Empire of Lies

by Raymond Khoury

  The surgeon’s reply didn’t just feed Ramazan’s confusion—it worried him. “Has he been reported to the Zaptiye?”

  Fonseca stopped. After a quick glance to make sure no one was within earshot, he dropped his voice and said, “There’s no need for the police at this stage. Let’s save the man’s life first. He’s going to be here for a while and he’s going to be pretty helpless. Let’s not make things worse for him before we know what his story is.”

  Ramazan held his gaze and considered his words, then nodded. Neither he nor Fonseca were huge fans of the Zaptiye—the city’s police force. Not nowadays.

  They rounded a corner and entered the ward, where they made their way past several other patients to reach the man in question.

  He was lying in a bed in a far corner by a window, hooked up to several monitors that beeped softly. A nurse by the name of Anbara was checking the drips that snaked into the intravenous cannula attached to his right arm. When she saw the doctors, she bowed slightly and retreated from the bed. The surgeon gave her a small nod back before turning to the patient.

  Ramazan couldn’t tell much about the man, given that he was covered by a bedsheet and had a transparent plastic oxygen mask strapped to his face. From what he could see, Ramazan thought the man might be in his late sixties. He had a full head of gray, slicked-back hair.

  He couldn’t see much else.

  “My name is Moshe Fonseca, effendi,” Fonseca told the man in his customary upbeat, confidence-inspiring tone. “I’m in charge of the hospital’s cardiothoracic unit. How are you feeling today?”

  The man’s eyes narrowed as he seemed to study the surgeon for a brief moment. Then he replied with a slow, gentle nod, closing his eyes as he did.

  “Good. Well, you’ll be relieved to know your case doesn’t present anything we can’t fix,” Fonseca continued. “Basically, you’ve got what we call mitral valve stenosis. We all have four valves in our heart. The mitral is one of them, and sometimes, for any number of reasons—age maybe, or you might have been born with it, or maybe you had a bad case of rheumatic fever at some point—this valve gets narrower, and it stops opening properly. Which means there’s less blood flowing into your left ventricle, which is the main pumping chamber of your heart. I imagine you’ve been feeling very tired and short of breath lately, yes?”

  The man nodded.

  “All these symptoms—coughing blood, the heart arrhythmia—they’re all because of this. Your lungs are severely congested; your heart has clearly been strained for quite some time. Frankly, I’m surprised you haven’t had this treated until now. It can easily cause clots that lead to a transient ischemic attack, which is a kind of ministroke, or even a full stroke and—well, that’s not something we want, is it?”

  Fonseca studied the man, but the patient said nothing.

  After a moment, Fonseca just nodded and said, “The main thing: you’re here now, and we’re going to fix this. The way we do this is by replacing your valve with a bioprosthetic one that will do the job your valve hasn’t been doing. That’s going to be my job.” He gestured at Ramazan. “And this here is Sayyid Ramazan Hekim, one of our finest anesthesiologists. He’ll be the one putting you to sleep. As your condition is rather urgent, I’d rather not wait any more than we have to before doing this, so we’ve scheduled you in this afternoon. I trust you have no problems with that?”

  The man shook his head.

  “Ramazan Hekim will answer any questions you might have,” Fonseca continued, “and he also has some pre-op questions to ask you, although I’m not sure how fruitful that’s going to be given your”—he hesitated—“condition.”

  The man didn’t react.

  “Very well then,” Fonseca said. “All you need to do now is relax. You’re in good hands and you have nothing to worry about. I’ll see you in the recovery room.” He turned to Ramazan. “He’s all yours.”

  Ramazan looked a question at him, still wondering about what the surgeon had meant by his earlier comment.

  “It might be a good idea for you to examine his breathing again,” the surgeon told him. “The fluid level in his lungs is quite high.”

  Fonseca lingered for a second with a telling look, as if to make sure his message had sunk in, then wandered off.

