The Abyssinian Proof

2

Istanbul, 2 Teshrinievvel, 1303 Rumi (October 14, 1887)

Kamil Pasha woke with a start. As he got up from the armchair, papers cascaded from his lap onto the floor. He must have dozed off. The lamp was lit. The clock on the mantel said three in the morning.

His manservant, Yakup, stood in the doorway balancing a glass of tea on a tray. “No word yet.”

“What’s taking them so long?” Kamil complained as he picked up the files from the floor and stacked them on his desk. He stopped for a moment to examine a rose-colored bloom that had appeared on the potted Cephalanthera rubra sitting beside the files. It was one of dozens of orchids scattered about the rooms of his villa. A passionate collector, Kamil had had a winter garden built onto the back of the house for his more delicate varieties.

Kamil went next door to his bedroom. He poured water from a pitcher into a china bowl and stood for a moment, hands splayed on the cool marble of the washstand, frowning into the mirror. The lamplight accentuated the lean angles of his face and the tired smudges beneath his eyes. He looked like a ruffian with his unruly hair and mustache, black stubble, and dour expression. They say a man’s fate is written on his forehead, he reflected, examining the lines that scored his brow. Perhaps it was just a map of where that man has been. He smacked the flat of his hand against the marble and turned away. A map would imply the existence of a Mapmaker, he thought grimly. No God worth his salt would work with such flimsy materials.

Kamil dipped a tinned copper mug into a jar of spring water and drank it down, then went back to his study. He pushed open the window and leaned out. A slick of moonlight spread outward from the Beshiktash shore at the base of the hill. Beyond the strait hulked the black hills of Asia. The moon was high and the night too bright for subterfuge. Had their target spotted the gendarmes following him?

Kamil was a magistrate in the new secular courts, responsible for investigating and prosecuting crimes, especially those that could potentially undermine the state. He oversaw an area stretching from the Old City all the way north to the fishing villages and summer konaks of the wealthy nestled into the European side of the Bosphorus. These days, the mood in the city was as brittle as tinder. Muslim refugees from the embattled Balkan provinces had been teeming into the city, thousands of them with harrowed faces and tattered clothing, clogging the lanes with bullock carts, and bearing tales of massacres. The municipalities and charitable foundations were overwhelmed.

To make matters worse, valuable objects were disappearing at an alarming rate from mosques, churches, and synagogues throughout the empire. Two days ago, an icon of the Virgin Mary that the Christians believed had miraculous powers had disappeared from the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate. Christians and Jews had begun to accuse the sultan’s government of orchestrating the thefts in order to undermine their communities, as if the disappearing antiquities were phantom limbs and they feared in this way that they might vanish entirely.

Then, this afternoon, the spark had been struck that could set all of Istanbul aflame. A man had ridden up to a carriage that was carrying an aide to the Ottoman governor of Macedonia and, before the guards could react, had leaned inside and shot him in the head. The man had galloped off, but one of the guards followed and alerted the gendarmes, the military police attached to the governor’s office. That had set in motion an elaborate trap, the jaws of which were about to close around the assassin and his co-conspirators.

When news of the assassination spread, a crowd of Muslims, their numbers swelled by desperate refugees, had gathered outside the Aya Sofya Mosque, still revered by Christians as the Byzantine cathedral of Hagia Sophia, and threatened to burn it to the ground. They were met by an equal crowd of Christian men. In the resulting melee, ten people had been killed.

Kamil glanced at the message from the minister of justice lying on his desk. It appointed him special prosecutor charged with seeing that the entire situation be brought under control as quickly and as quietly as possible, and gave him full charge of the military operation.

The last thing the government wanted was to arrest Christians in broad daylight. Disguised military agents had followed the assassin to identify his co-conspirators, and those involved would be arrested at the same time, silently and efficiently, so none could warn the others. When the assassin had settled in for the night, Kamil would lead the gendarmes in extracting him from his lair. The man would be brought to the ministry and then disappear. For all the Christian community knew, he might have escaped abroad. Kamil preferred not to think about what would happen to him; the man had shot a government official and there would be justice.

As soon as the assassin was captured, Kamil would focus on the thefts, the tinder feeding the fear and resentment. It wouldn’t take much for the city to literally burn. If an angry mob torched a neighborhood and the fire spread, as it had many times before, it would engulf large parts of a city still mostly built of wood. He had confidence in the military police and didn’t wish to get in their way, so he was now forced to wait for their signal.

