The Shroud

by Harold Robbins

  “Yuri, I couldn’t have found a place I’d enjoy more to eat in than this place. Built by a Roman emperor two thousand years ago. I have an ancient soul. I feel like I’ve come home.”

  He beamed and grinned.

  “I knew it would please you.”

  I had the good grace not to mention I’d be even more pleased if he told me there were no longer thugs in New York who wanted to murder me.

  “Why have you followed me all the way to Istanbul?” I asked.

  “Medusa.”

  “Medusa?”

  “Tomorrow I’ll take you to the underground Roman cistern near here that still has water in it. There are pillars there with Medusa’s head on them.”

  I knew he was referring to the Basilica Cistern, a Roman cistern with hundreds of marble columns, including two of Medusa, not far from the restaurant. Medusa was the monstrous bitch of Greek mythology whose look turned people into stone.

  She reminded me of Karina Nevsky.

  I’d been to the Basilica Cistern when I was in the city years ago. But I didn’t want to tell him that I’d already seen it. At the moment, I didn’t want to admit to anything.

  “One of them is upside down,” he said.

  He meant Medusa’s head.

  “Like my life,” I said. “Back to my question. Why have you followed me all the way to Istanbul? Don’t you Russian spies have problems you can deal with at home?”

  “Spies are the SVR, foreign intelligence. I’m with the FSB, internal security. As I said before, we are all formerly KGB.”

  I suppose it made as much sense as Americans having the CIA, FBI, NSA, DIA, DEA, ATF, HSD, and a bunch of other ABCs.

  Despite my own good sense, I found Yuri very attractive. He wasn’t handsome, wasn’t rich—that was two strikes against him. I was sure he was vodka and borscht rather than champagne and caviar; he needed a new suit, pushed me into danger, and lied to me … yet I found him sexy.

  Occasionally, I accuse a guy of thinking with his penis. I knew there was an analogy somewhere in the accusation about my own attitude.

  I really needed an overhaul of my attitude toward men when I got home. Why was I always attracted to the raw sexuality of the beer and hot dog guys rather than the proverbial suits who took women to trendy restaurants and expensive beaches?

  “Why did you lie to me about the wife and four kids?”

  He shrugged. “So you wouldn’t feel threatened. A man with a wife and four kids is usually honest and reliable.”

  “That makes you what—dishonest and unreliable?”

  “Word games. You are a woman and smarter than me, so you will always win with word games. But there are two things you don’t have and badly need.”

  “Which are?”

  “A man with guns. One in my pocket and one in my pants.”

  “Now that’s really romantic. Sounds like you hold a gun to a woman’s head while you make love. Has it occurred to you that I wouldn’t need someone with a gun if it weren’t for people like you—who have guns?”

  “It has occurred to me that you are a beautiful woman.”

  I shook my head. “You must think I’m one of those vain, lonely women whose heart flutters when a man smiles at them.”

  He smiled.

  Damn. I actually was vain and lonely and my heart was fluttering. But I needed answers even more than flattery.

  “Tell me more about the trouble between your people and Nevsky.”

  “He’s a threat to Russia remaining a free society.”

  “I hadn’t heard that Russian was a free society, but that’s all right. Why should I choose sides with you rather than him?”

  He raised his eyebrows. “You mean besides the fact that we are keeping the mafiya from killing you?”

  “Maybe he can do it better. So far all you’ve told me is that if I go home, I’ll get murdered.”

  Not to mention that since Urfa, the number of people wanting me dead had definitely increased.

  “His enforcers are neo-Nazis,” Yuri said, “what you Americans would call skinheads. We Russians hate the Nazis and still remember the horror of the storm troopers, yet he has chosen to have his followers imitate them.

  “He is not really religious, not like people who go to church because they love God. He and his followers are into dark magic, the occult. Nevsky believes he is a descendant of Nordic gods.”

