Up The Line

18.

I reached Istanbul on a murky summer afternoon and caught an express pod across the Bosphorus to the Time Service headquarters, on the Asian side. The city hadn’t changed much since my last visit a year before. That was no surprise. Istanbul hasn’t really changed since Kemal Ataturk’s time, and that was 150 years ago. The same gray buildings, the same archaic clutter of unlabeled streets, the same overlay of grit and grime. And the same heavenly mosques floating above the dilapidation.

I admire the mosques tremendously. They show that the Turks were good for something. But to me, Istanbul is a black joke of a city that someone has painted over the wounded stump of my beloved Constantinople. The little pieces of the Byzantine city that remain hold more magic for me than Sultan Ahmed’s mosque, the Suleimaniye, and the mosque of Beyazit, all taken together.

The thought that I would soon be seeing Constantinople as a living city, with all the Turkish excrescences swept away, almost made me stain my pants with glee.

The Time Service had set up shop in a squat, formidable building of the late twentieth century, far up the Bosphorus, practically facing the Turkish fortress of Rumeli Hisari, from which the Conqueror strangled Byzantium in 1453. I was expected; even so, I had to spend fifteen minutes milling in an anteroom, surrounded by angry tourists complaining about some foulup in scheduling. One red-faced man kept shouting, “Where’s the computer input? I want all this on record in the computer!” And a tired, angelic-looking secretary kept telling him wearily that everything he was saying was going on record, down to the ultimate bleat. Two swaggering giants in Time Patrol uniforms cut coolly through the melee, their faces grimly set, their minds no doubt riveted to duty. I could almost hear them thinking, “Aha! Aha! ” A thin woman with a wedge-shaped face rushed up to them, waved papers at their deep-cleft chins, and yelled, “Seven months ago I confirmed these reservations, yet! Right after Christmas it was! And now they tell me—” The Time Patrolmen kept walking. A robot vendor entered the waiting room and started to sell lottery tickets. Behind it came a haggard, unshaven Turk in a rumpled black jacket, peddling honey-cakes from a greasy tray.

I admired the quality of the confusion. It showed genius.

Still, I wasn’t unhappy to be rescued. A Levantine type who might have been a cousin of my fondly remembered instructor Najeeb Dajani appeared, introduced himself to me as Spiros Protopopolos, and led me hastily through a sphincter door I had not noticed. “You should have come through the side way,” he said. “I apologize for this delay. We didn’t realize you were here.”

He was about thirty, plump, sleek, with sunglasses and a great many white teeth. As we shot upshaft to the Couriers’ lounge he said, “You have never worked as a Courier before, yes?”

“Yes,” I said. “Never. My first time.”

“You will love it! The Byzantium run especially. Byzantium, it is so — how shall I express it?” He pressed his pudgy palms rapturously together. “Surely you must feel some of it. But only a Greek like myself can respond fully. Byzantium! Ah, Byzantium!”

“I’m Greek also,” I said.

He halted the shaft and raised his glasses. “You are not Judson Daniel Elliott III?”

“I am.”

“This is Greek?”

“My mother’s name was originally Passilidis. She was born in Athens. My maternal grandfather was mayor of Sparta. On his mother’s side he was descended from the Markezinis family.”

“You are my brother!” cried Spiros Protopopolos.

It turned out that six of the nine other Time Couriers assigned to the Byzantium run were Greeks by nationality or descent; there were two Germans, Herschel and Melamed; while the tenth man was a slick, dark-haired Spaniard named Capistrano who later on, when deep in his cups, confided to me that his great-grandmother had been a Turk. He may have invented that so I’d despise him; Capistrano had a distinct streak of masochism.

Five of my nine colleagues were currently up the line and four were here in now-time Istanbul, thanks to the scheduling mishap that was causing so much dismay in the anteroom. Protopopolos made the introductions: Melamed, Capistrano, Pappas, meet Elliott. Melamed was fair-haired and hid behind a dense sandy beard; Pappas had hollow cheeks, sad eyes, and a drooping mustache. They were both about forty. Capistrano looked a little younger.

An illuminated board monitored the doings of the other members of the team: Herschel, Kolettis, Plastiras, Metaxas, and Gompers. “Gompers?” I said. Protopopolos replied, “His grandmother was pure Hellene.” The five of them were scattered over ten centuries, according to that board, with Kolettis in 1651B.P., and Metaxas in 606B.P. — that is, inA.D. 408 and 1453 — and the others in between. As I stared at the board, Kolettis moved down the line by more than a century. “They have gone to see the riots,” Melamed said softly, and Capistrano nodded, sighing.

Pappas brewed strong coffee for me. Capistrano uncorked a bottle of Turkish brandy, which I found a little hard to ingest. He prodded me encouragingly, saying, “Drink, drink, it’s the best you’ll taste in the last fifteen centuries!” I remembered Sam’s advice that I should learn how to drink, and forced the stuff down, longing for a weed, a floater, a fume, anything decent.

While I relaxed with my new comrades, a Time Patrolman came into the room. He didn’t use the scanner to get entry permission, or even knock; he just barged in. “Can’t you ever be polite?” Pappas growled.

“Up yours,” said the Time Patrolman. He sank down into a web and unbuttoned his uniform shirt. He was a chunky Aryan-looking sort with a hairy chest; what looked like golden wire curled toward his clavicles. “New man?” he said, jerking his head at me.

“Jud Elliott,” I said. “Courier.”

“Dave Van Dam,” he said. “Patrol.” His huge hand enfolded mine. “Don’t let me catch you screwing around up the line. Nothing personal, but I’m a tough bastard. It’s so easy to hate us: we’re incorruptible. Try me and see.”

“This is the lounge for Couriers,” said Capistrano thinly.

“You don’t need to tell me that,” said Van Dam. “Believe it or not, I can read.”

“Are you now a Courier, then?”

“Do you mind if I relax a little with the opposition?” The Patrolman grinned, scratched his chest, and put the brandy bottle to his lips. He drank copiously and belched resonantly. “Christ, what a killer of a day! You know where I was today?”

Nobody seemed to care.

He continued anyway, “I spent the whole day in 1962! Nineteen goddam sixty-two! Checking out every floor of the Istanbul Goddam Hilton for two alleged timecrimers running an alleged artifact siphon. What we heard was they were bringing gold coins and Roman glass down from 1400B.P. and selling them to American tourists in the Hilton, then investing the proceeds on the stock market and hiding the stash in a Swiss bank for pickup in now-time. Christ! You know, you can make billions that way? You buy in a bear-market year and stick it away for a century and you end up owning the world. Well, maybe so, but we didn’t see a thing in the whole goddam Hilton except plenty of legitimate free enterprise based in then-time. Crap on it!” He took another pull on the brandy bottle. “Let them run a recheck upstairs. Find their own goddam timecrimers.”

“This is the lounge for Couriers,” Capistrano said once more.

The Patrolman took no notice. When he finally left, five minutes later, I said, “Are they all like that?”

Protopopolos said, “This was one of the refined ones. Most of the others are boors.”