Jenny White - The Sultan's seal

“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 shores 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 shell 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 documents by a special workshop on the palace grounds. The tughranüvis, 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 documents: 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 shifting 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 assistant 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 breasts. 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, dispassionate 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.