Murder in the Grand Bazaar: An Intellectual Thriller

By Miles Nilsson Fowler

American Professor Felix Markarian went to Istanbul, Turkey to meet an antiquities dealer and to appraise an ancient book, called a codex. When the police tell Markarian that the dealer has been murdered and the book stolen, the gay scholar is drawn into the investigation. Murder in the Grand Bazaar: An Intellectual Thriller, set in Is

• Language: English
• Publisher: Prosthetic God Publishing
• Release date: Jun 23, 2023
• ISBN: 9798218222512

Miles Nilsson Fowler

Miles Nilsson Fowler was born in New York City and has lived in half a dozen states. He only speaks one language but has dabbled in several, including biblical Greek and Coptic. He lives in Virginia with the love of his life and two cats.

Book preview

2

Acknowledgements and Disclaimers

Special thanks to Susan Shafarzek for literary advice and editorial suggestions; Kristine Montamat for advice about Turkish culture; and chatGPT (chat.openai.com) for information about Turkish law and culture, and much, much more. Notwithstanding these contributions, any errors, including sins, are mine alone. Actual persons, institutions, organizations, and publications are mentioned in passing but rarely, if ever, portrayed, and any resemblance of fictitious characters, institutions, organizations, or publications to real ones (living or dead in the case of persons) is coincidental.

About the name of the publisher: Prosthetic God Publishing is inspired by Sigmund Freud's observation (in Civilization and Its Discontents) that human beings are helpless when naked yet god-like when wrapped in our technology. We are then like prosthetic gods.

Cover art by Miles Nilsson Fowler

3

Prologue

Jerusalem, Israel, 1969

Father Aptos read each page before feeding it into the fire. He had read the letter before, yet he could not help reading it one last time before consigning it to oblivion, as if to assure himself that destroying it was the right thing to do. After all, the offending letter posed the existence of corrupted scripture that would shake men's faith and, worse, countenance sin as if it were permissible—or even virtuous.

It was true that the letter argued that this perverted scripture was false, but the painful irony was that, by describing such wicked verses, the letter's author—whoever he truly was, and even if he was who he claimed to be—prepared the weak-minded to accept the attribution of the most sinful practices to Our Lord Himself.

The abominable letter had been hand-written in eighteenth-century Greek script—supposedly copying a second- or third-century original—into the blank end pages of a sixteenth-century printed book. At first, Father Aptos had considered destroying the whole book, but this proved unnecessary after the offending pages were separated from the book by the head librarian in order to photograph them in color.

The color photographs, themselves, troubled him. They were the second set of photographs that had been made of the letter since its alleged discovery in 1958. The first set had been made at that time by an American professor, but they were black and white, and when Father Aptos first saw them in a book, they seemed unreal to him. The color photographs, while he doubted that they could authenticate the letter any better than the older black-and-whites, unnerved him because they were so vivid in their resemblance to the paper copy. He would have destroyed them, too, but the head librarian kept them locked in a safe in his office.

Father Aptos remained determined to destroy the paper copy of the letter. Without it, the letter’s authenticity would be more difficult to prove than it already was, and making that more difficult, or even impossible, was critically necessary. True, testing the ink on the paper might have been useful if it could prove that the copy was not two centuries old but was a twentieth century forgery. That would discredit the whole letter along with the American professor’s claim for the existence of the so-called Secret Gospel of Mark described in the letter. But he feared the consequences if tests showed, instead, that the copy really was two hundred years old. Giving even that much credence to the existence of the original letter and, indirectly, to the existence of another version of Mark was unacceptable. Without the handwritten copy, no one would have to believe that the letter was older than the few years since the first photographs of it had been made by that American, who was rumored to be a sinner himself, just as the false gospel made Christ out to be.

His eyes fell on the name of Carpocrates, a man that he hated ardently though he had not heard of him before the first time he read the letter. He had since learned that ancient heresy hunters knew the name of this heretic very well. On this final reading, he could not bring himself to finish the page that bore this diabolical name, which, by itself, justly condemned the letter to the fire.

He had resolved to destroy the letter the day that the head librarian showed it to six visiting European scholars. This had been shortly before it was cut from the book. These scholars had been the ones who urged the librarian to have the ink tested. But aside from the seven godless scholars (including the American), only a few Greek Orthodox clergy had ever seen the paper copy of the letter. While their collective testimony might count for something, all of them would die soon enough. He knew that his cancer would take him before long and felt sure that, in less than fifty years, few if any of the eye witnesses would remain on earth. Their impressions of the letter's authenticity would be gone along with its ashes in Father Aptos' hearth.

