“Murad Eslek!” He panted. Yashim remembered the street on fire, the man black with soot who grinned and shook his hand.
Reaching an alley which offered a choice to run right or left, Yashim hesitated. He seemed to have lost his sense of direction: Eslek’s sudden appearance confused him. He was aware that he had been running for a long time. He sensed he was very close -but he felt his own anger and confusion, pounding heavy-footed down an ordinary alleyway in Istanbul. What he had taken for inspiration had suddenly resolved itself into commonplace: it had become no more than coincidence.
“The tanneries!” Yashim gasped. The scent had both eluded and directed him for what seemed like hours. He had smelled it the moment Preen’s killer made explosive contact with him at the head of the stairs. It had drawn him along the streets, sucked him instinctively into alleyways, urged him left and right and now, within sight of his prey, it enveloped him.
Doggedly, feeling the weight on his feet for the first time, Yashim trotted left at a junction of mean alleys. Even in the darkness he could see that the walls around him were not continuous. Here and there a dim glow told him that he was passing a dwelling of some sort, but for the most part he moved in darkness where the lane bled out into scrub, and goats and sheep were tethered and corralled into flimsy yards. He heard them shift, with a low tinkle of bells; once he stumbled into a gate where the lane curved. His companion had long since dropped away: his quarry was nowhere to be seen. Nowhere to be sensed.
The reek of the tanneries had blotted him out.
[ 61 ]
The first thing Yashim noticed, after the stench he was forced to suck down into his heaving chest, was the light.
It rose in eerie columns from the vats into which, across an area of several acres, the animal skins were lowered for boiling and dyeing. Against a forest of flickering torches, each vat threw out a spume of coloured vapour, red, yellow and indigo blending and slowly dissolving into the darkness of the night air. The air stank of fat, and burned hair, and worst of all the overreaching odour of dog shit used to tan the leather. A vision of hell.
A hell into which Yashim’s quarry had disappeared.
Yashim dropped to one knee and took a careful look around.
He’d heard about the tanning yard, and smelt it, too, but this was the first time he had seen it with his own eyes. A high wall enclosed a space about the size of a football field, and crammed together, almost touching at the rim, the vats lay embedded in a raised floor of clay and cement, which glinted greasily in the torchlight, and allowed the tanners to walk between them and stir their bubbling contents with a long pole. Moulded of clay, lined with tiles, each vat was about six feet across. Here and there crude derricks had been set up for hauling the heavy bundles of wet skins in and out of the dyes, and at the junction of each four vats, in a space that resembled a four-pointed star, circular iron grilles had been fixed, Yashim imagined, to feed air to the flues that ran underneath. Several of these grilles were visible from where he stood.
Of the assassin there was no sign, but Yashim knew that he was there, somewhere, hidden behind the lip of one of the vats, perhaps, or standing motionless against the shadowed walls. Yashim knew almost nothing about the killer, except that he could operate in the dark: it was in the dark that he had launched himself against him, in darkness he had killed Preen, in the night he had stolen in to garrotte the hunchback. The dark, Yashim thought, is this man’s friend.
He scanned the tannery again. It was surrounded by high walls: only at the farther end of the tannery across the dancing glow of colour could he see other darkened doorways. He did not think the killer had found time to reach them.
Yashim shifted focus to look at the vats closest to him. The colours in the steam were less vivid, perhaps because of the way the light caught them; it was only further out, as the pillars of steam overlapped, that they showed a rainbow iridescence. Some of the nearer vats appeared to be empty.
Yashim edged closer on bended legs, holding up the skirt of his cloak. He stepped out onto the clay. It was surprisingly slippery, beaded with droplets of steam and fat, and he moved cautiously, planting his feet with elaborate care. He could feel the heat from the vats but, yes, there were empty vats among them. They were drained, he now saw, by means of a wooden bung attached to a chain which ran up the inside of each vat and was secured by a metal loop at the rim. He had a vision of the killer dropping down into one of them: like the soldier lying dead in the cauldron at the stables, long ago.
He reached into his cloak and unsheathed the little dagger at his belt. For a moment its blade glinted fiercely in the weird light, and then dulled as the vapour which filled the air condensed on the cold metal. He held it out, the handle beneath his thumb and nestling into his curled fingers, using it like a pointer.
He put one foot on top of the grating, feeling a rush of hot air up his leg; he tried it with his weight and felt the grating rock, with an almost imperceptible metallic sound. He pushed again, a little harder. Again the same slight yielding to pressure, but this time the metal grille gave a distinct knock against the frame.
Yashim stepped back and crouched down to inspect the grating. It was about twenty inches in diameter, set with rounded iron bars about two inches apart. He raised his head, considering. There had been so little time to hide. Crouched in one of the empty vats, the killer would be caught like a bear in a pit: it would be only a matter of time before Yashim found him, and then…
