The Sultan's seal

5

Michel stands inside the door to Kamil’s office, his feet slightly apart, hands loose at his sides, as if ready to take on an opposing wrestler. Kamil looks up and lays aside the file he has been frowning over. He waves Michel over to a comfortable chair.

“Two herbalists in the Egyptian Spice Bazaar sell dried tube flowers,” he reports, hunched forward in the chair, arms on his knees. “It’s not belladonna, but a related plant, Datura stramonium. The symptoms are almost the same. There’s quite a lively trade in tube flowers, unfortunately.” Michel grimaces. “In the past month, at least four people bought them, three women and an old man. There are other sources. It’s fairly common. It even grows wild outside the city walls.”

Kamil sits behind his desk, its dark, polished mahogany visible in neat avenues between stacks of letters and files. He drums his fingers on the wood.

“I had them track down two of the women,” Michel continues. “Both are midwives who use the herbs to cure bronchial troubles. The man too had a cough.”

“So this leads us nowhere.”

“There’s more. One of the midwives bought a large quantity. She sold them to several households around Chamyeri the week before the murder.”

“Anyone suspicious?”

Michel frowns. “Unfortunately not. The men checked every household and asked the neighbors. They verified that someone in each of the homes had been ill that week. That doesn’t mean someone couldn’t have taken some of the herb and used it for another purpose, but it seems unlikely. These are common village families. What contact would they have had with a British woman?”

“How was it administered?”

“We have to assume she drank it. The only other way to ingest the dried flowers is to smoke them, but that has only a mild effect and doesn’t dilate the eyes. The seeds are poisonous, but there was no sign that she died of something else before falling into the water. Perhaps it was given to her in a glass of tea. Too bad we couldn’t take a look at her stomach fluids,” he mutters.

“Where would such a woman drink tea? And with whom?”

“Not in a village. They wouldn’t even be able to communicate.”

“Chamyeri again. Both women were English governesses.” Kamil draws his fingertip along the edge of sunlight on his desk. “I wonder if anyone in Ismail Hodja’s family speaks English.” He looks up. “What about his niece?”

“Jaanan Hanoum?”

“She must have been there when Hannah Simmons’s body was found. She was a child then, of course.” Kamil’s lips tighten. “It must have been difficult for her. The young woman has had a rough time of it.” He shakes his head sympathetically.

Michel ignores Kamil’s evaluation. “Probably educated by tutors at home, like all women of that class. She had a French governess, but it’s possible she also learned English. Her father is one of those modernist social climbers.”

“He’s an official at the Foreign Ministry, I believe.”

“Yes.”

“But she lives with her uncle at Chamyeri, rather than at her father’s house.”

“Her mother went to live with her brother, the hodja, when her husband took a kuma. A modernist,” Michel adds sourly, “and a hypocrite. The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

“The man is insane. Two wives.” Kamil shakes his head in disbelief. “He might as well hurl himself in front of a tram.”

They share an uneasy burst of laughter.

“When Jaanan Hanoum came of age, she moved back to the city, to her father’s house. It’s pretty isolated up there, no place for a girl looking to be married. But since her troubles this past year, she’s been staying at Chamyeri again.”

“Istanbul society can be unforgiving. Poor girl. I wonder how she’s doing.”

“She’s gone. I asked around the village yesterday. They said that three days ago Jaanan Hanoum’s maid had an accident. She slipped and fell into that pond behind the house, and almost drowned.”

“Women should learn to swim,” Kamil snaps irritably. “Just last week I heard of two seventeen-year-old girls that drowned in a shallow stream. One fell in and the other tried to save her. They panicked and pulled each other under. It’s absurd that women are kept ignorant of even the most basic survival skills.”

“Jaanan Hanoum pulled the maid out,” Michel continues, “but she lost her sight. She must have hit her head on a rock. Jaanan Hanoum is on her way to relatives in Paris, left early yesterday morning. Planning to study, apparently.”

Kamil thinks about this, flipping his beads around his hand. “I wonder if either of them knew Mary Dixon.”

“Coincidence?” suggests Michel.

“I have no faith in coincidences,” Kamil mutters.

“If they heard the news in Chamyeri about the Englishwoman’s death, maybe it was just one tragedy too many for the young woman.”

“Maybe. But I still would have liked to speak with her. Who is left up there at Chamyeri now?”

“Just her uncle Ismail Hodja, his chauffeur, the gardener, and some daily staff.”

“I can’t imagine any of them having tea with an English governess, much less drugging and killing her.” Kamil shakes his head. “What else is near Chamyeri?”

Michel stands and paces the room, thinking. The folds of his robe tangle his muscular legs like tethers on a horse. He stops suddenly.

“I wonder.”