  Ramazan stood there, confused. He glanced at Anbara, who didn’t react. Then he looked at the patient, wondering what Fonseca was talking about. Examine his breathing? The man was connected to monitors that gave far more information than anything he could glean from a simple stethoscope. Still, the surgeon had been noticeably pointed about it.

  He reached into the tray unit by the bed, picked up a stethoscope, and moved in closer.

  “All right, let’s see how your lungs are doing, shall we?”

  The man’s eyes tightened, visibly uncomfortable about this, which Ramazan noticed as he folded down the sheet covering him. Then he pulled the man’s hospital gown up to expose his chest.

  And froze.

  The man’s chest was covered in tattoos. All of it, all the way down to his waist. Ramazan had never seen anything like it. He couldn’t see them as clearly as he would have liked, since some of them were obscured under the man’s chest hair, but from what he could see, they didn’t seem ornamental or symbolic. Rather, they were words and numbers written in the same Arabic-Persian alphabet that Ramazan used, only they were written the wrong way, from left to right. The letters were small, the technique intricate. He thought some looked like they might be names and dates, but it was hard to tell. They were difficult to read, given that they were mirror images of normal writing.

  There were also several drawings and diagrams, images that looked technical that Ramazan didn’t recognize at all.

  Still rigid with surprise, he glanced up at the patient. The man was watching him, his cold, impassive eyes clearly probing him. Ramazan felt a deep-seated unease—and, oddly, he felt scared. He wasn’t sure why, but something about the man’s unwavering gaze, coupled with the tattoos and the strong torso they covered, made him very uncomfortable.

  He glanced furtively at the tattoos again, then forced his attention away from them and did his best to sound casual and seem unperturbed by what he’d seen.

  “This might feel a bit cold,” he said as he placed the stethoscope’s resonator on the man’s chest. “Take a deep breath, please.”

  4

  Lying in his hospital bed, Ayman Rasheed eyed the anesthesiologist intently, looking for a reaction.

  As the man pulled back his gown, Rasheed saw surprise and confusion along with the reaction he liked most of all: fear. Which was good. The doctor wasn’t just unsettled by what he’d seen. He was scared.

  And fear, as Rasheed knew, made people clam up and keep their mouths shut.

  The tattoos were always going to be a problem. He’d known that all along, but he had no choice. In all these years, he’d been very careful about whom he’d allowed to see them. He’d stopped shaving his torso long ago, since he no longer needed them, but they were still visible. The surgeon, the anesthesiologist, others potentially—they would be wondering about them, asking themselves questions. And the Hafiye—his brainchild, the agency he had created after the dust of conquest had settled, to help ensure the empire’s survival—had its tentacles everywhere.

  The good news was that it was unlikely any of them would understand their relevance. He hoped that they would think it curious but not much more. That they would think he was some kind of freak, someone on the fringes of society, an eccentric. Tattoos had been a common sight in the world he’d left behind, more and more so with each generation, but he didn’t know if they were as popular in this new world, in the one he’d helped create.

  Either way, he didn’t intend to stick around too long or answer any questions they had. Once he was fixed, once the operation was done and he’d recovered enough strength, he’d go back and leave them even more confused than they now were.

  The crisis had struck him the day before, at
his summer palace of Versailles. It had happened at the tail end of a long, formal lunch with some visiting British dignitaries.

  He’d felt increasingly dizzy for days, exhausted after the most trivial effort. For a tough, solid man like him, it was far from the norm. The fatigue and shortness of breath had got worse until, two days before the Versailles event, he’d started coughing up blood. Then at the lunch, just as the servants were bringing out great platters of fruit and pistachio and honey desserts, he felt his heart race suddenly and uncontrollably and saw his own panic reflected in the horrified faces around the table. He turned pale and tried to rise out of his chair, only to collapse to the floor amid screams of alarm from his staff and guests.

