Land of the Blind

by Barbara Nadel

  Kerim had never heard of her. ‘Who?’

  ‘Josephine Tey. An English crime writer from the sort of Second World War time. I think you’ll have to get it in English.’

  ‘Is that OK?’

  ‘I read one book of hers, The Franchise Affair, in English and it was slow going but OK.’

  ‘How did you find out about her?’

  ‘That American friend of Pembe’s, Rita.’

  The image of a small, thin woman with close-cropped hair came into his head.

  ‘I expect Rita’s at Gezi,’ Sinem said. ‘I wish I could go.’

  ‘You can.’

  As soon as he’d said it, Kerim regretted it.

  Sinem sat up. ‘How can I go, Kerim?’

  ‘I can take you,’ he said. ‘If you really want to . . .’ He stopped. Her eyes were cold and he had to look away.

  ‘I’m dying, I can’t go anywhere,’ she said. ‘Why do you taunt me with things I can’t do?’

  The elephant seals on the TV bellowed in anger. Kerim was so close to telling her, but he didn’t. What good would it do? She believed what she believed, he was fond of her, always had been, and she was his wife.

  He smiled. ‘I’m sorry, Sinem, sometimes I forget.’

  She got up slowly. ‘Doesn’t matter.’

  ‘It does.’

  She left the room. Kerim turned the TV off and then the light. He’d wait until he was sure she was asleep before he went to bed. Alone in the darkness he wondered, not for the first time, what it was like to be Sinem. Most people he knew, maybe even that dead baby he’d seen earlier, clung to life with every atom of their souls. How could Sinem, and those like her, break that pattern? Was it just the pain that made her like that, or was it also what she was too? That he did understand, but it didn’t make him want to die.

  ‘Çetin Bey!’

  One of the transsexuals opened her arms wide.

  İkmen, smoking, bowed. ‘Nar Hanım.’

  Nar Sözen snaked an arm around his waist. ‘What are you doing here? You’re not going to threaten people, are you? That’s not really your style.’

  ‘No . . .’

  ‘I was devastated when I heard that Sergeant Farsakoğlu had died. Devastated! She was such a good friend to—’

  ‘Yes.’

  Peri Mungun knew that Çetin İkmen had the reputation for being a man of the people but she hadn’t realised that it meant people quite as diverse as these.

  He looked at her, Nar Hanım and her friend with their arms draped around him and said, ‘Miss Mungun, it’s your choice but if you want to come with your brother and me now we can get you out of here safely.’

  Ömer leaned forward and said, ‘Please.’

  His eyes pleaded and because she loved her brother, it touched her heart. She knew what he was thinking. If their parents found out where she was they’d be horrified. But Iris, for all her privilege, had had a point too.

  ‘Ömer, Çetin Bey,’ she said. ‘It’s very good of you to come but—’

  ‘You can’t stay here, Peri, you can’t!’

  He looked terrified. She took his arm and led him a little away from the others. Some children rushed past covered in brightly coloured face paints, laughing.

  Peri had thought it through. When Iris had challenged her, when she’d watched the transsexuals’ tent burn down and when she’d thought about her job in İstanbul and her life back in Mardin, she’d weighed the pros and the cons of everything that had happened and could happen very carefully. She’d decided what was important. To her.

  ‘Ömer,’ she said, ‘whether we like it or not our lives have been dominated by what other people think of us and those who share our beliefs. Back home, to some extent, we were accepted, but here and in the rest of the country . . . And it’s getting harder. Like these transsexuals, we are being told, albeit not always directly, to hide ourselves away still more and I don’t want to do that. Why should I? Why should I or you have to deny the existence of our beliefs? It’s not right, and if this protest is about anything it’s about stopping things that aren’t right.’

  ‘They want to build a shopping mall.’

  ‘And they want to cut down trees and kill off a green space to do it,’ Peri said. ‘Ömer, if our faith teaches us anything, isn’t it that the natural world is sacred? Everyone I’ve talked to here just wants what we want – equality, peace, respect for the natural world and an end to this mad development that is making a few people rich at the expense of many more who have become poorer.’

