Empire of Lies

by Raymond Khoury

  Kamal took a deep drag off his narguileh, and, as its soothing effect wormed its way into the darkest recesses of his mind, he thought back to when he’d last discussed it all with his father, during a phone call a few weeks back. A veterinarian who’d decamped from Paris to the Périgord and become a poultry farmer after losing his wife to a galloping cancer seven years ago, Kamal and Ramazan’s father was an earnest man, part of an older, more conservative generation that tended to support its sultan’s policies more blindly. He’d reminded Kamal of his responsibilities to keep his fellow imperial subjects safe and of his duty to his sultan and to his God. Beyond the echoes of that conversation, Kamal also drew solace from the doctrine he’d been taught at the academy, the one his superiors had been trumpeting loudly since the unrest had begun: citizens had no right to revolt against their rulers because civilization was the result of social and political consensus, and continually challenging its traditions would inevitably lead to anarchy.

  And nothing was worse than anarchy.

  The knock at Kamal’s front door took a moment to register.

  It wasn’t loud—more of a furtive, brief double tap. A familiar one. He checked his watch. It was well past ten. He thought briefly about whether to open, and then, when it came again, he raised himself off the large floor cushion, trudged over, and opened the door.

  Leyla slipped in, shut the door behind her quietly, and stood there, her back against the wall, her eyes and mouth gleaming with excitement.

  Kamal studied her uncertainly. “Leyla, tonight’s not—”

  She quickly quieted him by pressing a firm, perfectly manicured finger to his mouth. “Don’t be silly. I’m here now. My hero.” She beamed at him.

  “Don’t—” he started to say, but she leaned and kissed him before slipping through the doorway.

  “They’re all asleep. Very, very soundly.” She lived with her parents and one younger brother in an apartment two floors below him.

  In a society that was still bound by the restrictive limitations of shari’a law, her presence in his apartment was a highly dangerous one for them both—but also a highly tantalizing one.

  It was hard to say which was more provocative: her face or her body. Kamal had explored both in many snatched opportunities, ones that were almost always instigated by her. She was young—barely twenty—and she had an untamed spirit along with a nerve and audacity that knew little bounds. Like many other young women of her world, Leyla knew how to get around the severe boundaries that dictated what she could do, where she could go, and who she could see, and she was determined to make the most of it while she could. She would soon be married off to an older man, a moneyed jeweler she’d met twice while chaperoned and veiled. It had been enough to give her an unshakable feeling that the man was more interested in men than in women, but she also knew he would provide her with everything her parents could never afford. Hers would be a lush, comfortable life, and, although she would have preferred to spend it with Kamal, he’d made clear from the beginning of their liaison that marriage wasn’t an option.

  He gave her a slow shake of his head and let out a small chuckle, but she stilled it as she pressed her finger back against his lips, moving it tantalizingly left and right both as a scolding no gesture and as a tease, her head slightly tilted down, her dark eyes angled alluringly upward and hooked into his, her mouth slightly open, her plump lips moist and beckoning. And in a stampede of heartbeats, an unwelcome intrusion turned into an irresistible, ravenous hunger.

  Kamal grabbed her hand and pushed it aside as he planted his mouth on hers and kissed her, hard. Her whole body arched forward to welcome him as her mouth feasted hungrily on his tongue while he pressed against her, pinning her against the wall, his hands now tight around her jaw, keeping her in place for him to feed off like a starved beast at a trough. Then he released her face from his grip and moved his hands down, exploring and cupping the curves of her body, kneading its sensitive spots, the sudden spikes in her breathing guiding his fingers like strings on a puppet, and in a fury of movement, he had pushed their robes aside, grabbed her from under her thighs, lifted her so she was straddling him, and pushed inside her.

  They dropped to the floor, where Kamal lost himself in a frenzy of desire and anger, her gasps egging him on, one hand now braced against her mouth to muffle her moans, his eyes locked on her rapturous face but not registering it, each brutal thrust like the lash of a whip to tame the accusing eyes that were stalking him.

