The seraskier and he looked at each other.
“It’s very light,” Yashim remarked. They were silent for a moment. “What do you think?”
“I think,” said the seraskier, “that we do not have much time. Today is Thursday.”
“The review?”
“Ten days. To find out what is happening to my men.”
[ 5 ]
It had been a difficult morning. Yashim went to the baths, was soaped and pummelled, and lay for a long time in the hot room, before returning home in his freshly laundered clothes. Finally, having explored the matter in his mind in every way he could think of in an effort to draw a lead, he turned to what he always considered the next best thing.
How do you find three men in a decaying, medieval, mist-benighted city of two million people?
You don’t even try.
You cook.
Getting up he moved slowly over to the other side of the room, which lay in darkness. He struck a Lucifer and lit the lamp, trimming the wick until the light burned steadily and bright. It fell on a neat arrangement of stove, high table and a row of very sharp-looking knives, suspended in mid-air by a splice of wood.
There was a basket in the corner and from it Yashim selected several small, firm onions. He peeled and sliced them on the block, first one way and then the other, while he set a pot on the stove and slipped enough olive oil into it to brown the onions. When they were turning, he tossed in a couple of handfuls of rice which he drew from an earthenware crock.
Long ago he’d discovered what it was to cook. It was at about the same time that he’d grown disgusted with his own efforts to achieve a cruder sensual gratification, and resigned himself to more stylised pleasures. It was not that, until then, he had always considered cooking as a woman’s work: for cooks in the empire could be of either sex. But he had thought of it, perhaps, as a task for the poor.
The rice had gone clear, so he threw in a handful of currants and another of pine nuts, a lump of sugar and a big pinch of salt. He took down a jar from the shelf and helped himself to a spoonful of oily tomato paste which he mixed into a tea glass of water. He drained the glass into the rice, with a hiss and a plume of steam. He added a pinch of dried mint and ground some pepper into the pot and stirred the rice, then clamped on a lid and moved the pot to the back of the stove.
He had bought the mussels cleaned, the big three-inch mussels from Therapia, up the Bosphorus. He opened them one by one with a twist of a flat blade and dropped them into a basin of water. The rice was half-cooked. He chopped dill, very fine, and stirred it into the mixture, then tipped it out onto a dish to cool. He drained the mussels and stuffed them, using a spoon, closing the shells before he laid them head to toe in layers in a pan. He weighted them down with a plate, added some hot water from the kettle, put on a lid and slid the pan over the coals.
He took a chicken, jointed it, crushed walnuts on the flat of the cleaver and prepared Acen Yahnisi, with pomegranite juice.
When everything was done he picked up a swan-necked ewer and very carefully washed first his hands, then his mouth, his face, his neck and, lastly, his private parts.
He took out his mat and prayed. When he had finished he rolled up the mat once more and put it away in a niche. Soon, he knew, he would have a visitor.
[ 6 ]
Stanislaw Palewski was about fifty-five years old, with a circle of tight grey curls around his balding pate and a pair of watery blue eyes whose expression of beseeching sadness was belied by the strength of his chin, the size of his Roman nose and the set determination of his mouth, which at this moment was compressed into a narrow slit by the rain and wind backing off the Marmara shore.
He walked, as he did every Thursday night, along the road which ran from the New Mosque up the Golden Horn, a conspicuous figure in a top hat and frock coat. The coat, like the hat, had seen better days; once black, it had been transmuted by wear and the damp airs of Istanbul into something more nearly approaching sea-green; the velvet nap of the topper had worn smooth in many places, particularly around the crown and on the rim. Approaching a pair of ladies swathed in their chadors, accompanied by their escort, he stepped politely into the road and automatically touched the brim of his hat in salute. The ladies did not directly acknowledge his salutation, but they bobbed about a little and Palewski heard a muffled whisper, and a giggle. He smiled to himself, and stepped back onto the pavement to resume his walk.
As he did so, something chinked in his bag, and he stopped to check. Nothing explicitly forbade the diplomatically accredited representative of a foreign power from walking through the city carrying two bottles of 52% proof bison
