The Sultan of Byzantium (27 page)

‘If you hadn’t gone to Rhodes on your own, I would have invited you there before our Haghia Sophia excursion and this scene would have played out probably just about like it is now. If I could have called up the spirit of John IV, God knows, he would have been only too happy to have you killed with two bullets to the eyes. But I have to obey a different scenario. So I’ve rented a small boat in your name. You will be taken to it unconscious and a Slavic prostitute will be waiting for you there, also unconscious. The report I submitted to Angelos indicates that you’re a sex addict who is quite fond of making love to prostitutes in rented boats on the Bosphorus at night. Whisky will be poured down your throats. You and your whore will meet the bottom of the Bosphorus when your boat hits the rocks at one of the most accident-prone points of the Straits. The newspapers will cite the accident report saying that you lost control of the boat as the result of extreme intoxication.

‘A month later Manuel II’s manuscript will be donated to the Institute’s library. In time, Nomo will invite me to assume the Byzantine throne. I will of course be surprised at this unexpected turn and will do my best to be worthy of their trust … ’

It was a tragic performance, almost, the way he acted out this tirade. As I listened to him, however, my fear gradually faded. I thought I might simply get up and leave, like walking out on a bad one-man play. Laskaris barked a command to Iskender in Greek. When he loomed closer with a rag in his hand, I couldn’t help myself.

‘Haven’t you ever seen a police movie, you idiot?’ I yelled. ‘Don’t you know this psychopath is going to get rid of you the first chance he gets after you kill me?’

Laskaris’s man leaned over and spoke into my ear.

‘There are things in this universe you know nothing of, son of the dishonorable American,’ he said. The softness in his voice surprised me. I thought my heart would stop when he abruptly picked up the gun on the table and emptied it into Laskaris, who was sitting five steps away. I sighed for the lyrical sound of bullets bursting from a gun with a silencer. Iskender embraced me and kissed me on the head.

‘I swore to protect you, Halâs, even at the cost of my life. You’re my friend and my brother. Whoever tries to harm even one hair of your head will have to deal with me.’

At this juncture three men entered the big room. Kalligas seemed to have a body bag in his hand; Pappas carried a bottle of water. A tall white-haired man in his sixties was in the lead. He said, in English, ‘Your Majesty, my name is Basil Angelos. To express myself fully, I’ll continue in English, if you permit.’ He had an American accent and carried himself like a diplomat. As we took our seats around the table, Pappas hastily handed me the water. Iskender, muttering, helped Kalligas put the corpse into the bag.

‘Like the traitor Laskaris said, I was his boss and directly connected to Nomo. His con game fell apart when he failed to pass along your message to me from Trabzon. We checked his background, then contacted Alexander – sorry, Iskender – who was his employee. We told him to inform us before acting on Laskaris’s orders. Laskaris had failed to repay an advance he’d taken to buy a rare book long ago. While he was with you we went through his London house and found the book by His Majesty Manuel II. Our scholars found Laskaris’s claim not worthy of consideration. But since we knew he would never leave this country alive, we sent the book to the Institute’s library. Laskaris’s debt was paid.

‘We waited for you to confront Laskaris face to face. What you got out of him was much more than we already knew. With your permission we’ll remove the body, Your Majesty. As you know, your testing period is up in two weeks. It will be my honor to escort you to the holy Haghia Sophia. I’m certain you’ll complete the final stage and rise to aristocratic status. Then, after the investiture ceremony, the next item on the agenda will be implementing the last item of the emperor’s will. Now I would like to give you my private phone number … ’

On returning to ground level, I shook, feeling as if I was emerging from a nightmare. A summer breeze caressed my face and I stumbled. I accepted the first taxi I saw as my personal savior, and bought a bottle of tranquilizers at the first pharmacy. As I gratefully climbed into bed, one little fact nagged at me. If Laskaris kept the news of my finding the purple square in my hotel room to himself, how did Angelos learn about it? From Kalligas? Pappas? Was a chip implanted in me? Perhaps they were not ordinary security guards either.

At least I knew well that, instead of bringing together the mosaic pieces of the past, I had to get ready for the tricks of the future. And if I was now a true Byzantine like Manuel II and his princely sons, I was safe beneath the wings of Nomo. Wasn’t I?

