The Eighth Day (21 page)

“Si, Signore Cray! Two gentlemen come to see you.”

“At the hotel?”

“They ask to wait in your room, but this—” A pause. “—this I do not allow.”

“So they’re—”

“Outside. I think they have coffee.”

Danny hung up the phone, finished his drink, and tossed a few thousand lire on the bar. Then he went out to the street and began to walk. How did they find him? They didn’t follow him from the Casa Clera, because then he would have been toast last night. They couldn’t have gone to every hotel in Rome, asking if he was a guest. Yet somehow they had found out where he was staying. But how? He hadn’t made a reservation. And he’d used cash, not plastic. Which left, what?

His call to Caleigh. But there’d been no time to get a call log like the one he got from the information broker for Terio’s phone. There was a time lag for that kind of thing; it was forty-eight hours at a minimum before calls posted up.

It took him a while to figure it out, but eventually he did. There was no other way. They must have hacked the voice-mailbox on the phone.

This wasn’t something that Danny himself had ever done, but he knew enough about this
kind
of thing to know that it was possible. Most answering machines and voice-mail services worked the same way. To access messages from another phone, you called the number and waited for the outgoing message to play. Once it did, you pressed a key—usually the asterisk or pound sign—on the touch-tone pad. Then you entered an access-code that was two to four digits long, depending on the service and equipment. Half the time, people used a default number (like 1234) that was easy to remember. And, of course, just as easy to guess. Not that you would ever bother guessing. For fifty bucks, you could buy a tone-dialer on the Internet and download a shareware program that would run through all the possibilities for you.

Which was another way of saying that he’d made it easy for them. What were his words? His exact words?
I’m at the Abruzze Hotel in Rome. Call me.
He’d even left the number.

Way to go, Sherlock.

He had to get out of here. Because as dumb as it was to leave a message like that, it would be an even bigger mistake to assume that he had Zebek figured out, that he knew how the billionaire’s goons had found him. He was probably right, but if he was wrong, they’d find him again. And if they did, he had a hunch he could kiss his ass good-bye.

TWELVE

So he kissed Rome good-bye instead.

Getting out of town wasn’t the hardest decision he’d ever made. It was just a question of Istanbul or Oslo—and Istanbul made more sense. Norway would have been cooler, but Terio had worked in Turkey, so Turkey was where Danny went.

The four-ten flight landed just in time for a bloodred sunset. Passing through Turkish Customs, he could feel the tension slide from his body, and he heaved a sigh of relief.

Kemal Atatürk International Airport was sterile, modern, and efficient. Danny used his ATM card to get two hundred dollars in cash from a machine and was astonished to receive nearly a quarter of a
billion
Turkish lire. Examining the money, he saw that all of the crisp new bills looked alike, though their colors were different. Staring at them, he realized that until he memorized the colors he would have to count the zeros on each bill whenever he paid for anything.

A rank of taxis waited outside the terminal and Danny went up to the window of the first one that he saw. “How much to Cankurtaran?” he asked, naming a neighborhood that he’d read about in the in-flight magazine. The Blue Mosque was nearby, and so was Aya Sofia, one of the oldest and grandest churches in Christendom. It was a tourist area, anyway. He figured he’d blend in.

“Ten million,” the driver told him.

Danny laughed. “No problem.”

The traffic into town was heavy, but the driver had a way around it. Every mile or so, he’d abandon the road, swerving onto the tram tracks that ran beside it. This allowed him to surge from twenty to sixty miles an hour, passing hundreds of cars and trucks—until the single headlight of a trolley would sparkle in the distance and rapidly swell. At that point, the driver would swerve back onto the road, but only until the trolley passed. Then it was back to the tracks and playing “chicken.”

“Is this, uh, legal?” Danny asked.

“Oh no,” the driver said cheerfully. “It’s big trouble if they catch me. Two people killed this way last month.”

Danny sat back and looked for a seat belt. There wasn’t one, but it didn’t really bother him. Though the ride was way too exciting, he was pretty sure that he wasn’t meant to die in a traffic accident. Not now. Not under these circumstances. That would be like a piano falling on someone who was dying of cancer. It just didn’t happen. The terminally ill were immune to fatal accidents, and Danny realized that was how he saw himself—as “terminally ill.”

Anyone who had a case of Zerevan Zebek didn’t need to worry about seat belts.

Meanwhile, the city slid by outside the window, a jumble of ancient and modern buildings, massive apartment blocks, mosques, and markets. Up ahead, a trolley’s white headlight bore down upon them, and the driver swerved from the tracks onto the road. Suddenly they were cruising along the waterfront on a highway named for President Kennedy. Beyond the cab’s smudged window, dozens of freighters rode at anchor, their decks alight, glittering on the coal-black Sea of Marmara.

It was a stunning sight, but Danny found it depressing. It was exactly the kind of thing that you wanted to see, that you really
needed
to see, with someone you loved. Someone like Caleigh, whose last words to him were what?