  ‘Peri, the government won’t have it; they—’

  ‘If this is the moment, then, to challenge them, that is what I must do,’ she said.

  ‘You have to go back to work tomorrow.’

  ‘Do I? Yes, I know that logically I do,’ she said. ‘But I’m going to call in sick again tomorrow.’

  ‘You’ll lose your job!’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘You will! Nurses queue up to work in that hospital. You know that. You did.’

  Peri looked down at the ground. What he was saying was sensible and accurate and in a moment he’d invoke the image of their ageing parents.

  ‘Mum and Dad—’

  ‘Mum and Dad should be able to be who they really are too,’ Peri said. She looked up at him. For a moment the fear she saw on his face almost made her crumble, but then she took a deep breath and said, ‘Ömer, I have to do this, for all of us.’

  Yiannis watched Anastasia sleep. She always looked peaceful. That was the drugs. Awake she was tortured by her own inadequacies and by the past. What had she seen on that day in 1955 when her husband had died and her son had vanished?

  They’d never spoken of it. She’d just accepted him and then they’d started what had been a quiet life together. He’d learned a little from Hakkı Bey. The mob had torn Nikos Negroponte to pieces and smashed Anastasia’s head against the floor of their shop until, as Hakkı had put it, ‘her brain had died’.

  But it was possible to have a conversation with her, albeit of a frequently one-sided variety. She didn’t speak for weeks sometimes and then, suddenly, she would almost chat. What she understood was not always clear. Yiannis felt she knew what went on around her, which was why, when she woke up, they had to speak.

  Ahmet Öden and his development plans had been worrying and upsetting. Now they had achieved a different level. Had he really been in the house years and years ago? He had been a builder when he was young and so it was possible. Hakkı would possibly remember, although he’d never mentioned it, but he had gone home. Would Anastasia recall such a thing? She spluttered in her sleep, turned over on to her side and began breathing normally again.

  Had Öden been bluffing? Yiannis looked at the cruel stripes that the property developer had dug into the back of his hand. It was undeniable he was passionate. But about what? If he’d really been into the house and explored its every corner it was possible he knew. But why would that interest him? And if he didn’t know, then what had his threats actually meant?

  Yiannis went over to his mother’s bedroom window and looked up at the sky. Dawn was just discernible as a thinning of the darkness over the great monuments of Sultanahmet. Although he hadn’t slept he wasn’t tired, but his body ached. He looked back at the old woman asleep in her bed and wondered what she was dreaming.

  Chapter 11

  İkmen looked at the e-mail again. The translator of Ariadne’s notebook was very specific. She talked about two massive finds in the city. The body of Constantine Palaiologos had to be one and then there was something else. Described as a ‘structure’ by the translator, it had dimensions and, significantly, it was categorised as a ‘red’ building.

  Constantine didn’t feature; it was all about the structure. But where was it and what was it? İkmen had called the translator, who’d said he didn’t know. All he could say was that from Dr Savva’s descriptions of it, allied to her enthusiasm, it had to be Byzantine. Some of the less well-known Byzantine structure
s had been demolished in recent years, some in the last few months. Was this building even extant?

  ‘The entire text is a minutely observed description of every part of this structure,’ the translator had said. ‘For instance, there is a red block with a flat red slab on top in the middle of this building. She measured every dimension and observed where the “red” had been damaged in any way. I’ve found measurements of windows, doors, arches, carvings. Again and again she states how unbelievable and precious this place is.’

  ‘Could the “red” be stone?’ İkmen had asked.

  ‘Yes. Probably porphyry if the building was Byzantine. They used it all the time.’

  Just as in the case of the body of Constantine Palaiologos, there had been no photographs. Had Ariadne Savva been too cautious, too worried about keeping her finds to herself to risk taking pictures? And if the structure she had found had been made of porphyry, when had she been there last? They’d found a piece of porphyry in her hand when her body had been discovered. Had she visited this building within hours of giving birth? And where was it – somewhere near the sphendone?

