The Janissary Tree

[ 67 ]

It was said that the battle—they only called it a brawl—continued long after Murad Eslek had helped Yashim punch, kick and slash his way out of the tanneries and into the silent darkness beyond.

As they groped their way down the alleys, small lights glowed behind shutters overhead. Now and then a door banged. Away in the distance a dog began to bark. Their footsteps echoed softly on the cobbles, thrown back by buildings asleep, and at peace. A cold wind carried the smell of damp plaster, and the lingering scent of the evening’s spices.

“Phew! You stink, my friend,” said Murad Eslek, grinning.

Yashim shook his head.

“If it hadn’t been for you,” he said, “there’d have been nothing left to smell. I owe you my life.”

“Forget it, effendi. It was a good scrap, and all.”

“But tell me, how—” Yashim winced. Now that the excitement was over his scalded foot was beginning to smart.

“Easy enough,” Eslek replied. “I sees you running like a demon—maybe you got robbed, or something. But when you started in for the tanneries it didn’t look so good—I mean, they’re rough, them guys. That’s when I started to think you were going to need some heavy artillery. So I whipped back and raised the boys. I went round a couple of caffs. Put the word out. Ding dong up the tannery? No problem. Why, when we came and saw what trouble you were in the lads moved in like donkeys on a carrot. Lovely job.”

Yashim smiled. They were back in the city by now. The streets were empty and it was too late, he thought, to get a bath. Eslek seemed to guess his thoughts.

“Me, I’m in transport. We work nights, effendi. Cover the markets—veg, mainly, and small livestock. I was going in there when we ran into each other again. There’s a hammam we use, open all night, which you as a gentleman might not know about. It’s small, yes, but I reckon it’s clean. Leastways save you going back and stinking up your own gaff. No disrespect,” he added hurriedly, “but them tanneries don’t half get into your skin. It’s the fat.”

“No, no, you’re perfectly right. I’d be grateful, really. But you’ve done so much for me this evening, I don’t want to take you out of your way.”

Eslek shook his head.

“Almost there,” he said.

At the door of the hammam they parted, with a handshake. Yashim had murmured—and Eslek had protested.

“Drop it, effendi. You came out all right for us on the night of the fire. I’ve got a wife and kiddies up the street what know as you did a grand job for them. I was going to swing round and see you—sign of the Stag, you said, right?—and thank you proper. My advice is, don’t go messing with them tanners any more. They’re dirty, effendi, and it ain’t just the fat.”

Yashim was grateful for the baths. Eslek was right: they were clean. The proprietor, a sallow old Armenian with a weary and intelligent face, even agreed to send a boy to fetch clean clothes from Yashim’s landlady while Yashim sluiced away the coloured grease that had sunk between his toes and the miasma of shit that clung to his skin. All the time he fought not to remember what he knew.

Yashim unwound his turban and scooped water over his hair. Preen was dead. He concentrated on his surroundings. When the attendant offered him a bar of soap it smelled, he noticed, of Murad Eslek. He touched his left cheek: tomorrow he’d have a black eye. He continued to use the scoop, rhythmically ladling the hot water over his head, massaging the soap into his scalp, behind his ears, over his aching neck. His ribs were bruised where the assassin had plunged against him on Preen’s corridor. And Preen was dead. Yashim jerked his head up, to watch the attendant bringing him a basin of cold water for his scalded foot. There was nothing he could do about his knee. It looked red, and felt sore. It would heal.

He forced himself to remember the chase through the alleys. Palewski had told him once how Napoleon had entered Italy, winning battle after battle with the Austrians, until he had felt that the earth itself was flying under his feet. He had felt the same, pursuing the man who had killed the hunchback, through the inclined alleys of Istanbul. Pursuing the man who killed Preen.

He had not been able to save the assassin, that was true. Otherwise he could have made him talk. To have learned -what? Details, names, locations.

Even now, he could not decide whether the killer had been aware of what was happening when he had struggled to cut the rope that bound him to the derrick. Yashim had been hoping to inch him back, away from the boiling vat. Had the killer known where he was? Was it suicide? Yashim was pious enough to hope it was not.

Yet he could not rid himself of the idea that the killer, like himself, understood that they were both at an end of the same rope: bound for minutes in perfect mutual understanding. He wanted us both to go together, Yashim suspected.

All he had really learned, instead, was how the third cadet to die had been boiled so that all his bones were clean. And that, he reasoned, was something he could have guessed. After all, the soup master had already told him how the Janissaries had come back to Istanbul, taking jobs that were out of the way. Watchmen. Stokers. Tanners. He remembered the scarred and blackened face of the man who knocked him down.

Was it for this that Preen had died?

Yashim squeezed his hair.

Preen was dead.

And why was the assassin so determined to die?

What was there, apart from the threat of justice, that made a man decide to die rather than talk?

Yashim could think of only two things.

One was fear.

The other was faith: the martyr’s death.

He pulled back suddenly, gasping for breath, his eyes stinging.

Preen had died alone, for nothing, in the dark.

Wise and wayward, loving and forever doomed, she died because of him.

He had asked her to help.

It wasn’t that. Yashim whined, teeth bared, his eyes screwed up tight, knocking his head against the tiled wall.

He had never properly taught her to read.