The Templar Salvation (2010) ts-2

by Raymond Khoury

  But the elder wasn’t much help—in fact, he wasn’t any help at all. With his grandson to translate, he told Tess he didn’t know of any drapers or cloth makers who had been notable dervishes, and didn’t know of any who were currently, either. Tess and Reilly thanked their hosts for their hospitality and wandered off in search of the hotel the travel agent had booked them into.

  “I shouldn’t have let myself get carried away like that,” Tess grumbled, feeling exhausted and crestfallen. “There were plenty of lodges in Konya, even back then. The odds of stumbling onto the right one … it wasn’t likely, was it?” She sighed. “This could take a while.”

  “We can’t stay here any longer,” Reilly said. “They want me back in New York. And we don’t even have a change of clothes or a toothbrush between us. Seriously. This is nuts. We don’t even know it’s here.”

  “I’m not giving up. We just got here. I need to go to more of these ceremonies, talk to more elders.” She glanced at Reilly. “I’ve got to do this, Sean. We’re close. I can feel it. And I can’t walk away from it. I’ve got to see it through. You go. I’ll stay.”

  Reilly shook his head. “It’s too dangerous. That son of a bitch is still out there somewhere. I’m not leaving you here alone.”

  The comment soured Tess’s face. Reilly’s concern wasn’t unfounded.

  “You’re right, I know,” she said, nodding slowly to herself, unsure about what to do.

  Reilly put his arm around her. “Come on. Let’s find that hotel. I’m beat.”

  They reached the bazaar district, where they asked for directions before cutting through a galleried market hall the size of an aircraft hangar. Despite the late hour, it was still buzzing. All kinds of smells accosted them from colorful piles of fruit and vegetables, bucket loads of freshly made dolmates salcasi tomato sauce, and huge sacks of sugar beet and spices of every color, the whole succulent tapestry manned by old men in patterned hats, old women in multicolored head scarves, and cay boys hawking syrupy-sweet tea. A pit stop of doner kebabs and minty yogurt drinks was hard to resist. They hadn’t eaten much all day.

  “Can’t you stick around a couple of more days?” Tess pleaded, the idea of heading home and giving up the search sitting as heavily in her stomach as the thought of staying there alone.

  “I doubt it.” He chucked his empty sandwich wrapper into an overflowing garbage bin and downed the last of his drink. “I still have a lot of explaining to do over Rome.”

  “Rome,” Tess shrugged, her tone distant. It felt like a lifetime ago.

  “They don’t even know we’re here. I need to call in and find out when we’re being picked up and see if they can pick us up from here. Besides, I want to get back. There isn’t much I can do from here. I need to be back at my desk to coordinate the intel and make sure all the alerts are properly in place so we don’t miss him the next time he pops up.” He put his hands on Tess’s shoulders and pulled her closer to him. “Look, it doesn’t mean you have to give up on this. We’ve got a contact here now, that travel agent. You can call him from New York. Let him do your legwork. He’s better placed to do it anyway. We can pay him for it, he seems like a helpful guy. And if he comes up with something, we’ll fly back.”

  Tess didn’t answer him. Her expression had gone all curious and she was staring at something beyond him. Reilly eyed her for a beat, then turned and saw what she was staring at. It was a carpet shop. A bald, chubby man was carrying in an advertising sandwich board from the sidewalk. It looked like they were closing up for the night.

  “You’ve gone into shopping mode now?” Reilly asked. “With everything else that’s going on?”

  Tess shot him a reproachful grimace and pointed a sly finger at the sign above the shop. It read, “Kismet Carpets and Kilims,” and below that, “Traditional Handicraft Workshop.”

  Reilly didn’t get it.

  Tess pointed again and made a face like, Look again.

  He looked again. Then he saw it.

  In smaller letters, at the bottom of the sign. Next to shop’s phone number. A name. The name of the owner, presumably. Hakan Kazzazoglu.

  Kazzaz-oglu.

