51
“Never mind about the sandwich,” Yashim said. “I’ll buy another.”
He smiled as the boy got warily to his feet.
Yashim smiled. “You won’t run away when my back’s turned, will you?”
The fisherman eyed them both suspiciously as they returned to his boat.
“You owe me for the mackerel,” he said accusingly, as though it had been Yashim who had made it vanish.
“Here I am again; and we’ll have two more, if you please.”
Yashim paid for the sandwiches and led the way along the shore. After a hundred yards or so they found a small jetty and he invited Kadri to sit down.
“As good as any kiosk in the palace,” Yashim remarked comfortably, swinging his legs over the water. He liked the view over Pera, especially at night, when the streets were lit and the lights from the new apartment buildings sought their reflection in the still water. The outline of the old Genoese fire tower was distinct against the stars.
Yashim watched from the corner of his eye as Kadri tore into the mackerel with the appetite of a boy who hadn’t eaten all day. He was small but well proportioned, dark-skinned, with clear dark eyes and a shock of black hair that stuck out in comical tufts around his face.
“Have the other one,” Yashim suggested, holding out the untouched sandwich.
He could see the pale disk of Kadri’s face in the dark, but not his expression.
“Thank you,” the boy said. “I have eaten.” And then he added, “Thank you for the sandwich, efendi.”
“Take it, I’m not hungry,” Yashim said.
After a decent pause, Kadri’s hand came out and took the sandwich.
“I expect you’re wondering who I am,” Yashim said. “My name’s Yashim. Your tutor called me in to find you. It’s the kind of thing I do.”
“You find people?” There was a tone of disbelief in Kadri’s voice. “I didn’t know there was such a job.”
“No, well. I don’t live entirely on that kind of work, to tell the truth.”
“Because people don’t disappear often enough?”
“That, or I can’t find them often enough.”
The boy’s laugh was pleasant and unforced. “You found me, though, efendi.”
“I knew where you’d go.”
“In the whole of Istanbul? How?”
“Because it’s the same place I went when I ran away from the palace school myself.”
The boy was quiet for a moment. “You, efendi? You ran away?”
Yashim smiled ruefully in the dark. Kadri had been about to say something else-surprise that he’d been to the same school. Like the cadet at the gatehouse.
“Do you want to go back?”
“I–I don’t know, Yashim efendi. When I was hungry, I thought about it. But really I just wanted to get away. Or…”
Yashim imagined his face, screwed up with the effort to express what he felt.
“Or to be somewhere else, for a change?”
“That’s it, efendi. I just wanted to go into the streets. The ordinary streets.”
“And the ordinary rooftops, I imagine.”
“You know?” Kadri almost gasped.
“I think so,” Yashim said. “I guessed, when I saw the window on the landing.”
The boy leaned forward and put his chin in his hands.
“I think, Yashim efendi, that you find your people every time.”
Yashim laughed. “I try, Kadri. In the meantime, it’s getting late. If you aren’t going back immediately, we’re in danger of running out of options for the night.”
“Where will we go?”
Yashim was getting up. “I have an idea. Come.”
52
A single lamp burned low on an inlaid table, and above it a lozenge of incense drifted its heavy scent into the air.
Pembe lay against the pillows quite still, her eyes motionless, her hands folded placidly on her breast.
The girl neither saw the lamplight nor smelled the perfume in her nostrils. Her thoughts wandered down the cramped, dark corridors of her own small past, and into the ruins of her future.
In the past she could see a man in a sheepskin hat. Her father greases his carbine with mutton fat. A woman stoops to drag the stones from a patch of ground: when she straightens she is beautiful; she turns a wisp of her hair in her fingers and tucks it back beneath her kerchief and the hair is streaked with gray.
The girl remembered the first time she saw the sea. A ship. She thought they were both beautiful. The sun glittered on the water as it rose, lighting her path: a road strewn with flashing jewels.
Jewels around her neck; perfume between her breasts, and the tinkling of the bangles that she wore around her ankles. The path had glittered and she had smiled, knowing she was beautiful like the sea. Of course she had been chosen. Unafraid, warming the prince with that smile and the unblemished beauty of her white limbs.
There was to be a boy. His first. Her precious charge. For him she would be the man who oiled a gun, the woman who picked stones: unremitting, watchful, no fool. But she would be the khadin, too, first of them all, with honor and wealth and a world at her command. One day, at the end of the glittering road, valide.
Instead of which, an evil day brought her a girl. Nothing-and worse than nothing. A monster. Freak. A cursed thing, which had lived only a few days.
The door opened slowly and she saw the aga come in.
He tiptoed to the divan. She swayed as his weight settled, but she did not blink or move her hands.
Her mind picked among the pathways: something that stood between her and the light. A dark form. Not a man. Not a beast.
It was a woman, and Pembe’s heart burned with a desire for revenge.
When she spoke, the aga did not recognize her voice. “I know who did this to me.”
Ibou glanced nervously around the room. “It is the will of God, Pembe. It should strengthen you.”
The girl turned her head and spat.
“It happened after she came,” she went on. “When she beheld me with her eye. I felt it on me, but then I was not afraid.”
“Nonsense,” Ibou replied. He patted her hand.
The girl’s lips peeled back. “Talfa.” She spat the name through bared teeth. “She was jealous. Because I was young and beautiful, and was growing with a child. She wished to kill me in her heart.”
“The lady Talfa?” The aga glanced uneasily at the door. “You are alive, by the will of God.”
Her head sank back onto the pillow. “No, aga. No. I am dead already.”
53
The Polish ambassador to the Sublime Porte sat at his drawing room window and willed a breeze to rustle the wisteria. It was infernally hot, as hot as any summer Palewski had known in Istanbul.
