Kamil Pasha: The Sultan's Seal Part 1

The Sultan's Seal.

Jenny White.

"The purpose of the wine is that the cask be pure inside."

Our men of learning cannot plumb the sense these words convey.

-BKI.

Men string their cords of tears to either end of postures bent with care; From these they shoot the shafts of hope, unmindful of what made the bows.

-HAYALI.

1.

Dark Eyes.

A dozen lamps flicker across the water, moving up the strait in silence, the oarsmen invisible. A dry scuffling noise drifts from sh.o.r.e, the breeze too indolent to carry it very far. Wild dogs bark and crash through the bushes. There are snarls, a short yelp, then silence again.

As the boats cross the light of the full moon spilled across the Bosphorus, the fishermen take their places, actors on a luminous stage. In the stern of each boat a man rows, the other stands, holding a conical net attached to a pole. Attracted to the light of the oil lamps hanging from the bows, zargana fish crowd the surface. In a single motion the fishermen slip their nets through the black liquid, then raise them high above their heads. The sound of nets breaking the skin of water is so soft that it cannot be heard from sh.o.r.e.

There is a splash. The closest fisherman to land turns his head and listens, but hears nothing more. He casts his eye over the rocks and trees bleached by moonlight, what is beneath or behind them lost in shadow. He notices a circle of ripples moving outward from the sh.o.r.e and frowns, then points and mutters something to his brother, who is rowing. The other man shrugs and applies himself to the oars. It is so quiet that the fisherman imagines he can hear the scrabble of crabs across the stone point at nearby Albanian Village, where the current is so fierce that the crabs cannot proceed up the strait through the water. Centuries of crabs taking this shortcut have worn a path through the stone. Just an animal, he thinks, and tries to banish from his mind the stories he has heard about djinns and demons abroad in the night.

KAMIL PASHA GROPES on the bedside table for a match to light the lamp. He is magistrate for Istanbul's Beyoglu Lower Court that includes Pera, where the Europeans have their emba.s.sies and business houses, and Galata, the crowded Jewish quarter below Pera, a warren of narrow streets that wind and coil down the steep hill to the waters of the Bosphorus and its inlet, the Golden Horn. The pounding on his door has given way to loud voices in the entry hall. Just then, his manservant Yakup enters with a lit lamp in hand. Enormous shadows sail across the high ceiling.

"My apologies for waking you, bey. The headman of Middle Village says he has come on an urgent matter. He insists on speaking directly to you."

Squinting against the light, Kamil pushes back the satin quilt and stands. His foot slides on the magazine that has slipped off his bed. Sleep finds Kamil only when he loses himself in reading, in this case in the Gardener's Chronicle and Agricultural Gazette, several years out of date. It is now June in the Rumi year 1302, or 1886 by the Christian calendar. He had fallen asleep over the German botanist H. G. Reichenbach's recla.s.sification of Acineta hrubyana, a many-flowered orchid recently discovered in South America with stiff, unarticulated brown lips. Kamil has slept uneasily. In his dreams, an undertow of small, leather-skinned men, faceless, agile, pulled him down. Yakup, ever vigilant as are all residents of the wooden houses of Istanbul, must have come in and extinguished the oil lamp.

Kamil splashes water on his face from the basin on the marble washstand to dispel the numbing hollowness he always feels in those gray moments between waking and the first soothing intricacies of his daily routine-shaving, wrapping his fingers around the calm heat of a steaming gla.s.s of tea, turning the pages of the newspaper. The mirror shows a lean, tired face, thin lips pressed in a grim line beneath his mustache, eyes obscured by unruly black hair. A single bolt of gray arcs above his left brow. He quickly rubs pomade in his wet hands and slicks down his hair, which springs up again immediately. With an exasperated sigh, he turns to Yakup, who is holding out his trousers. Yakup is a thin, dour man in his thirties with high cheekbones and a long face. He waits with the preoccupied look of a lifelong servant no longer concerned with the formalities of rank, but simply intent on his task.

"I wonder what has happened," Kamil mutters. Believing himself to be a man of even temperament, he is wary of the surfeit of emotion that would cause someone to pound on his door in the middle of the night.

