Free The Sultan of Byzantium by Selcuk Altun

response to the emperor’s orders and the meddling of the Ottomans … )

EPSILON
    I was hanging up the map with the clues long after my meeting with Askaris when I remembered something beneath my pile of atlases. I’d never picked up this heavy book, assuming that it was just another of my grandfather’s tragicomic purchases. The letters on its spine proclaimed ‘Manassis’. Anxiously I lifted the cover of what looked to me like a box made up of straw. The book was printed in Venice in 1729. On the left side of the thin muslin-like pages was a text in Latin, and on the right side one in Greek. Together with the words of Constantine Manassis, I found passages from two authors whose names I had not encountered anywhere else. My own research told me that twelfth- and thirteenth-century historians had nothing to do with the Palaeologus family. The book seemed to have done time as a file cabinet: I found fifty-year-old business cards from Genoese restaurants stuck in its pages. One yellowing sheet of paper marked off in squares held directions to nightclubs. They were written in ink in old Turkish. In view of the grammatical mistakes, the author was surely my grandfather.
    Another, less worn-out sheet of paper contained a pentagram drawn with a ruler. Its only difference from the stars you see on flags was that the lines were elongated to form five isosceles triangles, with the bases delineated by dots. In two of the triangles were numbers. Another two were full of Latin letters, whereas the fifth one contained a sentence written in Arabic. I thought this document was a list of clues or maybe a cheat sheet for roulette. Or was it perhaps an attempt at using gothic letters to enhance the sophistic plot to siphon more money from my naïve grandfather’s pocket?
    As soon as I got back to Istanbul from London I pulled out the photocopy I’d made at the Center and compared the handwriting with these documents. It certainly looked like the two pieces of writing had come from the same hand. Now must be the time, I thought, to find out whether that hand belonged to Paul Hackett, for three years the son-in-law in the Ipsilandit Apartments. I’d been conditioned to hate my father as the reason for the dissolution of our family, but I was curious about Paul Hackett simply because of my grandmother’s charge that, ‘Except for your curmudgeonly manners and the pride you got from your mother, you’re the spitting image of your father.’
    During my last year at high school, when I was applying to universities around the world, Eugenio once asked, ‘Is it because Virginia was your father’s school that you don’t want to go there?’ I remembered how he slowly shook his head when he saw that I had no idea what school my father had attended. The publishing company Paul represented had gone belly-up; now the only chance I had of connecting with his past lay in whatever clues I could pick up at the University of Virginia, if I could go there. I composed a proleptic consolation for myself against the eerie possibility that the handwriting was his. I had no right at this point to promote my life from mystery novel to television soap opera. I don’t know why, but a sarcastic graffiti at LSE came to mind: ‘Where science ends, prayer begins.’
    The night of my return from London, I took the family to dinner at the Müzedechanga. I liked this museum restaurant in Emirgan because the shallow bourgeoisie overlooked it. We took a table with a view of an Ottoman Palace on the Asian side of the Bosphorus. As the second bottle of white wine was being uncorked, I thought I saw a
muezzin
in a turquoise caftan on top of the building’s tower. While looking hopefully around at his environment, would he be moved to recite a classical Bosphorus poem? He slowly disappeared behind a curtain of fog. Had I seen this illusion when I was a student, I would have thought, ‘If there
are
still people who can see the man in turquoise, I wonder how