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In accordance with international law, local quarantine stations had the right to collect payment from incoming ships and passengers in exchange for their services. The logic of quarantine—a word derived from the Italian term for “forty days”—was to isolate the sick to prevent illnesses from spreading to others. Over the centuries, and after many instructive epidemics around the Mediterranean and across Europe, those forty days had been reduced first to two weeks and later to even-shorter spans of time depending on the type and location of the epidemic. Quarantine practices had continued to evolve over the past forty years in the wake of French doctor Louis Pasteur’s discoveries on germs. The methods used to distinguish between clean and contaminated ports were constantly changing, as were regulations for the transport of goods and passengers, the criteria for determining which ships should be marked with the yellow flag indicating they were infected, the number of days patients had to spend in isolation, and the level at which quarantine fees and levies should be set.

Yet despite all these exhaustive prescriptions, a quarantine doctor examining a ship could also exercise a degree of autonomy in his decisions. Climbing with his entourage of soldiers aboard a Lloyd passenger ship bearing the flag of the German Empire, someone like Doctor Nikos might therefore decide, upon concluding his inspection, to turn a blind eye to a feverish passenger in exchange for a bribe, and thus effectively rescue a merchant from bankruptcy by allowing the ship to reach Istanbul five or six days earlier than it would have otherwise done; conversely, he might report on the basis of the slightest trace of suspicion that all of the passengers and even the cargo on an incoming ship were infected with disease, and thereby cause many a shopkeeper to lose their livelihoods overnight.

But a quarantine doctor could also ensure, with just one word, that a pilgrim who had saved up for years, sold his home, and embarked on the arduous two-month journey of hajj ended up being separated from his fellow travelers, taken off the ship, confined in an isolation camp, and deprived of his pilgrimage—his protests, threats, tears, and paroxysms of rage falling on deaf ears. Doctor Nuri had also seen impoverished quarantine doctors in distant coastal villages wield their power as a way of avenging their miserable lives, cowing and controlling the wealthier locals, and perhaps even punishing tradesmen whose businesses were doing too well. This same power was also what enabled many quarantine doctors to subsist.

The Doctor and Prince Consort was curious to know when Quarantine Master Nikos had last been paid, but rather than ask the question, he adopted instead that patronizing air that provincial governors often deployed when faced with civil servants and doctors complaining about the shortages they had to face and the insolvency of state institutions.

“In the Hejaz, when we ran out of lime to disinfect toilets and cesspits, we would make do with coal dust instead.”

“Is that an appropriate method for our modern age?” said Doctor Nikos. “I would rather use milk of lime, diluted twenty or thirty parts to one instead of ten, if need be.”

“What do you have that might serve as disinfectant solution?”

“Mingherians call blue vitriol ‘Cyprus vitriol.’ We do indeed have some copper sulfate in stock—I have been saving it up. Pharmacist Nikiforos will have some too. But it will not be enough to cope with an epidemic. We have a little bit of phenol and calomel, what they call white sublimate in Istanbul. Among Muslims here the understanding of microbes and epidemics goes no further than washing their coins with vinegar. The most they will tolerate is fumigation by sulfur and saltpeter. In the Çite and Bayırlar neighborhoods they sometimes light those useless fumigation sticks and rub them over their faces as if they were amulets blessed by His Holiness the Sheikh. We are going to require a great deal of disinfectant solution.”

“The men who will have to spray this all over the city and the doctors who will have to enter Muslim neighborhoods are going to have a difficult task on their hands after Bonkowski Pasha’s assassination,” said the Doctor and Prince Consort, eager to return to the most pressing subject of all.

“I attended some of Bonkowski Bey’s lectures on organic and inorganic chemistry at the Imperial School of Medicine. He was appointed Chief Inspector of Public Health and Sanitation while I was serving in Lebanon, and his reputation as a scholar grew and grew. To think that such a man should have been butchered in this manner! When you are out visiting patients, do not assume it will be enough to announce ‘I am a Muslim’; make sure you take a bodyguard with you, too—like that major of yours.”

“Don’t worry, I will be careful. But if the aim is to ‘sabotage’ quarantine efforts,” said the Prince Consort, using that word loaned from the French, “then you too must be careful. May I ask who this malicious actor is whom we must all be wary of?”

“The Governor Pasha did the right thing in locking up Sheikh Hamdullah’s stepbrother Ramiz. Of all the island’s sect leaders, Sheikh Hamdullah is the one the Governor Pasha is most wary of. So Ramiz has taken advantage. I think whoever killed poor Bonkowski Pasha is someone who knew Ramiz would end up being blamed for it.”

