Secrets of the Dead

XLIII

Istanbul, Turkey – Present Day

‘YOU GO IN alone. Look around, take some photos, then come back.’

Abby sat in the back seat of the taxi in a busy shopping street in a north-western district of Istanbul. The taxi was genuine; the driver was Barry, still in his dark glasses, but now with a leather jacket and a gold chain around his neck. Mark sat in the passenger seat opposite and pointed down the road, where the myriad domes of the Fatih Mosque bubbled down on each other until they vanished behind a large stone gate.

‘Don’t try anything like escaping,’ Barry said from the front seat. ‘You’re not really alone.’

They’d touched down in Istanbul twelve hours ago. She was done with buses, borrowed cars and stolen passports: with Mark in charge, an unmarked plane had flown them out of Split and straight to Ataturk Airport. A delegation of hard-faced men in rigid suits had met them and escorted them through a private channel past customs and immigration.

‘The government here can’t wait to get their hands on Dragović,’ Mark had explained during the drive from the airport. ‘They had him in prison three years ago and he escaped – that was a big embarrassment. They don’t appreciate what he did to Muslims in Bosnia either, for that matter. They giving us everything they can.’

‘How do they know Dragović will come? If he was in prison here once before, won’t he be shy of risking it again?’

‘He’ll come,’ Mark had said confidently. ‘All our networks are telling us he’s absolutely obsessed with this thing. Won’t trust it to anyone else.’

Abby got out of the car, made a show of sticking a ten-lira note through the window to Barry, and walked down to the mosque. She’d been to Istanbul once before, for an ICC conference, but that had been high summer when the city groaned with tourists and dust clogged the hot air. Now, in late autumn, the city seemed to have shrunk as it cooled. There was more air; the spaces between the buildings felt wider. The noise of the ships in the Bosphorus sounded unnaturally loud.

The tourists had gone home, but the street was still busy with locals shopping or visiting the mosque for their devotions. A white police van sat on the corner; two more policemen with automatic weapons wandered down the street, chatting to each other. Abby wondered if that was normal.

Mark had given her a guidebook as part of her cover. She opened it to the right page, and read the brief entry on the Fatih Mosque. Fatih meant conqueror, she learned. On the highest point of the highest hill in the city, the Ottomon sultan Mehmet the Conquerer had razed the old Church of the Twelve Holy Apostles and built his mausoleum on its foundations, when he captured Constantinople in 1453. Three hundred years later, an earthquake had destroyed his mosque; his successors had rebuilt it in what the guidebook called Ottoman Baroque style.

She went through the gate, into a wide open park of square lawns and leafless trees. The mosque stood in the centre, as if in a state of siege. Steel hoardings surrounded its base; scaffolding climbed its outer walls. Abby looked for any sign of the Roman building that had once stood there, but couldn’t see anything. She wondered, not for the first time, how a treasure like the labarum could have remained hidden through all the centuries of renovations, excavations, demolitions and rebuildings. Surely someone would have noticed something. Or perhaps it lay buried under a thousand years of rubble.

Mark had given her a camera. She took some pictures – a few general tourist views, some of less obvious features like doors, culverts and drainpipes. Make it look as if you’re scoping it out, Mark had told her. Look furtive. That part was easy enough.

She didn’t go into the mosque, but skirted around the outside to the back. This part was a cemetery: flat graves surrounded by wrought-iron fences; pillars that had once supported canopies now chopped off at the knees. And beyond them, far grander than the others though still dwarfed by the mosque, an octagonal mausoleum topped by a dome.

Abby’s heart beat a little faster. The octagonal shape was exactly like Diocletian’s mausoleum in Split. Could this be Constantine’s? She opened the guidebook again.

‘Behind the main mosque stands the türbe or tomb of Mehmet the Conqueror, reconstructed in the Baroque style after the earthquake …’

She should have known. And yet she still found the parallel intriguing. Mehmet the Conqueror and Constantine the Unconquered. Two men separated by religion and geography and a thousand years, but both wanting the world to know they had dominated. Two men who, for all their differences, had chosen to be buried in the same place. Was it Mehmet’s way of conquering the past – burying Constantine beneath him the same way the mosque buried the church? Abby didn’t think so. It was affinity, not rivalry, that had brought him here. He wanted the company.

Gruber: There are certain places where power abides. This was one of them – she could feel it. She thought of the dead man in Kosovo, Gaius Valerius Maximus, and wondered if he’d walked through this same courtyard, in the service of the Emperor who first built it.

She snapped a few more pictures, finished her circuit of the mosque and went back out on to the street. A taxi rolled by, the same number as before. She pretended to hail it and got in.

‘Well?’ Mark said.

She clipped on her seatbelt as the car started moving. ‘I didn’t see Dragović, if that’s what you were expecting. There’s a lot of building work going on, though. It looks as if they’ve excavated down near the foundations. That might give him a way in.’

