The Star of Istanbul

53

But the talk — or whatever else they had in mind — was deferred. We rode in silence now as the taxi entered the outlying village of Ortakiöi and we turned at the green-domed mosque on the bank of the Bosporus and headed inland, up the hill and into the densely populated Jewish quarter. The taxi dropped us at the mouth of a narrow street and we walked into its compressed air, which was full of the stench of sewage and the din of street voices, speaking mostly Ladino, the special mix of Hebrew and Spanish that the Sephardim carried with them into exile from Iberia.

We passed between the rows of wooden buildings. Most of them followed the Turkish form of overhanging, corbeled stories, but we climbed on and finally approached a break in the attached houses, near the top of the hill. Here was a longer, flat-fronted, three-story building, with several entrances along it and with a street or an alley on each side, an architectural descendant of the yahudihane that filled this de facto Jewish ghetto a couple of centuries ago.

We turned in at the center of the three entrances to the yahudihane, its doorpost affixed with a mezuzah, its metal casing rubbed bright from the faithful passing through this door.

And inside, the sound from outside grew dim, and the stench faded with the smell of coffee and tobacco. The large central room of this coffeehouse could have been found in the coffeehouses in any part of Pera or Stamboul or Galata, with its divans and tapestry rugs and small tables for the coffee trays. The clientele, however, was special. The clearest sign was the group of half a dozen men sipping coffee together near the door. They were the most ardent Sephardim in their gaberdines and long beards. As for the rest of the men in the room, though they were dressed in Western suits and jackets like the coffee-shop Turks, the inner edge of their coats or vests showed the woolen fringe of their prayer shawls. Many of them wore skullcaps, the yarmulke, with their secular clothes, at least in this select company, and no doubt their shorter beards were managed by scissors and clippers only.

Among the suited, close-clipped contingent was the owner of the coffee shop, who greeted Arshak now with a Merhabah and then accepted his hand for a warm handshake. And immediately behind him was another man, a man with a boxer’s build at the age when a boxer starts to think about retiring. He wore a dark gray fez that didn’t taper to the top.

The owner stepped aside for him and he came forward to embrace Arshak, and the two men spoke quickly, intensely, in Armenian. Lucine and I stood waiting, and the owner, apart from us but watching us closely, waited too.

Then Arshak and the other man stopped and Arshak turned to us full of blustery goodwill. “Fine,” he said. “Fine. Let’s have some coffee.” He was acting.

The Jew led the four of us through the room and out a back door into the courtyard, paved in field stone with a solitary fig tree growing in an earthen plot at the center. We sat at a horseshoe of iron benches: Arshak by himself on the bench at the apex, I on one of the sides, Lucine and the other man across from me, these two sitting at opposite ends of their bench. I sensed nothing between them.

The owner lingered briefly and bowed himself away and a young man in shirtsleeves, with yarmulke and ear locks, immediately whisked in with a low table, and another followed him with water pipes, and a third with coffee on trays.

In all of this, Lucine played the boy and kept her mouth shut.

After the young Jews left us and we were settled, Arshak said to me, “This is Tigran.”

Tigran nodded at me while Arshak spoke to him in Armenian again, perhaps to explain my unexpected presence in their plans.

When Arshak finished, Tigran stood and stepped toward me and I stood too and we met in the middle and shook hands. He said something in Armenian.

Arshak translated, even as Tigran continued the handshake: “He said he appreciates your sympathy for our people in this dark time.”

I said to Arshak, “Tell him with a grip like his, I’m glad we are on the same side.”

Arshak laughed and translated and Tigran laughed and through Arshak complimented me on my own grip. And that was it with Tigran. He sat back down and more or less vanished. I’d seen this happen many times before, covering wars abroad. He and I were a couple of guys who might have gone on to talk about a lot of things in common, but instead we might as well have been a couple of fig trees in a field because of the one thing we didn’t have in common. Words.

Then Arshak picked up his cup and saucer, and we all followed his lead and we took a sip of coffee, holding both saucer and cup, Turkish style.

Things suddenly felt oddly relaxed, given the situation. We seemed to be waiting for something.

I thought to keep my mouth shut and let them make the next move, even if it was in the conversation. But I said to Arshak, nodding toward the front of the coffee shop, “I don’t find their friendship so unlikely.” I knew enough about the situation to see past the classic schism of Christianity and Judaism.

“Then you know what binds us,” Arshak said.

“Persecution.”

“Good,” he said. “I thought I’d have to explain that first. Ours is not so well known as theirs.”

“You share the Turks,” I said.

He grew expansive. “That’s an odd thing,” he said. “The Turks despise the Jews in the street, face to face. But formally, by government attitude and even decree, they’ve made them safe. The Muslims and the Jews share the Old Testament more directly, and I think that makes the Jews tolerable to them in the abstract. The Armenians, however. We’re Christians. And worse, we are stained with the sin of having been a thriving nation in this land long before Turkey and the Ottoman Empire even existed, and by the fact that centuries ago the Turks stole everything from us. People and nations are the same: we preserve a special hatred for those we’ve already abused.”

With this, he paused. Lucine had been watching him as if from the back row of the orchestra seats. But now she leaned a little in his direction.

“The matter at hand,” she said to him with surprising gentleness.

He nodded in acknowledgment without looking at her. He said, “Three weeks ago, three hundred of the elite Armenian thinkers and leaders in Istanbul — writers and priests, politicians and publishers, teachers and artists, all of our best minds — were arrested by the government and deported overnight from the capital. They were imprisoned beyond Angora. Those that got that far. We’ve been told reliably that a group of them — twenty or so, ones with voices, writers like you — were murdered on the way to Ayaş.”

“But they all will die,” Lucine said. “Soon.”

Her voice faltered ever so slightly. She paused. She was about to speak again when we all heard feet scuffling on the fieldstones from the direction of the courtyard door.

Two men stood there. They were suited up looking like Turks but I knew somehow they belonged. They could have been Tigran’s sparring partners. One was a light heavyweight, one a welterweight. All three of them were swarthy and rough featured, of the same blood as the boys in the bar on the London Docks.

Part of me sensed trouble.

Tigran and Arshak stood up at once. Lucine looked to me and she rose. I rose with her. She stepped to me.

“I’m going back to the hotel now,” she said.

“Who are these men?” I asked.

She looked in their direction.

“They’re with Tigran,” she said.

“Look me in the eyes,” I said.

She did.

They were steady. But she was an actress.

“I thought you and your father had something to explain,” I said.

“A thing has come up,” she said. “They’d like to take you a little farther.”

“Not you?”

“You can ride a horse?”

“Yes.”

“Where you will go is out of the way. I need to get back to the hotel and prepare for Enver Pasha.”

Her eyes lost their focus a little now, drifted. But not from lying. “First impressions,” she said. “This one for him has to be distractingly good.”

Arshak was beside me now. “Will you come with us?” he asked, as if I had a choice. But he was an actor.

“If I say no?” I said.

“Why would you?” he said. “You have come a very long way with us already.”

I looked at Lucine.

I had.

But as far as I’d come, I didn’t yet instinctively trust her. And why would I trust her father? Or these three Armenian toughs? She could have made her own arrangement with the Pasha, letting passion overrule protocol.

My only alternative was to walk away. Or if I couldn’t simply walk away, then shoot my way out. But to go on with them now seemed more or less what I’d signed up for when I said yes to the secret service of my country. This was a rough-riding charge up a hill.

I looked at Arshak. “Let’s go,” I said.