Blue Voyage

by Diana Renn

  “So you never came in here to look for any clues that would maybe explain how he really died?” I asked her.

  “I sifted through a few things. But it was too painful. And anyway, Berk and I didn’t have secrets between us.”

  I studied her face carefully. She must not know about Lazar and Vasil at all, then, or my uncle’s consulting gig with them. Nazif had said she was out of town, at her friends’ hotel in Cappadocia, when the Lycian Society Onyx group held their secret meetings here. Had Berk not told her about those? Why would he conceal all that from his own wife?

  Because the business he was in with Lazar and Vasil, on behalf of the Lycian Society clients, was illegal. Shady, and shadowy. No wonder he encouraged her to go out of town.

  But Uncle Berk wasn’t shady and shadowy himself. Was he so desperate for money that he would sell himself out like that? If he had done it for his wife, for his family, did that make it all somehow okay?

  “Oh, I meant to tell you. I called Inspector Lale,” Aunt Jackie added.

  A chill ran through me. “Oh, no. I mean—you did?”

  “I realized it was silly to keep bugging you for that business card, so I looked her up online,” said Aunt Jackie. “I invited her to come over here and have a chat with me.”

  “Did you leave her a voice mail?”

  “No, I got her on the phone.”

  I frowned. Why was Inspector Lale taking my aunt’s call but not mine? That in itself seemed suspicious.

  “So when’s she coming over?” I fought to keep my voice steady.

  “She said we’d set up a time as soon as she got back in town. She’s still on the coast, where there was another robbery last night.”

  “Another one!”

  “Yes. She’s really got her hands full with the crime situation there. Another mosque and another small family museum were looted. She has to investigate their storage rooms and interrogate a local suspect they managed to take into custody. Anyway, when she comes, I plan to hand over my whole file and explain my theory. Maybe you can keep your mother busy with party planning or something while I do that. You know how she tends to have big reactions.”

  “Uh. Um. Sure, I can do that,” I said, mentally adding this information to my theory that Inspector Lale was working for the other side. True, I’d had trouble with the police in my past, so maybe it was in my nature not to completely trust them. But it now seemed entirely too convenient that Inspector Lale’s work kept her on the coast, with all these robberies taking place there. Maybe on these storage room inspections and police station interrogations she was confiscating other artifacts for “evidence.” And funneling the artifacts right back into the black market, or perhaps even to Lazar himself!

  I was getting so worked up about this idea I didn’t realize Aunt Jackie was already out of the office. “Hey, Zan,” said Aunt Jackie, looking back in through the doorway. “Thanks.”

  “For what?”

  “I know your dad had certain opinions about me, and probably your mother does, too,” she said. “But I know I’m not crazy. I knew Berk so well, and I knew his habits, and it makes no sense to me the way his life ended. So thanks for believing me.” She came back into the office and gave me a quick, warm hug. I hugged her back, tentative at first—afraid to squish the baby—then firmer. It felt good to hug someone, and be hugged back. Mine was not a hugging family. Maybe we were missing out on something.

  If you only knew how much I believed you, I thought as Aunt Jackie went back to Mom and the TV show. And if only she knew how worried I was, especially now that I couldn’t trust Inspector Lale.

  When my aunt left, I sat down at the computer, which was on a desk heaped with papers and books. Talk about an antiquity. The computer had a huge monitor and a hard drive tower—it was probably fifteen years old, at least—and it took forever to boot up. When it finally did, I pulled up my email right away. Nothing from Sage’s mom.

  Then I looked around the office, wondering if any clues might offer themselves up to me. Something to do with the urn and the work Uncle Berk did for Lazar. Nothing was going to be obvious, that was for sure. The walls were lined with file cabinets and bookshelves, and the shelves were sagging with books. College textbooks and reference guides, in both English and Turkish. Guides to ancient civilizations and art, bristling with sticky notes. I turned and nearly tripped over a stack of cardboard file boxes. When I dislodged the lid on the top one, I saw that it was crammed with three-ring binders and spiral notebooks. I chose a notebook at random and paged through it. It was filled with Uncle Berk’s small, cramped handwriting. It looked like lecture notes from his time in grad school at BU.