‘We’ll get on to the Culture Ministry. Perhaps we can slip a couple of people into the crews to look out for anything dubious.’

His phone buzzed. He tapped the screen, read the message and grunted.

‘No sign of Dragović moving yet. We’re watching the airports in all his known haunts. We’ve also put out the word to our networks. Nothing yet.’

Abby remembered the man in the black room in Rome, his silver gun against her head. She shivered.

‘Will he suspect anything?’

‘We gave the necklace and the text to a man called Giacomo in Belgrade.’

‘I’ve met him.’

Mark’s head flicked up; he gave her a suspicious stare. ‘You’ve got some interesting connections. When we get you back to London, we’ll have to sit down and have a conversation about all the people you’ve met.’

‘Can’t wait.’

They drove past a vast brick aqueduct, so huge that buses could easily drive through its arches. Just beyond it, Barry stopped the taxi on the kerb by a park. Mark ushered Abby out.

‘Go back and keep an eye on the mosque,’ he told Barry. ‘Call if anything happens. And no guns,’ he added. ‘If we start shooting up a mosque, we’ll have another fatwa on our hands before we know it. Starting from Whitehall.’

The taxi roared away and carved an aggressive U-turn across seven lanes of traffic. If Barry was trying to impersonate a Turkish taxi driver, he had the cover perfect. Almost as soon as he’d gone, an unmarked blue hatchback pulled up in its place. Mark and Abby climbed in; Abby wondered how many SIS agents – she assumed they were SIS – were swarming around Istanbul.

‘Where now?’

‘You wait at the hotel with Connie. I need to go to the consulate to talk to some people.’

The thought of sitting in another hotel room, watching canned TV and waiting for other people to decide her fate made her ill.

‘Isn’t there something I can do?’

‘Leave it to the professionals.’ He was so condescending she wanted to slap him. ‘Even if we did trust you – which we don’t – there’s nothing you can do.’

Thanks for spelling that out.

‘So what was that business at the mosque for? If Dragović’s people are watching me, you think they’re going to believe I just turn up, take a few photos and go back to the hotel? Don’t you think you can make it a little more convincing?’

‘What did you have in mind?’ Mark was looking out of the window, not really listening. Abby thought quickly.

‘There must be some kind of historical library in Istanbul. Somewhere that would have books about the Fatih Mosque, Constantine’s mausoleum and so on. Someone must have done some archaeological work on it in the last five hundred years.’

‘Are you a historian?’

‘I’m a lawyer. You get pretty good digging through a mountain of old documents looking for evidence. And as far as Dragović knows, I’m supposed to be looking for ways to sneak in underneath the mosque. Maybe I’ll even find something.’

Mark tapped away at the screen of his phone. Abby wondered if it substituted for thought.

‘OK.’

The palace stood at the eastern end of the peninsula, bordered by nothing but the sea. Not a palace in the monolithic western style, like Blenheim or Versailles – solid monuments to power. This was an eastern palace: a complex organism that grew and sprawled over centuries, a place of shady courtyards and quiet corners where lovers and plotters could listen and conspire.

Most of the site was a park: broad paths winding between oaks and elms, with the sea sparkling through the trees. Abby let herself in through a gate, trying to ignore the Connie-shaped shadow that followed twenty yards back. She walked past Hagia Eirene – the Church of Holy Peace, one of the oldest in Istanbul – and around to the one courtyard where classical columns and porticoes still held their own against the surrounding minarets and domes. Somehow, after two thousand years, there was still nothing that said ‘museum’ quite like Graeco-Roman architecture.

She’d called ahead. The receptionist showed her through to the library at the back of the building, a long room whose high windows looked out across the grounds to the pointed towers of the main palace gate. The librarian had perfect English and a perfect smile: in no time, a small pile of books and journals had appeared on the oak table beside her. Abby started reading.

From the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, she learned that the first construction on the mosque site had been a circular mausoleum built by Constantine for himself. His son Constantius had added a cruciform church; emperors had been buried there until 1028, when they ran out of room.

The article listed references for further reading, including a contemporary description of the mausoleum by the Bishop Eusebius, Constantine’s biographer.

The building stood impossibly high, every inch glinting with gemstones of every colour. The roof was gilded, reflecting back the sun’s rays to dazzle watchers for miles around.

It sounded like the sort of place you might keep your most valuable treasure. Abby read on through later, less evocative historians, skimming through pages of argument and counter-argument, speculation and guesswork. It seemed that no one had managed to add much definite about Constantine’s mausoleum since Eusebius – and with the mosque now planted on top of it, no one was likely to either.