“Yet there is an element of chance in this matter. You must have heard how everyone saw Bonkowski Pasha slip out of the Post Office of his own free will. Neither Ramiz nor anyone else could have predicted that.”

“Perhaps it is so, but then someone who happened to see him afterward might have thought that if they killed him there and then, the Muslims would be blamed for it anyway. For it is true that there are Greek doctors on our island who might, on occasion, not even deign to speak in Turkish to their Muslim patients.”

“The Muslim community may be right to complain about Christian doctors, particularly the more stern, tactless, and condescending among them,” Doctor Nuri prudently noted. “But earlier you mentioned that Muslims can sometimes resist quarantine measures out of ignorance alone.”

“They can and they do. But though they complain, they also fear the plague. They want somebody they can trust to come to them with advice on how they can protect themselves from infection. There is a world of difference between objecting to something, and objecting to it enough to be ready to kill someone over it. Bonkowski Pasha and his assistant, Doctor Ilias, visited those neighborhoods only to examine and treat patients. They did not have soldiers with them forcing people’s doors open and barging into their homes. Bonkowski Pasha wasn’t doing anything to hurt Muslims. Why should any Muslim want to kill him? Or why should it be assumed that it was a Muslim who killed him? I can already tell you what is bound to be the outcome of any serious investigation!”

“What would that be?”

“I do not know the killer’s name … But it is someone who wishes to see the Mingherian people obliterated and forgotten. I love Mingherians. I could not abide to see them suffer a fate they do not deserve.”

“Would you say that Mingherians are a distinct nation?” asked Prince Consort Nuri.

“If the Chief Scrutineer heard you ask that question, he would lock you up in the dungeons and torture you with clamps and vices to get you to talk,” the Quarantine Master replied. “It is true that some on the island still speak the old language at home, but if you gathered them all together, they probably wouldn’t even fill up a single room.”

CHAPTER 14

On his return to the guesthouse at the State Hall, Doctor Nuri ran into the Major at the door. The Major was on his way to the Post Office to drop off Princess Pakize’s first letter, which she had just finished and sealed.

That night, husband and wife ate dinner on their own for the first time. The Governor’s cook had left them a tray with a simple meal of börek—a savory pastry—and yogurt. They were both feeling uneasy, troubled by the rigors of their situation, the possibility that they might have been exposed to infection, and by the mousetraps inside their room. They could see that the joyful, carefree days they had enjoyed at the start of their marriage were over now. There was still some light around the State Hall, Hamidiye Avenue, and near the hotels and the port, where gas lamps burned until around ten o’clock. Later, when the streets outside were plunged into darkness, they stood at the window looking out at the bewitched city of Arkaz and listened to the sound of waves gently lapping at the shore, a hedgehog scurrying about the gardens of the Governor’s Residence, and the singing of cicadas.

The next day, the Doctor and Prince Consort went to the quarantine office to meet with Doctor Ilias, who had been released early that same morning.

“Bonkowski Pasha was like a father to me,” said Doctor Ilias. “To have treated me like a suspect, to have had me thrown into the dungeons as if I could have been responsible for his assassination—it will have given rise to all sorts of misconceptions. How could they not foresee that?”

“But you are not in the dungeons now!”

“The Istanbul dailies will have already written about it. I must return to Istanbul immediately to clear my name. Has the Sultan been informed that I am being held here?”

Before his appointment as Bonkowski Pasha’s assistant, Istanbul-born Doctor Ilias had been an ordinary physician whose work had passed largely unobserved. But after becoming assistant to the Chief Inspector of Public Health and traveling with him to all corners of the Empire, he had begun to make a name for himself, and written newspaper articles on epidemics, hygiene, and health. He was paid an excellent salary too. Five years ago, he had married Despina, the youngest daughter of a fairly wealthy Greek family in Istanbul. At Bonkowski Pasha’s suggestion, Abdul Hamid had even awarded him an Order of Mecidiye Medal. But this adventurous, honorable, fulfilling career would now be cut short by the brutal murder of his boss, Bonkowski Pasha.

The Doctor and Prince Consort realized that Doctor Ilias must have had occasion to accompany Bonkowski Pasha to audiences with the Sultan, and that he might perhaps have met the Sultan more than Doctor Nuri himself had done. (Though he was married to the Sultan’s niece, he had only met the Sultan thrice.)

