The Istanbul Puzzle (10 page)

Half an hour after leaving the airport we arrived at the tall, wrought-iron gates of Peter’s villa. We all needed some sleep, he said. He was right.

The reality of everything that had happened was sinking in like a brick in a pool. During the car journey across Istanbul, Peter had received a call. Father Gregory had died in hospital overnight.

I felt ill, and a sense of foreboding.

Pink roses hung in drifts along the top of the high, whitewashed wall, which stretched away on either side of the gates to Peter’s villa. This was clearly an upmarket suburb of Istanbul.

Isabel hadn’t said a word after Peter’s announcement of Father Gregory’s death. She looked pale.

The tall gates made a loud grating noise as they opened. An impeccably dressed man in a navy suit stood to one side as our driver pulled into the gravel courtyard.

‘Sleep well,’ said Isabel, softly. The driver jumped out, came around and opened my door. I took a deep breath as I adjusted to the heat after the air conditioned car.

‘You too, old girl,’ said Peter, as he got out.

‘Safe home,’ I said to Isabel. Then I got out.

Isabel called after me. ‘I’ll pick you up in the morning, at about eight.’

I turned. She gave me a knowing look, then a genuine smile. Her mask had slipped a little on the plane, and I was glad. There was something about her that reminded me a lot of Irene. The way she pushed her hair back behind her ears. Her smile. It was a little spooky.

As the car door closed I caught a last glimpse of black hair.

‘I have to go out tonight but my man will prepare dinner for you. We don’t want you wandering the streets,’ said Peter as we went inside.

I’d made the appointment to meet Abdal Gokan at 9:00 AM, at his offices the next day, Wednesday. It was lunchtime, but all I wanted was a proper bed. I felt like I hadn’t slept in days.

I shook my head and said, ‘Don’t worry, I won’t be going anywhere.’

After a quick shower and a snack of soft bread and crumbly white cheese that was brought to me in my spacious all-white bedroom, I paced up and down for a while, my mind still racing, but my body aching to sleep. The window in my room overlooked the front courtyard. The sound of Istanbul’s incessant traffic didn’t reach the room except for the occasional blast of a distant car horn.

After going through everything that had happened and my plans for the next day, I finally fell asleep. The luxurious feel of the cool cotton sheets was wonderful.

Peter wasn’t around when I woke later that evening. Nor was anyone else, except his ‘man’, the guy who’d met us at the front door.

He was as discreet a servant as I’d ever met. Not one word did I get out of him about Peter. Nothing. Not when he’d left, where he was, when he might be due back. Nothing.

He brought me dinner in my room though, set it on a round table near the window. I had turned on the Sony LCD TV. The BBC World news service was on. I turned it off after he left the room – the endless roll call of the problems in the world was too depressing.

As I listened to the faint hum of the city, still tired, feeling like I wanted to sleep again soon, I thought about everything that had happened.

Where was all this leading? Peter had claimed, when he’d told us Father Gregory had died, that it had been the third such attack on his convoy in as many weeks. Why hadn’t he told me that when he’d asked me if I wanted to travel with Father Gregory? Was it just a coincidence?

It took me a long time to drift off and my dreams were disturbed when I finally did. In one of them Isabel was walking away from me and I was trying to catch her. And I couldn’t. Something was preventing me.

Doctor Brian Osman was the son of an American dentist and a Turkish biologist. His medical practice, in the upmarket Istanbul suburb of Besiktas, was focused on tropical diseases, which Turkish people who travelled all over the world were now picking up in increasing numbers. A recent outbreak of haemorrhagic fever in the Black Sea region had brought a small number of patients to his shiny white door.

That morning, as Dr Osman put his key in the lock of the door that led out of the basement parking area of his building, the last thing he expected was to be knocked unconscious. When he woke, he was lying in the back of a truck and a man with a bald head, a pockmarked face and a cruel expression was kneeling on top of him. The man had a shiny knife in his hand. The tip of the knife was inches from Dr Osman’s face.

‘Do not struggle, Dr Osman, or I will enjoy running this piece of steel right through your eyeball until it’s poking around inside that clever brain. Understood?’

Dr Osman nodded. His heart was beating like a kettledrum.

‘What do you want?’

Malach leaned down.