Oh, yeah. Now, I remember. “Fuck you
.”

The Asian Shore Guesthouse was an antique wooden structure that the Turkish Automobile Society had renovated ten years earlier. Around the corner from the Cankurtaran railway station, it sat on the side of a hill, overlooking the Golden Horn. It had ten rooms and a roof garden where drinks were served.

The rooms weren’t bad, a little down-at-heels but clean and spacious. The view, however, was heart-stopping, with half of Istanbul laid out beneath the windows. With the lights off and the foghorns sounding, it was one of the most romantic rooms Danny had ever been in. And at twenty-three million a night, it was a steal: about fifteen dollars.

It didn’t take him long to settle in, since his only luggage was the nylon backpack that he’d bought in Rome. He took a quick shower, changed his clothes, and went out to look for something to eat. Though it was after ten, there were still plenty of restaurants open. He settled on a smoky little joint two blocks from the hotel, where he wolfed down skewers of vegetable kebab, served up with rice and a spicy eggplant salad. On the way back to his room, four different guys tried to sell him rugs.

And the incredible thing was:
He almost bought one.

Back at the hotel, he asked the young desk clerk, whose name tag read
HASAN
, if he had a telephone directory.

The desk clerk shook his head. “They haven’t printed a new one for years,” he said. “What name do you want? I can get it from Information.”

“Barzan,” Danny told him. “Remy Barzan.”

Hasan picked up the phone, dialed a number, and spoke briefly with an operator. Turning to Danny, he switched from Turkish to English without missing a beat. “You want the number?”

“And the address,” Danny said.

Hasan muttered something in Turkish, waited a moment, then scribbled on a scratch pad. When he was done, he hung up the phone and tore off the top page of the pad. “It’s in Beyo(breve)glu,” he said. “Near the big Catholic church.”

Danny thanked him and asked if he could have a wake-up call in the morning.

Hasan smiled. “You don’t need.”

“Yeah, I do,” Danny told him. “I’m—”

“Trust me! You don’t be needing this.”

Danny gave him a look. “Trust
me
: I do be needing it.”

The desk clerk laughed. “What time?”

“Eight would be good.”

“I’ll make sure you’re up. No problem.”

He
said
it was no problem, but Danny could tell the request went in one ear and out the other. The guy didn’t even write it down—just smiled at him.
Must be a Turkish thing,
Danny thought, and trudged up the stairs to his room. There he dialed the number the clerk had given him and listened to the phone ring in Beyo(breve)glu on the other side of town. He wasn’t sure what he was going to say, but the main thing was to set up a meeting—and soon. Except: Barzan wasn’t in. All Danny got was an answering machine with a message in Turkish. And after what happened in Rome, he wasn’t about to leave a message. Replacing the receiver in its cradle, he stripped off his clothes and fell back on the bed, exhausted.

The call to prayer—the
insanely amplified
call to prayer—blew him out of bed at dawn. This wasn’t a “Let us now pray” kind of thing but an ululating wail that went on and on, beseeching, reminding, cajoling, whining. To Danny’s ears, it sounded as if the muezzin was seated on a hot stove surrounded by amplifiers. This was a sound level that would have worked for Metallica in Yankee Stadium. When it finally stopped, Danny was wide awake and staring.

Taking the stairs down to the lobby, where a dozen neatly set tables were waiting, he breakfasted on bread and olives, cheese, and tomatoes washed down with fresh orange juice and hot black coffee. Just as he was finishing, Hasan appeared in the doorway with a sly smile.

“Well!” he exclaimed. “You’re up early.”

Danny laughed. “Yeah, I thought I heard something outside.”

“We’re a very spiritual people.”

“I’m sure you are.”

“You need a driver?” Hasan asked. “I can get you a good one, cheap.”

Danny shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he replied. “I feel like walking. But maybe you could help me with directions, though. I’m looking for the Agence France Presse.”

“No problem.” Turning on his heel, the young Turk left the breakfast room and returned a minute later with the address. “It’s in Taksim,” he said. “A long walk, but you can always get a cab. I think, best way: go down to the docks, where the ferryboats leave. This is Eminönü. Go left at the water toward the Galata Bridge, and cross over to the other side of the Golden Horn. Then you walk uphill toward the Tower and keep going. This address—it’s near there.”

“What tower?”

“Galata Tower. Round, stone, seventy meters high, maybe seven hundred years old. You don’t miss it. Once you’re there, it’s better you ask somebody—because the street . . . it’s not like the States.” He wrote the address on a slip of paper, extended it toward Danny, and hesitated. “Maybe you should take a taxi,” he decided.

“I’ll find it,” Danny told him, taking the note.

In fact, he was looking forward to exploring this city, which, on first impression, seemed like a hybrid of San Francisco and Tangiers.

