City of the Lost

I

They lay in bed together afterwards, turned to face each other. Iain told her more about what had happened since the police had come for him in Antioch: his interrogation, his deportation, his time in Israel, his afternoon with Mike.

‘How did that go?’ Karin asked him. ‘Did he get anything from those samples?’

‘It’s going to take longer than I expected. Though there was some pollen. From here in Cyprus, as it happens.’

She pushed herself up onto an elbow. ‘From where, exactly?’ she asked.

‘Some place called Salamis. Ever heard of it?’

Karin laughed. ‘Of course I’ve heard of it. It’s one of the great sites. In fact, I was going to go visit it with Nathan. It was founded by a Trojan War veteran, you see.’

Iain gave a wry smile. ‘Except don’t tell me: the dates don’t fit, right?’

She looked curiously at him. ‘Why do you say that?’

‘Your boss wrote a note to Mike to go with the samples. He said you were all closing in on your Virgil Solution. I couldn’t figure out what he meant. But then I realized. What’s Virgil famous for? For Dido and Aeneas, the impossible lovers who lived four hundred years apart. Impossible, that is, unless the conventional chronology is fucked up. That’s what you think, isn’t it, you and Mike and Nathan? That the Dark Ages never happened. That’s why there’s no trace of David or Solomon in Israel, and how Homer described the Trojan War so accurately, and how the Hittites and Phoenicians and those other cultures all picked up so precisely where they’d left off before. You think Dido and Aeneas really were lovers, don’t you?’

Her expression was hard to read, as if torn between discretion and an eagerness to share. ‘Not exactly,’ she said.

‘Not exactly?’

‘There really was a Catastrophe. There really was a Dark Age. We simply think it didn’t last anything like as long as most people claim. But even if we could cut out 350 years, which is pretty much the upper limit, Dido and Aeneas still couldn’t have been lovers. Though they could have known each other.’

‘I don’t get it. Why all the mystery? Why not just tell me?’

Karin sighed. ‘Because you learn not to. It’s considered crank history, you see. An extreme variant of it was once proposed by this crazy Russian psychiatrist called Velikovsky who also blamed the planet Mercury for destroying the Tower of Babel and Jupiter for Sodom and Gomorrah. So no one’s ever had to engage with our arguments. All they’ve ever had to do is point at Velikovsky and sneer at us. But our arguments are strong. That doesn’t make them right, of course, but it surely makes them at least worthy of refutation. But of course the people who matter can’t admit even that much. To do so would be to admit that all their ridicule was unwarranted, which would be humiliating. So they exclude us from their academy instead. They ignore our papers and try to pretend we don’t exist.’

‘So I’m in bed with a crank, huh?’ grinned Iain. ‘Cool.’ He kissed her, threw back the duvet, grabbed his towel from the floor. He paused at the bathroom door, turned. ‘And no going through my stuff this time,’ he said, gesturing at his holdall. ‘We know how that ends. Watch TV or something instead.’

II

The signs had been there, in the minutes leading up to it, that the dam had been about to burst. The chants in Taksim Square had turned increasingly belligerent. Small surges of demonstrators towards the police lines, almost playful to start with, had grown in frequency and aggression. Parents who’d hoped for a fun and cheap day out grabbed their children’s hands and headed briskly for the exit roads. And the police stepped up their own preparations too, putting on masks in anticipation of tear-gas, picking up their shields and batons.

A man holding a placard was shoved from behind by a youth in a Fenerbache scarf. He stumbled into one policeman and his placard hit another. They laid into him with their batons. He staggered off a few dazed paces, blood streaming from his forehead, then collapsed in an ugly heap. A roar went up. A volley of empty bottles and other litter was launched at the police, with rocks and other nastier missiles mixed in. Skirmishes broke out, turned quickly into running battles. Mounted police charged from one side; tear-gas canisters were fired from the other. Pandemonium took hold as panicked people tried to get away. A throng crushed up against temporary barriers set up to seal off a shopping street. The pressure proved too much for them, they gave way. The crowd spilled down it like a river in full spate. Most simply wanted to get to safety but others saw a chance for easy pickings. Plate-glass windows were smashed, clothes and jewellery grabbed. The steel shutters outside a large department store were jemmied up while a TV camera crew filmed it live for the news.

Police reinforcements were urgently summoned. But reports were now streaming in of trouble elsewhere. A builders’ merchant was on fire in Beşiktaş; a carpet shop in Üsküdar. Cars had been upturned and set ablaze all across the city. The Interior Minister went on television to assure the nation everything was in hand, but the split-screens showed the truth of it: the worsening mayhem in Taksim Square; a TV helicopter circling a city block on fire; young men with their faces hidden by hoods and scarves calmly looting an electronics store while police officers stood helplessly by.

And all that was before the bombs started going off.

III

Iain came out of the bathroom pulling on his last clean shirt to discover that Karin had indeed turned on the TV. A news channel was showing bewildered people covered in cement dust emerging from smoke, so that his first thought was that it was more footage from Daphne. But then he realized that this was something new. He sat on the bed beside her. ‘Where?’

‘Izmir,’ Karin told him. ‘But there’s been one in Bursa too. And you should see Istanbul. The whole country’s on fire. What the hell’s going on?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Iain. ‘Not for sure.’

She looked sharply at him. ‘But you think you do?’

Iain hesitated. He didn’t much want to open the door onto that part of his life; but she had a right to know. ‘Do you remember, when you were a kid, a scandal in Holland about things called Stay Behind Organizations?’

‘No. What are they?’

It would sound crazy if he came straight out with it. He had to give her some background first. ‘Okay. It goes back to the end of World War Two. We’d defeated Hitler, only to be faced with Stalin instead. Churchill fully expected war. It needed to be prepared for. Resistance groups had proved their value against the Nazis, even though they’d been set up on the hoof. Think how much more effective they’d have been if we’d been able to set them up in advance.’

