by Jay Amberg
5
The young man sits in the last seat in the back of the first Kent coach out of İzmir in the morning. The sun is well up, the passing fields bright. Though his backpack is stowed in the luggage compartment, his second bag stands on the floor between his legs. He is cramped in the seat, but he needs to touch the bag…to be in constant contact with it. He leans his head against the window away from the fat man next to him who farts garlic and snores.
When the young man failed to reach the director by phone the evening before, he did what he had to do and fled into town on the local bus. He hunched in an alley doorway, praying all night for an ephemeral peace, but he did not sleep. The cold mortar scraped him, and every noise spooked him. Rodents with gleaming eyes skittered around him, but he remained vigilant, his anxiety over what he did and what he possessed keeping him awake then and keeping him alert now.
Once he boarded the coach at dawn, he noted the arrival of each of the other passengers, even the women and children. No one was familiar except for one man who sat up front with his family…a man from his past, but not a digger or a preservationist. A man whose middle-aged paunch and receding hair reminded him all too much of his debasement. The man pretended not to notice him, and no else has spoken to him. Though fear keeps stirring his bowels, he should be safe, at least while he is on the bus. When the ubermeister realizes what has happened, he will loose the hellhounds on him, but they should not be hunting him yet. They will pursue him to the ends of the earth and wreak vengeance upon him. He has done the right thing, he is sure, but that won’t stop the hellhounds.
He gazes at the scabs forming on the knuckles of his right hand. The cuts still sting, especially when he closes his hand. He should have waited for the director, should have talked with her as usual, should have let her make the decision. But she was away, and there was no time. The fires of betrayal burned white, and he had to act decisively. He had to save the ossuary’s contents, preserve the holy relics, at any cost. Though the artifacts are inscrutable, he knows in his bones that they are more important than his life. What he has done is a sin, but necessary, the lesser evil to prevent the greater iniquity.
His right elbow rests on the narrow track at the base of the window. His arm vibrates as the wheels roll across the pavement. His reflection in the window jiggles, but his eyes still meet his eyes, noting the contradictions that have always been there—the face of both continents, the mixed heritage that others sense despite his attempts to conform, the features that attract women, especially older women, to whom he is not attracted. His name, Abrahim, must somehow give him away. Or, more likely, his eyes. They are brown—but not dark like his countrymen’s—rather the color of sand.
He stares at his reflection. He thought conservation would enable him to bridge the chasm he felt. And it did for a time. Preservation crosses cultures. Working with people from Europe and the States as well as his countrymen, he has unearthed Islamic and Christian artifacts. He has pieced together Roman tiles and Greek amphoras. Shards don’t care whose blood flows through him. And the director, at least, accepted that he is who he is. But will she understand why he has snatched the ossuary’s contents from her as well as from the ubermeister and the hellhounds? Will she forgive him?
Passing out tea and wafers, the coach’s steward has twice tried to make eye contact, but Abrahim will look only at his own reflection in the glass. He has done what he has done. But for all his depravity, he never would have sold out the relics. Not for any amount of money. Not even to save his life. He would never sell his soul to save his life. And now he must continue to flee the site, the town, the area. He cannot go home. They will look for him there. He knows where he must go instead. When he reaches Kayseri, he will find a café and email her. He will explain what he has left for her, what he has hidden, and what he has taken. From Kayseri, he will vanish into the heart of Anatolia.
6
Joseph Travers walks Istanbul the next day. He starts with Topkapi Palace’s grounds—the gardens and pavilions but not the harem or treasury. He needs to be outside and moving, in the sun and heat. When he called the Glavine International office the night before, William Glavine, Jr., admitted there were staffing issues with the Selçuk-Saint John’s Cathedral dig that they hadn’t discussed, but he told Travers it was a matter of ego and turf not life and death—and nothing, given Travers’ business background and mediation skills, he couldn’t handle. In fact, Glavine had asked him to represent the Foundation’s interests in Turkey because the site evaluation was essentially a personnel matter rather than an archeological problem.
