The Winter Thief (23 page)

T
HE CART ARRIVED, PILED HIGH
with supplies for the renovation of Huseyin Pasha’s mansion. The workmen hauled in ladders, several large crates of building materials, and containers of plaster and powders from which the paints would be mixed. One of these crates was carried directly into a windowless back room. It was furnished with a bed, comfortable chairs, a couch, and a large table. Still-life paintings adorned the walls. A pleasant fire crackled in the grate as the men gently deposited the box on the table.

They cut through the ropes and pulled off the perforated lid. Feride looked down into her husband’s eyes, which winked at her before roaming the room. He was swathed in bandages, now none too clean. She reached down to clasp his hand, but realized that she had no idea where he had been burned. Instead she pressed her fingertip to her lips, then to his. She leaned over to say something, but the words stuck in her throat. Against her will, she visualized the man before her touching another woman. Unable to speak the terms of endearment that filled her mouth, she stepped away from the table and called, “Doctor?”

Doctor Moreno limped over using a cane, his leg not yet completely healed.

“He’s here.” Her voice was tipsy with joy. How odd, Feride noted, that her love for her husband could flow through a side channel but not fill its proper bed. Is this how marriages die? she wondered. Dams shunt the natural flow of feelings into ever-smaller conduits until one day the river dries up completely. She remembered how before his death her father had become more and more indifferent to his granddaughters, to all his loved ones, as if life already had evaporated, replaced by the opium that gave him the dream of being alive but excluded everyone else.

One of the workmen set Doctor Moreno’s case on the table. Then he and the others, who, like all the supposed workmen, were Yorg Pasha’s guards, set to work dismantling the box in which Huseyin rested. Only a handful of servants would share the knowledge that their master had returned and was recuperating in this out-of-the-way room. The rest had been told that Huseyin Pasha was still missing.

A steaming cauldron of water, bowls, and sponges were brought in. The workmen left, and Feride and Doctor Moreno began to peel off the bandages and clean Huseyin’s wounds.

Feride sponged gently at her husband’s ruined body, careful not to disturb the scabs. The touch of his skin and the compassion she felt at his helplessness summoned a sadness so desolate that she put the sponge down and went to straighten the coverlet on the bed.

Doctor Moreno watched her but said nothing.

After a while, Feride returned to her task. She was dabbing Huseyin’s shoulder with a sponge and trying to avoid looking at his face when she noticed tears running down it. He was looking at her intently, the question clear in his eyes. Dropping the sponge, Feride ran from the room.

O
MAR’S ADOPTED SON,
A
VI
, followed him down the narrow streets, stepping carefully so as not to jostle the basket he carried on his back. Avi had insisted on carrying it, even though Omar and his wife, Mimoza, had been reluctant to burden the boy. They had given in when Avi knelt in front of the basket, slipped his arms backward through the straps, and swung it up onto his back like a seasoned professional. Omar and Mimoza had exchanged a glance. They had forgotten that before he joined their family the previous year, Avi had made a living on the street. He was a bit taller now and well fed, although still skinny. He carried the basket as if it were filled with air instead of tins of food, Mimoza’s spinach börek, and two sealed clay jugs of water.

Omar stopped in front of Bekiraga Prison, careful not to step in the foul puddles on the pavement, lifted the iron knocker, and let it fall. A grill opened and a guard peered out. Omar identified himself and the gate swung open.

The warden came running down the path toward them, arms outstretched. “Omar, my dear friend.”

“Abdulkadir, you pimp, you get younger every year. Tell me your secret.”

The warden chuckled. “Come to my office.”

When they reached the whitewashed one-room house set inside a miniature garden, Omar told Avi to set the basket down near the door. “This is Avi,” he told the warden, “my son.”

“Ah, ah,” the warden cooed, “Allah be praised.” He coughed violently and spit into the dusty geraniums at the side of the house.

Omar rummaged inside the basket and pulled out a clay container sealed with wax. “My wife made up an ointment for your cough. She knows about herbal remedies. Let me see, what were her instructions?” He passed a beefy hand over his mustache. “I don’t remember.”

“I remember,” Avi said in a shy voice.

