An Evil Eye

125

“ It might be here,” Yashim murmured, running his hand across the beaten iron surface of the gate. “The question is how to get in.”

Kadri stepped back into the roughly cobbled street and glanced up. A thin crescent moon hung in the black sky, and by its feeble light he assessed the wall.

“Let me take the rope, Yashim efendi.”

Kadri slipped off his shoes and slung the rope across his shoulders. He approached the base of the wall and raised his hands, feeling for a hold.

Kadri climbed swiftly, barely pausing to establish his grip on the stones: he swarmed up the wall as though it were covered in net. He had learned in boyhood that falling took time, and effort, so he moved fast instead, fingers and toes loosely flexed. Yashim saw him pause when he reached the projecting tiles, then whip out and over the eaves like a snake.

A moment later, Kadri was peering down into the inner court, formed in the ditch that separated the double walls of Genoese Pera. The walls themselves were velvety with soot from the forges, and by the time Kadri had descended, more cautiously, he was black from head to toe.

He went to the gate and called to Yashim through the latch.

“I’m in.”

A street dog rose from the shadows and gave two hollow barks, before settling down.

Yashim passed a candle through the little opening. “The watch is coming. I’ll be back in ten minutes.”

He melted into the darkness of a side alley, waiting for the familiar tap-tap of the watchman’s staff on the cobbles. When it did not come, he waited another few minutes before he went back to the gate. There he smelled charcoal, and the faintly acidic odor of cut metal. A nearby dog whimpered and whinnied in its sleep. Yashim listened for sounds in the courtyard and heard nothing. He moved from one foot to the other, feeling the cold, so that when Kadri spoke close to his ear he jumped.

“Three tunnels,” Kadri whispered urgently. “One’s small, more like a pipe. It goes in about twenty yards and then bends up sharply.”

“Maybe drainage,” Yashim suggested. “What about the other two?”

“The first one could just be some sort of cellar-it hardly slopes at all, and the air is musty. But it’ll take time to explore them both.”

“There isn’t much time,” Yashim pointed out. “The second tunnel?”

“Lower than the other one. It doesn’t seem to go upward but it smells fresher inside.”

“I’m sure that’s the one,” Yashim urged, with a confidence he didn’t really feel. Istanbul was a honeycomb of tunnels, cisterns, and holes in the ground; blanked-off cellars, disused waterways, the foundation arches of Roman buildings. Where they ran, or how they were linked, nobody knew. They composed a dark mirror image of the city above, an impress of the centuries that had passed since Constantine first planted his standard on the banks of the Bosphorus and named the city for himself.

A sound at his back made Yashim turn his head. Kadri melted from the gate, noiselessly; but still Yashim stood, ears cocked, listening.

A dog detached itself from the base of the wall and crept a few yards along the street toward Yashim, where it sat and scratched its fleas. It stuck its muzzle on its paws, and went back to sleep.

Dogs did not willingly shift about at night, Yashim thought.