The Christos Mosaic

by Vincent Czyz

  Zafer drove them south down what turned out to be Istiklal Avenue although it was nothing like the one in Taksim. It was lined by concrete boxes six or seven stories high that might have been part of some Soviet-inspired—or rather, distinctly uninspired—construction plan. As was usually the case with Turkey’s southern cities, motorcycles and scooters were popular. Drew had tooled around Istanbul on a motorcycle for a while, but too many near collisions with cars had convinced him to get rid of it.

  He glanced up at a hotel towering over the street. For all he knew, Jesse had booked a room there. Sweat had broken out on Drew’s forehead despite the car’s air-conditioning. I’m going to have to tell them about Jesse.

  They went over the Old Bridge that spanned the Asi, which was hardly a river anymore. Both of its banks either sheathed in concrete or lined with stone, it looked like a drainage canal. Drew had difficulty believing Roman ships had once followed it from the Mediterranean.

  Navigating winding back streets, Zafer brought them to a stately hotel. Apparently erected before architects had learned to cheat everything into concrete, it had shuttered windows, balconies with stone balustrades, and a vertical row of faux Moorish arches framing the windows.

  The lobby of the Hotel Antiocha was small but elegant, with red marble tiles and the sort of Victorian furniture that could have come out of a Dickens novel. Zafer handled the paperwork and surrendered a passport that Drew was sure did not have his real name on it.

  Cramming themselves and their baggage into a tiny elevator with a glass door, they took it to the fourth floor.

  The room was clean and spacious, with three beds, a wardrobe, and a small writing table. The back window opened on the eastern hills— wooded where they weren’t craggy with rock—against which the city had backed itself. Most of the flat-roofed houses dotting the slopes were white. Picturesque from a distance, Drew knew that up close they lost most of their charm. It was a poor quarter where Arabic was spoken more often than Turkish, the roads were often dirt, and the homes were generally in desperate need of repair. But with the dramatic backdrop of hills and a flock of birds wheeling gracefully overhead, Drew had an inkling of what Stephen had seen in this Arabic-Turkish backwater.

  He pressed a hand to his sweating forehead; his fingers were as cold as a can of refrigerated beer. “So what’s the itinerary?” He tried to sound casual.

  “Bad news first.” Zafer held up his phone. “I got some texts from my pal at MIT. The Israelis might have given us around $500,000 US for the Habakkuk Scroll, depending on its condition—”

  “That’s the bad news?” A surge of anger swept away Drew’s nervousness.

  “The problem is, when they investigate its provenance, Abu’s wife is probably going to get the money, not us.”

  “Okay, fine. Just promise me one thing: don’t agree to anything—no matter how much Serafis offers—until we’ve had a chance to come back here and talk over our options.”

  Kadir nodded. “I am never give my word at the time of bargaining. If you give your word, you cannot change it. This is the law of bargaining everywhere.”

  “That’s all I’m asking.”

  Kadir nodded. “Oldu.” Done.

  So he’d postponed the inevitable. “When do we meet with Serafis?”

  Zafer looked at his watch. “In about two hours. In Harbiye.”

  Harbiye was a sleepy hill-top town just south of Antakya. The town’s claim to fame was a gorge that myth had marked as the place where Apollo had pursued Daphne, and she, after imploring the gods for salvation, had been changed into a laurel tree. (This part of Turkey was so saturated with Greek myth the Turkish word for laurel was defne.) Shaded by cypress and laurel groves, cooled by clear pools and waterfalls cascading down the gorge as though a niagara had been hammered into dozens of shards, it was no wonder wealthy Romans had built summer villas in Harbiye.

  Two hours before they met Serafis … two hours for Zafer to cool down.

  “Guys … I, uh, I have something I need to tell you …”

  7: 3

  SERAFIS

  “WHAT THE FUCK is wrong with you?” Zafer was at the wheel of the Audi and Drew was afraid a seventeen-year-old in a souped-up Fiat was going to cut them off, get out of the car with an attitude, and get beaten into a coma. Then again, there was always the possibility Zafer was going to lose patience and pummel him into a coma.

