by Anton Gill
‘Welcome!’ he said, in English as he bustled round the desk to shake hands with Marlow, plant discreet kisses on Graves’s cheeks, and introduce himself. ‘Have they offered you tea? No? I’ll see to it.’
But he didn’t. He hastened instead to clear more mountains of books from two gilt armchairs, and made a little clearing around them so that Marlow and Graves could sit down. ‘I should have done this earlier – it’s not as if I didn’t know you were coming, after all …’ He pattered on, retrieving his own seat and facing them, elbows on the desk and fingers pointed together at the tips. ‘Have a good flight?’
They thanked him.
‘Good, good. Taxi OK? I’d have sent an official car for you, but we don’t like to draw attention to ourselves in this department,’ continued Detective-Major Cemil Haki. ‘But have no fear – the taxi was one of ours. And the driver. Did you guess?’
He laughed at their silence. ‘Orhan is one of our best couriers. He loves to play the cabbie. A little too authentically sometimes. But the safety of our guests is always paramount in his mind.’
‘That’s reassuring,’ said Graves.
‘And we keep our counsel. In all messages to the outside world from this department, in fact, we like to present ourselves as simple policemen. You’ll understand, won’t you? Trust is such a rare commodity that’s it’s always a shame to waste it.’ His tone turned briefly regretful.
Marlow was looking at a framed photograph on the wall behind the detective-major, between the two windows, and the one thing on the walls that hung straight as a die on its hook. It was maybe seventy years old, and showed a slim, thin-lipped, distinguished-looking man in an immaculate light-coloured suit, a cigarette in a holder dangling from elegant fingers.
The detective-major followed his gaze. ‘Recognize him?’ he asked.
Marlow shook his head. ‘But he looks familiar …’
‘It’s my great-great-grand-uncle, the famous Colonel – later General – Haki.’ The detective-major smiled. ‘I don’t take after him. Except perhaps in my line of work.’ He paused before going on. ‘He was involved with the British a couple of times at least – there was a famous business involving a gangster called Dimitrios at the end of the thirties, and in 1940 a British engineer called Graham got his fingers burned tangling with some German agents – the Germans always like to meddle in Turkey, you know; it was almost a kind of unofficial colony for them, and of course they hated the Russians, who were also trying to put their oar in …’ He trailed off, letting the faint suggestiveness in his tone hang in the air. ‘Asia Minor, the Cradle of Civilization, the Sick Man of Europe – all that kind of thing.’
‘I knew your name was familiar,’ said Marlow.
‘I thought you might know it.’
Haki became businesslike, sweeping the pile of ledgers away so brusquely that it collapsed – an event he ignored – and drawing the pencil-slim laptop to the centre of his desk. He flipped it open and busied himself with its keys and trackpad for a few moments.
He grunted in satisfaction then looked up, the glow of the screen giving his face a slightly sinister illumination. ‘We have found no trace of them yet,’ he said.
‘Have you got anything?’ asked Graves, ignoring a warning look from Marlow.
‘We would not have invited you into our inner sanctum for nothing,’ replied Haki, his own voice remaining politely neutral.
‘Tell us what you know,’ said Marlow. ‘What were they after? We have to find them.’
10
‘As you know,’ the detective-major said, ‘our friends were investigating the burial place of the Venetian leader Enrico Dandolo.’ He gestured them to look at a picture he had summoned to the Mac’s screen. ‘This is his monument in the great basilica of Hagia Sofia, only a short bus ride east of where we are sitting. The building is almost as old as Christianity itself, and it was a church until we Muslims took over this city in 1453, when it became a mosque. Four hundred years later it changed its nature again, and became a museum. But its original function as a place of worship – the house of God, of Allah – still sanctifies it in the eyes of many.’
‘Its being a cathedral didn’t stop Dandolo from desecrating it,’ observed Graves.
‘Ah, the fury of those Crusaders!’