He got up and fetched the stack of files from his desk. The reports described missing gold and silver vessels, icons, illuminated manuscripts and books, massive silver candleholders, and even ancient tiles pried from the walls of mosques. He pulled out a drawing of the icon of the Virgin Mary, no larger than his hand, that was missing from the Patriarchate. The sketch showed Mary looking out calmly at the world, while the baby Jesus, his right hand slung around his mother’s neck, stared intently into her face as if willing her to do something. The theft of this icon had raised the level of tension more than any other as, he supposed, the Christians believed their divine protection had thereby been revoked.

The thefts appeared to be the work of an organized ring. Many of the objects appeared on the market in Europe, out of range of the Ottoman police, just weeks after being stolen, despite strict new antiquities laws and closer customs inspections. Kamil had spent the evening reading the reports, looking for a pattern. He despaired of the shoddy investigations carried out by the police. No systematic questioning of possible witnesses, no collection of more than the most rudimentary evidence. If the culprit hadn’t dropped a knife or a calling card at the scene, the police generally found nothing of interest.

The churches in Beyoglu, the foreigners’ section of Istanbul, belonged to the embassies and were well guarded. These thefts were from Istanbul’s Old City, a jumble of districts inhabited by Greeks, Jews, and Muslims. Especially hard hit were the neighborhoods of Fatih and Balat, a tangle of crumbling houses, gardens, tumbledown ruins, and small villas that extended along the banks of the Golden Horn up to the old Byzantine city walls.

Kamil knew who the recipients of the antiquities were-the same people in whose drawing rooms he had seen displayed Greek busts and sections of Roman friezes when he studied law and criminal procedure at Cambridge University in England four years ago. Europeans had fallen in love with some romantic image of the Orient, short of actually embracing its people. Really, it was more of a lust, Kamil thought, that required an unlimited parade of objects to satisfy. But who was stealing these objects and how were they getting to Europe? There was something deeply disturbing about these particular thefts, as if his own home had been violated.

Yakup returned and held out a starched white shirt. The servant was tall and wiry, with high cheekbones and alert, almond-shaped eyes under brows that arched like bows across his forehead. He reminded Kamil of a Seljuk, one of the thirteenth-century Turkish tribesmen whose faces still bore traces of their Asian ancestry. Kamil had seen drawings of them in a collection of miniatures in the library of his friend Ismail Hodja, a learned Sufi sheikh and leader of the Nakshibendi order. Yakup’s father had been a Tatar.

Kamil slipped on the fresh shirt, then picked up a string of amber beads from his desk. “These belonged to my grandfather and probably to his father.” He held them up to the lamp, where the beads glowed like miniature hearths. “If I sold them, I’d probably get only a few kurush for them. But they’re worth more to me than almost anything else I own.”

“I know what you mean, bey,” Yakup responded. “It’s as if when you touch it, your fathers are speaking to you. Like a bell ringing and you can feel the vibration, even if you can’t hear the sound.”

“That’s it exactly. You’re a poet, Yakup.” Kamil laid the beads aside, pulled open the top drawer of his desk, and took out a Colt revolver, a box of bullets, and a holster. He pushed the files aside and placed the revolver on the desk. “Is there anything passed down in your family that speaks to you like that?” He strapped the holster around his waist.

“People like us don’t have a history, pasha,” Yakup responded, using Kamil’s hereditary title.

Kamil stopped and frowned at Yakup. “But your father was a water carrier, wasn’t he? He had a profession like anyone else.” Like Kamil, most Ottomans used only their given names, adding titles and descriptions to separate Ali the Water Carrier from Ali the Pasha, Grocer Ali from Bosnian Ali. Names passed away with their owners; they didn’t accumulate history.

“Great families have histories and their possessions become steeped in them, like baklava in sugar. My father’s water skin, on the other hand, rotted and we threw it away. Almost everything in our house was passed along to other families when our need for it was done. It’s not the same thing, my pasha. That’s how it always was and that’s how it always will be.”

Astonished, Kamil said, “I never knew you were such a fatalist. Come on, Yakup. You don’t really believe that, do you?”

Yakup shrugged, his face betraying only a stolid attentiveness, although Kamil thought his eyes sparkled with repressed humor, perhaps even a trace of mockery.

“Your history, my history, it’s all the same, Yakup,” Kamil said, reaching for the jacket Yakup held out. He picked up the beads and regarded them thoughtfully. “You’re right about possessions soaking up history, though. Every object contains a story about who made it, who owned it, and what happened to it. The older it is, the richer the story.”

“My father always said, ‘For the lean ox, there is no knife.’ If you’re poor, no one can take anything away from you.”