  The city was littered with Byzantine buildings and fragments. If, as her journal claimed, she’d found an entirely new structure, then where could it be? A lot of the city’s Byzantine heritage had been discovered underground, but the existence of windows in this one seemed to imply that it was above ground. In any western European city the notion of a valuable historic building hiding for centuries behind more recent structures was probably laughable; in İstanbul İkmen knew that it was possible. He’d grown up playing in abandoned hamams, empty Greek houses and what remained of Byzantine cisterns. But the city was changing fast. Rampant development meant that the past was being unearthed every day and it was having to compete with the present, which sometimes relegated it to loser status.

  Where was this place? As far as he knew Ariadne Savva’s social and work route took her to her apartment, Gizlitepe, the Museum, Aya Sofya and the Hippodrome. So basically Kadıköy district and Sultanahmet. All the latest Byzantine finds in Sultanahmet had been underground and the area was so well documented he couldn’t believe that researchers hadn’t found whatever remained. Of course parts of the Great Palace of the Byzantines were still hidden and so it was possible Dr Savva had found part of that. But how? And where? Were there any significant Byzantine structures in Kadıköy? He didn’t know the area well. But then he remembered something he’d once been told by an old Greek priest about Aya Sofya.

  So it wasn’t a structure, as such, but it was, if it existed, most definitely Byzantine. It was also, at least in part, almost certainly made of porphyry too.

  Süleyman peered over Ömer’s shoulder. The younger man felt his skin creep. He’d hoped he wouldn’t see it.

  ‘That’s Inspector İkmen’s handwriting,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Are those Greek names?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Inspector İkmen knows some of the old Greek families in the city.’

  ‘He knows everyone.’ Süleyman returned to his desk.

  ‘I asked him about families he thought might have been caught up in the 1955 riots,’ Ömer said. ‘And he gave me these names.’

  ‘Good idea.’ He didn’t look exactly overjoyed but at least he hadn’t shouted.

  A family called Gabras had owned a high-class bakery on İstiklal. An Alexis Gabras, a direct descendant, still lived in Şişli. But then all the bodies back in 1955 had been accounted for. Surely if someone had been unaccounted for, there would have been a record of it? Unless some of the Greeks had simply cut their losses. Most of the families who had lost members had left the city after 1955. A few had stayed, like the Diogenes, the Vatatzes and the Negropontes. Their dead, buried in the Greek cemetery at Şişli, had been quietly consigned to a history neither Greeks nor Turks could forget.

  Dr Akyıldız, the forensic archaeologist, was still waiting for further results on the Galatasaray skeleton that might give some indication as to ethnicity, which would help. But she was also taken up with another skeleton that was much more exalted. What if the body found in Edirnekapı did turn out to be that of the last Byzantine emperor? Ömer suspected the Greeks would probably want to rebury him with a religious ceremony, most likely in Aya Sofya. That would be contentious, especially if it was going to be converted back to being a mosque.

  If he were honest, Ömer wasn’t up to being at work. He hadn’t slept and was still in the clothes he’d worn the previous day, which Süleyman had noticed with a wry raise of an eyebrow. Ömer imagined he thought that he’d been with a woman all night. And in a way he had. She’d been his sister.

  Peri had flatly refused to leave Gezi. In spite of appealing to her responsibilities as a dutiful daughter, Ömer had failed to persuade her to give up on what had been developing into an almost carnival atmosphere. That was the problem. Since last night the police had pulled back and there were reports of people setting up facilities for the protesters including food, drink and clothes.