Omar and the warden grinned at each other, then at the boy. “Out with it then,” Omar said, not disguising his pride.

“You rub it on your chest at night before you go to sleep and put a warm, wet towel on it. She also said to smear some below your nostrils.”

Omar gave the clay pot to the warden, who peeled off the wax, sniffed it, and recoiled. “Allah protect us, if I smeared this on a prisoner, he’d confess immediately.” They laughed.

“She also sent this.” Omar gave him a paper-wrapped packet of fragrant börek, still warm from the oven.

“Bless her hands. You’re the luckiest man in the world, brother. It’s a wonder you’re not fatter than you are.”

Omar patted his not insubstantial paunch. “Shall we try them?”

The warden looked horrified. “You mean you want to eat some of my precious börek?” he cried out. “You’d tear the last scraps of food from the hands of a man dying of hunger?”

Avi looked confused and stepped behind the basket.

“I’ll make you a deal,” Omar said. They played this game every time he came. “If you let me see the prisoner, I’ll let you have all the börek.” He winked at Avi.

“You drive a hard bargain, but since you’re an old friend, why not?” He called one of the guards over. “You’ll see, I’ve moved him to one of our best cells, as you requested. That was a terrible trick to play on a man of such quality, ordering him to be put next to the cesspool. I didn’t think that was right. I hope you give me credit me for that. If I had known he was a friend of yours, I would have put him in a different wing right off.”

Omar said nothing. He was furious at the way Kamil had been treated. A small satchel of coins inside the packet of börek ensured that Kamil was comfortable. Omar knew that was the way the jail worked, but he found it hard to keep up the light banter when he wanted to stuff the avaricious warden’s mouth with coins until he choked or released Kamil from this hellhole. He knew that Yorg Pasha was working assiduously behind the scenes to get Kamil out.

Omar followed the guard down the path, Avi trotting behind them with the basket.

“Come back afterward and we’ll have tea,” the warden called out.

Kamil’s manservant, Yakup, had paid a large bribe to move him to a well-ventilated cell in a different wing and over the past two days had brought him supplies and meals, but without Omar’s intervention with the warden, he wasn’t sure what kind of treatment Kamil would receive in the prison. The warden might have been emboldened by the vizier’s signature on the warrant to play cat to Kamil’s mouse, despite Yakup’s bribe, but Omar had a well-earned reputation for retribution if he was crossed. Omar was certain that the corrupt, luxury-loving warden would never wager his hide.

The guard turned the key and the door creaked open. Kamil looked up from the book he was reading by the faint light from a high window. The air was damp and smelled of mold, but the cell was in the part of the prison farthest from the cesspool. Kamil sat in a cushioned chair, a thick-piled carpet beneath his feet. A mangal brazier heated the cell but did nothing against the cold draft from the window, which had no glass. Kamil was wrapped in a fur cape, a rug draped across his lap, and wore his kalpak. Yakup had shaved him that morning, so the only difference in Kamil’s appearance was the hard edge about his jaw and the black circles under his eyes.

“What news, Omar?” Kamil gestured to a pile of quilts stacked on the floor that he unrolled at night to use as a bed, the only other place to sit in the small room, no more than five paces across.

Avi set the basket down and squatted beside the door, shivering now that he was no longer exerting himself. Kamil took the soft rug from his lap and handed it to Omar, with a glance at Avi. Omar wrapped the boy in it. Then he took the containers out of the basket and stacked them on a low shelf next to some other covered pots. “I know you have food,” Omar explained, “but the wife insisted.” Placing his bulk between Kamil and the shelf, he lifted one of the lids of the containers Yakup had brought. Just as he feared, the food had been barely touched.

Omar sat down on the pile of quilts, sagging uncomfortably into the soft bundle. “I’d ask what you’re reading, but it would be way above my head, so don’t tell me.”

Kamil’s smile was forced. “Any news?”

“Your brother-in-law’s back home. The house is full of Yorg Pasha’s men, so I suppose it’ll be fine.” He looked unconvinced.

Kamil flung the book to the floor. “In Allah’s name, what is this pestilence, and why has it infected my life, my work, and my family?”

