“There’s something I wanted to ask you,” Yashim said. “Shall we have a coffee together?”
92
DR. Millingen closed his bag and snapped the catch shut.
He glanced up the bed, to where the sultan lay drowsing against the pillows. Ten grains: enough, and not too much. Laudanum helped ease the pain.
The doctor frowned. When he told the eunuch that his business was with the living, not the dead, he was telling a half-truth. Sometimes people who were well came to him, he bled and dosed them, and they lived. Sometimes he protected people who would otherwise have died. But his business was with neither the living nor the dead: it was with the dying.
His job was to give them courage, or grant them oblivion; for it was seldom death itself that people feared. For most of them, it was the realization of its approach; as if death was easy, but dying came hard.
The sultan was sunk back against the pillows, and his skin was sunk back against the bones: he looked papery. His mouth was open, at a slight angle; his eyelids were almost purple. His breathing was so faint as to be almost imperceptible.
Millingen bent forward to put his hand close to the sultan’s mouth.
The sultan opened his eyes. They were lifeless and yellowed around the dark core of the iris.
“S’agit-il des mois, des jours, ou des heures?” His lips barely moved. Hours or days? Millingen had heard that weariness before. The sultan did not lack courage.
“On ne sait rien,” he said quietly. “On va de jour en jour.”
The sultan did not drop his gaze. Only his hand moved slowly over the counterpane, as if there were some effort he wished to make.
“Sultan?”
“The crown prince. Summon him now.”
“Yes, Sultan. I will send for him.”
Millingen turned and went to the door, instinctively aware that he was being watched. At the door he looked back. The sultan moved a finger: go.
He opened the door and stepped out into the corridor. Two footmen snapped to attention on either hand, and a small, thin man in a fez sprang up from the sofa.
“He asks to see the crown prince,” Millingen said. He knew it was probably futile; the prince had a morbid horror of the disease.
The little man bowed. Millingen wondered if he knew it was futile, too, as he scurried off down the corridor.
Millingen folded his arms and let his chin sink toward his chest.
A week, he thought. If only he could have another week.
A memory of something he had once read came into his mind: Suleyman the Magnificent, dead in his screened litter, rushed from the battlefield as if he were still alive. The grand vizier having discussions with his corpse, in order not to alarm the troops.
He pushed the thought aside.
This is not the age of Suleyman now, he told himself. This is the nineteenth century.
93
GEORGE was sitting out in the little courtyard behind the hospice, his big face tilted to the sun, his eyes closed, with a skein of wool looped around his hands.
He opened his eyes and saw two men standing in front of him.
“Ha!” George boomed, lifting the wool from his lap. “You finds me like old womans now!”
He slipped his huge hands out of the wool and set it gently on the bench beside him.
“I sleeps like an old Greek lady,” he grumbled. He squinted up at his visitors. “What for you bring this rogue here, Yashim efendi? You wants I have bad dreams?”
Yashim smiled. “Murad Eslek, this is George.”
Murad Eslek shook his head. “I know George, efendi. Old bloke. Sells veg at that excuse for a market up the way from here. This ain’t George. Why, this man’s half his age and twice his size.”
George closed his eyes again and laughed weakly.
“Murad has been telling me about the Constantinedes brothers,” Yashim said.
George’s laugh turned into a cough. His eyes bulged, and he thumped his chest.
“What for you cares about such shits?” He spat on the cobbles. “Even Murad Eslek knows. They is bad mens, efendi.”
Eslek cut the air with his hand. “Too true, George. And I get the word that you was fitted up,” he added. “Valuable pitch, right? They made an offer.”
George rubbed his chest. “Those bastards,” he said quietly. “I works that market before they is born.”
“It was your father’s pitch,” Eslek pointed out.
“My grandfather had the farm,” George said. “Old Constantinedes lived nearby. He drink too much, beat his wife. So—my father helps his boys, brings them to the market. But they is bad boys who cheats peoples. My father says—we finds you new pitch. You cheats too many peoples, the peoples don’t come.”
George wiped his eyes with his massive thumb, and spat.
“When my father dies they says: George, it is finish for you now at market. Stay on farm, sell us your vegetables, and we sell to the peoples. But I think, no. These boys cheats the peoples. If I stops the market, why you not think they try to cheat me, too? Of course!”
“No one else asked you for money, then?”
“Money?” George looked surprised. “You asks rich man for money. Not the vegetable man.”
“And the men who attacked you. Did you recognize them?”
“No, efendi. I never sees them before in my whole life.”
Yashim and Eslek exchanged glances. “Leave it to me,” Eslek said. “And don’t worry. When you feel all right you can go back to your pitch. The Constantinedes brothers won’t be bothering you again.”
94
YASHIM paid a hurried visit to the hammam before crossing the Horn by caïque. It was still light when he arrived at the Polish residency. Palewski greeted him at the door.
“Come upstairs,” he said. “I thought of opening up the dining room, in your honor—but I’m afraid it’s a bit too far gone. The sitting room will be cozier.”
Yashim tried to imagine Palewski’s dining room. Holes in the plaster? Cobwebs? The windows obscured by creepers, perhaps, growing unchecked for years.
One of the little jobs that Xani had been going to undertake, no doubt.
He stopped on the stairs, one hand on the rail. “I think I’ve got Xani wrong,” he said.
Palewski turned.
“Wrong?”
Yashim nodded. “Just like the Hetira. I thought it was a protection racket, something like that. I thought it could have people murdered.”
They began to climb the stairs again.
“Why not? Look what happened to George. Look at the way they jumped you on the caïque that night.”
“George wasn’t done over by the Hetira. It was a turf war between him and another stallholder. Very vicious, and very unexpected. But not the Hetira. I learned that this afternoon.”
“But the caïque? And your apartment—remember that?”
“What do those events really amount to? Threats, yes. Unpleasant, certainly. But I’m still alive. So, for that matter, are you.”
Palewski pushed the door and they went into his sitting room. “The Hetira came after you for the book, but they didn’t kill Lefèvre. Is that what you’re saying?”
Yashim looked around. There was a small folding table set up in front of the empty grate. “They came after me—but I’m alive. Lefèvre was disemboweled. Just like Goulandris and the Jew.”
Palewski’s hands were on a yellow bottle.
“Tokay, Yashim. Wonderfully cold.”
He took a heavy crystal wineglass from the table and filled it. Yashim noticed the table was laid for three.