  But they wouldn’t let go—neither Nisreen’s stare, which Kamal now saw on every woman in the stands, nor her friend Azmi’s unflinching glare as it burned into him in the moments leading up to his death.

  They were still there, long after Leyla had gone. Another tall glass of raki hadn’t helped. Worse, his mind was luring him down a previously unthinkable abyss: it was making him question his career choice.

  Gazing out across the skyline of sleepy domes and minarets, he found himself wondering if he wouldn’t have been better off following a more benign path like that of his brother, an uncomplicated family man who went about his work quietly and built model train sets on Fridays. Ramazan also saved lives, but he did it without anyone looking at him as if he were a monster.

  And he did it with Nisreen by his side.

  As far as Kamal was concerned, that, more than anything, would have justified any career choice.

  But it was too late to do anything about that, and he knew it.

  8

  Seven blocks north of Kamal’s walk-up, Ramazan did his best to unlock the front door to his home quietly before stepping inside.

  The family apartment was on the fifth floor of a nineteenth-century stone building in the Mahmud Pasha mahalle—one of the residential neighborhoods that formed the city—and conveniently located only a stone’s throw from Bekri Mustapha Avenue and its bustling markets.

  It was late, and the only light came from a lone, dim lamp that shone from a small side table in the entrance foyer.

  He set his satchel down, slipped off his shoes, and then took off his robe and unrolled his turban. As always when he came home late, his first port of call was the children’s room. They were both fast asleep, in their customary positions: Tarek, his eight-year-old son, sprawled across his bed with the sheets kicked off, one arm curled around Firas, the stuffed toy dinosaur that was his inseparable companion; and Noor, just short of her sixth birthday, rolled up and cocooned under her blanket, her tousled curls barely visible. A small night-light projected stars and a crescent moon on the ceiling. No matter what life was slinging at him, no matter what stresses were buffeting him, seeing them was like a honey and aniseed infusion on a cold wintery night.

  He stood there for a minute, just watching them, serenaded by the sound of their gentle breaths. Then he pulled away and padded over to the master bedroom.

  He peered in from the doorway. His eyes had adjusted to the faint light from the hallway, and, although the room was dark, he was relieved to find that Nisreen was fast asleep as well. It was good that she’d been able to; Ramazan had little doubt of the torment she must have felt all day because of Azmi’s execution. Her face was facing his way and he stood there, contemplating her.

  Even in torment, she was gorgeous; there was no doubt about that. Even asleep, when her face was sunken into the pillow and her mesmeric almond eyes weren’t on display, when the aura she radiated was at rest, she was still bewitching.

  Gorgeous, clever, capable, and a great mother: he was a lucky man, and he knew it. Too lucky maybe—he often wondered about how he’d lucked out when, ten years ago, their parents had arranged their marriage. He was twenty-four and she was just shy of twenty. Not so much those first few years, when he was still in that optimistic, upbeat bliss of a new marriage, babies, young children, a career on the rise. But with time he couldn’t escape the notion that he was punching above his weight. Way above. It was painfully evident at dinner parties and at other social encounters: she more than held her
ground and appeared more accomplished, and charismatic men were irresistibly drawn to her. To her credit, she never played games, never led any of them on, never gave them the slightest opening. She was unfailingly respectful and loyal toward her husband. But he could sense the malaise growing inside her, the apathy, the dissatisfaction. He could feel her slipping away. They hadn’t discussed it outright, only tiptoed politely around it, and when they had, she’d always assured him that things were fine. But he still saw it in her face every morning and every night before he turned out the lights.

  The situation around them wasn’t helping; in fact, it was accentuating their divide. Nisreen’s friends were courting disaster. As a lawyer at the vanguard of reform for women’s rights, Nisreen had already been skirting the periphery of trouble, and that was before she’d started defending journalists and academics who had been yanked out of their homes or protesters who had been hauled off the streets. This worried Ramazan; at times, he tried to find some comfort in the fact that his brother was in the secret police, but he wasn’t sure how much that would help if things ever got ugly.

