The Winter Thief

60

“Where to?” Kamil asked the gendarme captain, a young man with professional bearing. Kamil had worked with him before on other cases, including the bank robbery, and he respected him as a good Ottoman officer-strong, educated, obedient, humane, and civilized. They were standing before a carriage surrounded by an escort of mounted gendarmes. A group of onlookers clustered at the top of the courthouse stairs. Kamil recognized his staff, one of the judges, and another magistrate. He saw the magistrate ask the judge something, then his surprised face. A crowd was gathering in the street, kept at a distance by the troops.

“Bekiraga Prison,” the captain said, avoiding his eye.

“What?” Kamil was shocked. The prison was notorious for its squalid conditions and bad treatment of prisoners. He had assumed they were driving to the governor’s office or to see the vizier or some other high official. “You’re joking.”

“I questioned it as well,” the captain explained in a low voice. “The directive is from the palace, signed by Vizier Köraslan himself. There was nothing I could do.”

This was the vizier’s response to his humiliation, Kamil thought with rising anger. Only the vizier had the power to put a pasha in prison. But Bekiraga Prison? That was beyond the bounds.

“Thank you for inquiring, but there must be some mistake.” He was grateful to the captain for taking the dangerous step of questioning his orders on Kamil’s behalf. He turned to get into the carriage. “Take me to the palace and we’ll straighten this out.”

“Pasha,” the captain said.

Alerted by a change in his tone, Kamil turned. “What is it?”

“I was commanded by the vizier himself to bring you to the prison and nowhere else.” He hesitated. “Otherwise I am commanded to kill you.”

Kamil felt for the young man. The very qualities Kamil admired in him had brought him to this point. “That would be assassination of a government official, are you aware of that?”

“Yes, pasha.” The captain stepped back at attention. “Please, pasha, get into the carriage.”

Kamil heard the note of pleading in the captain’s voice. He didn’t wish for the young man to have to make such a choice, so he put his foot back on the carriage step. “Very well,” he said as he got in. “This will be cleared up soon.” Kamil wished it were true. Justice, as he knew so well, had less to do with the evidence than with the people arrayed against you. In this case, Vahid and the vizier made a daunting combination. Who was on your side was just as important. He saw Omar on his horse, scowling, waiting to accompany the carriage. No doubt he had sent someone to inform Yorg Pasha and the minister of justice. His side was mobilizing, he thought with a rising sense of confidence as the carriage pulled away.

They clattered over the Galata Bridge, up Jalaloglu Street through Bab-i Ali, passing the two grand dowager mosques of Istanbul, Aya Sofya, formerly a Byzantine cathedral, and Sultan Ahmet with its six delicate minarets. The carriage crossed Beyazit Square and followed the high wall of the war ministry before pulling up outside a massive stone structure surrounded by a dry moat, inside which the tops of trees moved like restless brown water.

As soon as Kamil got out of the carriage, he was assaulted by the stench. Pulling his handkerchief from his pocket, he held it to his nose. Stinking liquid flowed from a pipe protruding from the wall into the moat. The pipe dripped, forming viscous pools in the lane. Kamil had never before visited the prison to which defendants at his court had so often been sentenced. The cesspool by the gate seemed to act as its calling card and perhaps an intimation of worse to come. Kamil put away his handkerchief and followed the captain through the gate, stepping carefully around the sludge.

Although he thought himself modern and civilized, Kamil had learned that he was capable of harboring a hatred and desire for revenge so deep that it grew like a carbuncle into his very soul. Vahid and his deadly schemes would not stand. And if he discovered that the vizier too had acted callously, and not simply because he had been misled by Vahid, he vowed to bring him down as well.

His thoughts thus occupied, Kamil followed the captain to the warden’s office, where the soldier handed over the arrest warrant to a sour-looking man with yellowish skin and lank hair. He wore a gray uniform and had wound a red-checked cloth around his fez. As the man bent his head over the document, Kamil wondered if he could read or whether he just was scanning it for the correct seal. The warden coughed, a wet cough that rattled in his chest, no doubt a result of working in these surroundings day in and out, Kamil thought. The man looked over the document for a long time, then glanced up at the new prisoner. Kamil caught the glint of intelligence in his eyes, or of wiliness.