“What?”

“The sea hamam. It’s below Emirgan, just north of Chamyeri.”

“Ah, yes, I’ve heard of it,” Kamil muses. “It’s built on a jetty over the water so people can swim in private.”

“More like wading in a cage rather than swimming. The Emirgan one is for women.”

“I misjudged our women’s progressiveness. What made you think of the sea hamam, of all things?”

“It’s a perfect place to meet if you want complete privacy. It’s closed at night, but it wouldn’t be hard to get in. In fact, it probably hasn’t been used since last year. It usually doesn’t open until midsummer. Other than a few villas and fishing settlements, there aren’t a lot of other possibilities. No one in the villas claims to remember an Englishwoman.”

Michel opens the door to the judicial antechamber, letting in a din of voices. He and Kamil push through the tide of plaintiffs, petitioners, clerks, and their assistants and emerge from the squat stone courthouse onto the busy Grande Rue de Pera. A horse-drawn tram clangs along the boulevard, carrying matrons from the new northern suburbs into town for shopping. As they wait for their driver to bring the carriage, Kamil surveys the early morning bustle of Istanbul’s most modern quarter. Apprentices balance nested copper tins of hot food and trays of steaming tea, hurrying toward customers waiting in shops and hotels. Carts rattle as vendors pull their wares along the cobbled street. Advertisements for their services, or for mulberries, green plums, carpets, or scrap metal, issue from practiced throats. Shop windows display the latest products.

This tumult, Kamil knows, is surrounded by the tranquillity of old Constantinople, the name many residents still use for their city, its Byzantine roots as capital of the eastern Roman Empire still everywhere in evidence. At one end of Pera is a pleasant cemetery beneath a vast canopy of cypresses where people stroll and picnic on the raised tombs. Embassies set in lush gardens line the boulevard. To the west, Pera overlooks the waters of the Golden Horn, which takes its name from the reflected fires of the setting sun. To the east, the land falls off precipitously to reveal the Bosphorus and the wide triangle of water where the strait and inlet merge to push into the Sea of Marmara. Cascading down the hillsides are canyons of stone apartment buildings and old wooden houses strung together by alleys meandering around the remains of Byzantine and Genoese walls, towers, and archways. Where the inclines are too steep, roads become wide stairways.

Kamil and Michel head north in an open phaeton, bundled against the wind. It is a long, dusty trip winding through the hills above the Bosphorus, but their driver knows the road well and keeps a steady pace. Kamil’s eyes graze the edge of the forest as they pass, alert for telltale colors and shapes of flowering plants, challenging himself to remember their botanical names. His fingers worry the warm amber in his pocket.

If he fails to solve this case, he will have the unpleasant task of reporting his failure to Minister of Justice Nizam Pasha. On the first Thursday of every month, Kamil must stand, hands folded before him, eyes lowered, in the drafty reception hall and wait for permission to speak. Nizam Pasha, seated cross-legged on a raised divan, listens in grim silence, regarding him with flat, unreadable eyes. When Kamil has finished, Nizam Pasha whispers to his subordinate, then dismisses Kamil with a careless wave of his fingers and a moue of the mouth, as if he has tasted something foul.

Only once has the minister spoken directly to Kamil, this during his first audience.

“Do not presume here on the cloak of your ancestors. You are naked in the sight of the padishah. Do not disappoint him.”

Nizam Pasha reports directly to the sultan, but his is only one vein among many pumping information into the heart of the empire. The secret police are the insomniac sultan’s eyes, watching, suspicious, invisible to all but a few in the palace. They spy on the police and the judges, as they do on all the other servants of the state.

Kamil reflects that his position as pasha and son of a pasha affords little protection from the secret police, who will punish not only those who displease them, but their entire families. The images of his unhappy but determined sister Feride and her young daughters flashes though his mind. And his silent father, captive to an inner world populated only by his dead wife. Kamil knows he must steer a delicate path between politically astute silence and the demands posed by proper judicial procedure and scientific investigation. This was never more important than in these uncertain days.

While the sultan wraps himself ever more closely in the cloak of religion by catering to the powerful sheikhs and leaders of Islamic brotherhoods, it is rumored that even among the sultan’s inner circle there are those who would like to see a representative government and an Islam compatible with modern notions of progress and reason. These are the men who pushed through the new legal system that has effectively taken away the power of religiously trained kadi judges and given it to magistrates, young men like Kamil with secular training and a preference for science and logic. In the new courts, magistrates argue cases before a state judge and supervise investigations. The formerly all-powerful kadis are restricted to handling local divorces and inheritance disputes, although a kadi still has a place on the bench in the Majlis-i Tahkikat, the Court of Inquiry, the highest court in the province of Istanbul. It is not surprising, Kamil thinks, that men like Nizam Pasha, whose education has been in religious medreses and who speak no European languages, should feel threatened by the magistrates under their jurisdiction.

