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But of all the cases of arsenic poisoning reported in the Ottoman Empire during the nineteenth century, none had been as acute (involving enough poison, in other words, to immediately knock a person dead) as in this incident at the Mingherian garrison, or openly manifested as an attack of such remarkable political audacity and arrogance. From the Governor to the Quarantine Chief, from the Doctor and Prince Consort to the garrison Commander, the island’s entire governing hierarchy had been targeted at its highest levels. They retaliated with equal force.

The eight soldiers who worked in the garrison kitchens were arrested straightaway, along with their sergeant. Then came the turn of the five privates who usually waited on officers and had laid out the table that day, as well as the garrison’s provisions master and his two assistants. The Governor sent the higher-ranked suspects to the Castle prison and had the kitchen staff locked up in separate cells at the southern end of the garrison grounds, where torture and interrogations were normally carried out. To make sure the new recruits didn’t notice anything, Mehmet Pasha arranged for the prisoners to be transported not in the vehicle traditionally employed for that purpose but in the van the garrison used to distribute the bread and pastries from its bakery. Afterward the bread van had to be disinfected, and this, combined with the striking appearance of the two spray-pump operators who had been summoned for the purpose, gave rise to a general and erroneous impression that the soldiers who worked in the kitchens had been arrested because they had brought the plague to the garrison. This misapprehension was also aided by the fact that plague victims were so often treated as if they had committed a crime, and that those infected were confined almost like prisoners to the isolation facility in the Castle’s prison wing.

For such illustrious personages from Istanbul to be picked off like sitting ducks on the island whose every inch the Governor was supposed to rule and control was an act of defiance aimed not only at the Ottoman Empire and at quarantine provisions, but clearly at the Governor too. But instead of mounting any kind of counterattack, Sami Pasha decided that the priority should be to conceal from Mingherians the truth about Doctor Ilias’s poisoning. He told the Quarantine Master that, if necessary, he should add one more to the tally of plague cases in his next telegram to Istanbul. Besides, Doctor Ilias hadn’t died yet, though he occasionally became disoriented and delirious, talking about his wife back in Istanbul before another spell of tremors similar to those that afflicted plague patients plunged him back into exhausted silence.

When Princess Pakize’s letters are published, historians will discover that the debate on the question of method that took place between the Governor and the Doctor and Prince Consort in the meeting that was held an hour later at the State Hall gave rise to some noteworthy philosophical and political paradoxes. The Governor and the Prince Consort once again compared the relative merits of studying the available evidence to reach a conclusion (inductive reasoning), a process which—influenced by Abdul Hamid—they referred to as “the Sherlock Holmes method,” versus those of applying a thorough and comprehensive political logic to establish the identity of the culprit from the outset and locate the supporting evidence accordingly (deductive reasoning).

“They stood in that very kitchen shamelessly pouring rat poison into the biscuit flour. It’s clear who did this—and neither I nor the Sultan back in Istanbul need any help from Sherlock Holmes to work out who must have supplied them with the poison. This afternoon the state prosecutor and his clerk will be questioning the kitchen staff held in the garrison prison. The Department of Scrutinia and the prosecutor will get those Greek nationalist guerrillas talking in no time, you’ll see.”

“Your Excellency, I am convinced that this is the work of one person alone,” said Doctor Nuri. “Do we really need to torture fifteen people to try and get to one?”

“Indeed we do not,” said the Governor. “Even the prospect of being tortured has got them so afraid that they have already started talking; they have been telling us things we haven’t even asked about yet. Tell me, could your Sherlock Holmes have done it so fast?”

In Mingheria, prisoners held on suspicion of theft or organized criminal activity would typically be interrogated in the Castle prison, where the soles of their bare feet would be beaten with sticks until their agonized screams could be heard in the Castle’s southern wing. In the garrison, the same torture was inflicted upon Greek nationalist militants and guerrillas caught trying to ambush Ottoman troops. The Governor knew that soldiers tended to be more lenient compared with prison guards and the prosecutor’s men, so he had sent the Chief Scrutineer to join the team leading the investigation at the garrison. The Chief Scrutineer was particularly skilled at formulating precisely the kinds of questions that could most effectively disorient prisoners already stupefied by the beatings they had suffered to their feet, and pick at the inconsistencies in their statements until they caved altogether. The Governor had ordered him not to leave the garrison until he had conclusively determined who among the cook and his assistants was to be blamed for this act.

