The Eighth Day (31 page)

“A car?”

“I have to see my grandfather.”

“Mounir? But when will you be back?” Danny asked.

“A day. Maybe two. The old man’s going to Diyarbakir in the morning—and then to Zurich after that. I can’t let him go without talking to him.”

“And what if you’re seen?”

“I won’t be.”

“But what if the soldiers come?” Danny asked. “What do I do?”

“Layla can handle it. She’s the one who fixed your lip. Just stay out of sight and everything will be fine.”

Danny spent the night in the villa’s library, soaking his feet in Epsom salts and his brain in Percocet. Finding a crimping tool and a spool of nine-gauge copper wire on the desk, he idled away the time before dinner making a mask of Zerevan Zebek. Finally satisfied with the image he’d created, he crushed the wire into a ball and dropped it in the wastebasket.

The crimping tool was cool, Danny thought. You could make interesting things with it. Maybe he’d make something for Barzan—a sort of thank-you-for-not-killing-me gift.

The villa’s owner had eclectic tastes, with a great collection of jazz and a wall of art books that Danny had never seen before. He was paging through a catalog raisonné of Caillebot’s works, listening to a Lisa Ekdahl CD, when a servant brought him dinner on a copper tray. Hummus and bread, tabbouleh, rice, and vegetable kebabs. A cold bottle of white wine.

It was perfect, in its way. All he needed, really, was Caleigh. But he resisted the temptation to call her—she’d probably hang up on him anyway, and if not he didn’t know what to say.

In the morning, his feet were almost back to their normal size—10s, instead of 12s. He could get his shoes on, although he didn’t
leave
them on. After breakfast in the courtyard, he retrieved the crimping tool from the library and began to play with it, sitting beneath an apricot tree. An hour passed, and then a second. The woman who’d sewn up his lip came by and, seeing the little objects he’d made, giggled brightly and clapped her hands.

“For shish, I think—yes?”

Danny nodded. “For shish,” he agreed.
What the hell is shish?

“This one,” she asked, holding the biggest of the pieces up to the sun, “is kink?”

He wasn’t sure what to say. Then it hit him. He’d made a chess set—or the beginnings of one, at least. “Right!” he exclaimed. “That’s the king—and this one’s the rook. And the bishop.”

“So good!” she told him. “Maybe . . . yes, I think . . . he is artist!”

“Thank you,” Danny said. It was the nicest compliment he’d had in a long while. By now, his hands were tired and his fingers ached. Setting the crimping tool aside, he went into the library and sat down at the desk in front of the computer. While the machine went through its boot routine, he gazed at the bank of TV monitors on the wall behind the desk. One of them was dedicated to the front gate, where the dogs snoozed on the ground like twin Sphinxes. A second monitor changed pictures every few seconds, shifting from the living room to the kitchen to the hall. A third monitor showed the countryside beyond the gate, while a fourth was trained on the room in which Danny had been beaten.
How much of that,
he wondered,
did Barzan watch?

He wanted to check his e-mail, but as he began to type in his name he changed his mind. With Zebek’s resources, Danny would not have been surprised if the billionaire had bribed his way into the servers at AOL and Yahoo. And Danny knew it was possible to trace a message all the way back to the computer—not just the Internet service provider but the actual computer—from which an e-mail had been sent.

So he abandoned the computer and checked out the bookcase. He found an English edition of Orhan Pamuk’s
The White Castle,
stretched out on the couch beside the window, and began to read.

The next thing he knew, Layla was waking him. “Now is eating,” she told him. “Is night, okay?” With a smile, she snapped on the light behind the couch and gestured to a tray beside the computer. “Good,” she promised, waving shyly as she left the room.

Swinging his feet from the couch, Danny checked out the tray: a steaming bowl of lentil soup, a plate of grape leaves stuffed with rice, pita, a cold bottle of beer. All of it was delicious, and he dove into it while watching a soccer game on television. Galatasaray versus Fenerbahce. Good game. Nice night. He could feel his body healing.