“What can you do? You spit downward, it lands in your beard; you spit upward, it hits your mustache.”

“That’s very fatalistic of you, Omar,” Kamil commented, unamused. “Surely you have a better idea.”

Omar showed a sharklike expanse of tobacco-stained teeth. “I swear to you Vahid will regret he was ever born.”

W
HEN
O
MAR
had gone, Kamil picked up his book, volume two of H. G. Reichenbach’s
Xenia Orchidacea: Beiträge zur Kenntniss der Orchideen
. Kamil’s German was rudimentary, but each orchid also was introduced by a description in Latin, the common language by which science ordered the chaotic munificence of life. The effort to understand the text made the time pass and gave Kamil the feeling that although his body was imprisoned, his mind was not. “
Sepala oblonga akuta
,” he read, “
intus pallide orchracea, extus flavida maculis quibusdam
…
”
He shut the book and dropped it to the floor.

There was no point to trying to forget that he was in prison. For the worst crimes, someone of his status would be executed or exiled, but never locked up in a stinking hole like this. It had certainly opened Kamil’s mind to what it meant when criminals were sentenced to prison. Perhaps the judge should allow them the choice of execution, he thought sardonically. The vizier was shaming him by punishing him with the lowest criminals. Kamil understood his motive, but he also sensed Vahid’s hand behind this penance.

Kamil began to cough, a harsh, wet rasp that worried him. He had asked the warden to put glass in the window, but this request had been refused despite another large bribe. Yakup had fashioned a thick curtain that Kamil could draw at night, but the guard had torn it down and made off with it, claiming it was against regulations. More likely, he wanted to steal the woolen cloth. Bribes, Kamil had learned, did not automatically lead to services.

T
WO DAYS AFTER
Apollo’s arrival, twenty men gathered in the rectory after midnight. They conversed in hushed voices for several hours, then slipped out into the dark. Apollo tiptoed into Vera’s room and sat beside her on the bed. He held her hand and leaned in. “I’m leaving, Vreni. Don’t worry. I’ll be back. Can you be ready to go in three days?”

Apollo’s mellifluous voice seemed to her an oboe, his words a symphony. She hung suspended from the sounds until Apollo shook her shoulder.

“Wake up, Vreni, and listen to me. This is serious. In three days I’ll come and get you. By then you’ll need to have packed warm clothes for the east. Get some boots. Marta will help you.” He leaned closer.

He smelled like cloves.

“Are you listening?”

Vera sat up, clutching the cover about her, and brushed her hair from her eyes. “Of course I am.”

“Don’t mention this to anyone else. Father Zadian doesn’t approve of your coming along with us.”

“I’ll be ready.” Impulsively, lured by the scent of cloves and the sound of oboes, Vera leaned forward and kissed Apollo on the mouth. He didn’t pull back but let their faces linger so that first their lips, then their cheeks touched.

“Farewell, Vreni.”

She couldn’t fall asleep for a long while. When she did, she dreamed of the east. She was running through a barren landscape, falling to her knees, rising again, trying to outpace the creature chasing her. She could feel its foul breath on her heels, then the back of her legs. Her lungs were bursting. She tripped and fell headlong, her pursuer lunged, and then her breath was burned away as she was taken. She woke up screaming.

W
HEN
M
ARTA
and Vera returned home from shopping two days later, they could see from the lane that something was wrong. The rectory gate hung askew and four unknown horses were tied to the fence. The streets were abnormally quiet. The boy they had hired to carry the basket of groceries bent over and dumped its contents on the ground and then ran away.

“They’re looking for you,” Marta whispered. “Hide in there.” She pushed Vera into the neighbor’s stable.

Shaken, Vera cowered among the bales of hay. Banging and loud voices came from next door. She heard Father Zadian say, “I will complain to the kadi about your desecration.” Vera was so relieved that he was unharmed that she almost didn’t hear the response.

“This isn’t a church. You’re not sacred, and neither is your house.”

Vera shrank back against the wall of the stable and scrabbled frantically to pull a bale of hay over herself. She recognized Vahid’s voice. Panicking, she slipped through the stable door and ran.