The Istanbul Puzzle (15 page)

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.

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, he 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.

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 even 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.

‘You know the story of Hansel and Gretel?’

‘Sure.’

‘Did you know it’s based on real events, children being abandoned in forests during the Middle Ages in Europe?’

‘Why would anyone abandon children?’

‘In the fourteenth century, the Black Death and the famines that followed it struck people down from Egypt to Scotland. England’s population crashed by more than half – from five to two million. Image the impact of something like that. The rules of society crumbled. Some people couldn’t look after their children. They were dying themselves. Children were taken into forests and abandoned. People thought they were doing the best for them. Maybe they were.’

‘Crazy.’

‘Remember Father Gregory talked about evil returning in cycles.’ She shivered, put her arms around herself.

‘Yeah, but he believed in evil spirits. I think we’ve moved on from there.’

‘The monks here in Constantinople predicted cycles of evil, of famines and plagues. We found references in some archives that mention this monastery. Apparently this place had a continent-wide reputation for its predictions.’

The air in the chapel seemed colder now than when we had come in. There was a lonely feel to the place too, as if it was waiting for tonsured rows of monks to return.

‘The fourteenth century was the last time anything truly threatened the social order in Europe. Estates were taken over by servants. Cities were abandoned by the ruling classes.’ Her voice echoed off the walls.

‘It was the worst century in Europe for seven hundred years. The monks here claimed they’d discovered a pattern. It’s mentioned in two documents. One of them is in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.’

I did a quick calculation. ‘So this coming century is going to be fun too.’

‘God knows. Apparently the monks here warned the Byzantine emperor at the time that the plague was on its way. Monks from this monastery had also predicted the famines and wars of the early seventh century. They happened just before Islam appeared and stormed the Middle East.’

‘How did the monks make their predictions? What were they doing, reading the stars?’

‘We’re not sure. It’s all a bit mysterious, dark arts stuff. When the monk’s predictions came true in 1314 they were praised for warning people. Later they were accused of being in league with the devil. Shooting the messenger is what we’d call it today.’

‘Yeah, I can see that happening.’

‘Then things got very bad. In 1347 three quarters of the population of Constantinople died from the plague. A lot of people thought it was the end of the world. Riots overran this monastery. Some of the monks were burnt to death.’

‘Lovely. That must have been because of those dark arts.’ I ran my fingers along the top of the altar. It felt smooth, well-worn.

‘Apparently the monks here were trained in astrology. That was what this place specialised in. There wasn’t any distinction back then between astronomy and astrology. Monks used the stars to decide the date of Easter, to tell people when to plant crops, when to reap, all sorts of stuff. It’s not surprising they were involved in predicting famines and plagues too.’

She pointed down.

‘We think this altar had something to do with their predictions.’ She spread her hands over the top of the altar, touching it gingerly, as if it was alive.

‘It’s the only surviving example of a Byzantine oracular altar. We think it was made in the sixth century. We believe it’s a copy of the altar in David’s temple in Jerusalem.’ She was speaking reverently, emphasising each word. ‘It’s made of quartz. And it’s totally unique.’

‘Do you think there’s anything in this seven-hundred-year cycle of evil stuff?’

‘You know what worries me, Sean?’ She looked around, as if checking the place for intruders.

‘Go on.’

‘The people who try to make these things happen, like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Some people want to stir things up, deep things, forces like hatred and fear.’

She sighed, then leaned over the altar.

‘Look at this top stone.’ She pointed at it. ‘It’s an inch thick. It must be the finest piece of Madagascar quartz in the whole world. And we’ve no idea how it was shipped here. My friend found it in a flooded shaft over there.’ She nodded towards a corner of the chapel.

I bent towards the quartz. The slab sparkled close up, as if it was alive.

‘See these markings?’ She traced her finger along a thin silver line on the top of the slab. There were other lines too, inlaid threads of silver all over the top of the altar.

She traced her finger along one line.

I peered closer. Far off, I could hear a wailing siren. Then it stopped abruptly.

‘This looks like the outline of a shape,’ I said.

‘It’s the evening star, we think.’ She ran her finger over the lines. I could just about make out lines joining together at the top of the altar.

‘On that side,’ she pointed to where I was standing, ‘there’s a pair of scales with a sword across its pans. That’s the symbol of the Last Judgment.’

I could see her breasts rising and falling beneath her T-shirt.

Something scuttled across the floor.