Land of the Blind

by Barbara Nadel

  The old man had been dead for nearly twenty years, but Ahmet still felt compelled to please him. He’d wanted the Negroponte House and its secret ever since Ahmet could remember. But that had been after 1955, when everyone had become nervous about Greeks and what happened to them in the city. In the twenty-first century things were different again.

  Ahmet wanted a cigarette. It was the first time he’d thought about them for years. As a young man he’d hidden his smoking from his father, who didn’t approve of any sort of addiction. Now in his exalted position as one of İstanbul’s most successful property developers and as a pillar of the community, smoking wasn’t appropriate. Just as having a mistress hadn’t been appropriate, either.

  ‘Ahmet Bey.’

  And here, at last, was the man he had come to meet. Old and arthritic, he walked a lot more slowly out in the open than he did in the house.

  ‘Good evening, Hakkı Bey,’ he said. ‘I’m glad you’ve come to your senses.’

  The Great Palace of the Byzantines was what had stood on the Sultanahmet peninsula before the Turkish invasion of 1453. Together with Aya Sofya, it was a complex of buildings rather than just one vast palace. It meant that in one relatively small area, the Byzantine emperors and their families could live, work, worship and even watch games at the Hippodrome. But because assassination was a real possibility for so many Byzantine rulers, tunnels were dug that led between significant parts of the complex. That way the emperor and his family could pass from building to building in safety.

  The map Professor Bozdağ had e-mailed him, originally drawn by a Monsieur René Goudeket, was small and hard to read. But Goudeket had clearly been very interested in mapping sites of Byzantine structures. Some were known, like Aya Sofya and Aya Irene, but back in those days only fragments of the Great Palace had been excavated. Not a great deal had changed in the intervening time, but what was thought to be the Palace Library had been discovered on a site next to the Four Seasons Hotel, and a few small chapels had been located in Cankurtaran.

  It was nearly midnight but Professor Bozdağ had told İkmen to call him if he wanted any more information or had questions. Whether he, like İkmen, was still in his office, was open to question, but he answered his mobile phone immediately. He was even jovial. Maybe he was lonely?

  ‘Rene Goudeket wasn’t a Byzantine scholar, just an amateur enthusiast,’ he said. ‘You know rich people from Western Europe – Britain, France, Germany – used to do what they called The Grand Tour? This was a trip into antique, usually poor lands like Italy, Greece and parts of the Ottoman Empire, generally Constantinople, Egypt and Palestine. For almost nothing they could travel in style and eat like kings while fooling themselves they were becoming very cultured. Most of them just got sunburn and food poisoning, but a few fell in love with this part of the world. Goudeket was one of them. Spent his life walking the streets of Sultanahmet looking for signs of the Great Palace. He never found it, of course.’

  ‘So his map is speculative?’

  ‘In part. The Sultanahmet Jail, now the Four Seasons Hotel, hadn’t been built then. But Goudeket does place what we think is the Great Library in roughly the same area as the structure we are gradually unearthing today. But most of the palace, the great reception halls, the baths, the university, the private royal quarters remain underground. Some we think we know about which, again, roughly relate to Goudeket’s map, while other parts of the building seem to have disappeared even from the consciousness of the old Byzantine families who remain in the city.’

  ‘Including the tunnels.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We know they’re there. We know it’s all there, somewhere. But where?’

  ‘Do you think that Dr Savva found a Byzantine building no one had ever discovered before?’

  ‘She found a Byzantine skeleton that could be significant. Who knows?’ He sighed. ‘I should have kept a closer watch on Ariadne. I didn’t know how secretive she was. We all suffer from professional jealousy from time to time, but I like to think that my team share information freely. To be honest with you, Inspector, the fact that she didn’t share is hurtful. It shows a lack of care for the team. In retrospect I feel as if I never really knew Dr Savva at all.’

  ‘No.’

  There was a pause and then the professor said, ‘I don’t suppose you know about the child . . .’

