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Doctor Nuri wasn’t quite so pessimistic. It was perfectly possible that by the next morning, the measures they had taken could suddenly slow the outbreak. It was all a matter of degrees. Rather than panicking and making misguided decisions, they should follow all developments closely and think about the possible causes of the resistance they were facing.

By now the Quarantine Regiment always accompanied doctors in their visits to Muslim homes where a patient had just died, helping to confiscate the victim’s belongings and to make the necessary arrangements for the corpse to be disinfected with lime at the New Cemetery. Doctor Nuri saw these as the more successful elements of the quarantine effort. But as the city’s neighborhood supervisors kept reminding them, even measures as simple as quarantine cordons were not taken seriously sometimes. In the neighborhoods of Turunçlar and Çite, the restrictions had precipitated a kind of indifference and contempt that occasionally manifested as anger. The clearest expression of this mood had been articulated by a ten-year-old boy named Tahsin, who had claimed the plague couldn’t hurt his father because they both had “one of these.” He was proudly showing Doctor Nikos a consecrated prayer sheet covered in minuscule handwriting. In response, Doctor Nikos had confiscated the thick, yellowing piece of paper, and when the boy wouldn’t stop crying, he’d had to call other doctors and quarantine officials to the scene.

The “Tahsin incident” was seized upon by the Governor and by many of the delegates of the Quarantine Committee as a convenient response (tradition, religion, sheikhs, the ignorant masses!) to the question of why the same measures that had been so successful in Smyrna did not seem to be taking hold on the island of Mingheria. Abdul Hamid’s Pan-Islamism, as well as a wariness of the Muslim uprisings that were taking place in Africa and Asia against European colonial rule, and many other historical prejudices also played a role in promoting this simplistic explanation. Yet this view was not exclusive to the island’s consuls and Greek doctors but was also held in some measure by Princess Pakize, who had received a more westernized and “rational” education in the harem than they’d had, as well as Doctor Nuri, who’d received his medical training from European doctors, and the Governor Pasha too.

The Governor Pasha had someone examine the prayer sheet the Quarantine Master had confiscated and learned that it had been issued by the sheikh of the Rifai lodge in the Vavla neighborhood. These devotional artifacts often served as a comfort to people, but what harm might they cause to the quarantine effort?

Doctor Nuri had often debated this question with the Arab sheikhs and British doctors he had encountered while fighting cholera epidemics in the Hejaz. Of course consecrated prayer sheets and amulets of this sort were of no “scientific value,” but when circumstances were particularly dire, they could prevent the public from slipping into despondency, and even bring them strength. To oppose the use of prayer sheets outright would only serve to estrange the public from quarantine doctors altogether, and compound their hostility and aversion to quarantine measures. On the other hand, the more they were left to trust in these tokens, the more wholeheartedly did people and shopkeepers embrace the idea that everything would be “just fine,” until they began to think that their affiliation with a particular lodge or a sheikh allowed them to transcend the laws of medicine and imbued them with superior powers.

“I could easily have that quack who runs the Rifai sect arrested, give him a good scare, and have his whole lodge, his home, and every last one of his people pumped full of Lysol, but believe me, there would be consequences!” the Governor had said. Doctor Nuri recalled that the Pasha had once spoken in a similar manner about Sheikh Hamdullah too. “Someone would immediately complain to the Sultan that we are harassing the lodges. The next day we would find a telegram from Istanbul telling us to let the sheikh go.”

The following morning the Doctor and Prince Consort set off to return the prayer sheet that the sheikh of the Rifai sect had issued to protect against the plague demon, and that Quarantine Master Nikos had taken from Tahsin. He was received warmly by the family, and saw no traces of the disease in their home. There was a strange white light in here, a sense of tranquility and of trust in divine providence. The boy’s father sold plums, quinces, and walnuts on a sloping road that led to the docks. The Prince Consort realized that Tahsin knew he was Murad V’s son-in-law—married to the fairy-tale princess who was the old sultan’s daughter.

