The Gold of Thrace Read online

  The screech of brakes jolted him out of his haze, and for a moment he thought of Lilith, the Screech Owl Goddess with the feathered legs, and remembered Emma.

  “Where are we?” he asked.

  “Plovdiv,” she said.

  The train stumbled to a stop. Passengers waiting at the edge of the platform seemed to waver in the currents of air that eddied around the slowing train and backed away as the conductor lowered the steps. A milling crowd, waving leva and shouting for attention, surrounded an old woman selling sandwiches and bottled drinks in the far corner of the platform.

  “I haven’t eaten for two days,” Irena told him.

  “There’s a sandwich vendor out there,” Chatham said. He knew that she had seen the old woman, but he said it anyway. “I’ll get you something.” That was the least he could do for her. “Be right back.”

  Chatham lingered at the edge of the crowd, trying to find the end of the queue. Hands and arms reached over him, passing money and plastic-wrapped sandwiches back and forth over his head. No queue, just a wild grab of confusion. He pushed his way forward, almost overwhelmed by the smell of body heat, snatched a sandwich from the basket and threw down a ten leva note.

  He made his way back to the train just as the conductor pulled up the steps, and hurried toward the compartment.

  Irena was gone. The suitcase and Irena, both gone. Only a card was left on the seat.

  He looked out the compartment door and searched the passageway. The train began to move. He stumbled to the window and searched the platform. No sign of her. The platform receded as the train picked up speed. He hoped for a glimpse of her, waving, calling, running after the train. He would pull the emergency cord and rescue her, reach for her, pull her onto the train, her body close against his, warm and damp from the effort of running. The train emerged into the open air, into the countryside, and still he stood at the window, searching, hoping.

  Finally, he picked up the card and sat in her seat to catch the warmth of her, the scent of her.

  The card was printed in Cyrillic on one side and English on the other. It said:

  Irena Konstantinova

  Ulitza G.S. Rakovsky 10

  Blok 4, Entrance g, Floor 3, Apt. 26

  Sofia

  He held the card between his fingers and pictured holding her lovely face between his hands, imagined stroking the sleek softness of her skin. He stared into the space in front of him and summoned up the seductive sound of her voice, the graceful movement of her hands.

  Her presence haunted him. He gazed out the window at the hills and plane trees and saw the flutter of her hair in the stir of the leaves, the motion of her lashes in the gentle movement of tufts of grass in the breeze. He closed his eyes to remember more, hoping, as he lingered on the edge of sleep, to dream of her.

  He woke to the caw, caw, caw of a screech owl. Emma, angry again. He opened his eyes, feeling as if he had slept all night. His mouth was dry and he was disoriented, surprised that it was still daylight. He was on a train, he remembered. The noise was the bleat of the train signaling that they were going around a curve.

  It was strange, he thought, Emma as Lilith, the screech owl.

  He remembered a session on ancient mythology at a meeting on Near Eastern archaeology. One of the papers recounted an ancient Hebrew myth about Lilith as God’s mistake, created before Adam and Eve. The man delivering the paper said that Lilith gave birth only to monsters because she was asexual, that God banished her to Eilat and created Adam and Eve, man and woman, in her stead. The man giving the paper smirked and said the story wasn’t in the Scriptures because the redactors believed God shouldn’t make mistakes.

  Chatham thought of Emma as the child of Lilith and almost laughed out loud. He was fully awake now.

  He still held Irena’s card in his hand. He wondered whether she was in danger, whether the card was a cry for help.

  He pushed the button to call the porter and told him that he wanted his suitcase from the baggage car and gave him the chit.

  He waited for the porter to come back and pictured Irena again and again and felt inexplicably giddy with joy.

  The porter returned with the suitcase and dumped it on the seat across from Chatham.

  “Ten leva, please,” he said and Chatham gave him twelve.

  He thought of Emma, lying in the sun in a beach chair at Bodrum, her blonde hair stiff with bleach, her leathery tanned skin, her bony shoulders, and he got off the train at Sofia.

  He’d find Irena, he vowed, and he’d find the gold.

