The Janissary Tree

“Somewhere reasonably salubrious. Is salubrious the word I want, Yashim?”

“Possibly. Your—informant—he wasn’t there himself?”

“Not that he told me. Don’t you want to know where?”

“Of course I want to know.”

“It’s some sort of gardens,” Preen explained. “Along the Bosphorus.”

“Ah.” Perhaps salubrious was the word Preen wanted: all things are relative, after all.

“There’s a kiosk there, apparently, perfectly clean. There are even little lanterns in the trees.” Preen sounded almost wistful. “You can sit there and talk, and watch the boats in the straits, and have a coffee or a pipe.”

Or an assignation, Yashim thought. The Yeyleyi Gardens were once a favourite of the court: the sultan would take his women to picnic there, among the trees. That must have been almost a century ago. The sultans had stopped coming when the place became popular; in time it grew faintly notorious. Not entirely respectable, the Yeyleyi Gardens had been the sort of place where lovers used to arrange to meet by accident, communicating in the tender and semi-secret language of flowers. These days the encounters were more spontaneous, but even better arranged, and the language possibly mercenary. He could quite imagine it being visited—a little hopefully—by what the serask-ier called boys of good family.

“So—what? They arrived, had a pipe and a coffee, and left together?”

“So I’m told.”

“By boat?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t say anything about a boat. No, wait, I think they left in a cab.”

“All four of them together?”

“All five.”

Yashim looked up sharply. Preen tittered.

“Four came, but five left.”

“Yes, I see. And do you, Preen, know anything about this Number Five?”

“Oh, yes. He was a Russian.”

“A Russian? You’re sure?”

Yashim thought about this. Stambouliots had a tendency to mark down everyone vaguely foreign, and fair, as a Russian these days. It was a function of the late war; and of all the wars the Porte had fought with the czar’s men over the last hundred years; increasingly ending with the defeat of the sultan’s army, and further tough demands.

“I think it must have been true,” Preen said. “He was in a uniform.”

“What?!”

Preen laughed. “White, with gold braid. Very smart. Ve-ry big guy. And a sort of medal on his chest, like a star, with rays.”

“Preen, this is gold dust. How did you get it?”

She thought of the young Greek sailor.

“I made a few sacrifices,” she smiled. Then she thought of Yorg and her smile faded.

[ 31 ]

Istanbul was not a city which kept late hours. After ten, for the most part, when the sun had long since sunk beneath the Princes’ islands in the Sea of Marmara, the streets were quiet and deserted. Dogs sometimes snarled and snapped in the alleyways, or took to howling down on the shore, but those sounds, like the