by Jay Amberg
Serkan is blown away. “Twenty-five grand,” as they say in movies. He’d be out of debt, maybe even able to get a lease on a new Audi. He takes a quick breath to hide his astonishment and then gathers himself. Suddenly, doing this deal straight seems like it may be the way to go. “And what is the condition?” he asks.
“Two, actually.” Mustafa smiles. “Three.”
“What are they?”
“First, the deal is only on the table today. Take it or leave it.”
Serkan nods. That’s to be expected.
Mustafa glances at his manicured fingers. “Second, we pay you one-fifth up-front. Today. I will handle any ongoing negotiations with the Americans, for whom I already have a perfect solution, an absolutely stunning amulet.”
Whatever the amulet, Serkan thinks, the negotiations are going to be more complicated than Mustafa imagines. He may be well educated, but he’s also smug. Jack and Clare have been doing business, making difficult and elaborate deals, for decades—and they will have an alternative to the amulet that the arrogant prick is unaware of.
“You can stay in the loop if you want,” Mustafa continues, “but I’m the closer. My piece is awesome. Breathtaking. Authentic. Never seen on the market before. It’ll sell itself the moment they see it.”
Serkan nods again. “Yes,” he says. “I’ll continue as the contact, the go-between, but you’ll do the deal—be the closer. That’s fine by me.” Though all of this is playing into his hands, he remains leery.
Mustafa fixes him with his eyes, which are abruptly less bleary. “And you need to do one more thing.”
“What?” When Mustafa’s gaze doesn’t waver, Serkan looks away.
“Obtain for me and my family certain information, archeological documents, that your mother possesses.”
“What…? My mother…?”
“Yes.”
Serkan is almost speechless. “She’s…retired.”
“From her official position.” Mustafa picks at an imaginary cuticle on his left middle finger.
“My mother?” Serkan repeats.
Mustafa looks into his eyes again. “She remains deeply involved in the search for antiquities. Especially for those that may be buried in or near Bergama.”
“I don’t think so.”
Mustafa laughs aloud. “Yes, Serkan. Absolutely. You have no idea.”
Serkan shakes his head, but he hasn’t been home much since his mother was fired. He has no idea how she is spending her time or what she’s doing. She was, though, a workaholic as he was growing up—couldn’t stay at home doing nothing. She always had a project—or seven—going. But she’s still his mother. He can’t embroil her in any of this. He sits straighter, looks Mustafa in the eye, and says, “This doesn’t—can’t—involve my family.”
Mustafa doesn’t laugh in his face again, but his smirk is condescending. “Yes, Serkan, it can, and it does. No information, no deal. At all. Ever.” Slowly and deliberately, he puts on his aviators.
Serkan stands, wipes his hand across his face, and says, “No!” Sweat is breaking on his neck and back. His chest feels hollow. “Leave my family out of this!”
“Serkan,” Mustafa’s voice somehow sounds even more patronizing. “She’s already involved. Over her head. You’ll actually be making her life safer. Much safer.”
“No!” The light streaming among the trees in the park looks like fire.
As Serkan is turning to leave, Mustafa holds out the phone and says, “You forgot something.” He cocks his head and smiles. “Oh, and Elif’s studio is nice, very functional. But she’s not much of a businessman, is she?”
Serkan, unable to breathe, is frozen in a raging sweat.
“Sit down,” Mustafa says. “We need to talk. Man-to-man.”
27
İZMIR, TURKEY
Nihat Monoğlu and Tuğçe Iskan sit on separate wooden benches in the dappled morning light near the jogging path in İzmir’s Kültürpark. The clearing’s three benches form a U that opens toward the narrow lane that runs along the park’s periphery. Monoğlu has his back to the thick trunk of a palm tree. Iskan’s bench, at a right angle on his left, is little more than a meter from his. A large tan dog with a green metal tag in its ear lies on the third bench across from Monoğlu. Above the three of them, the sky is Aegean blue.
