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“He could at least avoid going out into Hamidiye Avenue with his entourage when it’s busy!” the Governor would reply. “Everyone thinks he’s locked up in the dungeons!”

After midnight, as the landau with the Governor Pasha and the Prison Warden on board descended toward the shore, it crossed paths with a quiet, unassuming Greek family. Though it was completely dark, the father, who was carrying the family’s belongings on his back, recognized the Governor Pasha from his voice. Speaking slowly in rudimentary Turkish and a strangely sentimental manner, he told them that an infected person had visited their home. The Pasha was able to understand that one of the man’s children had developed a fever and fallen sick too. But was it the plague, or was it something else? The man’s wife began to cry. After the family had vanished into the darkness, the landau continued down the slope. They passed through narrow, crooked streets once lined with Janissaries’ shops, lorimers, leather dealers, saddlers, and small eateries. The Pasha experienced that same sensation of having been admitted into a boundless, mysterious, ancient realm that he and everybody else felt whenever they passed through the gates of the Castle.

Before going into the prison, the Pasha wanted to see the courtyard where people who had been exposed to the plague were being kept in isolation. The Castle was a convoluted network of walls, towers, and assorted structures built over hundreds of years, and the partially covered isolation facility was situated in the northeastern section of this vast complex, facing the port. Those who were being held in isolation there were visible from the city across the bay. Far from the Venetian-and Byzantine-era buildings in the southeastern section that had served for centuries as prisons, and from the Venetian Tower, famous for its damp dungeon cells, the isolation area was bordered along its southern edge by the Janissaries’ Barracks, built in the time of Blind Mehmet Pasha. From his chair in his office in the State Hall, Sami Pasha could look across the bay and see the windows of this most elegant of all the Castle buildings, and watch the bored and weary people held in isolation sitting and waiting on the rocks by the sea. Now, in the middle of the night, he found himself looking at the same place up close, and from the opposite vantage point.

More than half the people currently in isolation came from the city’s Muslim neighborhoods. They had been brought here because someone in their house had died, and it was therefore believed that they too might be infected. Most were angry at having been forcibly removed from their homes and families. But they were also trying to reason with themselves and accept the necessity of quarantine. In the first five days since the beginning of quarantine, a total of thirty-seven people had been put into isolation. The Prison Warden told the Governor that initially these “suspects” had been furious at their predicament, but that they had eventually calmed down. They were being given the same food that was fed to the convicts in the Castle prison, but even so the warden could not refrain from petitioning the Governor for an additional allowance.

As they climbed to the second floor of the barracks, they crossed an empty landing where the Governor felt the presence of the port and the darkness and the chill of the sea. The Castle gave everyone rheumatism. In the two months that he had spent here locked up in the Venetian Tower writing satirical odes to Sultan Abdulmejid, the famous stuttering poet Saim of Sinope had been driven half mad with rheumatic aches. The warden noted that there weren’t enough beds, so most of the plague suspects were having to share mattresses. Ever since the discovery of Guard Bayram’s corpse fifteen days ago, the Governor and the Prison Warden had been extremely concerned that the disease might spread across the Castle, and had accordingly taken extensive precautions to prevent this.

There had been mousetraps installed in every corner of the Castle. The rats killed by these traps were picked up with tongs, as the warden was at pains to note, and delivered to the municipal authorities. But so far none of the rats that had been caught in the Castle had died as the plague-infested ones in the city did, with blood oozing out their mouths and noses. A murderer shackled in his cell had become feverish and delirious, vomiting occasionally, but a second convict who shared the same cell did not seem to be sick at all. The Pasha strongly suspected that the murderous scoundrel didn’t really have the plague and was just pretending. The Prison Warden should have known that the only way to deal with a man in that state was to give his feet a good beating until he admitted he wasn’t sick, but the warden was probably worried that his men might catch the plague themselves while administering the necessary torture. It had also occurred to the Governor Pasha that if that beast really were to die of the plague, the definitive solution would be to dispose of his corpse in the middle of the night, throwing it into the sea unbeknownst to all, and before any rumors could start about an outbreak in the prison. Would the sharks who ate the corpse also die of the plague?

