The Baklava Club: A Novel (Investigator Yashim) Read Online Free PDF Page A

the irregularity. She is young, Yashim. There is a difference in our experience.”
    “I don’t understand.”
    “ Tiens , Yashim. Didn’t I say? Natasha will arrive this week.”
    Yashim almost choked on his coffee. “Arrive—here?”
    “Why not? She is twenty-one, old enough to do as she likes. I invited her to stay.”
    “But hanum—the daughter of an exile? The consequences—”
    The valide was not quite frowning, but her expression had tightened.
    “You think I am unaware that my invitation might have consequences? Do you forget who I am? A valide’s acts always have consequences!”
    She placed her hands on the writing box, and drew back her shoulders.
    “I was a politician before you were born, Yashim, I would have you remember that. Natasha Borisova is looking for a pardon for her father. Others have had it. I intend that the tsar should grant him one.”
    Yashim opened his mouth to speak, but the valide silenced him with an upraised hand.
    “If you think the girl asked me for this, you’re wrong. Not in so many words. But I wish to meet her, and form my own opinion.”
    A visitor in the harem? It was normal for foreign ladies, the wives of ambassadors, an Egyptian begum, perhaps, to visit and pay their respects to the sultan’s ladies. They would come for a few hours, talk stiffly over coffee, examine one another’s dresses and jewels, and then graciously depart.
    But to have a visitor! A foreign woman—as a sort of houseguest? It was unprecedented.
    “How long will she stay, hanum efendi? Where will she live?”
    The valide waved a careless hand. The bangles tinkled. “Oh, a few weeks, I don’t know. Perhaps I will be better able to judge once we have met her.” She took off her spectacles. “I rely on you, Yashim. For once, I hope you have no gruesome murders to occupy your time…? But of course the dead can wait. For a young woman, the harem has some fascination, no doubt; but after a few days she will be strangled by ennui. The old ladies,” she added pointedly. “They will devour her.”
    Ever since the unmarried ladies of her late son’s household had been permitted to retire to Topkapi, the valide had complained of being beset by old women. “Like children, Yashim,” she had remarked. “Like very, very old children.”
    Some were barely half the valide’s age, as they both well knew.
    “You wish me to—?” Yashim left the sentence half-finished, unable to conjecture what, exactly, the valide would wish.
    “Don’t be stuffy. Entertain the girl, Yashim. She’s not a Muslim, nor a slave. If Mademoiselle Borisova wishes to go out, then you must be her chaperone. Show her interesting things—the bazaar. Ayasofya. Caïques. Justinian’s Pedestal, or whatever it is.”
    Yashim inclined his head. “Justinian’s Pedestal” was a confection of the valide’s. She had, of course, no experience of the city in which she had lived for so many years. Topkapi was her home, and the walls of the palace framed her horizon; at most she would have been taken for an outing on the Bosphorus, to the sweet waters of Asia or Europe, to picnic on the grass.
    “As I have seen so few of these things, Yashim, Natasha can act as my eyes. She writes well about Siberia, as I mentioned. Now, when she arrives I want you to collect her from the ship. Bring her here, avec ses bagages .”
    She spoke with a certain relish: in some respects the valide was not so unlike her companions. She, too, would want to examine the bagages .
    “A young person will do me good. The girls here are all so dull—or they wish to murder me,” she added, referring to a recent episode from which she had made a perfect recovery. * “Never, I find, both together.”
    “Inshallah,” Yashim responded. He hoped that Natasha Borisova would not be one of those intelligent women who wound up wanting to murder the valide.
    She gathered up the letters, knocked them together against the lid of the box, and tied them up with the