A Deceit to Die For (42 page)

Gilbert took a deep breath. Kiyomi was bright, which was why he had hired her. She was already processing the different reasons he would want her to leave a message on his own phone.

“I’ll explain it all later. Everything is above board. Don’t worry and please keep calling Ginger’s number. I will be in touch soon.”

CHAPTER
35

D
ALLAS
 
 
“So, what do you make of it,” whispered Gwyn, pointing to the letter carefully spread out before them. Zeki had been looking at it for almost five minutes without saying a word. She had watched the pensive concentration oozing from his fingertips and drumming a beat on the table. Once, he picked up the document and held it up to the light, looking for a watermark that might indicate where the paper was manufactured. Finally, he condescended to quench her curiosity.

“I certainly see it in a somewhat different light after the events of the last week. I suspected from the start that this was no ordinary piece of paper. Everything about it is wrong.”

“What do you mean?”

He pointed to the seal.

“Well, first of all, the sultan’s seal is always affixed to the top of the document. Here, however, we have it at the bottom of the letter. But, this is nothing compared to what we see in the seal itself. The writer used the seal of a sultan who had been dead for more than three hundred and fifty years when this letter was written. This
tugra
belongs to Murad I, a sultan who lived in the late fourteenth century.”

“Is there anything exceptional about Murad that could help us?”

“Is there anything exceptional about Murad?” Zeki repeated the question, and a sad smile lit upon his lips. “What wasn’t exceptional about the man? He’s the one who formed the house of Osman into an Empire. He took a small burgeoning fiefdom and put it firmly on the road to Empire and eventually super-power status. He was the first ruler of the dynasty to use the title of sultan. He personally led his armies from victory to victory, shrinking the once-mighty Byzantine state to a tiny island within the walls of Constantinople. He expanded Turkish rule throughout the Balkans of southeast Europe and so
hastened the end of the Eastern Roman Empire’s thousand-year reign from the Pearl of the East on the banks of the Bosphorus.

“His armies shattered the pride and strength of the Serbian nation, forcing them into submission and making them vassals for the next three and a half centuries. Had it not been for Murad, the Ottomans might never have become the rulers of the Mediterranean and Black Seas, the Caliph of Islam, the Defender of the Faith and the Terror of the East. Ironically, he was also the only sultan ever killed in battle. It was at the Battle of Kosovo against the Serbs. His death gave rise to the reprehensible practice of fratricide, which continued for three centuries as each sultan who ascended the throne eliminated all of his father’s male heirs by strangling them with a silken bow string.

“The awe which he inspired in his contemporaries is clearly expressed by his nickname—
Hüdavendigar
, which means the God-like one. So, the short answer to your question is that Murad was the medieval personification of
exceptional
though I have no idea how that relates to this letter.”

“Wow!” exclaimed Gwyn. “Sounds like Napoleon on steroids. So, besides using the seal of a sultan long dead, what other peculiar features do you see?”

“
Rub el Hizb
has been used as a symbol in Islam for centuries. However, I don’t know why it is combined with that other symbol, what did you call it?”

“Ouroboros,” answered Gwyn,

“Right. Why a self-devouring snake would replace the traditional circle is more than puzzling. It’s bizarre in the extreme, but oddly enough, I’ve seen it once before.”

“You have? Where?”

“About five years ago, I was doing some research in the Ottoman archives in Istanbul. You’ve been there.”

“You mean the building across from the Hagia Sophia? The one with the marble fountains on either side, and the beautiful calligraphy above the massive red doors? I was there with my father. I always thought it looked very exotic.”

“Yes, that’s the place,” Zeki said with a smile. “Your memory is excellent. It is called
Bab-i Ali
, which means the ‘grand gate’. The archives are written, like our document here, with the Arabic script in Ottoman Turkish. I had requested a certain series of documents regarding the reign of Murad II. These were histories compiled during the reign of his son, Fatih Sultan Mehmet, and among them was a document, obviously misplaced, which had the
Rub el-Hizb
with the Ouroboros in the middle. Because my time was limited, I didn’t read it, but I pointed it out to the clerk when I returned the documents and said that I would like to examine it in greater detail on another visit. When I returned a week later, the document could not be found, the clerk I had spoken to was absent, and I was told in no uncertain terms that there were no documents in the archives that fit this description.”

“Sounds strange.”

“Strange indeed. I thought little of it until I saw the same symbol on the document your father showed me. It was the first red flag. Have you researched that symbol at all?”

“Yes, I have,” she replied. “Ouroboros is an esoteric symbol of unquestionable antiquity, predating both Christianity and Islam. It has been found in the pyramids and is referred to by Plato as the first living thing in the universe. In the west, it seems to have approximated the Taoist concept of Yin-Yang—the eternal act of creating and destroying. It was used by Gnostics, alchemists, Masons, the Unitarian church and others, but it’s not limited to the West. It pops up in cultures all over the world.”