They walked across the spacious courtyard between the Castle’s first wall, built by the Crusaders, and its second wall, built by the Venetians, and listened to the sound of their own footsteps before they entered the prison through its side gate.

The Pasha went to the door of the second dormitory first, where gangsters and felons were housed. The father and son who had been convicted during the pilgrim ship trial and had been serving their sentences ever since slept in this dormitory too. The Pasha glanced through the window on the door as if he could see into the darkness, then walked away. He had been thinking of finding an excuse to release the pair early, as he was worried that something might happen to them while they were inside.

Occasionally the Prison Warden would complain so much about a particularly unmanageable dormitory chief that the Governor, running out of patience, would instruct him to serve some kind of exemplary punishment, and the inmate in question would be given a thorough beating by the prison guards. It was imperative to the smooth running of the Ottoman Empire that the prisoner should never discover where the order that had resulted in his punishment had originated. After the beating, the convict would be taken from his dormitory, which the Crusaders, the Venetians, and the Byzantines had perhaps once used as a refectory or an armory or as sleeping quarters, and be transferred to the prison tower on the rocky cliff along the Castle’s southwest wall, where he would be thrown inside a frigid cell overlooking the sea. Also known as the Venetian Tower, this tall construction with thick walls had originally been built as an observation tower, but a mere one hundred and seventy years later it had begun to be utilized as a prison, and now, four hundred years on, this first seed of what had since become the much-larger Castle prison still served that same function under Ottoman rule. Healthy prisoners who were locked up in this tower, and particularly in the smaller cells on its lower floors, would soon fall ill, while older, sicklier, wearier prisoners would usually die within a year or two. The one relatively salubrious cell in the tower faced a narrow courtyard. Here, after being tormented all day by rats, cockroaches, and mosquitoes, and surrounded by the presence of so many others slowly dying with him, the prisoner would look out into the courtyard as the evening sun began to set to see inmates shackled and weighed down like galley slaves, pacing back and forth outside, and realizing then that things could get far worse for him than they already were, he would be moved to reflect upon his actions.

Governor Sami Pasha stepped onto the gloomy stone-paved landing next to the cell where Manolis, editor in chief of the Neo Nisi, had been locked up. A prison officer who had been waiting for the Governor to arrive told him that the interrogation was ongoing, but the exhausted suspect had fallen asleep. The Pasha’s orders were to do whatever it took to discover who had made Manolis write the column where he had brought up the Pilgrim Ship Mutiny again. He was convinced that whoever had been responsible for that must have also organized Bonkowski Pasha’s assassination. But this was not a theory he felt he could share with Doctor Nuri, who believed in the fanciful notion that a series of unconnected clues would eventually lead him to the killer. The Governor also didn’t want anybody to know that he was having the Greek journalist tortured. The Pasha hated when the uppermost tiers of the Ottoman ruling classes had their underlings do their dirty work for them, then acted as if they didn’t know anything about it, almost as much as he hated people who pretended to be more westernized than they really were. Often those who did that dirty work on some mysterious superior’s bidding would then strenuously and wholeheartedly deny that the order had originally been given by the highest authority in the land. It was Abdul Hamid who had arranged for the Ottoman bureaucracy’s brightest and most westernized minister and governor, Mithat Pasha—the man whose actions had led to Abdul Hamid’s older brother being deposed and Abdul Hamid himself taking the throne in his place—to first be banished to the Ta’if prison in the Hejaz and later be strangled in his cell, but all this the Sultan had organized in such a way that nobody had been able to tell who had planned it. The Governor Pasha had come across many naïve and simpleminded Ottoman bureaucrats who revered the memory of the reformist and parliamentarianist Mithat Pasha but could not bring themselves to believe that he had been assassinated on Abdul Hamid’s orders.

Apart from Manolis, there was another prisoner in the tower where the Governor Pasha usually put any Greek guerrillas, suspected criminals, and journalists he did not immediately wish to see beaten. The Prison Warden reminded the Governor about Pavli Bey. The Governor had had him locked up in the tower for penning false reports about a plague in the city, then forgotten that he had done so. Or perhaps he had not forgotten him altogether, but everything had been happening so fast that the Pasha hadn’t quite known what to do with him.