  He plunged into the chaos and milling crowds of the station and stopped at a stall to buy flowers.

  “Half a dozen roses, please,” he said in English, wondering if the flower seller could understand him.

  A dog, its coat dusty and unkempt, sniffed at his trousers and then scratched its fleas as it scraped its back along the sidewalk.

  “So many…” the woman hesitated, seemed to be searching for words, “strange dogs on the street in Sofia,” the woman said. “People can’t afford to feed pets, so they go loose and run in packs. Not too scary in the day, but at night they attack.”

  He paid the woman two leva and found a cab in the taxi rank. The driver had stepped out of the cab and said to him in English, “I take you wherever you wish.”

  Another enterprising Bulgarian, Chatham thought, who replaced Russian with English for the tourist trade.

  The cab driver tried to smile. He had steely blue eyes and a scar that reached across his cheek to his upper lip. It made him look like he was sneering, and Chatham felt sorry for him.

  “Ulitza G.S. Rakovski,” he said and showed the driver the card with Irena’s address.

  “I know where it is,” the driver said. “Near the city garden.”

  “I need a receipt,” Chatham said.

  The driver looked back at him, tore a slip of paper from a pad, and handed it back to him.

  “The meter,” Chatham told him. “Set the meter.”

  “It’s broken.”

  “How much to Ulitza Rakovsky?”

  “Fifty leva.”

  “Fifty?” He had to go to her, to save her from God knows what, he thought to himself. He shrugged and said okay.

  They drove down broad avenues created for parades, past blocks of large, dreary concrete apartment buildings, their facades cracked and peeling.

  “The Palace of Culture,” the driver said, gesturing to a building on the right. “When the Russians were here, there was a large ruby and gold star on the top that shone in the night. After they left, someone stole it. People get rich now from stealing.”

  “I’ll give you sixty leva if you get me there faster.”

  “Okay. I hurry.” The driver waved his hand to the left. “Here we have many museums. I show you Sofia.”

  Why had she left so suddenly, with no word?

  “Ulitza G.S. Rakovsky,” Chatham said.

  They passed a many-domed building, as pretentious as a dowager, its copper and gilded cupolas glinting in the sun.

  Maybe she didn’t want to see him. But she left the card.

  “The Cathedral of Saint Alexander Nevsky,” the taxi driver said, waving at the building.

  The taxi began to circumvent the cathedral while Chatham wondered what Irena was afraid of, why she left so suddenly.

  “The cathedral has a museum for icons in the basement,” the driver said. “You like icons? Bulgaria is famous for icons. I can get you an old one by a famous artist, cheap. You want?”

  “I want Rakovsky Street.”

  They had gone all around the cathedral by now and were starting a second circuit.

  “I can get you anything else you need in Sofia.” The driver slowed the taxi, reached into his pocket, and turned to face Chatham. “Anything,” he repeated. “You want my card? I give you my card.”

  Chatham waved it away. “Rakovsky Street. Now.”

  The driver shrugge
d, turned back to the wheel and started around the park behind the cathedral. He stopped in front of a large, square block of dilapidated stucco buildings.

  “Ulitza G.S. Rakofsky ten,” he said, “as you wished.”

  Chatham threw fifty leva into the front seat, grabbed his suitcase and bolted from the taxi. He searched for building numbers and finally found blue metal markers attached to the corner of each building just above the ground floor windows. He looked for Building 4, Entrance G. That must be gamma in Cyrillic, he thought, gamma. He ran inside and reached for the banister. It pulled from the wall into his hand.

  He sprinted up the stairs to the first landing, reached for the button to light the stairwell. It didn’t work. He dashed up another flight. This time when he pushed the button, a weak light flickered in the hallway. He ran up to the third floor landing and looked for apartment 26 in the dim light. He made his way down the hall, past doorway after doorway, 20, 22, and finally 26. He could just make out a strip of cardboard in the wavering light with the name Konstantinov in Cyrillic and Latin script taped on the door. He pushed the bell.

  The man from the railway station in Istanbul opened the door.