During this period, both the Quarantine Committee and the epidemiology team in the State Hall wasted several days over an audacious theory Doctor Nikos had developed in relation to the outbreak. One morning, as he studied the map hanging in the Epidemiology Room, Doctor Nikos had made a discovery: the rats that had brought the disease from Alexandria and the local rats they had infected were still only to be found in the western half of the city.

“There are plenty of green dots in the Christian neighborhoods too!” the Governor Pasha remarked.

“Those are mostly people who catch it when they go down to the port, and when they die in their homes later, we just assume their neighborhoods are infected too.”

“I have seen with my own eyes the dead rats in the forestlike gardens of the great mansion in the Petalis neighborhood where the Karkavitsases from Thessaloniki live.”

Our readers will be bemused to learn of how much time the Governor Pasha and Doctor Nikos spent debating this question. Doctor Nuri could understand how this bold idea had originated, and although he didn’t agree with it, he did not object to it either. Meanwhile, despite the Governor’s insistence that rat corpses were still being discovered in the city’s Christian neighborhoods, and the fact that even that same day some Greek children had come to the State Hall to hand in dead rats in exchange for their reward, Doctor Nikos—who had more experience with cholera than plague—never strayed from his conviction that he had made some kind of discovery. A clerk and two young Greek doctors named Philippos and Stefanos spent three days trying to find out how far the plague had spread into the Christian neighborhoods just across the Arkaz Creek, but their investigations proved inconclusive.

On the other hand, it was certainly true that some impoverished Greek children had been known to collect dead rats from Muslim neighborhoods and hand them in to the municipal authorities for money. This was a group of three boys who had run away from their respective homes when their parents had died. It was to be the first of the children’s gangs. The Governor had also heard that in the Hora neighborhood Muslim and Christian children had been warring over rat corpses. The bishop of Hagia Triada even considered whether to reopen the two schools affiliated with the church and have classes resume as a way of keeping Greek children away from street fighting and microbes.

This scheme never bore fruit (a third of the schools’ teachers and janitors had already fled the island), nor did any of the various other creative solutions that were dreamed up during this time, but we have reported them here to demonstrate not only the general sense of hopelessness that reigned in the State Hall, but also the mood that had taken hold among some of the island’s more erudite and distinguished personages. In that age when everyone believed that scientific discoveries could transform human life, and supported the increase in wealth that colonial pursuits had brought to Europe, it was the duty of society’s comparatively better-educated upper classes to come up with clever discoveries—like Samuel Morse, who devised the telegraph, or Thomas Edison, who invented the light bulb—to solve the world’s problems, or indeed to catch murderers as Sherlock Holmes did in his moments of investigative inspiration. Filled with these hopeful visions, many a Mingherian patriarch whiled his days away experimenting with vinegar steam, incense sticks, and hydrochloric acid from Nikiforos’s pharmacy, and various powders sourced from the island’s herbalists, to try and concoct a homemade cure for the plague.

The first fully effective and reliable plague vaccine would be discovered only forty years later. Back in the 1900s, doctors in Bombay and Hong Kong were still using blood serum to administer the plague microbe to patients, practicing, in their desperation, an experimental approach similar to what we have described above. But the failure of all these haphazard efforts demoralized both the Governor and the public, and poisoned the determination and optimism that were essential to the successful implementation of quarantine measures.

With Doctor Nikos’s epidemiological hypothesis leading nowhere too, any hopes that Bonkowski Pasha and his assistant’s killers could be found using the latest European methods also began to fade. “European ways do not always take root on Ottoman soil!” the Governor Pasha had once said in the middle of an unrelated conversation. Doctor Nuri had sensed a note of insinuation in the Governor’s words, but though he knew that it was not going to be easy to solve the murder in the manner of Sherlock Holmes, he continued to make frequent trips to talk to the city’s herbalists in search of clues.

Two days later the Governor received a telegram from his wife. With reports of the outbreak of plague on the island multiplying, an increasingly agitated Esma Hanım had written to say that she would be coming on the first succor ship that sailed to Arkaz. The Governor Pasha had already surmised from incoming telegrams that such a ship was being prepared, but so many schemes of this sort had been abandoned halfway in the past that he had forgotten all about it. Even just the idea of his wife—who hadn’t been to the island once in five years—emerging from such a ship with her brother by her side was completely bewildering to the Pasha. His first thought was this: in the five years he had spent apart from his wife, the Pasha had become a different person. He did not want to go back to the person he had been before. Even if the government in Istanbul were to change so that Kâmil Pasha of Cyprus became grand vizier and offered him a position as minister again, he might still not be willing to leave Mingheria and return to Istanbul.

