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But as they sat beneath Abdul Hamid’s old map all day, what most upset the delegates of the Guidance Committee was something the map didn’t even show: those Western nations who often supported the nationalist-separatist uprisings that were initiated by the Empire’s Christian subjects and constantly challenged the state’s authority were far more powerful than the Ottomans—not only in terms of military capability, but from an economic, administrative, and demographic perspective too. In 1901, the total population of the Ottoman Empire across its vast geographical span was nineteen million. Five million of these people were non-Muslims, and even though they paid more taxes, they were still treated as second-class citizens, leading them to make demands for “justice,” “equality,” and “reform” and to turn to the nations of the West for support and protection. To the north, the population of Russia, with whom the Ottomans were constantly at war, was seventy million, while the population of Germany, with whom the Ottomans had friendly relations, was close to fifty-five million. The economic output of these European countries, and particularly of the British Empire, outstripped the Ottoman Empire’s feeble efforts twenty-five to one. Moreover, the Ottoman Empire’s Muslim population, who shouldered most of the state’s administrative and military burdens, was becoming increasingly overshadowed by the Greek Orthodox and Armenian merchant classes whose influence was rising even in the outer provinces of the Empire. The rulers of these more remote provinces were unable to meet the demands for greater freedom made by this new and rising non-Muslim bourgeoisie of Greek and Armenian tradesmen; the only reaction local Ottoman governors were able to muster against the uprisings of their Christian populations, who demanded the right to govern themselves and only pay as much tax as the Muslim population did, was to try and wipe the rebels out, and to kill, torture, and banish them into submission.

“That evil djinn has possessed you again!” said Princess Pakize to her husband once they had returned to their cabin. “What were you thinking about?”

“That it is wonderful to be going to China and leaving everything else behind for a while!” said the Prince Consort Nuri.

But his wife could tell from the expression on his face that he was thinking of the outbreak in Mingheria and of Bonkowski Pasha.

CHAPTER 5

As it neared the shore, the traditional sharp-nosed Mingherian pinewood boat that had picked up Bonkowski Pasha and his assistant Doctor Ilias sailed along the tall Castle walls and the island’s rocky cliffs. There was no sound other than the creaking of oars and the gentle sloshing of waves against the towering cliffs that had held the Castle aloft for nearly seven hundred years. There was no light other than that of a few torches burning behind people’s windows, but in the otherworldly moonlight, Arkaz—the largest city and center of the province of Mingheria—looked like a white-and-pink mirage. As a positivist, Bonkowski Pasha was not a superstitious man, but nevertheless he felt there was something inauspicious in this sight. Though Sultan Abdul Hamid had granted him a royal concession to undertake rose cultivation on the island many years ago, this was Bonkowski Pasha’s first visit to the island. He had always imagined that his first trip there would be a joyous, cheerful, ceremonial occasion. It had never crossed his mind that he would have to creep up to the port in the dark of night like some kind of thief.

When the boat entered the smaller bay, the oarsman slowed down. A wet breeze was blowing from the shore, carrying the scent of linden trees and dry seaweed. The boat avoided the dock with the Customhouse, where passenger ships usually alighted, but turned instead toward the Arab Lighthouse, a relic of the time when the island was under Arab occupation, and stopped at the old fishermen’s wharf. It was darker here, and secluded. Governor Sami Pasha, who had organized the Royal Chemist and his assistant’s secret visit to the island under orders from the Sultan, had chosen this dock not just because it was quieter, but also because it was located farther away from the State Hall.

Bonkowski Pasha and his assistant, Ilias, passed their bags and other possessions to two municipal clerks in black coats who had come to meet them at the dock, and grabbed hold of the hands reaching down to help them off the boat. No one saw them getting into the carriage the Governor had sent to pick them up. Governor Sami Pasha had sent his secret guests the special armored landau he used on official occasions, and when he did not want to be seen by the people. Sami Pasha’s fat and somewhat-anxious predecessor had taken rather seriously the threats he’d received from the romantic Greek anarchists who wanted the island to break away from Ottoman rule, and believing them capable of throwing the bombs they seemed so fond of, he had commissioned Bald Kudret, Arkaz’s most famous blacksmith, to make the required sheets of armor, paying for them with money taken from the municipality’s eternally underfunded coffers.