  He was rushed to his chambers. He tried asking for them to hurry with fetching the hekimbaşı, his chief physician, but his speech was slurry and he could barely remember the man’s name. The right side of his face felt numb, and his right arm had virtually no strength in it. Once at his bedside, the assembled physicians seemed stumped and could do little to make him feel better as his vision grew blurrier and the room darkened around him.

  Miraculously, though, Ayman Rasheed had started to feel a bit better a few hours later. But he knew something was very, very wrong. He also knew he couldn’t count on his physicians to take care of it. They were, by his modern standards, clueless.

  It wasn’t through a lack of will or effort: medicine and science, built on a foundation of ancient Greek texts, had taken pride of place since the earliest days of the empire. The Ottomans had been the first to inoculate their children against smallpox, a practice they began in the late 1600s, long before anyone else. It was simply a question of progress. They just weren’t there yet. Eighteenth-century Islamic medicine wasn’t yet aware of viruses and bacteria. It was still based on Galenism, a tradition that considered illness to be an imbalance in the four elemental humors that composed the human body: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. And although Rasheed had brought a lot of advanced knowledge back from his world, most of it had been in the art of war, not in medicine.

  He knew it was going to take more than the herbs and distillations in their pharmacopoeias to cure him. There was no time to waste.

  He needed modern medicine. But he had to play it safe.

  He got his janissary corps to rush him back to his Paris palace, where he locked himself in his chambers after issuing strict instructions that he was not to be disturbed. He spent a fretful night waiting. He also calculated the exact amount of days he needed to factor in to arrive there one day after his last visit. Then, just before dawn, he slipped out of the Louvre through a hidden passage and made his way to the banks of the Seine, as he had done more than once before.

  There, by the edge of the river, he had uttered the long sequence of Palmyrene words—the ones he’d had decades to memorize—and jumped.

  He was relieved to hear that his condition was treatable. He’d made the right decision, no doubt. He would have died had he not made the jump. The surgeon had confirmed it.

  Despite his great discomfort, it felt good to be there again. It had been years since he’d been back, and seeing it again gave him a boost. After all that time, the empire was still there. Under strain, perhaps, but still there. It had endured, against the odds, resisting the vagaries of time and despite powerful foreign enemies at its borders and a vast array of religious and ethnic groups within them—even if those groups had shrunk over the centuries because of conversions.

  He could proudly claim to have had a lot to do with that endurance.

  He’d avoided coming back for—how long had it been? Almost a decade. He’d seen how the empire was going through tough times—due to the Americans, Rasheed had discovered, a fact that greatly displeased him. They were wrecking his world again, although this time it was more of an indirect consequence, made worse by the hotheaded tyrant currently occupying the throne in Istanbul.

  Perhaps he needed to do something about that.

  It had been on his mind since his last couple of visits, but he’d ultimately chosen to turn his back on his legacy, retreat to the comforts of his cosseted life as governor, and leave fate to run its course.

  The truth was, he’d achieved so much, and he was tired. He was enjoying the fruits of his work, payback for the harsh times that had rained down on him before that fateful discovery in Palmyra a lifetime ago. It also hadn’t helped that in 2017—this 2017, now referred to throughout the empire as 1438, following the Islamic calendar—he was nobody. An anonymous man by deed and by choice, needing to be cautious at all times, fearful of discovery, and, even before his health had deteriorated, unsure he had the energy or the will to try to affect the course of events and help steer the empire back to better days. Whereas back in the eighteenth century, he had it all. He was powerful, he was feared, he was revered. He was considered a visionary, a genius. He enjoyed a spectacular life, ruling over the Paris eyalet, one of the jewels of the empire, second only to Istanbul itself. Even the sultan held him in utmost respect. It was a far more satisfying and enjoyable place and time to inhabit.

  But now he was back. Not by choice. And, with a bit of luck, not for long.

  He knew they would treat him, of course, regardless of the tattoos, regardless of his silence, regardless of their not knowing the first thing about him.

