THE Street of the Tinsmiths ran slightly above and to the west of the Mosque of Rustem Pasha, itself half buried in the alleys and crooked passages that surround the southern entrances of the Grand Bazaar. Like most of the artisans’ quarters, it consisted of a narrow funnel of open workshops, each no bigger than a very big closet, where the smiths worked with forge, bellows, and hammers over the standard articles of their trade: tin pots, little kettles, weakly hinged or plainly lidded boxes of every size and shape, from the tiny round tins used for storing kohl and tiger balm to banded trunks for sailors and the linen trade. They made knives and forks; they made badges and insignia, spectacle frames and ferrules for walking sticks. Every one of them worked at a specialism, rarely if ever straying from, say, the remorseless production of amulets designed to contain a paper inscribed with the ninety-nine names of God to, for example, the perpetual manufacture of pin boxes. These were guild rules, laid down hundreds of years before by the market judges and the sultan himself, and they were broken only under very special circumstances.
Would the manufacture of an enormous cauldron, Yashim wondered, constitute a special circumstance?
The tin market was not a place for the crowds who infested some of the other industrious highways of Istanbul: the food markets, the spice bazaars, the makers of shoes. Even the Street of the Goldsmiths was busier. So Yashim walked along easily in the middle of the street and attracted few glances. Once the smiths had satisfied themselves that he was a stranger, they thought no more about him: they hardly cared to notice if he was rich, poor, fat, or thin, for no man alive was likely to bring them any greater profit than the modest profit they enjoyed by the terms of their guild membership. No one was going to stop by and offer to buy—at a wild price—any of their humdrum manufactures. The regulations of the guild were fixed: there was a quality, and a price, neither more nor less.
Yashim knew all this. For the moment he merely watched. Most of the smiths worked in the opening of their shops, closest to the light and air and away from the smoky furnaces that blazed in the background. From here, tapping incessantly with their hammers, they slowly pushed out a succession of little products. He glanced up: the usual arrangement of latticed windows overhead advertised the dwelling places of the men, their wives, and their children. The apprentices, Yashim thought, would sleep in the shops.
He took a turn into a courtyard and looked back. Up an alley thick with rubbish, the upper stories were approached by rickety staircases leading, in every case, to a mean doorway hung with a faded strip of carpet or a blanket cut into ribbons against the flies. Which left, he imagined, the flat roofs where the women could go in the day to get some air, unobserved. And at night, who used those roofs? Enough people, he supposed: you could never be sure. With a shrug he dismissed a faint idea and returned his inspection to the courtyard.
The sound of hammers beating against the tin was fainter here: it broke upon the courtyard like the musical note of frogs tinkling in a nearby lake. Few smiths were working in the alcoves of the courtyard itself: it served, instead, as a caravanserai where tin merchants brought the raw materials of the trade and sold it, at need, to the smiths outside. Here were piled thick sheets of tin in apparently random shapes, and their owners sat among them on low stools in quiet contrast to the arrhythmic tintinnabulation of the street beyond, sipping tea and telling their beads. Now and again one of them would make a sale; the tinsmith cut the sheet, the tin merchant weighed it out, and the smith carried it away.
Yashim wandered out for a last look. The bigger objects—lanterns, in the main, and trunks—were being assembled on the ground outside the shops. But Yashim was satisfied that nowhere, either inside or out, was there a place where a cauldron with a base big enough to fit a man could be discreetly built.
Someone, he thought, would have seen.
And that person, he thought, would have been legitimately puzzled. Why, in the name of all things holy, should anyone want to make a cauldron out of tin?
Of such a size, too! The biggest cauldron anyone had seen since—when?
Yashim froze. All around him the tinsmiths beat out their meaningless birdlike paean to industry and craftsmanship, but he no longer heard. He knew, in a flash, when that moment had been.
Ten years before. The night of June 15, 1826.