The Sultan's seal

43

Kamil strokes his father’s motionless hand. He seems unhurt, the wound on his head hidden by the pillow, his broken limbs under the comforter. The comforter moves up and down slowly, irregularly, with the old man’s breath. His face is puffy, eyes closed.

“He looks like he’s sleeping,” Feride says in a voice hoarse from weeping. “As if he’ll wake up at any moment.”

“You said the maid saw him climb over the railing?” Kamil is empty of all emotion, but he is aware that this is a temporary state, a putting off of the final reckoning.

“She said he was smiling and reaching out to someone. Maybe he thought he was going to Mama?”

“Yes, perhaps that’s where he went.”

“They’ll be together soon. That’s what he wanted more than anything else.” Feride bows her head over her father’s chest. “Baba.” She stiffens. “Baba?”

The comforter is unnaturally still. The pasha’s features have been sharpened by death, but the faint imprint of a smile remains, a footprint on the farthest shore of a man’s life.

Feride begins to wail.

Kamil is silent, the storm still building in his chest. He puts his arm around Feride and holds her.

“Oh, what have we done?” she cries out. The question pierces Kamil and he begins to shake.

“Don’t, my dear sister. There is no blame. We only wanted to help him live again.”

“We’ve killed him,” she wails. “We wanted him to be there for us, to be a normal family again. It was selfish of us. We should have allowed him his dreams.”

“Yes,” Kamil concedes sadly. “People should be allowed their dreams.”

AN HOUR LATER, Kamil is galloping around the steep curves winding up the wooded hill to Robert College. Great oaks and sycamores obscure the sky and cast a green pall over the road as if it were underwater.

At the parade ground at the top of the hill, he flags down a young man and asks where the teachers live. He spurs his horse and, before long, is pounding on the door of a Victorian clapboard house set at the edge of the forest.

When Bernie answers the door, it takes Kamil a moment to recognize him. He is wearing glasses.

“Why, hello, there,” he says, taking off his glasses. His hair is uncombed and he is wearing an old shirt and trousers with sagging knees. “You’re not seeing me at my best, but do come in.”

Kamil pushes past him. In the sparsely furnished living room, he turns and says, “What do you know about Michel Sevy? You know him, don’t you? You recognized his name this afternoon.”

“What’s gotten into you?” Then, looking more closely at Kamil in the lamplight, Bernie sits on the sofa arm and asks, “What’s happened?”

“They’ve executed Hamza.” He doesn’t mention his father. The memory is too raw to touch.

“What? But you haven’t even held a trial yet.”

“I know. It was done without my knowledge. By Michel Sevy.”

“Damnation.” Bernie looks up at Kamil, who is still standing in the middle of the room, hands on his waist. He takes a deep breath. “Kamil, my friend, sit down and let me get you something to drink.”

“I don’t want…” Kamil is still shaking with rage and with regret.

Bernie gets up and waves his hand. “Just sit. I’ll tell you everything you need to know. But first you have to calm down.”

When Bernie returns with two tumblers of scotch, Kamil seems calmer, but his nerves have simply welded into an iron resolve. He takes the glass from Bernie, but doesn’t drink. He puts it on the table too hard, liquid spilling onto some papers lying there. Bernie rushes over and dabs at the papers with a handkerchief.

“My new book.” He smiles sheepishly. Then, catching Kamil’s intensely focused gaze, he turns a chair around and sits.

“Michel is a police surgeon?”

“Yes, you know that,” Kamil snaps. He stands and moves toward Bernie. “Either you tell me who he is or I’ll shake it out of you.”

“Hey, hey, my friend. No need for violence. It’s too late now, anyway, for poor Hamza.”

“You knew him too?”

“Yes. Look, can I trust you not to pass this on to your superiors?”

“No.” Kamil is still standing, one hand flipping his chain of beads back and forth in a steady rhythm. He is breathing heavily.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. What on earth has happened to get you all in a lather like this?” He holds out a cigarette.

Kamil shakes his head impatiently.

Bernie sighs. “You’ll need more than a cigarette to digest this news. Why don’t you take a swig of your scotch?”

“Just talk.”

“All right, then. But in the name of friendship-we are still friends, right? — I beg you to keep this just between us.”

“I’d like to hear it first.” He doesn’t deny, nor does he acknowledge, the friendship. At this moment, it is irrelevant.

Bernie crosses his legs, then uncrosses them and leans forward, the scotch glass forgotten in his hand.

“All right. I do hope you have enough sense, after hearing this, to keep it to yourself. Eight years ago, Hamza was part of a group trying to engineer a coup against the sultan with British help. The sultan had just disbanded the parliament, so there were a lot of angry reformists, even in his own nest. Prince Ziya was one of them. He put the Brits in touch with someone in the palace. Hannah was the go-between, with Hamza receiving the information outside the palace and passing it on.”

