The Healer's Daughters

by Jay Amberg

  As they float into the sky, his grandfather asks the woman who these people are. She explains that they are Hui, Muslims from China who visited Islam’s holiest shrines and now want to see the ruins of older civilizations.

  Mehmet glances back and forth between the valley spreading below and the woman’s face. “And who are you?” he blurts. It is the boldest question he has ever asked anyone, but she is so beautiful he can’t help himself. When he realizes how rude he is being, he blushes.

  Both his grandfather and the woman laugh—but not at him. She cocks her head and smiles. “I am Uighur,” she answers. “I am Chinese, too, and Muslim, but from a western province.” She reaches over and pats his hand. “Uighurs are the oldest of the Turkish tribes.” She takes his hand for just a second. “You come from my people.” Her smile envelopes him. “I’ve been living in Istanbul for… How old are you?”

  “Uhh…ten tomorrow…”

  “Happy birthday! Since just before you were born.”

  Forever! he thinks. He has never been to Istanbul, and he would love to go, but he can’t find the words to say anything at all. His face burns.

  The cable car jiggles as its taut aerial cables run over the first towering stanchion’s wheels. He is higher than he has ever been before in his entire life. The two men glance at the car’s roof, nod, and whisper. The car rises at a steeper angle so that the world opens even wider.

  “Look at that!” his grandfather says, breaking the embarrassing silence. He points back down the hill at a spot near the cable car station. Mehmet presses his nose to the plexiglass. At a sharp turn in the road, two black cows, now the size of cats, are blocking the way of a shrunken white truck.

  ACROPOLIS CABLE CAR

  4

  BERGAMA

  Osama Flynn does not look back at the beardless man. He rolls up the window and shifts into four-wheel drive. His mouth goes dry, but it doesn’t matter. As adrenaline erupts, surging and spiking, he sucks in his breath. It’s a go! The mission’s a fuckin’ go! Beyond the final checkpoint! Beyond the point of no return! Allahu Akbar!

  He drums the steering wheel with both hands. The air is bright, swirling, the day itself aflame with vengeance and righteousness. All for the greater glory of God! His hands shake, but it’s not the fuckin’ jitters. Not at all! He’s ready. All in! Spoiling for the fight!

  All of his thoughts should be, must be, prayers. He’s devout, a devout jihadist, but Fightin’ Flynn is tearing his way to the surface, too. He’ll show his father, that drunken, shit-ass bum who beat his mother and him. And the Jesuits who drummed him out of school. He’ll show all those bastards who mocked him and his religion when he returned from Saudi Arabia to preach the Quran. And the mothers of his children who wouldn’t even let him see his sons, much less convert them. And his daughter who shunned him completely. He’ll get all those arseholes that called him a traitor and worse, far fuckin’ worse. Those fuckers that jailed him twice but couldn’t make anything stick. Now he’ll stick it up theirs big time! Yes, his mission is holy, the holiest, but he’s also going to go out with a massive bang! He’ll be honored in the caliphate—and famous all over the world. Legendary! Allahu fuckin’ Akbar!

  But he’s got to slow things down again. Can’t draw attention yet. The acropolis cable car station is coming up on his left. It’s monumental, five or six stories of tinted glass and green steel and brown trim. Struts and supports like buttresses. They’ve built a fuckin’ cable car cathedral! A fuckin’ St. Patrick’s dedicated to Western decadence! He rolls down the window and starts to flip off the faggots milling outside the four elevator doors. Stops himself just in time. He needs a cigarette! No, a shot and a chaser! No, the call to prayer. That’s what he needs. But there’s no call to prayer, just heavy metal drumming in his head.

  A tour bus is parked on the bluff to the right, a delivery truck and a couple of cars on the left. He shakes out his left hand, grabs the wheel again, and shakes out his right. He’s real close now, coming up to that last blind hairpin turn the operational tactics video showed him. As he swings into the turn, two huge cows lumber at him. Black and white dairy cows, even bigger than his grandfather’s Friesians, utterly bovine, slow, stupid, and blocking the road.