  Chapter Six

  Ephesus, Turkey, August 8, 1990

  “Terrible thing about Binali,” Kosay was saying.

  They were standing in the peristyle of an ancient Roman villa, surrounded by columns and a portico. The courtyard, open to the sky in the center of the house, gave light to all the rooms. They stood next to a shallow rectangular basin, an impluvium, built to catch water that ran off the roof to provide water for household tasks.

  Tamar, Orman, and Mustafa had clambered up the stairs with Kosay along the narrow lanes that separated the villas, above the remains of shops and taverns on the lowest level, to the slope above the Street of the Curetes so that Kosay could check the work on the restoration of one of the villas in the part of the city where prosperous Ephesians lived.

  “It’s for tourism, you know,” Kosay told them. “To make it authentic as possible to show life in Ephesus in the Late Roman period during the heyday of Ephesus when Artemis still ruled. Before she was replaced by Christianity.”

  On the way up, they had paused once to take a picture of a manhole that gave access to sewer pipes that led from the houses and was stamped with SPQR, the logo of the Roman Empire.

  Earlier that day, they had visited the house of the Virgin Mary on a wooded knoll on Bülbül Daği, the Mountain of the Nightingales, above the Magnesia Gate.

  Kosay had swept his arm in the direction of Ephesus and said, “You can just make it out from here, the road from the old harbor. Today, the harbor is three miles away,” Kosay said. “Once, the road from the harbor was lined with shops and grand public buildings.” He shook his head. “No more.”

  For a moment Tamar visualized him standing on the hilltop in the twilight after the tourists had left, presiding over Ephesus while the ghosts of the past whispered and whipped like wind through the grand boulevards and broken temples of the Ephesians. She almost expected him to say, “Mine, all mine, as far as the eye can see.”

  Instead, he said, “During the vernal equinox, pilgrims would crowd into Ephesus from all parts of the empire for the weeklong festival in honor of the goddess, pouring through the city gates and along the broad avenues. They shopped in the market stalls, bargaining for jewelry and small statues of the goddess, some of silver, some of gold and ivory with onyx hands and faces. They patronized the brothels, the baths. They used the public toilets.

  “In those days Ephesus was crammed with pilgrims from all over the Roman world. They came in the spring for the Vernal Festival to honor the beautiful Artemis, the Virgin Mother of the Gods, to walk along the Street of the Curetes, to marvel at the fountains and the grandeur of the temples, most of all the Temple of Artemis.”

  He paused. “It was burnt by the Goths,” he said.

  “The Ephesians were clever, you know. After Constantine, when the pilgrims stopped coming, all was not lost for the enterprising Ephesians. St. John, author of the Revelations, spent the last years of his life in Ephesus and is buried on the hill up there.”

  He pointed toward a hill in Selçuk that overlooked Ephesus. “His tomb became a place of pilgrimage.

  “Soon they began to circulate rumors that Mary had come to visit John and spent her last years here. And that’s not all,” he went on. “In the nineteenth century an Austrian nun had a dream in which she saw the house of the Virgin Mary, located up there. When the Austrian archaeologists came to dig, they found the house exactly where the nun said it would be, exactly how she described it.”

  He looked over at them with a smile. “It was built in the sixth century. Mary must have lived a miraculously long and sanctified life.” He lifted a quizzical eyebrow. “In the twentieth century, the popes declared the house a place of pilgrimage.”

  He gestured toward the trees surrounding the house, strung with prayers left by visitors to the holy site.

  “They say that Mary not only spent her last days here, she is also buried here.”

  “She’s buried in Jerusalem, in the Kidron Valley, across from St. Stephan’s Gate,” Tamar said.

  “Mary is buried in many places. She died well, and she died often, and according to the Italians, she never died at all, but went straight to heaven with her shoes on.”

  He paused a moment for an expressive shrug. “Christians outside of Ephesus knew nothing about this before the Council of Ephesus. Early travelers such as the Bordeaux Pilgrim and Egeria, a pilgrim from Aquitaine, visited Ephesus but never alluded to Mary in connection with the city.”