  ‘Not yet, sir, no,’ İkmen said. ‘As you know, unlike in the movies and on TV, DNA tests take time.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Professor Bozdağ guided İkmen through the main features of Goudeket’s map.

  ‘We can’t be sure exactly how the Great Palace Goudeket drew relates to the modern city now, but I think you will be able to see roughly where the buildings he is speculating about might be. Of course many of the street names are different now. Back in Ottoman times a lot of small thoroughfares weren’t named at all. And of course Goudeket was French and so he may have misinterpreted names.’

  ‘Of course. Thank you.’

  İkmen carried on looking at the map through a magnifying glass once the call was over. It looked to him as if the Sultanahmet Blue Mosque was right on top of what had been the private quarters of the Byzantine imperial family. So that would never be excavated. But part of the road behind the mosque had been redeveloped in recent years. Kabasakal Caddesi only had three large houses left intact now. One of them was the Negroponte House.

  Hakkı led him down the stone stairs from the garden and through the back door into the kitchen. When he’d been inside the building before, the kitchen could only be accessed from the entrance inside the house. The back door had been blocked then. And now everything was different. Though not exactly the way he remembered it, Ahmet could now see the arch right in front of him, the small tunnel and the tiny door at the end of it. The one he’d slipped through all those years ago.

  He turned to the old man. ‘How did he do it? Yiannis?’

  ‘It’s one of his illusions,’ Hakkı said. He half smiled. ‘If I told you, I’d have to kill you.’

  It had to be, in part at least, a change in vantage point. But he’d felt odd too. When he’d lost his temper it had felt as if he was shouting through wool. That was his memory of it.

  ‘Did he hypnotise me too?’ he asked the old man.

  Hakkı shrugged.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means if you want them upstairs not to know about this, you’ll have to keep your voice down.’

  Hakkı hadn’t betrayed his master and mistress out of Muslim Turkish solidarity as Ahmet had hoped. He’d asked for money and Ahmet had given him half. It was nothing, but the greed made him angry.

  ‘Do you want to go in?’ Hakkı said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘See your “wonderful things”.’

  He was mocking him. When Ahmet had told Hakkı what he’d seen all those years ago when the kitchen door had been left unlocked and he had gone inside, he’d quoted the words of the archaeologist Howard Carter who, when he had discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun, had seen ‘wonderful things’.

  ‘I’m going to take photographs. For proof,’ Ahmet said.

  The old man shrugged. ‘Be quick.’

  Ahmet walked towards the archway and into the small tunnel. He had to ignore the fact that the old man was a mercenary bastard for the moment. He had to get some good shots, so he could prove that it existed and that he knew about it. Once copies were in Yiannis’ hands he’d have to stop playing games and sell or be reported to the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. The house would be dismantled to make way for a very lucrative archaeological site. Except that it wouldn’t, because Yiannis would sell to him rather than be compulsorily purchased by the State. And then the site would be destroyed – by Ahmet.

  The small metal door scraped against the stone floor as he pushed it. It was dark inside. Ahmet no longer carried a lighter.

  ‘Don’t you have a candle?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  He l
ooked back into the kitchen, but the old man hadn’t moved.

  ‘Well bring it!’

  He looked into the gloom again, waiting. As soon as it was illuminated it would spring out at him as it had done that first time, like a massive, hidden jewel.

  He heard the old man move towards him and so on one level he was excited, but there was something else close to him too now. Something in the shadows that he couldn’t see, hear or dare move his hand to touch.

  ‘Are you sure we’re alone?’ he said to the old man as the light from the candle behind him began to ooze into the darkness. For a second there was a colour of blood on the floor and Ahmet smiled.

  So it came as a shock when Hakkı said, ‘No.’

  His heart had only just begun to hammer in his chest when there was a terrible pain in his head and everything went dark and silent.