  From the backseat, Kadir said, “What you can expect? He is infidel.”

  It was more joke than accusation.

  “I didn’t say a word about Serafis or what we’re doing here. She doesn’t know our hotel, she just knows we’re here. She doesn’t even have my cell phone number.”

  Zafer had been so angry at first he’d gone completely silent. Finally, as the meeting with Serafis approached, he started talking. “I can’t believe you did that. Why exactly do you want her here?”

  “After we talk to Serafis, we can show Jesse the photographs. She’ll have a much better idea of what the scroll is worth than Stephen did.”

  Zafer’s hands, crowned by knuckles like rocky outcroppings, relaxed a little on the wheel. “Could be useful. To keep Serafis from bullshitting us.”

  “After Serafis makes an offer, we can give Jesse a chance to study the photos. A few phone calls and we’ll know exactly what we have.”

  “That might work, but …” Zafer took his eyes off the road to look at Drew. “Don’t go behind my back again. I know what I’m doing. You don’t. All right? If I can’t trust you, you’re no good to us.”

  No good to us made him sound like a wrench that was the wrong size for a repair. A euphemism for worthless. He nodded, a little hurt, and prayed he could keep his word.

  Harbiye crowned a hill and spilled down its side. The Sun, at the bottom of its arc, appeared in bright bursts where streets spaced out buildings.

  Zafer suddenly slowed. “There they are.”

  A gray Mercedes Benz, tail lights aglow, was parked with its nose pointed down a side road. Black-tinted windows made it impossible to see inside. Slowing the Audi, Zafer flashed his high-beams—virtually invisible during the day, except to someone watching. The Mercedes pulled out.

  After fifty yards or so, the asphalt devolved to paving stones. The houses on either side of them were typically two flat-roofed stories with a vine, its trunk as thick as a man’s arm, crawling up the side. Rooftops were crowned by latticework carpeted by leaves and hung with clusters of grapes. Property dotted by olive and lemon trees was marked off by crumbling cinderblock walls. Here and there, a goat or a cow was tied to a pole, and chickens inspected the ground before pecking.

  As the westerly road bent away to the south to avoid tumbling over what was probably a sheer drop, they got a breathtaking glimpse of a broad valley hemmed in by hills, of a sky flushed with early sunset. The road, now marked as private and no longer lined with houses, ended at a wrought-iron gate. Surveillance cameras mounted over the entrance reared like mechanical cobras.

  Beyond the gate Serafis’s house bore no resemblance to the balconied, concrete homes they’d passed. Nor did it have anything to do architecturally with the more expensive houses they’d seen. Clearly Greek, it was a two-story cube of honey-colored stone. Some of the stone blocks were perfectly smooth while others had been left rough. The mason had used these differences in texture to create subtle designs around the mirrored windows and the front door. Two huge palm trees flanked the entrance, which was sheltered by a portico covered in Spanish tile. Strips of garden lined the stone walls around the house. The Mercedes stopped under loose latticework covered with wisteria. Drew was surprised to see, not a burly chauffeur in sunglasses and a dark suit, but an attractive blonde in sandals and a denim shirt hanging loosely over her shorts.

  Even Zafer raised an eyebrow.

  “Remember,” he told Drew as he opened his door, “not a word of Greek.”

  Drew nodded. Serafis was fluent in Arabic, Greek, Turkish, and English. If the dealer spoke G
reek to keep something private, Zafer wanted Drew to listen in.

  The woman approached Zafer. “Hello, I’m Dr. Courant-Ancuri. A pleasure to meet you.”

  In spite of the French-Italian surname, her English had what Drew thought was a German accent.

  “I’m sorry.” She smiled apologetically. “My Turkish is awful. What little there is.”

  “English is fine.” Zafer put out his hand.

  A little mannish but pretty. Blue eyes, sprinter’s legs, nervous smile.

  “Iyi akshamlar!” Serafis was standing in the doorway in a short-sleeve shirt with the top buttons undone. After his Turkish good evening, he switched to English. “I see you’ve met Francesca. A first-rate archaeologist without whom I would simply be lost.” He went straight to Kadir and thrust out a pudgy hand. “I’m Iorgos Serafis, the man who is going to make you rich.”

