Chapter 16: Eyes in the Crowd

Chapter 16: Chapter 16: Eyes in the Crowd

I

Constantinople, Emin?nü — 3 September 1903

Ayaan began the morning after the salute by doing nothing at all.

He sold lentils and nibs, he made change, and he answered every customer in the same plain voice. All the while he studied the lane, from the fountain at the corner to the steps of the ferry landing.

A market is a place where everyone is watched. Neighbors watch for debts, creditors watch for failures, and wives watch for the husbands who are late from the coffee house.

So he did not look for eyes. He looked for people whose reasons for being there were a little too good.

By noon he had found four.

The first was the simit seller, a thin man with a tray on his head who passed the shop every twenty minutes. He called his wares in the proper singsong, and he sold almost nothing.

Three rings in two hours. Ayaan counted them from behind the counter. And the tray is always full.

The second was a water carrier who stopped at the plane tree each time the simit seller went by. He filled no cups, and no one asked him to.

The third was a porter who sat on the same stone step with a coil of rope across his knees. In two days he had not lifted a single load, and he rose each time Ayaan crossed the lane.

The fourth was a clerk on the bench outside the money-changer’s, who read the same newspaper from morning until evening. A man reads one page in a quarter of an hour, and this one had not turned it since Tuesday.

Ayaan wrote none of it down. He kept it in his memory, where it was safe, and he went on selling.

That evening he told Zeynep, and she listened with her chin resting on her hand.

"I have seen the porter," she said. "I thought that he was ill."

"He is not ill."

"And the clerk?"

"The clerk reads very slowly."

She almost laughed, and then she did not.

"Four men," she said. "Who pays four men to watch a stationer’s shelf?"

"Not four." Ayaan shook his head. "Four is the number that I have found. I believe there are more."

"Then who is it?"

Every child in Constantinople knew the word hafiye. It was said low and said often, and it meant a man paid to listen and to write down what he heard for the palace at Y?ld?z.

The hafiyes were many, and most of them were poor. They were paid by the report, and a man who is paid by the report will invent one when he has none.

"A hafiye is noisy," said Ayaan. "He asks too many questions, he writes too much, and by the second month he is known in every coffee house."

"And these?"

"These are quiet. They take turns, and they never ask anything. Someone is paying them to be right, and not to be many."

"The man with the scar."

"Perhaps." He gave her the whole of his doubt, because she would accept nothing less. "It may be the palace. It may be an embassy, or a bank, or a rival of my father’s who has more money than I have guessed."

"Which do you believe?"

"I believe that I do not know yet," said Ayaan. "That is why I must count them before I decide."

Zeynep looked at the shelf where the nibs stood in their rows.

"Then count them," she said. "And I will count the ones that you miss."

II

Constantinople, Rüstem Pa?a — 10 September 1903

His mother waited until his father had gone to wash for the evening prayer. Then she set a spool of red thread on the table between them.

"A woman came to the door today," said Fatma. "She sold thread, and she was very pleasant."

"Did you buy from her, Anne?"

"One spool. I did not need it." She turned it slowly in her fingers. "She asked after you."

Ayaan said nothing, and he waited, as he had learned to do.

"She asked whether my son was the clever one who keeps the counter. She asked whether he had many friends, whether he went out in the evenings, and whether his father’s family came from Constantinople or from elsewhere."

"What did you tell her?"

"That you read too much and eat too little, and that you have one friend, the daughter of Mustafa the importer, with whom you argue." A small smile touched her mouth and faded. "I said that your father’s family had always lived in the city and had always been in debt."

"That was well done."

"It was true. That is what made it well done." She laid the spool down. "She never asked the price of her own thread, Ayaan."

Fatma was not a woman who raised her voice, and she did not raise it now. But her hand lay flat on the table, and the knuckles were pale.

"A woman who sells thread knows that every buyer wishes to bargain, and she waits for it. This one did not wait."

"No."

"Are you in trouble?"

"No, Anne."

"Do not say it quickly. Say it truly."

He took the time to give her the answer that he owed her.

"Someone is curious about me," he said. "I think that it is because the shop has done well, and because I am young. I do not believe that I have done anything wrong."

"That is not the same as being safe."

"No. It is not."

"My mother used to say that a curious stranger is the first sign of trouble. She was a hard woman, but she was seldom mistaken."

"What do you wish me to do?"

"I wish to be told." Her voice softened. "I am your mother, and I notice things. I would rather notice them with you than behind you."

He felt the truth of it, and he was ashamed that he had not thought of it himself.

