by Vincent Czyz
He glanced up at Istanbul University’s arch, at the permanently stopped clock in the form of Roman numerals engraved near the top: MCDLIII—1453, the year Constantinople fell to Mehmet the Conqueror. The year Constantinople ceased to be Byzantine, ceased to be Christian, ceased to be the guardian of Rome’s legacy. It was also the year the university had been founded. The mosque and the square had been named after Sultan Beyazit II, Mehmet’s grandson, who lay entombed in a courtyard garden beside the mosque.
A backpack slung over his shoulder, Drew passed under the far less impressive archway of Sahaflar Charsisi—the Market of Secondhand Booksellers. Canopied by trees and vines that broke sunlight into jigsaw pieces, the secluded courtyard was home to an enclave of chain-smoking dealers whose stalls and shops carried the odd, the obsolete, the sordid, the antique, the counterfeit, the pirated. Generally in English, French, German, Arabic, and of course, Turkish. Booksellers had been congregating here since in the seventeenth century, when they had vacated their stalls in the Grand Bazaar.
The shops were like family mausoleums that had been in use too long; only the more recent arrivals and the most prized editions rated indoor shelving. The rest were heaped up in front, obscuring display windows and clogging doorways. These tended to be out-of-print paperbacks with lurid titles. Those on the bottom—the pages water-stained, the garish covers faded and gritty with soot—would likely turn to compost before they were ever bought. But the sellers, smoking in front of their shops, held onto them. Drew regularly sorted through the teetering stacks and occasionally came upon a hard-to-find gem or a ridiculously underpriced first edition.
The market narrowed to a broad alley as he walked.
One of the shopkeepers, a dwarf, slid off a long-legged stool and grinned. In spite of the balmy weather, Kadir wore jeans cuffed at the hems, sneakers too dirty to be called white, and a black leather vest that sagged with age and with whatever had been stuffed into its half dozen pockets.
“Look who comes! The only donkey I’ve never seen before with two legs.”
“Ever seen,” Drew corrected.
Kadir’s shop sheltered under a lush tangle of vines. Although Drew’s Turkish was fluent, Kadir always spoke to him in English—he enjoyed the free lessons.
“So you admit it?” Kadir smirked.
“I admit it’s painful listening to your English. And your stall smells like you keep a goat in it.”
“At your borning time, you came out from a wrong hole, I think.”
Drew shook his head. “When you were born …”
Kadir’s abrasiveness was a callus the dwarf had grown while making his way through a city in which he faced humiliations foreign to someone of normal stature. He needed a ladder to reach books in his shop that were eye-level for Drew; packs of kids sometimes followed behind him, imitating his side-to-side tilt as he walked; he couldn’t see over the dashboard of a car, and because his legs were so short, phone-books wouldn’t help if he wanted to drive. Kadir’s features, however, were well-proportioned—no bulbous forehead, no blob of a nose. His nose actually had a certain nobility to it, as if it had been taken from a Greek bust. Admittedly though, his head belonged on a larger body.
“Anything worth my while come in?”
Kadir shrugged. “Are you sure you are capable to read?”
Drew rolled his eyes. “In English, Turkish, and Greek. If I couldn’t, you’d have gone out of business a long time ago. I mean, who would buy pulp like this?” From one of the leaning stacks outside the shop, Drew picked up a disintegrating paperback. “Warlords of Mars? The pages are falling out.” He reached for another. “She Walks by Night?” Drew read from the cover: “She climbed a ladder of lovers into the lap of luxury.”
The dwarf shrugged.
Stepping inside the shop, Drew was surprised to find someone sitting at Kadir’s tiny desk.
“Good day.” The man nodded to him and smiled. Swarthy, his black hair tightly curled, he looked North African. He wore a skullcap of white wool and a sort of white gown called a jalabiya.
“He is Tariq, a friend of me from Cairo. He looks for bargains in Istanbul.”