  Chapter 21

  Getting out of bed was a slow business for Mehmet Süleyman. Gonca’s entire family had decamped to Gezi Park and tent-dwelling the previous day and for the first time in years he had spent a quiet night alone with his gypsy lover. It had been blissful. She’d cooked, they’d eaten alone outside in the garden, then they’d made love and gone to sleep in each other’s arms. In the calmness he seemed to have fallen in love all over again. He looked at her sleeping and smiled.

  After he’d showered and shaved, Süleyman dressed quietly, careful not to wake her. But she was already stirring. Looking at him through half-closed eyes and a curtain of hair she said, ‘Is it time to go already?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Go back to sleep.’

  But she hauled herself up on her elbows. ‘I must cook,’ she said.

  ‘Cook?’

  ‘If everyone is going to stay in Gezi, they’ll need to eat,’ she said. ‘The adults can fend for themselves but the little ones and my father have to be properly fed.’

  He shook his head but he didn’t say anything. There was no point. Gonca would look after her endless stream of relatives, usually at her own expense, whatever he said. But her devotion did irritate him. Her work suffered and so did their relationship. That had been proven the previous night. Without the Şekeroğlus in tow, he didn’t think about anyone but Gonca. Well, he did, but only in a casual, looking at women in the street sort of way. He kissed her and left. On his way down the hill to his car he saw a lot of covered women and one girl in a tiny summer dress with flowers in her hair. She carried a rainbow flag and had the word ‘Gezi’ written on her forehead in what looked like lipstick. She was very young and very beautiful and she smiled openly at him.

  His head was sore but there was something else too – a chemical taste in his mouth and a feeling of his head being full. He’d been in that room, alone, and then someone had come . . . Had it just been the old man? He’d lost consciousness and now he was here. Which was terrifying because here was small. Unable to sit or lie down, he was propped like a plank of wood between two serpentine porphyry walls of amazing beauty. A large candle, like those the Christians had in churches, sat in a saucer at his feet, ensuring he could see everything.

  In front were bricks. Modern and rough with mortar in between. Turning his head so he could see what was behind his back, he saw a jug of water on a porphyry shelf. That, like the candle, was large. Ahmet Öden wanted to think that he was dreaming. But he wasn’t. He pushed the mortar between the bricks with one finger. It was still wet and for a few seconds that gave him hope. But even if he wiggled his finger almost all the way through the mortar, he couldn’t get to whatever was on the other side. The bricks stayed where they were. Probably because something outside was holding them in.

  He put his hand in his pocket to find his phone. But it wasn’t there. A chill rose from his feet to his head and he shuddered.

  ‘Things are going to get rough.’

  Çetin İkmen looked up at his superior. Standing in front of his office window, Commissioner Teker flicked ash from her cigarette out into the car park. He flicked his into an old saucer he’d brought from home.

  ‘Gezi Park cannot be occupied forever,’ Teker continued. ‘The politicians won’t have it.’

  ‘We won’t have it, I take it,’ İkmen said.

  ‘No. So you’d better get your son out of there before the sky falls in,’ she said.

  İkmen shook his head. ‘He loves it.’

  ‘He may do, but there are officers on the ground who are just gagging to have a go. You know it and I know it. Half of them come from places nobody’s ever heard of where women never leave the house and everybody is related. This is exciting for them.’

  He looked up at her. ‘Isn’t there anything you can do?’

  ‘If I’m ordered to move in, we move in,’ she said. ‘That’s my job, it’s what I do. I’m not political and I’ve come to you only because I know that your son is one of the protesters.’

  ‘A lot of people have relatives at Gezi . . .’

  ‘Yes, and I’ve told Sergeant Mungun to warn his sister.’

  ‘You know, if it hadn’t been for Gezi and Mungun’s sister we would never have found that baby,’ İkmen said.

  ‘That’s not a reason to believe that everyone in Gezi Park is perfect.’

  ‘I know that.’

  She put her cigarette out. ‘Whatever we may think about the current situation, it isn’t sustainable,’ she said. ‘One way or another it has to be resolved. And as servants of the State we will be asked to do that. Even if it goes against every personal belief we possess.’

