“You’ll do more than your best, Magistrate,” Nizam Pasha said in a low voice, then turned abruptly to speak to one of his advisors.
Kamil took that as his cue to leave.
He stepped through the portals of justice into the bustling avenue. The buttresses of Aya Sofya Mosque cast half the street in shadow. He marveled, as he always did, that the stolid former cathedral was still standing after more than a thousand years, having survived wars and earthquakes. At the other end of the avenue, the slender minarets of Sultan Ahmet Mosque soared white and delicate like orchid stems against the china blue sky. He had a vision of himself on an expedition in the eastern mountains, bending over a rare orchid. Yet he knew he couldn’t escape the responsibilities of his birth. These days, the title of pasha meant little more than a lord, but once it had given a man a clear position and duties in society. His father had been a governor and head of the gendarmes. One grandfather had also been a governor, the other a judge. Kamil had always thought of himself as one of the empire’s modern men, but maybe he was really a throwback, an idealist among the technocrats, a sheep jostling amid the goats.
Maneuvering his horse around the carts and carriages that were beginning to fill the streets, he rode back across the Galata Bridge and up the hill to the Grande Rue de Pera. Boys scuttled by carrying trays of tea and stacks of warming tins, rushing breakfast to craftsmen already toiling in their workshops. Shopkeepers cranked open their awnings and washed down the pavements before their shops. The street was filling with servants purchasing fresh bread for the families in embassies and mansions who were at this moment still rubbing the sleep from their eyes and deciding what to wear.
He loosened the reins, closed his eyes for a moment, and listened.
3
Back in his office, Kamil took up a sketch of a chalice stolen from a mosque two days earlier. Someone had colored in the precious stones, pink for rubies, yellow for diamonds. Like many in the Old City, the mosque had been converted from a church, and some of its Christian valuables were still kept in a storeroom. Probably not locked or guarded, Kamil thought, shaking his head at the foolhardiness of his countrymen. Constantinople had fallen to the Turkish armies more than four centuries ago, but Istanbul was still strewn with its bones. Byzantine walls, arches, cisterns, and artifacts came to light every time someone stuck a spade in the ground. The old city was encrusted with the new, but no matter how many palaces and mosques the sultans and their families built, the Christian city always found a way to remind the newcomers that it had been there first.
Abdullah brought in a new file. A note attached to the front asked that it be delivered to Kamil directly. Thinking the file might be important, Kamil opened it. A silver reliquary, he read, had been taken the previous day from a storeroom in the Kariye Mosque in Balat. Also a small prayer rug. An accompanying sketch of the rug showed elaborate borders of saz leaves and lotus palmettes, and an open field, in the center of which was a six-lobed medallion. There was a description but no sketch of the reliquary.
He read through the file again, running his hand through his wiry black hair. The streak of white over his left temple had become more pronounced since his father’s death and Kamil’s lean face appeared older than his thirty-one years.
A small rug and a tarnished silver box hardly seemed worth his while. Why had this file been addressed to him personally? He detached the envelope from the front and broke the seal. Before reading even the first line, his eyes were drawn to the sketch in the bottom right corner, a charcoal rendering of a fox. Above the drawing was the signature “Malik.”
Kamil remembered Malik with a rush of pleasure. The swarthy, white-bearded man with a pronounced limp had appeared one day at his office soon after he became a magistrate to ask about the medicinal uses of orchid powder. Having spent years finding, sketching, and cataloguing specimens native to the empire, Kamil had been delighted to find someone else interested in orchid lore and invited Malik to his house to see his collection. On that first day, he remembered, they had discussed Kamil’s favorite winter drink-hot, creamy saleb, made from the tubers of Orchis mascula. People believed it healed the spleen, helped in childbirth, and prevented cholera, something they had both agreed was unlikely. Saleb in Arabic meant fox, Malik had explained, because the orchid’s tubers looked like the testicles of a fox.
Their conversation had quickly moved from plants to philosophy. Malik, Kamil discovered, was a remarkably learned man. They began to meet once a month at a café near Karaköy Square, halfway between Kamil’s office and the Kariye Mosque, of which Malik was the caretaker. One day in late spring of this year, the café owner had handed Kamil a note in which Malik explained apologetically that a relative had come to town, so he wouldn’t be able to visit Kamil for a while. He had signed it with a sketch of a fox. Kamil berated himself for letting six months go by without calling on his friend. What if he had fallen ill? It would have been a simple enough matter to find his house, but Kamil, absorbed in his work, had let it go.
Happy to see that Malik was well, Kamil read his brief note. In it, Malik asked Kamil to come to see him that day on an urgent matter. The note was polite and apologetic, but gave no further information about what was so important. Surely not a simple reliquary and a rug?
Kamil debated whether he should go. He had only a week to solve the thefts. How could he justify wasting time on an errand for a friend?
He reread the report and noted, at the bottom of the page, the name of the police chief responsible for Balat and Fatih, Omar Loutfi. He had met Chief Omar several times and was impressed by his intelligence and tenacity, but remembered him also as a man with a temper, an intemperate tongue, and little patience. Still, discussing the thefts with the police chief of Fatih would give him a legitimate reason to follow up on Malik’s request and might even open up new leads. He had to start somewhere.
He left his office cheered at the prospect of meeting up with his old friend. In the antechamber, Abdullah was laughing with another scribe in the corner. When they saw Kamil, they fell silent and lowered their heads respectfully.
Kamil stepped out into the avenue and rounded the corner to the stables at the back of the court building. He waited in the dimness, breathing in the salty scent of hay and equine sweat while the stable boy brought out a strong bay. He swung himself into the saddle, glad of the activity. His horse wound its way through the narrow streets behind the Grande Rue de Pera, past the British Embassy, and down a steep hill to the Old Bridge across the Golden Horn, which shone like beaten copper in the morning light.
Chief Omar was a big, rangy man with a greasy mustache and the brusque talk and manner of a soldier. He had soft brown eyes, the kind that would be irresistible to a woman, but which lent the rough policeman a rather doleful air.
“I read your report on the theft at Kariye Mosque,” Kamil told him.
“You came all this way because of a silver box? Not that you’re not welcome,” he added graciously.
They were facing each other on low stools in a corner of the Fatih police station. Between them was a round copper tray on a stand that held a battered bowl and two glasses of tea. Despite the early hour, the Fatih station was busy. Several men squatted on their haunches against the wall. A heavily veiled woman sat on a low bench, telling her story to a policeman who stood by a desk. Her son had been missing for three days, she began. Whenever she finished a sentence, the policeman would repeat it to another man, sitting at the desk, who wrote it down in a ledger. Kamil could hear raised voices down the corridor, where they kept the prisoners.