The Sultan of Byzantium (26 page)

‘Raci, Yannis once told me his last name, but I don’t recall it precisely. Was it Askaris?’

‘You’re very close. Laskaris.’

This was the name, unfortunately, that I’d come to Rhodes to hear. John IV Laskaris was the last emperor in the dynasty of Byzantine emperors exiled to Nicaea. He assumed the throne at the age of seven when his father, Theodore II Laskaris, died young of asthma. Michael, the founder of the Palaeologus dynasty, forcibly established himself as the young emperor’s regent, then sent him off to a castle in Gebze, where he had the eleven-year-old boy’s sight extinguished. I knew the story of the little emperor line by line. Michael’s ruthlessness, in contrast to the tolerance John’s grandfather had shown Michael, had always been an embarrassment to me.

What Michael did to the young emperor was not forgiven by the Byzantine people either. According to Russian sources, John Laskaris accepted his destiny, living like a saint and dying in exile. In
The Imperial Twilight
, which I accepted as the most inclusive book on the Palaeologi, the method of blinding the child emperor was described as the most ‘humane’ one: John IV’s pupils were made to focus on the sun until darkness descended. However, the dissenting modern historian Michael Geanakoplos maintained that Laskaris in his adult years began to see again and fled to Sicily.

The business reminded me of the case of Cem Sultan. The kings of Europe, fearing the Ottomans, kept Cem as an involuntary ‘house guest’ as a precaution against his older brother, Sultan Beyazit. Similarly, the king of Sicily might have kept John IV under his thumb for a long time as a ploy against the Byzantine emperor, with whom he had frequent skirmishes. I expanded my hypothesis: John IV Laskaris was never able to regain his throne, perhaps, but he managed to marry and produce progeny, thus continuing the bloodline. And now the one wish of – probably – the last member of the family, who was also John’s namesake, was to exterminate me and recapture the throne stolen from his many times great-grandfather. Nomo, who’d only just noticed this enterprise, was warning me without intervening. They too were helpless in the face of the ‘divine justice’ principle that was the cornerstone and dead-end of the Byzantine Empire. John Laskaris could help the Empire by eliminating me; therefore he should not be stopped. This kind of fatalism was a black hole involuntarily bequeathed to Byzantium by Justinian. Because Nomo would remain neutral, the last John Laskaris could not learn that I had unmasked him. It was an advantage I needed in order to neutralize him. I had to prepare for the worst-case scenario. But more than anything else, I wondered what long list of evils this ruthless avenger, who was more Byzantine than I was, had visited on my family.

Those residents under no obligation to stay in town in June had already departed for warmer places of the northern hemisphere. Even the summer wardrobes of those who stayed behind possessed the touch of a secret designer; I wondered about their beachwear. It was almost a joke not to hear laughter or loud talk on the streets of the most liberated town in the world. It was also strange to have no major structural flaws in the daily flow of life. Back in Stockholm I once more concluded that, if Stockholm was heaven, then my citizens who enjoyed Istanbul’s traffic jams would consider heaven a boring place.

I stayed in Stockholm for three days this time. Mistral had a crowded daytime schedule and Nedim had left for Kulu with his family. Mistral’s neighbor, Lennart Espmark, a retired librarian, took me to the off-tourist tracks of the town as if he were repaying an old debt. I was too tired to tell him that I owned the books of the Swedish poets Lennart Sjogren and Kjell Espmark. He had a time-share house in Marmaris, where he went with his wife during August, and he couldn’t decide whether Turkish hospitality was a blessing or a curse laid on the Turks. He believed that the hillsides of the city, in which I could discern no disharmony of color or sound, held a special charm, and he wanted me to squeeze my impressions of the place into one sentence before we took leave of one another.

Mistral was happy with the way I enjoyed the town and her friends, but she noticed my moments of distraction when I was trying to figure out how my match with John Laskaris would conclude. ‘Hey gunslinger,’ she said, ‘are you playing chess with yourself?’ I thought I would be stepping into a trap of my own devising if I asked why she called me ‘gunslinger’. She had to be satisfied with my excuse that the deadline for my research reports was stressing me out. I wanted to make myself believe that I was a character in a novel who gave up his throne to marry his beloved.