4

The Dealer

Cairo, Egypt, September 1997

Ahmet Tatlık removed the twine and paper used to hold the loose sheaf of pages together. He judged the fragile pages to be genuinely stained by time and not treated with strong tea to create the illusion of age. They were certainly made of papyrus, which was the flax-based paper used in much ancient bookmaking. He believed that the pages once belonged to a single volume, but its cover, which most likely would have been made of leather, was lost. This was too bad, not only because such a cover would have added value, but because the volume had fallen apart without its binding.

Still, here was the remainder of a type of ancient book known as a codex. In Tatlık’s opinion, as an experienced antiquities dealer, this frayed and deteriorating object was probably quite valuable. He had purchased codices before and knew something about them. They were the first books in the modern sense. The codex was made up of separate pages that were bound together with a cover, just like a modern book. About two thousand years ago, codices began to replace the scrolls that were written on rolls of papyrus or other materials. The only thing that did not change was that codices were still handwritten just as scrolls had been.

Though invented by the Romans, codices were produced in the greatest quantities in Egypt where the flax used to make papyrus grew plentifully in the jet-black soil of the Nile Valley, and their leather covers were fashioned from the hides of cattle that grazed on the same fertile floodplain that was made by the Nile’s dependable annual inundation. Along with the thousands of codices that had been found, archeologists had turned up, perhaps, millions of loose scraps of pages from codices.

The Turkish dealer knew it was confusing to talk about a codex as a book because each codex was usually an anthology of several shorter books. Some of these books turned out to be early Christian writings, sometimes in Greek but often translations of Greek into Coptic, the ancient Egyptian language written with Greek letters instead of hieroglyphs. When the original Greek work no longer existed, the Coptic translation would often be the only version in existence, and then the book could be highly valuable to the mostly European and North American biblical scholars who, along with the libraries and museums they usually represented, purchased codices from him.

To Tatlık, who regarded himself as a devout Muslim, such books had no spiritual appeal, but dealing in Christian artifacts had been lucrative over the decades that he had been in this business. He also dealt in Islamic, Jewish, and secular antiquities, and sometimes bought and sold coins and objets d’art, always with an eye to high value.

He contemplated the physical dimensions of the codex. If he was going to smuggle it out of Egypt, he needed to consider its size and shape. He was thinking about how to slip it past customs. How could this be done at the least expense, with the fewest possible confederates? But first he had to buy it.

How much? Tatlık asked his counterpart in Egyptian Arabic.

One hundred thousand American dollars, said the Egyptian dealer sitting before him.

Tatlık scoffed at the asking price. He would ask for at least that much himself when he resold it. Paying so much to the Egyptian would deny him the kind of profit he desired. He was hoping to make enough from his next sale to retire comfortably.

He had been coming to Egypt for thirty-five years, and the Egyptian dealer had been a steady source of antiquities for much of that time. Now, the two men faced each other, Tatlık in a light gray business suit, and the Egyptian lounging in a white galabia. Tatlık was clean-shaven while the Egyptian’s beard was grizzled. Both were hatless. The Egyptian had a full head of thick, gray hair, while Tatlık’s bald pate was exposed. The Turk remembered when his friend’s hair had been dark brown and his own had been much the same color, only more plentiful. Bygone days.

It was a warm, early fall afternoon. The Egyptian’s cramped room was filled with racks of pots, vases, bolts of cloth, trinkets, and various kinds and sizes of books. The electric fan by the doorway to the small kitchen whirred softly. The sun outside was bright, but the room’s lone slatted window kept much of the light out, giving a gray cast even to the bright-patterned fabrics of various kinds, from scarves to rugs.

Some items were arranged on two wooden tables while others, including most of the books, were stacked on the floor. They formed low walls on three sides of the room, which reminded Tatlık of a childhood fort he had built out of his mother’s shoe boxes. That was when she was still buying shoes and modern clothes and otherwise keeping in step with fashion, and before his father had died. After that death, his mother had retreated into her widow’s black dress and hijab in which she was rarely seen by anyone outside of the family's flat where she still lived with her son.

Inside the low fortress walls created by the Egyptian’s books, they sat in a pair of stuffed chairs, both of which were somewhat threadbare, but beneath Tatlık’s heavy frame the cushion was thick and comfortable. Between the men was a low table with a simple black and white geometric pattern carved into its top. There was a still steaming pot of tea on the table and a cup for each of them. Tatlık set aside the codex so that he could refill his cup without danger of spilling tea on the pages.

Originally, this codex would have been bound in leather, he said to his host, but its cover has been lost. It is now just a sheaf of loose pages, and they are brown with age. Look, the edges are frayed and brittle, and there seem to be holes in each and every page. Besides that, the ink is faded.

It was the Egyptian’s turn to scoff. "That only proves its