The Istanbul Puzzle

by Laurence OBryan

  ‘Wait a second,’ I said. I stopped, bent down to tie the laces on my brown suede loafers. The smell of fish was heavy in the air.

  ‘Can we wait another minute for the crowd to go?’ I said, looking up at her.

  I never thought I’d have to use the stuff my dad had drilled into me, about how to defend yourself, how to deal with urban dangers, things he used to go on about until I was totally pissed with it all, but I was glad he had now.

  ‘Watch out for crowds, was one piece of advice I remembered.

  As I finished with my laces, an attendant opened a side gate and a stream of people rushed out onto the dock heading past us towards the ferry.

  Isabel bent down. ‘We’re being watched,’ she said.

  ‘You think?’

  ‘That guy from the ferry. You can’t miss him. He’s holding back, waiting for us.’

  I didn’t bother to look around. We had to get off the dock. I stood up, took Isabel’s arm and guided her to the side gate the incoming passengers were coming through. Then I pushed past them. They looked irritated.

  I kept smiling. The attendant on the other side of the gate shook his head, but let us through into the waiting area beyond. Moments later, we were exiting through a side door and heading for a group of taxis, their snouts pushing up against the brick walkway in front of the terminal.

  ‘Let’s go,’ I said, as we sat in the back seat of a cramped yellow taxi.

  Isabel said something in Turkish to the driver. He set off immediately. When I looked back I saw nothing unusual, just people milling about.

  We changed taxis at Taksim Square, a vortex of cars, trucks and pedestrians coming from all directions. The square had one saving grace: a half dozen major arteries intersected there. The honking flow of vehicles provided a perfect opportunity to lose anyone who might be following us.

  ‘Wait and see,’ said Isabel, when I asked her again where we were going, after we got out of the first cab.

  ‘No English from now on,’ she continued, as a cab pulled up the second she put her hand in the air.

  We didn’t talk again until we got out of the second taxi in a busy café-lined street, in a suburb I found out later was called Bebek. Isabel had given the driver directions in Turkish. It probably looked like we were sulking in the back, we were that quiet.

  Each time we stopped at a traffic light, I had to resist looking around. I felt like a criminal who’d just broken out of jail and had to know if he’d made it to freedom.

  The idea that people were actively looking for me, were out to kidnap or kill me, still seemed weird, but I couldn’t ignore that it was true. What had happened in my hotel had been a lucky escape. I mightn’t be that lucky the next time.

  The upmarket Istanbul suburb of Bebek was on the European side of the Bosphorus, down the hill from Taksim Square but further east, out towards the Black Sea. It had a mixture of Ottoman-era buildings, restaurants, shops and modern apartment blocks. The main road through Bebek twisted along the shore of the Bosphorus like a snake.

  Marinas and jetties jostled one another on its outskirts. The small bay that most of Bebek sits beside was lined with sleek powerboats and expensive yachts.

  The taxi driver barely let me close the cab door before he shot away to find another fare.

  ‘Back in a second,’ said Isabel, ducking into a shop. She came out with a bag of fruit and asked me if I was hungry.

  I took an apple. It was crunchy and juicy. She scanned the cars and people around us for a minute, then we moved off. We walked past a newly painted clapboard style hotel with people coming and going from it in smart outfits. Then we turned into a narrow alley. It ran up the hill behind Bebek. Other alleys branched off at regular intervals. This was where the older buildings of Bebek were. Ancient-looking doorways punctuated twenty-foot high walls on either side. The walls were crumbling in places.

  We turned into a smaller, dark lane, then into a passageway, so shadowy in places, I could barely see where I was putting my feet. A weak street lamp halfway along provided just enough light to give us something to aim for. Above our heads, an occasional star glittered through a thin orange haze. The noise of the traffic was well behind us and fading fast, as if we were leaving the 21st century behind. I glanced back. This wasn’t the sort of place I wanted to get cornered in.

  ‘Where the hell are we going?’

  ‘Trust me just a little, Sean, OK?’