  The enthusiasm had been compelling. People dancing in the night around fires where they were cooking meat and vegetables, the music and the atmosphere of brotherhood was something he wouldn’t forget in a hurry. Floridly ‘out’ gay boys standing shoulder to shoulder with bearded Muslims was an image that wouldn’t fade quickly either. He could see why Peri was there but that didn’t stop him worrying about her. The Prime Minister was due to go on a foreign trip in a few days and Ömer couldn’t see that he’d leave the situation in Gezi as it was now and just go. The government was furious about the protest. Ömer looked across at Süleyman who was smoking out of his window, and wondered what he thought. He was a distant member of the deposed royal family and so he had to approve of what some were calling the ‘new Ottomanism’ that was sweeping the national consciousness. The government were actively promoting the notion of being proud to be Turkish and doing things in a uniquely Turkish way with pride. This was all good. But much of the new Ottomanism rhetoric was also connected to religion and also, perversely, to a type of consumerism that would seem to be completely opposed to the tenets of Islam. People were better off. But what the Gezi protestors were asking was, ‘At what cost?’

  Süleyman was bored. While his old friend İkmen was engaged in a race against time to find a newborn child, he was stuck with an historical case involving a skeleton that was over fifty years old. He wasn’t involving himself in it any more than he had to, which meant that Ömer was really on his own.

  The body could have been that of a homeless man – enough of them died violently every year and always had – except for the complicated dentistry. How had a man with expensive teeth come to be buried under a tree in the grounds of a posh kids’ school? Galatasaray had been very co-operative and had sent over whatever they had about missing teachers or pupils over the years, very quickly. But that left nothing unexplained.

  On the one hand, the dead man was a nobody, and yet on the other he couldn’t be. And then it came to Ömer. What was key to this conundrum was, of course, teeth.

  ‘I would never say that anything was impossible, Inspector,’ Professor Bozdağ said. ‘But it is unlikely that a tunnel exists underneath Aya Sofya leading to the church of St Mary of the Mongols in Fener. I accept, however, that the story has been around for many centuries.’

  Although he was listening to the academic, İkmen couldn’t help looking up into the great dome, flanked by mosaic angels, their wings decorated with gold leaf.

  ‘We know that tunnels do exist under this building,’ Bozdağ continued. ‘One that leads in the direction of the Topkapı Palace and another that goes off towards the Sultanahmet Square. Which makes sense. The emperors were often at risk from their people and so it would have been of great benefit to them to be able to travel to the Great Palace and to the Hippodrome, unobserved. The last time the cavities underneath this building were explored was in 2009. But it’s very difficult because everything down there is flooded.’

&nb
sp; İkmen looked down.

  ‘Not only is there a reservoir down there, but seismic activity over the centuries has damaged the foundations and the passages and rooms they may conceal. I cannot see how even one as passionate as Dr Savva would have been able to explore such an environment, particularly on her own.’

  ‘But you said there were tunnels and that one led to Sultanahmet Square. Could that not extend up to St Mary’s?’ İkmen asked.

  ‘Theoretically, yes,’ the professor said. ‘But even if it does exist it is probably very damaged. From here to St Mary’s is about three kilometres, and when you think of all the earthquakes the city has suffered over the centuries . . .’

  ‘True.’

  A group of people in what İkmen still considered ‘country’ clothes – the men in battered suit jackets, the women in long dresses, their heads and faces covered – walked into the great building in silence. They were probably from one of the migrant communities along the Golden Horn, city dwellers, but they were all affected by the place.

  ‘What about evidence from the other end?’ İkmen said.

  ‘St Mary’s?’ The professor shrugged. ‘As the only Byzantine church to remain in Christian hands after the Conquest it has always guarded its secrets jealously. Or rather the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate has always protected it, I should say. I don’t know of any research into its foundations. What it may be built upon, I have no idea. Archaeologists have never been permitted to conduct research inside its walls. As an officer of the law, though, I imagine that you wouldn’t have any problems gaining access. You are, after all, investigating a murder. Whether it will be worth your time or not, I don’t know.’

  İkmen didn’t either. What he was really looking for was a building, but not even the professor could come up with one of those.

  ‘Are you sure that Dr Savva’s notebook referred to a real place?’ Bozdağ asked.

  İkmen had explained why he wanted to know about a tunnel under the Aya Sofya.

  ‘I don’t know for sure,’ İkmen said. ‘But why record the dimensions and details of a place that doesn’t exist?’