An Evil Eye Part 25

Husrev Pasha glanced up. "Two days?"

"Before you speak to the Russians."

Husrev Pasha stared at him. "I must talk to the sultan, and to the viziers. I'm afraid I cannot see what you can do, Yashim efendi. But two days?" Something like a smile appeared on his fleshy lips. "Very well."

88.

THE village of Ortakoy straggled out to nothing in a few hundred yards. Spiked with the wintry stems of Judas trees and hibiscus, the cliffs advanced toward the sh.o.r.e, and Yashim could see the road climbing its flank, deserted except for an unlit bullock cart that strained noiselessly against the gradient, laden with broom from the upper slopes.

He pushed on down the track. Certain details returned to him: the angle of a tree hiking its branches above the water; a tilted Roman milestone half sunk in furze; a long view of the Bosphorus where it slipped away between two promontories, Asian and European, etching the outline of the castle at Rumeli Hisar against the gray sky.

He had forgotten the little row of fishermen's shacks opposite the yali. They were built of wood and tile, single-story houses resting on ma.s.sive foundations of uncut stone. Their view of the Bosphorus was uninterrupted, over the sunken wattle wall and the lurching gateway where he had said goodbye to Fevzi Ahmet years before, and shivered in his furs.

The yali itself was gone. Yashim pushed against the wooden gate, overgrown with the brown tendrils of a summer past; he shoved with his shoulder and felt the grasping shoots break as the gate slowly wheeled back.

Yashim wondered how Fevzi Ahmet had come by the yali. Armenian merchants, Greeks in the banking line, privileged governors who sojourned for a season in the capital when their own gubernatorial konaks sweltered in provincial deserts: these were the men who took yali, owned them or borrowed them, with landing stages at the water's edge and shady gardens for their ladies to sit in through the hotter months.

Yashim sometimes dreamed of a yali himself, a small wooden house where the water would bounce light onto the ceiling and he would fish with a line; Palewski had said it was the Greek in him. But that was only in the summer months, when Yashim's small apartment in Balat could be stifling and the breeze failed to lick through the open window. In the winter, the yali lost their charms. Even a yali a few miles along the Bosphorus could be cut off by storms and ice, no closer to Istanbul than the Rhodopes or the mountains of Anatolia. Mountain houses were snug and solid, while in winter, the airy yali revealed their drafts; damp seeped into their floors; cold sank through their walls. Shuttered and forlorn, the yali of the Bosphorus sat out the snows until the spring returned: the trees put out their leaves for summer shade, the cold retired, the damp was cleared by a few days' sun and the pa.s.sage of air through rooms that had been locked for months.

But Fevzi Pasha had clung to his yali throughout the year: Yashim had seen the smoke rising from the chimney. And now it was gone, hollowed out like a candle in its socket, only a few charred timbers pointing wickedly toward the sky.

Yashim went along the path to where he had once stood by the front door. The building was already returning to the soil. Weeds had sprouted and withered in the ash. He stirred the ashes with his foot and dislodged a sour, acrid smell.

He took a step back. Mrs. Satzos had been right: there was always a thread to be unraveled in a man's life; a question you could ask about this house whose answer would lead ten years down the line to a Kapudan pasha sailing his fleet into the harbor at Alexandria. A question about a pile of charred wood that would explain his treason.

The day was cold and overcast. Yashim turned his back on the ruins and walked on to the next village. The fishermen had erected tiny platforms, like crows' nests, between an arrangement of poles, and between the platforms hung nets of heartbreaking length, straining the current for fish.

89.

TALFA advanced to the divan and performed a temmena, not quite brushing the floor.

"I hope you are well, valide."

"As can be expected, Talfa." The valide took a long breath. "And you, I hope, continue in good health?"

"Inshallah, by the grace of G.o.d," Talfa replied automatically. "I grow a little every day," she added, with a giggle.

"You were always too fond of sweetmeats," the valide remarked. She glanced past Talfa, to the slender little girl who stood quietly to one side. "And who have we here?"

Talfa half turned. "My daughter, valide," she said in surprise. "Necla. I said I would bring her."

"Of course you did." The valide held out her hand, and Necla stepped forward to kiss it.

"Very pretty," the valide said.