  He leaned forward, closer to me. “Does he look like a god to you? He and Hitler both look like they should have been digging graves, not putting people into them.”

  “Why do you think Nevsky is so successful at what he does?”

  “He taps into something deep in the souls of people, arousing something dark and powerful—the desire to be superior to everyone else. I’ve been told that Nevsky learned German in order to listen to Hitler’s speeches and understand his hypnotic appeal. What he learned was that Hitler talked to the German people like he was a coach addressing a sports team—he told them they were the greatest people on earth … it was their destiny to rule over others.

  “The people believed Hitler so well, they were willing to murder millions to fulfill their destiny. It is this sort of crazed, radical nationalism that makes Nevsky as dangerous as that Nazi madman.”

  “Your role in all this?”

  “A small pea in a big barrel. My unit follows him. When he goes somewhere, we follow him there. When he is home, we are outside. When his name came up in the phone chatter between mafiya bosses in Moscow and New York, the tapes were sent to me. I already knew something was planned between Nevsky and Lipton. Nevsky’s phones are not as secure as Lipton’s because we’ve had time to set up monitoring. When I saw that you were to be killed…” He grinned. “The rest is history.”

  “You saw an opportunity to use me. You are a bastard.”

  He merely grinned and shrugged. “As you Americans say … if the shoe fits.”

  “The way I see it, I shouldn’t get killed trying to help your corrupt masters fight with a corrupt competitor. Your people are no better than Nevsky. The only difference between your bosses and him is that they’re in power right now and he isn’t … yet.”

  “Let’s forget politics. It’s just more word games you will win. You are correct that I have been unfair to you. I must make it up to you.”

  “How?”

  “By making love to every inch of your body. By starting with the tips of your toes, licking them with my tongue, working up your thighs—”

  “Stop it. Do I look like a teenage girl that gets all excited at the thought of some man touching her?”

  “No—you look like a mature woman … full of fire and passion.”

  Damn … I was really attracted to this man.

  I don’t know why I have such bad taste in men. I want so many material things, but I always seem to fall for men who are better with the tools they were born with than the ones learned in MBA programs.

  Of course I was going to make love with him.

  I always slept with the enemy.

  * * *

  WE STOOD FACING each other in my room, naked, staring into each other’s eyes.

  We came together as lovers long apart, though we were almost strangers. Sex with the young tennis players had been titillating, but my naked body joined with Yuri’s not in lust but with a spiritual bonding.

  29

  With Yuri’s warm body lying next to me in bed, I knew he was fulfilling a need in me besides just the fleeting titillation of sex.

  That I was lonely and wanted a man in my life had been evident to me for a long time. I had a sense of security and fulfillment when I shared things with someone.

  The notion of being single gets old after a while. There’s no one to come home to, have dinner with, discuss how the day went, cuddle up and make love with in the middle of the night, lie in bed on Sunday morning with coffee, juice, and the Sunday paper.

  I knew our existences were worlds apart, but it wasn’t impossible.

&nbs
p; He’d have to move to New York, of course. Moscow was much too cold, too foreign for me. Besides, I didn’t speak the language.

  Marrying me would get him a green card. And if it didn’t work out, divorces were easy nowadays. That didn’t sound romantic, but I lived in a different world than my parents did.

  With those pleasant thoughts running in my head, I got up and went into the bathroom to take another shower. I wanted my body to be sweet for him when we made love again.

  I turned on the shower and paused.

  That old demon of paranoia that grips me so often took hold. Rather than stepping into the shower, I went to the bathroom door and crouched down, looking through the old-fashioned keyhole into the bedroom.

  Yuri was sitting up on the bed with my satellite phone in his hand. He appeared to be checking something. The battery?

  Maybe I’d seen too many spy movies, but I was pretty sure why he was tinkering with my phone—planting a bug.

  I took a quick shower and made sure to make noise to give him plenty of time to put my phone back.

  I came out wearing a towel wrapped around me.