  Serafis, while he towered over Kadir, could not have been more than five foot two. Balding, he kept what was left of his black hair short. Gold rings choked his thick fingers and a huge cross of lumpy gold bedded in black chest hair exposed by his shirt.

  When Serafis grabbed Drew’s hand and pumped it energetically, Drew saw that he was wall-eyed. Shit, you can never tell what the hell this guy is looking at.

  On either side of the carved wings of the doors were enormous terra cotta urns that probably pre-dated Peter’s church. Now they were being used as pots for a couple of broad-leafed plants.

  The front salon was an echoing space with a distant ceiling and tall windows that admitted girders of sunlight. A stunning mosaic of Apollo pursuing Daphne covered half of the tiled floor. The walls were lined with climate-controlled cabinets in which Serafis kept an assortment of vases, pitchers, urns, plates, and ceramic oil lamps in an impressive array of styles. A Corinthian capital had been covered with a cushion and made into a seat. But nowhere did Drew see a bookshelf.

  He stepped closer to a cabinet to get a better look at a large Greek vase. It showed a bearded man on a stake being attended by four women. On his toga was a wheat motif, and stalks of wheat sprouted at the base of the stake.

  “You didn’t know that Christ was Greek, eh?” Serafis stood next to him.

  “What?”

  “Dionysus, of course. See how he is set on a stake? The word stauros in the New Testament has been translated as cross, but it means stake.”

  Drew almost said I know.

  “Look … on his head is a crown of ivy instead of thorns. And what have the women brought? Loaves of bread and jars of wine. Dionysus worshippers ate a little cake called the makaria, which means blessedness, but it’s the Eucharist, of course—another Greek word!”

  Drew nodded as if this were all new to him.

  “And, if you look closely, you can see a little bit of purple coloring left on his tunic. Just like the purple robe Jesus wore on the way to Calvary.”

  “How … how old is this?”

  “Sixth century BC.”

  Sixth century BC! The ritual of the Mass predated Jesus by half a millennium.

  “There are many such vases already in museums showing almost the same things. Christ was a Greek before he was a Jew! But come.” He waved a hand that flashed with gold. “Forget about the trifles on my shelves. The true beauty is on the terrace.”

  After the guests had removed their shoes and slipped into flip-flops that Serafis provided, their host led them up a granite staircase and onto a terrace. Here, in addition to tropical plants in ancient pots, four columns no longer supported anything but Serafis’s affinity for the trappings of his livelihood. There were also several pieces of classical sculpture including a kouros, arms at his sides, shoulder-length hair falling in waves of white marble, placid face staring out over a view of the river basin that almost made Drew forget to breathe.

  The vista, not the antiquities, must have been the beauty to which Serafis had been referring. To the north, where stunted mountains roughened the horizon, Haribiye and Antakya was spread out below them. To the west, where the Sun had already disappeared behind the mountains, was a gently undulating quilt of square fields and groves. The distant valley seemed as peaceful as a vineyard that had been abandoned to honeybees and swallows. Even the view from Stephen’s house hadn’t compared with this.

  “Are those as old as they look?”

  “This?” Serafis kicked an urn overflowing with green fronds. “A cheap replica made in Cairo. But …” He held up a finger. “Importing these replicas is one way of getting a genuine antiquity out of Egypt. You paint it over in watercolors—a crude job of course so as not to attract attention—mix it in with a crate of similar replicas for the tourists, and no one is the wiser! Out from the port in Alexandria, into the port at Iskenderun not an hour’s drive from here.” He smiled gaily at his own ingenuity. “Please sit, sit. Francesca will bring us tea.”

  There was a single long table with a glass top. The four legs were fluted columns that even Drew could tell were plaster fakes.

  “Take a good look around you. Would you believe I was born in Istanbul the son of a cobbler? My father had to stare at the bottoms of shoes all day—God rest his soul.” He made the sign of the cross. “You know what an insult that is to the Arabs? The bottom of a shoe? Even in Istanbul, say thirty years ago, if you sat with one leg crossed over the other on the tram, the man next to you had every right to knock your teeth out.”

