The Winter Thief

23

Gabriel moved quickly and soundlessly through the lanes of the Kurtulush district until he came to a small cottage ringed by a garden wall. The papery trunks of poplar trees in the garden glowed in the slanting afternoon light. His driver, Abel, and Abel’s sister, Sosi, lived in this cottage with their aging father, an irascible man who was blind in both eyes. Gabriel had visited them before.

He planned to confront Abel about the explosion at the bank. What on earth did he hope to gain, Gabriel wondered, by attracting the attention of the secret police? There must be a reason, he told himself. Perhaps it could be explained as the excesses of immature, would-be revolutionaries, but he was furious at their lack of discipline. They had ruined the entire mission. As had he, he reminded himself ruefully. Still, he wanted an explanation.

The blue-painted door was ajar. Gabriel pushed it open and went inside. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the gloom, but he could already smell the blood and feces. Abel, dead, was naked and tied to a chair, his body livid with bruises, cuts on his arms and round burn marks, probably from cigarettes, on his genitals. Gabriel stepped on something and jumped back. On the floor were two of the man’s fingers, neatly severed at the joint.

Gabriel’s mind flashed back to Sevastopol, his sister’s broken body, the pink quilt stained with her blood, the fingerless woolen gloves the men had heedlessly left behind, their hands hot with stolen life. Gabriel moaned and dug his fists into his eyes until the vision receded and he was once again inside his skin, in this Istanbul room with Abel’s body.

That’s when he saw Abel’s father hiding inside the quilt cabinet, his milk-white eyes staring and his mouth slack with shock. “Sosi?” the old man whispered, trembling.

“Not Sosi, but a friend,” Gabriel reassured him. “Where is Sosi?”

“He took her.”

“Who did?” But Gabriel could find out nothing more from the terrified old man. Was it the secret police? Gabriel wondered. They would be after him and the gold. Abel knew where the gold had been stored. He must have told them. He had no reason to protect Gabriel. If the secret police knew that the gold was at Yorg Pasha’s mansion, then the old man was in danger as well.

Given Abel’s inexplicable perfidy at the bank, though, Gabriel realized there could be interests at play about which he knew nothing at all. Still, the young man’s brutal murder shocked him, and he worried about Sosi. He had met her when she delivered the keys to the vault she had stolen from the bank managers. He knew what happened to women taken by the secret police. Vera. Sosi. He fled the house, moving surreptitiously through the lanes of Kurtulush to Father Zadian’s church.