Chapter 14: A Dangerous Kind of Intelligence

Chapter 14: Chapter 14: A Dangerous Kind of Intelligence

I

Constantinople, Emin?nü — 19 April 1903

The page headed Observed held four entries, and Ayaan had read them so many times that he no longer needed the book.

June 1902. A man in a plain gray coat bought a pencil and asked who had advised me.

September 1902. The same man, or one dressed as him, questioned Haf?z Kemal about my lessons and my family.

March 1903. A man in a gray coat asked at the Feshane gate about the boy who had visited in February.

April 1903. Nothing.

The last line troubled him more than the others.

A watcher who stopped appearing had not stopped watching.

He had only learned to do it where he could not be seen.

Zeynep arrived at the shop an hour after noon, and she found him sitting on the lid of the chest with the book open on his knee. She did not ask what he was reading, because she had learned to read his face before she read his page.

"You have decided to tell me," she said.

"I have decided that I need you to see it."

She sat beside him and took the book. Her lips moved slightly as she read, and when she reached the end, she turned back to the beginning and read again.

"Three sightings in nine months," she said. "In three different places."

"Yes."

"A man who stands at a counter is one kind of watcher. A man who asks questions at a gate is another." She tapped the page. "The first is looking at you. The second is looking at what you have touched."

Ayaan looked at her. It was the sort of distinction that he would have reached by evening, and she had drawn it in a moment.

"Go on."

"Someone is collecting a record. Not of what you do today, but of every place you have been and every person you have spoken to." She frowned. "It would take a great deal of patience, and a great deal of money."

"Or an office."

"An office?"

He closed the book gently. "There are men in this city whose whole work is to write down what other men say. They write it for the palace, and the palace reads it, and no one ever tells the person who has been written about."

Zeynep’s face grew very still.

"The Sultan’s spies," she said.

"I do not know that it is them. It may be a rival merchant, or a creditor of someone I have never met, or a clerk who is curious and has too much time." He kept his voice level. "But I do not know that it is not."

"Then we must find out."

"We cannot, not yet. If I ask the wrong person, I tell the watcher that I have seen him." He held up a hand before she could speak. "And if he is from the palace, then a boy who confronts a spy is a boy who has something to hide."

"So we do nothing?"

"No." He turned to face her. "We do the thing that I should have done last summer. We look at what he can see, and we decide, one piece at a time, how much of it he should."

She absorbed this in silence.

"You mean to hide," she said at last.

"I mean to be ordinary." He gave her a thin, tired smile. "It is a harder task than it sounds, because ordinary boys do not keep a ledger."

Zeynep laughed in spite of herself, and then she became serious again. She took out her notebook and wrote a heading at the top of a clean page.

What the watcher can see.

"We will begin there," she said. "I will make the list."

II

Constantinople, Emin?nü — 3 May 1903

The list had forty-one lines by the first Sunday in May, and Zeynep had arranged them in four columns.

She had spent two weeks on it, in the evenings, with a candle in the storeroom and a blanket over her shoulders against the draft. The columns were headed Paper, Mouth, Eye, and Habit.

"Paper is what leaves a trace in writing," she said, laying the sheet on the counter. "Receipts, invoices, orders, letters. Mouth is what people say about you. Eye is what a man can see by standing in the lane. Habit is what we do the same way every week, so that a stranger can learn it."

"Read me the paper."

"Every receipt carries the name of the shop and the name of the buyer. Your name is on the first copy, because you sign it. The second copy goes to my father’s strongbox, with the same name."

"That is the easiest to correct."

"I thought so. Under my father’s arrangement, the receipts to the offices can be written in his house and signed by his clerk." She looked up. "Your hand need not appear at all."

Ayaan nodded. "And the ledger?"

"It is gray, and it is kept on the chest, and it is open whenever you are not looking at it." She said it without reproach, as a plain description. "Anyone who walks behind the counter can read it."

"Then it will be kept in the drawer, and the drawer will be locked, and I will carry the key."

"And the shorthand?"

"I will use it only in the blue book. The gray ledger will say what a grocer’s son might say, and no more."

She made a mark beside each answer.

"Now the eye," she said, and she turned the sheet. "A man in the lane can see which hours the shop opens, who comes, and who leaves with a parcel. He can see that you carry the key, and that you walk to Sirkeci on the second Thursday of each month."

"Then I will walk on a different Thursday each month."