Talfa frowned slightly. "Her skin will get lighter. Girls of her age are often a little dark."

Her eyes flickered about the valide's chamber. The valide gestured to some inlaid stools, and patted the divan.

"Please, be seated."

Conversation languished while the serving girl brought in coffee on a tray, and pipes.

"You may smoke, Talfa. I find it disagrees with me, but I quite like the smell," the valide remarked, truthfully. The whiff of tobacco reminded her of Martinique: of stinky carriages, and Creole weddings, and of her father talking business on the veranda, with a cigar. Sometimes she would creep onto his lap and fall asleep there, listening to the rumble of male conversation and laughter. In the still, dark air a lamp would be burning. The men drank rum and played bezique. Down in the lines, the African slaves were beating their drums softly. A tac-tac bird screamed in the trees beyond the garden.

She started. She opened her eyes and was surprised to see a dumpy woman sitting beside her, puffing on an amber stem held between her teeth.

"Who have we here?" she said; but perhaps she only imagined she had spoken, because the dumpy woman kept puffing away and darting her eyes about the room.

"Aimee! Aimee!" She could hear them calling for her, a long way off, but she didn't care. They would make her sit in a close, stuffy room to do needlepoint with Tante Merib. It was nicer in the soft gra.s.s, once she'd kicked off those little shoes with wooden soles. She pulled off her calico trousers and chucked them into a bush, and then her bonnet, and her ribbons.

She felt the sun hot on her face and on the top of her head.

She stepped into the brown water with her hands raised.

"Aimee! Reponds-moi! Ou est-tu? Aimee?" A little closer now. The water was as warm as it looked and the mud was squishy between her toes. All the little blacks played here, and Aimee knew why.

The fastenings on her bodice were the hardest to undo. She was only six, after all. She wriggled and pulled, but the dress caught under her arms and then, as she tottered forward in the water, it puffed up around her and she went off sailing ... Sailing like a little boat!

A big black man had jumped in to get her out when she was already half sunk, and the family had arrived at the bank of the waterhole. They'd followed her trail, they said.

After, Papa used to call her his pet.i.t paquebot. She smiled. She'd forgotten that.

Talfa cleared her throat, and stood up.

"Say goodbye nicely, Necla."

They performed temmena politely, and withdrew backward.

Talfa was, in her way, a grand personage; but the valide outranked her.

"Come, Necla. Hyacinth can take us to visit the other ladies now."

90.

THE road dipped behind a row of sheds that ran down to the water's edge. They were roughly planked, beneath a patchwork of tiled and shingled roofs, and from one of them a crooked pipe leaked a haze of smoke. Yashim could smell the resin in the clear air.

In a low, open-fronted boathouse, a man was working on his boat. Now and then he set down his tools and wrapped his icy fingers around a ball of dirty wool, to get them warm enough for the delicate resh.e.l.lacking of the hull.

He noticed Yashim out of the corner of his eye and straightened up.

"Something smells good," Yashim said, smiling.

The workman glanced at him, and then at the pot bubbling on the brazier.

"My own recipe, efendi. Fish. Turps. The fish is mostly bones."

"It must have been the turpentine." Yashim peered further around the door, hovering.

"Are you looking for someone, efendi? Please, step inside."

Yashim had often pa.s.sed these boatyards. He noticed the broom, and the dangling blue gla.s.s eyes on a peg, and the pots of brushes standing on the bench. He always liked a workshop, each ranged with tools common and special, the battered, dripped-on workbench, the perpetual fire of a brazier, the tamped-down earth floor tidy in the morning, and by nightfall cluttered with debris.

"You're repainting her?"

"I need to do it well, efendi, the paint and the lacquer. People think a boat is just wood, but that's really only the beginning, you see? It's what you do next that decides how she rides, how she looks-and how long she lasts, of course."

Yashim cast a critical eye along the black, tapered hull of the caique.

"That's not just ordinary pine, efendi." The boatman gestured with his brush, unable to conceal the pride in his voice. "It's slow-grown, Black Sea. And a cedar keel, same as the sultan's own caique, if you'll forgive me for saying so. That's one of the reasons she's lasted so well."

"You must have an in with the builder," Yashim remarked.