  I sat in the middle of the floor for some time, hugging my knees, immobilized. What was wrong with me? I’d never had any trouble snooping before, or going through other people’s stuff, whether it was in someone’s house or in a store. My shrink had always tried to get me to understand why I might be doing it—a need for attention, a cry for help—but none of her theories had ever sunk in. It was like autopilot when I went through other people’s things, like a part of my brain clicked off and left this buzzing sound in its place, and my body acted on its own. It was the opposite of the climbing wall, when I was in complete control, when I could command the tiniest of muscles in my fingers to keep me from falling. The worst of my falls, it seemed, had always happened on the ground, when I’d get caught for doing stupid things.

  I felt awful lying to my aunt to get into Uncle Berk’s office so I could go through his stuff. I had to remind myself that this time was different—wasn’t it? I was a detective now, not a thief.

  I pulled books and files off the shelves and flipped through them, scanning for any reference to the seahorse urn from the Karun Treasure. I opened desk drawers stuffed with tissue boxes and office supplies. I sifted through files on the desk, which held things like receipts for contractors at the hotel and copies of bills. Nothing jumped out that had any connection to the Lycian Society, the seahorse urn, the Karun Treasure, or Lazar.

  I did, however, see invoices from an assisted reproduction clinic. Bills for thousands of dollars, all marked “paid.” So there had been some money coming in, from somewhere.

  I sat on my uncle’s office chair and looked around in despair. It seemed as if he’d saved every scrap of intellectual work he’d ever produced or consumed. The office was a monument to my uncle’s failed hopes and dreams—or a tomb for his intellectual life. It would take an entire archaeological team to get to the bottom of this. No wonder Aunt Jackie felt overwhelmed just walking through the door.

  But I had to do something, chip away where I could. So next I scanned the jumble of icons on his cluttered computer desktop. Folders with labels in Turkish and English. Video game icons next to virus protection software next to several search engines. PowerPoint presentations. Resumes. I found a bunch of spreadsheets created in the past year that contained digital photos of antique objects, and notes on dimensions, all in Turkish. I couldn’t read all the file headings, but each spreadsheet seemed to be a kind of database for an art and artifact collection. It looked like museum names on some files and mosque names on others. I figured it was all from the consulting work Aunt Jackie had mentioned—non-criminal work, I imagined.

  Then it occurred to me that if he’d been writing fake appraisals or false histories for Lazar, he’d probably been smart enough not to do it on his home computer. Feeling increasingly guilty, yet unable to stop, I opened a few files to check out his most recent Word documents. I saw nothing about ancient artifacts or appraisals, just hotel information, spreadsheets and purchase orders for food and supplies, and employee records. An electronic copy of Hotel Management for Dummies. A document dated back in January listed four pages of repairs and improvements the hotel needed. The numbers in the outgoing expense column were way higher than those in the incoming column.

  Clearly, despite havin
g some guests, the hotel was struggling. They’d been struggling, too, with the fertility treatment bills. Yet Uncle Berk had somehow raised enough money for four rounds of IVF and managed to keep the hotel sputtering along. Lazar must have come along with an offer—or offers—that my uncle couldn’t refuse. So maybe Uncle Berk and Sage had something in common: a desperate need for money to make their problems disappear and their dreams come true. And when Lazar produced an artifact that needed to have a story behind it—a fictional one to cover up its true origins from looters and sketchy dealers, and to distance himself from it as well—maybe my uncle realized he was in deeper than he wanted to be. It was one thing to authenticate “trinkets” as replicas, but it was a whole other level of crime to be passing off a lost part of the Karun Treasure as a fake in order to sell and transport it illegally. Maybe that’s why he’d been holding on to both the urn and the fake certificate he’d created for it. He couldn’t let Lazar get away with this one.