Yakup helps him into a white s.h.i.+rt, stambouline frock coat, and yellow kid boots, intricately tooled. Made by a master bootmaker in Aleppo according to a method pa.s.sed only from father to son, they are as soft as the skin at a woman's wrist, but indestructible and impervious to both knife and water. Etched in the leather inside the shaft is a grid of tiny talismanic symbols that call on powers beyond those of the bootmaker to strengthen the wearer. Kamil is a tall man, slim and well muscled, but his slightly rounded shoulders and upward-tilting chin convey the impression that he is bending forward to inquire about something, a man lost in thought, bowed over old ma.n.u.scripts. When he looks up, his moss green eyes contradict this otherworldliness with their force and clarity. He is a man who controls his environment by comprehending it. As a result, he is uninterested in things beyond his control and exasperated by that beyond his comprehension. Fate belongs in the first category. Family, friends, women inhabit the second. His hands are in constant motion, fingertips slipping over a short string of amber beads he keeps in his right-hand pocket. The amber feels warm, alive to his touch; he senses a pulse, his own, magnified. The fingers of his father and grandfather before him have worn tiny flat planes into the surface of the beads. When his fingers encounter these platforms, Kamil feels part of a mortal chain that settles him in his own time and place. It explains nothing, but it imparts a sense of peace.

He lives frugally, with a minimum of servants, in a small, ocher-colored wood-frame villa that he inherited from his mother. The house is set within a garden, shaded by old umbrella pines, cypress, and mulberry trees, on the Bosphorus sh.o.r.e above Bes.h.i.+ktash. The house had been part of his mother's dowry. She spent her last years there with her two children, preferring the quiet waterfront community, where everyone knew her and had known her parents and grandparents, to the palatial mansion on a hill overlooking the Golden Horn from which his father, Alp Pasha, minister of gendarmes, had governed the province of Istanbul.

Kamil kept the boatman who for years had ferried his father on weekends to his wife's villa. Every morning, Bedri the boatman's knotted arms row Kamil down the strait to the Tophane quay, where a phaeton waits to carry him up the steep hill to the courthouse on the Grande Rue de Pera. On days when his docket is light, Kamil walks from the quay instead, delighted to be outdoors. After his mother died, Kamil had a small winter garden added to the back of the house. As magistrate, he has less time now for botanical expeditions that require weeks of travel, so he tends and studies the orchids he has gathered at his home from many corners of the empire.

Taking a deep breath, Kamil strides down the wide staircase to the entry hall. Waiting impatiently inside the circle of lamps held by Kamil's servants is a short, red-faced man in traditional baggy trousers, his vest askew and one end of his c.u.mmerbund coming undone. His red felt cap is wound in a striped cloth. He s.h.i.+fts his weight restlessly from one st.u.r.dy leg to the other. Upon seeing Kamil, he bows deeply, touching the fingers of his right hand against his lips and then his forehead, in a sign of respect. Kamil wonders what has happened to agitate the headman to such an extent. A murder would have been brought to the attention of the district police first, not to the magistrate at his home in the middle of the night.

"Peace upon you. What brings you here at this early hour?"

"Upon you be peace, Pasha bey," the headman stutters, his round face reddening further. "I am Ibrahim, headman of Middle Village. Please excuse my intrusion, but a matter has come up in my district that I think you must be told about."

He pauses, his eyes darting into the shadows behind the lamps. Kamil signals to the servants to leave the lamps and withdraw.

"What is it?"

"Efendi, we found a body in the water by the Middle Village mosque."

"Who found it?"

"The garbage scavengers." These semiofficial collectors begin just before dawn to gather the refuse washed up overnight on the sh.o.r.es and streets of the city. After extracting useful items for themselves, they load the rest onto barges to be dumped into the Sea of Marmara, where the current disperses it.

Kamil turns his head toward the sitting room door and the window beyond. A thin wash of light silhouettes the trees in his garden. He sighs and turns back to the headman.

"Why not report this to the police chief of your district?"

Kamil shares jurisdiction with two other magistrates for the European side of the Bosphorus all the way from the grand mosques and covered markets in the south, where the strait loses itself in the Sea of Marmara, to the frieze of villages and stately summer villas extending along its wooded hills north to the Black Sea. Middle Village is little more than half an hour's ride north of Kamil's villa.

"Because it is a woman, bey," the headman stutters.

"A woman?"

"A foreign woman, bey. We believe Frankish."

A European woman. Kamil feels a chill of apprehension. "How do you know she is Frankish?"

"She has a gold cross on a chain around her neck."

Kamil snaps impatiently, "She could just as easily be one of our Christian subjects."

The headman looks at the marble-tiled floor. "She has yellow hair. And a heavy gold bracelet. And something else...."

Kamil sighs. "Why do I have to drag everything out of you? Can't you simply tell me everything you saw?"

The headman looks up helplessly. "A pendant, bey, that opens like a walnut." He cups his hands together, then parts them. "Inside one sh.e.l.l is the tughra of the padishah, may Allah support and protect him." He reaches one cupped hand forward, then the other. "Inside the other are odd characters. We thought it might be Frankish writing."