“So,” Zeki continued, “We have an Islamic symbol, which incidentally has been adopted by the most powerful political party in modern Turkey, used together with a very unIslamic symbol on a document dating back to 1736. I find all this very peculiar indeed.”

“What is the
Rub el Hizb
?” asked Gwyn.

“It’s used to mark sections of the Qur’an. But, from what I have read, the symbol itself dates back to Tartessos in ancient Andalusia.”

“Excuse me, but you lost me there.”

“Andalusia is the Anglicized pronunciation of the Arabic
al-Andalus
, which is the name for Spain in the Islamic world. Tartessos is the name of a civilization that thrived in this region before the Roman Empire. Some even say it is the Tarshish of the Old Testament because it is an area rich in metals.”

“Old Testament?” Gwyn looked surprised.

“You haven’t read it?” asked Zeki, seeming just as flabbergasted.

“Well, yes, I have, but I am surprised that you would be so knowledgeable about it.”

“And, why is that? Because I am a Turkish Muslim?”

“Well, yes, to be honest, I did not expect you to have studied the Old Testament since it is not your religion.”

“Not my religion? Each statement of yours is stranger than the last. My faith is in the God of Abraham. Is there another more complete record of Abraham’s faith than that in the Old Testament?”

“I guess it’s just not what I expected.”

“You mean not what you’ve been conditioned to believe. If I knew your father, he probably taught his daughter to expect the unexpected, to question every assumption and look for truth behind reality’s mask. I suggest you start applying those lessons. I suspect our path may be illuminated by surprises over the next few days.”

Zeki had turned his attention to the second paragraph of the document. It was written with the Arabic script, but the words were completely
unintelligible. It wasn’t Ottoman, Persian or Arabic. After a few minutes, Gwyn suggested that he transliterate the Arabic letters into the Roman alphabet so she could help. This was trickier than it sounded because the letters in Arabic did not always have a direct correspondence in the Latin script. He read through the lines again, made a couple of small changes and pushed it across the table to Gwyn.

“Looks like Spanish or Portuguese to me,” he said.

La decisión del consejo de cancelar al hijo del profeta y borrar todo rastro dél sigue entre nuestros deberes más solemnes. Una carmesí puesta de sol inglesa en Suri-Strend habrá, y también un dorado amanecer en Tunez, cuando el pájaro que volose sea devuelto a Südde-i Saadet. Caminad sobre la nieve, pero no dejéis huellas. Nuestro siempre fiel D. os proporcionará la ayuda necesaria para el envío. Que la entrega sea rápida.

Gwyn scanned the quickly scribbled lines.

“Probably Spanish, but let’s get a dictionary.” She pushed back from the table. “I’ll be back in just a sec.”

She walked towards the library reference section. In two minutes, she reappeared carrying a bulky Spanish dictionary, which she plopped down on the table.

“I’m certain that the language is Spanish. I mean I don’t speak it, but I have seen enough of it written to recognize grammatical structures like
de, del, una
, etc., I thought we could look up a few of the words to see what it’s about.”

Three minutes later Gwyn was satisfied all of the words in the first line were equivalent to words in the first line of the English translation. She turned to Zeki.

“So, we have a letter in Ottoman Turkish with a Spanish translation using Arabic characters. This just keeps getting more and more bizarre.”

“Let’s start with the obvious,” replied Zeki. “Tunis is a city in Tunisia, south of Spain across the Mediterranean. It’s an Arabic-speaking Muslim country so the use of the Arabic script is not so strange. Obviously, there was some doubt as to whether the person or persons who would be reading it could understand Ottoman Turkish so it was provided in Spanish as well. The Arabic script is strange, I admit, but there is certainly a geopolitical conjuncture that seems plausible.”

Gwyn interrupted. “Do you know when the Spanish finally succeeded in defeating the Muslim rulers of Spain?”

“Every Muslim knows the answer to that,” he replied. “It’s remembered every year throughout the world of Islam as the Lament for Andalusia, but I’ve read that American children memorize the same date as ‘In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue.’”

“Then this letter was written two hundred and thirty years after the conquest,” Gwyn responded doubtfully.

“Yes, but the Moors did not leave Spain in 1492. I don’t remember the exact date of their deportation, but I know that it was much later.”

Gwyn typed Muslim, Arabic, Moors, Spanish, deported in the search engine and hit return. She began scanning the results and then without taking her eyes off the screen, she asked,

“Who are the Moriscos? That name occurs in several places.”

“The Moriscos,” replied Zeki, “were the Muslim inhabitants of Spain who were given an ultimatum by the Spanish Crown in 1501 to convert to Catholicism or be deported. It is a long and sad story. You may add it to the list of topics to research. I suppose they retained some veneration for the Arabic script, but after several generations under Spanish rule, I’m sure most spoke Spanish as their native language.”