The Winter Thief

8

At five o’clock in the morning, Yakup roused Kamil from his bed with a glass of strong tea. A gendarme waited in the entry hall to tell him that the rubble had been cleared from the front of the bank. It had stopped snowing. A thick fog wrapped the city in muslin and deadened all sound, so that the tick of their horses’ hooves on cobble was very loud.

Through the mist, the bank looked undamaged. Across the street, the taverna was now just a blackened pile. Kamil walked up the cracked marble stairs into the bank. The gendarmes had set up scaffolding to keep the entryway from collapsing. It opened onto a high-ceilinged room decorated with blue tiles and lit by torches and lamps. Along a marble counter were the tellers’ cages and a woman’s section where the bank teller was obscured behind a wooden lattice. Benches ranged along two sides of the room. Except for the entrance, the bank seemed unscathed.

The gendarme captain saluted Kamil, and Omar sauntered over. “About time. I’m almost ready for another breakfast.” He waved his hand around the room. “Not as bad as we thought.

“The explosives were set at the entrance,” the captain explained. “It looks like a hasty job, meant more for show than damage.”

“Was anything taken?”

“We waited for you,” Omar announced, running his finger over his mustache. “The vault is downstairs. It’s open,” he added meaningfully.

He led Kamil to an iron gate at the back of the lobby, beyond which narrow steps descended. Kamil pointed to a polished wooden slide that ran from the head of the stairs into the basement. “This must be where they send the bags of coin down to the vault.”

“About ten years ago, they had a robbery here, an inside job,” Omar told him. “One of the clerks was sneaking into the reserves and replacing gold coins with silver. It was years before they noticed the adulterated bags. By that time he had stolen about eighty thousand British pounds. I heard that after that, they developed a new, foolproof security system. Wait until you see it.”

At the bottom of the stairs a corridor led to a thick wooden door. It stood open, a key protruding from the lock.

“This explains why the empire is bankrupt,” Omar said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “We don’t need a treaty to hand our wealth over to our European friends. They can just come in here, jiggle the lock, and take what they want.”

They crossed the threshold and found themselves in a brick chamber with a vaulted roof, lined with shelves of ledgers. There was no gold.

Omar pointed to two doors at the far end of the room, each behind a gate of iron bars. “Strong rooms. Well, at least that.”

The outer barred gates could be opened with a key, but the strong room doors appeared to be of solid iron and had double locks. One of them was ajar. Kamil pushed it open and stepped inside. The air was musty and smelled of leather, ink, and old paper.

The walls, floor, and ceiling were welded iron sheets. Wooden shelves held leather bags, chests, metal strongboxes, bundles of banknotes, and stacks of securities. One set of shelves near the door was bare, the floor littered with gold coins from a leather bag that had fallen and split open. Kamil picked up one of the coins and tossed it in his hand, then placed it on the shelf. “I wonder how much is missing.” Several European countries stored their assets in this bank.

“I bet it won’t be pigeon shit. Do you think they were just run-of-the-mill thieves or that they’re going to use this money to raise hell? I’d put my money, if I had any, on raising hell. Why else the fireworks? Either way, our padishah is going to be very unhappy.”

“‘Unhappy’ isn’t the word I would use.” Sultan Abdulhamid would assume a connection between the weapons smuggling and the robbery and put pressure on the minister of justice, who in turn would blame Kamil for not apprehending the smugglers in time to prevent the robbery. Kamil was certain Nizam Pasha would assign him this case as well. He often gave Kamil important cases with one hand and with the other undermined his ability to prosecute them, as if he couldn’t decide whether he wished Kamil to succeed or fail and so routinely prepared the way for both.

“Can you imagine if they had gotten hold of the guns too?” Omar whistled. “It must be something big they’ve got planned.”

“With this gold, they can buy ten shiploads of guns.”