From a distance, no one would likely even notice that Iskan and Monoğlu are talking. She is on her way to Bergama; he is traveling back to Ankara, his flight from Adnan Menderes Airport leaving in two-and-a-half hours. He holds a newspaper, she a cell phone. “She’s up to something,” Iskan says as she lowers her head and stares at her cell phone as if she is receiving a message.
Monoğlu does not at first answer. He folds the newspaper, places it on the bench’s seat, and then takes a Yenice from his gold-plated cigarette case. “Of course,” he says finally. “She’s always up to something.” Even his whisper is a growl. “But it’s probably not illegal.”
“Her son’s involved with the Hamits.” She randomly taps her cell phone with her thumbs. Three crows haggle in the upper branches of the conifer across from her.
He shrugs, lights the cigarette with his old Zippo, and drags on the Yenice. “Yes, he is,” he says, smoke escaping his nostrils. “But you know better than to assume guilt by association.”
“Tell me you’ve begun to believe in coincidences.” The breeze is warm but not yet hot. She likes the smell of lit cigarettes, has ever since she was a young girl and sneaked out of her family’s house to spy on the men who gathered near the plane tree in her village’s center. Women like her mother mostly stayed at home, cooking and baking and cleaning and taking care of the children and the chickens, all the while gossiping with each other in one another’s gardens. But the men gathered in the cafés, smoked, drank çay, and talked football and politics, always politics.
He waves his hand holding the Yenice. “I don’t. Her son is in shit up to his neck. But I’ve known Özlem a long time. She’s smart. Stubborn. Doesn’t always follow Ministry rules. Butts heads with bureaucrats. And she can be both clever and conniving. Does that sound to you like anybody else you know?”
“I’m not conniving.”
The tan dog raises his head during an outburst of distant barking, but almost immediately rests his muzzle on the seat again. His left forepaw dangles over the edge of the bench’s seat. Birdshit stains the bench’s slats just below the etched İzmir Büyükşehir Belediyesi.
Monoğlu smiles to himself. “No, you’re not.” He takes another drag on his Yenice. “But you’ve still got to remember that she hates Mustafa Hamit and his family for what they’ve done over the years. And what they’ll keep doing if nobody stops them.” Exhaling, he tugs at his right ear. “She’d never get into bed with him.”
Iskan picks at the irritated cuticle of her right thumb. “Sending me that Galen letter… She ruined my career.”
He taps ash onto the clearing’s paving stones. “Did she?”
Somewhere over toward the children’s Fun Park, a woodpecker looses a staccato riff.
Iskan says nothing because she has learned, mostly from him, not to take every negative comment as a personal attack that must be countered.
“She used you,” Monoğlu adds, “but that doesn’t make her a criminal. Or mean that your career is ruined.”
“So honesty is what made her pass a copy of Galen’s letter on to the Ministry but keep the original? Remember, she left me hanging. That was complete…” She doesn’t want to swear in front of her old boss even though she has heard him spewing expletives any number of times.
“Of course, it’s horseshit,” he says. Smiling, he adds, matter-of-factly, “Perhaps, she wanted to get fired so that she could pursue it…the search for Galen’s legacy. After Allianoi, her job became shuffling paper, petty stuff
that almost anybody could do.”
“And getting me in trouble was just an unintended consequence?”
Trying to keep his smile from his voice, he says, “Oh, I would bet it was intended. I haven’t actually spoken to her in months, but my guess is that she thought you were the only one who would, honestly, follow up…” He takes a final drag on the cigarette. “Maybe, she thought…thinks…the best way to keep you digging into the case was to get you thrown off it.” He lets amiable laughter slip into his snarl. “You’re still on it, aren’t you?”
She doesn’t answer. The breeze, the sunlight filtering through the branches, the resting dog, though it’s all pretty peaceful, she feels even more on edge than usual.
“You wouldn’t be if you were actually assigned to it,” he says. “Some of my old friends in the Ministry would have stolen whatever information you dug up and dismissed you outright.”
She remains quiet for another minute before saying in a less antagonistic tone, “So that’s what you’re doing, too? Taking retirement so you can hunt out corruption in the Ministry.”