‘So why is there a memorial to him there?’
‘For many years it was thought to mark his tomb; but it is in fact an embellishment of the nineteenth century.’
They looked at the grey marble stone, set into the floor of one of the church’s galleries and virtually indistinguishable from its surrounding flagstones except for a simple carved border and the incised words: HENRICUS DANDOLO.
‘So where is the grave itself?’ asked Marlow, as he thought: And why is it so important? Why have the Turks involved their secret police in a missing persons enquiry?
‘Apparently a mystery,’ replied Haki. ‘Until your archaeologists made their discovery. It seems they were the first to find it. At any rate, there’s no record of anyone else having made the discovery, though there’s some evidence to suggest that German archaeologists were sniffing around the site early in the twentieth century.’ He swept his hand over the computer’s trackpad. ‘Here.’ He tapped the screen. ‘This is the Church of St Irina. It’s not far from Hagia Sofia, just a little to the north, but it’s much older, founded by the Emperor Constantine himself. This is one of the oldest Christian buildings in the world. There was a Roman temple there before. Constantine built a church on top to make a point.’
‘And Adkins and the others found the grave there,’ said Marlow.
‘Yes.’
‘How did they know where to look?’
The smile died on Haki’s face. ‘Nobody will know that precisely until we find them, but we do know that there were some papers in the city archives in Venice, and it certainly looked as if no one had seen them for centuries. Whatever the case, those documents must have contained a clue. It’s the only possible explanation. Dandolo made his mark for his city, and he was extremely old when he died, so there was bound to be some clue – the odd thing is that it wasn’t discovered long ago.’ He looked thoughtful. ‘Who knows?’
‘What did they find?’
Haki shut the computer and leaned back in his chair. ‘I haven’t given you any tea yet,’ he said, ‘and you must be exhausted.’
‘Never mind. Tell us what you can.’
The Turkish agent spread his hands. ‘They were on to something, that’s for sure, but in view of what’s happened to them, it seems they weren’t the only ones to know about it, though they thought they were.’ He leaned forward, elbows on the desk again, but this time his hands made fists, which he clenched and unclenched, gently but insistently, as he spoke. ‘No one knows exactly how old Dandolo was when he died – but, as you know, he was at least ninety-five. A stupendous age for his time.’
‘A stupendous age for ours,’ said Graves.
‘He died here in Constantinople – I mean Istanbul – in 1205. He’d come to power late in life, he was already in his seventies, and he was hungry to use it. Maybe that hunger was what kept him going. As you probably know, he was also blind, or at the very least he had seriously impaired vision. No one knows why, possibly he had an accident or a disease of some kind, but it struck him when he was about sixty, thirty-odd years before the Fourth Crusade, and it seems to have struck him – here.’
‘In this city?’ asked Marlow.
‘In this city.’
‘What happened?’ asked Graves.
‘We don’t know. But a standard punishment for serious crime in the Byzantine empire was – blinding. They took a magnifying glass and burned out the eyes, using the light of the sun, just as a boy burns holes in paper.’
‘My God,’ said Graves.
‘As you say,’ replied Haki. ‘Perhaps the public executioner who was charged with the task botched the job and left the future doge of Venice with some vision left. I think he can’t have been
totally blind because he couldn’t possibly have achieved what he did if he hadn’t been able to see at all. A blind man in his position would have to have had absolute trust in at least a handful of people, and trust, as I have said …’ Again, his voice trailed off.
‘But nobody knows for sure,’ said Marlow quietly.
‘None of the accounts written at the time agree.’ Haki rummaged on the desk until he unearthed a small brass handbell, and rang it. It emitted a tinny sound which didn’t seem loud enough to penetrate beyond the room’s walls, but apparently it did, for Haki explained: ‘I’m ringing for tea. I want some even if you don’t. All this talking …’
A young man in a white jacket appeared with a brass tray holding a pot with an elegant spout, a smaller one, three tulip-shaped glasses filled with steaming tea, a bowl of brown sugar lumps, and some dried white figs stuffed with walnuts. Haki popped a lump of sugar behind his upper front teeth and took up a glass. He slurped noisily and happily through the sugar. ‘Better!’ he said.