  Working faster, I sifted through more files and papers. Near the top of a stack was a copy of a British archaeology magazine, with a sticky note. I opened it and found an article called “Rich as Croesus” about the Karun Treasure—written by my uncle!

  I snatched it up with both hands and read it fast. It described the origins of the looted treasure, and explained that “Karun” was the Arabic version of “Croesus,” after King Croesus, the legendarily wealthy king of Lydia. It then went on to tell how the Karun Treasure hoard had passed through a series of middlemen and eventually made its way to deep storage at the Met in New York. When some of the objects were finally displayed, they were labeled as “East Greek artifacts.” A Turkish journalist got suspicious and investigated. Eventually the objects were all shipped back to the Uak Archaeological Museum, a small museum in a village near Ankara.

  One of the key pieces of the collection, a gold seahorse brooch—“The Hippocampus Brooch”—was later discovered to have been replaced by a fake. The director of the Uak museum, who had helped to bring back the treasure to Turkey in the first place, was found to be responsible for selling the one-of-a-kind item right out from under the museum and arranging to have it swapped for a fake. He was now in jail. The original brooch had been tracked down in Germany, but it had yet to be returned.

  Uncle Berk went on to explain how the scandal angered a lot of archaeologists and museum curators. Some thought Turkey had blown it—their treasures had been returned from the Met, but they didn’t look after them properly, so they didn’t deserve to keep them. A lot of people thought the artifacts didn’t belong to Turkey at all, since they were created by civilizations that had lived on the land long before the Turks got there. These objects belong to the world, some art collectors argued, and should be cared for in countries with the resources to display and secure them properly. Still others felt that anything found on Turkey’s land must belong to Turkey, and stay in its place of origin no matter what, even if it meant not as many people got to see it.

  I studied a picture of the original golden brooch that went along with the article, and could hardly breathe. The brooch reminded me so much of the urn! The smiling, winged seahorses on the urn looked the same. The brooch had tiny acorns dangling from gold chains, and the acorns looked exactly like the lid of the urn. The brooch was beautiful; I could see why someone would want to own it. But stealing it from a museum and replacing it with a specially made fake? That was so wrong. It meant that all the people who’d come to the museum to see the treasure were robbed, too. Seeing the fake was not the same as seeing the real thing. If I went all the way to France to see the Mona Lisa, only to find out later that what I’d actually seen was a forgery, I’d definitely feel ripped off.

  Uncle Berk’s last paragraph hinted that there might be even more lost Karun Treasure items out there, in museum storage in other countries, or in the homes of private collectors who didn’t know what they’d acquired. He encouraged any museums or collectors who found artifacts in their storerooms matching materials or motifs from the cache to come forward. He felt as if the treasure should be reunited, in Turkey, once and for all.

  “Any single item of the Karun Treasure is priceless,” Uncle Berk concluded. “But until all its items are recovered, authenticated, and brought into the light of day for everyone to know about, no museum or private owner will be rich as Croesus. The real curse of the Karun Treasure—indeed, the tragedy—is that tomb raiders and their accomplices have stolen history. And in doing so, they have robbed all of us.”

  I stared at the page, letting those final words burn into my eyes. I pictured the urn sailing over the cliffside, and the look on Aunt Jackie’s face when she realized another connection to her husband had been lost. That had been really sad. But it was even sadder now that I realized the urn’s value wasn’t just sentimental, and the urn didn’t belong just to her. It meant a lot to Turkey, and to the world. A piece of history could be completely wiped out because some people wanted to own stolen artifacts and other people wanted to profit from that.

  And then I thought of how this article fit perfectly with what Nazif had seen and overheard at the Lycian Society meeting. My uncle hadn’t felt comfortable working to get this lost item out of the country, when it could have been reunited with its companion pieces instead. By aiding the robbers, he was becoming one, too. And maybe his only reason to help Lazar and his group had been to get enough money for all those fertility treatments. Or to save the failing hotel.