“I’m retired,” he says, “so that I can enjoy my grandchildren.” He stubs the cigarette on the sole of his shoe and places the butt on the bench’s black steel arm. “And irritate my wife with my bad habits.”
Hearing the same quick gait she noticed when they were first talking, Iskan glances back over her left shoulder as a gaunt man with matching pale blue shorts and a T-shirt runs along the path. His sweating, shaved head bobs. She takes a deep breath and says, “You’re the source of the materials and photos being sent to me, right?”
“What materials?”
“The ones you figured I’d show to Özlem Boroğlu to stir things up.”
“I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”
“And the photos on the net of The Dying Gaul, was that you, too?”
He shrugs, seemingly unaware of what she is talking about. The photos, which first appeared just before the bombing in Bergama, show a bronze statue of a naked warrior with a chest wound.
She taps her cell phone’s screen until it wakes up again. “Well, if you do meet the guy, thank him for me. It definitely worked.” She pauses again. Across the narrow lane, the two-story, blue-and-gray sports center has silhouettes of athletes painted on the windowless exterior—a blue tennis player, a green weight lifter. “I’ve taken a two-week leave.”
“I see,” he says. “You have time in the bank…?”
“Of course. You know I—” She smiles, realizing he is teasing her. Last year, she never took a day off, not once. “My boss was only too happy to sign off on my request.”
“He doesn’t appreciate your…tenacity?”
She smiles again. “And tell your friend the evidence—I’ve found a lot more—shows that for a long time the Hamits have been buying up land around Bergama. And out toward Dikili. And up toward Kozak. Through dummy corporations. Purchase and lease-back deals with local farmers. Since even before they dammed Allianoi. But lately, after Galen’s letter, the number of deals in the valley and up in the hills has really spiked.”
He takes another Yenice from its case. “I’m not surprised.”
She looks over his right shoulder at the ten-meter-high, white fence of a tennis complex. “I still haven’t been able to track the Aureus.”
“Maybe there’s nothing to track.”
“Huh?”
“I’d bet that Özlem thinks the coin came directly from the boy or his grandfather. One of them found it.” He taps the cigarette against the case. “If it’s from anybody or anywhere else, other coins would’ve surfaced. Or at least there’d be rumors of them.”
Iskan looks up from her phone and rolls her neck, then stares down at the cigarette butts ground onto the pavers. Tufts of grass are growing between the stones, and pine needles litter the unswept areas around the bench’s steel legs. She will not, just as Monoğlu won’t, bring up the fact that the boy, little Mehmet, is dying. The doctors are going to pull the plugs on the life-support equipment sometime in the next day or two.
“Sounds like you’ve hit a wall on that,” he says, his voice far more somber.
“Not entirely.” Her thumbs tap furiously.
“What if the two of you worked together?” There’s no irony in his voice.
She stops tapping. “Me and Boroğlu? Did I mention she hates me?”
“And you’re not overly fond of her. I get that. Just the same…”
She looks into his eyes. “One of us would probably wind up dead.”
“But what’s that I’ve been hearing about women…it takes a village?”
She shakes her head and looks up at the morning sunlight in the branches of the trees. “I’ve never been very good at being a villager.”
He lights his cigarette and exhales slowly. “I know. And neither has she…”
“And neither,” she says, “have you.”
“Well, at least you’ve still got the Aureus coin safe.”
“What coin?” she says.
28
KAIKOS VALLEY
At 3:23 a.m., Elif Boroğlu hides her bicycle behind a clump of bushes just off the two-lane country road seven kilometers outside of Bergama. The night is warm and mostly cloudy, the moon hidden. Rain is forecast by morning, but she should make it back to town by then. It will be the first rain in two weeks and will likely cover any tracks she leaves. Wearing black hiking shoes, black pants, and a black, long-sleeved T-shirt, she shifts her dark backpack to balance its weight and then heads across a field recently plowed under. The night smells of fertility.