Kamil could think of nothing to say. “I didn’t do it” seemed a ridiculous claim, given the document in the warden’s hand. He knew that only proof of his innocence would get him out, or pull. It seemed that it would always be so. When he was studying in England, he realized it was the same there, that whom you knew was the deciding factor. A young man at the university, the eldest son of a lord, had destroyed the taproom of a pub on a drunken rampage with his friends. His father paid the owner for the damage, but the rape of the pub owner’s daughter and her subsequent death were never investigated despite a roomful of witnesses to both events.

Kamil had been at the pub the night she was killed, sharing a pint with some fellow students. The young man came in with a group of his friends, went straight to the girl, and pulled her from behind the counter. When her father tried to come to her aid, one of the men smashed a chair over his head. Customers fled for the door. The girl shouted that they were too late, she had told the police everything.

“Yes,” the young toff had said, “that’s what I heard.” He grabbed her by the hair and punched her in the face and chest until she lay broken and bleeding on the floor. The men left, laughing and slapping each other on the back, as the anguished father bent over his daughter’s body.

Kamil had tried to go to the girl’s aid, but though he struggled, he made no headway against his fellow students, who overpowered him. “It’s none of your business,” they warned him. “We’re not getting involved.”

He had never spoken to any of them again. It was almost unbearable for him to think about this experience now, the deep sense of shame and dishonor he felt at having witnessed such a crime. In a roomful of people, no one had moved a finger to help her. They knew, he supposed, what he did not, that the outcome was preordained by the lord’s power to manipulate all around him, including life and death. The others in the pub had accepted that they were nothing more than pieces on an aristocrat’s chessboard.

Kamil had reported the incident to a bored policeman at the Cambridge station who clearly knew that the moment Kamil was out the door, the report would go into the trash. Kamil had to believe that the Ottoman system was more just than that, that the murder of an ordinary girl would not go unpunished because she was poor. Then, as now, he felt rage and a desire to seek vengeance against those he knew to be unjust. Yet here he stood in prison, wrongfully accused by a powerful man. He tried to believe that right would prevail, not because he too had powerful friends but because the system itself was just. He would be released because the evidence would show that he was not guilty. And when he was released, he would act. He was no longer a student in a foreign place, but a pasha and a magistrate, the sultan’s special prosecutor. He would never again allow someone to hold him back.

The gendarme captain saluted, then turned. As he was leaving, he glanced worriedly over his shoulder at Kamil.

The warden coughed so hard it bent him double. He leaned out the door and spit a gob of greenish fluid on the ground, then wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “Welcome, pasha. Your staff will have to bring your food in from the outside, but otherwise you’ll find your room as comfortable as the best hotel.” His laugh was cut off by another fit of coughing. When he had regained his voice, he told Kamil, “Come with me. The warrant specified Number Eleven. You must have friends in high places.” He laughed again, a nasty snicker that put Kamil on his guard.

Kamil followed him down a vaulted corridor smelling of damp, mold, and urine. They climbed a set of stairs. A sharp ammoniac reek and other foul odors Kamil couldn’t identify became stronger until he almost gagged. He pulled out his handkerchief again, setting off another bout of laughing by the warden. The next corridor was low, so they had to stoop. The warden stopped before a thick wooden door set on iron hinges. He turned the key in the lock and pushed it open. A horrible stench wafted from the room.

“What is that?” Kamil asked, not moving. His head felt as though it were being torn to pieces.

“The cesspool is right outside this window,” the warden explained, pointing to an opening high up on the wall. “Look,” he said in a conciliatory voice, “your friends were playing a trick on you, that’s clear. For a small commission, I can move you to a better cell.” He winked at Kamil. “You’ll find that anything’s possible here for a man like you.”

Kamil grabbed the warden by the collar. “How dare you address me in that manner. How dare you ask me for a bribe. I will not forget this, you filthy son of a bitch.”

The warden must have seen something in Kamil’s eyes that frightened him. He pulled himself from Kamil’s grasp and scuttled down the corridor. “Here,” he called over his shoulder. “I made a mistake. This is the one.”

Kamil followed him, coughing into his handkerchief. The warden held open the door of another cell, and Kamil stepped over the threshold.