“Yashim, my friend,” Palewski protested. “Are there any aspects of this mystery which don’t involve cookery? I feel we may have to suspend our Thursday evenings until this is all over. I’m not sure I’m up to it.”
Yashim seemed not to have heard.
“The way the bodies appear, it’s almost as if they’re signalling their reach—first at the new stables above Aksaray, then way over the Golden Horn in Galata, near the Mosque of the Victory. Finally, today, we get one at the very gates of the Bazaar. Corpses materialising out of thin air—and another to come,” he added. “Unless we get there first.”
“You could only do that if—what?—there were some sort of pattern. Something about each of those locations which suits the murderer, however far apart they are. Delivering corpses all around the city, and even to Galata, has to be more difficult than just letting them bob up in the Bosphorus.”
Yashim looked up and nodded. “But for some reason the killers think the added difficulty is worthwhile.”
“A pattern, Yashim. You need to get hold of a decent map and plot the points.”
“A decent map,” Yashim repeated flatly. It was many years since anyone had attempted to make a good map of Istanbul.
Palewski knew that as well as he did.
“All right, what else do you have?”
“One Sufic verse. May or may not be relevant. One uniformed Russian,” Yashim replied.
“Ah. A Russian. Now that I can help you with.”
Yashim told him what Preen had discovered about the decorated fifth man.
“Order of Vasilyi, I shouldn’t wonder. Only awarded for battlefield experience, but it’s not immensely high grade. You wouldn’t wear it if you could get something grander.”
“Which means?”
“Which means that your boy is probably a good soldier, but not a grandee. Fourth rank aristocracy, or lower. Could be a career soldier.”
“In Istanbul?”
“Attached to the embassy. There’s no other explanation. I’ll find him for you right now.”
Palewski unwound himself from his armchair and dug about in a low shelf. He dragged several copies of
“It’ll be in here—who’s come, who’s left, who’s presented their credentials at court. Look, new boy at the British embassy, American charge d’affaires upscaled to consular rank, Persian emissary plenipotentiary received, blah blah. Next one. New Russian trade agent, wrong line of country, departure of French consul—ah, wish I’d gone to that party—etcetera, no. Next. Here you are. N. P. Potemkin, junior attache to the assistant attache of military affairs presents his credentials to the viziers of the court. Pretty lowly. Not full accreditation. I mean, he never got to see the sultan.”
Yashim smiled. Palewski’s own reception by the sultan had been the high point of his otherwise stillborn diplomatic career. As well as making a story which Palewski told in the driest way possible.
By a quirk of history, the Polish ambassador was maintained in Istanbul at the sultan’s expense. It was a throwback to the days when the Ottomans were too grand to submit to the ordinary laws of European diplomacy, and would not allow any king or emperor to claim to be the sultan’s equal. An ambassador, they reasoned, was a kind of plaintiff at the fount of world justice rather than a grandee vested with diplomatic immunity, and as such they had always insisted on paying his bills. Other nations had successfully challenged this conception of what an embassy was about; the Poles, latterly, could not afford to. Since 1830 their country had ceased to exist when the last parcel, around Cracow, was gobbled up by Austria.
The stipend the Polish ambassador received didn’t seem to cover the cost of maintaining the embassy itself, Yashim had observed, but it at least allowed Palewski to live in reasonable comfort. “We talk of Christian justice,” Palewski would explain, “but the only justice that Poland has ever received is at the hands of its old Muslim enemy. You Ottomans! You understand justice better than anyone in the world!” Palewski would be careful not to complain that the stipend he received had not changed for the last two hundred years. And Yashim would never say what both of them knew: that the Ottomans only continued to recognise the Poles to irritate the Russians.
“So it seems,” Yashim mused, “that junior attache Potemkin springs into a coach with four of the brightest New Guard cadets—and they’re never seen alive again.”