"And the week of the Friday count, when the witness comes?"

"We will change the hour, but not the day. Mustafa Efendi’s clerk will not mind."

"It is a great deal of trouble," said Zeynep, "to look like a boy who has no secrets."

"It is less trouble than the alternative."

She made another mark, and then she moved to the last column. When she reached the column headed Mouth, she stopped, and her voice dropped.

"This is the difficult one."

There were many names in it.

Münir Bey and his eleven clerks, Hovsep Agopian and his warehouse men, and the schoolboys of the lane.

Hatice, the neighbor with the figs, and Tevfik Efendi with the old men of the guild.

"They are not enemies," Zeynep said. "They are people who admire you, and who say so."

"That is why it is difficult."

"What will you do? You cannot ask them to be silent."

"I will not ask them to be silent." He rubbed his eyes. "A request for silence is the loudest message of all, because it tells them that there is something to tell."

He went to the back of the shop, where Mehmet was weighing out dried apricots for a customer. When the customer had gone, Ayaan spoke quietly, and his father listened patiently, as a man who had learned not to interrupt.

"Mustafa Efendi," Mehmet said at the end. "You wish me to ask him to say less."

"I wish you to ask him nothing, Baba. I will ask him myself."

He found the merchant that evening at the door of his warehouse, with a lantern in his hand and a ledger under his arm. Mustafa heard him out, and when the account was finished, his face was grave.

"I will not lie for any man," he said. "I have never done it, and I am too old to begin."

"I do not ask you to lie, Efendi."

"Then what do you ask?"

"That when you are asked about me, you say what is true and no more." Ayaan met his eyes. "That I am a boy who keeps a counter, that my father is a grocer, and that your daughter and I are friends. All of that is so, and none of it is untrue."

"And the part that is not said?"

"Is the part that would be said by someone who wished to be admired." Ayaan took a breath. "I think that you are a man who does not wish to be admired for his silence. But a merchant who is trusted by everyone is a merchant who is not asked."

Mustafa lowered the lantern. For a long moment he studied the boy in the yellow light.

"You are afraid," he said.

"I am careful, Efendi."

"That is what a frightened man calls it." But the sharpness had gone out of his voice. "Very well. I will say what is true, and I will say it briefly. If that is the whole of your request, you have it."

"It is the whole of it."

"Then go home, Ayaan. And be careful that your caution does not become the thing that men remember."

Ayaan walked home through the dusk with the words repeating in his mind. It was the same warning that Mustafa had given him in October, and he knew that it would be true in a year, and in ten.

III

Constantinople, Emin?nü — 17 May 1903

Münir Bey came on a Sunday, which he had never done, and he came without his folder.

He walked into the shop in a coat that was too thin for the cold, and he stood at the counter turning his fez in his hands. Ayaan had been sorting nibs, and he laid them down and waited.

"I have been questioned," said the old copyist.

"By whom, Bey Efendi?"

"I do not know. He did not give a name." Münir Bey’s voice was dry and steady, but his fingers on the brim of the fez were not. "He came to the corridor on Thursday, and he asked the clerks about the paper. Where it came from, who delivered it, and what sort of boy it was who brought the account."

"What did you say?"

"I was not there. The younger men told me afterward." He drew a breath. "They said that you were a diligent grocer’s son, and that you counted slowly, and that you had a good supplier at your back. It was what I would have wished them to say."

Ayaan was silent.

He had not told Münir Bey to say it, and he had not told any of them to say anything.

"Who taught them?" he asked.

"No one. They are not fools." The copyist looked at him with his old tired humor. "You taught them yourself, my boy, by being very careful for a year. When a stranger asked, they knew without being told that you were a person to be protected."

"I did not intend it."

"No. That is the best kind of loyalty." Münir Bey replaced the fez. "But I have come to tell you something more, which I did not wish to say in front of the clerks."

"Please."

"The man who asked was not an official of the treasury. I know the treasury’s men, and I know how they ask. This one did not write anything down while he spoke." He leaned forward. "He remembered. And afterward, in the street, I saw him stop at a coffee house and write for a long time."

Ayaan felt the cold in his shoulders.

A man who writes after, and not during, has been taught to do it.

"Did you see his face?"

"A little. He was about thirty-five, and he wore a plain brown coat, not gray." Münir Bey shook his head. "That is all. I am sorry. I should have followed him."

"You should not have, Bey Efendi. I am glad that you did not."