He glances fondly at his companion in the phaeton. Michel has been his ally in puzzling through the logical complexities of many cases. His mood lifts as he remembers the pleasant hours spent listening to Ladino songs and Italian cantos in tiny clubs hidden in the alleys of Galata, Michel as his guide to the richly textured but insular world of the Jewish community. Jews and Christians had been the merchants, bankers, surgeons, and artists, the beating international heart of the empire for hundreds of years. Their presence here predates that of the Ottomans. Jewish migrants and refugees not only were gladly sheltered, but sought after by the sultans, who valued their education and acumen. The Sephardic Jews expelled in 1492 by Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain were invited by Sultan Bayezid II to settle in the empire under his protection, with the following comment: “How can one call this king wise and sensible, when he beggars his own country and enriches mine?” Their descendants in Istanbul, like Michel, still speak Ladino, the Spanish of the expulsion.

On their free afternoons, Kamil and Michel meet in the café where they had become reacquainted, discussing the latest medical advances and scientific techniques in the books and journals with which the book dealers in the courtyard behind the Grand Bazaar keep them well supplied. Sadly, the young surgeon does not share his interest in botany, but is more interested in the volatile properties of plants, the secrets they are forced to release under duress.

After a while, Kamil leans his head against the padded leather headrest and allows himself to drift. He finds himself dwelling on a memory of Sybil lifting the bundle of the dead woman’s jewelry from her lap. Her hands were plump and dimpled as a baby’s. The tender feeling evoked by the memory surprises him. Then he realizes, they are his mother’s hands.

AMID A RACKET of gulls, they make their way along the creaking jetty to the small square structure at its end. The Bosphorus here has thrown up a long scallop of rough brown sand and rocks. The sea hamam is built on stilts over shallow water, reached by a long pier. Its bleached boards are bearded with sea moss. The door is latched but not locked. There would be nothing inside to protect. Kamil opens the door and enters a windowless room. There is a musty smell of swollen wood and unwashed laundry. The Bosphorus has no odor. It is too swift. It tears the briny air with it like a flag in a gale. But there is a sense of the sea inside the dark room, a feeling of motion, as if the room is tilting.

Kamil stops a moment to let his eyes adjust, then looks around. The entryway is blind, designed so that no one standing outside can see into the inner quarters. There is a rack for shoes, empty now. He moves to the door at the end of the hidden leg of the room. He does not hear Michel enter behind him, but knows he is there. This door leads to a platform around a square expanse of water. The sea sucks noisily at the flimsy pillars that hold the structure above the level of the water.

He clicks his tongue in disapproval. “I doubt this will be standing by midsummer.”

“They’ll repair it before they open. They can’t afford to have naked society ladies swept away by the current.”

Ringing the platform are wooden cubicles with low wide shelves that, in season, would be cushioned so that bathers could lounge on them and drink tea. Each cubicle is faced with a slatted double door that can be closed for privacy or flung open so that the occupant can face the captured sea and chat with other bathers.

They begin methodically to search each cubicle, Kamil moving clockwise and Michel counterclockwise around the hamam.

“There’s a mattress here,” Michel calls. Kamil comes over to look. It is an expensive one, stuffed with wool and covered in flowered cotton. On a high shelf, he finds two tea glasses, of cheap quality but showy, decorated with crudely painted gold flowers. Michel gets his leather bag.

“What do you have in there?”

“Things we might need.” He pulls out a squirming sack and extracts a black and white kitten. “A quick test. I dilute any residue, then put a drop of the liquid in his eyes; if they dilate, we know we have datura.” He pushes the kitten back into the sack and cinches it.

Kamil is amused by the surgeon’s innovation. He hands the glasses to Michel, who examines them thoroughly.

“Too bad,” a disappointed Michel comments. “No residue.”

Kamil is looking over the lip of the bathing platform.

“This isn’t very deep. I wonder if there’s anything down there.”

“If I wanted to get rid of something quickly, what better way than to drop it into the water? The current would take it away.”

Kamil lies on his stomach and looks under the floorboards.

“Yes, but look.”

Michel kneels and looks under the floor as well. Backsplash wets their faces. A fishing net, attached to the bottom of the hamam, extends around the entire perimeter.

“I suppose that’s to keep undesirable creatures-human and otherwise-out of the pool,” comments Michel, grinning. “Let’s see what we’ve caught.”