Kamil slipped the beads into his jacket pocket and turned to face Yakup. “Your father came from the Crimea, didn’t he?”

“Twenty-five years ago, after the war with Russia. The Cossacks killed his parents, but they missed me and my mother. After the war, he tried to start over, but they told him his land was owned by Russians now. They suspected him because he was a Muslim and he was afraid they were going to arrest him, so my parents joined some other Tatar families and migrated here. My father wasn’t even religious,” he added. “He just wanted to work.”

“Your parents were very brave.” Kamil pulled on his boots, instinctively checking for the long, slim blade secreted in the shaft of one of them.

Yakup shrugged. “They didn’t have much to leave behind. All their wealth was walking beside them on the road.”

Kamil picked up his revolver and dropped a bullet into the chamber. It made a satisfying click when he rotated it. There was a rap at the entry door and Yakup hurried downstairs to answer it. He reappeared with a gendarme captain, who bowed formally and introduced himself. The soldier was young and held himself with easy confidence.

“Welcome, Captain Arif. What news?” Kamil finished loading his gun and snapped it shut.

“Pasha, we have him,” the captain said, standing at attention.

Kamil slipped the revolver into his holster, and pocketed a leather bag of extra ammunition. “Let’s go then.”

The last stage of the operation slid into place.

The priest stood outside the door of a shabby cottage, in an isolated corner of Balat. The house was wedged between the ruins of a Byzantine foundation and a small brick warehouse that backed onto the water. Across the lane, in the dark recesses of an alley, Kamil watched as the priest embraced a man who was standing inside the darkened entrance, then handed him a basket. When the priest had gone, a light appeared behind the closed shutters. The moon now rode low in the sky and the night was dark enough to conceal the platoon of soldiers surrounding the house. Others would be waiting for the priest at his residence.

Kamil lit a cigarette to keep himself warm, careful to keep the glowing tip hidden within the palm of his hand. Captain Arif came to stand beside him, an immaculate Peabody-Martini repeating rifle slung over his shoulder. Kamil offered him a cigarette.

“I thank you, Magistrate,” Captain Arif said in a low voice. “Perhaps later. My men are in position.”

“Good.” Kamil smoked and thought about the best way to proceed. They had learned that the suspect’s name was Marko and he was a member of a group calling itself the Macedonian Revolutionary Organization. He was fifteen years old.

Kamil glanced at the rifle on the captain’s shoulder, threw down his cigarette, and began to walk across the lane toward the cottage.

The captain chased after him. “What are you doing, pasha?”

“I’m going to talk with him.”

The captain stopped. “What do you mean talk to him?”

“I’m going to reason with him.”

“With all respect, pasha, you don’t know what weapons he has in there.”

“You’re not responsible for me, Captain Arif.” Kamil assured him, “I’m armed.”

The captain didn’t look reassured. “Please, pasha. At least let me go in with you.”

“Stay just outside the door. I’ll call you if I need you.”

The captain nodded reluctantly and whispered instructions to an aide.

Kamil knocked. When there was no answer, he knocked again. He could hear someone moving behind the door.

“Who is it?” The voice was indistinct, but sounded young.

A boy, Kamil thought. They’ve sent an army to capture a boy.

“Marko, my name is Kamil Pasha. I’d like to speak with you. I guarantee that no harm will come to you while I’m with you.”

There was no answer.

“There is no reason for you to die.”

“There’s no reason for me to believe you either,” the voice said. “I’m sure you’re not alone.”

“No, but I’ll come in alone.”

“Why would you do that? Are you trying to prove your bravery?”

“I don’t need to prove my mettle against a boy,” Kamil retorted, annoyed. “I want to talk to you. There’s an army out here. Take your pick.”

Captain Arif was pressed against the side of the wall.

The door cracked open and Kamil could see the shadow of a face beyond it. “I agree that talking is better than dying,” the voice said, closer now. “Come in.”

Kamil pushed through the door and it slammed shut behind him. He flinched away from a light held directly before his eyes. A moment later, the light receded. A dark-haired boy with a tired smile beckoned him into the room.

“Sit, Kamil Pasha. Thank you for honoring me with your visit.” He indicated a chair across the sparsely furnished room. There was one other chair, a stained mattress on the floor, and a basket containing food and a book.