  They drove down the hill, stopping once at a souvenir kiosk, where Tamar bought a guidebook, a set of slides for lectures, and a statuette of Diana of Ephesus to put on the dashboard of her car, and then continued on to the main part of the site where Kosay was supervising the reconstruction of one of the Roman villas on the slope.

  ***

  Kosay inspected the remains of a fountain on the north side of the peristyle in the Roman house on the slope before he spoke again.

  “Binali called me from Kilis, you know,” he said. “He was upset, said something was very wrong, that he had to see me.”

  “Did he tell you what upset him?” Mustafa asked.

  “He didn’t want to say over the phone. I told him to come ahead.”

  “And then?” Orman asked.

  Kosay shrugged and sighed. “He was killed before I could see him.”

  “And the Kybele,” Orman said. “It was stolen the same day?”

  “Appalling. There’s a rash of thefts. The Kybele, the mosaic from your site.”

  “If you’re not careful,” Orman said, “they’ll steal your streets.”

  “It’s not a joke, Orman. I take my job as a custodian of the past seriously.”

  “As we all do,” Orman said.

  Kosay led them through the Roman house from room to room, all lit by an eerie light that filtered through splintered roofs. He pointed out frescoes of muses and patterned mosaic floors, water closets and fountains, as if he were a real estate agent showing an extravagant house in a California suburb.

  “They lived in luxury with kitchens and baths, central heating and running water,” he told them.

  “The best of everything,” Mustafa said, with a touch of envy and maybe a tinge of disapproval for their dissolute ways.

  Tamar had heard somewhere that Mustafa came from the mountains of Kurdistan, where even running water was a luxury.

  When Kosay finished, he led them down to the Street of the Curetes, named for the priests of the terrible Anatolian goddess Kybele.

  “This is where Binali was killed,” he said, pausing for a moment, pointing to a spot on the ground where the soil between the tesserae had darkened, and then went on down the street.

  In front of the arched entrance to Hadrian’s Temple, a young Brit had climbed on a plinth to str
ike a heroic pose, his backpack on the sidewalk, while his friend fidgeted with a camera. A woman with a minicam on her shoulder shouted to them, “Out of the way, out of the way.” She turned to Tamar and said, “Schrecklich. They are everywhere,” before Tamar moved on to join the others as they took a dogleg onto the Marble Road.

  Kosay stopped at the corner of the Street of the Curetes and Marble Street next to a footstep incised in the pavement.

  “This is the brothel, once filled with laughter. Now only silence,” he said. “Under the sand in there, there’s a mosaic floor with portraits of the women of the brothel.”

  He crossed into the brothel and took a whiskbroom from his back pocket. He brushed away the sand that covered the floor to reveal a mosaic portrait of a young woman with a long, melancholy face and dark-rimmed eyes, then he sighed and covered her again and led them further up the street.

  They passed the many-columned agora and continued on, stopping in front of the theatre.

  “This is where bulls and manhood were sacrificed for the glory of Artemis,” Kosay said. “And where the Ephesians attacked St. Paul. He stood there, ranting at them, and for three hours they attacked and harassed him, shouting, ‘Great is the Artemis of the Ephesians. Great is the Artemis of the Ephesians.’ They stoned him, almost killed him, your St. Paul.”

  He nodded toward Tamar, as if she had sole proprietorship of St. Paul. The accusation made her feel responsible for the decline of Ephesus, made her feel that if it weren’t for her, Artemis would still be alive and well, receiving the bloody testicles of bulls and supervising the castration of priests.

  They walked a little way along Arcadia Street, the broad colonnaded road paved with marble that once led to the harbor, to the parking lot and got into the van, and started up the road toward Selçuk.

  He drove a little way, stopped, and pointed to the ruins of a Byzantine church. “The Church of the Virgin Mary,” he said. “It was once a basilica near the port, a commercial exchange in the heyday of Ephesus. They converted it into this church in her honor. They hosted the third Ecumenical Council here at this church and had Mary declared a virgin, the Virgin Mother of God, just as Artemis was the Virgin Mother of the Gods.”