“And I have found these!” Tariq held up stack of thoroughly dilapidated books from the eighteenth or nineteenth century. “The one on top is a prayer book once owned by Sultan Selim III. I know a collector in Cairo who will give a very good price for it. Once it has been restored, of course.”
“You see, American infidel?” Kadir said. “This makes more worth than all the books outside added together.”
“Is worth more …”
Finishing the tea in his tiny tulip glass, Tariq stood up. “I will be going now, Kadir. We will see each other soon, inshallah.”
“Inshallah.”
Tariq nodded affably to Drew.
Half-heartedly, Drew scanned the creased paperbacks and aging hardcovers with their torn dust jackets, but they were all familiar.
“I’m heading out, Kadir.” Drew hiked the straps of his knapsack over a shoulder.
“One moment, please. “ Kadir waddled to the register and came back with a flat box wrapped in brown paper.
“What’s that?”
“An old book. Please, for one night, let it stay next to you.”
“Why? Don’t you lock the place up when you go home?”
“Tariq is the friend of me, but sometimes competitor men are following him. Such men can be know the way to open locks, without keys.”
“Black market competition, huh?” Drew thought of the massive iron doors at the arched entrances to the market, which were swung closed and locked every night. “It’s not for me, Kadir. Don’t you have other friends? A sister somewhere?”
“But in a hundred years they cannot think of you! One night, dostum, that’s all.”
Drew hefted the box, which was flat, wide, and not very heavy. “All right.” He slid his knapsack off his shoulder and dropped it between zippered teeth.
“Keep it in a safety place.”
Drew put his knapsack back on, wondering what Kadir had given him. Arabic calligraphy Tariq had brought from Egypt? No, it was too heavy for that. An old book written in Coptic? And why had Tariq brought it to Istanbul? Unless he knew a seller here and Kadir was the middleman. The more Drew thought about it, the more he wanted to open the box.
2: 2
MERE INK ON PAPER
DAY HAD FADED to a glow in the west, and the sky over the Golden Horn was a blue deeper than any length of velvet a jeweler might spread to display his diamonds. When had the sky been such a perfect veil between heaven and Earth? Perhaps Tariq only saw it that way because he would soon be a wealthy man. Behind him, the minarets of the New Mosque were lit up as though to attract the faithful. A mere three or four centuries old, the mosque was indeed new compared to the treasures of Egypt.
Istanbul, which had given up the anarchy of the Arab bazaar in exchange for a façade of European enlightenment, was not nearly as noisy or crowded as Cairo. And it was surrounded by water—the Bosporus, the Black Sea, the Sea of Marmara, the Golden Horn. Cairo of course had the Nile—the life-giving Nile—but only the Nile. Here the August wind was neither burning nor ragged with sand. Perhaps, after he found a buyer, he and his family would settle in Istanbul. The scrolls would bring him more than enough money to leave Egypt—perhaps a million US dollars! It was not an unreasonable price. To many people, they were nothing more than ink on paper, but mere words were sometimes enough to ignite wars.
And now Kadir was holding his guarantee of safety.
Tires shrieked and Tariq whipped his head around. Two Turks jumped out of their cars and began shouting at each other. Roads merged in complicated intersections here because of the bridge spanning the Golden Horn.
“Less traffic than Cairo perhaps,” Tariq said to himself, “but drivers are just as impatient.”
He leaned on the steel railing of a quay along the Golden Horn, which reflected colored lights from restaurants tucked under the bridge. Pe
ering into the water, dark and sparkling at the same time, he smiled as he waved to fish he could not see.
“Tariq.”
He flinched and turned toward a man not more than a meter away. He didn’t recognize him. Tariq looked to his left and realized there were two men. Leaning casually on the quay’s railing, they had taken up positions on either side of him. One was likely Egyptian, but the other, with his pale skin and red hair, was almost certainly a Westerner. Perhaps American or British.
“How do you know my name?”
“Your name isn’t all we know.”
The Egyptian spoke to him in Arabic. Tariq straightened up. Had he seen them before?