  Francesca arrived with a tray of glasses and a double-boiler of tea.

  “I couldn’t bear my father’s life. The same dingy shop for ten or twelve hours a day.” He squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head with brisk distaste. “Of course, my occupation has its own drawbacks. Everything about the antiquities market flows like mercury. If you like your things in boxes or neatly on their shelves, as my father did, this is not the business for you. The market is shadowy, not black. Difficult to tell what is solid from what is not, what is counterfeit from what is real, what is valuable from what is worthless. But … if you have the talent for this, you can make a great deal of money. Tariq understood this.” Serafis turned to Kadir although his eyes going off in different directions made it hard to be sure he was looking at the dwarf. “You and he were good friends, weren’t you?”

  Kadir nodded.

  “Tariq worked for Nabil, but for me he also did a few things. Of course you know something about our dealings or you wouldn’t be here.” His rings glinted in the dying sunlight as he waved a hand dismissively. “His job was to let me know about antiquities surfacing in Cairo.” He sighed wearily. “A shame he is gone. A very likeable man.”

  Zafer and Kadir had listened quietly, but Drew felt compelled to break up Serafis’s monologue. “If you don’t mind my asking, why Antakya? Why not … Cairo or Paris? It’s not just the port at Iskenderun, is it?”

  “My boy, I have a villa in Rhodes. I have an apartment in Zurich— Switzerland, you know, is an absolute haven for looted antiquities. Any time you have artifacts from a violated tomb in Italy or an illegal dig in Greece, you send the merchandise to a freeport in Zurich and store it there for a while. The Swiss don’t bother about what you’ve got as long as you pay your rent, and, best of all, there are no Swiss duties to pay. That is why they are called freeports. Then you have someone swear out an affidavit saying the objects came from somebody or other’s attic. The goods are then shipped from Switzerland as though that had been their point of origin. Wonderful isn’t it?”

  Drew looked at Francesca. Probably in her early thirties, she had a PhD in archaeology, and here she was serving tea to this Greek maganda with a gold cross around his neck big enough to sink him in the river.

  “You see,” Serafis continued, although it was impossible to tell who he was looking at, “no one wants to know how you get hold of these things, not even the museums. The thinnest of cover stories will do. And the next thing you know, your acquisition is being displayed in the Met or the Getty.

  “As for Antakya … one of the best routes for antiquities being smug
gled out of Egypt has always been through Syria—hardly eight miles from here. When Egypt passed new laws and enforced them more strictly, I actually considered giving up my little summer home here. Ah … but the war in Iraq changed the antiquities trade.” He clapped his hands together and smiled impishly. “A single car seized by the Iraqis was loaded with nearly four hundred artifacts from the Baghdad museum. A stroke of bad luck they were caught at all! At this very moment, illegal digs are going on all over Iraq and Syria—day and night since there is no longer any central authority to stop them. Peasants with shovels are turning up great numbers of objects. And once again, much of it is coming through the porous Syrian border. Business has never been better!”

  Francesca seemed to be avoiding eye contact with everyone at the table.

  “Be at ease, enjoy the view, drink your tea …” Serafis pushed up off his thighs as he rose. “I have something to show you that puts your scroll to shame.”

  Serafis came back with a shoebox and pulled out something rectangular wrapped in newspaper. He grinned as he peeled away paper and spread three tablets on the glass table. They were engraved with tiny rows of odd, fingernail indentations.

  If that was Sumerian cuneiform, Drew was looking at the oldest writing in the world.

  7: 4

  GOD’S ONE GIFT

  THE BROAD TERRACE was a tiny marble echo—smooth and barren and white—of the green expanse it overlooked. Its pots, its columns, its pieces of classical sculpture cast shadows that felt almost as old as Sumer’s time-razed ziggurats. The Sun had dropped well below this edge of the world, crowning the hills with hot embers. Above their red glow the sky was a burnt orange that gave way to shades of darkening blue—like perfectly blended waterlines staining the western sky. The underbellies of long clouds were purple smudges. Insects, invisible among the greenery, chewed the fringes of the otherwise still evening.