grass vodka, but Palewski wasn’t eager to put the case to the test. For one thing, he was not absolutely sure that there hadn’t ever been, in the whole tumultuous history of the city, an edict which made carrying liquor a flogging offence. For another, his diplomatic immunity was at best a fragile kind of favour. He had no gunboats at his disposal to ride up the Bosphorus and bombard the sultan into a more amenable frame of mind if things went wrong, as Admiral Duckworth had done for the English in 1807. He had no means of exerting government pressure as the Russians had done in 1712., when their ambassador was clapped up in the old prison of the Seven Towers. Forty years ago, the rulers of Russia, Prussia and Austria sent their armies into Poland to wipe the country from the map. Palewski, in truth, had no government at all.
The Polish Imperial Ambassador to the Sublime Porte rearranged the damp cloth which protected his bottles, drew the strings of his bag tight again, and walked on through a dwindling series of streets and alleyways until he came to a very small porte cochere in one of the back alleys of the old town down by the Golden Horn. The door was small because it was sunken: only the upper three-fifths showed above the level of the muddy ground. A scattering of small boys tore past him, no doubt rubbing yet another layer of shine into the back of his old coat. A snapping bell, clapped between the fingers, announced the approach of a man in a tiny donkey cart, weaving his way with miraculous precision through the narrow interstices of the close medieval streets. Hurriedly, Palewski knocked on the door. It was opened by an old woman in a blue wimple who silently stood back to let him enter. Palewski, stooping, stepped in just as the cart swept by with a pattering of tiny hooves and a shout from the man at the reins.
Outside, the light, such as it was, was fading; inside, it had never, apparently, risen. Palewski wondered briefly whether sunlight had penetrated to this spot at all in the past fifteen hundred years: the sunken doorcase, he had long suspected, was early Byzantine work, and he had no reason to imagine that the dark wooden handrail, to which he was now clinging as he swung blindly but unfalteringly upstairs, was anything but Byzantine itself, like the stone of the house, and the window embrasures, and the very probably Roman vaulting overhead.
At the head of the stairs he paused to catch his breath and analyse the peculiar mixture of fragrances seeping through the lighted crack at the foot of the door in front of him.
Yashim the eunuch and Ambassador Palewski were unlikely friends, but they were firm ones. “We are two halves, who together become whole, you and I,” Palewski had once declared, after soaking up more vodka than would have been good for him were it not for the fact, which he sternly upheld, that only the bitter herb it contained could keep him sane and alive. “I am an ambassador without a country and you—a man without testicles.” Yashim had considered this remark, before pointing out that Palewski might, at a pinch, get his country back; but the Polish ambassador had waved him away with a loud outbreak of sobs. “About as likely as you growing balls, I’m afraid. Never. Never. The bastards!” Soon after that he had fallen asleep, and Yashim had employed a porter to carry him home on his back.
The impoverished diplomat sniffed the air and adopted a look of cunning sweetness which was entirely for his own benefit. The first of the smells was onion; also chicken, that he could tell. He recognised the dark aroma of cinnamon, but there was something else he found it hard to identify, pungent and fruity. He sniffed again, screwing his eyes shut.
Without further hesitation or ceremony he wrenched open the door and bounded into the room: “Yashim! Yashim! You raise our souls from the gates of hell! Acem Yahnisi, if I’m not mistaken—so like the Persian fesinjan. Chicken, walnuts—and the juice of the pomegranate!” he declared.
Yashim, who had not heard him come up, turned in astonishment. Palewski saw his face fall.
“Come, come, young man, I ate this dish before you were weaned. Tonight let us give it in all sincerity a new and appropriate name: The ambassador was out of humour, and now is delighted! How’s that?”
He presented the bottles to his host. “Still cold, you feel! Marvellous! One day I shall take a light and go down into that cellar and find out where the icy water comes from. It may be a Roman cistern. I shouldn’t be surprised. What a find!”
He rubbed his hands together while Yashim, smiling, handed him a glass of vodka. They stood for a moment looking at one another, then tossed back their heads simultaneously, and drank. Palewski dived on the mussels.
It was going to be a long evening. It
[ 7 ]
The Street of the Tinsmiths ran slightly above and to the west of the Mosque of Rustem Pasha, itself half-buried in the alleys and back-doubles which surround the southern entrances of the Grand Bazaar. Like most of the artisans’ quarters, it consisted of a narrow funnel of open workshops, each no bigger than a very big wardrobe, where the smiths worked with forge, bellows and hammers over the standard articles of their trade: tin pots, little kettles, weakly hinged or plainly lidded boxes of every size and shape, from the tiny round tins used for storing kohl and tiger balm to banded trunks for sailors and the linen trade. They made knives and forks; they made badges and insignia; spectacle frames and ferrules for walking sticks. Every one of them worked at a specialism, rarely if ever straying from, say, the remorseless production of amulets designed to contain a paper inscribed with the ninety-nine names of God to, for example, the perpetual manufacture of pin boxes. These were guild rules, laid down hundreds of years before by the market judges and the sultan himself, and they were broken only under very special circumstances.
Would the manufacture of an enormous cauldron, Yashim wondered, constitute a special circumstance?
The tin market was not a place for the crowds who infested some of the other industrious highways of Istanbul: the food markets, the spice bazaars, the makers of shoes. Even the Street of the Goldsmiths was more busy. So Yashim walked along easily in the middle of the street, and attracted few glances. Once the smiths had satisfied themselves that he was a stranger, they thought no more about him: they hardly cared to notice if he was rich, poor, fat or thin, for no man alive was likely to bring them any greater profit than the modest profit they enjoyed by
