I wish you, dear sister, and your family, which is my family, a straight path through life to your own abodes of bliss.
Your loving sister,
Sybil
5
Michel stands inside the door to Kamil’s office, his feet slightly apart, hands loose at his sides, as if ready to take on an opposing wrestler. Kamil looks up and lays aside the file he has been frowning over. He waves Michel over to a comfortable chair.
“Two herbalists in the Egyptian Spice Bazaar sell dried tube flowers,” he reports, hunched forward in the chair, arms on his knees. “It’s not belladonna, but a related plant, Datura stramonium. The symptoms are almost the same. There’s quite a lively trade in tube flowers, unfortunately.” Michel grimaces. “In the past month, at least four people bought them, three women and an old man. There are other sources. It’s fairly common. It even grows wild outside the city walls.”
Kamil sits behind his desk, its dark, polished mahogany visible in neat avenues between stacks of letters and files. He drums his fingers on the wood.
“I had them track down two of the women,” Michel continues. “Both are midwives who use the herbs to cure bronchial troubles. The man too had a cough.”
“So this leads us nowhere.”
“There’s more. One of the midwives bought a large quantity. She sold them to several households around Chamyeri the week before the murder.”
“Anyone suspicious?”
Michel frowns. “Unfortunately not. The men checked every household and asked the neighbors. They verified that someone in each of the homes had been ill that week. That doesn’t mean someone couldn’t have taken some of the herb and used it for another purpose, but it seems unlikely. These are common village families. What contact would they have had with a British woman?”
“How was it administered?”
“We have to assume she drank it. The only other way to ingest the dried flowers is to smoke them, but that has only a mild effect and doesn’t dilate the eyes. The seeds are poisonous, but there was no sign that she died of something else before falling into the water. Perhaps it was given to her in a glass of tea. Too bad we couldn’t take a look at her stomach fluids,” he mutters.
“Where would such a woman drink tea? And with whom?”
“Not in a village. They wouldn’t even be able to communicate.”
“Chamyeri again. Both women were English governesses.” Kamil draws his fingertip along the edge of sunlight on his desk. “I wonder if anyone in Ismail Hodja’s family speaks English.” He looks up. “What about his niece?”
“Jaanan Hanoum?”
“She must have been there when Hannah Simmons’s body was found. She was a child then, of course.” Kamil’s lips tighten. “It must have been difficult for her. The young woman has had a rough time of it.” He shakes his head sympathetically.
Michel ignores Kamil’s evaluation. “Probably educated by tutors at home, like all women of that class. She had a French governess, but it’s possible she also learned English. Her father is one of those modernist social climbers.”
“He’s an official at the Foreign Ministry, I believe.”
“Yes.”
“But she lives with her uncle at Chamyeri, rather than at her father’s house.”
“Her mother went to live with her brother, the hodja, when her husband took a kuma. A modernist,” Michel adds sourly, “and a hypocrite. The more things change, the more they stay the same.”
“The man is insane. Two wives.” Kamil shakes his head in disbelief. “He might as well hurl himself in front of a tram.”
They share an uneasy burst of laughter.
“When Jaanan Hanoum came of age, she moved back to the city, to her father’s house. It’s pretty isolated up there, no place for a girl looking to be married. But since her troubles this past year, she’s been staying at Chamyeri again.”
“Istanbul society can be unforgiving. Poor girl. I wonder how she’s doing.”
“She’s gone. I asked around the village yesterday. They said that three days ago Jaanan Hanoum’s maid had an accident. She slipped and fell into that pond behind the house, and almost drowned.”
“Women should learn to swim,” Kamil snaps irritably. “Just last week I heard of two seventeen-year-old girls that drowned in a shallow stream. One fell in and the other tried to save her. They panicked and pulled each other under. It’s absurd that women are kept ignorant of even the most basic survival skills.”
“Jaanan Hanoum pulled the maid out,” Michel continues, “but she lost her sight. She must have hit her head on a rock. Jaanan Hanoum is on her way to relatives in Paris, left early yesterday morning. Planning to study, apparently.”
Kamil thinks about this, flipping his beads around his hand. “I wonder if either of them knew Mary Dixon.”
“Coincidence?” suggests Michel.
“I have no faith in coincidences,” Kamil mutters.
“If they heard the news in Chamyeri about the Englishwoman’s death, maybe it was just one tragedy too many for the young woman.”
“Maybe. But I still would have liked to speak with her. Who is left up there at Chamyeri now?”
“Just her uncle Ismail Hodja, his chauffeur, the gardener, and some daily staff.”
“I can’t imagine any of them having tea with an English governess, much less drugging and killing her.” Kamil shakes his head. “What else is near Chamyeri?”
Michel stands and paces the room, thinking. The folds of his robe tangle his muscular legs like tethers on a horse. He stops suddenly.
“I wonder.”
“What?”
“The sea hamam. It’s below Emirgan, just north of Chamyeri.”
“Ah, yes, I’ve heard of it,” Kamil muses. “It’s built on a jetty over the water so people can swim in private.”
“More like wading in a cage rather than swimming. The Emirgan one is for women.”
“I misjudged our women’s progressiveness. What made you think of the sea hamam, of all things?”
“It’s a perfect place to meet if you want complete privacy. It’s closed at night, but it wouldn’t be hard to get in. In fact, it probably hasn’t been used since last year. It usually doesn’t open until midsummer. Other than a few villas and fishing settlements, there aren’t a lot of other possibilities. No one in the villas claims to remember an Englishwoman.”
Michel opens the door to the judicial antechamber, letting in a din of voices. He and Kamil push through the tide of plaintiffs, petitioners, clerks, and their assistants and emerge from the squat stone courthouse onto the busy Grande Rue de Pera. A horse-drawn tram clangs along the boulevard, carrying matrons from the new northern suburbs into town for shopping. As they wait for their driver to bring the carriage, Kamil surveys the early morning bustle of Istanbul’s most modern quarter. Apprentices balance nested copper tins of hot food and trays of steaming tea, hurrying toward customers waiting in shops and hotels. Carts rattle as vendors pull their wares along the cobbled street. Advertisements for their services, or for mulberries, green plums, carpets, or scrap metal, issue from practiced throats. Shop windows display the latest products.
This tumult, Kamil knows, is surrounded by the tranquillity of old Constantinople, the name many residents still use for their city, its Byzantine roots as capital of the eastern Roman Empire still everywhere in evidence. At one end of Pera is a pleasant cemetery beneath a vast canopy of cypresses where people stroll and picnic on the raised tombs. Embassies set in lush gardens line the boulevard. To the west, Pera overlooks the waters of the Golden Horn, which takes its name from the reflected fires of the setting sun. To the east, the land falls off precipitously to reveal the Bosphorus and the wide triangle of water where the strait and inlet merge to push into the Sea of Marmara. Cascading down the hillsides are canyons of stone apartment buildings and old wooden houses strung together by alleys meandering around the remains of Byzantine and Genoese walls, towers, and archways. Where the inclines are too steep, roads become wide stairways.