As Kamil sat down, he realized his revolver was gone. He scanned the room. Marko was wearing trousers and a shirt, but Kamil didn’t discount the possibility that the revolver or some other weapon was secreted in the boy’s waistband. Marko brought the other chair to sit facing Kamil and placed the lamp between them. His face was attractive, still rounded with childish plumpness. A dark fuzz across his upper lip and uneven patches on his cheeks indicated the beginnings of a mustache and beard. He had not even begun to shave yet, Kamil observed, then reminded himself of the brutality of the boy’s crime.

“What can I do for you, Kamil Pasha?” Marko’s voice was deeper than his looks implied.

“I would like for you to come with me quietly. The house is surrounded by forty gendarmes. The people who helped you have all been arrested.” At that, Kamil saw Marko’s face collapse. For a moment, he thought the boy would cry, but then he saw anger in his eyes.

“What advantage would it bring me to go with you?”

“You would live.”

“Ah.”

They sat silently for a moment. Then Marko asked, “Answer me this, pasha. If a man kills another man but feels no remorse, does that mean he is by nature a bloodthirsty brute?”

“That depends entirely on the context. A soldier who kills the enemy of his country may be justly proud of his service, while a man who kills another out of greed is an enemy of society.”

“Exactly so.” Marko leaned forward, his eyes shining with passion. “But one people’s just cause is another people’s lost territory. Therein lies the dilemma. We Macedonians won our liberty from your empire, but now it has pulled us back like an abused wife who has run away and must be punished. We have an Ottoman governor, but he is simply the greatest of the bandits pillaging our land.”

“The empire’s laws are just,” Kamil retorted.

“That’s a dream. We’re living a nightmare.”

“Why did you kill the governor’s aide?”

“He dishonored my sister.”

Kamil was taken aback. “Why didn’t you accuse him in court?” The moment he uttered the words, he knew how futile such a gesture would have been. The Balkan provinces were in such chaos that the rule of law had ceased to be applied, and judging by the tales of refugees, rape was probably a daily occurrence, one of many unspeakable crimes committed by each side against the other.

Marko nodded, acknowledging Kamil’s confusion. “You’re a wise man, Kamil Pasha. I understand that you’re devoted to your empire, as I am to my people. By killing the governor’s man, I cleaned his filth from a small spot of our land, the size of my palm perhaps.” He held out his hand. “You must imagine thousands upon thousands of hands, each cleansing the space before them. We will win because each man’s ambition is the same. You will lose, pasha, because your empire is driven by the greed of a few men.”

“That’s not so, Marko,” Kamil responded heatedly. “The empire’s system of laws…”

Suddenly Marko pulled Kamil’s revolver from his shirt, held it to his own temple, and fired.

Kamil jumped up from the chair and staggered backward. The door slammed open and Captain Arif rushed in, followed by a dozen heavily armed soldiers. Marko lay on his side, the basket of food on the floor next to him spattered with blood.

“Search the room,” Kamil told the captain.

He picked the book out of the basket, where it had miraculously remained untouched. English poems by John Donne. Kamil opened it at the marker and read, “Death be not proud, though some have called thee mighty and dreadful.”

“No other weapons,” Captain Arif announced, holding out Kamil’s revolver.

Kamil took the gun and slid it into its holster. He steadied himself for a moment against the chair, then dropped the book into his pocket and walked out.

Kamil mounted his horse and let it wander at will through the sleeping lanes of the Old City. After a while, the sky began to bleed light. In the distance, Kamil could make out the dome and minarets of the Mosque of Sultan Ahmet, and those of its Byzantine sister, the Aya Sofya. The dawn call to prayer hovered in the air, snaking like mist from every corner of the city. Long shadows prostrated themselves before the orange light of the rising sun. This early in the morning, Karaköy Square was nearly empty. He passed two fishermen squatting by basins in which fish feebly circled. Trapped and tired, Kamil thought, feeling compassion for a fellow creature in similar straits.

Restless and unable to shake the image of the boy’s face-his look of surprise at the moment of death-Kamil dismounted. He wanted to walk the rest of the way to his office, so he left his horse at a stable behind the square.

He bought a simit from a man balancing a tray of the circular breads on his head, then began the steep climb up High Kaldirim Road, a broad stairway lined with shops, most of which were still shuttered. Finding he had no appetite, Kamil offered the rest of his simit to a bony street dog. The dog sniffed it suspiciously, then took it with a delicate snap of its teeth before rushing off.

Kamil’s yellow kid boots navigated the uneven steps. His mother had commissioned them from a master bootmaker in Aleppo. Despite the delicate leather and intricate tooling, the boots were almost indestructible, tanned by a secret method passed from father to son that made the leather impervious to knife and water. Their wearer was further protected by talismanic symbols carved inside the shaft. Ill with a wasting disease, his mother had whispered to him, “So that Allah might lighten your step and guard your path,” while the bootmaker’s assistant took elaborate measurements of his feet. She didn’t live to see the boots finished, but he felt her love in them. It was this, rather than the talismanic charms, he believed, that gave the boots their singular effect.

