Turgut switched his torch on and flashed it around what had, over the weeks, become a grimly familiar scene. Silted over until almost halfway up the columns that supported the roof; much of the filth in the cistern, Turgut reasoned, must have originated from pre-Ottoman times. So far they had not so much as glimpsed the floor.
Neşe walked over to the small pit they had dug last time and began to rake away at the dirt with a trowel. As she bent towards her work, she put one hand into the small of her back and groaned.
‘I don’t know how much longer I can carry on doing this,’ she said as she watched her son begin his heavy, rhythmic digging. ‘May Allah forgive me, but I just don’t always feel strong enough. My heart is good, but I am old.’
‘No, you’re not,’ her son panted as he shifted the muck onto the pyramid of filth they had constructed beside their excavation. ‘And anyway, all this will stop when we find what we’re looking for.’ He paused for a moment in order to wipe his brow and catch his breath. ‘It’s well known that when we conquered the city, the Greeks didn’t have nearly so much gold as Fatih Sultan Mehmet thought that they would. It must have gone somewhere. And just like Dad always said, it has to be somewhere that people haven’t been to before. Like this.’
‘Yes, yes, I know all that,’ Neşe replied as she tetchily scraped away at the shifting sludge underneath her feet. ‘I’m just saying that for me—’
‘For you it is the same as it is for me,’ Turgut responded. ‘Hard work with only Dad’s dream to keep you going.’ And he turned away from her and started digging again.
He dug for some time, steadily, with purpose, unaware that for quite a while his mother had stopped her labours. But when he did notice, Turgut became concerned. Seemingly frozen in her painful stooping position, Neşe had one hand stretched shakily out in front of her.
Alarmed Turgut threw down his shovel and moved towards her. ‘Mum!’
But she didn’t answer. Her eyes glassy, Neşe just made a small gurgling sound in her throat – the sort of noise those who have just experienced a stroke might make.
‘Mum!’
Turgut grabbed her around the shoulders and tried to pull her up towards him. But Neşe, frozen to the spot, would not come. Mesmerised by some place just in front of her, she kept on looking ahead until her son saw what had caught and paralysed her attention.
It was Turgut’s turn to gasp as the beauty of the ancient crown hit him in the eyes. The light from his torch played across the artefact. There was gold and jewels also – emeralds, rubies, diamonds the size of babies’ fists . . .
Turgut, his whole body trembling with emotion, reached past his mother and touched it gently with his fingers. The crown felt strangely warm.
Chapter 3
* * *
The two of them took their seats in silence. Dressed in shorts and brightly coloured T-shirts, their faces almost completely obscured by dark glasses, they didn’t look anything out of the ordinary – for Angelinos. Had they been in New York or Seattle, they would have seemed weird, but not here in the City of Angels.
Not that the dark glasses fooled anyone. Angelinos are trained from birth to see celebrity through brick walls, if necessary. And besides, the glasses weren’t meant to actually hide anything – they were part of the uniform. Vitamin pills, small scars behind the ears, Tiffany jewellery, dark glasses.
Some of their fellow travellers, the women particularly, did recognise them. But as they were, as always, travelling Club Class, none of the women actually said anything to them. He knew, however, that on such a long flight it was only a question of time. They would, he thought, probably use the topic of his recent marriage to Kaycee as an opener. He turned to her and smiled, watching as she attempted to make her seatbelt small enough to hold her emaciated hips.
‘My God,’ she said as she smiled back, her deep Southern voice drawling with intelligent contempt, ‘if I get any thinner I’ll be joining the spirit world!’
Her husband, the most successful Hollywood actor ever to originate from Turkey, laughed. ‘When we arrive in İstanbul, you can eat exactly what you like,’ Hikmet Sivas said. ‘In fact if you don’t, my sister Hale will be very offended.’
‘So it’s true what they say about you people then?’ Kaycee asked.
‘What’s that?’
‘That you like eating and big ladies.’
Hikmet Sivas laughed. ‘Yes, we do,’ he said. ‘All the sensual pleasures . . .’ And then his face darkened.