"I will tell you each week, Anne, as I tell Baba."

"Good." She took up the thread again. "And when the neighbors ask about you, I will say what I said to her. That you are a good boy who reads too much."

"That is exactly what I would wish."

"I know." Fatma looked at him, and for a moment she was not the woman who kept his supper but someone older and more watchful. "Allah protects the careful, my son. Be careful for all of us."

He promised that he would.

Later, in the narrow room where he slept, he lay awake and counted the people who had now been drawn into the matter. His father, his mother, Zeynep, Mustafa Efendi, and a woman with a spool of thread who had gone away with nothing she could use.

The watcher had begun with a shop. He was now approaching a family.

That was a different thing, and Ayaan did not intend to let it continue.

A man may accept being studied himself. He cannot accept it for his mother, who had done nothing but keep a clean house and a patient table for thirteen years.

III

Constantinople, Emin?nü — 19 September 1903

For nine days Ayaan arranged for the lane to talk about him.

He told three small things to three people, and he made each of them a little different. To Salih the barber, whose shop faced the grocer’s and whose tongue was known to the whole street, he mentioned that he would go to the Spice Bazaar on Saturday to look at sealing wax.

To Sabri Usta, who kept the coffee house at the corner, he mentioned that on Monday he would walk to Beyaz?t to see a stationer about ink. To no one at all did he mention the third thing, which was that on Tuesday he would go to Sirkeci unannounced.

It was a poor man’s experiment, and it required nothing but patience.

Each of the three things was harmless, and each was true enough to be believed. If any of them returned to him, he would know by which road it had traveled.

On Saturday he went to the Spice Bazaar with Zeynep, walking slowly under the arches among the stalls of sumac and saffron. He bought nothing.

In the doorway of a seed merchant, pretending to read a folded newspaper, stood the clerk from the bench.

On Monday he walked to Beyaz?t and spoke honestly with the stationer about the price of ink. He returned by the old book market, and he looked behind him at every corner.

No one from the lane was there.

On Tuesday he went to Sirkeci and sat for an hour with Hovsep Agopian over a matter of bindings. When he came out into the street, the porter with the rope was thirty paces behind him, studying the window of a tinsmith with great attention.

He told Zeynep the result that evening, in the storeroom, with the door closed.

"So the barber gives them what is said," she said. "And the porter follows what is not."

"Two channels. The coffee house is clean, and so is Sabri Usta."

"Will you speak to Salih?"

"No."

"He has been selling you."

"He has been selling a barber’s gossip, and I do not know what he was paid for it." Ayaan shook his head. "Salih has seven children and earns less in a month than we take in a good week. He did what a poor man does, and I will not make him pay for it."

Zeynep considered this, and he saw that she was not displeased.

"Then what do you intend?"

"I intend to use him." He opened the blue book on his knee. "A man who repeats whatever I say is a man through whom I may say a great deal that is true and dull."

"You would feed him boredom."

"I would feed him the truth, in the quantity that my father spoke of. The paper that I stock, the prices that I pay, the hours that I keep." He turned a page. "None of it is secret, and all of it will make a very small picture."

"He will see that the picture is small on purpose."

"He will see that it is accurate." He looked up. "I will not pretend to be something that I am not, Zeynep. I will only say less, and every word that I do say will be one that I could repeat before a magistrate."

She was silent for a moment, and then she nodded.

"That is the better method," she said. "A lie must be remembered, and the truth need only be repeated."

He wrote one line in the book, beneath the earlier entry, in the small script that only he could read.

Four watchers, two channels. The barber talks; the porter follows. The source is organized, patient, and well paid.

Then, because honesty required it, he added a second line.

I did not see the porter on Tuesday until I was already at the door. I have been missed more often than I have found.

IV

Constantinople, üsküdar — 26 September 1903

The ferry left Emin?nü a little after noon, crowded with women carrying baskets and men carrying newspapers. Zeynep held a parcel wrapped in brown paper on her lap.

It was a true errand. Her mother had a cousin in üsküdar who needed a length of cloth, and Mustafa Efendi had agreed without question that his daughter might carry it, provided that a sensible boy went with her.

Ayaan had not corrected the description.

Ayaan took the bench nearest the rail and studied the passengers one at a time, as he had studied the lane. There was a widow with a basket of quinces, two students arguing over a book, a sailor asleep with his cap over his eyes, and a bearded man in a gray coat who looked at the water and nothing else.

Any of them might have been paid, and any of them might have been only himself.

They crossed in a brisk wind, and the water was bright and hard with sun. On the far shore, the hills rose in terraces of wooden houses, and the domes of the mosques stood out clearly against a pale sky.