The baker Ibo leaned out of his shop, hands and forearms white with flour. He motioned a glass of tea at Kamil. “Do good and receive kindness. Come and rest a moment, Magistrate Bey.”

“Another time, Ibo.” Kamil was in no mood for idle chatter.

He reached into his pocket for his string of beads. As he walked, he drew them over his right hand, his thumb and forefinger smoothing each bead along its way, reading the inflections worn into the amber by his father and grandfather, and finding peace in that continual text. Marko’s face receded and Kamil settled into the calm apprehensiveness that allowed him to wander among the facts, gather them up, sort them.

The Christian icon was different, he thought, from the other stolen objects. It was too well known to be sold or even displayed openly. That required a special kind of buyer.

By now he was almost at the top of the road of stairs, where it entered the Grande Rue de Pera.

“Bey, bey.”

Kamil was startled from his reverie by a tug on his jacket. He swung around, irritated to see that it was a street urchin. The boy stepped back but held his ground. Enormous eyes in a pale, fine-boned face focused expectantly on Kamil. A threadbare sweater and wide, much-patched trousers hung on the boy’s slim body, held in place by a ragged sash. His bare feet were brown, although whether from the sun or the dirt of the streets was unclear.

The boy stuttered, “Bey, I…” He lowered his eyes and began to back away.

If the boy were a pickpocket, he would have been long gone by now. Kamil reached into his pocket for a coin.

When the boy saw the kurush in Kamil’s outstretched hand, his cheeks flushed red and he shook his head vehemently.

“Well, what do you want, my son?” Kamil asked.

The boy seemed to regain some of his courage. He reached into his sash, drew out an object, and handed it wordlessly to Kamil. It was a quill pen. Kamil took it, puzzled.

“Thank you,” he said, turning it over in his hand. It was a simple, common pen like those used in his office. He examined the boy’s face. He looked familiar, but Kamil couldn’t place him. Perhaps one of the apprentices at the hamam baths he went to every week, or the boy at the coffeehouse who refilled his tea and refreshed the tobacco in his narghile? They were all about the same age, eight or nine, and lean as street cats.

The boy was still looking at Kamil expectantly.

“What’s your name?”

“Avi, bey. I am Avi. I brought you a message from Amalia Teyze,” he blurted out. “You told me that if I learned to use this,” he indicated the pen, “I should come back and see you.”

“Of course,” Kamil exclaimed. This was the young boy sent last year by the Jewish midwife of Middle Village to give him a message about a murder case. He had been so impressed by the boy’s refusal to accept payment-because, the boy had insisted, he was only doing his duty-that Kamil had given him the first object within reach, a pen from his desk. He remembered Avi as the child with hungry eyes, taking in everything in the room. Someone eager to know things.

“Well, Avi. Of course, I remember you.” Kamil wondered what the boy expected of him. Despite the early hour, a small crowd had begun to form around them.

“Why don’t we walk a bit together.” Kamil resumed his climb, the boy keeping pace beside him. Out of the corner of his eye, Kamil could see Avi trying to keep a serious demeanor, but his joy kept breaking through. It both amused Kamil and touched him.

“And did you learn to use the pen?” Kamil asked.

Avi stopped and turned to him with a wide grin.

“Yes, bey. Amalia Teyze taught me letters.”

Kamil was surprised. He had thought the midwife illiterate, like so many of the empire’s subjects. “And what can you write?”

They began to walk again.

“My name,” Avi said excitedly. “I can write my name.”

“Is that so?” Kamil noted noncommittally. He found himself inexplicably disappointed that Avi hadn’t learned more than just his name, but reminded himself that this was more than most people could do.

They stopped at a patisserie and he bought Avi a yeast bun stuffed with goat’s cheese. The well-heeled patrons stared disapprovingly as the boy placed the bun on his palm and swiftly devoured it, using his other hand to shield it. Kamil wondered why the boy ate so quickly and furtively, as if someone might steal the bun from his hands, and realized he must be very hungry. But surely the midwife cooked for the boy? She had seemed a kind and efficient woman. He took a closer look at the boy’s ragged clothing, his grimy face and bare feet. When Avi had come to his office the previous year, his clothing had shown signs of attention from a loving hand. Kamil remembered a colorful sweater and patched but clean trousers. Something must have happened. Had the boy run away? He would give Avi some tea and something more to eat at the courthouse, then sit him down and find out what this was all about. He bought some meat-filled pastries and cheese börek, and then they resumed their walk down the Grande Rue de Pera.

