Palewski’s eyebrows shot up.
“Meet a Russian—disappear—it’s a common phenomenon. It happens all the time in Poland.”
“But why would they meet a Russian official in the first place? We’re practically at war with Russia. If not today, then yesterday and probably tomorrow.”
Palewski put up his hands in a gesture of ignorance.
“How can we know? They were selling secrets? They all met at the Gardens, by chance, and decided to make a night of it?”
“No one meets anyone at the Gardens by chance,” Yashim reminded him. “As for selling secrets, I get the impression that it’s us who need their secrets, not the other way round. What could the cadets be selling—old French trigonometry tables? Details of cannon they probably copied off Russian designs in the first place? The name of their hatter?”
Palewski scowled and thrust out his lips.
“I think that’s enough tea,” he said thoughtfully. “The penetration of arcane mysteries requires something stronger.”
But Yashim knew the consequences of following Palewski’s well-meaning advice. So he made his excuses, and left.
[ 34 ]
Yashim walked quickly away to the Pera quay on the Golden Horn, and crossed by caique to the Istanbul side. His friend was right: it looked as though another body, the fourth, was going to wind up on his plate tomorrow night. And that was just the beginning of his difficulties.
A jogging donkey-cart blocked his progress as he walked back to his lodgings. The driver looked round and raised the handle of his whip in acknowledgement, but the alleys were too narrow to let him by, and Yashim was forced to drag his feet, smouldering with impatience. At last the cart turned into his own alley, and at that moment Yashim saw a man loitering, about halfway down. His outfit of scarlet and white indicated that he served as a page of the interior service of the palace. He was looking up the other way, and Yashim slipped back into the alley he’d come from.
He leaned against the wall and considered his position. The seraskier had given him ten days: ten days before the great Review that would show the sultan at the head of an efficient, modern army that could match anything the empire’s enemies could put into the field against it. Four days had already gone, and time seemed to be running out: there was the question of the upcoming murder, Palewski’s well-founded observation that he needed to get his hands on a good map, and the problem of the Russian attache, Potemkin. But there was the strangling at the palace, too, and the valide’s lightly couched threat that he had better find her jewels if he ever wanted another French novel. Well, he did want another: but Yashim wasn’t naive. Novels were the least of it. Favour. Protection. A powerful friend. He might need that any day.
He wasn’t ungrateful, either. The palace had discovered—and then allowed him to exercise—his particular talents, the same way that for hundreds of years the palace had selected and trained its functionaries to exploit their natural gifts.
Apart from the sultan himself, and the palace eunuchs, he was the only man who could take up an invitation to enter the women’s quarters. The only man in the whole empire who could come and go at will. And when the palace turned to him for help it was his duty to oblige.
But that put him in a difficult position. He was engaged by the seraskier: the seraskier had called him in first.
A killing in the harem was bad. But what he was dealing with outside looked worse.
For the fourth cadet, time was running out.
But why?
Why now?
He took a deep breath, pulled back his shoulders, and walked around the corner into his street.
[ 35 ]
The Dresser of the Girls looked beseechingly at Yashim, then at the Kislar Agha, the chief black eunuch, who was spreading his considerable bulk across a chaise longue. Neither the Dresser or Yashim had been invited to sit.