Kamil frowns. He can't think of any explanation for the sultan's personal signature to be on a piece of jewelry around the neck of a woman outside the sultan's household, much less one with European writing. It makes no sense. The tughra, the sultan's seal, is affixed on special possessions of the imperial household and onto official doc.u.ments by a special workshop on the palace grounds. The tughranvis, royal scribes charged with creating the intricate and elegant calligraphic design of the royal name, and the royal engravers are never allowed to leave the palace for fear that they could be kidnapped and forced to affix the signature to counterfeit items. Since the empire is so large and such forgeries might go unnoticed, the only solution is to keep the sultan's "hands" close by his sleeves. Kamil has heard that these scribes carry a fast-acting poison on their person as a further precaution. Only three people hold the royal seal used for doc.u.ments: the sultan himself, the grand vizier, and the head of the harem household, a trusted old woman who grew up in the palace. Royal objects made of gold, silver, and other valuable materials are engraved with the tughra only on their orders.

The headman's roughened fingers clasp and unclasp as he waits before Kamil, head bowed, eyes s.h.i.+fting anxiously across the marble floor. Noticing his increased agitation, Kamil realizes the headman thinks Kamil blames him for awakening him. He eases the frown from his face. Kamil remembers that even law-abiding citizens have reason to fear the power of the police and courts. The headman is also a craftsman responsible to his guild master for his behavior and afraid of bringing official wrath down on his fellows. He probably brought the matter to the magistrate's attention instead of the Middle Village police because of the gold found on the body. The local police might have stripped the body of valuables as efficiently as the garbage scavengers and he might be held responsible. But the sultan's seal and the fact that the woman might be European also indicated that the matter would fall under Kamil's jurisdiction of Pera. While the sultan had given foreigners and non-Muslim minorities of Pera the right to administer their own district and to judge cases related to personal matters, like inheritance and divorce, the population still relied on the palace for protection and the state courts for justice in other matters.

"You did well bringing this to my attention immediately."

The headman's face relaxes and he bows low. "Long life to the padishah. May Allah protect him."

Kamil signals to Yakup, standing just outside the hall door. "Ready a horse and send messengers to Michel Efendi and the police chief responsible for Middle Village district. Ask them to meet me at the mosque and to keep away idlers until I arrive, especially the garbage scavengers. They'll pick her clean. I want to see that pendant. The police are to make sure nothing is disturbed." He adds in a low voice so that the headman does not hear, "And the chief is to make sure the police disturb nothing."

"I sent a messenger to the local police, bey, and told my two sons to stay with the body until I returned."

This headman has healthy ears, Kamil notes.

"You are to be commended, Headman Ibrahim. I will make sure the proper officials are notified of your diligence and desire to please the state." He will ask his a.s.sistant to send a commendation to the headman's guild boss.

"I rode here on a neighbor's horse, Pasha bey, so I can show you the way."

THE VILLAGERS HAVE pulled the body out of the water and onto the quay and covered it with a worn sheet. Kamil pulls back the cloth, looking at the face first, out of respect and a certain reluctance. In the year since he was appointed magistrate, most of his cases have involved theft or violence, few death. Her hair is short, an unusual style, pale and fine as undyed silk. Strands of it cradle her face. A cool breeze strokes his neck, but he can feel the heat crouching in the air. Already he is sweating. After a few moments, he pulls the sheet away slowly, exposing her naked skin to the sky and the burning eyes of the men around her. The sharp ammonia stench of human excrement from the rocks at the base of the quay makes him jerk his nose away and step sideways toward the corpse's legs.

He can no longer avoid looking at her body. She is short and slender, like a boy, with small b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Her skin is stark white, except for a dark triangle at her pubis. Crabs have begun their work on her fingers and toes. She wears no rings, but a heavy gold bracelet weighs down her left wrist. The currents have cooled her body, so it has not yet begun to change into a corpse; it is still a dead woman. Later, she will become a case, an intellectual puzzle. But now he feels only pity and the shapeless anxiety death always awakens in his body. She is not pretty in the accepted sense; her face is too long and narrow, her features too sharp, with wide, thick lips. Perhaps the face in motion might have been attractive, he muses. But now her face has the cool, dispa.s.sionate remove of death, the muscles neither relaxed nor engaged in emotion, her skin an empty tent stretched over her bones.

A gold cross hangs from a short chain around her neck. It is remarkable that the cross has not come off during the body's tumultuous ride through the currents, he thinks. Perhaps the body has not come far.

