The Janissary Tree

[ 44 ]

Yashim stirred his coffee mechanically, trying to identify what still bothered him about the night’s events.

Not the fire itself. Fires were always breaking out in Istanbul -though it had been a close-run thing. What if he had left the window shut—would the smell of smoke have reached him in time? He might have gone on sleeping, oblivious to the jagged screen of flame dancing its way towards his street: roused when it was already too late, perhaps, the stairwell filled with rolling clouds of black smoke, the windows shattering in the heat…

He thought of the crowd he’d seen that morning, the women and children standing dazed in the street. Dragged from their sleep. By God’s mercy they, too, had woken up in time.

A phrase of the Karagozi poem leaped into his mind. Wake them.

The spoon stopped moving in the cup.

There was something else. Something a man had said.

Janissary work. To think we used to get the Janissaries from the Beyazidiye Pound to do this for us.

A Janissary fire-brigade had been stationed close to the Beyazit Mosque, the first and perhaps, in its way, the greatest of the mighty mosques of the sultans: for even Sinan Pasha, the master architect whose sublime Suleymaniyye surpassed Aya Sofia, acknowledged that the Beyazit Mosque had shown the way. But it wasn’t the mosque which mattered: it was its position. For the Beyazit Mosque straddled the spine of the hill above the Grand Bazaar, one of the highest points in Stamboul.

A unique vantage point. So unique, in fact, that it was selected as the site of the tallest and perhaps the ugliest building in the empire: the Fire Tower which bore its name. The bag of bones had been discovered only yards away.

And there had been another Janissary watch, across the city, operated from the Galata Tower. The Galata Fire Tower. High over the drain which held the nauseating corpse of the second cadet.

And at the Janissaries’ old centre of operations, the old barracks now razed and replaced with the imperial stables, there’d been a tower which Yashim could still vaguely recall.

Palewski had suggested that there could be a pattern to explain the distribution of the bodies—so if each body had been placed in the vicinity of an old fire-station, a Janissary fire-watch, a tower…Yashim probed the idea for a moment.

Fire had always been the Janissaries’ special responsibility. It had become their weapon, too. People were roused from their beds by the firemen’s tocsin. Wake them.

Where, then, had the other fire-station been? There were to be four corpses. There had to be four fire-stations. Four towers.

Perhaps, Yashim thought fiercely, he might still be in time.