The old man regarded him for a moment, and some of the weariness went out of his face.

"I have spent thirty years copying other men’s words, and I have learned to know when a word is being taken," he said. "Be careful, my boy. This is not a game of the lane."

"I know."

"No. I do not think that you do." He said it gently. "But I think that you are learning, and that you are learning quickly. It is the best that anyone can ask."

When he had gone, Zeynep came out from behind the crate. She had listened, as she always did, and she had a sheet of paper in her hands with a new line written at the top.

A second man. Brown coat.

"There are two of them," she said.

"Or more." Ayaan sat down on the chest. "A gray coat in March, and a brown coat in May. If it is an office, they do not send the same man twice."

"Then the first man was not the watcher."

"The first man was one of many." He looked at her, and for the first time that spring he felt the fear plainly, and he did not push it away. "Whoever it is has patience, and he has men. I do not yet know what he wants."

"What do we do?"

"We find out how much he knows." He drew the sheet toward him. "And we find out how he learns it."

"That will take time."

"It will take as much time as it takes. I would rather be slow and certain than quick and seen."

IV

Constantinople, Emin?nü — 21 June 1903

The test had been Ayaan’s idea, and he had not liked it from the beginning.

It was a small, harmless piece of deception, and it was the first that he had practiced on those who had been kind to him.

He had told himself that it was a measurement and not a lie, and he had not been certain that the distinction was true.

Three weeks earlier, he had spoken to three groups of people about the same thing.

He had told each of them a different version of it.

To the schoolboys of the lane, he had said that he meant to try a new red ink from Lyon.

To the old men of the guild, through his father, he had said that he meant to try a new sealing wax from Vienna.

To the clerks of the corridor, through Münir Bey, he had said that he was thinking of adding a line of ruled copybooks.

None of it was important, and none of it was true, and he had written each version in the blue book so that he would not forget which was which. It was a different small invention for each of three groups, so that if one returned to him, he would know which of them it had passed through.

On the third Sunday of June, he found out.

He had gone across the lane to buy a pencil that he did not need. The bookseller’s stall was busy, and the apprentice, a thin boy of seventeen with a sullen mouth, served him without looking up.

"Anything else?" the apprentice said.

"Nothing. Unless you have the red ink from Lyon."

He had spoken it lightly, as a joke between neighbors. But the boy’s hand paused on the counter for the space of a single breath.

"We do not stock Lyon ink," he said.

"Pity. I had heard that it was coming."

"Who told you that?"

"I do not remember," said Ayaan, and he smiled and took his pencil and walked away.

His heart was beating hard. He crossed the lane at an even pace, and he did not look back until he reached the door of the shop.

The apprentice stood in the doorway of the stall with his arms folded, and his eyes were on Ayaan’s back.

It was not the look of a boy who was merely curious. It was the look of a boy who had been told what to remember.

The red ink had been told only to the schoolboys.

It was the cleanest proof that he could have asked for, and it gave him no pleasure.

He had wanted to be wrong. A world in which no one watched him was a world in which he was only a clever boy, and he had grown fond of being only that.

He found Zeynep in the storeroom, and he told her at once, in a low voice, with the door closed.

"The apprentice," she said. "The one who stood by the mosque in March last year."

"He has been watching since before the guild. He did not learn about the red ink from the boys. He asked them, and they told him, because they are boys."

"Who does he report to?"

"I do not know." Ayaan sat on a crate and pressed his hands together. "He cannot be the man in the coat. He is too young, and he has no money. He must be one of those who collect small things for someone else."

"Hac? Nuri?"

"Hac? Nuri has no reason to keep a boy at his counter to count my pencils. He lost that quarrel in the spring, and he knows it." He shook his head. "Someone else pays the apprentice, and the someone else is better informed than the bookseller."

Zeynep was silent for a long while. The only sound in the storeroom was the slow dripping of a tap in the yard.

"What will you do?" she asked at last. "You cannot confront him. You cannot tell the guild. If he is a boy in someone’s pay, he may be the safest of all the people who are watching you."

"Because he is the one I can see."

"Yes."

"Then I will not touch him." Ayaan stood and began to pace the narrow floor. "I will not frighten him or dismiss him from my mind. I will let him go on watching, and I will give him something to watch."

"What?"