He bends closer to examine the necklace. The cross is wide and showy, of beaten gold, decorated with etched roses whose outlines have been filled in with red enamel, now cracked. The metal is twisted where the chain pa.s.ses through, as if it had snagged on something or someone had tried to pull it off. He lifts the cross with the tip of his finger. Hidden beneath it, in the deep hollow of the woman's throat, is a round silver pendant, simple but beautifully designed. A thin line bisects it.

He leans closer to the dead woman's neck. A damp, mineral cold seems to rise from the body, or perhaps it is his own face that has become clammy. He looks up into the glare of the strait to steel himself. Drawing a deep breath, he returns his attention to the pendant. He inserts his thumbnail and pries the halves apart, angles them so that they catch the morning sun, and peers inside. A tiny recessed lock that had held the halves together is broken. The inner surface is engraved with a tughra on the top half and, on the bottom, strange markings-as if a child had tried to draw a picture using only short, straight lines-unlike any European language he has seen.

He lets the cross and pendant fall back onto the woman's neck and turns over her wrist to examine the bracelet. It too is unusual; as wide as his hand, it is woven of thin filaments of red and white gold in a checkerboard pattern. The bracelet fits tightly around her wrist, held in place by a slim metal post inserted into interlaced channels.

The crowd of locals jostling to see has increased; it is time to move. He gestures to one of the policemen.

"Cover the body and bring it to the hamam."

The policeman bows, pressing his fist solemnly against his forehead, then against his heart.

Kamil looks around for the headman, who is standing proudly in a knot of local men, answering questions. The two strapping young men flanking him must be his sons, he thinks with a twinge of regret. Kamil has not married, despite his parents' and now his sister Feride's introductions to any number of suitable young women from good families. He would love to have a grown son or daughter, but the emotional messiness and demands on his time he imagines would be made by a wife and young children repel him.

"Where was the body found?"

The headman leads him down a short flight of steps to a narrow rocky cove behind the mosque. The rococo mosque stands on the tip of a spit of rock that stretches out into the Bosphorus like a hook, making a natural barrier. It looks like an ornate wedding cake of white marble on an outstretched hand. On its southern side is a small open square where men come to sit and drink tea under the plane trees, watching the fishermen make their boats ready and mend their nets.

Kamil picks his way, stepping carefully to avoid the night's effluvium. He squats at the water's edge. Opaque in the early light, it sloshes heavily against the rocks as if weary.

"This is where they found her. There's a whirlpool that washes things up. My sons are fishermen and were in the square cleaning their boat when they heard a commotion. They ran over and stopped the scavengers from taking the bracelet."

"Your sons are admirable young men, Ibrahim Efendi."

The headman bows his head, suppressing a smile. "Thank you. I'm proud of my sons."

"Did the scavengers take anything else?"

"Not that I know of."

"I'd like to speak with your sons."

Kamil questions them. The younger boy, his mustache still only a soft shadow above his lip, answers so earnestly that his words pile up one on another and the magistrate is forced to ask him to repeat. The body had been caught on a rocky protrusion and the young men happened upon the scavengers just as they finished pulling it onto the sh.o.r.e. They had called their fellow fishermen over and together they kept the scavengers from looting the body while the younger brother ran to fetch his father. The men had no idea who the woman was. This did not surprise Kamil, since the only women whose faces these men were likely to have seen were their own relations or women of easy virtue. While the Christian and Jewish subjects of the sultan did not always veil their faces, they were nevertheless modest and did not display themselves to strangers in the streets unnecessarily. Kamil sends the eager young man to find the village midwife. He will need her help to examine the body. From his elder brother, Kamil learns that the fishermen had heard strange noises coming from sh.o.r.e the night before, the barking of wild dogs and a splash.

The men place the body on a board that only moments before had carried loaves bound for the bakery ovens, drape it with the sheet, and carry it up a narrow dirt alley between the overhanging roofs of wooden houses. Their feet stir up white puffs as they pa.s.s. Soon the householders will emerge for their morning ch.o.r.es and sprinkle water on the streets to lay the dust. Pigeons and doves murmur behind the high garden walls.

The hamam is a square stone building topped by a large round dome. Since it is early, the fires that heat the pipes under the floor have not yet been stoked, and water does not yet flow into the basins set into the wall around the room. The gray marble rooms are cool and dry. The men file through a series of small echoing antechambers until they reach the large central room beneath the dome. When the hamam is in use, bathers soak in this room in cascades of hot water br.i.m.m.i.n.g from marble basins in a haze of steam. Kamil directs the men to lay the body on the marble belly stone, the round, raised ma.s.sage platform dominating the center of the room, and to light the lamps.