  Screaming, “Geezus fuck!” he slams on the brakes. The truck stalls. He rips off the service cap and thrashes the wheel with it. He’s panting. Can’t stop. That could’ve done it! Could’ve done him! He could be fuckin’ smithereens, and he didn’t come all this way, sacrifice everything, to blow up a couple of cows. No fuckin’ way!

  As the cows file past his cab, close enough that he can smell them, a little girl follows. She’s got a stick like a staff and a brown dog at her side. She smiles at him and says, “Teşekkür!”

  He bangs his forehead on the steering wheel. His hand shaking, he restarts the engine and shifts back into first. He rolls his neck and slouches his shoulders, but his muscles are never going to loosen up. Never. His sweat, gone cold, stinks. He looks down, realizes he’s shit his pants. That’s the stench—but who gives a flyin’ fuck! He clutches the steering wheel to stop the shaking.

  The truck takes the hairpin curve. The gate is locked but only with a chain and padlock. And somebody’s painted “Açık” in red letters on the white sign. He stops the truck again, flings the service cap out the window, adjusts his black headband, revs the engine, and pops the clutch. When he busts through, the gate swings over and clanks against the stone wall that lines the road. Whooping, he roars up the road until he’s beyond the wall.

  He shifts and then veers right up the hill into an olive grove. Branches whip against the windshield and scratch along the roof; olives ping like black hail. He finds a line up and through, the grove rushing past. He’s bouncing, riding the light-blasted moment, rocks striking the truck’s undercarriage. He’s wrestling the wheel with his left hand, grabbing the detonator with his right.

  The video warned him to be careful, but he’s rocketing way the fuck beyond caring now, he and the truck a missile. Free of the grove. The perimeter fence coming at him—the slit in the barbed wire right where the video said it would be. Wheels are spinning and rocks flying. The fence’s chain links bursting. The truck plowing up the hill. He and the engine roaring. At the top of his lungs! “Allah!” The stanchion dead ahead! The cable cars high above. His right thumb is twitching. “Allah!” The world itself is screaming for him. The greatest fuckin’ rush ever!

  5

  BERGAMA

  Tears run down Özlem Boroğlu’s face. Standing on a grassy promontory jutting from Bergama’s great hill, she drags on a cigarette, shakes her head, and exhales through her nose. She is only a few meters from where twenty-three hundred years before the renowned Altar of Zeus stood on Pergamon’s acropolis. The carnage that scars the steep slope below her is, however, wholly modern—and instantly infamous.

  The last of the ambulances and fire trucks left at dusk, but the lights of the police cars still flash. The klieg lights set up by the investigators glare, making the the blast site ghostly and surreal in the night. The wind has blown the truck bomb’s smoke away, but the smell of smoldering grass and plastic remains. She can’t keep her eyes from the fallen cable cars, whipped and crushed, the steel and plexiglass flattened by the impact on the ground. The wrenched and twisted stanchion the terrorist’s bomb blew up is only partially visible; nothing identifiable remains of the truck itself. The tangled cables strewn down the hill present a cursive warning in the language of terror, violence, and death.

  Boroğlu takes another drag, coughs up the smoke, glares at the butt, drops it, and grinds it into the ground. Twenty-two tourists are dead, two of them children. Nine more are critically injured, including a boy barely alive in intensive care. No one has claimed responsibilty yet, but this is the work of Daesh. Criminals! Worse—radical Islamic thugs that defame God to further their evil ambit
ions. This destruction, this murder of innocents, this spread of terror—Allah has nothing to do with any of it. This horror is only about the worst in humans: greed and hatred and prejudice and the lust for power.

  Boroğlu paces the promontory. She is so deeply heartsick and bitterly angry that she cannot stand still. And there is nothing else she can do. None of the officials or investigators here will even speak to her because she has no authority, having been so recently forced out of her job. But she knows better than anybody else what this carnage is really about. The town of Bergama is built upon ancient Pergamon, once the greatest city in Asia Minor and the cultural rival of Athens. Bergama is a UNESCO World Heritage site, and she was until last fall the municipality’s director of Archeology and Antiquities.

