The Janissary Tree

[ 60 ]

Yashim, mounting the stairs two at a time, heard the crash of Preen falling backwards, and at the top of the stairs he grabbed the wall and swung himself round the corner into the corridor. The darkness disoriented him. He heard another movement in the passage and shouted:

“Preen!”

Without hesitation he took two steps into the dark. Only two—but they saved his life. He had got no further when he was suddenly smashed backwards with a force that seconds earlier would have catapulted him down the stairs. He felt a savage blow to his face and the breath knocked out of his lungs as he was hurled back against the wall.

Two things flashed through his mind as he retched for air. One, that he was already too late. Another, that the killer who had struck him and who was at this very moment flinging him—self down the darkened stairs, flight by flight, was not going to get away easily.

He put out a hand and gripped the banisters. The movement seemed to let air back into his chest; another brought him to his feet. For a moment he stood, heaving, and then with an oath he plunged down the stairs.

He reached the corridor on the ground floor and tore out of the entrance into the street, where he swivelled and glanced about. A black man he recognised from the morning lay sprawled in the dust, still holding two chamber pots aloft in either fist. He jerked his head and swung a pot over his shoulder. Yashim began to run.

There were still many people about, and while it was hard to see how many, or where they were until he was almost upon them, because it was very dark, something in the way people shrank back at his approach told Yashim that he was on the right track. A man runs through a crowd, he thought, and the crowd instinctively expects another, on his trail: quarry and hunter, the pursued and the pursuer, old as man himself, older than Istanbul. A picture of two snakes swallowing each other’s tails swam in his mind. He ran.

He reached the corner of the street and plunged left, guided by a sharp rage and an instinctive urge to climb, to take to the higher ground. Figures shrank away at his approach. At a corner lit by the torches of a coffee-house he caught sight of people turning their heads back to focus on him and he thought: I’m closing. But the streets were narrowing again. At a junction of three alleyways he almost paused, and almost lost his way: but then a faint something in the air, a sickly-sweet trace he had smelled before but couldn’t identify, gave him the lead he sought and, ignoring a well-lit empty alley and another he thought he recognised as a cul-de-sac, he plunged down the darkest and the meanest of them all. Whether he was trailing by instinct, or magic, or by signs he could not even pause to decipher—a faint incline, a preference for the dark over the light, an unreasoned and unexamined knowledge of the difference between a street and a dead-end which he had imbibed, as it were, from years of living in Istanbul—he did not know: had he stopped to think he would have stopped altogether, for the breath was flying to his lungs like an angry lizard: he could feel its scales upraised, its scrabbling claws.

He swerved to the wall and flung out his hand to meet it and stood for a few seconds, breathing heavily. Ahead, lights flickered and glittered red in the darkness, a string of little street shrines lit by candles glowing behind the coloured glass. He guessed where he was. And at that moment he realised, too, where he was going.

And he ran on with such a fierce, formless and glowing conviction that at the next alley he swerved suddenly to the right and almost knocked a man to the ground.

It was a glancing blow, shoulder to shoulder, but it made the man wheel; and as he wheeled, Yashim turned his head and caught sight of his face. It contained, he saw, a whole range of expressions—anger, confusion, and a spark of sudden recognition.

“The fire!” The man cried out, almost with a laugh.

Yashim waved an arm and sped on, but the man was at his back. “Effendi!”

Yashim recognised the voice. And at that very moment the alley made a sudden shallow curve and a light was burning at its far end: and right in his line of sight he caught a glimpse of what he already knew had been in his mouth all along, like the tail of a snake: a fleeting glimpse of a man who disappeared.

A voice came from behind: “I saw him! Let’s go!”

Yashim glanced sideways as the other man, fresh to the chase, loped up at his shoulder.

“Murad Eslek!” He panted. Yashim remembered the street on fire, the man black with soot who grinned and shook his hand.

Reaching an alley which offered a choice to run right or left, Yashim hesitated. He seemed to have lost his sense of direction: Eslek’s sudden appearance confused him. He was aware that he had been running for a long time. He sensed he was very close -but he felt his own anger and confusion, pounding heavy-footed down an ordinary alleyway in Istanbul. What he had taken for inspiration had suddenly resolved itself into commonplace: it had become no more than coincidence.

“The tanneries!” Yashim gasped. The scent had both eluded and directed him for what seemed like hours. He had smelled it the moment Preen’s killer made explosive contact with him at the head of the stairs. It had drawn him along the streets, sucked him instinctively into alleyways, urged him left and right and now, within sight of his prey, it enveloped him.

Doggedly, feeling the weight on his feet for the first time, Yashim trotted left at a junction of mean alleys. Even in the darkness he could see that the walls around him were not continuous. Here and there a dim glow told him that he was passing a dwelling of some sort, but for the most part he moved in darkness where the lane bled out into scrub, and goats and sheep were tethered and corralled into flimsy yards. He heard them shift, with a low tinkle of bells; once he stumbled into a gate where the lane curved. His companion had long since dropped away: his quarry was nowhere to be seen. Nowhere to be sensed.

The reek of the tanneries had blotted him out.