"Good morning." Michel Sevy, the police surgeon, appears behind Kamil, startling him.

"I didn't expect you so soon."

Kamil had requested the young Jewish surgeon's a.s.sistance on this case, as on others, not just for his medical knowledge, but for his skill in doc.u.menting the telling details of a crime scene in his notes and sketches. Still, Kamil finds Michel's habit of appearing at his elbow, seemingly out of nowhere, vaguely disquieting, as though it were not in his power to command Michel. Rather, the surgeon arrives as a djinn might, stealthily and unpredictably.

"You must have galloped the entire way from Galata," observes Kamil dryly. Michel's heavyset face and thick neck are red from exertion. His hair and mustache are the color of wet sand and his large, doleful eyes an indeterminate hazel. They roam the room slowly as he takes off his outer robe and hands it to the policeman by the door.

Kamil reflects that Michel reminds him of the brown spiders in the northeast mountains. The spiders were the size of a fist, but their coloring perfectly camouflaged them in the low, sere brush, so that travelers did not see them until they were underfoot. They were fast and, when they ran, let out high-pitched squeals, like babies. He had seen a man die after being surprised and bitten by such a spider. Usually, Michel's penchant for colorful dress draws attention to him that his person does not, but when pursuing criminals into their neighborhood dens, Kamil has seen Michel in dun-colored pants and robe that render him all but invisible.

Today Michel is wearing baggy blue shalwar trousers under a red-striped robe held in place by a wide belt of yellow cloth. His black leather shoes make no sound as he walks across the marble floor toward the belly stone. He moves with the careful deliberation of a wrestler.

"I was curious. The messenger gave me only half a story. Something about a drowned foreign princess."

His smile fades as he looks down at the dead woman.

"Besides," he continues, looking more serious, "this is partly a Jewish neighborhood, so I thought I could be of some a.s.sistance."

Despite Michel's abruptness, Kamil appreciates his direct answers, so different from the usual polite circ.u.mlocutions with which conversations are initiated. He finds that people often are afraid to tell him what they know, in case they are wrong. They also are afraid to say that they don't know something. His teachers at Cambridge University, where he had studied law and criminal procedure for a year, a.s.sumed that when questioned, a person would answer with either truth or falsehood. They had no concept of Oriental politeness that avoids the shame of ignorance and s.h.i.+es away from the brutal directness of truth, and that encourages invention and circ.u.mlocution as the highest markers of ethical behavior.

Accuracy in a subordinate means sacrificing the buffer of respectful indirectness and obfuscation of problems that would have spared his superior from worry. But Kamil, laboring since his youth under the heavy mantle of his father's status, is only too happy to shrug it off.

"I HAVE the tools."

Michel pulls a leather-wrapped kit from his belt and places it on the belly stone, at the head of the corpse. He takes a folder of thick blank paper from a saddlebag, and a narrow lacquered box from which he extracts a pen and several sticks of fine charcoal.

"Ready."

"We'll wait for the midwife. In the meantime, go to the street and see what you can learn. Was anyone traveling last night or out on a boat and did they see or hear anything? The fishermen mentioned barking dogs. Did anyone notice an unknown woman in the vicinity? Also, send two policemen along the sh.o.r.e north of here. Her clothes are missing and there may be some signs of a struggle. Perhaps someone heard something in one of the other villages near the sh.o.r.e. Have them check in the coffeehouses. That's always the best way to learn anything. On your way out, clear the room of onlookers. Have them leave the lamps."

Michel does as he is told and then is gone, leaving the door ajar.

A few moments later a woman in a frayed cloak appears in the doorway just inside the circle of light. Her head and shoulders are draped in a brown shawl. Slipping off her outer shoes, she pads softly across the marble on leather socks. She removes her cloak and shawl with swift, practiced motions, folds them neatly, and drapes them over a nearby basin. Underneath, she wears a striped robe over wide trousers and a kerchief tied around her graying hair.

"Are you the midwife of Middle Village?"

"Yes, my name is Amalia." She averts her face modestly, but alert eyes sweep the room. Seeing the body on the marble slab, she comes forward.

"Poor woman." She smoothes the hair gently away from the dead woman's face.

"Is this as she was found?" She moves to the body and begins examining it. She is used to being in command of a situation and seems oblivious that she is sharing this activity with a magistrate.

"Yes. We need to know if she has been tampered with and anything else you can tell us. I will wait over here."

He withdraws to the outer shadows and waits at a discreet distance, but where he can still see what she is doing.

The midwife's practiced hands probe the body of the dead woman.

"A woman in her twenties, I would say. Not a virgin. She has not previously given birth; there are no signs of stretching."