He was wedged in between the desk and a stool, pressed up against the wall, his thin arms raised above his head, wrist to wrist, his head jammed against his bended knees. There was an astonishing amount of tacky dark blood staining the floor, as the guard had first noticed, but the nape of his neck gleamed almost white in the dim light. Yashim felt the man’s arms: they were quite cold. He took hold of the gray hair on Goulandris’s scalp with a tremor of reluctance, and tugged back his head; as it slipped between his arms they shifted stiffly forward, checked by the rigor of death. Yashim peered down and grunted; then he fastidiously drew out a handkerchief, swirled it into a ball, and dabbed at the man’s throat. He tried not to look into his one glittering eye.
The handkerchief came up clean.
But there was a lot of blood on the floor.
Yashim stood still for a moment. The light failed, and there was a man at the door. “The kadi is on his way, efendi.”
“That’s good. This-is his province. He will know what measures need to be taken.”
“But you, efendi-”
“No, my friend. I’m going to the palace. Don’t worry,” he added when he saw the guard step back a pace, “you have done everything well. And everything you could.”
They saluted each other, one hand to the chest.
14
Malakian was standing uncertainly in front of his shop, a padlock in his hands.
“Goulandris? Incredible. Who would want to kill him? He was a very old man.”
“He knew very little about books.”
“Very little? You say so, efendi. But yes, stubborn. A stubborn old Greek. It is terrible.”
Yashim shook his head. He was reminded of another stubborn old Greek, his friend George, beaten and left for dead in the street. Like Goulandris he, too, was a trader. “What do you know about the Hetira, Malakian?”
Malakian rubbed the edge of one of his enormous flat ears between his forefinger and thumb. “Ask a Greek, efendi. This is something Greek. I would not know.”
“But the word means something to you.”
Malakian frowned. “This is my shop, Yashim efendi, in the bazaar, like always. It is cheap here, yes. In Pera you will find many new shops-but Pera is expensive.”
Yashim shook his head. “I don’t understand.”
“I am stubborn man, like Goulandris. But I am not Greek. So.”
“Why would the Hetira want to drive out Greeks?”
Malakian said nothing, but he shrugged slowly.
15
Yashim stopped by the fish market on the Golden Horn. Still smarting from the Frenchman’s indifference to the dolma he had so lovingly prepared, he chose two lufer, the bluefish that all Istanbul took as the standard for excellence. He watched the fishmonger slit their bellies and remove the entrails with a twist of his thumb.
Yashim was proud of Istanbul-proud of its markets, the cornucopia of perfect fruits and vegetables that poured into them every day, proud of the fat-tailed sheep from Anatolia, which sometimes came skittering and bleating through the narrow streets. What other city in the world could produce fish to match the freshness or the variety offered by the Bosphorus, a finny highway running straight through the heart of Istanbul? Why, at any season of the year you could practically walk to Uskudar on the torrent of fish that passed along the straits-
“Don’t wash it,” he said quickly. A fish would begin to deteriorate from the moment it lost its slimy protective coat.
“Bah, we have too little water,” the fishmonger grunted. “The supply is weak again.”
But it flowed: that was what mattered. Sometimes, standing on Pera Hill and looking back across the Golden Horn to the familiar skyline of the city, marked by the great domes of Sinan’s mosques; or passing the jumble of buildings-mosques, houses, caravanserai, churches, covered markets, shops-which lined the Stamboul shore of the Horn, it seemed incredible to Yashim that the city should function from one day to the next and not simply explode, or tear itself apart, or at the very least subside into a confusion of bleating sheep, rotting vegetables, and men gesticulating and thundering in twenty languages, unable to progress or retreat through the overcrowded streets.
Yet whenever Yashim looked more closely, at the level of a particular street, say, he was struck by the air of invisible good order that kept everything and everyone flowing smoothly along, like water in the pipes and aqueducts: so that when a man was murdered, and another attacked, both traders, both Greeks, they seemed inevitably to belong to some hidden economy in the city, a single channel of a commerce freighted with menace and brutality.
Yashim delivered one of the bluefish to the nuns at the hospital.
“Perhaps he can manage a little of this?” he asked tentatively.
The nun smiled. “It will do him good.”
“And perhaps-then, if he can eat, he can speak-a little?”
She laughed with her eyes. “Very well, efendi. If he is not asleep, you may have a moment. Not more, please.”
Yashim bowed.
George looked worse than when he had first seen him in the filtered subaqueous light of the wardroom, for the bruising on the side of his head had come up. He was still bandaged, with one eye covered; the other peered with difficulty through swollen, bulging lids. His breathing, however, seemed normal now.
Yashim squatted by the bed. “They’ll be giving you some fish today. Lufer.”
“Too much soup,” said George finally. His voice was a croak.
“You’re a big man, George. Fish is just the start of it. We’ll get you onto some proper meat in a few days.”
George made a faint whistling sound between his lips. It appeared to be a laugh. “Tough to shit,” he croaked.
“Yes, well, perhaps that’s right.” Yashim frowned. “The nuns will know.”
George closed his one eye in agreement. Yashim bent closer. “What happened, George?”
“I forgets,” he whispered back.
“Try to remember. You were attacked.”
The eye opened a crack. “I slips, falls over.”
Yashim rocked back on his haunches. “George. You were badly beaten up. You were almost killed.”
“No beating, efendi. Is accident. I falls on stairs.”
“So you remember that, do you?”
George’s eye swiveled toward him.
“Who pushed you, George?”
The eye slid away. Nothing.
“The Hetira?”
But his friend had rung down the shutter on his one good eye. His swollen face was incapable of expression.
George was a proud man. Tough and proud enough to take a beating-and too proud to speak, as well.
Or too afraid.
Yashim had a question for the nun as he left.
“Only his wife, efendi. She’s been coming here every day. She always talks. He is a good man. He listens to his wife.”
“And does she think-that he had an accident?”
The nun lowered her eyes and answered demurely. “We do not judge our people, efendi. We try only to heal.”
She glanced at him then, and Yashim turned his head away. Muttering a farewell, he found his own way out into the street, and heard her bolt the door at his back.
16
Widow Matalya’s brow furrowed and uncreased as she made her count. She champed her toothless gums together, and the hairs trembled on a large black mole on her cheek. Now and again her fingers twitched. Widow Matalya did not mind, because she was asleep.
She dreamed, as usual, about chickens. There were forty of them, leghorns and bantams, scratching about in the dust of the Anatolian village where she had been born more than seventy years ago, and the chickens in her dream were exactly the same as the chickens she had tended as a young woman, when Sipahi Matalya had ridden through her yard and sent them all squawking and flapping onto the roof of their own coop. Sipahi Matalya had taken her to Istanbul, of course, because he was only a summer sipahi, and they had shared a very happy marriage until he died; but now that her children were grown she thought very often of those forty birds. Awake, she wondered who had eaten them. Asleep, she checked that they were all safe. It was good to be young again, with all that ahead of one.