His fingers cut the air gently as he crossed himself yet again.
“The man who kept preaching right to the bitter end, even while he was crucified upside down,” Conrad said. “A true martyr.”
“How did you get hold of them?” the priest asked.
“Please, Father. We are not in confession here, are we?” Conrad smiled, teasing him for a moment before leaning in and lowering his tone. “There are many crypts in this city. Under the Chapel of the Holy Virgin of Pharos, inside the walls of the Great Palace, at the church in Pammakaristos … if you know where to look, they’re there. The holiest of treasures, tucked out of harm’s way just before the great sack and now waiting to be unearthed and returned to their rightful glory. And as anyone will tell you, I know these dungeons like the back of my hand,” he smiled, raising his right hand. “But I need to know if you want these or not, Father. There are other buyers waiting … and I need the funding to continue my work if I’m ever going to lay my hands on the greatest treasure of them all.”
The bishop’s eyes bulged wide. “What treasure it that?”
Conrad leaned in closer. “The Mandylion,” he whispered.
The bishop sucked in a sharp intake of breath and his face lit up. “The Mandylion of Edessa?”
“The very same. And I think I’m close.”
The bishop’s fingers started twitching greedily. “If you were ever to find it,” he said, “I would be very, very interested in acquiring it for our cathedral.”
Conrad inclined his head casually. “As would many of my clients. But I’m not sure I’d ever want to part with it. Not when the image of our Lord himself is imprinted on it.”
The old priest’s lips were quivering visibly now, his wrinkled fingers beseeching the air between them. “Please. You must promise. Let me know when you have it. I’ll pay handsomely.”
Conrad reached out and brought the man’s withered forearms back down on the table. “Let’s conclude this matter first, shall we? The rest we can talk about, when the time comes.”
The bishop studied him for a beat, then smiled, a thin-lipped, rotted-toothed smile that was a fair match for the bones he was buying. They agreed on a time when they would meet up again for the exchange, then the old man got up and walked off.
Conrad cracked a satisfied grin as he packed up the bones and hollered out an order for a pitcher of beer. He took in the bustle out in the tavern’s main room. Merchants, aristocrats, common folk, and whores, wheeling and dealing and getting drunk in a raucous blur of pidgin Italian—the lingua franca of the Galata district—and laughter.
Quite a change from the austerity of his previous life, as a warrior-monk of the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon—the Templars.
He smiled. The city had been good to him.
It had taken him in and allowed him to create a new life for himself, which hadn’t been easy. Not after all the setbacks and disasters that had befallen him and his brethren, not after they’d all been turned into hunted men. But things were going well for him now. His reputation was growing with every sale. And he particularly enjoyed the fact that he was prospering at the expense of those who had brought about the demise of his Order, fleecing those whose ilk had caused him to end up in Constantinople.
Like his adoptive city, Conrad was rising from the dregs of a Vatican-bred calamity. His troubles had begun with the defeat at Acre in 1291, almost two decades earlier, a disastrous battle that ended with Conrad, his fellow Templars, and the rest of the crusaders losing the last major Christian stronghold in the Holy Land, and resulted in the mass arrests of 1307, which the King of France and the pope had orchestrated to take down the Order. The Queen of Cities had suffered its own catastrophic upheaval around a hundred years earlier, when the pope’s army had raped and pillaged it in 1204 after besieging it for close to a year. Blood had flowed, ankle-deep, down the streets. Great fires had ravaged it for days on end, wiping out a third of its buildings. Anything that was left standing had been looted and ransacked beyond recognition. In the aftermath, anyone who could afford to do so had moved away. Once the world’s marketplace and the proud home of God’s emperor on Earth, the New Rome had been turned into a city of ruins.
Its conquerors hadn’t had much joy in ruling over it. Its first Latin emperor, Baldwin, was captured by the Bulgarians during a skirmish near Adrianople less than a year into his reign. They chopped his arms and legs off and dumped him in a ravine, where he was said to have survived for three whole days. His successors didn’t fare much better. They only managed to hang on to the city for five decades before their infighting and incompetence brought their reign to a humiliating end.
The Byzantine emperor who retook the city in 1261, Michael VIII, saw himself as a new Constantine and set about restoring it to its former glory. Palaces and churches were refurbished, streets repaired, hospitals and schools founded. But reality soon put a cap on these ambitions. For one thing, money was tight. The Byzantine Empire wasn’t much of an empire anymore. It was much smaller than it had been, effectively no more than a minor Greek state, which meant that its rulers were only receiving a fraction of the tax and customs revenues they had previously enjoyed. Worse, its eastern flanks were under constant attack. Bands of nomadic Turks were further chipping away at the fractured and shrunken empire. Fleeing refugees from the beleaguered provinces, penniless and desperate, were now crowding the city, living in squalor in overcrowded shantytowns and across its rubbish dumps, further straining its economy. A harsh winter had only made matters worse, a late frost wiping out large tracts of crop-land and exacerbating the food shortages.
The chaos and the turmoil suited Conrad. He needed the anonymity that a city in flux could offer. And there was good money to be made if you knew where to find it: the pockets of gullible, visiting clerics from the churches and cathedrals of the wealthy West.
Constantinople may have been stripped of anything of value a hundred years earlier, but it was still an Aladdin’s cave of holy relics. Hundreds of them were believed to be scattered around the city, tucked away in its many churches and monasteries, waiting to be pilfered and sold. They were of great value to the priests of Western Europe. A cathedral, a church, or a priory far from the Holy Land would gain tremendously in stature—and, hence, in contributions—once it housed a major relic originating from those distant shores. The faithful wouldn’t have to embark on long and expensive pilgrimages and travel across land and sea to see, and perhaps even touch, the bone of a martyr or a splinter from the True Cross. Which was why many clerics came to Constantinople, in search of a trophy they could take back to their home church. Some paid good money, others schemed and stole—whatever it took to secure their prize.
Conrad was there to help.
Even if, far more often than not, the prize wasn’t exactly what he claimed it to be.
Like any parlor trick, it was, he knew, all in the presentation. Invest in the right packaging, get the backstory right, and buyers would be lining up for a shard of the Crown of Thorns or a fragment from the robe of the Virgin Mary.
“Another satisfied customer?” the tavern keeper asked as he brought over a fresh pitcher of beer.
“Is there any other kind?”
“Bless you, my son,” the barkeep chuckled. He set the pitcher on the table and nodded toward the back of the bar. “There’s someone waiting for you out back. A Turk. Said his name was Qassem. Said you’d know who he was.”
Conrad poured himself a glass and downed it in one chug, then set it down and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Out back? Now?”
The barkeep nodded.
Conrad shrugged, then pushed the reliquary toward him. “Look after this for me until I get back, will you?”
He found the man waiting by a stack of empty barrels outside the rear entrance to the tavern. He’d met Qassem and his father shortly after arriving in the city a little over a year ago. He’d taken an instant dislike to Qassem, a brooding, muscular young man in his early twenties whose eyes lacked any trace of warmth. The father, Mehmet, was a different story. A tub of fat, hairy flesh, he was a dumpling of a man with a wide forehead, bulging eyes, and a short, thick neck. He was also a consummate trader, one who could sell you something then buy it right back from you at half price and make you feel like he was doing you a favor.
He also had access to whatever Conrad needed to pull off his scams, and he didn’t ask too many
