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All patients seemed to exhibit bloodshot eyes and suffer from strange convulsions and unbearably painful headaches. Some experienced paranoia, irrational fears, and anxiety, while others engaged in compulsive behavior like repeatedly turning their heads from left to right (the customs officer sitting by the window, for example) or making sudden attempts to scramble out of bed (like the aging, teary-eyed master potter who had a shop on Hamidiye Avenue). Most of the patients had some kind of boil, an abscess half the size of a little finger—what the Europeans called a bubo—growing on their neck, behind an ear, in an armpit, or on their groin. But the Doctor and Prince Consort had heard from other doctors that even patients who did not have boils or blemishes of any kind could still become feverish, somnolent, and lethargic, until they suddenly dropped dead (or got better).

A remarkably thin, scrawny patient (reportedly a roofer) was suffering from dry mouth, could no longer speak, and kept obsessively stammering. Some patients complained vociferously of their various discomforts, and Doctor Nuri tried his best to understand what was ailing them. Piercing and draining patients’ buboes did seem to have temporarily calming, reviving effects. Indeed every patient—even those who didn’t need it—asked for this procedure to be performed on them, though it was not a cure. Patients in the throes of a seizure or a bout of delirium sometimes gripped their sweat-and vomit-stained sheets so hard in their suffering that their skin and the sheets seemed to fuse into a single entity. The patients’ wailing, their agonized howls and exhausted sighs, blended into one another, like one long hum. One of the reasons why doctors often confused the plague with cholera was that some of those affected seemed to be constantly thirsty. The steam from the cauldron of boiling water outside the entrance to the hospital building mingled with the thrum and the aura of death inside.

During his time in the Hejaz, Doctor Nuri used to look at the destitution and backwardness of the pilgrims arriving from India, Java, and all over Asia, witness how the British would treat them as if they were less than human, and feel guilty about his good education and his fluent French. Now he felt guilty for having nothing but spurious words of comfort to offer patients who knew they had contracted a fatal disease and for knowing that over the coming days things were going to get much worse than they already were.

They visited the Hamidiye Hospital next and found that the situation there was the same. The Doctor and Prince Consort was struck by how Doctor Ilias put his grief and his fear to one side to examine every patient one by one and listen earnestly to their complaints.

“But this won’t last,” said Doctor Ilias when the two of them were alone again. “They will kill me too. Do not forget, please, that the Sultan wishes for me to return to Istanbul as soon as possible!”

Sitting on the landau later on their way to Nikiforos’s pharmacy with the Major and the Governor’s men in tow, Doctor Nuri and Doctor Ilias called to the coachman to slow down so that they could assess the mood on the streets. Unnervingly, the European way of life around the hotels and in the streets that led down to the port seemed to be proceeding as usual. It was eerie to see how relaxed these Mingherians were, lounging in coffeehouses and diners and sitting in their barbers’ chairs, laughing at one another’s jokes and making plans for their next business venture or to go fishing together. In the Vavla neighborhood, the sight of barefoot children gaily running around the dusty, neglected streets that led to the shore transported the Doctor and Prince Consort to some hot and distant city in the East.

When they reached the pharmacy, Nikiforos immediately informed them that he had definitely not owed the Royal Chemist—may he rest in peace—any money from the activities he had undertaken under the royal concession.

“Who would you say might have thought they had something to gain from killing Bonkowski Pasha?” said Doctor Nuri, again asking the question outright.

“Not all murders are committed for gain. Some are committed out of a sense of injustice or hopelessness, and sometimes a person becomes a killer entirely by chance, from one moment to the next, and without ever having planned to. The folk from Çifteler and Nebiler villages and the followers of the Terkapçılar sect that Governor Sami Pasha rounded up and jailed after the Pilgrim Ship Affair are known to loathe doctors and quarantine officers. One of them might have been out selling produce—eggs, say—then chanced upon Bonkowski Pasha wandering around Vavla and decided there and then to drag him right off the street. I did hint to my dear friend that he would do well to go to Germe and Vavla to evaluate the situation there. They know this, of course, and that’s why they left the body here, to try and make me look like a potential suspect.”

“You are indeed a suspect!” said Doctor Nuri.