  She was getting sucked into the spiraling unrest, and he feared for her safety, but he also knew there wasn’t much he could do about it. Nisreen was a conscientious wife and mother, to be sure. But she was also a woman of strong convictions and a fighter. She was animated by a flame that he could never fully grasp, let alone match. And the more he played it safe and stayed out of the troubles swirling around them, the more he excused himself from any invitations to join in any form of protest, the more he could see the chagrin darken her face.

  As he stood there, the serenity he’d felt from seeing his children drained away, supplanted by a roiling anxiety about what the future held for him and Nisreen.

  He wasn’t ready for bed. He made his way back to the front of the apartment, past the family living room and the sala, the more elegant, formal sitting room that was used for entertaining guests, and entered his study at the front of the apartment. This was his sanctuary. Given the work he did, Ramazan needed to have other interests to distract him from the strain, stress, and even the occasional boredom of his job. Several of the anesthesiologists he knew felt the same way. One of his closest colleagues was a volunteer doctor for the ambulance service in his spare time. Some were avid sportsmen; others were real polymaths: musicians, authors, painters. Ramazan was a train buff, as attested to not only by the large table that stood proudly in the middle of the room housing his model railroad, an elaborate set that he had spent years building, but also by the model trains lining his bookshelves.

  He padded around the table and opened a corner cabinet, from which he dug out a bottle of yeni raki, the more distinctively bitter raki that was distilled from sugar-beet alcohol, and poured himself a tall glass.

  Alcohol was still, of course, banned for Muslims across the empire, but its prohibition had ebbed and flowed over the centuries, depending on who was in power. Some sultans, like Süleyman the Magnificent, were excessively puritanical. He had decreed that drunks were to be punished by having molten lead poured down their throats. His son Selim II, however, was an unrepentant hedonist who repealed his father’s ban, claiming that while the prohibition on alcohol was righteous and wise, it was only meant for the common folk and not for the more refined upper tiers of society who knew how to drink in moderation.

  In the palaces and across the empire, water, coffee, tea, and fruit juice were the only approved drinks for Muslims and the only ones consumed publicly. Privately, things were different. The Zaptiye turned a blind eye to what took place in the privacy of people’s homes; they only swooped in and arrested offenders when things got out of hand or when political winds required a face-saving display.

  Drink in hand, Ramazan edged over to the balcony doors and looked out. Illuminated minarets, taller than any building across the cityscape by decree, poked the dark sky, the slow blinking of the lights at the top of their finials hypnotic and soothing. In the distance, the dome of the Mehmediyye Mosque, exquisitely lit up, slumbered in splendor. On that warm summer night and under an unusually luminous crescent moon, one could be forgiven for imagining the city as a beacon of tranquility. The menace that loomed over its citizens was nowhere in sight, but Ramazan, like anyone else who was up this late, knew it was there. It had merely slunk back into the shadows, waiting for the next opportunity to strike.

  He finished his drink and poured himself a second glass. He was tired, but he wasn’t sleepy. A strange current was rippling through him. His mind was too fired up, captive to both the concern over his wife and the curiosity about his mysterious patient.

  He checked his watch. It was twenty past two.

  He wasn’t ready for bed. He retrieved his mobile phone and, ignoring a silent scream of warning deep within him, pulled up the pictures he’d taken of the stranger’s tattoos.

  9

  One by one, Ramazan enlarged the pictures for a closer look.

  Written that way, back to front, the words tattooed on his patient were hard to read. He wondered about that. The obvious answer was that they’d been done that way so the stranger could read them while looking at himself in a mirror. Ramazan thought of a further reason: it made them harder for a casual observer to read. Which was useful if one had something to hide.

