“Master?” I replied, and made obeisance to the ground, a formality we never had recourse to when we were alone.
“Abdullah, these men would like a word with you.”
He turned, and turned me with him, to the room. The visitors—if they could be called that, for they had penetrated far into the house, to the very door of the mabein—were brazenly making a search of every alcove, pulling back curtains, opening blanket chests, and peering into large jugs. Their uniforms and swords told me at once who they were: from the palace, the Sultan’s personal bodyguard.
And my master and I were on the opposing side.
“You the head of the Grand Vizier’s harem?” One of them confronted me.
“By Allah’s most merciful favor,” I replied, bowing again.
“Tell me, khadim, how’s the honor of your harem?”
“By Allah, it’s my life if my master’s honor is not beyond reproach.”
“But might it not also be your life if you do not aid your master in concealing something behind the walls of your precious harem?”
“Sir, my honor and my master’s cannot allow you to continue in this vein. You will please retract such insinuation.”
The captain of the troop now came face-to-face with the mabein door. He looked at it hard as if he wished to see through it, his hand reached out to try the door, but in the end the sanctity of the place kept even him from trying it. He turned his piercing stare on me then and I met it with what I hoped was discretion as solid as the wood of the door.
“Very well,” the captain said. “I’ll take your word, khadim. But you should know that this is a very serious matter.”
“Wealth belonging to the Imperial coffers—to the Caliph of all the Faithful—has been lost,” my master explained quietly, with a quiet hand on my shoulder. “Lost in the business of the death of Joseph Nassey.”
“‘Stolen’ is more like it,” the captain said. “And if you are found to have had connection with this business, it will not go easy with you.”
My master replied: “Good man, I assure you and his graciousness the Sultan, once again I assure you that no crime has been committed at all. My agents sold the Jew’s goods exactly as I commanded them and every akçe was brought to the treasury. The accounts were carefully kept. I have shown them to his majesty many times. There is no failure there. If he expected the Jew’s property to amount to more, that I cannot help. I cannot help that what the records say Sultan Selim—may he find mercy in Paradise—paid out to the man is more than three times the figure we got. Please remember, gentlemen, the present state of the currency and its effect on the marketplace. Besides, Joseph Nassey was obviously a spendthrift. We cannot be held responsible for that, just because of the dark suspicions that peasant Turk Uweis may harbor.”
“Better that my lord Uweis harbor suspicions in defense of our master’s goods than that you harbor the man wanted for questioning in connection with the pilfering—that man, Feridun Bey, your secretary. He has very curiously disappeared from the city.”
“Would it were our master’s goods that concerned Uweis. Unfortunately, the Sultan promised that small Turk all the dead Jew’s goods as his own. It’s greed that fuels his suspicions.”
“Be careful what accusations you speak against Uweis Bey unless you can explain the whereabouts of your secretary.”
“Feridun Bey is an honest man,” Sokolli said. “Were every soul in the Divan as honest, they would recall that he was Keeper of the Imperial Seal for a time, and had proven his worth there long before I was fortunate enough to gain his talents for myself.”
The captain moved in close to Sokolli Pasha, threatening. “Tell me where you have hidden this man of many talents, then.”
“I do not know where the man is,” my master repeated firmly.
And I came to my master’s defense with these words: “What man would jeopardize the safety —not to mention the honor—of his harem by inducing something of that nature into it?”
But by the time the soldiers had turned on their heels to leave, I was convinced that when I next took a meal into the mabein, the features and gestures I might discern beneath the light apricot veil would be those of the secretary, Feridun Bey.
* * *
It seems Uweis was not totally convinced by the blank wall of the harem, either, for that afternoon, in company with Nur Banu, the little Turk’s wife came to pay a call on my lady. They had hardly been on speaking terms before.
We received them with customary and polite formality, with rose-water, tea, and little saucers of preserves. I didn’t even bother to try to caution my lady against it. I knew as soon as the formalized phrases—”We are all well, Allah be praised”—had run out, nothing on earth could keep Esmikhan from bemoaning the fact that her position was being usurped by a newcomer. Had she suspected there was anything to hide, she could not help behaving in a suspicious manner, trying to cover up something that consumed her every waking thought. Better to give her free rein on this subject, common in all harems.
“Bring the girl out and let us judge the depth of the threat for ourselves,” Nur Banu said.
Uweis’s wife, a simple, silly woman, had been reduced to tears of sympathy in the first few minutes. But the Queen Mother was much shrewder. Indeed, Nur Banu probably endured her companion only because she could carry messages quickly to her husband, the Turkish hunter who had the Sultan’s ear.
“She will not come out,” my lady moaned.
Uweis’s wife wanted to stay and talk. She knew only too well what it was like to have a younger, more beautiful woman catch her husband’s fancy. But Nur Banu had learned now what she’d come for: that there was a newcomer in