They delivered the cloth first. The cousin gave them sweet pastry and questions about Zeynep’s mother, and Ayaan answered what he was asked and no more.

Then they walked up the hill toward Do?anc?lar, where the old konaks stood behind high garden walls.

"This is the road," said Ayaan quietly. "Hovsep’s carter told me that the paper goes up here."

"He told you this?"

"I asked him which road his cart took on Tuesdays. He thought that it was a boy’s question."

At the top of the road, a tea seller kept a small stall beneath a fig tree. Ayaan bought two glasses, and he sat on the low wall beside it, and he spoke of the weather.

It took a quarter of an hour. At the end of it, the tea seller had told him the name of the retired pasha who lived behind the green gate, which was R?fat Pa?a. He had added that the old man had been a governor in the provinces, that his eyes had failed three winters ago, and that his library was the finest on the hill.

"And the man who keeps it?" asked Ayaan, in the mildest voice that he possessed.

"Cevdet Efendi." The tea seller nodded with approval. "He comes on Tuesdays and Saturdays. He reads to the pasha in the garden, loudly and slowly, because the old man’s ears are failing also. He carries the chair out himself, and he carries it back."

"He sounds a patient man."

"Allah sends few like him." The tea seller gathered the glasses. "The pasha has no sons living. That man is the nearest to one that he has."

They walked back down the hill in silence.

Ayaan thought of a scarred man in a dark coat, lifting a chair into a garden for a blind old pasha, and he knew with complete clarity that the thing was true. There was a library. There was an old man. There were three years of Tuesdays.

It is not a false life.

It is a true one, with a second purpose added, and that is why it cannot be broken.

"Well?" said Zeynep, at the landing.

"The cover is real. Every piece of it that I can touch is real." He drew a slow breath. "I do not know what to make of that."

"Perhaps it means that he is a man who finds it easier to be honest than to lie."

"Perhaps."

The return ferry was nearly empty. They stood at the rail and watched the shore of Constantinople grow larger, and the minarets of the Yeni Cami come clear against the sky.

When the boat touched the quay at Emin?nü, the first person Ayaan saw on the stones was the water carrier.

He was standing beside the plane tree with his jar on his shoulder, an hour before the time at which he usually came. He did not look at them, and he did not look away.

Zeynep saw him a moment later, and her fingers closed on Ayaan’s sleeve.

"They knew," she said, in a whisper. "They knew that we crossed."

"Someone was on the ferry."

"Did you see him?"

"No." It cost him something to say it. "Did you?"

"No."

They walked up the lane side by side, past the barber’s window and the coffee house, and neither of them spoke until they reached the door of the shop.

"I wished to learn how he is built," said Ayaan. "I think that he has learned something of how I am built, and that he has learned it faster."

"Then we are even for one afternoon."

"We are not even." He unlocked the door. "But we are no longer far apart."

V

Constantinople, Emin?nü — 9 October 1903

Cevdet returned on a Friday, after the noon prayer, when the lane had emptied and the shutters of half the street were closed.

The bell rang once. He stepped in and took off his glove, finger by finger, and laid it on the plank.

"Good afternoon, young Hassan."

"Good afternoon, Efendi. Is the library in need of paper?"

"The library is well supplied." The scarred lip rose in its false amusement. "I have come only to pass the time. I find that I have a fondness for this counter."

Ayaan set down the ledger. Zeynep was in the storeroom with the door ajar, and he could hear her not breathing.

He had rehearsed this meeting a dozen ways in the dark. In none of them had the man come alone, and in none of them had he come without a reason.

"You went to üsküdar," said Cevdet.

It was said gently, without accusation, as a man remarks that it has rained.

"I did, Efendi."

"On an errand for Mustafa Efendi."

"On an errand for Mustafa Efendi, and on another of my own." He met the dark eyes directly. "I wished to learn whether the man who bought my paper was what he said that he was."

For the first time, the scarred man hesitated. It was a very small thing, no more than a pause between two breaths.

"And what did you learn?"

"That you read to the pasha on Tuesdays and Saturdays, and that you read loudly because he does not hear well." Ayaan kept his voice level. "That you carry his chair into the garden yourself, and that the tea seller on the hill is fond of you."

"Rüstem, the tea seller, is fond of anyone who tips him." But the voice had changed, and the quiet was a different kind of quiet. "That is a great deal to learn in a quarter of an hour."

"It was a quarter of an hour, Efendi. I was seen to be asking."