Kaycee took a hardback book out of her hand luggage and opened it halfway through.
‘So maybe I can put on a little flesh for a spell,’ she said, looking down at the page in front of her.
‘Yes.’
‘Shame I’ll have to lose it again before we come back.’
‘Mmm.’
And then Kaycee looked up from her treatise on the theoretical nature and function of black holes and gazed out of the airplane window. Out there was Los Angeles, their rich and privileged home. Strangely, she pulled a face.
‘Fucking shitty place,’ she said and looked at her husband. ‘I’m for İstanbul! Can’t wait!’
‘Indeed.’
Still smiling, she returned to her book.
İstanbul. Hikmet Sivas inwardly shuddered. Home. It had been a while – too long. Things had changed. Time was when he couldn’t wait to get home. But not now. This time it was different, this time he was under pressure.
‘It is Ali Bey, isn’t it?’
In response to his now rarely used stage name, Sivas turned. The woman’s sun-cooked skin resembled that of an alligator. She pulled her orange lips back in a smile.
Sivas bowed graciously. ‘Yes,’ he said.
‘I told Miriam it just had to be you,’ the woman said, indicating another, even drier woman in one of the seats to their right. ‘I’d know you anywhere. I met my second husband at one of your movies, The Man from Acapulco. It opened six months to the day after Kennedy was shot. I shall never forget it.’
‘How kind,’ and then he turned his head away and closed his eyes. Ali Bey – what a long time ago that had been, and how much being him had cost Sivas.
The woman, not receiving any further response from her idol, resumed her seat.
Sivas/Ali Bey feigned sleep until the plane took off.
‘It’s fake.’
Neşe’s eyes instantly filled up with tears. ‘It can’t be!’
‘Well, you hold it then and tell me what you think.’ Turgut passed the crown over to his mother.
Neşe straightened her back as she took the glittering article from her son and then grunted, although whether that was from the pain that moving elicited or from the sadness she now felt as she held the thing, it was impossible to tell.
‘It’s light, isn’t it?’ her son said, shaking his head in disbelief. ‘Gold and jewels are heavy and cold. This isn’t.’
‘It’s like one of those crowns young brides wear here,’ Neşe said alluding to the longstanding love affair Turkish brides continued to have with crowns such as these.
‘It is one of those, Mum.’
‘Yes, but how did it get—’
‘I don’t know!’ the young man snapped.
‘Turgut!’
He raised his shovel and once again dug down into the muck around his feet. ‘Just throw it onto the pile,’ he said, tipping his head towards the silt they had already excavated.
‘Oh, but Turgut, we could keep—’
‘It’s totally worthless, Mum!’ Exasperated and exhausted, Turgut nevertheless dug with a fierce sense of purpose that did not easily allow for dissent.
‘All right, all right.’
After some difficulty, Neşe negotiated the uneven surface of the filth until, crown in hand, she came to the pyramid of silt. With a sigh of mild regret, she looked down at the object and even though the thought that it might look nice on her daughter crossed her mind she stepped forward to throw it onto the pile. However, as she leaned acro
ss her foot caught against something and she slipped.
‘Turgut!’
As she started to fall, he came running but not quickly enough to be able to catch her.
‘Mum!’
Neşe hit the silt without a sound or anything beyond a little discomfort, the muck cushioning her fall. It was a pleasant surprise to find that she hadn’t done herself any harm apart from being filthy from head to toe. Turgut shone his torch up and down his mother’s blackened body and fought to suppress a laugh. What with all the many layers of clothes she wore on her body and head, plus the dirt, Neşe looked even more like a bundle of rags than she usually did. Poor old Mum, Turgut thought affectionately, nothing she does ever comes close to fulfilling her dreams. Poor peasant.
As he leaned towards her to help her up, he asked, ‘What made you fall?’
‘Something there,’ Neşe replied shortly, waving a disgruntled hand down towards her feet.
Turgut shone his torch down to where she had indicated.
