Jenny White - The Winter Thief

The governor nodded. “The residents are eager to help.” Shoulders sagging with relief, he went to consult with the local men with whom he had just been arguing.

Vera led Kamil to a guesthouse near the port. “Gabriel told me he stayed here when he first arrived in Trabzon. Because the roads were still bad, he left his trunk behind. He gave me this key,” she said, pulling it from her pocket, “and told me that if anything happened to him to get the trunk. It was almost as if he knew he wouldn’t survive.” She regarded the house and then led him around the back and through a gate. “That must be it.” She pointed at a windowless stone shed. The key fit in the lock.

They squeezed inside. Kamil lit a lamp he found by the door, revealing a jumble of boxes and barrels and, behind them, a chest as high as Kamil’s waist.

“Gabriel said the gold from the bank would be in the chest.” Vera ran her hands across the dusty lid, her voice thick with feeling. “He didn’t have a chance to tell me what he wanted me to do with it. I know he’d approve of using it to help these people.” She looked at Kamil, concerned. “You’re not going to return it to the bank, are you?”

Kamil had no answer. Vera didn’t have a key to the chest, so he forced the lock. They drew open the heavy lid. The chest was crammed with furs and other household goods. Puzzled, they pulled everything out and examined it, piece by piece. When the chest was empty, Kamil climbed inside it with the lamp to examine the bottom. With the tip of his knife, he scored the leather lining and pulled it up, revealing a recessed latch. He manipulated it until a soft click revealed the outline of a panel, which he pushed aside. An extensive false bottom opened to view. Kamil reached in and extracted a necklace set with large emeralds, which he gave to Vera, then pulled out a handful of gold liras.

Vera stared at the jewelry draped over her hand. “God save us,” she exclaimed.

Kamil took in the sea of gold lapping at his feet. “It seems he has.”

Kamil didn’t tell the governor where the gold and jewels came from. It was about half of what had been taken from the bank, and he wondered where the other half was. With some shame, but seeing no other solution, he let the town think it was his personal fortune. He implied that it had been left with Yakup, who had stayed behind in Trabzon. He had removed the emeralds from the necklace so they couldn’t be identified. Neither the governor nor the residents seemed to think it unusual for a pasha to travel with so much wealth. Perhaps they were simply too relieved at having the problem solved to inquire too closely.

He sent Yorg Pasha a telegram to tell him he was safe and a longer letter to him and one to Feride with a ship leaving that morning for Istanbul. There was no sign of Vahid in Trabzon, although a local doctor said he had treated a man who had lost part of his hand. The sultan’s Kurdish irregulars had vanished.

Over the next few weeks, Kamil worked together with the governor and town leaders to erect shelters and purchase food and other supplies that had to be brought in by ship. A cold fog still enveloped the town in the mornings, but later the sun burned it off, revealing fields of forget-me-nots and wild tulips amid brilliant green meadows. Birdsong mingled with the sounds of sawing and hammering. The women refugees, now mostly widows, sat outside the doors of their communal shacks in flecks of sunlight, staring into space. Only the children, resilient as spring flowers, ran exuberantly underfoot.

Some of the money from Gabriel’s chest was used to hire ships to take people to Istanbul or other Black Sea ports where they had relatives who might take them in. Some families had decided to return to their villages under Levon’s protection. A photographer disembarked from one of the ships and, carting his box and tripod through the town, took pictures of the remaining refugees.

Kamil began to think of leaving. He trusted the governor and the sizable Armenian community in Trabzon to continue the relief effort as long as the money held out, as it would for some time yet. Kamil reminded himself that he faced a murder charge. The thought was so ludicrous that he laughed out loud.

Vera cradled the Henchak pin in her hand. She had found it wrapped in a piece of flannel in Gabriel’s chest, along with her passport, and, pressed between two pieces of cardboard, a dried daisy she had given him before their marriage as a memento of a lovely day they had spent picnicking in the Alps. He had brought this simple, fragile flower all the way from Geneva to Istanbul and from there to Trabzon. She had been married only a single night, and all the rest had been misunderstanding and needless pain. Why had she immediately assumed that her husband would abandon her?

He was like the Straw Thief, she thought, a hero who loved her and his people and took great risks to help them. He had embarked on a long road across the globe and had produced something new and wonderful for them but had made mistakes along the way. One by one, his successes had slipped through his fingers, numbed by this savage winter. She pressed the flannel parcel to her chest and gave way to her grief, whether for herself or for Gabriel, she didn’t know.

“Come with us, Vera.” Alicia pleaded, her eyes dull with the pain of losing Victor. Her freckles looked almost black in her pale face, and her hair blazed in the sunshine. She and Apollo and some other comrades were boarding a ship to Batumi the following morning, then traveling overland to Tiflis.

“This is just a harbinger of things to come,” Apollo told Vera. “They’ll go after the Armenians whenever the wind blows the wrong way. The villagers don’t have any coordinated defense, just bands of young men with outdated rifles. They would barely have been armed if Gabriel hadn’t brought in weapons.”

Vera didn’t point out that it was Apollo who had brought the weapons to the east.

“We have to organize.” Apollo took her hand. “Come and help us do that, Vreni. It’ll be in Gabriel’s name. He would have wanted us to do this.”

Vera thought about the women and children huddled in hastily assembled wooden shelters at the edge of town, coughing in the smoke from their braziers. Would forming an armed revolutionary group help them? Or could justice be had without violence? Gabriel had always wanted peace, yet his actions had led to the deaths of so many people.

“I need to think on it,” she told Apollo, her hand lingering in his. “Kamil Pasha has asked me to return to Istanbul to testify in a court case. I should do that first. Send me a message when you’re settled and tell me where you are.”

Kamil Pasha had told Vera about Sosi’s murder and the attempt to blame it on him. She had failed Sosi once, and she promised herself that she wouldn’t fail the courageous girl again. The idea of bringing Vahid to justice for what he had done to them was immensely satisfying.

Apollo drew Vera to him and kissed her on the lips. “Promise me you’ll come, Vreni.”

Vera nodded, mute with joy, now and forever adulterated with regret.

The following morning, Kamil stood on the pier and watched a group of refugees and the surviving members of Gabriel’s commune board their ship. Omar had learned that they planned to organize an armed resistance against the Ottomans, coordinating and arming all the small village-based groups like Levon’s. As an Ottoman official, Kamil knew he had a duty to stop them. As a representative of justice, he had no idea what the right thing to do was.

He was spending the empire’s wealth-the proceeds of a robbery that he had been charged with solving-on saving these Armenian refugees, who in the future might well turn on the empire. He had helped them while they used illegally obtained weapons to defend themselves against the sultan’s irregular troops. Worse yet, he had subverted his soldiers to fire on their own. The sultan could exile him or even have him shot for any of these offenses. Yet he felt he had done the right thing. Did moral decisions have to be worked out along the way, or could one rely on a set of moral principles that applied under every circumstance? He found himself thinking that what was right today might not be right tomorrow depending on the circumstances. He wondered uneasily where such a relativist attitude might lead him.