“His Serene Highness the Sultan’s wish is that you should stay on the island and assist us in discovering who is behind this diabolical act.”

That afternoon someone sent Doctor Ilias an anonymous letter indicating that it would be his turn next.

“This is no doubt the handiwork of opportunists, of shopkeepers who are against quarantine,” the Governor remarked. Then, to reassure the terrified Doctor Ilias, he had him picked up from the derelict house where he was still staying, and to which the anonymous letter had been sent, and had him taken to the guesthouse attached to the military garrison. This place abounded with mousetraps and was therefore slightly better equipped against the plague, as well as being safely out of reach of would-be assassins.

That day, in accordance with the Governor and the Quarantine Master’s plan, Doctor Nuri and Doctor Ilias took the landau to visit the hospitals first. There were two hospitals in the capital: the small and underequipped Hamidiye Hospital (named after Sultan Abdul Hamid), which had not officially opened yet and was used by soldiers and by the Muslim elites, and the Theodoropoulos Hospital, which had been built by the island’s Greek community. Constructed during the golden years of the trade in Mingherian marble by the family of one Stratis Theodoropoulos, a Greek from Smyrna who had prospered from that trade, this second establishment was equipped with thirty beds. Like the Hamidiye Hospital, the Theodoropoulos Hospital often also doubled as a refuge for the poor, the helpless, and the downtrodden and was seen by Mingherians as a peaceful, perhaps even a pleasant, place by virtue of its wonderfully fragrant grove of lemon trees and its magnificent views of the Castle. As the disease continued to spread, the Theodoropoulos Hospital had also begun to be attended by Muslims who did not have the means to see a doctor privately and had nowhere else to turn.

Accompanied by the Major and the Governor’s men, Doctor Nuri arrived at this hospital to find it in a state of heightened activity. There was a tense crowd outside the entrance. Since the increase three days ago in the number of plague patients turning up at the door, the hospital’s largest ward had been partitioned into two halves, with a screen separating ordinary patients from those afflicted with the plague. But the plague section had soon expanded, and with that day’s arrivals, it had now become entirely congested. The other patients were unsettled by the noise of the plague patients raving in their sleep, their endless vomiting, their howls of pain from the headaches they suffered, and by the way they seemed to descend, just before they died, into a state of exhausted madness. Over the past week, most of the homeless, the poor, and the elderly who had previously been staying at the hospital had already gone elsewhere. Doctor Nuri and Doctor Ilias were told by the director of the hospital, the elderly Doctor Mihailis, that fights over beds had started breaking out between the families of patients with familiar complaints like asthma and heart disease and the more panicked and desperate plague victims.

Doctor Mihailis’s affable welcome to Doctor Nuri and Doctor Ilias had been followed by his admission that, up until now, he had been convinced that the disease spreading through the island was not the plague. He had been waiting for the results of the microscope tests from the laboratory, and in the meantime he had only concerned himself with those symptoms of the disease which were reminiscent of cholera—namely, fever, vomiting, variations in heart rate, fatigue, and lethargy. With a similar glint of adventure and crisis in his eye, he told Doctor Nuri that he had been in Izmit during the epidemic of cholera there seven years ago. His working manner was stern, but there was also something in his expression that seemed to say, “Don’t worry, we’ll sort this out,” which was heartening to his patients and had earned him the trust of the island’s plague victims too, so that they would scream and call out for him to come and look at the swollen and pus-filled cysts on their necks, armpits, and groins. There was also another doctor in the ward that day, a frowning young man from Thessaloniki named Doctor Alexandros.

This Doctor Alexandros told the Doctor and Prince Consort that the elderly patient who seemed to sleep all the time and would immediately start groaning and crying if he happened to wake up for a few minutes was a fisherman who had come to the hospital two days ago. (The fishermen’s wharf and neighborhood was close to the jetty that had been used during the Mingherian marble trade.) The ward’s janitor, meanwhile, reported that the elderly, semiconscious woman who lay quietly dying over there was not the wife but the sister of the man weeping at her bedside, that she had been vomiting constantly on the day she’d arrived, and that yesterday, like many of the other patients, she had raved and ranted without pause. Fever and delirium were symptoms common to all those infected. A patient who worked as a porter in the docks tried to stand up but couldn’t walk properly, and after a couple of wayward steps he fell backward onto his bed. Doctor Ilias devoted a lot of time to this tenacious patient, pointing out the view from the window and the Castle’s childlike spires as a way to rekindle his optimism, his will to live, and his zest for fresh air.