  Reilly recognized the first part of the word, but it didn’t gel with what he expected to see. There wasn’t a fabric in sight. “It’s a carpet shop,” he noted, his tone confused. “And what’s with the ‘oglu’?”

  “It’s very common suffix in Turkish family names,” Tess replied. “It means ‘sons of,’ or ‘descendants of.’ “

  She was already heading into the store.

  Chapter 54

  As Tess had deduced, the carpet seller was indeed the descendant of a draper. In her desperation, Tess had been more forthcoming with him than she had been with the Sufi master, telling him that she had come across some old biblical manuscripts and was trying to find out more about their provenance. After a bit of hesitation, she’d even reached into her rucksack and shown him one of them. Sadly, he didn’t turn out to be any more helpful than the elder.

  It wasn’t that he was being evasive or difficult in any way. The man just genuinely seemed not to know what Tess was talking about, despite being very candid about his family history and about being a practicing Sufi himself.

  It didn’t deter Tess. She felt sure that they were on to something. It wasn’t necessarily a draper and his fabric store they were looking for. It was a name. A family name, one that could be associated with any profession or any kind of shop. And in that sense, the carpet seller had been helpful. He wrote down a list of all the other Kazzazoglus he was aware of and where their places of business were. There were more than a dozen of them, everything from other carpet sellers to potters and even a dentist. He also listed several other possibilities where the family names were also derived from the other ways of saying “draper” in Turkish, using the same words the taxi driver had given Tess.

  They thanked the man and left him to close down his shop.

  Tess felt rekindled. “We can’t leave,” she told Reilly, holding the list up to him. “Come on. One more day. Just buy us one more day. Give them some line about a lead concerning the Iranian. You can come up with something.”

  He rubbed the weariness from his face and looked at her. Her infectious drive was hard to resist at the best of times. Given what he’d been through the last few days, he didn’t stand a chance.

  “You’re bad,” he said.

  “The worst,” she smiled, and led him back to the hotel.

  REILLY GAVE AOARO THE LOWDOWN on what they were going to do and set up a vague lead story for his partner to give their boss. He and Tess then left the hotel bright and early the next day and spent it scouring the shops the carpet seller had listed for them.

  The people they met were overwhelmingly kind and welcoming. With each inquiry, Tess found it easier to be more open and felt no qualms about showing around the two codices. But it was ultimately pointless. No one knew anything about a stash of ancient books, and if they did, they weren’t saying and were hiding it well.

  She and Reilly closed out the day with the last name on the list. It was a ceramics and earthenware shop with an astounding variety of multicolored and intricately decorated tiles, plates, and vases in its front window, run by a chubby, soft-spoken, and easygoing fortysomething-year-old with intensely dark eyelashes that would have made him the perfect plus-size model for Maybelline if they ever chose to market mascara for men. They spoke openly for ten minutes or so, helped by the fact that there was no one else in the store apart from the owner’s teen daughter, who shared her father’s eyelashes but not his corpulent physique and was a much better Maybelline bet, and a shrunken, elderly woman the owner introduced as his mother, who was equally clueless about Tess’s inquiries.

  Despite their not being able to help Tess, the sight of the rare book had piqued a surge of interest in both the shopkeeper and his mother, as it had with many of the others. The old woman shuffled over and, softly, asked if she could take a closer look at the codex.
Tess handed it to her. The woman opened it gently, glancing at the inside page and turning over a couple more.

  “It’s beautiful,” the woman said as she perused its contents. “How old do you think it is?”

  “About two thousand years old,” Tess replied.

  The woman’s eyes widened with surprise. She nodded slowly to herself, then closed the codex and gave its brittle leather cover a soft pat. “This must be worth a lot of money, no?”

  “I suppose so,” Tess answered. “I never really thought about that.”

  Which seemed to surprise the old woman. “Isn’t that what you’re after? You’re not hoping to sell this?”

  “No. Not at all.”

  “What then?”