Michel strips to his undergarments and lowers himself into the chilly water. He seems not to notice the cold, but goes about his work slowly and methodically, his powerful legs cutting effortlessly through the chest-high water. He ducks under the floor and pulls the net toward the center, then hands it to Kamil squatting on the platform above. Slowly, hand over hand as he saw the fishermen do in his youth, Kamil hauls it in. Michel pulls it up from below so that nothing is lost. When the entire sodden net has been dragged onto the wooden floor, Michel climbs out of the water and dons his clothing. The two men untangle the net and check their catch. Before long, Kamil points to a white gleam amid the slippery brown sea grass, pieces of clothing, and other debris. It is a teapot.

Its lid is missing but the contents are still inside. Michel reaches in and extracts a wad of faded yellow-green matter, bloated and slimy from long immersion in the water. The shape is no longer recognizable, but it is not the short black bristles of ordinary tea. Michel folds the leaves into a piece of oiled cloth.

They place several other items from their catch into a small bag: a broken tortoise-shell comb, a small copper-backed mirror, a woman’s slipper-items owned by a thousand women. Kamil examines a small knife, its horn handle swollen and separated into layers, but its blade clean of rust and still sharp.

“Odd thing to find in a woman’s bathhouse.” He wraps it up and places it in the bag. “Let’s look outside.”

Stooped low, hands clasped behind his back, Kamil paces the rocky sand surrounding the structure. He stops for a moment to listen, sniffs the air, then strides over and pulls aside the low-growing branches of a pine tree. He averts his face to avoid an explosion of flies and calls Michel over. At his feet is the carcass of a dog.

THE FOLLOWING DAY, Kamil watches as Michel cuts up the tea leaves, soaks them in alcohol mixed with sulfuric acid, and heats the mixture slowly.

“This will take a while. It has to heat for half an hour, then cool.” Michel sits at a desk in the cluttered room that serves as his laboratory and office in the Police Directorate, a large stone building on a side street off the Grande Rue de Pera. Tethered by a string to the base of a cabinet, the kitten is lapping at a saucer of milk.

“Call me when you’re done.” Kamil returns to a divan in the entrance hall and props a writing desk on his lap. He extracts from his coat a file on the case he is prosecuting the following morning, a Greek man accused of stabbing his wife’s brother to death when he tried to intervene in a family argument about property. The other family members refuse to testify, but several neighbors heard the altercation.

Murder is always about property, thinks Kamil, not passion in the way poets define it. Passion about something or someone simply means demanding ownership or at least control. Parents want to own their children, husbands their wives, employers their apprentices, supplicants their God. The most passionate of all destroy what they own, thereby making it forever theirs. Much of the world, from politics to commerce, is driven by fear of losing control over people, land, things. Fear that fate is stronger than will. Kamil places his trust in will.

What do I fear? he muses. Is there anything I love so passionately that I would kill to retain it? He can think of nothing and this makes him sad. A memory stirs in him of the moment he found the rare black orchid now in his greenhouse, of breathing its perfume for the first time. This evokes an image of Sybil’s violet eyes. He feels his senses, the surface of his skin, expand to an almost painful brilliance; his breath quickens. He smiles and thinks, I am not as desiccated as all that. As if passion were a virtue.

A young clerk bows, startling him. “The Doctor Efendi is waiting for you.” Abashed, Kamil hides his face from the young man before him, busying himself by gathering his writing utensils and placing them in a narrow box that he slips into his sash. By the time the clerk leaves him at the door of Michel’s office, Kamil has pushed all thoughts of Sybil from his mind and his body is once again the clean-swept temple of will and reason.

Michel has already strained the mash of leaves and is passing the liquid through a moistened filter. He transfers the strained liquid to a test tube and adds ether, then shakes and strains it again. He then adds potash and chloroform, which cause the liquid to separate. The room reeks of chemicals, but neither man notices. Michel pours the remaining liquid onto a watch glass and waits for the chloroform to evaporate. He scrapes the residue into a test tube and dilutes it with water and a drop of sulfuric acid.

“Now we can examine it.”

He takes a drop of this solution and places it on a glass. He stirs in a drop of bromine and waits. The liquid doesn’t change color.

“There should be a precipitate,” Michel mutters.

He tries various other reagents, but the liquid does not crystallize. The workbench is littered with watch glasses and test tubes. He turns to the sodden mass of cut-up leaves.

“This is not datura. Sorry. An unusual type of leaf, a tea of some kind, but not tube flower.”

Kamil sighs. “Too bad.” As he turns toward the door, he pauses. The saucer lies overturned on the floor near a white slick of milk. He bends his knees to look under the chair. The kitten is gone.

“What happened to your cat?” he asks.

Michel turns suddenly and looks at the saucer. At that moment, before Michel can compose his face and offer a bland reply, Kamil sees in it a mixture of guilt and fear.