The armored landau, driven by Coachman Zekeriya, passed the hotels and customs offices that lined the harbor, their lamps all unlit, and turned left into a series of alleyways to avoid entering Istanbul Street, the city’s most famous slope. Through the windows of the landau, the Royal Chemist and his assistant smelled the scent of honeysuckle and pine trees and saw in the moonlight the city’s ancient, mossy stone walls, its wooden doorways, and the fronts of its pink brick homes, their windows all pulled shut. As the carriage wound its way uphill and into Hamidiye Square, they noticed the half-built but unfinished clock tower that had sadly not been completed in time for the celebrations that had begun last August for the twenty-fifth anniversary of His Excellency the Sultan’s ascension to the throne (his coronation). They saw the torches burning in front of the Greek Middle School and the Post Office (formerly the Telegraph Office), and the sentries that Governor Sami Pasha had planted at every intersection since the rumors about the plague had first begun to spread.

“His Excellency the Governor is a peculiar character,” Bonkowski Pasha told his assistant when they were alone in their guest quarters. “But I must say I had not expected to find the city so immaculate, so calm and serene. We must recognize this as his personal achievement, unless there is something that escaped our notice in the dark.”

Doctor Ilias, a Greek from Istanbul, had been “assisting” the Sultan’s Royal Chemist for the past nine years. Together they had fought outbreaks of disease in every corner of the Empire, spending nights in hotel rooms, municipal and hospital guesthouses, and military garrisons. Five years ago they had saved Trebizond from cholera by arranging for the whole city to be disinfected with the sprayable solution they had brought with them on the ship they’d arrived on. On another occasion, in 1894, they had combed the environs of Izmit and Bursa village by village to halt the spread of cholera there, sleeping in army tents at night. Bonkowski Pasha had come to trust this assistant who had just happened to have been assigned to him from Istanbul one day, and had also grown accustomed to sharing his private thoughts with him. As they hastened from city to city and port to port battling outbreaks, the Royal Chemist and his assistant, already widely known for their erudition, had come to be seen among the Empire’s bureaucrats and public health officials as a pair of “scientist-saviors.”

“Twenty years ago, the Sultan entrusted me with the task of fighting an outbreak of cholera in Dedeağaç Province, whose Governor at the time was Sami Pasha. His obstructive disdain for me and the young quarantine doctors I had brought along from Istanbul led to more lives being lost, and he must have realized that I would mention this in my report to the Sultan. It is therefore possible that he might be hostile toward us now.”

Bonkowski Pasha had spoken in the Turkish he preferred to use when discussing matters of state, similar to the language we are writing in now. But both the Greek doctor Ilias, who had studied medicine in Paris, and Bonkowski Pasha, who had studied chemistry also in Paris, sometimes spoke to each other in French. So it was that as he felt around in the darkness of their guesthouse rooms trying to work out what was inside, what was shadow and what might be furniture, and where the windows were, the Royal Chemist said in French and as if here speaking in a dream: “I can smell the scent of misfortune!”

Later that night, they were woken up by noises that sounded like the scrabbling of rats. In Smyrna, the war on the plague had become a sort of war on rats. Now that they had arrived in Mingheria, they were surprised that no traps had been set in the guesthouse they had been brought to under the Governor’s supervision. The fact that the plague was spread by rats when the fleas that lived on them bit humans had been communicated in countless telegrams from the capital to provincial governors and local quarantine offices.

In the morning they came to the conclusion that the scrabbling they had heard in the middle of the night must have been produced by seagulls landing on and taking off from the roof of the derelict wooden mansion they were being housed in. To keep them hidden from Arkaz’s meddlesome journalists, gossip-spreading tradesmen, and malicious foreign consuls, Governor Sami Pasha had put up the illustrious Royal Chemist and his assistant not in the spacious guesthouse annexed to the new State Hall but in an unused wooden building that had been readied in a day by the local Director for Charitable Trusts, and to which the Governor had dispatched the requisite guardsmen and servants.

The Governor turned up unannounced at the residence that morning to apologize to his secret guests for its state. Seeing Sami Pasha again for the first time after so many years, Bonkowski Pasha suddenly felt he could trust him. In the Governor’s imposing, almost stocky figure, in his not-yet-graying beard, and in the thickness of his eyebrows and nose, the Royal Chemist saw strength, and a kind of toughness.