  “I’m not sure,” Tess said, thinking aloud. “This gospel—and any others that might be out there—they’re part of our history. They need to be studied, translated, dated. And then, whatever’s in them needs to shared with whoever’s interested in learning more about what took place in the Holy Land back then.”

  “You could still do that by selling it to a museum,” the woman pressed, her eyes now alive with a hint of mischief.

  Tess half-smiled. “I’m sure I could. But that’s not what I’m looking for. It never was. And these books …” Her expression darkened as she reached out and took the codex back from the woman. “A lot of people got hurt on the way to finding them. The least I can do is make sure their pain and suffering wasn’t entirely in vain. These books are their legacy as much as anyone’s.”

  The woman tilted her head with a kind of “too bad” shrug. “I’m sorry we couldn’t help you,” she offered.

  Tess nodded and tucked the ancient book back into her rucksack. “That’s okay,” she replied. “Thanks for your time.”

  With nothing more to discuss, all that was left for her and Reilly was to politely extricate themselves from the shop once the conversation turned to the fine ceramics the family produced and the bargain prices that were on offer.

  They left the three generations of Kazzazoglus to close up their store and stepped out into the still night. The hotel wasn’t too far, a ten-minute walk from the shop. It was a simple, medium-sized place. Modern, three stories high, the kind of hotel one usually associated with a secondary airport. Long on functionality, short on charm. Then again, Reilly and Tess weren’t exactly on their honeymoon. Their room, which overlooked the main street from the top floor, provided them with a decent shower and a clean bed, and that was all the charm they needed right now. It had been a long day, the latest in a string of long days and longer nights.

  Tess felt glum. She knew she was out of time. They’d be heading home the next day, empty-handed. There was no way around that. They kissed and held each other quietly for a long minute in the cocoon of their unlit room, then Reilly pulled out his phone and dialed Aparo’s cell. Tess crossed over to the window and stared out, lost in thought. The city had settled into sleep mode, and the street below her was deserted. A lone street lamp stood sentinel to the left of the hotel entrance, bathing the cracked sidewalk with its jaundiced light. The only movement came from a trio of stray cats that slipped in and out from under some parked cars as they hunted for scraps.

  As her eyes tracked them absentmindedly, she thought back to the last time she’d noticed any, outside the Patriarchate in Istanbul, just after she’d been told they were revered in Turkey as bringers of good fortune. The memory made her shiver. They hadn’t been particularly auspicious on that occasion. She looked out across the canopy of trees and rooftops and, for a moment, pictured herself out there, on her own, roaming the town, without Reilly close by. The thought gave her little comfort. The Iranian was still out there, somewhere. Out there and pissed off. No, Reilly was right. She couldn’t stay. It wasn’t the sensible thing to do, and right now, with a daughter and a mother waiting for her back home, sensible was definitely the way to go.

  She turned to join Reilly, and her gaze swept downward, finding the cats again. They skirted the edge of a storefront before slipping into a darkened alleyway—past a lone figure that was standing at the alley’s mouth.

  A lone figure that was looking up in Tess’s direction.

  Tess stiffened. There was something familiar about its silhouette. Her eyes locked in on the sight, her retinas straining to sharpen the image bouncing off them.

  It was a teenage girl.

  Not just any teenage girl.

  The girl from the ceramics shop.

  She didn’t move. She was just standing there, in the shadows, watching the hotel. And despite the darkness, Tess could make out the white of her eyes, tiny twin beacons of light in the desolate nightscape.

  Their eyes met. Tess felt a jolt at the base of her neck. It seemed mirrored in the girl, who turned abruptly and scampered into the alley.

  Tess bolted for the door, screaming to Reilly, “It’s the girl from the shop, she’s outside watching us,” before rushing out.

  She flew down the stairs and out the hotel doors and tore down the alleyway, with Reilly close behind. There was no sign of the girl. Tess kept going until she reached an intersection with a narrow street. She looked left and right. The street was lifeless.