The iron door opened noisily, and two guards stepped inside, carrying torches.

“Ah, Pasha …,” said the journalist, sitting up on his bed of straw. “So the outbreak is real after all!”

“Yes, Pavli Bey; that is why we are here. You were right. We have begun quarantine procedures.”

“It is too late, Your Excellency!” said the journalist. “It has reached the prison too, and soon we will all be dead.”

“You mustn’t despair!” said the Pasha. “The state will sort everything out.”

“You’re the one who put me in prison because I said there was an outbreak …,” the journalist replied. “And now people are dying, killed by that same outbreak!”

The Governor reminded the journalist that he had been put in prison not because he had reported the truth, but because he had not followed the Governor’s instructions.

“Don’t think you’ll be set free now just because you were right about the outbreak!” he continued sternly. “They might decide to try you for treason. I can stop that from happening, but Chief Scrutineer Mazhar Effendi will need your help.”

“We have always been the municipality’s and the sultans’ staunchest supporters, and prayed for their success,” said the journalist.

“We know that the rebel Haralambo, who has set up camp near Menoya Bay and in the Defteros Mountains, receives support from Arkaz, and we know who from,” said the Governor Pasha. “Let me make it very clear to you that you must stay away from these people!”

“They are up in the mountains, and I’ve had nothing at all to do with them …”

“They have friends in Arkaz, places to stay and people who support them. We know all this, Pavli Bey. I am informed that Haralambo comes to Arkaz sometimes, and that when he does, he stays in the Hora neighborhood.”

“I don’t know anything, Pasha,” said Pavli the journalist, giving the Governor a look that seemed to say that even if he did know something, he wouldn’t tell.

The Governor stormed out of the cell and told his clerks to send a note to the prison the next morning and see to it that both “this one” and Manolis were set free. Then he followed the Prison Warden toward the wing of the prison where Ramiz and his associates were being held.

As they walked across flagstones and up stairways to the sound of their own footsteps, the Governor could tell from the silence around them that the prisoners had heard the sound of the Castle’s main gate, the doors to its courtyards, and the entrances to its prison buildings opening and closing in the middle of the night, and that they were waiting expectantly to discover the reason for this unannounced visit—perhaps an execution to be carried out in the inner courtyard, or a dormitory search that would result in a round of bastinado. The clerk behind him was carrying a torch, and the Governor enjoyed watching its black shadow cast upon the walls and stone floors of the prison.

That afternoon, in preparation for the Governor’s visit, Ramiz had been taken to a room in the prison’s administrative offices where they had served him a plate of mullet stuffed with vegetables and some bread on the side, told him that his sentence might be commuted if he behaved himself and elicited the Governor’s trust, made sure he was aware that gallows were already being erected in the State Hall Square without waiting for Istanbul’s approval, and finally sent him back to a more comfortable cell.

As he always did in these nighttime visits, the Governor strode into Ramiz’s cell and coolly delivered the speech he had prepared.

“It is my belief and that of the judicial committee that has convicted you that you are guilty of this crime, but against the scourge of plague we must practice forgiveness and obedience, not conflict. Thus, if you answer my questions truthfully and honorably, confess to your crimes, and provide a written statement expressing your heartfelt remorse, the authorities in Istanbul may order you to be released on the condition that you never set foot in Arkaz again.”

Ramiz was completely drained after three days of intermittent torture and hardly any sleep in his cold and preternaturally damp cell, but the Governor saw a glimmer of life in his eyes. Was it righteous anger, or the confidence of having friends in very high places? The Governor Pasha asked Ramiz a long list of detailed questions about Haralambo, the Greek consul, and the rumors that the Pantaleon Company’s ferries were being used to smuggle weapons to the island. He even intimated that the Pilgrim Ship Mutiny had been provoked by the British. But, he added, Istanbul would ensure these enemies of the Sultan received the punishment they deserved. He warned Ramiz not to get complacent just because the army was fighting the Greek guerrillas in the northern villages, and ordered him to leave the prison guard’s daughter Zeynep alone. The whole island would be better off if she married the Major, said the Governor Pasha, stating openly that “the girl” was in love with the army officer anyway.