Elisabeth Kostova - The Historian

“Turgut was watching me. ‘This church was endowed by Dracula during his second reign,’ he said quietly.

“I stood gazing at the picture for a moment longer. Then I could bear no more and I shut the book. Turgut took it from my hand and put it away. When he turned to me, his look was fierce. ‘And now, my friend, how do you intend to find Professor Rossi?’

“The blunt question went into me like a blade. ‘I’m still trying to piece all this information together,’ I admitted slowly, ‘and even with your generous work last night-and Mr. Aksoy’s-I don’t feel we know much. Perhaps Vlad Dracula put in some kind of appearance in Istanbul after his death, but how can we find out if he was buried here, or still is? That remains a mystery to me. As far as our next move goes, I can only tell you that we are going to Budapest for a few days.’

“‘ Budapest?’ I could almost see the conjectures racing across his broad face.

“‘Yes. You remember Helen told you the story of her mother and Professor-her father. Helen feels strongly that her mother might have information for us that Helen’s never drawn out of her, so we’re going to talk with her mother in person. Helen’s aunt is someone important in the government and will arrange it, we hope.’

“‘Ah.’ He almost smiled. ‘Thank the gods for friends in high places. When will you leave?’

“‘Perhaps tomorrow or the day after. We’ll stay five or six days, I think, and then come back here.’

“‘Very well. And you must carry this with you.’ Turgut stood up suddenly and took from a cabinet the little vampire-hunting kit he had shown us the day before. He set it squarely in front of me.

“‘But that is one of your treasures,’ I objected. ‘Anyway, they might not let it through customs.’

“‘Oh, you must never show it at customs. You must hide it with the greatest care. Check your suitcase to see if you can put it in the lining somewhere, or better yet let Miss Rossi carry it. They will not search a woman’s luggage as thoroughly.’ He nodded encouragement. ‘But I will not feel easy in my heart unless you take it. While you are in Budapest, I will be looking through many old books to try to help you, but you will be hunting a monster. For now, keep it in your briefcase-it is very thin and light.’ I took the wooden box without another word and fitted it in next to my dragon book. ‘And while you are interviewing Helen’s mother, I will be digging around here for every possible hint of a tomb. I have not given up on the idea yet.’ He narrowed his eyes. ‘It would explain very much about the plagues that have cursed our city since that period we have been speaking of. If we could not only explain them but end them -’

“At that moment the door to his study opened and Mrs. Bora put in her head to call us to lunch. It was as delicious a meal as the one we’d eaten there the day before, but a much more somber one. Helen was quiet and looked tired, Mrs. Bora handed around the dishes with silent grace, and Mr. Erozan, although he sat up for a while to join us, was unable to eat much. Mrs. Bora made him drink a quantity of red wine, however, and eat some meat, which seemed to restore him somewhat. Even Turgut was subdued and seemed melancholy. Helen and I took our leave as soon as we politely could.

“Turgut saw us out of the building and shook our hands with all his usual warmth, urging us to call him when we knew our travel plans and promising us unabated hospitality on our return. Then he nodded to me and patted my briefcase, and I realized he was referring silently to the kit inside. I nodded in response and made a little gesture to Helen to tell her I’d explain later. Turgut waved until we could no longer see him under the lindens and poplars, and when he was out of sight, Helen put her arm wearily through mine. The air smelled of lilacs, and for a minute, on that dignified gray street, walking through patches of dusty sunlight, I could have believed we were on vacation in Paris.”

“Helen was indeed tired, and I reluctantly left her to nap at the pension. I didn’t like her being alone there, but she pointed out that broad daylight was probably protection enough. Even if the evil librarian knew our whereabouts, he was not likely to enter locked rooms at midday, and she had her little crucifix with her. We had several hours before Helen could call her aunt again, and there was nothing we could do to arrange our trip until we received her instructions. I put my briefcase into Helen’s care and forced myself to leave the premises, feeling I would go stir-crazy if I stayed there pretending to read or trying to think.

“It seemed a good opportunity to see something else in Istanbul, so I made my way toward the mazelike, domed Topkapi Palace complex, commissioned by Sultan Mehmed as the new seat of his conquest. It had drawn me both from a distance and in my guidebook since our first afternoon in the city. The Topkapi covers a large area on the headland of Istanbul and is guarded on three sides by water: the Bosphorus, the Golden Horn, and the Marmara. I suspected that if I missed it, I would be missing the essence of Istanbul ’s Ottoman history. Perhaps I was strolling far afield from Rossi once again, but I reflected that Rossi himself would have done the same with a few hours of enforced idleness.

“I was disappointed to learn, as I wandered the parks, courtyards, and pavilions where the heart of the Empire had pulsed for hundreds of years, that little from Mehmed’s time was on exhibit there-little apart from some ornaments from his treasury and some of his swords, nicked and scarred from prodigious use. I think I had hoped more than anything to catch another glimpse of the sultan whose army had battled Vlad Dracula’s, and whose police courts had been concerned about the security of his alleged tomb in Snagov. It was rather, I thought-remembering the old men’s game in the bazaar-like trying to determine the position of your opponent’s shah inshahmat by knowing only the position of your own.

“There was plenty in the palace to keep my thoughts busy, however. According to what Helen had told me the day before, this was a world in which more than five thousand servants with titles such as Great Turban-Winder had once served the will of the sultan; where eunuchs guarded the virtue of his enormous harem in what amounted to an ornate prison; where Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent, reigning in the mid-sixteenth century, had consolidated the Empire, codified its laws, and made Istanbul as glorious a metropolis as it had been under the Byzantine emperors. Like them, the sultan traveled out into his city once a week to worship at Hagia Sophia-but on Friday, the Muslim holy day, not Sunday. It was a world of rigid protocol and sumptuous dining, of marvelous textiles and sensuously beautiful tile work, of viziers in green and chamberlains in red, of fantastically colored boots and towering turbans.

“I had been particularly struck by Helen’s description of the Janissaries, a crack corps of guards selected from the ranks of captured boys from all over the Empire. I knew I had read about them before, these boys born Christian in places like Serbia and Wallachia and raised in Islam, trained in hatred of the very peoples they sprang from and unleashed on those peoples when they reached manhood, like falcons to the kill. I had seen images of the Janissaries somewhere, in fact, perhaps in a book of paintings. Thinking about their expressionless young faces, massed to protect the sultan, I felt the chill of the palace buildings deepen around me.

“It occurred to me, as I moved from room to room, that the young Vlad Dracula would have made an excellent Janissary. The Empire had missed an opportunity there, a chance to harness a little more cruelty to its enormous force. They would have had to catch him quite young, I thought, perhaps to have kept him in Asia Minor instead of returning him to his father. He had been too independent after that, a renegade, loyal to no one but himself, as quick to execute his own followers as he was to kill his Turkish enemies. Like Stalin-I surprised myself with this mental leap as I gazed out at the glint of the Bosphorus. Stalin had died the year before, and new tales of his atrocities had leaked into the Western press. I remembered one report about an apparently loyal general whom Stalin had accused just before the war of wanting to overthrow him. The general had been removed from his apartment in the middle of the night and hung upside down from the beams of a busy railway station outside Moscow for several days until he died. The passengers getting on and off the trains had all seen him, but no one had dared to glance twice in his direction. Much later, the people in that neighborhood had not been able to agree on whether or not this had even happened.