The Last Cato (43 page)

He didn’t look at me once during breakfast or during the trip to the airport or as we were getting into the Westwind and taking our seats (very gingerly) in the passenger cabin. The plane was starting to feel cozy, like home base. It was our only stable point of reference. We took off from Hellinikon Airport at around ten in the morning. Once in the air, Paola, our favorite stewardess came around, offering food, drinks, and even entertainment. After fearing for the life of the poor girl as she stumbled down the aisle, Captain Glauser-Röist told us smugly that he had run the distance between Marathon and Kapnikarea in only four hours and that his pulse meter hadn’t gone off once. Farag laughed and congratulated him with a handshake and some affectionate punches in the arm. I sank into complete misery recalling the beeping of Farag’s and my pulse meters in those precious moments we spent together on the silent highway from Marathon.

The flight between Athens and Istanbul was so short that we barely had time to prepare for Purgatory’s fifth circle. In Constantinople we would aim to purge ourselves of the sin of avarice. We would do it, according to Dante, spread-eagle on the ground:

When I came out and stood on the Fifth Round,
I saw spirits stretched out upon the dust,
Lying face downward, all of them in tears.

Adhaesit pavimento anima mea,
*
I heard, accompanied with heavy sighs
That almost made the words inaudible.

“That’s all we have to go on?” Farag asked. “It’s so very little, and Istanbul is so big.”

“We also have the
Apostoleion,”
Glauser-Röist reminded him, calmly crossing his legs as if he weren’t in any pain from the tattoos or those nasty blisters the Marathon highway had left us as a souvenir. “The Vatican enunciator in Ankara and the patriarch of Constantinople have been working on that since last night. When we get to the hotel, I’ll get in touch with Monsignor Lewis and Father Kallistos, secretary to the patriarch. The latter informed me that the
Apostoleion
was the famous Orthodox church of the Holy Apostles. It served as the royal pantheon to the Byzantine emperors until the eleventh century, and it was the largest church after the church of Saint Sofia, but nothing remains of it today. Mehemet II, the Turkish conqueror who brought down the Byzantine Empire, ordered its destruction in the fifteenth century.”

“There’s nothing left of it?” I was shocked. “What do they suggest we do? Excavate the city in search of its archeological remains?”

“I don’t know, Doctor. We’ll have to investigate. Emulating the emperors, Mehemet II had his own mausoleum built there, the mosque of Faith Camii, which is still in use. Nothing remains of the
Apostoleion,
not even a stone. We’ll have to wait for documents from the enunciator and the patriarchate to learn more.”

“What did you ask them to investigate?”

“Everything. Absolutely everything, Doctor: the complete history of the church in great detail; also the history of the Faith Camii; the plans, maps, and drawings of its construction, names of its architects, objects, works of art, all the books that talk about them, the ritual of burying the emperors, and more. As you can see, I haven’t left out a single detail. I am sure that the enunciator and the patriarchate are working on the matter. The apostolic nuncio, Monsignor Lewis, told me we would have the help of the Italian embassy’s cultural attaché, an expert on Byzantine architecture. The patriarchate is especially anxious to collaborate because it has suffered the Staurofilakes’ villainy. What little remains of the fragment of the True Cross that Constantine received directly from Saint Helen disappeared a month ago from the patriarchal Church of Saint George. The Patriarchate of Constantinople, so powerful long ago, is so poor today that it can’t use any of its resources to protect its relics. There are barely any Orthodox faithful left in Istanbul. The process of Islamization has been so intense and nationalism has turned so violent that nearly 100 percent of the population is Turkish and Muslim.”

Just then, the commander of the Westwind announced we would be landing in the Atatürk International Airport in Istanbul in less than a half hour.

“We must hurry,” Glauser-Röist urged, opening the book again. “Where were we?”

“We had just started,” Farag said, opening his copy of the
Divine Comedy.
“Dante was listening to the spirits of greed recite the first verse of Psalm 118: ‘My soul is stuck to the ground.’ ”

“Fine, let’s continue. Virgil asks them to point out the entrance to the next cornice.”