  She turned to me when she reached a doorway set at a lower level than the alley. Steep, rough narrow stone steps led down to it. Bunches of stone grapes, smoothed by time, barely visible in the half light, were set into the wall around the door. We were at a doorway to another age.

  ‘We’re here,’ she announced. ‘This is where an empress started work at the age of thirteen.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘I bet you’ll never guess.’

  I looked around. A square of wooden planks covered part of the wall beside the door. Otherwise, the place looked unexceptional.

  Chapter 27

  Doctor Osman bent over the girl. He was holding the front tail of his shirt over his mouth and nose. She was lying on a low steel bed, covered by a purple cotton sheet. The bed’s faded yellow paintwork was badly chipped. The girl couldn’t have been more than twenty. She was dark-skinned, looked Indian, and was wearing dark threads around her right wrist. Apart from that, she was naked.

  Her symptoms were obvious. She had yellowish swellings all over her body and a black tongue, which made her look like she’d been sucking coal. She was sweating too, and her breath, which rasped, stank. That meant the delicate tissue of her lungs was dissolving. He’d seen enough.

  The girl had some type of pneumonic plague, most likely, a truly virulent and feared airborne variety. And he knew what she needed. Urgently.

  He turned to the man who’d brought him to the basement room.

  ‘This woman must be taken to a hospital. At this stage she has a fifty percent chance of survival, no more, if we can get her treatment quickly. She’ll die if we don’t.’

  The giant with the puckered skin and bald head blinked. Then he pulled out a finger-sized glass vial from a thin aluminium case from inside his pocket. He was wearing a white hospital mask.

  ‘Take a sample from one of the pus sacs, doctor,’ he said. His mask moved in and out as he spoke.

  Doctor Osman saw the other item in the aluminium case. It was one of the permission forms he used when he needed to request a specimen test. The Florence Nightingale Hospital in Sisli, a twenty-minute drive away, where most of his tests were done, wouldn’t accept the form without his signature. The sample would be tested for Yersinia pestis, the plague bacilli. Plague bacilli express a unique protein.

  The difficult work would be identifying which family the bacilli from this case were from. The great fear among doctors who knew about these things, was that a natural mutation would emerge in the plague virus, which was resistant to all antibiotics. No one in their right minds would cultivate such a mutation. Or would they? He looked at the man holding the vial.

  If someone wanted to, and God forbid they succeeded, they might even produce airborne bacilli that would be resistant to even the latest antibiotics. Such a virus would be unstoppable, unless you knew the pattern of mutation. People who weren’t treated by someone who knew what they were dealing with would suffer from multiple organ failure. The only question would be how long they’d last, and which of their loved ones they’d infect before dying a painful and traumatic death, while bleeding from all orifices.

  ‘Has she been taking antibiotics?’

  ‘Do as I said. And sign the form.’ The man lifted the edge of his jacket, exposing the black knife sheath under his armpit.

  ‘This woman will die if she isn’t treated,’ said Dr Osman. Could he appeal to the man’s humanity?

  Malach pulled the knife out of its sheath. He held it up, stepped forward. The doctor put his hands up.

  When he was finished, h
e placed the vial in the aluminium case and signed the request form. He noticed an unfamiliar email address – it was his name on the form, but the email address that the test report was to be delivered to wasn’t his.

  ‘How long will it take for her to die?’ said Malach, as he put the case back in his jacket pocket.

  ‘I don’t know. I can’t answer that. She needs treatment.’

  The door of the room closed with a bang.

  ‘You can’t leave us down here,’ the doctor shouted at the top of his voice. ‘Come back!’

  He was hoping someone else might hear him, but the resounding echo of his voice and the memory of the two flights of stairs they’d come down to reach the room made him certain that his efforts were in vain.

  He heard a coughing sound and turned. Wine-dark blood was oozing from the girl’s mouth. He backed away. That wasn’t right. It was happening too quickly. This was a death sentence. His hand was at his mouth. It was shaking, violently.