"A boy who sells pencils, and nibs, and paper, and keeps the same hours every day. A boy who makes small profits, and writes plain receipts, and goes home to his mother." He stopped. "Everything that he reports will be true. It will also be dull."

She regarded him with an expression that was half admiration and half dismay.

"You mean to bore the palace," she said.

"I mean to bore whoever it is." A faint smile touched his mouth. "It is a more dangerous work than it sounds. A man who is bored begins to doubt that his task is worth the cost."

"And in the meantime?"

"In the meantime, I do the real work where the apprentice cannot see." Ayaan pulled a sheet of paper toward him. "Through your father’s warehouse, through the corridor of the Porte, and in the hours when the lane is asleep."

Zeynep took the pencil from his hand and wrote a single word at the top of the page.

Dull.

"I shall be very good at it," she said. "I have been practicing since I was six."

V

Constantinople, Rüstem Pa?a — 28 June 1903

Fatma had been waiting for him in the kitchen, and she had not lit the lamp.

She sat at the table with her hands folded, and the last of the evening light fell in a long band across the floor. Mehmet stood by the window with his back to the room.

"Sit, Ayaan," she said.

He sat. The silence stretched, and he understood that his parents had been speaking of him before he came in.

"Your father has told me what you are doing," his mother said. "He has not told me all of it. I think that he does not know all of it."

"I am protecting the business, Anne."

"I know what you are protecting." Her voice was low and even. "I wish to know who is protecting you."

He opened his mouth, and then he closed it. It was a question that he had not asked himself.

"I have Zeynep," he said slowly. "I have Mustafa Efendi, and Münir Bey, and Baba."

"You have people who admire you. That is not the same as people who can stand in front of you." Fatma turned her head toward the window, where Mehmet had not moved. "Your father and I are not powerful people. We are a grocer and his wife. If a man comes to this door with a paper from the palace, we cannot send him away."

"Fatma," said Mehmet quietly.

"I will say it, because he must hear it." She looked back at her son. "I am not telling you to stop. I am telling you that every step you take in the dark is a step that we cannot see, and that I would rather you took it where I could."

Ayaan felt his eyes sting, and he lowered them.

"I do not wish to frighten you, Anne."

"You are not frightening me. You are making me proud, and it is a more difficult thing to bear." She rose and came around the table and put her hand on his hair. "I do not ask you to tell me everything. I ask only that you tell your father one thing each week, so that if the day comes, there is someone who knows where to begin."

"Each week."

"One thing. It need not be large."

"I promise."

"And you will eat," said Fatma, "before you open the book again tonight."

"Yes, Anne."

Mehmet turned from the window at last. His face was worn, and his eyes were bright in the dimness.

"Allah has given you a mind that He gives to very few," he said, "and I have no wisdom to guide it. But I know that a man who hides everything is a man who cannot be helped, and that the best of all hiding is the kind that leaves one door open."

"Which door, Baba?"

"This one." He laid a hand on the table. "Come to it when the rest are closed."

That night, Ayaan sat alone in the shop, with the shutters drawn and the lamp turned low. He took the blue book from the drawer and opened it to a clean page.

He wrote a heading in his small shorthand, and beneath it, three rules.

Information is the first capital that a man must guard. Everything else can be rebuilt.

What is seen should be true and plain. What is done should be done where it is not seen.

Never confront an enemy whose face is not known. Make him spend his strength on a shadow.

He read them twice.

He understood that they were the rules of a different kind of business, and that he had begun to practice it without having decided to.

The pencil trembled slightly in his fingers, and he put it down until the trembling had passed.

A light tap came at the shutter.

He froze with his hand on the lamp. The tap came again, softly, and he heard Zeynep’s voice from the lane.

"It is I. Open, quickly."

He drew the bolt. She slipped inside and shut the shutter behind her, and her face in the lamplight was pale.

"I came from the warehouse. Father sent me with a message for the guild." She spoke in a rapid whisper. "There was a man at the corner of the lane. I have not seen him before."

"The brown coat?"

"No. A larger man." She swallowed. "He stood in the shadow of the mosque, and when I passed him, I saw his face. There was a scar on it, from the ear to the corner of the mouth."

Ayaan did not move.

"He did not follow me," Zeynep said. "He only looked at the shop. He looked at it for a long time."

Outside, in the dark, the lane was silent. Beyond the shutter, the bell above the door hung motionless in the lamplight, and for the first time since he had learned the word watcher, Ayaan felt that the watcher had a face.