He found his way down to the water without any trouble and made his way over to Eminönü, which was as crowded as Grand Central Station. Boats came and went from the docks, heading for destinations near and far, on both sides of the Bosphorus. A river of pedestrian traffic flowed through a haze of smoke boiling from little boats, rocking at the quay, where vendors sold grilled fish and rounds of bread encrusted with sesame seeds. There were almost no women to be seen—just a mob of lookalike men with short black hair and thick mustaches. Danny maneuvered his way through the crowd to the Galata Bridge, where he joined a stream of men going to work or heading home.

Traffic on the water was almost as dense as that on the land. Rusting freighters plowed the waves beside glittering cruise ships, sailboats, and tankers. Arab music—dissonant and hysterical—came at him from every direction. Seagulls dipped and soared. Sunlight twinkled on the waves. The sky was implacably blue. The whole scene suggested a painting by Childe Hassam on dope.

Once Danny reached the other side of the bridge, the road began to climb, leading him up a narrow street packed with hole-in-the-wall shops selling an improbable mix of satellite dishes, cable boxes, and descramblers. At the base of the Galata Tower, he drank a Turkish coffee in a small café and showed the waiter the slip of paper that Hasan had given him.

The Agence France Presse office was on the third floor of a plain brick building off a thronged pedestrian mall known as Istikal Caddessi. A scholarly-looking fat man with square-rimmed eyeglasses and strands of hair combed over a bald spot answered Danny’s knock. Behind him Danny saw a couple of old wooden desks, piled high with newspapers, books, and reports. A tangle of wires networked the computers to a quartet of telephones, a fax machine, and a printer. In the back of the room, a woman worked on a laptop while she talked animatedly into her cell phone.

“Oui?”
The man in the doorway regarded him curiously. Obviously, they didn’t get many visitors.

“Do you speak English?” Danny asked.

In reply, the man made a seesawing gesture with his right hand.
“Un peu.”

“I’m looking for . . .” Danny hesitated. The fact that Chris Terio had called both Remy Barzan’s apartment and the AFP did not mean that Barzan worked for the AFP. He might or might not. Maybe Terio knew more than one person in Istanbul. Still . . .

“Yes?” The man in the doorway looked impatient.

“I’m looking for Remy Barzan.”

A frown accompanied a definite change in the man’s mood. He crossed his arms in front of his chest. “He’s not here.”

“But you know him, right?”

“Of course.”

“So . . . he’s a reporter for you?”

“He covers Kurdish affairs.” The man angled his head, as if to get a better look at Danny. He frowned, as if he didn’t like what he saw. “What do you want with him?”

Danny hesitated. Good question. But a truthful answer was impossible. Where would he begin? “I was told to look him up if I got to Istanbul, so . . . here I am. Do you know when he’ll be back?”

“No. We haven’t seen him for a while. To tell you the truth, we don’t even know if he’s
coming
back.” Danny’s disappointment was so immediate and obvious that the man’s attitude softened. “You tried his flat?”

“No one answers.”

The man nodded. “Donata!” he called over his shoulder. “This man’s looking for Remy!”

Donata kept the cell phone to her ear but rolled her eyes in sympathy. She fashioned a big shrug and turned her back. The older man made a hapless gesture that was meant to end the conversation, but Danny was reluctant to leave. Barzan was just about the only lead he had, so he stood where he was, thinking,
Now what?
Norway?

The woman at the back of the office closed her cell phone and came toward them. She was heavyset and masculine-looking, with a frizz of reddish hair and a lot of makeup. “Donata,” she announced, offering a pudgy hand.

“Danny Cray.”

“You’re wanting to see Remy?”

“Right.”

“And it’s important?”

Danny glanced at the older man and shrugged. “Yeah,” he admitted, “it’s pretty important.”

The older man snorted. “I thought you were just ‘looking him up.’ ”

“Believe me,” Danny said, “it’s a long story. I was told to look him up—but it
is
important.”

Donata pressed her mouth into a line. Thought about it. And came to a decision. “I think: maybe he’s in the east.”

“ ‘The east,’ ” Danny repeated, as if it were a street address.

“He specializes in Kurdish matters,” Donata continued. “So he’s often in Diyarbakir. But if you’re thinking of going there, I wouldn’t. It’s dangerous.”

“Oh.”

The man peered at Danny, seemed to realize he didn’t have a clue. With a glance at Donata, as if to get permission, the man spoke. “There are terrorists. Kurdish separatists. So the military is there in big numbers. Lots of excesses. Lots of trouble. Good for a journalist. Bad for tourism.”

Donata sighed. “I don’t know what we’re going to do if Remy doesn’t come back. When he started, I thought he was just amusing himself. A rich boy, writing the occasional color piece. But he’s actually very good. A serious journalist.” She shook her head. “He’ll be difficult to replace.”

“You talk as if you don’t expect him to return,” Danny said.

The two exchanged looks and seemed to come to some agreement. “I don’t see the harm in telling you,” Donata said. “Remy, he disappears”—she looked up at the ceiling as if it had a calendar imprinted on it—“a little more than a week ago. On the day we don’t see him, his car—” She clapped her hands together and said, “Boom! It’s nothing left.”