Barzan returned late the following night—too late to talk, as it happened. But he was eager to meet with Danny in the morning, waking him at seven for coffee in the library. Coffee poured, they sat down, but before they began talking a loud thump from the direction of the wall of windows claimed their attention. They both jumped and turned toward the verdant green of the atrium. Barzan strode toward the glass and peered down. “A bird,” he said. “They see the reflection of the trees in the glass and fly right into it.” He shook his head. “They lose a few every month, the groundskeeper tells me. The atrium is not so much a sanctuary—which is the way the architect saw it—as a death trap.”

Danny peered down and spotted the bird on the ground, next to a flowering bush. “Maybe it’s just stunned.” Surreptitiously he tapped his head three times, some kind of little spell he’d learned from his Aunt Martha. Dead birds were bad luck.

Barzan stirred sugar into his coffee. “I tried to get Mounir to postpone the meeting, but he refused.” He shook his head.

“What meeting?”

“The Elders. And Zebek. They meet in Zurich,” Barzan told him. “A week from tomorrow. At the Baur au Lac in Zurich.”

“With Zebek? But the guy’s a psycho,” Danny objected.

Barzan gave a bemused shrug. “It’s very hard to keep my grandfather out of Zurich.”

“And why’s that?”

Barzan rolled his eyes. “Well, as a matter of fact, Granddad’s got a . . . what should I say? A Swiss miss?”

“A what?”

“There’s an escort service,” Barzan explained. “He goes to it every year.”

“You mean—hookers?”

Barzan nodded.

“But he must be eighty years old!” Danny exclaimed.

“Closer to seventy-five, but it isn’t just Heidi that takes him to Zurich. It’s business, as well as pleasure. All of the
ulema
will be there. It’s a
shura
—happens every year, same time, same place. But this year, it’s even more important.”

Danny wasn’t sure what Barzan was talking about—
ulema
?
shura
?—and it must have shown on his face, because the journalist explained.

“The
ulema
are the Elders,” he said. “When they get together, it’s a
shura
. It’s like an intertribal council, but in this case, it’s actually a board-of-directors meeting for Tawus Holdings.”

Danny gave a little shake of his head. “I’m missing something,” he said.

“Remember what I said about the Sanjak?” Barzan asked.

Danny nodded.

“Well,” Barzan said, “I don’t know who Zebek got to carve it, but—”

“You think it’s a fake? That he replaced the original?”

“Of course,” Barzan replied.

“But why?”

“So he’d be named the new Imam. When the Elders meet to discuss succession, the ritual is that the Sanjak is brought out. To
oversee
the proceedings, if you will. In this case, the old Imam was elected when he was only forty and he lived to be a very old man. So no one had seen the thing in almost fifty years. Once it was uncovered—”

“I get it.”

“What happens is that when the Imam dies, the Elders stay in the underground city, in Nevazir, until they’re able to agree on a successor. They deliberate in a room with the Sanjak. It can take days—even weeks. It’s like electing a pope. There’s a lot at stake.”

“And how long did it take them to pick Zebek?”

“My guess is about a minute,” Barzan answered. “Once the statue was uncovered, it was seen as a sign.”

Danny shook his head. “But how did they know who it
was
? If Zebek moved to Italy as a kid . . .”

Barzan nodded. “There’s a Turkish television show—like
60 Minutes.
Very popular. Profiles, investigations, consumer pieces—you know the kind of thing.” Barzan’s hand opened, as if he were releasing a moth that he’d caught. “Most of the people they profile are celebrities or politicians. But every once in a while, they’ll do a story about a Turkish artist or an entrepreneur who’s making it big in London or New York. The idea being to remind people that Turkey is a Western democracy, a modern state that’s ready for NATO.”

“And Zebek was on the show?” Danny asked.

“A couple of months before the Imam was killed.”

Danny thought about it. “So what you’re saying is: First, he was profiled on the show—”

Barzan shook his head. “No.
First,
he had the statue carved. Then he switched it.
Then
he went on the show.”

“Some of the Elders saw it—”

“
Everyone
saw it. It’s the most popular news program in the country,” Barzan corrected.

“Okay, so everyone saw it, and . . . what did they think?”

Barzan shrugged. “They couldn’t believe it! The last time a Kurd was profiled, I wouldn’t want to guess. And here you had this slick and charming businessman—did you know he’d gone to M.I.T.?”