  “Where the hell did she go? She couldn’t have gone that far that fast,” she blurted.

  “You sure it was her?”

  “Definitely. She was looking right up at me, Sean. She must have followed us back. Why would she do that?” Then she remembered something. “Shit. The gospels. They’re in my rucksack.”

  She moved to head back to the hotel, but Reilly stilled her with an arm and brought around her rucksack, which was slung over his shoulder, with the other. “Calm down. It’s here.” The bag was all they’d brought with them to Konya. In addition to the two codices, it also held Reilly’s handgun.

  Tess exhaled heavily with relief. “You think this is what they’re after? You think she was scoping us out to try and grab them?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.” Reilly glanced around and got his bearings. He gestured right. “Their shop’s in that direction. Maybe that’s where she’s headed.”

  Tess thought about it for a quick second, then nodded. “Makes sense. Let’s go there.”

  “Why?”

  “I want to know what the hell she was doing here.”

  Chapter 55

  Finding the shop was easier said than done. The old district’s narrow streets and alleyways were a confusing maze, even more so at night, with very few street lamps around. And when they finally reached it, it was all dark and locked up for the night.

  Tess marched right up to it and started slamming her palm against its aluminium shutters. “Hey,” she yelled out. “Open up. I know you’re in there.”

  Reilly stepped in and stopped her. “You’re going to wake up the whole neighborhood.”

  “I don’t care,” she blurted back. “Maybe their neighbors need to know about what kind of scams these people are running.” She pounded the shutters again, shouting, “Open this door. I’m not leaving.”

  Reilly was about to interfere again when a light came on behind the louvered, wooden shutter of a window above the store. Seconds later, it squealed open, and the head of the shopkeeper poked out.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked. “What do you want?”

  “I want to talk to your daughter,” Tess said.

  “My daughter?” The shopkeeper was clearly dumbfounded. “Now? Why?”

  “Just tell her I’m here,” Tess insisted. “She’ll know.”

  “Look, I don’t know what you think you’re—”

  A voice coming from a narrow alley that ran down the side of the store interrupted him.

  “Yatagina don.”

  The old woman stepped out of the shadows, addressing her son sternly and waving him back inside with both hands. “Yatagina don,” she repeated. “Bunu halledebiliriz.” She watched as he nodded, then he reluctantly closed the shutters and disappeared behind them.

  The w
oman turned to Tess and just eyed her without saying a word, though the tension in her face was evident, even in the dim light of a lone street lamp farther down the road. When she moved aside, the teen girl was there, behind her.

  “What was she doing outside our hotel?” Tess asked, her whole body buzzing with anticipation.

  “Lower your voice,” the woman hissed. “You’re going to wake everyone up.” She rattled off a quick sentence in Turkish, and the girl slipped away.

  “Hey,” Tess blurted, stepping forward. “Where’s she going?”

  “The girl did nothing wrong,” the woman countered. “You should leave.”

  “Leave? I’m not leaving. I want to know why she followed us back to the hotel. Or maybe we should just report it to the police and see if she’d like to tell them instead.”

  This made the old woman flinch. “No. No police.”

  Tess opened out her palms questioningly and gave her a “well then?” look.

  The woman frowned, visibly tormented by something. “Please go.”

  Something in the way she said it lit up a different pathway in Tess’s mind. She’d been so protective of the codices she’d failed to consider the other possibility.

  Her tone softened and she inched closer to the old woman. “Do you know something about these books?”

  “No, of course not.”

  Her rapid-fire denial was far from convincing.

  “Please,” Tess insisted. “If you do … you need to know this. There are others looking for these books. Murderers. They’ve killed many people while trying to find them. And just like we found you, they could find you too. If you know anything about them, you should tell us. It’s not safe for you right now.”

  The woman studied Tess, her mouth a tight line, her brow knotted, her hands shivering perceptibly despite the balmy weather, her eyes betraying some intense debate going on deep within her.