“We know you did business with Abu Kobisy until his death a few weeks ago.”
Yes! He had seen the redheaded one before. In Cairo. “Peace be upon Abu. He was a good man. A fair man.” Had they followed him?
“But you haven’t been entirely fair to him. Have you?”
“Why do you say this?”
“We know what you took.”
Tariq scanned the crowded quay and busy street, calculating his chances of escape. “It’s in a safe place. If anything happens to me—”
“If anything happens to you, I guess we’ll have to deal with the dwarf.”
They knew! Tariq’s heart began to pound as though trapped.
One of the men put a hand on his arm, but Tariq jerked it away and sprinted across the quay.
“Wait! Tariq!”
The men took off after him. “We just want to talk!”
Tariq knocked over a woman, who shouted at him in Turkish.
“Tariq! You don’t understand!”
Tariq darted into the road, and a taxi skidded to a stop inches from his hip. Legs trembling, jalabiya flapping in the breeze, he was unsure which direction to take.
“Tariq!” The Egyptian one would reach him in a few more steps.
Leaping away from his pursuer, he stumbled over the curb of an island separating two roads and staggered into traffic. The rubber of locked wheels screeched as a truck slammed into him, catapulting him into the air.
The men who had given chase watched his body smack against pavement sixty or seventy feet from the truck, roll a few times, and flop to a stop.
A crowd surged into the street and gathered around the fallen man.
Faces turned toward the two men, but they were walking briskly toward Galata Bridge.
2: 3
A THOUSAND PLACES OF MISRULE
GALATA TOWER LOOMED on Drew’s right, illuminated for the tourists. Straight as a minaret but stout, almost squat, it had a conical roof that reminded Drew of a witch’s hat. He was fond of this quarter with its eroding tenements and cobblestone streets winding up and downhill.
Whenever a cross street broke the wall of buildings on his left, he could see the dark mirror of the Bosporus and the Asian shore dotted with lights.
End of Empire. That’s what they should call these neighborhoods of neoclassical buildings that had lost their grandeur and been converted into apartment buildings. He passed cracked marble steps, fluted pilasters stained by coal smoke, huge double doors that creaked on rusty hinges and opened onto dank stairwells.
In Ottoman times Galata had been teeming with sailors from all over the Mediterranean. Like any port town, it had had more than its share of taverns. One seventeenth century Ottoman, writing with the disdain of a Muslim who abstains from alcohol, claimed that Constantinople had “a thousand places of misrule.”
Drew had been a little unruly himself that evening. He’d met a few friends at Timur the Lame’s, where he’d downed one pint too many. There had been a chorus of protests when he got up to leave, and although he smiled when somebody tugged at him to keep him in his chair, he missed Yasemin in a way that being around other people only made worse.
Pain was supposed to be like glass in the sea: after a few years, it should be worn smooth. Hard, but no longer sharp. But that hadn’t happened. After two years, the divorce hurt as much as it had after two weeks.
A little unsteady on his feet, he walked down the hill in the warm night air.
From somewhere within the labyrinth of dark streets, he heard the cry of a boza seller, who sounded not as though he was hawking fermented slush out of a vat-sized bucket, but as though he were calling to a lost child. Or wife.
Christ it was hard sometimes, living in the city where he and Yasemin had met.
Drew turned down his street, hardly more than an alley just below Galata Tower.
Standing in the recess of the doorway across from his building was one of those Turks who probably conducted business by the light of a street lamp—part of the shadow population of the city. A couple of inches shorter than Drew, he was broader and a lot thicker. Shoulders, head, and neck of a bull, all he needed were the horns.
They exchanged glances, and Drew wondered if the guy had decided to roll him. Trying not to look drunk, he kept the Turk in his peripheral vision while he stuck a key in the lock. He yanked hard on the steel door—the goddamn thing was as heavy as the stone lid of a crypt.
The man crossed the street. “Bey Efendi, one moment—”
Drew ignored him and let the door swing closed under its own weight. He heard the lock click and went up the staircase. His apartment was at the top, the fourth floor.