“But it is a conspiracy,” said the pharmacist, turning to Doctor Ilias.

“I warned Bonkowski Pasha not to venture into those neighborhoods alone,” said Doctor Ilias. “But every time we went to investigate a new outbreak in some district capital, he would always find an excuse to go out exploring on his own if he was not satisfied with what the local governor or quarantine master was showing us.”

“Why?”

“Nobody ever wants a quarantine, not governors or mayors, not shopkeepers nor the rich. Nobody wants to accept that the comfortable lives they are accustomed to might suddenly come to an end, let alone that they might die. They will reject any evidence that disrupts their usual ways, they will deny any deaths, and even resent the dead. When they see the renowned Chief Inspector of Public Health Bonkowski Pasha and his assistant appear before them, they realize that even the authorities in Istanbul have recognized the gravity of the situation. But this never happened here. They would not let us meet with anyone.”

“That was a precaution requested by His Excellency the Sultan himself,” said Doctor Nuri.

“More than everything else, that is what troubled Bonkowski Pasha when the Aziziye secretly dropped him off on our island at midnight five days ago!” said Pharmacist Nikiforos. “It will be a formidable task to prepare an island for quarantine when it hides its dead and denies there is an outbreak at all. We must also contend with the existence of forces upon this island bent on eliminating quarantine doctors. We would all do well to fear another assassination.”

“Do not worry!” said Doctor Nuri. He was troubled and even a little mortified by Pharmacist Nikiforos and Doctor Ilias’s fears. He had just realized that the reason why these two Greek men seemed more perturbed than Muslims were by recent events was that they were Christians. As this book is ultimately intended as a historical account, we see no reason not to mention future events here. By the time they reach the end of this book, our readers will discover that Doctor and Prince Consort Nuri’s instincts were sadly accurate, and that Pharmacist Nikiforos, the painter in Istanbul, and Doctor Ilias would all be killed for political reasons.

As he enumerated the properties of the various products he was placing in a gift basket, Pharmacist Nikiforos showed Doctor Nuri the symbols that adorned the bottles of La Rose du Minguère and La Rose du Levant and brought the conversation—as he had planned to do all along—to Bonkowski Pasha’s friend from his youth, the Armenian painter Osgan Kalemciyan, and to the cloth that the Governor Pasha had confiscated.

“The Governor Pasha misunderstood the significance of that piece of cloth, and thought it a flag!” he said.

When the doctors convened in the Governor Pasha’s office upon their return from the pharmacy that day, Governor Sami Pasha stated crisply that he would return the confiscated cloth to Pharmacist Nikiforos as soon as the Quarantine Committee assembled. The meeting was cut short when Governor Sami Pasha received the news of the sudden death of one of the municipal government’s clerks.

Bonkowski Pasha’s funeral was held that evening in the small and gracious Saint Anthony’s Church. Despite the Sultan’s telegrams and the encomiums that had appeared in the Istanbul press, the island’s Greek journalists did not turn up, and the ceremony was a small one. Because of the plague, the family of the murdered Chief Inspector of Public Health had not been able to attend anyway. Aside from a few elderly members of the island’s Catholic community, the only other mourner in the church was a former Polish army officer’s son; the army officer had later joined the Ottoman army, and his son now lived in Mingheria. But it was Doctor Ilias, who stood weeping outside in the churchyard beside the rose-adorned grave site, who was the most desperate and broken-hearted of all.

CHAPTER 15

At this point it will benefit this story and history for us to go back three years in time to describe the events of the Pilgrim Ship Mutiny, an incident which was still causing the Governor much political trouble and personal distress.

During the 1890s, one of the precautions the Great Powers took to halt the outbreaks of cholera that spread from India through to the rest of the world via pilgrim ships passing through Mecca and Medina was to impose a ten-day quarantine on any vessels returning from the holy lands. Empires with colonies in Muslim countries were particularly adamant about the need for this second quarantine. For instance, the French, not trusting the quarantine measures employed by the Ottoman authorities in the Hejaz, would put passengers returning from the hajj to the French colony of Algeria aboard the Messageries Maritimes Persepolis through a further obligatory quarantine, and only then allow them to disembark and go back home to their towns and villages.

