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cheated on his wife, the Jewish convert to Islam, whose money funded his opulent lifestyle. (The dossier prepared by the organization included – as if it were necessary – his ability to multiply five-digit numbers in his head with the speed of a computer.) In the photographs taken secretly for the dossier, the professor’s attitude to other people seemed rude and belittling. If he had asked me at any time to solve an arithmetic problem, I would have been ashamed and embarrassed. My trigger finger began to twitch.
    I was going to lay an ambush for him in a lonely street in Üsküdar where, God forgive him, he used to meet his lover. Baybora, for the first and last time, had poked his crow’s beak into this business on the pretext of assisting my training. Respectfully, I passed the endless walls of the Karacaahmet Cemetery till I reached shady Eşrefsaat Street. It seemed that in pursuit of his intrigues, at 3 o’clock on Tuesdays and Saturdays, the immoral professor would turn from Rumi Paşa Mosque into neighbouring Çeşme-i Cedit Street. Before my reconnaissance expeditions into a district which had still preserved its sacred Ottoman origins, including even street names, I had taken ten days’ leave without pay, and step by step I had traced the journey of the wretched 60-year-old to his love nest. The vulgar womanizer would swagger along, and I was sure that as he got out of the taxi he never even raised his head to glance at the elegant 500-year-old mosque opposite. I couldn’t help wondering how much daily profit a Çadırcılar trader would need to make to buy his cap with the earflaps, his leather jacket and suede boots.
    In the mosque courtyard I patiently traced, stone by stone, the geometrical tomb of Rumi Mehmet Paşa, Grand Vizier from 1466 to 1469. Clumps of couch grass had invaded the slope of the family tombs. But between the sunken mosque walls and the cornerstones of the street the sloping building site seemed more level. A vigorous blanket of mallow-like weeds spread 150 metres around the young plantation. The space between the mosque wall and the neglected building to the east of the site, which autumn rains had turned into a sea of mud, was separated by a barbed-wire fence. I’m indebted to the heroic street cats for the idea of climbing over that rusty fence two metres high to the street below.
    Forty minutes beforehand, I hid my grey cap and false beard in a nook to the right of the fence. I was concentrating on
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when the victim’s taxi arrived. He deigned to get out of the shabby vehicle, muttering at the poor driver. Scrutinizing both ends of the deserted street I leapt into the bushes. Between us was a space of perhaps thirty metres. I drew Walther II, in the name of God, while the professor was putting on his hat, and fired six bullets into the chest and heart of the man who could multiply five-digit numbers in his head. Leaping over the wire fence, I landed first in neighbouring Parlak Street, then ran on into Şemsi Paşa Road. I jumped into an old taxi heading for the Unkapanı Bridge with ‘Old Chap, Business is Crap’ written on the back window. At the spot where I’d chucked away Walther I, I committed Walther II to the blessed protection of the Golden Horn. Baybora had warned me, ‘Don’t look at the newspapers for two weeks.’ While I was failing mentally to convert into Turkish lira the $150,000 I would earn in exchange for those six bullets, I had come to the Valens Aqueduct erected in ad 373. Was it nerves? God forgive me, I remember I began to laugh ...

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    A pleasant autumn was approaching. As the evening ezan rose from mosque to mosque I stood up from the desk and went out onto the balcony. I don’t know a more strategic point from which to observe the monumental trees. Beyond the field of red and white tulips that surrounds the pool begins the display of cedar, pistachio