  He pulled it off, kissing both of my nipples, and laid back on the bed, waiting for me to mount him.

  I didn’t want to make him suspicious, so we made love again. I just didn’t give all of myself to him this time.

  Why did I always seem to end up sleeping with the enemy?

  Maybe it’s my kismet. My fate in life.

  30

  I awoke in the morning and stared up at the ceiling, wondering where my life was going.

  I felt like a dog chasing its own tail.

  My father used to say that if you keep banging your head against a wall that won’t give, move a little and find a spot that will.

  I definitely felt like I was banging my head against a brick wall. Even though it seemed I had achieved a measure of independence from Lipton by striking out on my own, I was still a part of his game.

  Yuri appeared to be another brick wall.

  He was using and abusing me, but I still felt an attraction to him. And despite his messing with my phone—and my life—I had a feeling that something had happened between us besides a one-night stand.

  The problem was that regardless of the feelings we had for each other, we were both being pulled and manipulated by others.

  He awoke and sensed I was awake. His manhood came awake, too, rising out of the ashes of last night’s lovemaking to enter me and light my fires again.

  I enjoyed and hated myself for it.

  * * *

  BEFORE I STEPPED into the shower, I peeked once more through the keyhole. I didn’t catch Yuri doing anything except getting a few minutes more of shut-eye.

  After I was dressed, I told him, “I have to meet Lipton in the Grand Bazaar in half an hour.”

  “He called you?” Yuri asked.

  “No. He left instructions at my hotel in Urfa.”

  I didn’t dare say Lipton had called. For all I knew, Yuri’s people were listening in on all the calls on the satellite phone.

  “Please don’t come to the bazaar,” I said. “If Lipton thinks I betrayed him, he’ll never tell me anything again.”

  “Will you report to me everything he says to you?”

  “Of course. Have I ever denied you anything?”

  I gave him a kiss and slipped away as he tried to get me back into the bed.

  “Later,” I said.

  I sighed as I went down the stairway to the lobby. We had parted with me lying that I was planning to meet Lipton, and Yuri lying that he wouldn’t shadow my meeting with Lipton.

  More tangled webs …

  Why couldn’t I just have a normal relationship with a man?

  I shouldn’t blame myself—all I did was answer a phone call in New York and suddenly someone was trying to kill me by orgasm. But in some perverse way, I knew it was my own karma bringing all this hell in my life.

  I had pissed off someone big-time in a past life.

  Keeping up the charade, I had the hotel clerk write the bazaar’s name on a piece of paper so I could show it to a taxi driver.

  I wanted to leave a trail to the marketplace etched in stone.

  In the taxi to the bazaar, I pushed the satellite phone out of sight into the crack of the backseat without the driver seeing me. When I had calculated I was halfway to the bazaar, I had the driver turn right and drive me to another street where I saw a row of taxis.

  I got out, then took another taxi. And then another.

  In the meantime, I hoped that whatever satellite monitoring surveillance Yuri’s outfit had in Moscow would be sending Yuri off on a wild-goose chase as the taxi with the phone roamed the streets of Istanbul.

  I realized the phone was how he located me.

  I knew that police could find people by tuning in to their cell phones. And that spy agencies often talk about picking up “chatter” on cell and satellite phones before major terrorist acts, meaning that they were listening in on conversations.

  That meant Yuri had probably been tracking me and listening to my phone conversations even before he tinkered with my phone.

  I didn’t know what he’d done to the phone, maybe put another bug or something in it, but there was no way he could have followed me to the bed-and-breakfast without having already been tracking that phone. I had been too clever about losing a possible tail.

  Even if I hadn’t been as clever as I thought, I had been erratic enough to make it impossible for any normal human being to have followed me.

  But who said I was dealing with anyone normal?

  Whatever he’d been doing, the phone was no longer of any use to me.