As Travers walks among the pavilions in the palace gardens, his mind shifts, as it inevitably does early in his treks, to the losses in his life. In an attempt to root himself in the present, Travers stops at a lily pond by the Baghdad Pavilion. He breathes the sweet blossoms and watches the carp ripple the water, but he still can’t help remembering the exact moment his ex-wife, Mary, called his office, hysterical and incoherent, screaming about Jason and the BMW. It took Travers a moment to comprehend that there had been no accident. Fire burst in Travers’ belly and flamed through him producing, paradoxically, an icy sweat that froze his breathing. Choked, he gaped at the pen in his hand, the notes scrawled on the legal pad, and the sheaf of contracts—all objects suddenly and utterly alien. Mary ranted on, but he was already bound by fire and ice. And when she hung up, the buzzing began. The long walks ensued through every season and locale. Here at the lily pond, a carp’s tail breaks the water’s surface, a quick pop followed by concentric circles spreading outward.
Leaving Topkapi’s grounds, Travers passes the Executioner’s Fountain where the sultan’s minion washed off the blood after public beheadings. He then circles Hagia Sophia without going in to see the church’s famous mosaics of the Savior and Virgin. Instead, he heads deeper into the city toward the Grand Bazaar. When he pauses at Constantine’s Column, the last flame-darkened remnant of the emperor’s forum, he notices a man in a pale yellow shirt also stop forty feet behind him on the sidewalk. The man was lurking earlier by Topkapi’s Gate of Salutations, and with his light skin, closely cropped brown hair, and thick neck, he looks to Travers more European than Turkish.
When Travers begins to walk again, his yellow-shirted shadow crosses Divanyolu Caddesi and trails along the other side of the street pretending to window-shop. The road rises gradually, and Travers quickens his pace on the steeper grades and slows on the flatter stretches. He’s not imagining his shadow keeping a regular interval behind him, but he can’t understand why. He’s carrying nothing of value, has no information anyone would want, and isn’t meeting anybody.
More confused than frightened, he keeps altering his pace. He expected a sense of mystery, of adventure, something emanating from Istanbul itself. The Islamic overlay on the Byzantine city, though, diminishes any sense of the exotic. A man is tailing him, but no dark-eyed beauty beckons from an alleyway. And all his trekking the last three years has put him at ease on foot—if not in mind—almost anywhere. The Grand Bazaar itself is merely a huge shopping mall with thousands of small stalls and stores including hundreds selling gold jewelry. He serpentines through the throng and leaves the bazaar through the rear exit—but doesn’t shake the shadow.
The warren of narrow streets beyond the bazaar is crowded. Vendors pushing carts peddle all manner of stuff from incense sticks to plastic scuba diver dolls. The veiled women shop in groups, and the men smoke and chat. The national government in Ankara may be rattling swords, but in Istanbul’s streets none of the words or gestures seems political. People are simply leading their lives, buying and selling, eating, drinking tea, and talking endlessly. The Spice Bazaar at least smells marvelous, and there are scores of herbal aphrodisiacs among the spices and seeds and sweets sold in the stalls. The shadow, not the city, is causing the muscles in Travers’ neck and shoulders to tighten.
Travers stops on the
steps of the New Mosque, finished in 1633. The shadow keeps his distance, loitering at the souvenir booths on the side street. As Travers sits on the twenty-third step and drinks a bottle of water, he looks across the Golden Horn at Galata Tower where the Ephesus Project dinner is scheduled that evening. Tour boats dock along the shoreline, and traffic streams across the bridge. Sophia Altay talked a lot about her work and explained at least some of what caused her to believe he had come to Istanbul to fire her, but she did not say why she was undertaking the supplemental dig or what specifically she was looking for. She was certainly passionate about archeology, but she remained guarded about what she actually sought. She expected him to believe her version of the power struggle occurring at Saint John’s and to trust her, something that wasn’t all that easy at this point in his life. But she wasn’t herself offering trust, or anything else, in return. If there was any quid pro quo, he missed it.