“How do you know all this?”

Bernie does not answer right away. He gets up and paces the room as if looking for a way out, drawing deeply on his cigarette. His other hand still holds the glass of scotch. Finally, he stops before Kamil and gives him a long look.

“You’re my friend, Kamil. I don’t want you any deeper in this shit. You’re already up to your shirt collar in it.”

“Are you involved in this?” Kamil asks sadly.

“Well, not precisely.”

Bernie and Kamil stand tensely facing one another. Kamil’s beads flip back and forth in a staccato.

“I need your assurance that this stays between us.”

Kamil meets his eye. “I cannot give you such assurance.”

Bernie sits suddenly on the chair. “Oh, what the hell,” he mutters angrily. “I’m sick and tired of this skulking around. For what? So more people can get killed? I was shanghaied into this and I’m damned ready to get out.”

“Into what?”

Bernie squints up at Kamil and says, “British Foreign Service.”

“What? You? You’re American.”

“Good disguise, eh? Well, yes, I am American, but one of my relatives in England is in the Foreign Ministry-Sybil’s brother-in-law, actually. They thought I would be less obvious. Who’d suspect an American of anything more than rudeness and bad taste?”

Kamil doesn’t smile, but pulls over a chair and sits. “Go on.” The puzzle of the case is calming him, as if each piece he puts together redeems a piece of his shattered life.

“Hamza was having an affair with Hannah. Our correspondent in the palace had the pendant made and Hamza gave it to Hannah as a gift. If someone inside wanted to communicate with him, they’d wait until she took it off, put a note in it, and she’d carry it out when she met Hamza. It was cleverly designed. You needed a key, but the lock was invisible unless you knew it was there. She probably didn’t even know it could be opened. We used it to schedule our operation.”

“And the Chinese-that was your contribution?”

“No. Our contact inside the palace came up with it. He has some kind of interest in China and copied out the characters, although not perfectly. It’s why they called me in on this. I can read the characters. I puzzled over why that particular poem, but I can’t figure it out, other than the possible connection to the revolutionary, Kung. It probably has a personal meaning to whoever sent it from the palace.”

“Who is it?”

“We never found out. Even Hamza didn’t know. The messages went in through the harem, but we don’t know who sent them out. We’ve always assumed it was Ali Arslan Pasha, the current grand vizier. The top women in that part of the harem where Hannah worked were related to him.

“So you used Hannah.”

“Yes, although we never thought any harm would come to her.”

“What Hamza did was harmful.”

“You mean, sleep with her or whatever they did in that pavilion? That was his business. Anyway, he was a free man. We had no say about what he did or didn’t do.”

“Did he kill her?”

“I don’t see it,” Bernie says thoughtfully. “There was no reason to. He seemed like a pretty good guy. I think he genuinely cared for Hannah. I’m not sure what motivated him, whether it was patriotism or something else. He did seem to honestly believe in modernizing the empire, but there was a real bitterness about it, like there was something personal in it for him, so I just don’t know.” Bernie throws up his hands. “Anyway, around that time everything went to the dogs.”

“What do you mean?”

“Someone was on to us and spilled the beans. The secret police moved in. They got Prince Ziya. Killed him in Paris. I guess to warn off anyone else thinking of bucking the sultan. Then Hannah turned up dead. We never figured out how they found out about Hannah-who ratted. Anyway, I got out fast, so did Hamza. He had a driver, that Shimshek Devora, who must have known about all this too, but someone finally found him and shut him up for good. We always assumed the secret police were responsible for Hannah’s death. I guess probably Mary’s too-then framed Hamza for it. That would be typical. Two birds with one stone. Hamza comes back from exile years later and-boom-they use Mary to bait their trap. The secret police have long memories. They keep files on everything. Your government must have warehouses full of secret reports. Maybe that’s why they have to keep building new palaces. They get pushed out by all that accumulated paper.”

“What does any of this have to do with Michel?”

“Remember that night we went out on the town and that dog almost had me for dinner? That animal belonged to your associate Michel Sevy.”

“How do you know that?”

“I saw him duck down an alley after I shot the dog. I recognized him. I have to admit, I was pretty surprised when you told me the name of your associate. I paid his office a little visit and, sure enough, it was the same guy on our tail eight years ago. Michel Sevy. The Chameleon, we called him. He didn’t even bother to change his name.

He doesn’t work for you or for the police. He’s one of the sultan’s own. I reckon he didn’t like me snooping around.”

“That’s outlandish. Michel in the secret police?”

“Why not? Did you have anything to lead you to Hamza until Michel laid it all in your lap?”

“No. Most of the clues led in other directions.”

“I remember you had a gut feeling that something wasn’t right. Ask him yourself how he knew about Hamza.”