  Hospitals in the Ottoman Empire—known as darusshifas, which meant “houses of cures”—were charitable institutions that followed the Islamic moral imperative to treat everyone, regardless of their status or even their religion. Rasheed had no reason to think this practice had changed over the centuries, and on a previous visit, anticipating a need just like the one that had brought him to this hospital, he had checked out the Hurrem Sultan and had been pleased to be proved right.

  Watching the anesthesiologist examine him, Rasheed didn’t think he would be a problem. Rasheed knew how to read men, and the look of fear in the man’s eyes told him all he needed to know about him. He was weak. A lamb, a follower, a man without much of a spine.

  The surgeon, however, was different. He seemed to be more sharply observant than his colleague. Rasheed knew he’d need to remain alert to any nuanced shifts in his behavior.

  When the man had introduced himself, Rasheed had been surprised to realize he was obviously a Jew. He’d met quite a few since landing in the sultan’s chamber all those years ago. The Ottomans had welcomed them with open arms after the Spaniards had expelled them during the Inquisition, and Rasheed had grown to appreciate or disdain them as he would any other person, according to their individual merits and regardless of their religion. But he also knew their numbers in the empire had dwindled over the centuries. Although the empire was tolerant of other faiths and allowed them to worship freely, this tolerance was based on a precept of order that assumed the superiority of Muslims over non-Muslims. Conversion to Islam was not forced, but over the centuries the Ottomans had put in place burdens—taxes, being ineligible for any government post, even limitations on what colors of clothing could be worn—directed at non-Muslims as powerful enticements to convert.

  At first, Christians and Jews had resisted the notion, even if it meant they would be second-class citizens. But after Vienna, Rome, and Paris fell, their resolve to hang on to their birth religions weakened, then collapsed. The cohabitation and interdependence of the different faiths gave way to mass conversions.

  Faith was the primary organizing principle of Ottoman society, and with time there was no ethnic consciousness left. That was very much part of Rasheed’s grand design. He knew it was the greatest threat to stability; he had experienced it firsthand back in his original homeland, a lifetime ago. He’d seen its blood-soaked effect across the entire region.

  Yes, the endurance of the empire owed him a great deal indeed, he thought, as he considered the two men who would help settle that debt and enable him to go back and live out the rest of his days in splendor.

  Nothing—nothing—was going to interfere with t
hat.

  5

  On a quay by the Bayezid Bridge, Kamal and Taymoor flashed their badges and cut through the Zaptiye cordon to reach the small huddle of police officers.

  One of them frowned as he saw them approach.

  “Here we go,” he chortled to his buddies, knowing that Kamal and Taymoor were well within earshot. “We can rest easy. The ‘experts’ are here.” No air quotes were necessary. His tone didn’t leave much room for a misreading.

  “Salamu alaykum too, mulasim komiser,” Kamal returned with a sardonic smile. “Mind if we take a look?”

  “A look I don’t mind. Assuming you can swoop in here and take over, I do. What is it with you guys anyway? Is there anything you don’t butt into these days?”

  “Not my call.” Kamal shrugged as he moved in close to the dead body. “Just following orders.”

  “Honestly, we had better things to do today than barge in on you like this,” Taymoor added, his grin and the raised eyebrows that accompanied “barge” confirming how pleased with himself he was.

  “Orders.” The lieutenant inspector virtually spat the word out. “Well, who knows? Maybe this poor effendi and his dastardly friends were plotting to use the river to flood the whole city, and your being here will save us all.”

  “It’s happened before. The saving part, anyway,” Taymoor said as he brushed past him to join Kamal.

  A year ago, Kamal would have also questioned the order for him and Taymoor to look into such a situation. A dead body had been fished out of the Seine. At this stage, there was nothing that cried out terrorism or internal security. Accident, murder, or suicide—it was clearly a police matter. But things had changed. The charged situation across the empire meant the bosses at the Hafiye felt a need to be on top of any suspect event. Which meant that Kamal and Taymoor were often getting dispatched to check out cases that, at first look anyway, fell outside their operational purview.