‘I have a friend who is sick,’ he said. He pushed the knife against the doctor’s cheekbone until a bubble of blood appeared.

‘She needs you.’

A car arrived for me at eight o’clock the following morning. I’d eaten soft bread, olives, some spicy salami and downed coffee and two glasses of orange juice for breakfast. Peter hadn’t returned, his man said, after he’d carried my breakfast into my room. I didn’t care. I wasn’t exactly looking forward to having Peter with us when Isabel and I went to Hagia Sophia.

Isabel wasn’t in the car though when I looked into it. The driver said, in heavily accented but perfect English, that he’d waited for her, rung her doorbell three times, tried her phone, but she hadn’t come down. So he’d come to get me, as he’d been told to.

My energy was already being sapped by the heat. This was not what I needed to hear. What was she up to?

‘You still need me,
effendi
?’ the driver asked. He looked distracted.

‘Does the Consulate know about Isabel not coming?’ I said. He nodded, but looked a little unsure. Had something happened to her?

He took out his mobile phone as if he sensed my anxiety. He pressed some numbers. I waited beside the car.

‘She not answering,’ he said, holding the phone out to me. I could hear the sound of it ringing. ‘Maybe she forgot.’ He shrugged.

All of a sudden my memory was a bit hazy about what she’d said before we’d parted. She’d told me a car was coming at eight, but had she said she’d come too? Had she just said I’d be picked up?

Yes, it was a possibility. And it was getting closer to nine by the second – I didn’t want to be late for my meeting with Abdal.

‘Can we pass by her apartment to see if she’s ready?’ I asked.

He shook his head. ‘No, no. I cannot. I can take you to one place. Where I was told to go, or nowhere.’ By the look on his face it was clear I wasn’t going to change his mind.

Was this deliberate, or was she flakier than she seemed? I looked at my watch. Why should I be worried if she wasn’t here? Weren’t they the ones who needed to shadow me? Wasn’t it also possible Isabel had decided to let me have my freedom?

As we drove off on our way to the offices of the Laboratory for Conservation beside Hagia Eirene, at the back of Hagia Sophia, I wondered if I should do more to find her.

‘Where does Isabel Sharp live?’ I said, to the driver.

His only response was a shake of the head.

‘When did you see her last?’

He didn’t respond to that question. I was on my own now. The only problem was, I didn’t have my phone.

Peter hadn’t given me my phone back. I’d been too tired, distracted, to ask him about it the afternoon before. If I’d known he was going to disappear with it I’d have demanded it back.

Questions flowed through my mind, as we nosed through the traffic. Was this all a game to them? Were they hoping to find out if I was hiding something? Was I being followed?

I looked around. There were too many cars behind us to have any idea if I was being tracked.

It was certainly possible that they were giving me plenty of rope, to see what I’d do with it.

A minute later I got an idea. I borrowed the driver’s phone, spoke to someone at the British Consulate. The driver had the number. The man at the other end didn’t sound at all concerned that Isabel had missed her appointment with me. He offered to get a message to her, and assured me that she’d contact me as soon as she could.

The driver dropped me off at the back gate of the laboratory near Hagia Sophia. The laboratory was in a three-storey Ottoman-era building constructed of giant blocks of granite. The entrance was right behind Hagia Eirene in a stable yard, which was paved with slippery soapstone that looked as if it had been new when horses had been the only form of transport.

There was a deserted out-of-the-way feel to the yard.

‘No Abdal Gokan. No,’ shouted the attendant, shaking his head, when I enquired about him. The attendant had raised his voice when it became clear from the look on my face that I hadn’t understood the stream of Turkish that had come from his mouth. He was sitting inside a scuffed wooden cubby-hole that took up one corner of the black and white tiled high-ceilinged entrance hall to the laboratory.

It took me a few seconds to work out that he probably meant that Abdal Gokan simply wasn’t in yet.

‘I’ll wait,’ I said.

He didn’t reply. He just closed the frosted glass hatch that separated us.

A large gilt-framed picture of Atatürk looking stern was the only image on the walls. Pinned up to the right of the door was an old calendar, curling at the edges, with a Turkish red crescent moon at its centre. I could smell dust. There was a stifling air to the place, as if asking for anything to be done quickly here would be met by utter indifference and then total silence.