"You were." Cevdet drew a stool toward the counter and sat, without being invited. "I wish to say something, and I wish you to hear it without answering."

"As you please."

"I will not insult you by saying that you are not observed." He folded his hands on the plank. "You know it, and you have known it for weeks, and you have counted my men with more care than I expected. I will ask only one thing in return."

"What is that?"

"That you do not insult me by pretending to be unobserved."

The shop was very still. Outside, a gull cried on the quay, and the sound carried clearly in the empty lane.

"I would not," said Ayaan.

"Good." The scarred man nodded slowly. "You have also found my barber, I think."

"I have not touched him, Efendi."

"I know that. It is the reason that I am here." Cevdet’s eyes moved over the shelves, the drawer, and the small brass bell. "A boy who finds a source and ruins it is a boy who wishes to hide. A boy who finds a source and leaves it alone is a boy who has nothing that he fears to have repeated."

"I have only what I have told you, Efendi. A shop, a family, and a few good friends."

"And a very fine memory." It was said without emphasis. "I noticed it in July. I have not mentioned it since, and I do not intend to ask where it comes from."

Ayaan did not allow his face to change.

"My father says that it is a gift from Allah, and that I should be grateful and quiet."

"Your father is correct on both points." Cevdet rose and drew on his glove. "I have a second observation, and then I will go."

"Yes, Efendi?"

"Counting men is harder than counting coins. A coin does not know that it is being counted."

"A man changes his sum less honestly," said Ayaan.

It was out before he had weighed it, and he saw at once that it was more than he should have said.

The scarred man laughed, quietly and truly, and this time the scar did not distort the sound.

"Yes," he said. "That is exactly the difficulty."

He went to the door and paused, as he always did, with his hand on the frame.

"We do not understand one another, young Hassan. I wish that to be clear. We understand what the other will not say, and that is only the first part of understanding."

"Then I hope that we shall learn the rest, Efendi."

"So do I." The bell rang. "Allah keep your family."

When the door had closed, Zeynep came out of the storeroom with the daily sheet crushed in her hand.

"He knows about your memory," she said.

"He knows that I have one. He does not know what it is."

"That is a very small difference."

"It is the whole of the difference," said Ayaan. "And I intend to keep it."

VI

Constantinople, Emin?nü — 10 October 1903

The simit seller did not pass the shop that morning.

Ayaan noticed it at the first hour, and by the third he was certain. The water carrier did not come to the plane tree, the porter’s stone step stood empty, and the clerk’s bench outside the money-changer’s held an elderly man who was asleep.

The lane was entirely ordinary. For the first time in six weeks, no one in it was looking at him.

Salih the barber waved from his doorway, as he did each morning, and Ayaan waved back. The wave was the same as always, but Ayaan wondered whether the barber had been told to stop reporting, or only to report to someone new.

He should have felt relief, and he did not. The quiet in the street told him that the watching had not ended, and that it had only moved to places where he could not count it.

At noon he went to open the drawer for change, and he found a folded paper lying on the plank beside it.

It had not been there when he swept the counter at dawn. He and Zeynep had been in the storeroom for the better part of an hour, counting the morning’s stock, and neither of them had heard the door.

He unfolded it slowly.

It was the first page of a library catalogue, written in a small, even hand. Each line gave a title, an author, and a number, and the totals at the foot of the page had been corrected in red ink.

Beneath the corrections, in the same hand, were seven words.

Slowness is not the same as care. — C.

Ayaan read the line twice. Then he looked up and searched the empty lane, the closed shutters, and the long shadow of the plane tree, and found nothing.

Zeynep came to his shoulder and read the page without touching it.

"He left it while we were in the storeroom," she said. "He came in, put it down, and went out, and we never heard the bell."

"The bell was lifted from its hook." He pointed to the bracket above the door, where the brass bell now hung a little crooked. "Someone took it down to enter, and hung it back on the way out."

"In an hour, in the middle of the morning, with the lane full."

"Yes. The drawer was not touched, and nothing on the shelves has moved." He studied the paper. "It is not a threat, Zeynep. It is a signature."

"Of what?"

"Of the fact that he can enter whenever he chooses." Ayaan folded the page along its crease. "And of the fact that he did not take anything when he did."

She was quiet for a long moment.

"What will you do?"

Ayaan placed the catalogue page inside the blue book, beside the entry that read Not yet an enemy and the line beneath it that read Not yet anything. He closed the cover, and he looked once more at the crooked bell above the door.

"I will straighten the bell," he said. "And tonight I will begin to learn how a man walks through a locked door without a sound."