[ 55 ]
Yashim went down to the water stairs at first light, still clutching the note which the kadi had written shortly after the morning prayer. By the time he was settled in the bottom of the boat, the note was limp with the exhalations of Istanbul’s morning damp, between fog and drizzle, but he didn’t need to read it again.
While the rower dragged busily at his heavy sculls and sent the caique skimming towards Seraglio Point, Yashim drew up his knees on the horsehair cushion and automatically let his weight settle on his left arm, to trim the fragile boat. A wooden spoon, the kadi had written: having seen the bag of bones and wooden spoons tipped out over his floor only yesterday, the coincidence had inspired him to inform Yashim.
Twenty minutes later, the rower turned the caique and backed it neatly against the Yedikule stairs in a flurry of backstrokes and shouts.
As soon as Yashim saw the little man sprawled face down in the mud with a wooden spoon bound tightly to the back of his neck he knew that this was not the fourth cadet. The corpse’s hands were by his ears, his knees slightly bent, and there was a curve in his back which made him look, Yashim thought, as if he were simply peering down into a hole in the mud.
Yashim rolled the corpse over and looked at its face.
The staring eyeballs. The protruding tongue.
He shook his head. The night watchman, who had been squatting close to the body for several hours, spat on the ground.
“Do you know him?”
The night watchman shrugged.
“Fings ‘appen, innit?” He glanced over at the corpse, and brightened. “Yer, good lad an’ all. Did some blokes a favour. Women, y’know, and all that.”
He scratched his head.
“Mind you, fackin’ tough.” His simple mind slipped into the reverse key. “Bit too ‘eavy, if you ask me. They didn’t like ‘im, not the women.”
Yashim sighed.
“These women. Are you saying he ran a brothel?”
“Yeah. Funny lookin’ geezer, too.”
Yashim walked away, squelching in mud up to his ankles. Up on the quay he saw the entrance to a courtyard and picked his way across a scattering of rubbish to a pump. He cranked the handle. A thin trickle of brown water dribbled from the spout.
People were stirring in the apartments around the courtyard. A shutter banged and a woman leaned out of an upstairs window.
“Hey, what you doin’?”
“I’m washing my feet,” Yashim muttered.
“I’m chuckin’ this bucket, so watch out.”
Yashim beat a hasty retreat, the mud still clinging to his feet. What a foul district this was!
He walked around the corner, hoping to find a cab or a sedan chair. Every doorway seemed to have its ragged beggar or snoring drunk: some of them stared blearily at Yashim as he walked past. The bars were supposed to close at midnight, but Yashim knew that they tended to stay open for as long as anyone had money to spend, finally pushing them into the street when their purses were empty and their guts were full. He couldn’t understand the attraction. Preen had once argued with him, saying that she enjoyed the bars, their mixture of happy and sad.
“Except for drunks, you can never tell who you’ll meet, or why they’re there. Everybody has a story. I like stories,” she had said.
Too many of those stories ended like this, Yashim felt, soaking up your own vomit in a cold doorway. Or head-down in the mud, dead, like that crookbacked brothel keeper he’d just seen, maintaining the tone of the neighbourhood.
Hadn’t Preen mentioned speaking to a hunchback?