When Elif was young, she often went to the Allianoi excavation with her mother. She liked the archeological work at the site, particularly the painstaking preservation of artifacts, but she enjoyed even more wandering the nearby hills scavenging. Sometimes her younger brother, Serkan, went with her, but he quickly became bored with the tramping and returned to the site, where he was particularly taken by the statue of the water nymph. She gradually came to feel, to learn, to know the contours of the earth as though it was a mother’s living body—which, she has now come to understand, it was and is.
While in high school, she began to go farther afield, often alone and at night. She had friends, both at school and in town, but her explorations were solitary—though not ever lonely. Her brother seemed not even to notice, and her mother, perhaps due to her own upbringing, turned a blind eye on the excursions. Over the years, Elif discovered two ancient cult sites around Bergama, one of which she has shared with her friends. She is, however, the only person to have visited the second site in two millennia. The earth has also disclosed to her dozens of gravesites including four that were entirely undisturbed, which out of respect for the deceased and the land itself she has not revealed to anyone, even her mother. Özlem was, until recently, always busy with other archeological projects, and Elif believed that so many graves were being desecrated by robbers that she would not add to the list.
When she is alone like this in the hinterland late at night, the earth sings to her. Not just the hum of insects and the distant barking of dogs, but the land itself. The songs are sometimes chants, sometimes dirges, and, more recently, anthems, but to her all of them are holy and all ground hallowed.
After crossing the field, she climbs two low hills, passes through a narrow valley, and reaches a rocky, crescent-shaped ridge. Near a boulder the size of a Fiat Ægea, she opens her backpack. In the gathering breeze, she catches the first scent of the approaching storm. She hears a rustling off to her right, and two large dogs, one tan and one chocolate, rush at her through the brush. Both leap at her. She throws her right arm around the darker dog’s shoulder as they tumble together to the base of the rock. “Quiet, Gula!” she whispers as the dog pins her and licks her face. The tan dog is on her, too
, slobbering. She holds back laughter as she fends them off. She is clearly trespassing in their territory, but they have been friends, she and the dark bitch and her son, for years.
Elif rolls to her side and, with both dogs still bounding about, gets to her feet. “Stay!” she says as she removes a plastic bag from her backpack and pulls out a frozen beef bone with scraps of meat still on it. The bitch seizes it and turns away. Her son takes his bone but settles at Elif’s feet and manipulates it with his paws as he gnaws at it. Both dogs lie in darkness, but their bushy tails catch shadows as they wag. As the dogs, who belong more to these low rolling hills than to the local farmers who sometimes provide them with food, attack the bones, Elif pulls her long, tousled hair back into a ponytail and hefts her backpack. She used to come this way in daylight, walking about and sharing treats with dogs, but her recent visits have been, out of necessity, nocturnal.
Through terrain that is increasingly rocky, Elif and the dogs, proudly carrying the bones in their mouths, trek along another ridge that rises gradually toward a steep rock massif. Gula stays close, but her son periodically runs off after a scent or sound that Elif can’t detect. After twenty minutes of climbing, she stops by a narrow cleft in the rock. Gula sniffs about while her son marks territory. Elif stands still for three full minutes, letting her senses sharpen. She then looks closely at the area around the cleft but finds no tracks, no signs that others have been here. She is not a geologist but knows that the cleft was never the tomb’s entrance. She glances up at the escarpment, the wall of rock. The earth quakes frequently around here, not in human time, but in its own. The crust heaved at some point, perhaps during the great quake of 262 CE that demolished much of Pergamon, sheering the escarpment and sending down a cascade of boulders, rock, and scree. Elif is reasonably sure that this area was once a necropolis, and the landside that covered this and other tombs also created this cleft.
As Elif puts down her backpack, Gula, who first discovered this place while chasing hares two years ago, settles near her. Elif takes out her miner’s light, adjusts it on her head, and breathes deeply. Getting into the tomb is for her frightening, though the tomb itself is not. She scratches Gula behind the ears; whispers, “Guard the door, my dear”; crouches; and wedges herself into the crevice. She then squirms at an angle to her right, scraping her chest and shoulders against the rock. She extends her left arm high above her head, finds a handhold, and pulls herself upward.