Another shout of “Bey Efendi!” was muted by the stone walls of the old building. “One moment, please!”
Not tonight, Drew thought. There was a reason, after all, that the first- and second-floor windows in this neighborhood were barred.
Drew let himself into his apartment, closed the door, and turned on a light.
Books were strewn all over the hallway that ran the length of the flat. Had he been … robbed?
One of the floorboards creaked loudly under Drew’s foot. He stopped and listened.
All he heard was his own suppressed breathing. What the hell am I doing? He hit the switch to the bedroom light, but nothing happened. A fried bulb?
There was a silent explosion of light, and the floor buckled underneath him—no, his knees had caved in.
Somehow he managed to keep his feet, but a shoulder to his chest knocked him against a wall, and a man shoved past him. He caught a fist in the gut, sank to the floor, and had to fight for his next breath.
The front door opened, and he heard another set of footsteps in the hall.
Damn. He had to suck hard to get air. He’d felt something like this during wrestling matches when he was so tired he just wanted to quit.
Someone was coming up the stairs.
With a grunt and a wince, Drew got to his feet.
Before he was able to close the door—now flung wide open—the Turk he’d seen on the street stepped inside.
“Iyimisiniz?” Are you all right?
“Who the hell are you?”
“Zafer. Kadir sent me to keep an eye on you.”
“I guess he picked the wrong guy.”
“Did they get anything?”
“I got something—I got my ass kicked.”
“Sorry about that. But I only came a few minutes before you. I rang the bell …” He shrugged. “Why didn’t you wait when I called you?”
“Because I’m a little drunk, and you don’t look like the kind of guy I should be letting in the building at night.”
Zafer smiled. “You prefer men in suits?”
“I prefer not to get cold-cocked when I walk into my own home.”
“Cold-cocked?”
“Clocked when I’m not looking.”
“Ah, you mean sucker punched.”
It wasn’t until Zafer’s face had eased into a smile again that Drew realized he had a certain crude charm and a square jaw that belonged on a steam shovel—one you could probably break a knuckle on. His curly black hair was short and his forehead tapered a little towards his hairline. No gray. A few creases in the corners of eyes more Asian than Western, he looked to be in his late twenties.
; “Your slang’s pretty good.”
“American movies. Did they find the package?”
Drew glared at him. “What exactly did Kadir give me?”
“Bilmiyorum.”
“You don’t know? Well, I doubt they got what they were looking for because it’s not in my flat.” Drew pointed at the ceiling. “It’s on the roof.”
Drew went out the door again, up another flight of stairs. Zafer followed.
Istanbul was all shadow and glitter below them. Ships, like floating lanterns, moved slowly through the Golden Horn.
Sections of rectangular duct had been stacked against a parapet. Drew reached into one and pulled out the flat package. It looked about the right size for copy paper, maybe a couple hundred sheets. What the fuck was in here?
Zafer held out a large hand. “You can give it to me.”
“I don’t think so.”
“It belongs to Kadir.”
“Kadir almost got me killed.”
Zafer stepped toward Drew. “You shouldn’t—”
“Back off or I’ll toss this thing as far as I can. Onto some other roof.”
“Okay …” Zafer pulled his hand back and held it up as a gesture of submission. “Open it.”
Drew tore away the brown paper. The box underneath had no markings. He lifted the top flap and squeezed his hand inside.
Zafer stepped forward to get a closer look.
“I don’t believe this.”
Zafer shook his head. “Me neither.”
2: 4
A TEMPESTUOUS SAGA
WALLED-IN ON ALL SIDES as though they were eunuchs in a harem, dealers were just opening their shops and setting out their wares under a canopy of leafy vines. Several men standing in front of Kadir’s shop shook their heads and clicked their tongues. His stall had been broken into. Entire shelves had been cleared, and aging books with weak spines had given up many of their pages. Kadir picked up two weighty volumes, one in each hand, but then despaired about what to do with them and simply held them out.