Chapter Twenty The Sermon #4
Khuroshvili was intrigued, and found a piece of silver about the size and thickness of Malcolm’s little finger.
He even offered to lend a pair of fine shears to cut the silver, once it was beaten flat, into the best shape.
He had a trick, furthermore, to coat the metal with an oil that would keep tarnish at bay for longer than the bare silver would manage by itself.
A little clay pot of that sat beside the silver on the bench.
Next Malcolm asked about powder. Did Khuroshvili use any kind of fine powder, perhaps for polishing the gold he retrieved for the Queen? Some kind of abrasive, perhaps, or polishing compound?
By this time, after their several conversations, he and the jeweler had managed to come to a friendly understanding.
Khuroshvili didn’t ask too closely what Malcolm was planning, no doubt in case it was dangerous to know, and for his part Malcolm held back from the many personal questions he’d have liked to ask. They spoke as one craftsman to another.
So Khuroshvili, saying nothing, merely offered several grades of abrasive powder, which Gulya learned was made from ground pumice. Malcolm chose the very finest grade the jeweler had, as fine as flour, and took as much as Khuroshvili let him, a couple of handfuls in a bag of waxed silk.
Finally Malcolm asked to borrow a small pair of bellows. Khuroshvili laughed and shrugged and handed them over. They shook hands, and Malcolm left with Gulya to take his treasure to their quarters.
“Now,” he said to her when everything was laid on the table so he could look at it and weigh it in his hand and let his muscles and his nerves think about it, “I want to speak to the Queen. I want to do it privately, out of earshot of anyone else except you. Yes, I know that never happens; but the Queen has never had to deal with a man from the realms of gold before. This is not a request but a command. Gulya, you went to the forge of Sorush alone, and tried to fight him by yourself; you must summon all the courage you have to speak to Queen Shahrnavāz and urge her to listen as I tell her what we’re going to do. It’s hard, but there’s no alternative.”
And he wished Pan had been there, to join them in this venture.
—
When the ferry returned to Baku, the air was still wild, the waves choppy and white-capped. Lyra was looking forward strongly to feeling firm ground underfoot. She found Ionides sheltering from the teeming rain by the gangway, looking anxious.
“You not feeling brisk and easy?” he said.
“I had a bad night. I’ll just be glad to get off this boat. What’s going on? Have they said anything about starting again?”
“No, Miss Silver. Something else happening.”
The ferry was just tying up. Lyra followed his glance as he looked past the dock gates.
There were police cars racing by, their sirens howling, their lights flashing, and their tires spraying water.
The rain was so heavy, the air so dark, that the city was almost invisible, but Lyra thought she could see, beyond the buildings at the dockside, a plume of smoke rising into the morning sky.
“People trying to get the captain to say what’s going on, but he say nothing. All the officers like this,” and he pulled an imaginary zipper across his closed lips.
“Perhaps this is why they had to turn round,” Lyra said. “They must be used to storms at sea.”
He shook his head. “More than that,” he said.
Other passengers joined them at the rail; it was clear that no one knew any more than they did, but everyone was concerned.
When eventually the way was opened, the passengers disconsolately or angrily or nervously moved ashore, coats over their heads against the teeming rain, and tried to find somewhere to stay till the voyage could resume.
—
What had happened was a simple event with a million ramifications.
Mustafa Bey was a man of habit, both by temperament and by necessity.
He was at his table in Marletto’s Café, for example, at the same time every day; he used a regular team of drivers, secretaries, and messengers; the contracts he made were always rigorously honored.
His clothes, the food and drink he enjoyed, the exercise he took every afternoon, all contributed to the sense he gave of permanence and rightness.
His movements were as predictable as those of the planets in the sky, and all the innumerable customers and clients and interests he dealt with had come to rely on this regularity as much as on the clock tower of Bab al-Faraj.
He was perfectly aware, of course, that this predictability was a weakness too. It made him vulnerable. The bodyguards he employed knew it too, and were extremely well paid for their vigilance.
But whatever he paid them wasn’t enough.
While Lyra and Ionides were arriving in Baku, one of Mustafa Bey’s bodyguards approached him on the riverbank, in the middle of his daily walk, signaling as if to say there was danger nearby and he needed to come close; and when he was close enough, he drew out a long knife and plunged it several times into his employer’s chest. Mustafa Bey fell dead at once, and a moment later so did the assassin, with three bullets in his head.
The other bodyguards were good shots: just not quite good enough to stop the assassin without killing him.
No one could make him talk now. A theory emerging very soon afterwards held that the bodyguards had known exactly what they were doing, because they too were in on a plot, and didn’t want the killer to reveal why he’d done it, or who’d paid him.
More theories began—theories explaining everything.
They proliferated like bacteria in a particularly nourishing solution.
The more theories, the less knowledge, it seemed, because in the following hours it became clear to everyone in Aleppo, and in the next few days to everyone who had dealings with Mustafa Bey from Morocco to Nippon, that the only person who knew everything about the great man’s business had been the great man himself.
Every detail of his arrangement with such-and-such a farmer in Tunisia to supply dates at such-and-such a price, every clause of his contract with the water authorities of the lower Oxus River to continue their supply of fresh water to the caravansaries east of the Aral Sea, every fluctuation in the price of raw silk in the markets of Urumqi—those and a thousand other matters had been held securely in the living brain of Mustafa Bey, and every single one of them faded to nothing as the blood drained from his body and that brain closed down cell by cell.
The news spread north and south and east and west, as fast as the words could be passed from one person to another.
More than any other event for years, the death of Mustafa Bey left the world of the Silk Roads paralyzed with fear and shock.
Those thousands of contracts and agreements and deals—who would carry them out now?
How would suppliers be paid? Who could guarantee that anyone would be paid anything?
Lyra was not the only individual with reason to be grateful to the generous merchant; there were widows and orphans, the families of old friends or servants, and not least there was the owner of Marletto’s Café, who foresaw his business losing all its celebrity in a week and dwindling and shriveling into a faded teahouse no more distinguished than a hundred others in the city.
In Baku, as in many other cities the length of the Silk Roads, people who felt their entire worlds shaking underfoot began to panic, and storm the banks, and loot the markets, and riot.
And of course Lyra’s precious letter, the laissez-passer that had been going to promise her safety and protection and passage with all the authority of the greatest name on the Silk Roads… suddenly valueless.
One of the few people unaffected was Lyra, who had heard nothing about the assassination, and was at a table in a hotel courtyard busily writing her first report to send to the great merchant, unaware that he was dead.
It was harder than she’d thought it would be; the question was, as always, where to begin?
After several false starts, she began with the arrival of the autobus de luxe into the unfinished station in Baku.
But she couldn’t make that work either. In the end she put her paper away and took out the resonating lodestone, and began to write to Malcolm.