“I did. He said he was having Hamza watched. He withheld evidence from me. But he didn’t explain why.”

“So now you know. Whether or not Hamza killed those women, he was going to hang for it because it let the secret police nail him as a traitor. I don’t know why they didn’t just shoot him on a dark night and get it over with the minute he stepped back in the country. Although that would have killed any chance they had of finding out who his contact in the palace was.”

Kamil jumps up from his chair, fists clenched, knocking his glass to the floor. “We’re a civilized country, Bernie,” he shouts. “We have a judicial system. We don’t just gun down people in the street like in America.”

Bernie laughs. “That’s what you’d like to believe, my friend. It’s very unlike you to disregard all the evidence.” He flings away the stub of his cigarette, which has burned out between his fingers. “Just listen to yourself. Like a preacher with a rod stuck up his ass.”

Kamil takes a step in his direction. “How dare you!”

“Hey, hey, now. Whoah.” Bernie stands up and backs away, hands held defensively before him. “What the hell is the matter with you today?”

Kamil’s face twists grotesquely with the effort to contain his emotions. He is weeping, he knows-he can feel the wetness on his cheeks-but is powerless to stop.

Bernie seems stunned. “Kamil, old buddy. Calm down now. Obviously I don’t have the whole story. Something’s happened. Now, why don’t you sit down over there?” He points at the sofa. Kamil doesn’t move. “I’ll be right back.” He edges carefully toward the door.

Kamil can hear the creak of a cabinet opening, then the muffled clank and splash of a metal scoop descending into a clay jar of drinking water. Bernie returns a moment later, carrying a glass of water. Kamil is sitting on the edge of the sofa, head in his hands.

Bernie pushes the glass within reach on the side table and pulls a chair over to sit in front of Kamil. He waits quietly until Kamil raises his head, then hands him the water.

“Sybil told me you like a drink of water to calm the jitters,” he admits bashfully.

Kamil takes a sip, then another. He sits back and closes his eyes for a few moments. When his breathing is back to normal, he asks Bernie for a cigarette. They sit for a while in silence, smoking. Bernie sips at his scotch.

Kamil is the first to speak. He wants to tell Bernie about his father, but doesn’t.

“If Hamza didn’t kill those women, who did?” His voice retains a small tremor, but he feels himself gaining strength. He will tell Bernie about his father later, when he has command over himself again.

“Michel is a foot soldier. It could have been him or someone like him. They found out about Hannah, so she was a target. Maybe they thought she could tell them who the traitor in the palace was. That’s what they’re really after. The shark in the sultan’s pool. But she didn’t know, so she had nothing to tell them. None of us knew.” He looks away. “I hope she didn’t suffer too much. She was a nice girl.” A sip of scotch. “They probably would have killed her anyway.”

“The silken cord. It was a warning to the plotters.”

“What’s that?”

“She was strangled with a silken cord, the traditional method of executing members of the royal family.”

“I thought she drowned.”

“She was strangled first.”

Bernie wants to ask more, but decides he would rather live with a question than an answer. They sit together in silence, each weighing the burden of his own thoughts.

“What about Mary Dixon?” Kamil asks finally. “Why would the secret police want to kill her? Was she part of this?”

Bernie stands and walks to the window. His back to Kamil, he says thoughtfully, “That’s the rub. There’s something going on, but as far as I know Mary had nothing to do with any of it. I almost swallowed my tongue when you showed me the necklace she was wearing.”

“What is going on?” Kamil asks carefully, bracing himself for an answer he is sure he doesn’t want to hear.

Bernie turns to face Kamil. His expression is obscured by shadow but his hair, caught by the light, coils like hot wires around his head. He runs his hand through it, then goes to the sideboard, opens a fresh bottle, and pours himself another scotch. He holds the bottle out to Kamil, who shakes his head no.

“You remember that Chiraghan Affair a few years back-another attempt by the Young Ottomans to replace Abdulhamid with his brother Murad. The sultan’s been walling himself up ever since. I understand he might be a bit sore after the Brits occupied Egypt, but that was four years ago, water under the bridge. No reason for him to turn his back on us and start hobnobbing with the Germans. That’s never a good idea. And he’s threatening to head up some kind of international Islamic movement. Those are dangerous games. We’ve got to stick together. What with Russia tearing up the countries around it like a hungry bear, we’re just a little concerned that the Ottomans don’t become their next meal. They’ve already taken a few good bites.”

“I’m aware of the situation,” Kamil says dryly. “What does this have to do with Mary Dixon?”