  He stepped out to the foyer and held the phone so it faced the mirror above the side table. He studied the photograph. The words were easily readable now. There were several names and dates—“Dorde Petrovic, Visevac, 16/11/1762”; “Alexander Ypsilantis, Istanbul, 12/12/1792,” and others—but he didn’t recognize any of them. He pulled up another photograph. More names, plenty of them—“François-Marie Arouet / Voltaire,” “Rousseau,” “Napoleon,” and others—alongside places and numbers that looked like more dates from some distant, centuries-far future, all of which meant nothing to him either. He flicked to the next shot. More unintelligible gibberish with lines like “3NG / 1diatomite / min sod carb.”

  He went through a few more photographs that showed the tattooed drawings. They also seemed random. One was a diagram showing the inner workings of some kind of box that had a long handle coming out of it and coiled cylinders inside it. Another was a diagram of a mechanical contraption that had a crank handle, what looked like a rotating barrel made up of several cylinders, and various springs and pins linking them. A few others showed schematics that involved vats, cylinders, tubes and valves linking them, and fire—and these registered with him. Sizzling with curiosity now, he kept going until, a couple of images later, he came across something else that triggered a burst of recognition.

  At first, it looked like just another list of names and places. “Thomas Savery / Salisbury Court / London,” “Denis Papin / Paris 75 / London 87 / Marburg,” and a few others. In his haste, he was about to flick to the next photo when he made the association and realized what he was looking at. He swiped back to the drawing of the vats and the tubes.

  Savery, Papin, and some of the other listed names, like Huygens and Newcomen, were centuries-old inventors who had pioneered the steam engine.

  The tattooed schematics depicted early versions of it.

  The inventors—English, French, Dutch—had all moved to Vienna not long after its fall to the empire in 1094.* Like many scientists, they had been attracted by the sultan’s offers of unlimited funding and resources. They were all part of the Ottoman industrial revolution, a golden era for the empire that had begun during its victorious sweep across Europe in the late seventeenth century and had changed the world.

  The inventors in question had collaborated on creating the first steam-powered trains, which had a dramatic effect on shortening travel times between Istanbul and the far reaches of the empire, allowing the efficient shuttling of troops and military supplies. This had played a huge role in the conquest of Europe after the fall of Vienna.

  Why did the stranger have those names and schematics tattooed across his torso?

  Ramazan mulled it over in the d
arkness, deciding he needed to investigate further. On tired feet, he padded to the family living room, where he sat at the low desk and switched on the computer. He scrolled through the pictures he’d taken of the tattoos again, still wondering about them. He was having second thoughts about running queries through the government-controlled Hafiza Internet search engine, which was the only one available in the empire. Abdülhamid’s tight controls meant that only government-approved websites and content was authorized to be online. Anything else was blocked. Even so, Ramazan knew that he still needed to be careful about what he typed into the search box. Everything accessed online would go through the authorities’ filters. Websites, email—every keystroke would be suspect and analyzed by algorithms, and there was no way to evade them. The Internet was heavily censored and monitored—goals easily achieved, since the state was also the only internet provider across the empire and everything passed through its servers. A small group of rebellious coders had tried to spread a VPN by putting it on discs distributed on the sly, but that soon ended after the authorities caught them and had them publicly flogged and locked up. The VPN discs that were still in circulation were highly prized until the government’s coders figured out a way to flag anyone using them. Arrests followed. No one was using the discs anymore.

  Ramazan hesitated, pondering his next move. It was very late, he’d had a long day, and he was exhausted and weary. But there was a stubborn curiosity flickering deep inside him that he couldn’t extinguish. He shrugged and decided that his queries shouldn’t raise any red flags, then started typing the words into Hafiza methodically and cautiously. Most of what he inputted yielded nothing. Many of the names gave no result; it was as if those people had never existed. A few, like Baruch Spinoza, were obscure writers and political thinkers whose work had been officially discredited centuries ago. But then the result from one of the queries he entered shot a spike of dread through him: “3NG / 1diatomite / min sod carb” turned out to be an abbreviated formula for manufacturing dynamite. Which triggered a sudden, unexpected association in Ramazan’s mind regarding one of the schematic diagram tattoos he hadn’t recognized before that moment: he was now sure that it depicted an ancient, plunger-type blasting detonator.