  Bombing this place, which she herself considers sanctified, not only debases shared human heritage and strikes terror locally and internationally, but it also draws attention away from the fact that what ISIL’s leaders are really doing is looting ancient archeolgical sites and selling off unique, irreplaceable treasures to line their own pockets and fill their war chests. Their buyers are the world’s rich, insatiable collectors from Russia, Europe, and the United States—exactly the people who ISIL’s propaganda declaims as Satan’s agents. For their part, the superrich collectors are knowingly funding the radical Islamists they say they abhor. She is not naive to the ways of the world, but she still loathes the fact that some of her countrymen, well organized and absolutely cynical, act as brokers for these utterly immoral deals.

  A shadow passes under the branches of the trees at the site of the Altar of Zeus. Boroğlu turns as her daughter approaches. They throw their arms around each other, clinging and weeping.

  “Oh, Elif!” Boroğlu whispers through her tears. “Elif…” Her daughter is twenty-nine, taller than Boroğlu and thinner, but they share the same strong jawline and high cheekbones. Elif’s black hair is long, almost to her waist, and tied back in a loose braid.

  Looking over her mother’s shoulder at the disaster, Elif weeps harder, her breath coming in gasps. She, like her mother, has lived on this hill for the last nineteen years. It is in ways simple and complex her home. And now it is, literally and metaphorically, ravaged.

  “Mom, I can’t…,” Elif says.

  “No, I can’t believe it either.” Boroğlu brushes tears from her daughter’s cheek.

  “How could any…anybody…?” Elif tries to catch her breath but cannot. “Why…would…?”

  Boroğlu has no answer for her daughter. There are reasons, of course, but they aren’t rational, aren’t sensible to someone like Elif who would never hurt anybody to gain fame or wealth or power.

  “It’s…it’s…evil!” Elif chokes. “They’ve got to be…”

  When a siren blares, the two women clasp each other more tightly. Boroğlu cups her hand on the back of her daughter’s head and draws her close as she did when Elif was a girl. Gradually, Elif’s breathing becomes more regular as she rests her head on her mother’s shoulder. She is not at all calm, but she returns from the edge of hysteria.

  Boroğlu steps back, clasps her daughter’s wrists, and asks, “Have you talked to your brother?”

  Elif shakes her head.

  Boroğlu’s hands clutch her daughter as she looks into Elif’s large, dark eyes. “Have you heard from him? Anything?”

  Elif buries her face in her mother’s hair. “No,” she murmurs. “Nothing at all.”

  6

  ANKARA, TURKEY

  Shortly before midnight, Tuğçe Iskan stares at her computer in the windowless Ankara Ministry of Culture office that she shares with seven others. Despite the horrific news from Bergama, she is the only one still here working. Her colleagues left several hours ago, but she has stayed, culling through the media coverage, the official reports, and scores of files, old and new. Her memory is pretty much photographic, and she is already noticing patterns in the information, some of which she will share with her boss.

  Iskan, a large woman, tall and solidly built, sits back and runs her fingers through her short blonde hair, scratching her scalp. At the office, she wears long-sleeved blouses buttoned to the collar partly to discourage her colleagues, all men, who seem obsessed with her figure, and partly to cover her tattoos, which she has chosen not to share with them. Now, though, both sleeves are rolled up. On her left forearm, in bold letters, is Ataturk’s dictum, “My people are going to learn the principles of democracy, the dictates of truth, and the teachings of science. Superstition must go.” On her right is, “The greatest war is the war against ignorance.”

  Just before her boss left at 18:45 to attend a formal, official Ministry dinner, he assigned her to fly to Bergama in the morning. Although the department is an investigative unit, he instructed her not to run her own inquiry but simply to find out if there is anything about the attack that could embroil him or his domain in the investigation. He chose her because she has had previous business in Bergama, and, most likely, he wanted to get her the hell out of the office.

  Iskan’s official Ministry cell phone pings, but she doesn’t immediately check it. She logs out and shuts down her computer, then takes a deep breath and exhales. Her group—she would not call them a team—is supposed to be investigating criminals involved in the smuggling of antiquities out of Turkey, but most of the leads she has generated since she joined the unit eleven months ago have simply vanished into the Ministry’s bowels. Only one of her reports on a lesser target has led to an arrest. And her colleagues in the office have shunned her because she gets so much work done.