Another strain on the Pasha’s morale was a new disagreement that had recently arisen with the authorities in Istanbul. Ever since the quarantine had begun, it was forbidden for any ship to leave the island without undergoing a period of isolation first. (This was an order the Pasha had been successfully implementing.) But whenever he went to visit his lover Marika in the evenings, he would look at the little bay near the spot where the carriage dropped him off, and at the coves and beaches farther along the shore, and see boatmen busy smuggling passengers and their belongings to ships waiting out at sea. Quarantine was being broken every night under cover of darkness. On the first day that quarantine measures were introduced, all the ferry companies had done this.

For political reasons, over the next few days the Pantaleon Company’s ships continued to accept passengers even if they hadn’t been quarantined, as did smaller companies like Fraissinet. The nights were windy and the sea was rough, and the Greek boatmen who rowed out to these ships in the dark had a difficult job to do. The Governor Pasha eventually learned through his spies that the foreman Kozma and his team, as well as the Italian consul’s protégé foreman Zachariadis, had been making a fortune out of these activities. But Foreman Seyit, who was under the Pasha’s protection, had not been involved in the smuggling at all.

Having found out so belatedly about these illicit activities, the Pasha became understandably concerned that the Sublime Porte and the Sultan might judge him to have been negligent in the matter, if not downright complicit. He felt as if he had completely lost his bearings, and could not seem to make the right decisions. For a while, he fantasized about sending a telegram to Istanbul asking for the battleship Mahmudiye to come and bomb the smugglers. After all, the boats now smuggling people off the island were the same ones that had brought Greece-friendly separatist guerrillas onto Mingheria’s northern shores just two months ago. He even considered rounding up all the heads of the ferry companies, from the smallest to the largest, and declaring that they were all under arrest for having contravened quarantine regulations and international travel protocols. But that would have been excessive. In the end, the Pasha spent a lot of time not being able to decide what to do.

In any event, as soon as they reached the countries, cities, and islands to which they were headed (places like Crete, Thessaloniki, Smyrna, Marseille, and Ragusa), all ships carrying passengers from Mingheria were now being confined to makeshift quarantine stations in remote, secluded bays, a measure readers will recall from the incident with the rebellious pilgrims which we recounted at the start of our history. The failure of Mingheria’s quarantine was embarrassing Ottoman diplomats and bureaucrats, and the Sultan himself, in front of the whole world.

Sometimes the Governor Pasha could feel the unstoppable force of the plague bearing upon him like a vast, transcendent wave, but having found the composure and faith required to stay afloat, he would internally congratulate himself as well as Doctor Nuri and the other quarantine doctors for their courage and firmness in the face of adversity. But at other times he would focus obsessively on trivial squabbles with the island’s consuls, on diplomatic and political schemes that were of no use in stopping the advance of the outbreak, and on pointless reports and editorials published in newspapers nobody read, expending time and energy on previously unnoticed paradoxes and on trying to expose the consuls’ duplicitous behaviors.

The Messageries Maritimes representative Andon Hampuri, for example, kept demanding special privileges and concessions for his company, complaining that quarantine was damaging their profits by preventing them from carrying people who wished to flee the island, only to quietly note elsewhere that “the French government demands that no one is allowed off the island until they have gone through a period of quarantine and isolation first!” Aware that the two positions were incongruous, he would only speak of them at different times, and smile at the Pasha in abashment. Sami Pasha himself was a regular practitioner of this kind of deceit, and fully aware of how complicated politics could be. “All Ottoman citizens are equal now, and there are no more infidels in the eyes of the law!” he would daily proclaim in his enthusiasm for the range of westernizing reforms the Empire had recently introduced; yet at the same time he would favor Muslims at every opportunity, or at least believe wholeheartedly that he should do so, and feel guilty when he didn’t.