“There’s not a mark on them. Clean and whole.”
He picked up the pelvis and began turning it this way and that between his hands. The seraskier pulled a face. He’d dealt with corpses often enough—but fondling bones. Euch.
“It was a man, anyway,” Yashim remarked.
“Of course it was a fucking man. He was one of my soldiers.”
“It was just a thought,” Yashim replied pacifically, setting the pelvis in position. From overhead it looked almost obscenely large, thrusting out from the skeletal remains spread on the marble floor. “Maybe they’d used another body. I wouldn’t know.”
“Another body? What for?”
Yashim stood up and wiped his hands with the hem of his cloak. He stared at the seraskier, seeing nothing.
“I can’t imagine,” he said.
The seraskier gestured to the door, and heaved a sigh.
“Like it or not,” he said, “we’re going to have to tell the people something.”
Yashim blinked.
“How about the truth?” He suggested.
The seraskier looked at him levelly.
“Something like that,” he said abruptly. “Why not?”
[ 33 ]
Fine cities whose contented citizens support an intelligent administration do exist, containing not a single dilapidated public building, a solitary weed-strewn building lot, or even a crumbling palazzo; but a great city must have them all, for decay, too, is a sign of life. In the right ear, dereliction whispers of opportunity. In another ear, of delinquency and corruption. Istanbul in the 18305 was no exception.
The ragged bell-pull that now lay, inert, in Yashim’s hand as he stood at the top of the steps by the front door of a building in Pera, Istanbul’s so-called ‘European’ quarter across the Golden Horn, inspired a similar reflection. He sensed that in some way the broken bell claimed kinship with much that was already ragged and mouldering in the ancient metropolis, from cracked basilicas to sagging wooden houses, from the office of the Patriarch to waterlogged pilings in the port.
At the last, mortal wrench of the cord, a bell had pealed somewhere inside the old mansion. For the first time in weeks, and the last time in years, a bell announced to the Polish ambassador that he had a visitor.
Palewski manoeuvred himself off the divan with an oath and a tinkle of broken glass.
At the head of the stairs he gripped the balustrade and began to descend, quite slowly, towards the front door. He stared for a moment or two at the bolts, then stretched, flexed the muscles in his back, ran a hand across his hair and around his collar, and wrenched it open. He blinked involuntarily in the sudden rush of winter light.
Yashim shoved the remains of the bell pull into his hands and stepped inside. Palewski closed the door, grumbling.
“Why don’t you just come in through the windows at the back?”
“I didn’t want to surprise you.”
Palewski turned his back and began to mount the stairs.
“Nothing surprises me,” he said.
Yashim glimpsed a dark corridor, which led to the back of the Residency, and a sheet covering some furniture stacked in the hall. He followed Palewski up the stairs.
Palewski opened a door.
“Ah,” he said.