Bernie waves his scotch at him. “No offense meant. I’m just setting the stage, so to speak.” He takes a long sip. “Well, as I said, we don’t like the direction this sultan is taking. We need your empire stable to keep the Russians in check in Europe. That’s better achieved under British protection, not by getting in bed with the Germans and with radical Islamic movements. The opposition, the Young Ottomans, were pretty well crushed after the Chiraghan Affair. But last year, we had a new communication from someone inside the palace, a letter posted in Paris and addressed to a safe house in London. It contained the same two characters for brush and bowstring. It proposed our assistance in a coup in exchange for British control over Syria. We provide a little money, a little muscle-and in return strengthen our own position in the region-well, that sounds like a mighty good bargain.”

“The lion keeps the bear at bay so it can tear the haunches off its prey without being disturbed,” Kamil comments sourly.

Bernie sips at his scotch and smiles indulgently at Kamil. “Kamil, my friend. This is politics, not philosophy. How do you think your empire got as fat as it is? By stealing food from the tables of other empires.” He shrugs. “Besides, your grip on that province is pretty tenuous these days anyway. It’s only a matter of time. Better to cut your losses now and let the Brits deal with it. They have plenty of experience wrangling territories that are trying to throw their riders.”

Kamil glares at him. “Go on.”

“Anyway, I came here to investigate-to make sure it was serious. This time we decided to cut out any middlemen, like Prince Ziya. Hamza was already back, but since the police knew about him, he kept his role in this quiet.”

“What was his role?”

“To try to make a connection with the person in the palace. I had no idea he was using Mary, or the pendant again. We thought the pendant was lost until you found it on Mary’s body.

Kamil is aghast. “An innocent young woman loses her life in this crazy scheme the last time and so you try it again, with the same degenerate accomplice? Mary had no idea, did she?”

“Probably not, assuming that’s what happened. And I can’t think of any other reason Mary would be wearing that pendant. I agree with you about Hamza. He plays his role too well. Played. The poor bastard.” He looks for a long moment into his glass, then meets Kamil’s eye. “This is not a pretty profession, magistrate bey. And to tell you the truth, I’m sick of it. This is my last assignment. I just want to go back to writing my book.”

“So you really are a scholar.”

Bernie looks offended. “Of course.”

“Who else here knows about this?”

“No one, other than me, Hamza, and the person pulling strings in the palace. We kept the circle small.” He takes a sip of scotch. “And now the secret police, God bless them. But for the life of me, I can’t figure out how they would know about this latest communication. It’s too early in the game. In fact, there is no game. We never received any messages after that first contact.”

“What about Shimshek Devora?”

“Hamza’s driver? I can see Hamza tying up loose ends. He’s meticulous when it comes to self-preservation.” He shakes his head slowly. “Still, he’s known this Shimshek for years. Hard to fathom that he would kill a friend. He was pretty broken up about Hannah. Still, if the executioner’s blade is aiming for your head, you’d probably shift whoever you had to, to get out of the way.”

“And the pendant?”

“I’m still wondering how Mary got hold of it. Maybe Hamza took it back when Hannah was killed-I guess that makes him look pretty suspicious-and later gave it to Mary to wear into the harem, thinking someone would see it and put a message in it like before. Baiting the hook. But I still have a hard time believing he would murder the women.”

He splashes scotch into a glass and hands it to Kamil, who takes it this time.

“I wonder who has such free access to the harem,” Bernie continues. “Maybe one of the eunuchs. He could come and go, take the message to whoever it is outside the harem that’s orchestrating this whole shebang. We just don’t know.”

Kamil tilts his glass and watches the golden liquid swirl, then takes a sip. “Whoever reported on Hannah could still be there, see the new pendant on Mary, and report it again.”

“A snitch in the harem. Maybe,” Bernie replies, rolling the word around his mouth. “But why? It would put that person in danger from the people behind the plot. I’d be surprised if whoever snitched the first time would still be hanging around the same harem, alive. I’d bet the snitch didn’t know the whole story. You sell out a couple of people, but you don’t realize they’re just the small fry. There’s a big hammer behind them just waiting to come down on you. Whoever knows about the plot-and the pendant-would be a target.”

Kamil jumps to his feet. “May Allah protect her. Sybil Hanoum! She told the women about the pendant.”

Bernie swings around and stares at Kamil. “What women?”

“She visited Prince Ziya’s fiancée, Shukriye Hanoum.”

“My God, I thought she was dead.”

“She married someone in Erzurum. But she’s back in the city, so Sybil Hanoum went to see her. Sybil Hanoum told the women there that both Hannah and Mary had the same pendant with a tughra inside. She probably also told them about the poem. Shukriye Hanoum apparently thinks she was punished because the sultan wrongly thought Prince Ziya was part of a plot to overthrow him.” He looks at Bernie. “Maybe no one made the connection,” he adds hopefully.

“Who else was there?”

“Shukriye’s sister, Leyla, Ali Aslan Pasha’s wife Asma Sultan, and her daughter Perihan.”

Bernie closes his eyes. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.”