It looked like the branch of a tree. Long and white, it lay to one side of the muck pyramid. Turgut moved the beam of his torch along its length until he came to what should have been either a thicker part of the tree or a break where the branch had separated. But instead of either of these there was only a hand, graceful and slim, its long fingers decorated with numerous multicoloured rings.
When, after having a shower, putting on make-up and changing her clothes, Hulya İkmen finally arrived at the police station she found that her father had altered his plans and was preparing to go out.
‘We’ll have to talk later,’ he said, ushering her out of his office almost as soon as she arrived.
Even through the haze of cigarette smoke that drifted across his nose and into his eyes, Hulya could see that her father’s face was very grey. She had seen it like this before – after the earthquake and when her grandfather had died – and it alarmed her.
‘Dad—’
‘Just go home now, Hulya, please,’ he said.
She looked beyond her father towards his deputy Orhan Tepe. But she got no answers from his blank countenance. And so with a shrug she began to make her way back towards the stairs. With any luck she might see a few young, handsome officers on the way who might glance at her carefully applied make-up and brand new jeans. If they did, her efforts would not have been wasted, even though her affections lay elsewhere. But try as she might she couldn’t smile – not even at that pleasant thought. Perhaps it was because of her father’s appearance, or her worry about Hatice – or rather what she knew about Hatice . . . Her heart jumped.
Hulya put as much distance between her father and herself as she could and ran all the way down to the ground floor.
As soon as he saw his daughter tearing down the stairs, İkmen put his jacket back on and checked his pockets for cigarettes.
‘OK, Orhan,’ he said to his deputy, ‘let’s get over there.’
‘Yes, sir.’
When he’d got the call just minutes before, İkmen had wanted to ‘get over there’ immediately. In the garden, or rather underneath the garden of a house on Türbedar Sokak, a corpse had been discovered by a mother and son hunting for treasure in a little-known cistern. The body was young, fresh, and female, and İkmen had a bad feeling about it. Even before he’d learned these details, he’d had a bad feeling about it. His heart had started to race and the skin on his scalp prickled uncomfortably underneath his hair. Feelings that his late father had described darkly as either ‘witch’s sense’ or, more commonly, ‘that thing you do, like your mother’. His mother, Ayşe, had indeed possessed some very strange and unnerving abilities. Widely recognised as a witch, İkmen’s long-dead Albanian mother had passed on much of her character to the younger of her two sons. Now was one of those times when that inheritance, at least to İkmen, was most apparent.
For the moment he kept his feelings to himself. He would need a clear and open mind to deal with what was awaiting them at the scene. After all, he could be wrong. It was improbable, but not entirely without precedent. And in this particular instance he very much hoped that he was wrong.
İkmen’s hopes exploded into bitterness as soon as he saw the young girl’s face. Hunkered down in the organic-smelling silt, his eyes straining to accommodate both the light from the arc lamp and the dense surrounding darkness, İkmen groaned when he looked into her dead eyes. She had been, still was, so pretty.
‘She’s called Hatice İpek,’ he said wearily to his deputy. ‘She’s seventeen.’
‘Is she known to us?’
‘No, no.’ İkmen, with some reluctance, replaced Hatice’s head in the silt and then slowly rose to his feet. ‘No, she’s a friend of one of my daughters. She lived with her mother and sister in the apartment opposite ours.’
‘From the way she’s dressed—’
‘Since when did you see a working girl dressed like that?’ İkmen said and the two of them looked down at the body again. ‘Since when did you see anyone dressed like that?’
Although her clothes were covered with filth it was easy to see that the likelihood of Hatice having bought them herself was slim. The dress, if not the cheap and plentiful jewellery, was extremely elaborate. Full length, it was made of richly marbled satin which was further decorated with occasional tiny fabric roses. Cinched in at the waist by a thick metal belt, the dress was cut low to allow the full glory of Hatice’s breasts to be appreciated. Around her neck, wrists and ankles, as well as on every finger, cheap jewellery glittered. Only the crown which had led the Fahrıs to the discovery of Hatice’s body lay away from her, the only thing that was out of place.
