It takes a book to hide a book.
38
Enver Xani fitted his key into the lock and pressed the door gently. Beyond the door lay a cool, dim chamber that echoed to the sound of running water. He stepped inside, grateful to escape the heat and dust of the city, and bent down to unstrap his shoes. He laid them carefully on a stone, pushed the door shut behind him, and stood waiting for his eyes to adjust to the gloom.
The coldness of the water still surprised him. In winter, the brothers said, it seeped into your very marrow; you spent the day wet, frozen, moving between the siphons and the cisterns of the city in fur-lined boots, your hands and hair permanently clammy, the joints of your fingers and toes swollen with the cold. It wasn’t work for old men. Which was why most of the watermen took an apprentice with them on their rounds; invariably one of their own sons.
In summer one could be grateful for the chill and the darkness, for the quiet and refreshing sound of flowing water. Outside, the dust was baked in the hot streets, stirred up by the passage of many feet, untouched by the slightest breath of wind. In here, in any one of the dozen or so siphons and cisterns dotted around the city, one could step into the cool stillness of the forests, fifteen miles off, from where the water began its long, slow descent toward a thirsty capital. It was a privilege. Enver had paid well for it.
He hung the key on a hook, the way he had been shown; it certainly would not do to drop a key into the maze of channels that swirled and eddied at his feet. In three months, he had been taught everything that an apprentice could be expected to know after years of following his father on the job: only by following the rules could he perhaps make up for the experience he lacked. For the brothers, the rules were like a religious ritual; just as this siphon room was, in its way, like a church or mosque, cool and quiet amid the heat and bustle of the city.
Enver took a stick from its place on the wall and dipped it into the broad receiving tank, measuring its depth. The water from the incoming pipe flowed gently into it at one end; on the far side, in the shadow, the water brimmed against the rim of the tank, sliding noiselessly over seven shallow scoops into the distribution basins. At the appointed hour he would stop up the outlets to basins three, five and six, open the pipe to release the flow from basin two, and pass the signal down the main bore to the next man.
Enver felt a squeeze of anxiety in his chest as he ran over the mnemonic verses he had learned. 3,5,6. Then 2. They belonged to the rules, as did the tarnished hollow ball of tin, which would shortly shoot from the delivery pipe and set his work in motion. His job now was to watch for the ball.
Enver squatted at the edge of the receiving tank, frowning as he focused on the spout. The water purled over the lip of the spout and tumbled in a thick coil into the tank, on and on, without stopping. From time to time he saw the coil flicker; sometimes he felt sure that the water was arriving, not in a ceaseless stream but by a series of almost imperceptible pulses, like blood through the veins of a man’s wrist, gluck-gluck-gluck, and he had to close his eyes and breathe deeply to dispel the illusion. But was it an illusion? Many of the brothers were able to tell precisely when the ball was set to arrive by the most minute change in the volume of delivery, the smallest shift in the music of the waterfall. “Steady, now. Stand by,” they’d say, ever alert to the subtle change, breaking off a conversation. And a few moments later the tin ball would drop into the tank, sink a few inches, and then bob up to the surface and glide softly to the edge. “Not yet,” Enver thought; but he had misjudged, for at that moment a tiny scraping noise announced the ball’s arrival at the near edge of the tank. He hadn’t even seen it come: it must have dropped from the spout when he closed his eyes, trying to decipher the rhythm of the water.
Disappointed, he stared down into the tank. He should pick up the ball, block the necessary distribution pipes with the rags, and then drop the ball into the exit pipe, to float away on its long journey through Istanbul. 3,5,6. Then 2. Light from a spangling of small holes in the roof of the chamber danced and dissolved on the surface of the water, as black and depthless as a pool of oil. With a sigh he bent forward and retrieved the tin ball. For a moment the light seemed to bounce from the surface around the chamber, a sudden brightening that Enver caught in the corner of his eye; then it settled once more, and he shivered. He had heard the brothers’ stories of ifrits and demons who haunted the darker corners of the cisterns; but it was growing cold now, too.
He gripped the ball in his fist and stared down at his own reflection in the black water.
For a fraction of a second, he caught sight of a second face, staring up out of the dark tank.
Enver had no time to wonder. He gasped, and something took him by the back of his head, so that the last thing Enver Xani saw in this world was the sight of his own face rushing toward him, its mouth open in a silent scream.
39
It was late in the evening when Yashim arrived at the gate of Topkapi Palace. Two halberdiers scrambled to their feet as he entered, and one of them placed his foot carelessly over a pair of dice on the stones.
“Quiet times,” Yashim murmured.
The halberdiers grinned foolishly. Yashim went past them and into the first, more public court of the palace. He crossed the cobbles in the shade of the planes, remembering when the great court had been full of people-soldiers respectfully dismounting, the standing grooms, the pashas coming to and fro, surrounded by their retinues, cooks bawling out orders, flunkeys darting everywhere on errands, cartloads of provisions rolling slowly toward the imperial kitchens, turbaned kadis gravely discussing the judgments of the day, oblivious to the noise, harem carriages rattling off toward some sheltered picnic spot by the Sweet Waters, Black Eunuchs trotting home with their shopping in a string bag, a swaggering group of Albanian irregulars, trying not to look awed, with pistols in their sashes, little boys staring up at the collection of severed heads displayed on the column, and around them, between them, the ordinary people of Istanbul, whose conversation was an underlying murmur like the sea.
The court was silent; only the gardeners squatted at their quiet tasks, beneath the swaying branches of the planes.
Where, Yashim wondered, had it all gone? Not to Besiktas, certainly, the sultan’s new Frankish palace on the Bosphorus, where sentries in kepis stood to attention outside little boxes, close to the railings. At Besiktas, carriages turned in smartly across the raked gravel, wheels crackling on the stones, and people in stamboulines got out, went up the steps, and disappeared.
Across the First Court stood the Gate of Felicity, whose conical towers could be seen from the Bosphorus and the Golden Horn. He wondered if it was still the Gate of Felicity, now that it no longer opened into the dwelling place of God’s Shadow on Earth. Could one still count oneself happy to pass through that gate, yet no longer able to share the same ground as the sultan himself?
As soon as he had phrased the question in his mind, Yashim knew it wasn’t the ground that he was thinking of, but the shadow of protection under which he had always operated. The sultan trusted him. A word would save him-but the word would not come from a sick man, far away in his palace on the Bosphorus. The French ambassador’s report would pass into other hands. Yashim’s involvement with the archaeologist would seem, at best, foolish. The slur would mark him like a stain on his character, a faint question mark over his good judgment.
He knocked, and waited. After a while the wicket gate opened, and an old halberdier of the tresses, a man he knew, welcomed him in without ceremony.
“The valide, it will be, efendi. She’s expecting you?”