Near the bottom of the New Mosque’s steps, the shadow reaches for postcards with his left hand. Even at that distance his nose looks crooked, as though it has been broken more than once. Holding the bottle of water to his temple, Travers notices a second man, neither peddler nor tourist, standing at a nearby kiosk holding a plastic replica of a mosque. The man is older than the shadow, darker and heavier and more nondescript in black pants and a plain blue shirt—but he’s every bit as out of place.
Travers’ breath catches; his skin prickles. Are they some surveillance tag team? Or is the older guy shadowing the younger? His mind, Travers thinks, is playing tricks—delayed jet lag or some deeper disorientation. But it’s not in his head. The two men are standing down there, thirty feet apart, each pretending to scrutinize some mundane trinket. The younger is keeping a furtive eye on Travers, and the older is waiting for someone to make a move. Something is happening here. What it is isn’t exactly clear, but Travers is already involved.
Travers gulps the rest of the water and bolts through the crowd. He climbs quickly through the steep streets and alleys toward Suleyman’s Mosque. He rounds a corner, clambers up the street, and rounds another corner. Panting, he looks over his shoulder but doesn’t see either shadow. A sour odor permeates the narrow lane, but it might only be his agitation. It’s not the place or the crowd but the sense of being sucked into something unfamiliar that’s causing sweat to roll down his face and chest.
He doesn’t slow until he reaches Suleyman’s Mosque. The mosque’s courtyard provides shade and a stunning vista of Istanbul’s sprawl across the Golden Horn, but Travers is too uneasy to settle there under the flowering trees. As he paces the path along the mosque’s wall, a young couple strolls by, but no one else is around. He circles the mosque past the Muvakkithane Gateway where the mosque’s astronomer determined the times for prayer. The four minarets rise into the azure sky, and the graveyard spreads below a canopy of trees. The tomb of Suleyman the Magnificent, the Ottomans’ greatest ruler, gleams in the mottled sunlight.
Finally, Travers is able to sit on a bench by the mosque’s exterior wall overlooking the Golden Horn. His breathing slows, and the sweat on his chest and back cools. The young man and woman are seated on the lawn in a patch of shade. She is thin and dark; he has black hair and sharp facial features. The cars and trucks and boats and pedestrians—the Golden Horn’s bustling commercial traffic—suggest that nothing out of the ordinary could possibly be occurring. But it is, within Travers and around him. He gazes over at the couple under the tree. They are hardly speaking, a soft word now and then, and barely touching, her left hand grazing his right. Four months before, when Christine said good-bye and walked out of his condo for the last time, Travers felt a pure and vast emptiness. She is still very much on his mind, and he longs for her touch, even the simple quotidian contact they shared for six years.
Now, seated in spotted shade surrounded by incandescent light, he feels more estranged than empty—disconnected from everyone and everything. And yet, he’s being followed by two men. Or not. Shaking his head, he smiles. Here he is, utterly alone in Istanbul at Turkey’s most sacred Islamic site overlooking the juncture between Europe and Asia, and he’s imagining he’s being stalked. Laughter starts choking out through the tension, lopsided chunks from deep within him. The couple glances at him, the woman smiling demurely.
Three minutes later, when the laughter finally subsides, Travers gathers himself and goes back around the mosque past Suleyman’s tomb, out the gate, and toward the cabstand behind the mosque. Heat rises in waves from the hood of the first taxi. And Travers is not imagining any of whatever is happening. The second shadow, the heavyset man in the blue shirt, leans against the back of the taxi. His arms are folded across his chest, and he’s scowling at exactly nothing. Up close, he looks like the second rug peddler’s brother at the Blue Mosque. Travers no longer feels jangled, but he wants no confrontation either. He cuts into a narrow lane, and on the hot, hurried walk back toward his hotel, he feels haunted by history he doesn’t understand.
7
Nihat Monuglu meets Travers in the Blue House Hotel lobby at 6:45. Pushing fifty, he’s short and stocky—heavily muscled and bald and ruddy and round-faced with a thick mustache going gray. His Mercedes sedan, though clean, smells of smoke. He talks constantly, inquiring about Travers’ trip and welcoming him to the country on behalf of the Ministry of Culture. He offers Travers a Yenidje Régie Turque from his gold-plated cigarette case, telling him that it is the finest Turkish tobacco. When Travers declines, he doesn’t himself smoke.