When they reached the entrance to the courthouse, Avi stepped back into the street and, crossing his arms, began to shiver, his eyes shifting between the enormous, imposing door at the top of the stairs, Kamil’s face, and the ground.

“What is it?”

“I really can write,” Avi said softly. “But I’m not anybody.”

Kamil stooped down and told him, “Well, come in and show me what you’ve learned.” He walked up the stairs. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Avi trailing behind, awestruck.

Kamil greeted the burly doorkeeper. “Good morning, Ibrahim.”

“Günaydin, pasha.” Ibrahim held open the door and bowed low as Kamil passed through.

Kamil suddenly heard a commotion and turned. The doorkeeper had lifted Avi by his sweater like a mother cat lifting her kitten and was hoisting him out of the door.

“Ibrahim, let him go,” Kamil called out. “He’s here to see me.”

Ibrahim shrugged and dropped the boy, who scuttled to Kamil’s side. Kamil saw that he was crying but trying to hide it. They walked a short way over the tiled floor, past the small room behind the doorkeeper’s station, in which a teakettle was steaming over a brazier. Ibrahim followed with a lamp. At the end of the corridor, the door to the courtroom, still locked at this hour, loomed in the half light. It was a massive double door, carved with swags of gilded roses, as if justice were a pleasure garden. Beyond was a horseshoe-shaped room that always reminded Kamil of a theater, with magistrates and solicitors striding across the stage beneath the box that held the presiding judge. The audience would sit behind a waist-high partition, fidgeting and rumbling as if bored by the play.

They entered the suite of rooms that made up the magistrate’s offices and waited while Ibrahim lit the lamps. The outer office was still empty of scribes at this hour. During the day, all manner of the empire’s subjects sat, patiently waiting to pour their story into the ear of a scribe, who would then translate it into the stilted, self-aggrandizing language of bureaucracy in the form of a petition. At the back were two doors to smaller rooms in which Kamil’s legal assistants met with solicitors and their clients. A heavy gilded door, mercifully without a garden motif, opened onto Kamil’s private office.

The light picked out Abdullah, Kamil’s head clerk, snoring on a divan in the outer office. The soles of his feet showed brownish yellow through holes in his socks.

“Abdullah,” Kamil called testily. “Get up.”

The clerk woke, startled, and rolled to his feet. “You’re here early, Magistrate.” Seeing Avi, he said, “How did this street dog get in here?”

“He’s here to see me.”

Abdullah shrugged. “I’ll get the tea, in that case,” he said and, shoving his feet into leather slippers, shuffled toward the corridor.

“Bring two glasses and two plates,” Kamil called after him. He invited Avi into his office and pulled over a chair. When Avi didn’t move, Kamil realized he was unfamiliar with chairs and the high tables that accompanied them, alien European contraptions. Kamil fetched a small portable writing desk and placed it on the carpet. Avi folded himself into a sitting position before it.

While they waited, Kamil handed Avi his pen, showed him where the ink was, then placed a piece of paper before him. He moved the lamp nearer as the light from the window was still only a pale wash.

Avi touched the white paper reverently. “I can write on something less good, bey.”

“If you want to be a scribe, this is what scribes write on.” Nonetheless, he was impressed by the boy’s frugality and modesty. He noticed that the boy’s hands were blistered.

“What happened to your hands?” he asked.

“An accident, bey.” Avi tucked his hands under the desk.

“Someone should take a look at them.”

The boy stubbornly shook his head.

“Can you write?”

“Yes, bey,” Avi responded eagerly.

Kamil stopped, unsure what to tell the boy to write and unwilling to give him a task that he couldn’t do and thus shame him.

“Write the alphabet.” Thinking this would buy him some time, Kamil sat at his desk and began to go over his notes on the thefts.

“I’m finished, bey.”

Startled, Kamil walked over to see what the boy had done, prepared for a page of ink blots and scratches. Instead, he found a neat line of letters.

“Why don’t you write your name at the top?”

He watched as Avi confidently took the pen, dipped it in ink, and wrote, “Avi of Middle Village,” the coiled Arabic letters sweeping right to left across the page.

“Write my name.”

Avi wrote, “Kamil Pasha.”

“Beyoglu Municipality.”

The boy wrote.

“Remarkable.” Kamil took a closer look at him. “How old are you?”