“Have they already taken the mark off Dante’s forehead?” I interrupted. I gently touched the decussate cross on my right thigh.

“Dante doesn’t always explicitly say that the angels are going to erase the scars of the deadly sins in every circle, but at some point, he always indicates this after each new ascent, a moment in which he feels freer. From time to time he realizes they’ve removed a
P.
Do you need more details, Doctor?”

“No, thank you. Please continue.”

“The avarice souls answer the poets:

“‘If you have been exempt from lying prone,
And wish to find the quickest way to go,
Be sure to keep your right side to the edge.’”

“That is to say,” I interrupted again, “they should turn to the right, leaving the precipice to their right side as well.” The captain nodded.

True to form, Dante gets involved in a lengthy conversation with one of the spirits, Pope Adrian V, whom history records as a very greedy person. I suddenly realized that the poet placed a large number of holy pontiffs among the souls in
Purgatory.
I wondered if there was an equal number in the
Inferno.
Clearly, the
Divine Comedy
wasn’t a work that glorified the Catholic Church. Just the opposite.

I listened to the captain read the first tercets of Canto XX, in which Dante describes the difficulties he and his teacher face as they walk along that cornice, with so many weeping souls stuck to the ground:

“My master moved ahead close to the cliff,
Wherever there was space—as one who walks
along the ramparts hugs the battlements:

“The mass of souls whose eyes were, drop by drop,
Shedding the sin which occupies our world
Left little room along the terrace edge.”

We skipped over the part of the canto where several souls walk along singing about the punishment for greed: King Midas, the rich Roman Craso, and others. Suddenly an apocalyptic tremor shakes the ground in the fifth circle. Dante is frightened, but Virgil calms him down.
“You need not fear while I am still your guide.”
Canto XXI starts with the explanation of such an event: A spirit had fulfilled his punishment and was purified, thus his stay in Purgatory was over. On this happy occasion, it was the soul of the Naples poet, Publius Papinius Statius. His penance complete, he’d just detached from the ground. Estacio, who didn’t know to whom he was talking, explained that he became a poet out of a deep admiration for Virgil. This confession, of course, causes Dante to laugh. Estacio is offended, not knowing that the Florentine is amused because the person Estacio so admired is there in front of him. Clearing up the confusion, Estacio falls to his knees before Virgil and begins a long string of admiring verses.

Our plane’s descent was so rough my ears popped immediately. Paola came around to remind us to buckle our seatbelts and to offer one of her tasty treats one last time before we landed. I accepted a glass of the horrible bottled juice she carried on a tray, and I drank it to keep the air pressure from destroying my eardrums.

We didn’t even have to enter the Istanbul airport. A car with a small Vatican flag on one of its headlights collected us at the Westwind’s stairs. Escorted by two Turkish police cars, our automobile left the wide runway behind and drove through a side door in the security gate. Running his hand over the car’s elegant leather upholstery, Farag admired how far we’d come since Syracuse.

I had visited Istanbul for a few days during the investigation for which I won my first Getty Prize in 1992, and I recalled a much prettier, more intimate city. I was caught off guard by those horrible blocks of apartments, like concrete anthills. Something terrible had happened to the city that was once, for more than five hundred years, the capital of the Turkish Empire. The car ambled down back streets to the Horn of Gold headed for the Fhanar neighborhood. That’s where we would meet the patriarch of Constantinople. Before, there had been little wooden cabinas with beautiful shutters painted the colors of the rainbow. Now, groups of Russians were crowded together to sell trinkets, and young Turks sporting shaggy Islamic beards instead of the traditional Ottoman mustache ate garbanzo beans and pistachios from paper cones. I was shocked at the number of women wearing the turban, the traditional black veil pinned under their chins.