  Yuri was tampering with it and Lipton wasn’t calling me. Even if Lipton called, I wouldn’t have jumped through any hoops for him.

  I got out of the taxi at a fast-food restaurant and used sign language to order a sigara boregi, a crispy, cigar-shaped roll of fried phyllo dough stuffed with cheese and spinach. I wasn’t hungry, but was stalling so I could watch out the window for people following me.

  The maneuver accomplished nothing except to help calm my paranoia. But the boregi was good, despite my vow to stay away from deep-fried food.

  I ate another sigara boregi and waited another fifteen minutes before I finally got into a taxi and gave the driver the handwritten note that the bed-and-breakfast clerk had prepared for me yesterday with the name and address of the Phanar, the residence and headquarters of the Eastern Orthodox Church’s Patriarchate of Constantinople.

  31

  The patriarchate’s headquarters were in the old quarter on the same peninsula as the Sultanahmet, which formed the heart of the city when it was capital of the Roman and Byzantine empires.

  Like the Sultanahmet, the Phanar was in a neighborhood bordered by the inlet called the Golden Horn. The area had historic residences and religious edifices like the rest of the city.

  The Phanar complex was a huge structure with an enormous dome, but the main entrance was only three stories tall. The complex lacked the venerable grandeur, majesty, and sheer wealth conveyed by the Vatican in Rome.

  What it didn’t lack was charm, atmosphere, and history.

  The Phanar’s Church of Saint George is no ordinary house of worship—it’s the headquarters of one of the great religious leaders in the world. But he is a big leader with a small flock—over the centuries, most of the Greek population in Istanbul and the rest of Turkey left because of religious and political differences.

  The Greeks had once been part of the Turkish empire and the parting had been bloody. It left Greeks and Turks in each other’s political territories and at each other’s throats for the last couple of centuries.

  Even up to today, the Greeks and Turks have had strained relationships, which was why the Christian patriarchate walked a thin line in the Islamic city, even though the Turkish government tried to cast itself as secular in a country that was more than ninety percent Muslim.

  Obviously
, not everyone in the country agreed with the government’s attempt to maintain a neutral stance on religion. The clerk at the bed-and-breakfast told me that in 1997 the cathedral had been badly damaged by a terrorist bomb that also injured church personnel.

  I checked in at a reception desk of the Phanar and waited only a couple of minutes before a priest entered and introduced himself as Father Dimitrios.

  His English was leaden, but I was once again grateful that my native tongue was spoken by so many others.

  “What is your interest in the Mandylion?” he asked.

  It was a natural question for him to ask, but it caught me by surprise.

  “I’m a writer. I’m doing an article for National Geographic.”

  “What is National Geographic?”

  “An American magazine dedicated to educating people about natural phenomena and different cultures.”

  I was surprised he hadn’t heard of it, but I couldn’t name a Turkish magazine, either.

  “It’s a very respected and scholarly magazine, dedicated to the preservation of knowledge. It doesn’t deal with anything controversial or scandalous.” I added the latter so he wouldn’t worry about talking to me.

  He merely nodded, but he headed for the door with me alongside him, so that was encouraging.

  Father Dimitrios was a very large man—in all directions.

  He had a huge head, entirely bald, with a long, raven-black beard that fell lower than his broad shoulders. Only his enormous belly was bigger than his shoulders.

  As we stepped outside to take a walk, he blinked his eyes behind thick, Coke bottle–sized eyeglasses.

  In his long, dark brown robe with a rope cord and leather sandals, he looked like a medieval monk who had come out of his cell and wandered into the daylight to find that centuries had passed him by.

  He had a musty smell about him, an odor of holy wine and living communally with no one but men. He carried an old, scarred, and worn brown leather satchel hanging from a strap over his left shoulder.

  As we walked he talked about things that had happened centuries before, but were still well remembered by people like him whose burden it was to both keep the faith and carry on the history for millions like me who took it all for granted—and only got pious when things were looking darkest.