  Chapter 28

  Isabel bent down and pulled at a brick in the edge of the arched doorway. With a bit of wiggling it slid free. She put her hand inside the cavity, pulled out a shiny brass key, then put the brick back, stood, went down the stairs and inserted the key in the door. Then she stepped inside and reached for a light switch.

  A single bulb came on. It was dangling on a thin white wire from the centre of a ceiling at least thirty feet above the floor. The bulb and wire looked totally out of place in what appeared to be the entrance hall to an ancient church.

  Wall paintings, so stained they were almost totally blacked out, covered the walls and faded into shadow above our heads. The paintings had jagged pieces missing, but I could still make out thin figures standing – they looked like saints. The floor of the hall was made of black and white geometrically patterned tiles, which someone was restoring. Small stacks of tile pieces were stacked in a corner where the restoration work was still ongoing. There were seven wooden doors around us. All were closed.

  ‘This is one of the oldest Byzantine buildings outside the original city walls of Constantinople,’ said Isabel, as she closed the door behind us. ‘It was part of a monastery before the conquest. After Mehmed conquered the city, it was closed down. During early Ottoman times the place was a storeroom. Amazingly these Byzantine wall paintings were just plastered over. They were all there when we stripped the layers away.’ She looked up at the walls, and turned slowly on her heel.

  Faded paintings covered each wall. I could imagine what the hallway must have looked like a thousand years ago, when oil lamps and candles were all they had.

  The hallway must have witnessed some amazing sights. Byzantine officers, clerics and merchants must have walked through it, all of them long dead now.

  ‘I think we’ve lost anyone who was trying to follow us,’ said Isabel. She was gazing up at the mosaics, as if she was still awed by them, no matter how often she came here.

  ‘Very few people know about this place,’ she said. ‘Istanbul still has a lot of secrets.’ Her voice echoed.

  ‘It’s incredible. Who owns this place?’ I was expecting her to say some institution.

  ‘A friend of mine. He’s turning the building into an upmarket townhouse. He’s persuaded me to do a bit of freelance work for him. I started restoring mosaics when I first came here. I needed something to keep me sane. I went on a course not far from here. I love this place. I always feel safe here.’

  The six-inch thick wooden door we’d come through certainly looked as if it could hold back an army.

  ‘And we’ve discovered a layer to this building that blew our minds.’

  ‘What layer?’

  ‘We found this phallic symbol etched into the wall outside. It was covered in layers of plaster and a layer of brick, but when all that came off it was as clear as day.’

  ‘That’s what they found at Pompeii, isn’t it? Doesn’t that mean there was a brothel here?’

  She nodded. ‘And it gets more amazing. This guy called Procopius wrote a secret history of the Empress Theodora, the wife of Justinian the Great, the guy who commissioned Hagia Sophia.’

  ‘So,’ I said, ‘what are you saying?’ I’d read about Theodora’s reputation.

  ‘Procopius claimed that Theodora started out as a low-class prostitute who danced naked in a brothel for all to see.’ She was still turning, looking at the walls around us as she spoke.

  ‘He even named the brothel she worked in. It was called the Lair of the She Wolf Number VII. They all had numbers back then, licences too.’

  I felt an odd sensation, as if the layers of the saints’ paintings around me were coming off and I could see licentious paintings and a hall full of customers and prostitutes.

  ‘You’re not going to tell me you’ve discovered Theodora’s brothel.’

  She nodded. ‘That’s what we think. Above the phallic symbol there’s an image of a she wolf etched into the wall with the number VII beside it. It couldn’t mean anything else.’

  ‘I can’t argue with you.’

  ‘They say Theodora started by servicing fishermen and sailors living outside the city, that she moved on to aristocrats who didn’t want to be seen in the brothels in central Constantinople. In the end, she caught the eye of the young Justinian. She ended up saving his imperial crown too, when the Nike rioters tried to overthrow him. She ordered his general to slaughter them all.’

  ‘Why did they call brothels the lairs of the she wolf?’