But then, to the Royal Chemist and his assistant’s dismay, the Governor said what every mayor and provincial governor the world over always said when faced with an outbreak of contagious disease.

“There is absolutely no epidemic in our city,” Governor Sami Pasha began, “let alone the plague, God forbid, but we have nevertheless had this breakfast sent for you from the army garrison. They will not even eat bread fresh from the oven there without having had it disinfected first.”

Bonkowski Pasha spotted a tray of olives, pomegranates, walnuts, goat cheese, and military-issue bread in the adjoining room and smiled at the Governor. “The people here, Muslims and Greeks, are all rather fond of gossip,” said Governor Sami Pasha as a fez-clad servant poured coffee from the stove into the cups on their table. “They will spread all kinds of misinformation, they will claim an ‘outbreak’ when there isn’t one, and ‘no outbreak’ when there is, they’ll tell the papers ‘Bonkowski Pasha said so’ just to put you in a difficult position, as they did in Smyrna. Of course their aim is to pit Muslims against Christians, sow discord on this peaceful island, and tear it away from the Ottoman Empire, as they did with Crete.”

At this point we will remind our readers that “foreign powers” had recently wrested the neighboring island of Crete from Ottoman control with the excuse of needing to quell a series of clashes that had erupted between the island’s Muslim and Christian populations four years ago.

“Of course the people of Mingheria are more even tempered, so here they have had to make up this story about an epidemic!” explained the Governor Pasha.

“But, Pasha,” said the Royal Chemist to the Governor who was six years his junior, “during the outbreak in Smyrna nobody cared whether you were Greek or Orthodox or Muslim or Christian! Both the Greek newspaper Amalthea and the Ottoman paper Harmony and even the merchants that make a living trading with Greece took the sanitary measures seriously and obeyed quarantine orders. It was thanks to this goodwill that we succeeded.”

“Well, we do have the news and papers from Smyrna delivered here—if a little late—on the Messageries ferry. Perhaps it is not my place to say, but things did not happen quite as you have described, my dear Chief Inspector Pasha,” said the Governor. “All the foreign consuls in Smyrna, foremost the Greek and French, complained every day about your quarantine measures and sowed discord by having their newspapers publish their objections. I do not allow for that kind of subversive, disruptive journalism to be practiced here in Mingheria.”

“On the contrary, as soon as the people of Smyrna realized that quarantine was inevitable and beneficial, their collaboration with the Governor’s Office and with the Quarantine Authority was impeccable. By the way, the Governor of Smyrna, Kâmil Pasha of Cyprus, sends Your Excellency his warmest regards. He is of course aware that I am here.”

“I served as Minister for Charitable Trusts under Kâmil Pasha when he was Chief Minister fifteen years ago,” said Governor Sami Pasha, fondly recalling his remarkable youthful achievements. “His Excellency Kâmil Pasha is a man of superior intelligence.”

“You will recall that in Smyrna His Excellency Kâmil Pasha allowed the news of the outbreak to be made public, and he was right to do so,” said Bonkowski Pasha. “Would it not perhaps be better if Mingherian newspapers published news of the outbreak here too? The populace must be allowed to worry, shopkeepers must face the fear of death, if they are to follow quarantine measures willingly once these are introduced.”

“I have been governor here for five years, and I can assure you there is no cause for concern. The people of Mingheria, the Orthodox and the Catholics and even the Muslims, are at least as civilized as the people of Smyrna. Whatever the state demands, they shall heed and uphold. But to announce plagues and epidemics where there officially aren’t any would create needless panic.”

“But if you encourage the newspapers to publish information about the plague and its spread, about quarantine measures and the number of victims, the people of the island shall be even likelier to obey the state’s instructions,” Bonkowski Pasha patiently replied. “You know as well as I do, Governor Pasha, that it is a difficult proposition indeed to govern the Ottoman Empire without help from its newspapers.”

“Mingheria is not Smyrna!” said the Governor. “There is no disease here. That is why the Sultan has kept your visit a secret. Of course it is also his will that if the disease is here, then you should introduce quarantine measures to stop the outbreak as you did in Smyrna. But the nefarious machinations of the island’s foreign consuls, and the fact that it was our Quarantine Committee’s Greek doctors (all colluding with Greece, no doubt) who first reported an outbreak on this island, have made His Highness the Sultan suspicious, and he has forbidden you from meeting with Mingheria’s Quarantine Committee.”