Empire of Lies

12

Over at the Hurrem Sultan Külliye, Ramazan was bringing his patient back to consciousness.

Enough time had passed since the surgery, and all the signs were positive. The mystery man had a stable heartbeat. The oxygenation level in his blood was good. His renal function was normal. There was no bleeding in the drainage tubes coming out of the sides of his chest. The lung X-rays were fine. Of equal importance to Ramazan, however, was that the cardiothoracic nurses’ night shift would be ending soon, and he figured that a tired nurse would make it easier for him to get some time alone with his patient.

He was pleased to find that Anbara wasn’t on duty. They hadn’t discussed the man’s surprising outburst just before the surgery, and Ramazan wasn’t keen to bring it up with her yet either. He needed to understand more about what was going on and thought that the more time that passed without discussing it with her, the more he could downplay it, if need be.

With another nurse assisting him, Ramazan initiated the recovery process, gradually reducing the level of drugs passing through the IV line while monitoring the man’s reactions, only this time he was doing it slightly differently. His objective wasn’t to bring the patient back to full consciousness as fast as possible.

He had something else in mind.

He watched as the man’s vitals ticked up, and then he saw the first stirrings of awakening. There was movement behind the tattooed man’s eyelids before they fluttered, barely at first, then more noticeably. Patients were groggy and disoriented when they awakened after surgery. For some, it didn’t take too long to become clearheaded, but for others it can take hours. That was what Ramazan was after: he intended to keep his patient in a bleary state as long as possible. A state where he would be unguarded about what he said.

Making sure the nurse was focused elsewhere, Ramazan tweaked the setting on the tattooed man’s IV line so it would keep delivering a mild dose of sedative, along with some of the anesthetic. How much he’d need to achieve the state he was after, though, was a guess. He’d never attempted to prolong a patient’s delirium. It went against everything he stood for as a doctor and clearly violated the rules and practices of his profession. Despite the trepidation pulsating inside him, despite the crippling tightness spreading across his body, he kept going.

He wasn’t sure why he was doing this, but he didn’t stop to think about it too much. He was doing it, regardless of the consequences, driven by a curiosity he couldn’t suppress, the excitement of it egging him on, feeding on itself. It wasn’t like him. In fact, he’d never done something like this before. It wasn’t his style. He could picture his brother Kamal doing it. Kamal was the one with an appetite for risk and a disdain for rules. Ramazan had always been the sensible one. The safe, reasonable, measured one. The boring, methodical anesthesiologist. And maybe that was why he was doing it. Maybe he needed to be more adventurous.

Maybe that was what Nisreen also needed him to be.

Less than a minute later, the tattooed man was slowly emerging from unconsciousness.

“How are you doing, sir?” Ramazan asked him. He gave him a moment, then tapped his left arm gently. “Can you raise this arm?”

The man was clearly groggy. He also couldn’t talk, given the breathing tube that was down his throat. Ramazan felt the man move his arm slightly. He checked his breathing, took his hand, and squeezed it, looking for a reaction to make sure there was no residual paralysis. Once he was satisfied that all the signs were good, he had the nurse assist him in removing the man’s breathing tube and replacing it with a nasal cannula.

“You see,” Ramazan told him after it was all done, “you’re as good as new. We didn’t screw up, just as you ordered. How could we, with someone as important as you, right?”

He gave the nurse a wry little wink as he said it, but he was more focused on his patient, looking for a reaction. The man’s eyes were roaming the ceiling, still fighting his drooping eyelids, but then their eyes connected, and he detected something: a hint of a grin and the smallest, slowest of nods.

Ramazan had got through.

He turned to the nurse. “I’ve got this. You can finish up with the rest of your roster.”

The nurse seemed surprised. “Are you sure?”

“Yes. You’ve had a long night. I can take care of this. You should finish up and head home.”

The nurse hesitated, then nodded. “Okay. Thank you, that’s very kind.” She smiled, threw a last passing glance at the patient, then walked out.

A pregnant silence smothered the room, punctuated by the low beeps from the monitors.

Ramazan checked the tattooed man’s drugs, then leaned across so he could see him.

“You were right,” he told him. “We owe you. All of us. We’re all grateful to you.”

The man looked at him, his features shuttered with confusion and tiredness. But then it appeared again. The small, self-congratulatory nod.

Anticipation rushed through Ramazan.

“But I’m sure you’d also like me to convey your thanks to the staff,” he said, coaxing him softly. “They’d be most honored. What can I tell them, on your behalf?”

Ramazan watched with a tingle of anticipation as the man’s expression clouded. The patient seemed to be mired with confusion and was clearly having trouble ordering his thoughts. Then he seemed to reach some inner peace and spoke, his voice coarse and weak, his words still in that formal, classical dialect. “Tell them that it is not only I, your governor, but our esteemed padishah, the sultan muhteşem Mehmed himself, nay the entire people of the empire, who are thankful for all your efforts in bringing your governor back to good health.”

Ramazan felt the air rush out of his lungs in a flight of dejection.

The governor?

Ramazan scoffed inwardly, trying to suppress his derision while scolding himself for letting things get this far. The governor, every citizen of the Paris eyalet, if not of the empire, knew who that was at the time of muhteşem Mehmed—Mehmed the Magnificent, the illustrious Mehmed IV, the sultan whose army had conquered Paris and much of Europe. The governor’s name was Ayman Rasheed Pasha. He had been the sultan’s philosopher-royal and special counselor, and he was a titan of Ottoman history. He was in all the history books, and the monuments to his legacy could be seen all over the city, testaments to his glory.

So this delusional joker thinks he’s Ayman Rasheed Pasha, he thought. He felt deflated with disappointment. This had been a huge waste of time, but then what did he expect? He had allowed his imagination to run away with him, spurred by a deep-seated need for something unexpected, some magic that might inject some vigor into his life—and his marriage.

He needed to bring the man off the drugs and hope his little excursion outside the bounds of hospital regulations would pass unnoticed. Then he’d leave the man in the nurses’ care and try to forget any of it had happened.

He was reaching for the IV line when the man said, “It would please me to take you back with me. You would be my hekimbaşı,” he added—his chief physician.

Ramazan paused. Playing along, he said, “It would be an honor. But back where?”

The man looked at him curiously, as if he were surprised that Ramazan didn’t know. “To Paris, of course.”

More nonsense. “But we are in Paris, your excellency.”

The man shook his head slowly, a sly twinkle in his eyes. “Not your Paris. Mine.”

“Your Paris?”

“Yes,” the man said. “You could make sure I remain in good health, and it would save me from having to make the journey back here again, if there were complications. It’s quite tiring, you know. And there’s always a risk.”

Ramazan studied his patient warily, now wondering how quickly he could shut down this absurd conversation and get back to reality. “A risk?” he asked, deciding he might as well bring the man back to full consciousness now and be done with this mockery. “How so?”

“It’s not so easy to travel three hundred years across time. You have to be careful.”

Ramazan suppressed a snort. “So you’ve done this before?”

“Oh, yes.”

“When did this all start?”

And then Rasheed began to explain.

Slowly, at first. Then, with Ramazan realizing he needed to hear more and managing the drugs to keep him on the edge of delirium while maintaining a coherence to his words, he spoke more, with Ramazan coaxing him on with carefully worded questions and prompts.

Keeping the nurses at bay, Ramazan kept the man talking for a long time. And the story that he heard didn’t seem to him to be that of a delusional nutcase or an enemy of the state.

Far from it.

In his own wishful delusion, Ramazan had come to the hospital hoping for a revelation that might change his life.

What he got instead was a story that went beyond anything he could have ever imagined.