Constantinople, where imperial Rome survived until the fifteenth century, was the most prosperous capital in ancient history. From Blaquerna Palace, on the shores of the Marmara Sea, the Byzantine emperors governed a territory that stretched from Spain to the Near East, passing through northern Africa and the Balkans. They say that in Constantinople you could hear all the languages of the globe. Recent excavations showed that in Justinian and Theodora’s time there were more than 160 bathhouses lining the streets. As I traveled down its streets that day, all I saw was an impoverished, backward city.

If Vatican City was the center of the Catholic world, splendid in its beauty, magnificence, and riches, then the center of the Orthodox world was that humble Patriarchate of Constantinople, located in a poor neighborhood in an extremely nationalistic suburb of Istanbul. Growing traditionalist aggressions had forced the patriarchate to build a protective stucco wall around itself that barely fulfilled its function. Who would have thought that, after fifteen hundred years of glory and power, such an important Christian throne would end in such a deplorable state?

The Turkish police parked at the entrance to the Fhanar and waited. The embassy’s car crossed the central plaza and braked at the front steps of one of the humble buildings that made up the ancient patriarchate. The elderly Father Kallistos, secretary to the patriarch, came out to greet us and to accompany us to Bartolemeos I’s offices, where he said many people had been waiting for us since dawn.

The office of His Most Divine Holiness was a meeting room. Sunlight streamed in through a pair of huge windows that looked out on the patriarchal Church of Saint George. The ancient symbols of power, the imperial eagle and crown, were everywhere: woven into the designs of the rugs and tapestries on the floors and walls, carved into the beautiful engravings in the tables and chairs, depicted in the paintings and art work that covered every surface. His Most Divine Holiness was a rather tall man of around sixty who hid behind an extremely long, snow-white beard. He was dressed as a simple Orthodox pope, with a habit and black cap dating from the time of the Medicis. He wore enormous glasses—they seemed to slide down his nose at will—yet he emanated such dignity that I felt I was in the company of a long-gone Byzantine emperor.

Next to the patriarch was the Vatican nuncio, Monsignor John Lawrence Lewis, dressed as a clergyman. He rushed over to welcome us and to start the introductions. Monsignor Lewis bore a surprising resemblance to the Duke of Edinburgh, Queen Elizabeth’s husband. He was just as tall and thin, equally ceremonial, and on top of it all, just as bigeared. I stared at him, trying not to laugh. A female voice wrenched me from my reflections.

“Ottavia, dear, don’t you remember me?”

I didn’t recognize the woman who approached me just as Monsignor Lewis was introducing us to the patriarch. She was one of those women who, having crossed the threshold of middle age, becomes scandalously flashy with excessive makeup and jewelry. Her light brown hair cascaded onto her shoulders, and she was wearing an elegant light-blue suit jacket and a miniskirt.

“No, I’m sorry.” I was sure I’d never seen her before. “Do I know you?”

“Ottavia, it’s me, Doria!”

“Doria?” I stammered. A vague memory, the hazy faces of the Sciarra sisters started to emerge. “Doria Sciarra? Concetta’s sister?”

“Ottavia!” she exclaimed, happy I’d finally recognized her, throwing her arms around me and giving me a big hug (careful not to mess up her makeup). “Isn’t this great, Ottavia? How long has it been? Ten, fifteen years?”

“Twenty,” I said with disgust.

How short they seemed at that moment! Doria Sciarra was the one person in the world I couldn’t stand, that vain little girl who sowed discord everywhere she went and ruined everything without the slightest thought. I knew she was not fond of me either, so I didn’t understand why she was making all that fuss. I could foresee that she was about to cloud my mood for the rest of the day.

“Why! Isn’t this marvelous?” she said, dreamily. She was as phony as a Barbie doll. “Who would have guessed? Life takes such amazing turns!” She emitted some childish, singsong giggles.

That girl who was once as big as a house and as brunette as burnt wheat now flaunted a borderline anorexic body and a golden mane of hair. I remembered my family saying that “we have some problems with the Sciarra family,” that they were invading our markets and waging a dirty war.

“I am so sorry about your father and brother, Ottavia. Concetta told me a few weeks ago. How’s your mother?”