I waited.

Every time I heard someone walking in the yard outside, a sense of expectation rose up inside me. I stared at each person who passed through the hall. They looked back at me with undisguised suspicion.

Come on Abdal.

There was a single piece of paper pinned to the wall near the door to the yard. It was in Turkish. I was looking at it when I heard a voice behind me.

‘Mr Ryan. How are you?’ boomed the voice. I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned quickly.

It was Abdal Gokan. He looked troubled.

Abdal was a big man, bearish, friendly, with a greying well-tended beard and a thick sixties-era moustache. He looked like an old-fashioned professor from a southern university who’d been bypassed for promotion. His clothes, a limp black linen jacket and a faded black shirt and trousers, hung on him like crumpled curtains. Where he’d appeared from I had no idea, but I didn’t care.

‘Abdal, great to see you.’ We kissed each other’s cheeks.

‘Has anyone else contacted you? I was supposed to meet a colleague here. She was going to come along with us this morning.’

‘I arrive now,’ he said. ‘Wait, let me see if there are any messages.’ He turned and went to the cubby-hole. I stared at the back of his jacket. It looked as if he’d slept in it.

‘No messages,’ he said, when he turned back to me. ‘Come, you will look at our new laboratories. I want to show them to you.’ He had a weary expression, as if he was a gundog who’d seen too much death.

I decided to put the whole thing about Isabel not turning up aside. She knew what she was doing.

He spent the next twenty minutes taking me on a tour through chaotic offices and pristine new laboratories, telling me all about the new researchers and restorers they had working inside Hagia Sophia.

‘Everything this year is focused on the main apse,’ he said, as we passed a room where tiny pieces of mosaic were laid out on long tables.

‘Did Alek work at any other location, somewhere not directly related to our project?’ I asked.

‘No, he worked where we agreed. There was no reason for him to work anywhere else.’

I was disappointed.

‘Come, let’s go over there. You can see where he was working for yourself,’ said Abdal. His expression had become closed, as if he hadn’t appreciated the veiled suggestion that Alek had done something he shouldn’t have, and that if he had, that Abdal might have any knowledge of such things.

We exited through a side door. It took about ten minutes to walk around to the main entrance to Hagia Sophia. Abdal walked slowly. I looked, but I couldn’t see anyone following us. Had I slipped the net? Or had something happened that I knew nothing about?

I felt a coldness in the pit of my stomach. As I looked at the passers-by an image of the thugs who’d pursued us out of the hotel a few days ago came to me. I scanned the passing tourists – from every country it seemed – and the street vendors selling postcards and bottles of water. Were those evil bastards still looking for me?

Abdal’s security card got us past the long queues of tourists at the main entrance to Hagia Sophia. Then, after dodging shoals of them in the long high narthex, clustering around their guides, we went through to the main part of the building, where it was much cooler. This was a space I knew well. Every time I entered it I felt a sense of sanctity, spirituality. Maybe it was the trapped air, the thin dust of marble and ancient brick, or maybe it was the hushed voices, the upturned faces all around, or simply just the sheer size and age of the place, its massive walls reaching up like a fortress of faith.

I’d spent a few days visiting Hagia Sophia during the bidding process for the project. This time however, as it was high summer, the nave was brighter from sunlight pricking though the air from the rows of luminescent windows on the second, third and distant fourth levels. This had been the largest Christian church in the world for a thousand years, its grandeur an advertisement for the success of the empire that built it.

When Abdal had finished pointing out the wall paintings and mosaics that Alek had photographed, he took me to an area cordoned off by high scaffolding around the Sultan’s gallery. The tourists circling the central nave – cameras and guidebooks clutched tight – stared at us as Abdal knocked on the steel door that provided access to the shuttered area. The door was opened by a white-haired older man. Beyond him, I saw two other men kneeling at the thin pillars that supported the gallery.

‘Is it possible that someone took Alek somewhere else to look at mosaics? There was talk of other interesting mosaics nearby,’ I said.

Abdal looked at me as if I’d insulted his family.

‘That’s not possible,’ he said shaking his head vigorously. He sounded irritated. ‘This is where the interesting work is.’ He pointed at where the men were working.