As Monuglu snakes through traffic with aggressive nonchalance, Travers glances out the window at the sideview mirror. If there are any shadows following, they are likely catching exhaust fumes and little else—but he’s still uneasy. When he returned to his hotel, the bright-eyed clerk seemed to have glanced at him differently than she had the day before. And his room had been searched, his papers riffled and his clothes rummaged. Everything had been gone through and then too carefully rearranged, as though somebody wanted him to know his room and his belongings were fair game. Three briefing folders he had left on the desk were now alphabetized. And it wasn’t a maid: a masculine odor permeated the room.
Monuglu and Travers cross the Galata Bridge and circle up a hill away from the Golden Horn. A valet takes the Mercedes at the entrance to the Pera Palace Hotel, and, as Monuglu ushers Travers through the lobby, he chants a litany of the hotel’s famous and powerful patrons, including Mata Hari, Jackie Onassis, and Atatürk himself. The first of their group to arrive at the Grand Orient Bar, Monuglu and Travers sit at a round table in the center of the room. Fewer than a dozen other customers are there, and it occurs to Travers that maybe none of Istanbul’s establishments catering to a foreign clientele is busy. Wars flaring in the region and continuing monetary troubles have, among other side effects, made Istanbul less international—a fact Monuglu assiduously ignores as he continues to extol the city’s virtues. Travers listens and nods, but he’s wary as well; Monuglu’s manic friendliness is almost as disconcerting as the shadows’ silent presence earlier.
“Raki,” Monuglu says. “You must try the raki.” He glances at the bartender, stands, and swings a fifth chair around to the table. He then lumbers to the bar, where he greets the bartender as though they are old friends.
The bar has a large mirror behind it, in which Travers can see Monuglu laughing and chatting with the bartender. Ornate chandeliers hang from the high gold and white ceiling. Rugs spread across the inlaid wood floor, and the armchair Travers sits in is lumpy. In fact, the whole place sports trappings of a British Victorian bar a century past its prime. Only the jackhammer outside obliterating the bar’s piped-in Turkish music rivets Travers to the present.
Monuglu leads the bartender back with a tray of five short glasses of clear liquid and five tall glasses of ice water. When Monuglu pours the syrupy liquid into Travers’ water glass, the concoction turns cloudy and white. As he mixes his own drink, a tall thin man appears i
n the bar’s doorway below the antique rifle hanging on the wall. He surveys the area, says something to the bartender, and struts toward the table with long strides and thrown-back shoulders.
Looking up from his task, Monuglu says, “Herr Professor Kirchburg, mein alt Freunde.”
The man waves his hand over the raki and says, “Nihat, old man, I see that, as per usual, you’re conjuring white lightning for a visitor.” His accent is German, his English British.
Monuglu stands, shakes the man’s hand, and turns to Travers. “Joseph,” he says, “I would like you to meet Professor Leopold Kirchburg, the founder and director of the Aegean Association.”
“Herr Travers,” Kirchburg says, “we have been awaiting your arrival. Welcome to the cradle of civilization.”
“Thanks,” Travers says, nodding. “I’m glad to be here.” The man is in his late fifties, fair-skinned, and at least six-foot-six. His blond hair, specked with white, reaches the collar of his maroon sport-shirt, and his neatly trimmed beard swirls with gray and white as well as blond and brown. His pale blue eyes take Travers in and size him up.
“Please,” Monuglu says, gesturing to the chair between them. “Have a raki.”
“I’ve ordered a Tanqueray and tonic,” Kirchburg says, wrapping himself into the chair opposite Monuglu. He crosses his leg and, swiveling toward Travers, points at the raki. “Poison,” he says. “Pure Ottoman poison.” He glances quickly over his shoulder at the bartender. “You have found your accommodations satisfactory?”
“Yes, sure,” Travers answers. As he sips the raki, which tastes too much like licorice, the jackhammer looses a particularly strident riff. “You’ve just arrived, too?”
“Ja,” Kirchburg answers. “I’m staying at the Çırağan Palace Hotel, if you need to contact me.”