But despite having their feet beaten and some having their nails torn off with pliers, none of the kitchen staff produced a sufficiently compelling account. Not one of the tortured prisoners was able to say convincingly enough: “Yes, I saw who did it: it was bald Rasim who mixed rat poison in with the walnuts and the rose-scented flour!” For they all knew that whatever they said, the officer interrogating them in the garrison would take them to the kitchen and expect to be shown exactly where they had seen it happen. In other words it was not possible to lie one’s way out of the foot whippings. There wasn’t even any proof yet that the arsenic had come from rat poison. The Governor Pasha was vexed that the torture carried out in the garrison jailhouse had not yielded the desired outcome, but he did not lose hope. The biscuits had been prepared and baked that morning in the garrison kitchens. Evidently the provisions master, who had been sent to the Castle prison earlier, or one of the elderly garrison waiters must somehow be involved.

So it was that the Governor Pasha decided to make another of his customary nighttime visits to the prison and sent word to Prison Warden Sadrettin Effendi accordingly. He also wrote Istanbul another telegram requesting that a support vessel be sent with additional doctors and supplies on board. An appeal made on behalf of a four-person family whom the Quarantine Regiment had put into the Castle’s isolation facility that afternoon following the swearing-in ceremony had been passed up through the ranks until it had finally landed on the Governor’s desk. He decided to ignore it.

The Governor then busied himself for a time with everyday matters that had nothing to do with the outbreak: he read and sent back to the Chief Scrutineer a report from an informant stating that there were twenty-five revolvers hidden inside the crates of cherries and strawberries that the deputy of the consul who ran the local Lloyd agency had arranged to have delivered directly to his seaside home without going through a customs check, declaring them to be for “personal consumption”; there had been a request from Istanbul (coming most likely from inside the harem) for a pair of Mingheria’s native green-speckled, garrulous parrots to be caught and sent to the palace; money was needed to repair the Maviaka Bridge in the north after it had been damaged by rain. Another problem that, fueled by a stream of informers’ reports, had grown increasingly urgent over the past few months, centered on allegations of misconduct around the municipal kitchens. To stop municipal employees from trading rumors over lunch, the Governor Pasha had made these meals the responsibility of individual department heads. So the Chief Secretary and his clerks, the Chief of Charitable Trusts and his assistants, and the Chief Archivist and his men all had their lunches in their respective offices. The municipality provided each office with an allowance and with food supplies for this purpose. But the department heads were known to take some of these supplies home with them, particularly when their salaries from Istanbul were delayed, or even to do what Chief Scrutineer Mazhar Effendi unabashedly did and pilfer beans and lentils from the municipal storehouse to fill up their own family kitchens. The British consul Monsieur George had helpfully suggested that one way to stem this hemorrhage of public funds might be to adopt a table d’hôte system (as was beginning to be done in some military bases in Istanbul), but it would have been unwise to introduce such a measure now, for it was bound to cause the plague to spread even faster and to antagonize the department heads. Some clerks, particularly those with influential friends, only came to the office to eat lunch.

The Governor was also thinking about his upcoming night trip to the prisons. When Chief Scrutineer Mazhar Effendi returned from the garrison, the Governor outlined his plans for this visit. Three separate gallows were to be erected that night side by side to carry out the exemplary punishments of the three villains—starting with Ramiz—who were guilty of Bonkowski’s murder. Şakir would be more than enough to deal with these three cowards, but his working alone could also pose a problem; the executioner would have to carry out each sentence in turn, and that could take a long time.

CHAPTER 29

Shortly after dark the Governor looked out of his window to see that the gallows really were being erected in the State Hall Square, and prompted by an urge he could make no sense of, he walked to Marika’s house. As always, the sight of her dark eyes and her thin, delicate nose filled him with joy, and he was able to forget his political preoccupations for a while. The first new rumor of note that Marika relayed to him that night was that Doctor Ilias had caught the plague at the garrison. This was being regarded as yet more evidence that the plague had been brought to the island by Bonkowski Pasha.

“Doctor Ilias is hiding in the garrison because he is afraid, not because of the plague,” said the Pasha.

Marika had also heard that despite pressure from foreign consuls, the Sultan was going to intervene to stop Ramiz’s hanging.