“I’m nine.”

Kamil made a decision. “If you’d like to apprentice with the court, Avi, I’ll arrange it.”

Avi nodded shyly, eyes gleaming. An orphan raised by the village midwife. Kamil pitied the boy. His own mother had died after a long illness, and his father had passed away the previous year.

Abdullah came through the door carrying a tray. He put it down on the table and bowed his way out of the room. Kamil opened the package of pastries and placed a meat pastry and a piece of börek on each plate, holding some aside for Abdullah and Ibrahim. He sat at the table before his own plate and watched as Avi climbed onto a chair to eat. The boy added so much sugar to his tea that the spoon almost stood up by itself.

“What would Amalia Teyze say about your working here?” Kamil asked him.

Avi became very still, clasped his hands in his lap, and refused to meet Kamil’s eye. Finally, he said in a small voice, “I know she’d want me to do this.”

It was obvious that Avi was hiding something, but Kamil decided not to press the matter now. From what he remembered of Amalia, it seemed unlikely that Avi would have had reason to run away. Perhaps she was ill and couldn’t take care of the boy anymore and he was embarrassed to say so. Either way, an apprenticeship would be the best solution. He’d send someone to check on the midwife.

Kamil got up and pulled the cord on the wall beside his desk to summon Abdullah. The head clerk came into the room and waited just inside the door, pointedly ignoring the boy, who had slid from his chair and stood behind the magistrate.

“Abdullah, this is Avi of Middle Village.” Kamil pulled the boy forward. “I’m putting him in your care. I’d like him trained as a scribe.” He showed him the paper in his hand. “You can see that he already knows his letters. Let him learn the trade with the other apprentices and send someone to confirm this arrangement with his guardian, the midwife Amalia. And get him cleaned up.”

“But, Magistrate,” Abdullah sputtered. “Look at him. He’s a street urchin. He can’t apprentice here.” He peered at the boy. “Avi. That’s a Jewish name. They can’t even speak Turkish properly, much less write it.”

Kamil raised his eyes to look directly at his head clerk and said in an icy voice, “The Jews are physicians and scholars and the padishah himself employs them. Who are you to claim otherwise?” He glared at Abdullah. “You can conquer from the back of a horse, but you can’t rule from the back of a horse. For that you need learned men.” He pointed his chin at Avi. “And they start out like this, as young boys with promise.”

“Yes, Magistrate,” Abdullah answered with what Kamil was certain was feigned meekness. The clerk grabbed Avi’s arm and led him out.

A few minutes later, the door opened and Abdullah stepped in again. He waited just inside the door, hands clasped before his belly, shoulders slumped.

“What is it now?” Kamil snapped.

Abdullah straightened. “Magistrate, a letter from the Ministry of Justice has arrived.”

“Fine. Let me have it.”

Abdullah bustled importantly to Kamil’s desk and placed a letter before him, then retreated to wait by the door.

Kamil broke the seal. Minister of Justice Nizam Pasha desired that he come to the ministry immediately. The minister would want to hear his report on this morning’s raid, Kamil knew. Word of the arrests would have spread by now.

Kamil had never understood the origin of the minister’s seeming dislike of him. He assumed it was because Nizam Pasha had been educated in the religious schools of the old empire, while Kamil represented the new generation of bureaucrats-young, educated abroad, fluent in every language but religion. The minister was in his sixties and still dressed in the old-fashioned robes of the kadi courts instead of trousers, frockcoat, and the jaunty pressed-felt fez that was the mark of the modern man. Kamil had never seen any evidence of corruption, though, and for that he respected the minister.

He set the letter aside and pulled out his pocket watch, another gift from his mother. It was only eight o’clock. The minister kept early hours. Kamil respected that as well, although he wondered why the minister had assumed he would be at the court at this hour when the offices didn’t officially open until ten. Kamil had a sudden unpleasant thought. Did Nizam Pasha assume Kamil wouldn’t be here, and thus when he failed to appear, could accuse him of not answering the minister’s summons? Kamil decided he had no evidence for such a supposition, but the idea soured his mood.

“Get my horse ready,” he told Abdullah gruffly. “I’ll ride over to the ministry now.”

A clerk ushered Kamil into the reception hall of the Ministry of Justice. Nizam Pasha was sitting cross-legged on a raised divan, flanked by his advisors. At his feet sat three scribes, bowed over their writing desks. An army of clerks and other officials stood to attention along both sides of the enormous, gilded room. Kamil stepped forward and waited for permission to speak.