Lennart and his wife were not at home when I knocked on their door to say good-bye. In the IKEA sack I hung on the doorknob was a bottle of cognac and an envelope. In the envelope was my one-sentence impression: ‘When Noah’s Ark comes back, Stockholm, you won’t be able to decide if you’re a port or a passenger!’

*

I wasn’t lying when I told Iskender that I wanted to scare somebody and that’s why I wanted to borrow his 7.65 automatic pistol. I was going to threaten John Laskaris and make him take me to his boss. If he refused, I would confiscate his cellphones and wait for that boss to call him. Since I hadn’t risen to the status of the Elect, my only contact with Nomo was through my sworn enemy – a twist worthy of a detective novel. On the evening of June 22 I called Laskaris, who was in Istanbul awaiting me, and told him to meet me in the quarters beneath the Tekfur Palace. In my briefcase I had a length of rope, a pair of scissors and strong tape. My knees were knocking despite the two double cognacs I tossed back. My trembling stopped as I shook Laskaris’s hand for the last time, but a headache sprang up in its place. I sensed symptoms of irritation in this creature, who, with his bulging eyes and beak of a nose, deserved his moniker, ‘The Raven’. He looked like an employee trying to resign before he could be fired. I sat in the armchair at the head of the table, took out my gun, and said, ‘Come and sit next to me and start talking. Tell me everything about the crooked plot you’ve cooked up, your majesty, my dear John Laskaris.’

Leaving an empty chair between us, he sat down with an impudent smile on his face. I was about to open my mouth again when I felt the cold steel touch of a revolver at the back of my neck. Laskaris laughed. He’d probably been waiting for this moment for fifty years. He laughed until tears ran down his face. Finally he wound down somewhat and stopped to rest, still gasping.

‘Aren’t you going to turn around and say hello to your prospective executioner, my dear helpless great-great-great grandson of the ungrateful traitor Michael?’

‘Before you turn around, put what’s in your hand on the table,’ said a deep voice behind me, and my blood froze.

That voice belonged to Iskender. I turned in wonder to see his real face. The person I called ‘Big Brother’ for twenty years and treated as my confidant had not a trace of shame on his face. Instead, he was biting his lip to keep from laughing.

‘May God send you to hell, you thing without a shred of honor,’ I said, and spat in his face. I turned to Laskaris.

‘Before you start your own journey to hell, false emperor,’ he said, ‘you’re going to hear more than you wanted to hear.

‘After he escaped to Sicily my great-great-great grandfather John IV, the last emperor of the Laskaris dynasty, waited in vain to be restored to the Byzantine throne. The necessary conditions did not occur, however, and he died while still in exile, married to a noble Sicilian woman and the father of a son.

‘Official Byzantine historians, who concocted the story that Constantine XI died fighting on the walls, also set down, on orders, that John IV died in exile in Gebze. This way, the possibility of a Laskaris ever obtaining the throne again was totally erased.

‘My modern-day grandfather, my maternal Uncle John, and I all worked for Nomo in disguise. We were looking for tangible proof of our rights. I studied history at Cambridge with my uncle’s approval. He had the respect of Nomo, and after university I went to work for him. My Uncle John died of heart failure when he was on the verge of retirement.

‘I’ve been with Nomo for forty years. For six years my mission was to handle communications between your grandfather and the organization. Byzantium possessed the finest historical documents of its time. While looking for the proof I needed, I also worked to prevent a competent Palaeologus from coming to power. This part of my mission wasn’t much trouble – your grandfather was an honest man, but not good for much. A dreamer, a hedonist, a parasite. He survived all those “bankruptcies” of the businesses he sank only thanks to Nomo’s salvage efforts. In his sixties, he was persuaded to give up business and move to Galata. Several properties were bought for him so that he could lead a comfortable life in Istanbul.

‘I have no doubt that the nature of your grandfather’s death has been concealed from you. It was on a winter midnight. He was leaving his usual bar when he was hit by a stolen jeep fleeing police pursuit. After the accident there were some surprise developments in Nomo. One member, whose hope in the Palaeologus family had diminished, brought up the possibility that the son-in-law Hackett might do for the throne. After some hesitation, the other members reacted favorably. After all, Hackett was a well-educated American, a historian who had absorbed both West and East. Besides, he was a secret agent. It was a relief to me when I was assigned to compile a report on his private life.