  But he hadn’t followed through on the last job. He had been hiding the urn in his desk—a supposedly cursed urn—with the fake certificate of “inauthenticity,” for weeks. How long would he have kept it there? Was he planning to hand it over to museum officials eventually, or to the police? What was the reason for the delay? And if Uncle Berk were around right now, what would he want me to do?

  I sighed and put the magazine back on the stack of papers where I’d found it, and that’s when I noticed what was beneath it. It was a large envelope addressed to Inspector Lale Demir, at the Istanbul Police Station. I snatched it up. Maybe he meant to mail her a copy of the article—they were, after all, old friends and colleagues, and maybe he trusted her. I picked up the envelope and noticed it wasn’t empty. Inside it were hard copies of those database spreadsheets I’d seen on his computer, with the photos and dimensions and notes—all in Turkish.

  I chewed my lip. I wanted to believe through all of this that Uncle Berk was a good man, doing the wrong thing for noble reasons. But I was afraid there was more to his story. Why had he been sending this information about museum and mosque collections to Inspector Lale? Was it to help her trace stolen goods? Or to help her and a bunch of thieves acquire them? How deeply was Uncle Berk involved in this smuggling ring anyway?

  29

  Later that night, the muezzin woke me from my fitful sleep.

  “Allahu Akbar . . . Allahu Akbar . . .”

  I put on my hoodie and sweats and made my way to the roof, where I faced the minarets.

  “Ash hadu al laa llaaaha illal laah . . .”

  As the voice took twists and turns, I found myself wishing I had someone or something to pray to. But I’d never been very religious. Mom had grown up Christian but secular, and didn’t spend much time learning about Jewish traditions with us. Dad was raised Jewish, and he talked a good game about faith and God, but remained carefully neutral, to get votes. I’d gone through the basics of Hebrew school and survived my bat mitzvah, but never felt a personal connection to the Torah text I’d learned to read. And after three sessions of temple youth group in ninth grade, I dropped out, preferring to sleep in or see school friends on Sundays.

  I didn’t know who or what I could count on anymore. Not God. Not my family. Not my friends. It was as if I was up on the top rope, looking down, and nobody was there holding the end.

  When the call to prayer ended, I turned to go, taking one last look at the Blue Mosque. It was a cloudy night, the moon o
bscured. The blue lights beneath the minarets gave off an unearthly glow. Then a movement on Nazif’s roof caught my eye. Was Nazif’s family out there again? Maybe that’s why I’d come up to the roof. Not for the call to prayer, but for a glimpse of a happy family.

  But it wasn’t the family I saw.

  A white cloth had been strung up on the trellis where Nazif’s family grew grapes. A light shone from behind it. Suddenly two black figures appeared on the makeshift screen. Shadow puppets, flat and hinged, controlled from behind by a stick. They were just like the puppets my uncle had given me a few years ago for Christmas, in a kit that now lay somewhere under a bunch of outgrown toys and board games in our basement back home.

  I walked to the edge of the roof, drawn to the two puppets as they danced jerkily. They seemed to fight, then come together and embrace; then dance, then fight, then flip and tumble. It was almost like watching a cartoon; the characters were in constant motion. Until one of the puppet’s legs broke off and the show stopped. The broken puppet limped offstage and the other one chased after it. The screen went blank. I waited, holding my breath.

  The next puppets that emerged were different. One was wraith-like and reminded me of a ghost, until I realized it was a bird. The other puppet was a boy. The boy shadow tried to catch the bird shadow, doing somersaults and handsprings and vaults while the bird darted just out of reach. It was a beautiful chase scene, and even in two-dimensional paper, the shadows managed to convey a sense of longing. Then the shadow bird flew away. The boy puppet sank to his knees, watching it go, slowly hanging his head and bringing his hands to his heart. Then he sank below the stage.

  I clapped, softly.

  The light winked off, and the puppeteer emerged from behind the screen. He nearly dropped his armful of shadow puppets on sticks when he saw me.