He squeezed the handle and stepped inside.
The room was almost dark. Two candles burned in their sconces at the far side of the room, really too far away to be of any use to him. He turned to the right, gliding along the gallery. The oils were hard to make out, but as he passed one of them he paused. He stepped aside, to let the meagre light reveal it, and even though it was mostly shadow, the composition of figures closely grouped at its centre was unmistakeably that of the czar and his amorous czarina, with their little children.
He went back up the gallery.
Two shoulder-length portraits. A full-sized rendition of a man on a horse. A scene he could not decipher, including a river and a mass of men and horses surging towards it. Another portrait.
And he was back at the door. He could hear the footman banging the door downstairs.
He looked around in astonishment.
The vestibule still housed, as he remembered, a positive Parliament of Russian nobles, a Hermitage of royal heads. As for landscapes, well, many versts of the Russian steppe had been crammed in there, too, where Cossack hussars stooped in village streets to kiss their sweethearts farewell.
There wasn’t a map of Istanbul to be seen.
Where the map had been, he was looking at a portrait of a gouty czar.
He took a step closer. The czar looked surprised: perhaps he didn’t like to be ignored. Even in the feeble candlelight Yashim could still make out the faint outline of the frame, bleached against the painted woodwork.
Yashim hardly had time to register this appalling thought when he heard footsteps mounting the stairs.
Without a second’s hesitation Yashim lunged for the door at the far end of the room. The handle turned easily, and in a moment he was through.
[ 77 ]
The Russian ambassador put a monocle to his eye and then let it fall without a sound as his eye expanded in surprise.
“This I do not believe!” he muttered, to no one in particular. A Second Secretary, standing close by, stooped as if to gather up the remark and put it to his ear; however he heard nothing. He raised his head and followed his master’s gaze.
Standing by the entrance with a glass of champagne in one hand and a pair of kid gloves in the other was Stanislaw Palewski, the Polish ambassador. But he was like no Polish ambassador that the Russian had ever seen.
Palewski was dressed in a calf-length, padded riding coat of raw red silk, fantastically embroidered in gold thread, with magnificent ermine trim at the neck and cuffs. His long waistcoat was of yellow velvet: unencumbered by anything so vulgar as buttons it was held at the waist by a splendid sash of red and white silk. Below the sash he wore a pair of baggy trousers of blue velvet, stuffed into flop-topped boots so highly polished that they reflected the chequerboarding of the palace floor.
The boots, Yashim’s tailor had said defiantly, were beyond his help.
But now, thanks to a some judicious polishing of the ambassador’s feet, it was impossible to detect that the boots were holey at all.
“It’s an old trick I read about somewhere,” Palewski had earlier remarked, calmly blacking his toes with a brush. “French officers did it in the late war, whenever Napoleon ordered an honour guard.”
[ 78 ]
Yashim pulled the door closed behind him, releasing the handle gently so as to make no sound.
He was just in time: even as he put his ear to the door he could hear the other door being flung open. Someone marched into the room, and then stopped.
In five seconds they’ll be through this door, too, Yashim thought. He looked round, hoping to find a hiding place.