‘What do you think she can have been doing here, sir?’ Tepe asked, shuffling his feet to stop himself from sinking into the silt.
İkmen shrugged. ‘I don’t know, but I suspect that she wasn’t doing anything.’ He, too, moved his feet uncomfortably on the precarious dirt surface, ‘I mean, I can’t see anyone having a passionate tryst down here, can you?’
‘No.’
‘And yet dressed as she is, she obviously wasn’t just doing her mother’s shopping.’ He sighed. ‘I would say that she was probably dumped down here after – something. Forensic and Dr Sarkissian will be able to tell us more once they’ve worked their morbid magic, but from the way she’s lying I don’t think she was just carelessly hurled down here.’ He looked at her briefly again and then turned away. ‘She looks carefully arranged, laid out.’
Tepe, who had been looking at Hatice’s body as İkmen spoke, tilted his head upwards to indicate his agreement.
‘Did you get anything useful out of the people who found her?’ İkmen asked.
‘Not a lot,’ Tepe said. ‘They’re well-known treasure hunters. The type of people the Fire Department hate. You know the sort, they get themselves into difficulty and have to be rescued. The old lady who owns the property charges them to dig here. Apparently they pay her quite well.’
‘Really. And so did she, the old lady, see anything odd going on in her garden either last night or this morning?’
‘She says not,’ Tepe replied. ‘But then if the Fahrıs know that this cistern is here, others may do too. Not that they’ve told anybody.’ He smirked. ‘They’re very secretive about the locations of their dig sites, apparently. The son told me his late father reckoned there was a lot of Greek gold to be found underneath the streets of the city.’
‘He may well be right,’ İkmen said. ‘Stories have been going around for years about the gold the Greeks might have wished to conceal from us when Mehmet Fatih conquered the city. It’s why otherwise sane people periodically get stuck underground and have to be rescued. The lure of easy money.’
Tepe looked about him with disgust. ‘I’d rather just keep on doing the lottery myself,’ he said.
‘Yes. Although in my experience,’ İkmen said, ‘the possibility of discovering lost Greek gold is probably a more realistic route to wealth.’
Tepe indicated his agreement with a ru
eful smile. The lottery, like every other kind of easy money, was a long shot. Unfortunately.
In spite of incredulous as well as disapproving looks from several of his colleagues, İkmen – seemingly impervious to the rancid stench from the silt – looked again at the corpse and lit a cigarette. As Tepe watched the smoke weave and shimmy its way towards the cistern entrance above, İkmen said, ‘She wanted to be an actress, you know.’
‘Mmm.’
‘She and my daughter Hulya shared a dream – apparently.’ That he hadn’t known anything about his daughter’s aspirations until that morning was something that now saddened İkmen. Always too busy – even for his children. If he’d known what the girls’ interests were he could have at least prepared them. One simply did not trust men who wanted girls to dance for them, however great an ‘entertainment opportunity’ that might be. But then if he had failed, so had Hatice’s mother, Hürrem İpek – yet another parent who worked in law enforcement, İkmen observed bitterly.
‘So do you think this girl’s ambitions may have something to do with her death?’ Tepe asked.
İkmen sighed. ‘I think it’s possible. My daughter said, when I finally managed to persuade her to tell me, that Hatice had gone to work elsewhere, entertaining men, after she left her job at the pastane last night. I’m just so relieved that she didn’t ask Hulya to go with her.’
‘So she was involved in prostitution.’
‘Not consciously I don’t think, no,’ İkmen replied. ‘The doctor will confirm whether she has been engaged in sexual activity . . .’ He closed his eyes briefly against the unpleasant picture that was forming in his mind of the thick black depths of the far corners of the cistern. ‘But you and I both know that the word “entertainment” is frequently used as a cover for rather more sinister activities. I think we should start at the Sultanahmet pastane which is where Hatice worked. I know Hassan Bey, the proprietor. We also need to speak to an old actor, you won’t remember him, Ahmet Sılay.’
Tepe shifted his feet again; his shoes were beginning to feel damp. ‘You think he might be involved?’
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