‘… In old panoramic photographs of Istanbul the church of churches looks as innocent as a wooden toy. Her kneeling pose makes her look like she’s holding a priceless object in her lap that she’s protecting from danger. The brick-colored plaster covering the exterior looks like it would peel off in the first rain, but it’s 1,500 years old. It took seven and a half years to collect the material for its construction, and five years for the construction itself. Haghia Sophia is the Shakespeare of churches. Her dome is 180 feet above ground level, with a diameter of 100 feet. It has survived all manner of natural and man-made disasters, including earthquakes. Haghia Sophia is close to God with her symmetrical arches and sky-wide domes; and close to humans with her ornamented pillars and colorful detail. I’ve never seen any other church that could aspire to this level of architectural grandeur and beauty of interior design.

‘… In 1934 the sacred space became a museum, as if it knew what to expect of the future. Each of its mosaic mazes possesses a rich and unique combination of religion and art. In them I saw everything: a fairy-tale palace, a time tunnel, a lighthouse, an aquarium, a caravanserai, a virtual hot springs, a suburb of heaven, a purgatory, an art studio.

‘… The drunken hooligans of the Fourth Crusade did not overlook Haghia Sophia as they plundered Constantinople, with the permission of the Venetian Doge. It is the historians’ crime that they did not record the Crusaders’ orgies with prostitutes in the church, but invented stories about how flames rose from its dome when the city surrendered to the Ottomans.

‘… If visitors from another planet came to earth in some future millennium, it would be Haghia Sophia that would present them with the common message of humanity … ’

These lines belonged to my father. When I first saw them, with an ‘X’ over each paragraph, I immediately read these paeans of praise and found them a wee bit exaggerated. But I read them again before my Haghia Sophia expedition, and determined the first stop in my quest to sort out the last item of the will.

In another one of his notes my father complained about the mysterious gaps and mistakes in Byzantine history. For instance – as an example of incomplete information – he pointed out that the mathematician Anthemius and the geometrician Isidore are known as the architects of Haghia Sophia; but in fact the Emperor Justinian put them in charge of every detail of construction. And then there were the two mistakes that I knew of personally: one, the Emperor Constantine XI did not die on the walls but was hijacked; and, two, the last emperor of the Laskaris dynasty, John IV, died in Sicily, not Gebze. The few historians or clergymen courageous enough to record these truths were mocked if not persecuted.

*

The lengthy queues at the ticket office of Haghia Sophia were discouraging. With over 2 million visitors a year, the long-retired church was now the country’s favorite museum. The doors had only been open for ten minutes and already the long line of old and half-naked tourists standing in the summer heat was hurting my eyes. But while I was still convincing myself that I was an emperor in the camouflage stage, the line melted away and I was in. The courtyard was a maelstrom of chaos. While harried guides tried desperately to organize the straggling Mediterranean tour groups, the perfectly orderly Japanese groups looked on in amazement. I spotted Pappas and Kalligas hovering nervously around the main gate. I was getting tired of them. Just before entering the church I called Pappas over and said, ‘You’ll soon be rid of me, pal.’ I couldn’t keep from pinching his two cheeks and saying, ‘I don’t know why, but I always felt close to you.’ Angelos called my cellphone just as I passed through the Emperor’s Door to tell me that he was at the café next door in the event that I needed help. I started to sweat. Then I realized that I didn’t really care so much anymore about my many times great-grandfather’s will. I didn’t want to take this job that I couldn’t quit, true, but it would also be unfair to say that the only benefit I had of it so far was meeting Mistral. For me, understanding Byzantine civilization was of the highest importance.