  Briefly she put a hand on his shoulder and then she left.

  İkmen lit another cigarette. If anyone reported him for smoking indoors he’d just own up and take his punishment – with the requisite amount of resentment. What was he going to say to Kemal? And would it even make any difference? He was at Gezi every day now, along with his Auntie Samsun.

  And why was he worrying about the kid so much anyway? He was young, fit, he’d done his army service and knew how to handle himself. Was İkmen just absorbing Fatma’s excessive concern for their youngest child? She wanted to keep that boy at home and a ‘baby’ forever and it wasn’t healthy. But then the kid very readily took the free board and lodging he had right in the middle of what had become one of the world’s most vibrant cities.

  He knew he should really be more worried about Samsun. She knew some very tough trans women who could handle themselves far more effectively than Kemal, but Samsun herself was old and weak. She had an arthritic knee, diabetes and vertigo to his knowledge and yet he knew that if things got rough she’d throw herself into any sort of action, however dangerous, to protect Kemal. İkmen’s mother’s family were an odd lot. Albanian by birth, most of them, including Samsun, and for much of the time very ‘foreign’ to İkmen, they nevertheless cared about him and his family. Maybe Kemal would stop going to Gezi if he explained to him that he could be putting his auntie at increased risk of harm? Young policemen, like young men everywhere, tended to target people like themselves. You could have a good scrap with an equal opponent. Would Kemal buy it? He didn’t know.

  İkmen switched on his computer and went into his mail programme. There was a message from Mr Savva, asking about when his daughter’s body might be released, asking about the child. He’d had to tell him but he didn’t feel good about it. The Greek was, in spite of what he’d said at the start, pinning his hopes on the Erol sisters’ baby. It was natural he wanted to believe that something remained of his dead daughter, but it was more than possible that it didn’t, and there was nothing İkmen could do to hurry the DNA test results.

  In the meantime, whoever may have killed Ariadne Savva was still free. And much as he wanted to believe it was Ahmet Öden, there was no evidence to connect him to her death.

  The first Mary had heard about Mr Öden’s absence had been at the dinner table the previous evening. The Chechen cook had said that ‘Ahmet Bey’ had given him instructions only to make dinner for Miss Mary and Kelime Hanım. She’d thought that he had probably gone out
to dinner with business associates. But now it was lunchtime and he still wasn’t home. Also, why were all of his cars still on the drive? Mr Öden didn’t drink and so there could have been no reason for not driving himself. Unless someone had given him a lift?

  ‘Where’s Daddy?’

  Kelime was asking every five minutes, or so it seemed, and it was driving Mary crazy. She didn’t know! But she, unlike the girl, couldn’t express her agitation. Mr Öden was her employer and so to be overly concerned about him would be unseemly.

  ‘He’s at work, Kelime,’ Mary said.

  ‘When’s he coming home?’

  The poor kid looked like a massive pink curtain in the voluminous party frock she’d wanted to wear that day. ‘Soon,’ Mary said.

  ‘Is he? Can I have an ice cream now?’

  ‘After your lunch.’

  Kelime put her head down on her chest. Lunch, which was an over-large portion of mantı with salad, sat in front of her, untouched – and, Mary knew, hated. As she did every day, Kelime had started hassling for chocolate, ice cream and cake almost as soon as she’d woken up. And Mary had allowed her to have some. Now she was digging her heels in.

  ‘Eat your mantı, Kelime,’ Mary said. There was nothing new in the fact that Mary was at odds with the girl over food. But she was aware of a tension that wasn’t usually present. It was because Mr Öden wasn’t at home. And because he’d been out all night. Did he have another mistress? Already? In her head she could admit to his weaknesses and the reality of how bitter they made her feel. How could he have taken a dirty gypsy into his bed? How could he? Mary smoothed her pencil skirt down over her thighs and nibbled at the tiny ravioli. Kelime watched her from underneath knitted, resentful brows. She wondered how the inevitable tantrum would take her.