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see if he was making fun of him, then, satisfied that the chief was genuinely impressed, stretched his scabbed mouth into a rictuslike grin.
    “Then what happened?” Kamil prompted him.
    “They went back inside. Then the stranger came out and left in the carriage. The driver was in and out too, helping carry the chests and other stuff.”
    “What other stuff?” Omar asked.
    “He went in with two heavy bags.”
    “Did he bring them out again?”
    The guard thought for a moment. “I don’t remember.”
    “So Swyndon stayed in the bank?”
    “I didn’t see him come out, but there’s another door down the street. Haraf was guarding it, but he got caught in the explosion.” Kamil saw the guard struggle to contain his emotion. “He had come over to ask me if I would be his son’s sponsor at his circumcision. That’s the last thing I remember.”
    Omar took down the guard’s address and the names of the other guards and promised to notify their families.
    They walked down the row of beds toward a table where the novice had placed a tray of tea and pastries. “Well, now we have our top official robbing his own bank,” Omar announced.
    They passed a shelf lined with blackened objects, scorched and scarred by fire. Each was neatly labeled with a number tied on with string. Kamil stopped, intrigued, and called Sister Hildegard over. “What’s all this?” he asked.
    “Those are things we found on the patients. It helps family members identify them. Do you have any idea what this is?” She reached into a cabinet, pulled out a partially melted object, and handed it to Kamil. “You can see why I keep it out of sight.” Kamil cradled the medal in his hand. It was a gold starburst decorated with diamonds. A bit of scorched blue ribbon still clung to the back.
    “Allah protect us,” he said in a soft voice. It was an order just like the one Huseyin had been wearing for Elif’s portrait.
    “Do you recognize it?” Sister Hildegard asked, picking up the alarm in Kamil’s voice.
    “It’s a royal order, but I’m not sure which kind. My brother-in-law, Huseyin Pasha, has one. But I’m sure he’s not the only one who does.” Sultan Abdulhamid used royal orders to reward the loyalty of his top men. “There’s no number attached to this.”
    “We found it in one of the carts that had carried both dead and wounded. It’s heavy. It must have slipped off the body. We have no idea who it belongs to.” She added, with a sympathetic look, “I’m sorry. Was your brother-in-law injured?”
    “I don’t know.” Kamil was already walking back toward the row of bedsteads, followed closely by Omar. In the first bed, the patient’s breathing was labored, each breath accompanied by a faint bubbling sound. Of the face, Kamil could see only the eyes, closed in sleep or exhaustion.
    “We know who this man is. But three are unidentified,” the nun explained, “the ones with a green or red cloth tied to the bed. The red one is a woman. But several more seriously injured patients were moved to another hospital with special facilities. The foreign embassies already took their people away.” She shrugged. “They think their medicine is better.”
    “Where?” Omar asked.
    “The German hospital, probably.” Sister Hildegard rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands and Kamil saw that they were red with exhaustion. “Oh, you mean the badly injured ones,” she said. “Eyüp Mosque hospital. They have a burn specialist there.”
    Kamil stood over one of the beds marked with a green cloth and regarded the swaddled figure that lay there. Thick black hair curled from the head. The figure was slim, even under the carapace of bandages. The man in the adjacent bed was too short to be Huseyin. The coals in the braziers hissed. The smell of carbolic barely masked the stench of pus, blood, and urine.
    “May I keep this?” Kamil asked Sister Hildegard. “If it’s not my brother-in-law’s, I’ll return it.” The nun