“How strange!” said the Governor. “I wonder where they got that from.”

“But neither the Greeks nor the Muslims think Zeynep is going to wait for Ramiz while he is locked up in the dungeons. Pasha, is it true that the old sultan’s daughter’s guard is in love with Zeynep?”

“It is!” said the Governor.

As he walked back through the silky night toward the State Hall, without a carriage and without guards, the Governor was stopped by the night watchmen, who did not recognize him at first. He looked again at the gallows rising in the darkness.

Three telegrams had arrived that evening, and a secretary had placed them on the Governor’s desk after arranging for the municipal code breaker to decrypt them. The first telegram requested that the executions of the suspects in the Bonkowski murder be put on hold until they were approved by Istanbul. The second was in response to the telegram the Pasha had sent that morning: it said that the supply ship Sühandan would soon be on its way. The third telegram suggested that if the killers were to repent and confess, they might be granted the Sultan’s pardon, but there would have to be some justification provided and information supplied to support such a decision. The Governor was not in the least surprised by any of these three telegrams. He sat at his desk for a long time, staring at the Castle lanterns burning in the distance.

When the Governor wished to silence and browbeat his opponents and any journalists into submission, he would intimidate them with beatings, prison sentences, and solitary confinement but also ensure that he provided these treacherous snakes with gaps through which they could slither back to their old lives, using municipal clerks and mutual acquaintances to present them with gifts and offers of collaboration. (The Governor liked to think of this dual approach of his as a form of “merciful cunning” learned from Abdul Hamid.) He particularly enjoyed making secret trips to the prison in the middle of the night to visit prisoners in their cells and propose alliances. It was the kind of grand entrance that could impress even the most disconsolate of inmates. The Pasha usually undertook these expeditions whenever pressure mounted from Istanbul for a particular prisoner to be released.

The Chief Prison Warden had come to the State Hall to deliver his report. As they made their way back to the Castle together in the armored landau, they discussed the state of its prison wing. Among politicians and intellectuals of that era, the Arkaz Castle Prison, also known as the Mingherian Dungeon, was one of the most-feared penitentiaries in the Ottoman Empire, its reputation surpassed only by the prisons in the castles of Fezzan, Sinope, and Rhodes. Conditions in the island’s prison were worse than those in other similar establishments across Ottoman lands. The prison dormitories, where petty thieves and unfortunate victims of calumnious accusations lived shoulder to shoulder with hardened killers and inveterate swindlers, were veritable criminal academies where even the most innocent of prisoners quickly learned all kinds of tricks and longed for a chance to put their new skills into practice.

Like many other reform-minded Ottoman statesmen, the Governor harbored a particular interest in prisons. Whenever Hüseyin Pasha, a retired brigadier general who now served as the Chief Inspector of Prisons, came to visit the island, the Governor and the Prison Warden would always have long talks with him on the subject of “prison reform.” What was the surest way to discover and deal with insubordination in the dormitories, overly permissive guards, and unruly inmates? Should the openings on cell doors be moved a little higher, and should the dormitory system be replaced with individual cells?

Another cause for embarrassment was the pervasive misconduct of the prison staff. Some would seize the money and belongings handed over by inexperienced new arrivals; others would collect regular levies from selected victims and even hold out the promise of a pardon or a more comfortable confinement in exchange for “gifts.” Some wealthier and more powerful inmates would bribe the dormitory chiefs, the warden, and the guards and spend most of their days and nights in their own homes, paying only the occasional visit to the prison. The Governor Pasha would sometimes remark that when destitute prisoners were left to rot in dank cellars for having stolen a piece of bread while these far-more-culpable local celebrities wandered freely on the streets, people’s faith in the concept of justice was bound to be eroded. In these moments the municipal secretary, Faik Bey, who considered it his duty to enlighten the Governor on the facts of life even when the Governor knew those facts already, would remind the Pasha that the prison guards had not been paid in five months, and that Master Emrullah, who was mostly serving his sentence at home, had not only been providing several prison guards with financial assistance, but that he had also paid for glass windows to be installed in the dormitories that overlooked the port, that every time he came to the prison he would hand out jugs of olive oil, dried figs, and eggs he had brought from his village, and that he had engaged his own men out of his own pocket to repair the broken wall near the main entrance.