  ‘Some say it’s because she wolves are rapacious, others say that a good she wolf can lick you all over.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Procopius says she turned all the brothels in Constantinople into monasteries near the end of her life. She died in 548. That was probably when this building was turned into a monastery.’

  She moved to a large arched doorway to our left and went through it. I followed her up a tightly-winding stone-flagged staircase. Its walls were covered in faded ochre and indigo geometric shapes.

  ‘I’ve never seen patterns like this,’ I said.

  Isabel didn’t answer. The air around us was heavy, thick with a damp, musty smell. I could hear the distant sound of a car horn beeping, then a squeal of tyres, but the noises were muted. The modern world was being kept in the distance here.

  ‘What did Peter say when you told him about the secret dig under Hagia Eirene?’ she asked, as we continued climbing.

  ‘Not a lot. He wasn’t that interested.’

  The stairs were lit with low watt bulbs dangling intermittently from the roof. It was going to take a lot more work to finish the place properly. We stopped on a deeply shadowed landing with a stone archway leading off it. On the other side of the arch was blackness. Isabel pressed a switch dangling loose from the wall.

  A string of bulbs came on high up, illuminating the most breathtaking hall I’ve ever seen. The walls were alive with paintings, many of them of warrior angels. The floor was a riot of cracked and broken black and white tiles. Many of the wall paintings were only partly visible because of soot. The effect was captivating.

  I imagined shaven-headed Byzantine monks praying here while these life-sized frescoes looked down on them.

  ‘They’re a militant looking bunch, aren’t they?’ said Isabel. ‘See, that one. That’s St Michael.’ She pointed to an angel holding a faded, but fiery sword. ‘There’s St George. They look like real people, don’t they?’

  The ceiling was almost totally black, except for where a section was missing in one corner and grey roof beams could be seen.

  ‘This looks newer than the entrance hall down below,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, we think so too. We reckon this was an upper area, maybe a tavern, which was rebuilt into a chapel. Have a look at this altar,’ she said. ‘I was thinking of it when we were talking to Father Gregory. This is really what I wanted you to see.’

  At the far end of the chapel was a dining-table-sized block of yellow marble. The mosaic floor pattern around it was e
ven more elaborate here. Someone had been working on it too. Piles of a chalky mixture lay around it.

  ‘Is this your work?’ I said pointing at the floor.

  ‘Some of it.’

  I bent down to look at it. Gaps in the mosaic had been filled in with a neutral colour that let the mosaic stand out.

  ‘This is amazing. Irene would have loved this. She used to paint. She’d have gone mad for this place.’

  Isabel looked pensive, as if she was weighing up something. Her black hair shone in the golden glow from the bulb dangling above our heads.

  ‘I can’t imagine what you must have gone through, losing your partner like that.’ She sounded genuinely sympathetic.

  I didn’t answer her. It was a part of me that I preferred to keep locked away.

  ‘How did you get through it?’

  I shrugged. ‘Most people go through tough times – divorce, their parents dying, losing jobs, illness. Nobody escapes,’ I said.

  ‘You’re right.’ She paused.

  I got the feeling she wanted to tell me something else, something personal.

  ‘When my marriage broke up,’ she went on, slowly. ‘It took me a year to get over it, maybe more. He was one hell of a cold fish at the end. It really got to me. But I still don’t think that was on the same scale as what happened to you.’

  ‘What is it they say, if it doesn’t kill you, it can only make you stronger?’ I touched the marble table with one hand. It was ice cold.

  ‘A lot stronger.’

  She walked around the altar to the other side.

  ‘You’ll like this,’ she said softly. ‘They used to believe that an altar like this could ward off evil, that it held healing magic. Put your hands on it, Sean, flat like this.’ She put her hands on the altar, splayed out.

  I did what I was asked. It certainly couldn’t do me any harm. The altar felt cold, but it wasn’t unpleasant. I didn’t feel any magic though.

  ‘We discovered so much stuff about this place, when we were researching it.’

  ‘There’s more?’ I took my hands off the altar and put them to my forehead. They felt amazingly cool.