The man c.o.c.ked his head. "I do, efendi. I do. I married his daughter."

"And how old is she? I mean, the caique."

They both laughed.

"Same age as my marriage, by G.o.d! Twenty-five years I've had them both."

Yashim uttered a bismallah, in polite and indirect acknowledgment of the caiquejee's good fortune.

"Please," he added. "I'm interrupting your work."

The caiquejee shrugged, and bent over the hull of his boat to lay off the brush. Without looking up he said: "I know you, efendi. Forgive me, I don't remember where-but I recognized your face."

Another man might have been pleased, flattered even; but Yashim frowned. Perhaps it was only the man's talk. Or perhaps as he slid into middle age, his face and bearing were settling into shape: they had become impressionant. Memorable.

"Forgive me, efendi. It's just a hobby of mine, faces. I see 'em all the time, rowing people around. Sad or bad or having fun. Greek or Turk. Might as well take an interest. And I remember yours."

Yashim nodded. "I understand. You're Spyro, aren't you? We met the day they took down the old plane tree."

The caiquejee gave him an odd look. "Spyro." He jabbed his thumb to his chest, then scrunched up his face and sought inspiration in the roof. "And I took you to the Balat stage."

"The bridge has come on since then," Yashim said.

Spyro leaned aside, and spat. "They'll get their bridge, now." He paused, ruminatively. "I miss the tree. Like an old face, it was." He dipped his brush into the pot and wiped the drips carefully off around the rim. "But I'll tell you something, efendi, about the bridge. People think we're sorry, but it won't be the ruin of us caiquejees, and you know why? A caiquejee built it." He laid off the brush against the lacquered hull. "G.o.d's truth."

"A caiquejee?"

"The Kapudan pasha to you and me. Begging your pardon, efendi."

"Fevzi Ahmet Pasha?"

Spyro bent his head and lifted the brush, leaning back to survey his work. "His father worked the boats. Little man. Kept the color in his hair right up to the day he died."

"He took a wife on the Danube," Yashim added.

"That's right, he did." He looked up. "You are better at this than me, efendi."

"Go on." It was like a melody heard across the water, fugitive and incomplete. Yashim had heard it before, but he wanted to hear it again.

"A girl from the Danube," Spyro said. "Fevzi was her boy. Fevzi as he was, efendi."

"That's all right."

"Nice-looking lad. Popular on the boats." He paused. "After what happened, I suppose that's what kept him together. His old father wouldn't let him work, so he found a job with some army man. New Troop."

Yashim almost missed it. "After-what? What happened?"

Spyro glanced apologetically at the brush in his hand. "Forgive me, efendi. I like to work fast-you need to lay off the paint quickly, or it dries and streaks the finish. It's the only time I'm anxious in a year, when she's out of the water, like this."

"Please, go ahead."

Spyro dipped the brush and added another streak to the strippeddown hull. Yashim could just see the top of his head. "There were two of them, efendi," he muttered. "Fevzi, and the little girl. Gul, her name was. Fevzi's little sister. Oh, she was a bright one! She and her dad, she'd make him laugh. Ride about in his caique and pretend she was the valide sultan, do this, do that. Fevzi was popular but Gul stole the whole village, believe me. Two long plaits down her back, and her only ten or so when ... when ..."

The top of his head disappeared.

"Ach, what a shame. Still chokes me up, efendi, after all those years. She doted on her dad, and on her big brother, too. That's what did it. Fevzi's practicing his strokes, you see? Every evening, when his father's home, Fevzi takes the caique out and learns to pull. Little Gul, begging for a ride. But they wouldn't let her go, see? She was only a little girl."

He stood up and waved his brush. "So one evening, the lad lets her come. She wants to go up the strait-gives her orders like an empress. There's a bit of a current above Rumeli Hisar, nasty rip. The boy knew about that, kept well out, he said, but-well. They bring the barges from Varna down, mostly timber, twenty tons, four on a line. You've got to steer clear of those because they can't maneuver much. Maybe the poor lad took his eye off the water for a moment. Panicked, steered into the rip.

"I remember coming home that night, seeing the boats out on the water, all lit up. Must have been twenty, thirty, or more. Every boat in the village. They were looking for little Gul."