This procedure was one that the Ottoman authorities also implemented, deeming it necessary in light of the perceived weakness of their own Quarantine Authority in the Hejaz. Soon the Quarantine Committee in Istanbul had made this “precautionary quarantine” mandatory across the Ottoman Empire, regardless of whether a ship bringing pilgrims home had raised the yellow flag or reported any sick passengers.

The journey itself was grueling and torturous enough, with many dying on the way (it was indeed considered unremarkable for a fifth of the pilgrims from Bombay and Karachi to perish in transit), and most returning pilgrims, having made it safely back home, objected to the prospect of being quarantined for another ten days. Soldiers would sometimes have to be brought in, and in many places doctors had to ask the police and the gendarmerie for help. In outlying ports and on small islands like Mingheria, where quarantine premises fell short of requirements or existing facilities were too small to contain the villager pilgrims, the authorities would hastily round up leaky old ships and barges available for cheap hire and use these as temporary holding and isolation facilities. Sometimes, as in Chios, Kuşadası, and Thessaloniki, these vessels would be towed to some remote bay or near a stretch of empty land where a camp would be set up with tents borrowed from the army.

Desperate to get home, returning pilgrims were often exasperated by this second quarantine. Some would survive the journey only to die during those final ten days. There were scuffles and arguments between the hajjis and the Greek, Armenian, and Jewish doctors who came to examine them. Having been forced to endure this mandatory quarantine, the pilgrims were also expected—to their immense frustration—to pay a quarantine levy. Some of the wealthier and more cunning pilgrims would bribe doctors and break quarantine outright, to all the other pilgrims’ fury.

Three years ago, a series of blunders had led to an incident that, out of the many similar situations occurring throughout the Ottoman Empire, was to prove the most egregious of all and give rise to the most vehement anger against quarantine measures. A telegraph from Istanbul had ordered that on its return from the Hejaz, whence it had sailed under the British flag, the ship named Persia should not be allowed to approach the port of Arkaz. Accordingly, its forty-seven pilgrims were transferred onto a rickety old barge procured by Quarantine Master Nikos, and the barge was then towed to one of the small coves in the north of the island, where it dropped anchor. This remote bay was surrounded by rocky hills and cliffs that served as a natural cage and was therefore a suitable spot to establish a quarantine zone. But those same steep and rocky cliffs also made it harder to deliver food, potable water, and medicines to the pilgrims.

A storm delayed the setting up of the camp for the doctors who would be needed to examine the pilgrims, for the soldiers that would help the doctors, and for the storage of medical supplies. The storm raged on for five days, during which the returning Mingherian pilgrims suffered the torments of thirst and hunger. Then they were subjected to a scorching heat. The pilgrims were mostly bearded, middle-aged villagers who tended to small farms and olive groves, and had never traveled outside the island before. There were also some pious and equally bearded younger men among them who had set out to help their fathers and grandfathers on the journey. Most of them hailed from mountain villages in the north of the island, like Çifteler and Nebiler.

After three days, cholera began to spread through the overcrowded barge. One by one, the exhausted pilgrims began to die. Weakened by their journey, they had no strength left to resist the disease. But though the death toll kept rising every day, the officials and doctors who had dragged the pilgrims here were still nowhere to be seen, until even the older hajjis began to grow restless.

The two Greek doctors who had managed to climb over the mountains on horseback and finally reach the quarantine camp after a three-day journey were in no hurry to row out to the germ-infested barge and deal with the furious pilgrims. They could sense that the vessel was filthy and overrun with disease. Some of the pilgrims did not understand why they were being kept there, but knew deep down that they were dying. Faced with their imminent end, the last thing that these weary old pilgrims wanted was to have one of these Christian doctors with their goatees and strange spectacles to spray them with Lysol and disinfectant liquid. In any case, two of the disinfectant spray pumps the doctors had carried across the mountains on horseback broke on the first day. Quarrels had also begun to erupt among the pilgrims themselves. Those saying “We should throw the dead into the sea” clashed with those who replied “They are family, they are martyrs, we will bury them in the village!” and used up what little strength they had left in arguing.

At the end of the first week, with the disease still rampant, and the bodies that had been thrown into the sea not recovered and buried but left instead to be picked at by birds and fish, rebellion broke out on the barge.