“Begin,” the minister commanded, his eyes implacable beneath a large white turban. He wore a black robe with frogged buttons, its wide sleeves lined with magenta silk.

Nizam Pasha listened expressionlessly to Kamil’s report. When Kamil described Marko’s suicide, the minister’s face registered surprise. “That’s unfortunate. We could have obtained a great deal of useful information from him if you hadn’t decided to play the hero.”

“I apologize, Minister.” Kamil imagined Marko in the hands of the ministry’s torturers and understood the boy’s decision. “From now on, I’ll devote myself to the thefts.”

“Now is not soon enough,” the minister said, drawing out his words. “The entire situation is out of hand. Yesterday the Greek Orthodox Patriarch suggested that the government is involved in the thefts. Unbelievable.” His voice rose. “He actually accuses us of ransacking their churches to pay for the wars. And now the Jews are starting to complain that their places of worship are being looted as well. They’ve lost sight of the fact that mosques are being stripped too. The minorities have tasted blood in the provinces and now they’re rioting in the capital. These thefts pour oil on the fire.”

Kamil had seen the Muslim refugees from the Balkans. There were too many for the mosque hospitals and soup kitchens to take care of, and they sat begging in doorways and on street corners across the capital, their eyes angry or simply blank. They bore the scars of massacres, neighbor killing neighbor without mercy. European countries were quietly supporting Christian populations that wished for independence from the empire, fanning the flames of nationalist movements that devoured everything in their way, friend and foe alike. Istanbul was a tinderbox of enraged Muslim refugees who had lost everything and angry minorities who were afraid of losing as much.

“It’s not enough that the Europeans are taking our provinces and emptying our treasury.” The minister leaned forward angrily. “They’re stealing our culture too. There’s a long pipe sucking the treasures of the empire into Europe, and I want you to find it and shut it down. Is that clear?”

“Yes, Minister. I’m…”

“I give you one week, Magistrate,” Nizam Pasha interrupted. “Seven days. If you haven’t broken this antiquities ring by then, you’re dismissed from the court. But if you do manage it,” he paused for several long moments, as if trying to decide whether he should go on or not, “I can’t promise anything, but, who knows, there might be an opening on the Appellate Court.”

Kamil was offended that the minister assumed he had to be bullied or bribed into doing his job. He had made no appeal to Kamil’s professionalism or to any shared vision of public service. Kamil wondered if the spirit of public service that had animated his ancestors was now dead; these days, what you did was more important than who you were. There were advantages to this, of course. It allowed talented men to rise, but it also discouraged the enthusiasm that for generations had driven men to follow their families’ tradition. Who cared anymore who one’s grandfather was, when all that counted were results?

“I’ll do my best, Minister,” he responded politely. The Appellate Court was the next level of appeal above the district court Kamil now represented. All were technically subordinate to the chief public prosecutor at the Court of Cassation, but Nizam Pasha insisted that the prosecutors report directly to him. Kamil wondered whether a promotion would give him a freer hand or just subject him to even more scrutiny.

“You’ll do more than your best, Magistrate,” Nizam Pasha said in a low voice, then turned abruptly to speak to one of his advisors.

Kamil took that as his cue to leave.

He stepped through the portals of justice into the bustling avenue. The buttresses of Aya Sofya Mosque cast half the street in shadow. He marveled, as he always did, that the stolid former cathedral was still standing after more than a thousand years, having survived wars and earthquakes. At the other end of the avenue, the slender minarets of Sultan Ahmet Mosque soared white and delicate like orchid stems against the china blue sky. He had a vision of himself on an expedition in the eastern mountains, bending over a rare orchid. Yet he knew he couldn’t escape the responsibilities of his birth. These days, the title of pasha meant little more than a lord, but once it had given a man a clear position and duties in society. His father had been a governor and head of the gendarmes. One grandfather had also been a governor, the other a judge. Kamil had always thought of himself as one of the empire’s modern men, but maybe he was really a throwback, an idealist among the technocrats, a sheep jostling amid the goats.

Maneuvering his horse around the carts and carriages that were beginning to fill the streets, he rode back across the Galata Bridge and up the hill to the Grande Rue de Pera. Boys scuttled by carrying trays of tea and stacks of warming tins, rushing breakfast to craftsmen already toiling in their workshops. Shopkeepers cranked open their awnings and washed down the pavements before their shops. The street was filling with servants purchasing fresh bread for the families in embassies and mansions who were at this moment still rubbing the sleep from their eyes and deciding what to wear.

He loosened the reins, closed his eyes for a moment, and listened.