At the bottom of the pile was a dog-eared archaeology journal. It mentioned an excavation done in the 1940s, which had found traces of Byzantine stonework, and a colonnaded cistern under the mosque courtyard. It observed that the mihrab inside the mosque – the holy niche that directed worshippers towards Mecca – wasn’t centred on the mosque walls. Anomalies and asymmetries in architecture often happened if a new building was built on old foundations, the authors said: by looking at what didn’t line up, you could infer what lay underneath.

That jogged something in Abby’s mind, an uneasy asymmetry in her own thoughts. It niggled, but she couldn’t place it. She read on.

‘During the excavations in the 1950s, the Director of Tombs reported the discovery of a Byzantine chamber under the mihrab of the modern mosque, accessible via a tunnel from the cellar of Mehmet the Conqueror’s mausoleum.’

She stared: her head spun. She felt herself trembling as she read the final sentence of the conclusion.

‘Perhaps the original Roman structure, last resting place of the emperor Constantine, has at last been found.’

She went over to the librarian and flashed her most beguiling smile.

‘Is there still a Director of Tombs in Istanbul?’

He nodded. ‘This office is part of the General Directorate of Monuments and Museums.’

‘Where can I find him?’

He looked surprised. ‘Here in this building. The office is upstairs. I can call for you if you want.’ Abby hesitated, then nodded. The librarian picked up the phone and spoke briefly. ‘One moment.’

A minute later, Abby heard high heels clacking on the wooden floor. The door opened and in walked a tall, strikingly beautiful woman with long black hair and an elegant dark dress. Her lips, her nails and her shoes were all bright red; her eyes were shadowed a shimmering aquamarine. Abby had rarely felt so drab – a disgrace to every ideal of femininity.

‘Dr Yasemin Ipek,’ the woman introduced herself. And then, seeing the doubt in Abby’s face, ‘I am the Director of Tombs.’

It was hard to imagine her scrambling around in dank, ancient holes underground.

‘I understand you are interested in the tomb of Constantine the Great?’ She smiled. ‘I have many tombs in my directorate. Sadly, his has been lost for centuries.’

Abby pointed to the article and quoted the last line. ‘It says here there’s a Byzantine chamber right underneath the holiest point of the mosque.’

Dr Ipek nodded. ‘I have read about this excavation. One of the directors of this museum, Professor Firatli, conducted it after the war. In fact, if you go into the crypt underneath Mehmet’s mausoleum, you can still see the wooden boards they put up to close the passage.’

‘Have you ever opened it?’

‘Never.’

‘How about in the 1940s? Do you know if they found anything down there? Any kind of relic or artefact?’

Dr Ipek narrowed her eyes. ‘There is nothing in the records.’

‘Is it possible to open the chamber?’

Abby could see the warmth fading from Dr Ipek’s face; a discreet glance at the silver wristwatch.

‘It is closed for structural reasons. The chamber is directly under the wall of the mosque, and we have many earthquakes here. You would have to apply for a permit from the minister directly.’

She saw Abby’s disappointment and relented a little. ‘You were thinking perhaps you will find Constantine’s lost sarcophagus under there?’

‘Something like that.’

‘Sometimes I wonder the same. But Professor Firatli was a scholar. If he had discovered something, he would have reported it.’ She smiled to herself. ‘Poor Constantine. He should have kept to his original plan and been buried in Rome. Then his tomb would have survived, and today he would be safe in the Vatican Museum.’

Abby blinked.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Constantine did not always intend to be buried in Constantinople, not until very late in his life. He built a mausoleum in Rome, which still stands at Tor Pignattara. When he changed his plan, he had his mother, the Dowager Empress Helena, buried there instead. You can still see her sarcophagus in the Vatican Museum.’

She carried on speaking, but Abby didn’t hear it. Her mind was racing, trying to compute all the names and dates she’d heard in the last few days.

CONSTANTINUS INVICTUS IMP AUG XXI.

XXI. Twenty-one probably means the twenty-first year of Constantine’s reign, which would date the poem to 326 or 327. For what that’s worth.

‘When did Constantine change his mind about where he wanted to be buried?’ she asked.

‘His mother died in 328. So far as we can tell, he did not start building the mausoleum in Constantinople until near his death. Nine years later.’

Abby’s mouth was dry. She knew she had to get this right.

‘So if someone was writing about Constantine’s tomb in the year 326 …’

Yasemin Ipek, Director of Tombs, finished the sentence for her.

‘… almost certainly, he meant the mausoleum in Rome.’

‘And you said it still survives.’

‘On the outskirts of Rome. It is just a ruin now.’ She smiled. ‘If you are interested in underground passages, I think this is the place for you. It stands above the catacomb of Saints Marcellus and Peter.’

‘Excuse me.’

Abby ran out of the library. Connie was waiting in the corridor, pretending to examine some Ottoman vases. She saw Abby coming and moved to cut her off, but Abby wasn’t trying to get past her.

‘We’re in the wrong place.’