‘I only ask because I wondered if someone took him underground. Some of the tunnels and cisterns have been opened up recently, haven’t they?’

He shrugged.

‘Your colleague worked where we told him to. We are very strict about such things. Your project included work in the public areas only. I pointed all those out to you.’

Someone behind Abdal called out in Turkish. Abdal turned and shouted something back. A man in the far corner had risen to his feet. He came forward, waving his hands. Abdal turned to me. He didn’t look pleased. When the man arrived beside us, a rush of Turkish poured from Abdal. I heard my name somewhere in the middle.

‘
Merhaba
, Mr Ryan,’ said the man who’d come over, solemnly, when Abdal had finished. He bowed slightly. He was small and had a thin black beard and leathery skin. Another archaeologist, I guessed. He was wearing a red Polo T-shirt and cream pants. He looked concerned.

‘My name is Bulent,’ he said. ‘Abdal tells me you are a colleague of Mr Alek.’ Before I could reply, he continued, ‘It was a terrible thing that happened to him.’

He shook my hand for a long time, gripping it tightly, as if he was trying to comfort me. Then he kissed me on both cheeks. His skin was smooth.

Abdal looked at him disapprovingly. His colleague ignored him.

‘Your Mr Alek, he was crazy for his work. He stayed here late every night. And he start in the morning before everyone. He wanted to know everything.’ He gestured at the golden-veined dome high above us.

‘Alek always worked hard,’ I said. Talking about him in the past tense made me feel uncomfortable. It didn’t seem right.

‘He was a good man.’

He looked down, held his palm to his chest, as if he was praying. ‘It is too bad, Mr Ryan. He didn’t deserve such a thing to happen to him.’

‘At least he was doing what he loved in his last few days.’

‘You are right. He loved this place.’ He looked a little teary-eyed.

‘He said to me that people in ancient times knew more than us about sacred geometry, about how a space like this can help us come close to the divine.’ He gestured again at the dome high above our heads.

‘He was a clever guy,’ I said.

Alek had told me about his sacred geometry theories about Hagia Sophia. He’d dug up some weird facts about the place. He’d claimed Basilides, the philosopher who inspired the architects of Hagia Sophia, had learned the secrets of sacred geometry from the first followers of St Peter.

Bulent nodded in agreement. Abdal looked as if he couldn’t wait for the conversation to end.

‘Mathematical harmony is a true reflection of the divine, Mr Ryan. A clue to the master plan. It’ll survive us all. But I must go.’ He bowed his head.

‘I’m glad we spoke,’ I said. Abdal looked relieved.

‘Did Alek do any work outside Hagia Sophia?’ I asked Bulent quickly, as he started to turn away.

Bulent paused before answering. ‘He talked about a lot of things. He had some crazy ideas.’

He looked at Abdal, who seemed furious now.

‘Mr Ryan, enough. I have to get back to my office. I have showed you where Alek was working. I have answered your questions. I have done what I promised. I can do no more. We are all sad about what happened, but I can assure you, it had nothing to do with his work here. Our police tell me it was bad luck. He was, how you say, in the right place at the wrong time?’

I didn’t bother to correct him. His colleague held out his hand. I shook it.

‘
Güle
güle
,’ he said.

Abdal ushered me out through the steel door. His colleague went back to work.

‘If you need more help, email me from England,’ said Abdal, as he shook my hand.

Then he was gone, and I was alone with the tourists. I walked fast across the patterned marble floor. The heat of the day, even well out of the sun, lay heavy like a blanket. It made it difficult to think. And I definitely needed to think, to work out what I should do next.

One thing was sure; they wouldn’t want to hear about sacred geometry back in Oxford. Alek should have been collecting digital images, not superstitions. But what had annoyed Abdal so much?

An odd sensation came over me. I could smell, ever so faintly, the smell of death from Father Gregory’s hidden cave, as if it was clinging to me. Outside, I stopped a man selling bottles of water and bought one.

And then I was in the brilliant sunshine and ahead, across the wide open area in front of Hagia Sophia, were the minarets and giant dome of the Blue Mosque, the four-hundred-year-old Islamic mirror of Hagia Sophia, designed, it seemed, to demonstrate that Islam could equal the magnificence of any Christian edifice.