again, and with a heave on the flat of his axe sent it loose out the other side. Yashim gripped the pin and jerked it out.
The building gave a lurch. Several panels of plaster from the upper storey crashed down at their feet and exploded into a powder that was immediately whipped away by the rush of hot wind flaring down the street. Yashim glanced back. Two houses along, the fire was beginning to take hold. Sparks were flying past: one of the men he’d sent to the back of the house stuck his head out through a pair of uprights leaning at a drunken angle to the ground and hurriedly withdrew it. Everyone laughed.
“They’ll be out in a moment. And none too soon,” a man said. They scented victory: their mood had changed.
Sure enough, the two men appeared suddenly on the other side of the frame and darted out through the collapsed doorway.
“To think we used to get the Janissaries from the Beyazidiye Pound to do this for us!”
They were enjoying themselves now. A slithering crash from overhead told them that the joists had sprung: the planking of the upper floor leaned at an angle that was already putting pressure on the roof supports, forcing them up.
“It’s going wide!” Yashim bellowed. It was true: the whole frame of the house was sagging towards them, spinning around. “Watch out!” Yashim backed, darted forward down the street away from the fire. The others followed. At twenty yards they stopped to watch the whole frame of the house take a sudden lurch into the street like a drunk wheeling from the wall. The roof tiles seemed to hang suspended in the air until, with a crash that could be heard over the crackling of the fire and the shouts from the upper end of the street, the edifice fell with a sudden
Yashim hit the ground, cradling his head in his arms: it was like a desert sandstorm flying overhead. Someone nearby screamed. He pressed his face into the dirt, even as the storm of debris began to ebb. A few pieces of broken tile skittered along the ground and harmlessly struck his arms.
Cautiously he peered up over the crook of his elbow. Further along the street the fire still raged: it had caught up with them now, and the shutters of the last house standing blew open with a force that sent them rocking wildly on their hinges. But the flames that shot from the casements darted out in vain. Where there had been wood and eaves, there was only a black gap and a few stray timbers dangling from a skinny beam.
Someone stooped and helped him to his feet. He recognised the man with the axe: they shook hands and then, because the excitement had been intense and the labour was won, they embraced, three times, shoulder to shoulder.
“You did us a favour, my friend,” the other man said. He looked like a ghost, his face blanched by the dust. “Murad Eslek, me.”
Yashim grinned.
“Yashim Togalu.” Not Yashim the eunuch. “At the sign of the Stag, Kara Davut.” And then, because it was true, he added: “The debt is all mine.”
The note of cultivation in his voice caught the man by surprise.
“I’m sorry, effendi. In the dark…all this dust…I did not—”
“Forget it, friend. We are all one in the sight of God.”
Murad Eslek grinned, and gave Yashim the thumbs up.
[ 44 ]
Yashim stirred his coffee mechanically, trying to identify what still bothered him about the night’s events.
Not the fire itself. Fires were always breaking out in Istanbul -though it had been a close-run thing. What if he had left the window shut—would the smell of smoke have reached him in time? He might have gone on sleeping, oblivious to the jagged screen of flame dancing its way towards his street: roused when it was already too late, perhaps, the stairwell filled with rolling clouds of black smoke, the windows shattering in the heat…
He thought of the crowd he’d seen that morning, the women and children standing dazed in the street. Dragged from their sleep. By God’s mercy they, too, had woken up in time.
A phrase of the Karagozi poem leaped into his mind.
The spoon stopped moving in the cup.
There was something else. Something a man had said.