Marlow followed suit, without the sugar. Graves found the glass too hot to hold comfortably.
‘Forgive me,’ said Haki. ‘You aren’t used to it. There are napkins on the tray.’ He passed her one.
‘Adkins and his team,’ he resumed, ‘were fascinated by the skill, given his age and disability, which Dandolo showed in manipulating an entire foreign, powerful army and diverting it from its true goal – Jerusalem – to direct it against the main trade rival of Venice – Constantinople – under the thinnest of pretexts. Of course he was helped by our natural propensity for greed and gain, but he was asking them to attack fellow Christians, and they weren’t just any bunch of mercenaries – they were a crusading army, which had the blessing and the encouragement of the pope himself. The whole thing had been pretty much Innocent III’s idea in the first place anyway.’
‘And did he succeed?’ asked Graves.
‘Yes,’ added Marlow. ‘At the expense of breaking the back of what remained of the Greek empire.’ He thought for a moment. ‘And how did he do it? That’s what Adkins and Co. were trying to find out.’
‘I’m not sure that I follow your train of thought,’ replied Haki. ‘But what I have to say is relevant. What was left behind, as the victors parcelled out the land between them amid much squabbling and more bloodshed, was a fractured and unstable political structure – a kind of pastiche of what it was like in Western Europe at the time, little kingdoms wrangling with each other, nobody turning his back on anybody. It was a kind of vacuum, and – even though it took another two hundred and fifty years – it laid Europe open to us, the Turks. The Muslims.’
‘A vacuum which Dandolo was responsible for,’ said Marlow.
‘Yes. Not, I think, that he would have cared.’ Haki sipped his tea. ‘Sacrificing the future for short-term gain is nothing new. And in every department of our lives, plenty of us don’t mind who else we hurt, as long as we get what we want – whether it’s a new business or a new lover. People do what they want to do. No one has any control over what anyone else chooses to do with his or her own life, no matter how much we sometimes like to think we have. Acceptance can be a bitter thing.’ He drained his steaming glass and grimaced. ‘Already getting cold,’ he remarked. ‘More?’
They shook their heads.
‘Do we know if the archaeologists found anything which answered their questions? Anything in the tomb?’ persisted Marlow. ‘Their disappearance is linked to something they found in the grave.’
Haki agreed. ‘I think they discovered more than they bargained for.’
‘What?’
‘Dominance of the Mediterranean trade and the routes to the south and east wasn’t all Dandolo was after,’ said the detective-major. ‘I need to do just a little more digging myself, but I’ll show you tomorrow. And the rest of the story can be explained better when you see for yourselves what we’ve got.’ He looked at his watch. ‘But not tonight. I have preparations to make, and other business to attend to before I wend my weary way home to my wife and family.’ He raised a hand to silence their objections. ‘Please. You are – as I think you say – on my turf now, and you must allow me to be the best judge of how we proceed. We will need hours tomorrow, and even people like us cannot function efficiently without rest. I’ll send you a mail which will be on your laptops by the time you return to your hotel. I hope you left them in the safe there if you didn’t bring them with you. This can be a very light-fingered city. Yes? Good.’ He rang the bell again and the first discreet young man immediately materialized. ‘Zafer: organize some transport for these two good people back to the Four Seasons.’
It was a different yellow cab this time – a Toyota – and a different driver. This one drove steadily and did not speak, nor was any fare discussed. But he kept glancing in the rear-view mirror, and from the expression on his face he saw something he didn’t like. He took a couple of turns down side-streets which clearly weren’t leading them by any direct route to the hotel, and looked in the mirror again.
