The first person Murad Eslek saw when he strolled into the cafe for his breakfast was Yashim effendi, the gentleman he had rescued from the tanners.
Yashim saw him grin and wave. He murmured something to a passing waiter, then he was sitting down beside Yashim and shaking hands.
“You’re well, inshallah? How’s the foot?”
Yashim assured him that his foot was getting better. Eslek looked at him curiously.
“And I believe you, effendi. Forgive me, but you seem like a watered rose.”
Yashim bowed his head, remembering the hours he and Eugenia had spent sheathing the sword last night. He thought of her gasping, flinging back her beautiful head and baring her teeth with frantic lust, almost overcome—as she had whispered to him—by the discovery of a man who could do more than feed her appetite: who could, in the hours they played together, awaken a hunger she had never known before. He hadn’t slept a wink.
He hadn’t slept too much the night before, either, the night that he’d dropped Preen’s assailant into the bubbling vat at the tannery. Since then he’d been constantly on the move—that second time to the Russian embassy, sending Palewski to the party to buy him time, pounding the streets in search of a tekke which meant nothing to anyone but him and—who? All the time his mind had been turning over the possibilities, tracking back over his encounters of the past week, looking for something he could take a grip on.
All the time trying not to think about what had happened last night. The pain, and the desire. The torment he had been powerless to resist.
He’d see what his friend Eslek could do to help him, and then he’d go to the hammam to revive. To wash away the dust of the Kerkoporta Tower. To ease his aching limbs, to dissolve his thoughts, and contemplate the presence of the demon he had fought so long and so hard to control.
Murad Eslek looked up from his coffee to see the expression on Yashim’s face.
“You all right?”
Yashim smoothed it away.
“I need your help. Again,” he said.
[ 91 ]
An hour before dusk, Stanislaw Palewski joined a group of men spluttering with indignation at the doors of the Hammam Celebi, one of the better baths of the city on the Stamboul side. It stood at the bottom of a hill, below a network of crowded alleyways whose relatively generous width suggested that this was, all the same, a prosperous district, neither so crammed that its houses almost jettied into their neighbours across the street, nor so grand that they were hidden behind walls, but a district of well-to-do merchants and administrators who liked to saunter down the streets in the evening, and sit discussing the day’s news in the numerous cafes and eating houses. It was not far, in fact, from the Kara Davut, and it was with the idea of stopping for a bathe en route to Yashim’s Thursday dinner that Palewski had crossed the Galata bridge on foot, at peace with the world, with two bottles of the bison grass tucked very chill, and snug in their wrappings, into the bottom of his portmanteau.
The Hammam Celebi was unexpectedly closed for cleaning. Disappointed bathers clutched bags of clean linen and fulminated gloomily against the management.
“They are saying to come back in one hour, or even two!” A man with an Arab headcloth complained. “As if I should spend my evening running up and down hills carrying clothes like a pedlar!”
Another man added: “And as if this wasn’t Thursday!”
Palewski pondered this oracular argument. But of course: tomorrow was a holy day for rest and prayer, to be tackled unspotted, at least on the outer side. Thursday night was always busy at the baths.
“Forgive me interrupting,” he said politely. “I don’t quite understand what the matter is.”
The men turned to look him up and down. If they were surprised or displeased to find a foreigner—and a ferenghi, to boot—with a plain intention of entering their bath, they were certainly too well mannered to let it show. And when it came to bathing, the procedure was, by long tradition, a democratic one. The hours for men to use the hammam were hours when they could be used by all men, infidel or believer, foreigner or Stambouliot.
A third frustrated bather, a man with a small paunch and a few grey curls peeping from his turban, politely offered Palewski an explanation.
“For some reason none of us can fathom, the bath people have taken it into their heads to clean out the hammam in the middle of a busy evening, instead of at night.”
