“Yes, I see.”
“May I have your permission to interview the officers who shared their dormitory?”
The seraskier blew the wind between his teeth and stared down at the floor. Yashim had been here before. People wanted solutions, but they always hoped they could reach them without creating a fuss. The seraskier wanted to make a public announcement but was not, it seemed, quite ready to risk offending or alarming anyone. The forces of the padishah, he would aver, are working ceaselessly and with complete confidence to bring the perpetrators of this evil deed to light—and he wouldn’t mean a word he said.
“Effendi, either we must try to find out what happened, or there is no point in my proceeding with this case.”
“Very well. I will write you a chit.”
“A chit. Will that be enough, do you think? To talk, perhaps. In the murky place: will a chit hold out?”
The seraskier looked straight into Yashim’s grey eyes.
“I’ll support you,” he said wearily.
[ 18 ]
Yashim arrived early at the little restaurant beneath Galata Point and chose a quiet alcove which overlooked the channel of the Bosphorus. The Bosphorus had made Istanbul what it was: the junction of Europe and Asia, the pathway from the Black Sea into the Mediterranean, the great entrepot of world trade from ancient times to the present day. From where he sat he could watch the waterway he loved so much, the narrow sheet of gun-metal which reflected back the shape of the city it had built.
The water was as ever thick with shipping. A mountain of white sail rose above the deck of an Ottoman frigate which was tacking up the straits. A shoal of fishing smacks, broad-beamed and single- masted, held out under an easterly wind for the Sea of Marmara. A customs boat swept past on its long red oars like a scurrying water-beetle. There were ferries, and skiffs, and overladen barges; lateen-rigged cutters from the Black Sea coast, house-boats moored by the crowded entrance to the Golden Horn. Across the jostling waterway, Yashim could just make out tiskiidar on the opposite shore, the beginning of Asia.
The Greeks had called Uskiidar Chalcedon, the city of the blind. In founding the city, the colonists had ignored the perfect natural setting across the water, where centuries later Constantine was to turn the small town of Byzantium into a great imperial city which bore his name. For a thousand years Constantinople was the capital of the Roman empire in the east, until that empire had shrunk to a sliver of land around the city. Ever since the Conquest in 1453, the city had been the capital of the Turkish Ottoman empire. It was still officially called Constantinople, though most ordinary Turks referred to it as Istanbul. It remained the biggest city in the world.
Fifteen hundred years of grandeur. Fifteen hundred years of power. Fifteen centuries of corruption, coups and compromises. A city of mosques, churches, synagogues; of markets and empo-ria; of tradesmen, soldiers, beggars. The city to beat all cities, overcrowded and greedy.
Perhaps, Yashim sometimes reflected, the Chalcedonians hadn’t been so blind, after all.
He had half-expected the Albanian to stay away, but when he looked up there he was, massive and grim, hitching his cloak. Yashim gestured to the divan and he sat down.
“Ali Pasha of Janina,” said the soup master. “The name means something to you?”
Ali Pasha was the warlord who by guile and cruelty had built up a semi-independent state in the mountains of Albania and northern Greece. It was fourteen years since Yashim had seen his head displayed on a pillar at the gates of the seraglio.
“The Lion,” Mustafa rumbled. “We called him that. I soldiered in his army—it was my country. But Ali Pasha was foxy, too. He gave us peace. I wanted war. In 18061 went to the Danube. That is where I joined the corps.”
“The Janissaries?”
The soup master nodded.
“As a cook. I was already a cook, even then. To fight—it’s not so much for a man. For an Albanian, it’s nothing. Ask a Greek. But cooking?” He grunted with satisfaction.
Yashim clasped his hands and blew into them.
“I am a man of tradition,” the soup master continued. “For me, the Janissaries were the tradition. This empire— they built it, didn’t they? And it is hard for an outsider to understand. The Janissary regiment was like a family.”
Yashim pulled a sceptical face. “Every regiment says that.”