As I slowly walked deeper into the interior toward the dome, the temperature inside seemed to increase. With each step the colossal pillars seemed to elongate and the dome rise higher into the sky. I felt an intense joy of life together with a deep respect for death. The gilded ceiling contained engravings, designs and carvings from assorted layers of civilization. It was an eye-catching and heart-warming symbiosis. I was in a space beyond church, museum or palace. Coolness filled me from inside out; my eyelids drooped. Was the Christ depicted in the mosaic on the wall about to conduct a hymn of lamentation? If so, a magnificent chorus would respond in perfect harmony, and all the emperors would bow their heads. I woke to the fluttering of a pigeon over my head. Yes, there were pigeons flying freely inside the church. I had come to in the Omphalion, the circle where the emperors received their crowns. As the tip of my shoe touched the border, I once again felt regret for the major handicap of the Byzantines: the lack of a firm principle for the succession of emperors. At this point a fat tourist in his seventies, apparently oblivious to the magnificence of Haghia Sophia, materialized next to me. He seemed to be from rural America. His witty comment, ‘Is this where we line up to be the emperor?’ left him gleefully chortling at his own joke and me disgusted with it. It would have been meaningless to respond to him with a line from his countryman Ezra Pound: ‘Dreams are the only reality.’

We ascended to the upper gallery by way of a curving ramp made of smooth and slippery cobblestones. A well-dressed French woman in my group said, ‘This reminds me for some reason of “The Phantom of the Opera”.’

I approached the masterpiece of mosaics: the Deesis. The lower half of the great panel was gone. Christ, life-like and in color, was posed between his mother Mary and John the Baptist. This must have been the Mona Lisa of Christ depiction. Despite the large warning sign below it, and the female security guard’s nonstop admonitions – ‘Do not use flash’ – the tourist platoons pressed their camera buttons without let-up or mercy for the fragile mosaic. Clearly this was a crowd that would ignore environmental pollution until it lapped at their doorstep.

The divine Christ appeared to be indicating something just across the way, with both his upraised right hand and his eyes. There, a carved slab recessed in the floor between two pillars stopped me. Here was the tomb of the Doge of Venice and butcher of Constantinople, Enrico Dandolo (1107-1205). (The ironies of history are scandalous.) It was on the orders of Dandolo, an enemy of Byzantium, that the army of Crusaders had plundered the capital of the world. The peerless palace complex; the Mese, which was the Milan of the times; the coastal residences of the Golden Horn that Venice imitated, were all devastated. Rich and poor were slaughtered together. Small girls and nuns were raped. It was the most monstrous massacre history ever witnessed! While the two-faced western world closed its eyes to the tragedy, Venice recorded it as the noble Conquest of Constantinople.

So it would be natural for any Byzantine emperor to top his revenge list with Venice. I was sure I would find the ‘decree’ somewhere on the arch-enemy Dandolo’s tombstone. It was a marble slab about three by five feet, inscribed with HENRICUS DANDOLO. I leaned over and was about to spit on it, here where tourists seldom came, but restrained myself at the last moment. I focused on three small dark marble rectangles wedged beneath the slab. They seemed to have something scratched into them with a stylus of some sort. I touched the left one with my index finger and rubbed it, hopefully, from right to left. I felt something. All three produced a similar impression. In a state of excitement I left the museum, went home, took an inspirational shower, swallowed a tranquilizer and went to bed. I returned an hour before closing time, carrying a briefcase inside which was a magnifying glass and a Byzantine Greek-English dictionary.

The tourist traffic upstairs was thinning and nobody paid attention to my scrutiny of the Dandolo epitaph with a magnifying glass. When I’d transcribed and translated the three words written in the Greek alphabet, what I had was: ‘Burn the Doge’s palace.’ For the first time I was overtaken by a crisis of laughter. Tears sprang from my eyes but at the same time I relaxed. A Japanese girl who didn’t want to miss her chance snapped three pictures of ‘Man Laughing with a Magnifying Glass in Front of a Tombstone’, then ran downstairs. I left the church without calling the team to inform them of the denouement. Perhaps they could guess it anyway from the expression on my face. After the (L)askaris case I thought I should distance myself from them a little. I exited the courtyard and regarded Haghia Sophia from the outside, again in amazement. Did the Ottomans want to keep her from flying off by nailing down her skirts with four minarets? Really, it was not so preposterous for Haghia Sophia to stand as a church and a mosque at the same time. The image of Fatih Sultan Mehmet, the Conqueror and head of the Ottoman-Byzantine Empire, came to mind. This was in fact the real message of the double-headed eagle as imperial seal: sovereignty over both East and West. The Empire could have been a supreme power uniting, with good will, Europe and Asia; and so many of the world’s geopolitical problems might thus have been averted.