“Yes.” Danny paused, trying to make sense of it all. “So what you’re saying is, the TV people made a big deal about him being a Kurd—”

“No,” Barzan replied. “That’s not what I’m saying. It’s much subtler than that. The ‘TV people’ didn’t have to make a big deal out of it. In Turkey, ‘Zerevan Zebek’ is like ‘Menachem Goldberg.’ You hear the name, you don’t have to ask his religion or ethnic background—you just know. In fact, if he lived here, he’d probably have adopted an alternate name, a Turkish one—although that is finally beginning to change.”

“So the Elders see the show—”

“And they remember it,” Barzan said. “It’s no big deal, but they remember.
I
remembered.”

“And the Imam—”

“Is fine. But not for long. A month goes by, another—and he’s murdered in Diyarbakir. There’s a
shura
, two days later in Nevazir. The Sanjak is revealed and . . . it hits them. They remember.”

“Zebek becomes the Imam.”

Barzan nodded.

“Have you told your grandfather about this?” Danny demanded.

“Of course.”

“And?”

“ ‘And’ nothing. He can’t act without proof. He can’t even bring an accusation. You must understand—” He leaned toward Danny. “Many of the Elders believe that Zebek
is
the fulfilment of the prophecy in the Writing. That he is the Tawus returned. That they will now inherit the earth.” He shook his head. “Not only are they not inclined to question him—they think he’s a deity, the living god. That’s why Rolvaag’s report was so important.”

Danny sighed. “The tree rings, right? What’s that all about? I don’t understand the connection.”

Barzan steepled his fingers and rested his chin on the apex for a moment. “When Chris saw the picture of the Sanjak, he remembered the man he’d seen a few days before getting out of the Bentley.”

“And he knew it was Zebek?”

Barzan shook his head. “No. All he knew was that the man in the Bentley was a dead ringer for the Sanjak. But
I
knew who it was. I’d seen him on television—like everyone else.”

“And you told Terio?”

“Of course. The thing is, Chris was more outraged about it than I was. He was incensed about what he considered a perversion of an ancient tradition. He was determined that Zebek was not going to get away with it.”

“So then what?” Danny asked. “What did you
do
?”

“The idea was to prove that the Sanjak was a fake,” Barzan said. “That Zebek had switched one statue for another to engineer his election as Imam.”

“And how did you expect to prove that?” Danny asked.

“Tree rings. It was Chris’s idea. You can date wooden objects—the masts of ships, the logs in a building—by comparing the grain in the wood to cross sections of trees whose age is known—so long as they come from the same area. What makes the comparison possible is the way rainfall varies in different parts of the world in different years.”

“And Terio knew how to do this?”

Barzan shook his head. “Chris was a scholar. Religious historians, you know, often work hand in hand with archaeologists. And archaeologists work with dendrochronologists all the time—these are the guys who do tree ring studies. Anyway, the technique is used to date wooden artifacts and sometimes those are connected to religious chronologies. So Chris knew about this and he got in touch with Rolvaag in Norway.”

“Rolvaag was a dendrochronologist?”

“Right. And there’s a huge database relevant to this area because—well, because we’re in Mesopotamia. Archaeologists have been digging around here for a couple of hundred years. They’ve dated everything. They have a bunch of different time lines—but the big ones are ceramics and tree rings.”

Danny thought about it. “So the idea was . . . what? To date the head?”

Barzan nodded. “It should be about eight, nine hundred years old. Sheik Adi was supposed to have carved it himself.”

Danny looked confused. “But how—”

“We made a second trip to Nevazir and bribed the caretaker to leave us alone with the Sanjak. Then we shaved a section from the base—like a piece of veneer—and sent it to the man in Norway.”

Danny groaned. “Rolvaag.”

“Yes. By the way, I called the young lady in Oslo again,” Barzan said, “to see if she turned up the report. Or the sample.” He made a thumbs-down gesture.

“But,” Danny began.

“What?” Barzan asked.

“We could do it again. We could take another sample of the statue—”

Barzan was shaking his head. “No.”

“Why not? You did it before!”

“I’m sure it’s long gone. No reason for anyone to look at it now until the next
shura
. In other words not until Zebek dies. Besides, the man who let us into Nevazir had an accident,” Barzan explained. “One of Zebek’s men took his place. The way the statue’s guarded now, it’s impossible to get in without permission.”

“Then let’s get permission. Your grandfather—”