‘Boktan,’ he muttered. Without looking at his passengers, he added in English, ‘Sit tight.’
11
It had stopped raining, but the roads were still slick and wet, and the pollution in the air which the rain had caught in falling had made them slippery too. The driver picked up a little speed, then abruptly did a handbrake turn, spinning the car round 180 degrees before steadying it among a fanfare of angry horns from other vehicles and, ramming it into a lower gear, roaring off up Babiali Cadessi in the direction of the Galata Bridge.
But the black van that was following them was fast too. It swung in behind them. There could be no doubt now.
Their driver turned west again on Nuruosmaniye and then south, crisscrossing the network of streets in Emin Sinan and Mimar Hayrettin, tearing down them as the people on the streets scattered and yelled. The van hammered behind them, smashing into a trader’s stall in a cascade of fake Rolexes. They continued on, hurtling through streets barely wide enough to take the vehicles, the lights of their pursuer shining into their car as Marlow and Graves hunched down and pulled out their guns.
Marlow manoeuvred himself to look out of the rear window and could see a figure leaning out of the front passenger window holding what looked like an Uzi sub-machine gun, but as he levelled it, the van hit a pothole too deep even for its tyres to take. The big vehicle jolted and the gunman, braced hard against the window frame, snapped like a twig, dropping his weapon. The van swerved on to the pavement, rending its side on the stonework of the buildings which lined it, then swung round in a skid and came to a halt.
Their cab pulled off down a dark alley which twisted so much it hardly seemed possible for the car to take its turns, but after a while it broadened. The driver rammed the car round a corner into a courtyard, jammed on the brakes, killed the engine and doused the lights.
All three of them sat silently, catching their breath and listening to the uninterrupted roar of the distant traffic. The driver turned in his seat, pistol out, and watched keenly through the rear window. Then the tension left his shoulders.
‘Got the amciklari,’ he said, though his voice was still tight. He looked at them. ‘Better get you some other transport. This car’s no good now.’
He dug out his mobile phone and punched a key and was soon talking urgently to someone at the other end.
Twenty minutes later, at a quarter past midnight, a dark Mercedes limo dropped Marlow and Graves at the bright and expensive hotel in the busy tourist district, which they’d chosen precisely because of the crowds and the anonymity.
‘Drink?’ asked Graves, motioning towards the bar. She was feeling shaky, the tiredness had caught up with her, but she was trying to digest what Haki had told them, and to second guess what he had in store for them the next day.
‘Rooms first,’ said Marlow, keeping the urgency out of his voice. ‘Need to check.’
Graves collected their laptops from the concierge’s safe and followed him upstai
rs. They had a suite with bedrooms and bathrooms opening off either side of a large central salon, equipped with all the WiFi and broadband necessary to any tourist or businessman who might stay in this kind of hotel. Graves was about to place the laptops on the coffee table when Marlow stopped her.
‘Just a moment,’ he said.
She watched as he went into his room, returning with a simple extendable metal tape-measure. On the coffee table, on one of the bedside tables, and on the desk which stood under the windows, with their spectacular view over the Sultanahmet Camii and the Sea of Marmara beyond, a number of casually arranged books and magazines lay. Moving swiftly, Marlow measured the exact distances from the edges and corners of the magazines and books to the edges of the surfaces of the tables. After the first three measurements, he relaxed, but that disappeared after he’d worked on the coffee table. He checked again. Then he remeasured the distances on the desk. He stood back.
‘Check your room, Laura,’ he told Graves. ‘Carefully.’
She did as he asked and returned. ‘Nothing missing,’ she said.
‘Everything as you left it?’
‘Ye-es –’
His disquiet was beginning to affect her. She wanted to relax. She cast a glance at the mini-bar. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘The magazines aren’t as I left them,’ he said. ‘A centimetre out of place. We’ve had visitors. And those guys sure as hell weren’t following us just to check we’d be coming back here. Whoever they are, they know about us.’
