The Winter Thief

4

When the blast hit, the first thing Vahid looked at was the porcelain ball hanging from a chain in the middle of the ceiling. His mother continued tatting in her chair by the stove, undisturbed by the noise. He wondered if she was going deaf, although she seemed to hear what she wanted to hear. Her eyes were clouding over with cataracts, slowly blinding her. She didn’t need to see in order to wrest tiny shapes from the thread that slipped through her still-nimble fingers. Almost every surface in the small house was decorated with doilies, laces, and the embroidered cloths she had brought as part of her dowry when she married Vahid’s father. His death, like his life, had left no imprint on the house at all.

The decorative ball was useful as a quick earthquake indicator. Tonight it hung unmoving from the painted ceiling, a still fulcrum in a field of peeling stars and flowers. Not an earthquake then, but a powerful explosion somewhere in the city. He checked the time. Eight o’clock. He opened the window, letting in the smell of damp charcoal and wood fire. A foul-smelling yellow mist insinuated itself into the room. Flakes of snow settled on his sleeve.

To the northeast, above the dark hulks of houses, the sky was abnormally bright. He heard shouts in the distance. Beneath his window, a group of men stood talking excitedly. “The bank is on fire,” he heard one of them say. Vahid marveled at the speed of gossip. The Ottoman Imperial Bank was on the other side of the Golden Horn, the inlet that divided the old city from the new. Certain that this was no ordinary fire, Vahid drew on his coat and boots.

“Are you going?” his mother asked in a reedy voice.

“Yes,” he responded curtly, thinking, as always, that it was obvious that he was going, but feeling guilty about his annoyance. He descended into the dark street.

He followed the commotion down the hill toward the Eminönü pier. A pall of white smoke rose from the opposite shore. He pushed his way through the crowd across the Galata Bridge. In Karaköy Square, men with flares ran about, shouting. As he approached the bank, torches were no longer necessary. The fire was at a wooden taverna across from the bank. The blaze was enormous. Both floors must have been crowded with diners, he thought. Vahid never frequented this taverna, popular with bankers and bureaucrats from the Sublime Porte, the center of government just across the Golden Horn.

The fire brigade pumped water from a tank into the flames. When the fire died down sufficiently, men dashed inside and began to pull out bodies. Those still alive were laid on a covered cart. The air stank of charred flesh. Vahid pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and held it over his mouth. He surmised the victims were rich men making deals or entertaining their mistresses. Many of the corpses were naked-their clothes had burned off-mouths cooked open, blackened hands curled in supplication. Snowflakes settled on them, melting immediately. The cart carrying the wounded began to groan up the steep hill.

The street echoed with shouts and coughs, the moans of the wounded, the murmur of the crowd. A woman screamed, “My daughter, my daughter,” bucking against the bystanders who held her back from the burning building.

A burly, broad-shouldered man whom Vahid assumed to be the police chief was shouting at his men, “Keep the hell out of there, you idiots. It’s going to collapse and crush your stupid skulls. Where the hell is Rejep?”

Sure enough, there was a loud creaking and the taverna lurched as the second floor crashed down upon the first. The chief ran into the rubble, hauling and kicking planks out of his way, and pulled out one of his men. There was a cheer from the bystanders.

As he approached, Vahid noted with surprise that part of the stone facade of the bank also had collapsed. The explosion must have been there, with the fire spreading across the lane to the wooden taverna.

An explosion at the bank was sure to unsettle Sultan Abdul hamid. It was an attack on the financial center of the empire. As he surveyed the scene, Vahid began to see the destruction before him as a rare opportunity. As head of Akrep he commanded hundreds of agents and spies who would track down these criminals. Before long, they’d be hanging on a meat hook in Bekiraga Prison. Perhaps they were revolutionaries with bigger designs on the empire than a simple robbery. He could make sure they confessed to such a plot before they died. When Sultan Abdulhamid saw that Vahid had saved the empire, he was certain the padishah would appoint him chief of the Teshkilati Mahsusa, the enormous secret service that was now only in the planning stages.

As head of the Teshkilati Mahsusa, Vahid would command thousands, not hundreds, of men. They would infiltrate towns and cities all over Europe, not only the Ottoman Empire. He would have direct access to the sultan, instead of having to work through the vizier. The vast networks and resources would make him feared by even the highest-ranking men in the empire. There were those who didn’t believe him worthy of such an exalted position, men who would rejoice if he failed. But Vahid knew in his heart there was no one more capable than he, and he would prove it, possibly now with the help of this remarkable twist of fate.

The snow had let up, and he could see the corpses at the side of the road. At a distance they all looked alike, oozing black and red, mouths open in interrupted screams, claws instead of hands. The police were wrapping each body in a sheet. One man stopped to retch into the gutter.

Vahid walked over to examine the bodies more closely. The patrons of this taverna had been powerful men, but in death they were indistinguishable from those they had commanded.

He recognized her hair. Waist-length golden curls that turned in on themselves like a nautilus. He had never seen another woman with such hair. It had miraculously escaped the flames and unfurled across the pavement. He knelt and reached out to stroke it, avoiding looking at her body. When his hand touched the curls, his fingers stiffened, and for a moment he was unable to breathe, as if his own hands and lungs had been immolated in the fire. With great effort, he turned and inspected her face. It was Rhea. What an hour before had been a delicate face with an engaging smile and alabaster skin had become the bloated black and red mask before him. He remained motionless for a long while, then retrieved a silver hairpin set with rubies from her hair. When two policemen came to move the body, he stood and stepped away.

What was the woman he loved, the woman he was going to marry, doing at a taverna? Overcome by rage at the thought that she had been with another man, he squeezed his hand around the hairpin in his pocket, lacerating his palm. He would find this person and do to him what the man had done to Rhea.

As Vahid walked away from the scene, lost in thought, a man approached him. “Sir,” the Akrep agent said discreetly, “there’s been a new development.”