‘I needed to arrange for you to become emperor in place of your father. That would gain me a lot of time during which I could find the evidence I was looking for. I wrote a false report that your mother was on the point of divorcing your father after getting wind of his mistress. It didn’t take long for the slander to become true. In the Anglo-American colony of Istanbul there was a sharp Canadian girl who had just broken up with her Turkish fiancé. She worked odd jobs and was having trouble paying off a bank loan she’d taken out to fly back to her country. I had my man offer her a sum that would pay off her debt and cover a first-class ticket to Canada, in exchange for seducing Paul Hackett. Your mother was furious when she saw the pictures of them having candlelight dinners and walking hand in hand in Emirgan Park. Four months after your grandfather’s death, your parents divorced.

‘To show that you were fated to wear the purple, I spiced up my report with a bit of the occult numerology the Byzantines loved. My idiot boss, Angelos, took your birth date, which happened to be the day after the fall of Constantinople, as a divine omen. The development I didn’t expect was your father’s falling truly in love with that hired woman. Together they went to Canada. With Nomo’s permission I had them followed. Your father was not an alcoholic but he always loved his wine, and two glasses would loosen his tongue. Whenever he got the chance he would joke about his married life. He would chortle to himself after relating, for instance, how his wife’s and father-in-law’s names were converted from Byzantine names, and how on returning he made them pay “indemnity” in the Byzantine manner. It took three years for the Thessalonican immigrant I put on his trail to discover that he was stealing rare books from his father-in-law’s house. The man from Thessalonica introduced me once to Paul as an antiquarian book dealer interested in Byzantine books. Five minutes after we shook hands Paul Hackett said, “I think I know you from somewhere,”and a little later, “Oh, I remember where – Istanbul.” I left the bar instantly. The next time he met our man from Thessalonica, he told him, “I’m pretty sure now that I saw your weird friend once with my father-in-law.” This was your father’s death sentence. He experienced the same fate as your grandfather – hit by a mysterious jeep as he emerged from a bar.

‘According to the Thessalonica man, all of your grandfather’s rare books were sold, except one. A Toronto book dealer bought them up for the Research Institute of Byzantine History at various auctions. I don’t know when Paul’s wife sold the last one, but I found it in London at a coy bibliophile’s shop in 2007. It was in manuscript form and its author was Manuel II, the father of Constantine XI. This work, in which the most philosophical Byzantine emperor recorded his personal remembrances and impressions, contained the written evidence I was searching for. It stated in detail the places and dates of John IV Laskaris’s Sicilian residence. I bought it and hid it from the Institute’s library to keep the information out of the hands of meddling historians. For me, the best time for the reality of the situation to emerge would be when the Byzantine throne was vacant. Manuel II’s written testimony would be enough for me to stake my claim. That I personally carried the genes of John IV could easily be established by the family tree that my grandmother had commissioned, plus the related church registers.

‘It was Nomo’s idea that Iskender would be your mentor and protector. It was I who selected him. His Greek grandmother was my mother’s next-door neighbor. His father was a Turk from Rhodes who moved to Muğla with Iskender after his wife died. He is devoted to me, but he also knows that I’m the legitimate successor to the Byzantine throne.

‘As I said, I procured the manuscript by Manuel II in 2007. In my report to Angelos I suggested that the throne be offered to you in 2008, as that was the 555
^th
anniversary of the Conquest and you were ready to take the test. I decided to take precautions against you in Trabzon. You surprised me with the purple square that you said you found in your hotel room. If it was really Nomo who had it put there to test you, I would put you in a difficult position by not relaying to them your reaction. If, on the other hand, it was not their doing but yours, I would avoid falling into your trap by saying nothing. When I saw that suspicious look in your eye, what do you think I did to renew your trust in me? It was Iskender who shot at you in Cappadocia and I who saved your life by pushing you to the ground! But there wasn’t much change in your attitude, so I asked Iskender to follow you more closely. When I heard that you were going to Rhodes, I knew you were about to unmask me. Then, when you asked Iskender for his gun, it was of course inevitable that we would come to this point.