The Winter Thief

96

“Can’t you keep your perversions at home?” Vizier Köraslan slammed his fist into the veneered tabletop, leaving a hairline crack. “Did you think no one would find out about your games in the basement?” He strode to the door, opened it, and slammed it shut again. Then he circled Vahid, who was standing in the middle of the carpet, eyes down, hands clasped before him. A thick bandage covered his right hand.

“I know everything. There is nothing I don’t know.” He grabbed Vahid’s arm and pushed back his sleeve, revealing a tortured field of old scars and new cuts.

Shocked, Vahid hurriedly pulled his sleeve back down. How could the vizier have known about his cutting? No one had ever found out, not since as a ten-year-old boy he had discovered the peace such regularly administered measures of pain could bring him. Deeply ashamed, he kept his eyes on the carpet. His wound beat in his hand like an anvil, but it was useless pain, runaway pain that did nothing to calm him.

Vizier Köraslan sat down in a satin-upholstered armchair and looked him over slowly. “They have proof that this girl was murdered in your headquarters. What do you plan to do about it?”

Vahid grasped on to this appeal to his competence. “One of my men has been charged with the girl’s murder.”

“You realize that everyone will know it was you who killed her.”

Vahid looked up. “Do you know that, Your Excellency?”

Taken aback, the vizier said, “Well, not directly, but from the evidence, it can be assumed.”

“You don’t know it,” Vahid told him, “and neither does anyone else. They can think whatever they like, but they don’t know.”

“It will damage you politically, nonetheless. Who would follow someone who makes an innocent man take the punishment for his own crimes”-Vizier Köraslan held up his hands-“whether he actually committed them or not?”

Vahid took a step closer to the vizier. “And what of your son, Your Excellency?”

The vizier’s face flushed red. He rose to his feet. “You backstreet scum, you son of a whore. You dare threaten me?”

Iskender is the whore’s son, Vahid wanted to cry out. I am the good son. He stood unmoving, glaring at the vizier.

Perhaps having noticed something unpleasant in Vahid’s eyes, the vizier stopped shouting and was regarding the Akrep commander with disgust. “I should never have gone along with your stupid scheme. You told me the troops would wipe out a small group of socialists that no one cared about. Instead they ran loose and massacred entire villages that had nothing to do with the Henchak revolt you sold me. Now I know why you disappeared. You went to lead them yourself, and undoubtedly to engage in more of your unpleasant digressions.” Vizier Köraslan’s mouth screwed up in distaste. “The Franks are looking for any excuse to invade. By allowing such madness, you gave them the pretext to come in and help the embattled Armenians. If Kamil Pasha hadn’t stepped in to save the refugees and if I hadn’t sent reporters and photographers east to make sure the world knew about it, it could have been a disaster. I was a fool to trust you.”

“You’ve never trusted me, Your Excellency,” Vahid pointed out reasonably. “We had an arrangement that until now has suited us both.”

“You said you’d increase my influence with the sultan, and instead now he suspects me. You were going to sideline Kamil Pasha, and now he’s a hero. Why? Because you enjoy giving pain and you don’t know when enough is enough.”

Vahid smelled the old man’s must emanating from the vizier’s mouth. It reeked of death. He, on the other hand, was young, vital, untouchable. When Vizier Köraslan was deposed, he, Vahid, would be promoted to be the head of the Teshkilati Mahsusa. He would build a secret service for the sultan that would deprive all his enemies of air. He would be the guardian of the empire. Not the sultan, not this vizier, not his father’s favored son.

“You go too far,” the vizier said, visibly unsettled by the smile on Vahid’s face and no doubt remembering that Vahid held evidence linking his son to murder. “You are mad.”

“No, Your Excellency. I am not.”

Vizier Köraslan stared at him a moment and seemed to come to a decision. “Get out,” he said.

Surprised, Vahid hesitated, then turned and left the room.

AFTER VAHID had gone, the vizier called in his secretary and asked him to summon Nizam Pasha and Kamil Pasha. “Tell them to bring the file on the Armenian girl’s case.”

The two men were surprised to be summoned. Vizier Köraslan listened to the pasha’s evidence that placed Sosi in Akrep’s basement. He further surprised them, saying, “I have absolutely no doubt that Vahid committed this murder and probably others. He is an unscrupulous character who has been clever enough to pin the blame for his misdeeds on others. Why, he’s even tried to blackmail me with trumped-up evidence against my son. We cannot have a scoundrel of this magnitude commanding a force like Akrep. That institution will be shut down and replaced by a more efficient secret service, and I want Vahid arrested and charged with murder and treason.”

“Treason, Your Excellency?” Nizam Pasha inquired.

“Kamil Pasha, did you not witness Vahid leading a group of bandits in the massacre of innocent civilians in the east and attacking your imperial troops that were protecting the population?” Without waiting for Kamil, who seemed at a loss for words, the vizier answered his own question. “That, gentlemen, is treason.”