‘Stay Behind Organizations,’ murmured Karin.

‘Our enemies were communists,’ said Iain. ‘Our natural allies, therefore, were nationalists and ultra-right-wingers — pretty much exactly the same people we’d just been fighting. We brought likely prospects to England, taught them how to identify and recruit others, raise funds, make bombs, assassinate and sabotage. We effectively wrote the handbook of modern terrorism then gave it to them. When we Brits ran out of cash, the CIA took over. They weren’t scared only of the Soviets invading, they were equally nervous that some European country would vote the communists into power and so bring down NATO from within. Their response was something called the strategy of tension. It involved having their pet Stay Behind Organizations run high-casualty bombing campaigns then blame them on left-wing terrorist groups — of which there were plenty, mind you. The idea was that the situation would get so out of hand that the public would demand the restoration of security, whatever it took. That would give the army the perfect excuse to step in. They’d arrest a long list of left-wing politicians, academics, trade unionists and writers, and the bombings would magically stop.’

Karin looked horrified at him. ‘Are you serious?’

‘Yes.’

‘How do you know all this?’

Iain sighed, reluctant to admit that for years this had been his own life, and that he’d been proud of it too. For the curse of it was that it always seemed to start with honourable intentions, with a refusal to watch passively as good people suffered under terrible regimes. But the violence needed to overthrow those regimes poisoned everything. And so, one day, you’d walk unexpected into a compound captured by men you’d trained yourself only to find them standing among the executed corpses of their former enemies, and their young families. For no one back home ever seemed to learn the bitter truth of it: that the enemy of your current enemy all too often simply became your next enemy. ‘It’s public domain,’ he told her. ‘It came out in the early 1990s. The Gladio investigations. Every country in Western Europe had its own version, including Holland. But they never got all the way to the bottom of it. Too many powerful people and institutions were implicated. Besides, there was no real appetite for it. The Cold War had been won, you see. It was history.’

Karin looked bleakly back at the TV. ‘Oh hell,’ she said.

IV

It was a curiously telling way to learn about a man, looking through his photographs of himself and his friends. By that light, Zehra didn’t much warm to Yasin Baykam. The only thing to be said in his favour was that at least he’d taken them down and hidden them in his closet; as though he’d grown ashamed of the man he’d once been.

It was easy to work out which ones had been in the picture frames. They were backed with card, and mostly had dates and locations pencilled upon them. She examined one now: black and white, unevenly faded, starting to curl up a little at the edges, revealing the dried yellow glue beneath, and exuding a faint yet evocative chemical smell. In the next, six young men were sitting around a campfire in a clearing in a forest, roasting chunks of meat on skewers. Now they were marching down a city street, parading the banners of the Nationalist Movement Party and carrying placards demanding war with Greece. He and three friends then held their forearms up for the camera, showing off matching tattoos of grey wolves. Now he was in army uniform, a rifle in one hand, his other draped around the shoulders of a young woman struggling not to show her fear. Then a very different shot, Baykam standing sheepishly alongside a stick-thin teenage girl, an older woman with a broad flat nose and an older version of himself that could only be his father. Home on leave. When she saw where it had been taken, she tapped Andreas on his arm. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘He came from Antioch.’

Andreas had made discoveries of his own: a sheaf of handwritten letters on distinctive thick yellow paper. ‘Did you read these?’ he asked.

‘They’re in foreign.’

‘They’re from the daughter of the family who used to own his house.’

‘Ah,’ said Zehra. There’d been a plague of these pests since the border with the south had been opened. They came to gawp at your house and make pointed comments about the improvements you’d made, trying to make you feel guilty for building a new life after having been chased out of your own childhood home. ‘And?’

‘The first one is very formal. Merlina introduces herself. She lived in his house as a young girl. She has her own children now. With his permission, she’d love to show them where she grew up. But these later ones…’

‘Yes?’

He held up another letter, a colour photograph pinned to its top corner. Yasin Baykam looking faintly bewildered, surrounded by a family of five, all smiling broadly for the camera, the little boy standing in front grinning crazily and giving two thumbs-up while his elder sisters each held gifts of food they’d brought. Zehra’s heart gave an unexpectedly powerful thump as she looked at it, at the thought that even a man like this could find a new family after he was grown old. She gestured at the photographs spread out on the floor. ‘These used to be on his walls,’ she said. ‘He must have taken them down before these people came to visit. Then he never put them back up again.’

‘Men of violence often mellow as they grow old,’ nodded Andreas, getting onto his hands and knees to look at her photos. ‘They come to regret the things they once did. Imagine that you’d been a fiercely nationalistic Turk, the Greeks your sworn enemies. You’d defeated them on Cyprus, you’d taken one of their houses as rightful booty. But now the former owners come to visit. And they’re nothing like what you’ve imagined. They’re nice. They’re warm. They bring you pies. And, despite yourself, you like them. That would have to shake your view of the world, wouldn’t it?’

‘That’s why he went to see the Professor,’ murmured Zehra. ‘He wanted to make amends.’

Andreas was still glancing over her photographs. Suddenly he froze. ‘I’ll be fucked,’ he said. He rested his weight on one hand and reached across to turn one of the photographs around to face him. It showed Baykam standing in front of a tank with a tall, good-looking officer, a bandanna around his forehead. ‘It’s the Lion,’ he said. ‘I’ll swear to God that’s the Lion he’s with.’

Zehra shook her head. ‘The who?’

‘The Lion of Famagusta. General Kemal Yilmaz. Turkey’s Chief of the General Staff himself.’