  When Iskan was a child, she was ostracized within her family because she was left-handed and, therefore, unclean—the child of the Devil. Her mother never allowed her to cook or even enter the kitchen when food was being prepared. Still, she obstinately refused, even when very young, to do tasks right-handed. She retreated to her room, taught herself to read, and devoured books. Only over time did she become aware that others could not, as she could, read a text once and then always picture it later. This gift, if it really was a gift, was something she did not share even with her parents and her older sister and brother. Nor has she shared it with the men in this office. She does not at all mind missing out on the office’s rumors and gossip, but there must at some point have been something relevant to her investigations that someone should have proffered.

  When Iskan checks her Ministry phone, there is a single text message confirming her flight from Ankara to İzmir at 7:15 in the morning. On her private iPhone, which she always keeps silent, there is an e-mail from her anonymous source. In the past four months, she has received numerous photos of and documents about Hamit Antique Emporium, the most venerable of the licensed, established dealers of Hellenistic and Roman antiquities in Istanbul. Turkish regulations concerning the sale and export of antiquities have become exponentially more byzantine, but the Hamit family still releases an annual catalog of stunning jewelry, artifacts, and statuary for which it has legal provenance. There have, of course, been stories that the family moved into the lucrative illegal markets long ago and, worse, has established recent ties to the Daesh terrorists who are plundering ancient cultural treasures in Iraq and Syria. Antiquities now comprise a minor part of the family’s extensive financial holdings. And as long as the legitimate family business makes a few astronomical sales each year and the family continues to make lavish donations to certain public entities, no one in the government is going to question the integrity of the firm. In fact, her initial investigation into the family’s operations was quashed within two weeks of her opening it last year. This source has, however, recently gotten her again intrigued enough to follow up on her own time. She has kept all of her relevant files on a private server outside the office.

  As usual, the e-mail has no message, just an attachment. When Iskan clicks on the icon, she finds a single photograph, a long shot of two men sitti
ng on a stone bench in a park. She is not one who startles easily, but as she zooms in on their faces, her breath catches. The well-dressed, silver-haired man on the right is Mustafa Hamit, the family’s patriarch, but she also recognizes the older portly man on the left—a Russian diplomat stationed at the consulate in Istanbul who is widely recognized both as a spy and a member of the Russian president’s inner circle. It can’t be. The two men might well do business together but would never be seen together in public. It doesn’t make any sense. Or, does it? A pattern forms in her mind, a possible fit within a sequence of other images.

  Iskan unfastens the top three buttons of her blouse, revealing two more Ataturk quotes, each curved below a collarbone. Her subdued demeanor during office hours belies a deeper, vibrant, and, at times, more fierce energy that, since her childhood, has often emerged at night when she is alone and imagery and information are forming and reforming into something akin to understanding. Still holding the iPhone, she pumps her arms in the air and then dances among the desks, exulting—strutting, high-stepping, bobbing and weaving, but not smiling. The phone held high in her left hand, she whirls and whirls.

  She stops abruptly. Lowers the phone. Stares at the image on the phone. It’s real, not Photoshopped. She’s sure. What, other than the obvious one about collusion, are the implications? Who is setting up whom? Which one of the men was being followed? Who was the follower? Why? And, who is her source? What’s in it for him? Her visual memory is spectacular, but she has at times in her life jumped to conclusions. She has got to slow herself down. Do her due diligence. Scour her electronic sources. Utilize her methodology. Make the case, not merely break it.

  7

  BERGAMA

  At seven thirty in the morning, Recep Ateş carries two cups of Starbucks coffee toward the bench on which Özlem Boroğlu sits. Without saying anything, he hands her a cup as he joins her. Nodding her thanks but not looking at him, she draws deeply on her cigarette. Once each week for seven years, they have met here on the second level of this tiered park cut into the hill overlooking Bergama’s main street. The park lies near his Ministry of Culture office on the Bergama Museum grounds and not far from the office she had at the town’s municipal building. Their meetings most often began with remarks about the weather and questions about her children and his sixteen-year-old twin girls, but pleasantries aren’t possible today.