, the seat of the Osmanli government, where the necessary permissions could be obtained. Such was Lieutenant Sefton's advice, at any rate, and Barnett had no one else to ask.
Sefton pushed back his chair and stood up. "Take my word for it, Barnett," he said in his clipped, inflectionless voice. "If I don't come along with you, you're fated to spend the rest of the week warming one of the marble benches in the courtyard." He took his gold-tipped walking stick and tucked it under his arm. "I offer you the use of my years of acquaintanceship with the convolutions of Osmanli bureaucracy. I must go to the Sublime Porte at any rate, to see about my own accreditation."
Barnett nodded his acquiescence. "I'm convinced," he said. "I just didn't want to put you to any trouble, but as you're going at any rate, I'd be glad of your assistance." Was it his imagination, or did Lieutenant Sefton seem overly anxious to accompany him?
They left the hotel together and walked down the hill to Galata and the floating bridge. The fog was almost burned off now, and the clear March air smelled of some unidentifiable spice. Lieutenant Sefton pointed out the sights as they walked and told anecdotes of the timeless city. "I've been away for two years," he said, "but nothing changes. Across the bridge in Stamboul twenty years or two hundred could pass, and still nothing would change."
"Were you here long?" Barnett asked.
"Long enough," Sefton said. "I was junior naval attache to our embassy. Then I was naval attaché. Finally, they decided that I'd gone native and shipped me home." He laughed, but the memory was clearly a bitter one.
"And now you're back."
"Yes."
"Excuse me if I ask too many questions," Barnett said. "It's a habit that you get into if you're a journalist."
"Quite all right," Sefton said. "Actually, I'm here on the same business you are: the sea trials of the Garrett-Harris submersible. I seem to have become the Royal Navy's submarine expert."
"Ah!"
Sefton bounced his walking stick against the sidewalk. "The Royal Navy, you understand, has no interest in submarines."
"No interest?" Barnett asked.
Lieutenant Sefton nodded. He evidently got a great deal of perverse pleasure from telling this story. "The Holland submersible was tested in New Haven, Connecticut, last year, and I observed. My report was favorable. I strongly suggested purchasing one and beginning our own testing program for the craft.
"The report went all the way up to the First Lord of the Admiralty. He scribbled one line across the cover and sent it back, and that was the end of that."
"One line?"
"Yes. It was: 'Of what use is a boat which sinks?' "
-
The street they were following ended in a steep flight of stairs, below which the blue waters of the Golden Horn danced and shimmered in the late morning sun. The sails and masts of a myriad of boats of all shapes and sizes bobbed and nodded in front of them. There were galleys and galleons, caiques and scows, ships of every age and race of Man. Directly ahead of them, like a great humpback watersnake, was the floating bridge. Over a quarter mile long, it had a line of shops and coffeehouses along one side of a roadway that was wide enough for two four-wheelers to pass abreast. The bridge floated on pontoons, and a draw section in the middle could be raised to let the water traffic through.
Off in the distance two great buildings rose out of the haze on the Stamboul side. The dome of the Mosque of the Sultana Validé shimmered directly in front of them, and off to their left, gleaming white across the water, the suleimanieh, the gigantic and ancient mosque of Soliman, straddled a tall hill and frowned out over both the Golden Horn and the Sea of Marmara.
They descended the stairs and each paid his penny to the white-robed toll collector. The bridge was as crowded, Barnett thought, as the Bowery on a Saturday afternoon. And such people as were never seen on the streets of New York: Persians in flaring red robes and tall, conical hats; Circassians with curled blond beards, wearing long, black caftans and bearskin caps… Four black Turks trotted by with an ebony and ivory sedan chair on their shoulders. A veiled harem girl stared soulfully through the gauze curtains at Barnett, and then giggled as the chair passed.
"I'm getting a peculiar feeling as we cross this bridge," Barnett told Sefton. "It's hard to explain, but it's as though we were going, step by step, backward in time."
"The nineteenth century has yet to reach Stamboul," Sefton agreed, "for all that it's almost over. For us, it's 1885. For them" — he pointed with his stick at three women in front of them wrapped in layer after layer of concealing linen—"who is to say what year— what age — it is. As they reckon time, it is the year 1302 of the Hegira. These young ladies are halaiks—slave girls — belonging to the harem of some emir, and the two tall Negro gentlemen escorting them are eunuchs from his court."
They reached the Stamboul side of the bridge, and Barnett stepped thoughtfully into an alien world. "Well!" he said, "there's an article for my paper. We're still a mite sensitive on the subject of slavery in the United States, having eliminated it from our own shores a bare twenty years ago. And you might say we did it the hard way, too. Is slavery an accepted institution here?"
Lieutenant Sefton nodded, the trace of a hard smile on his face. "Slavery, bigamy, harems, eunuchs, exotics, exquisites — and a hundred things we've never heard of, and another hundred for which English has no words."
"Goddamn!" Barnett said. "You'll have to tell me all about it. This might make the Sunday Supplement! Course, I'm not exactly sure how to explain to our readers what a eunuch is, but I'll give it a stab and let the rewrite desk worry about it."
The Sublime Porte, a connected maze of palaces and gardens surrounded by a high wall, contained the palace of the sultan's chief minister, the grand vizier, along with the ministries of foreign affairs and war. Lieutenant Sefton led the way into the palace and took Barnett through a series of offices and waiting rooms. In each he spoke to someone, a few lire notes changed hands, and they were forwarded to the next. Although the official language of the Ottoman government was French, Sefton spoke in Turkish, and Barnett merely stood by and tried to look intelligent.
Finally, they were taken to a richly appointed room on an inner courtyard of the palace. "We have arrived," Sefton said, sinking into a gold-brocade overstuffed armchair. "The Captain Pasha himself is going to see us."
"The Captain Pasha?"
"The Osmanli equivalent of the First Lord of the Admiralty," Sefton explained, darting his eyes around the room like some great hawk.
"Was it really necessary to bribe all those people to get here?" Barnett asked.
Lieutenant Sefton focused his gaze on Barnett and studied him as he would a whist hand. "You are serious," he decided. "My dear man, those weren't bribes. You're in the Levant. Simple gratuities, incentives. Thus we arrived in this office in slightly over an hour instead of two weeks. This despite the fact that the Captain Pasha actually wants to see us."
"I wasn't making a moral judgment," Barnett assured him. "This sort of thing exists in the States. It's just the openness of it here that surprises me. A Tammany politico would take you in the back room with the lights turned down low. And he'd have four relatives and a judge all ready to swear that he was somewhere else at the time."