Authors: Will Adams
Something banged loudly outside. She went to the window. An old truck was passing along the road. Her nerve was shaken, however. It was time to leave. She fetched the smallest of the wheeled suitcases and packed all the photographs and documents into it. It was so heavy that she had to bump it downstairs one step at a time. She closed the front door behind her then ducked her head and hurried back through the citrus grove, dragging the case after her like a sulking child.
An army Land-Rover drove by just as she reached the road. Her heart went crazy on her. They were sure to stop and ask her to explain her flustered appearance and odd behaviour, demand to see inside the suitcase; but they simply gazed past her as if she wasn’t there. Nothing in this world was quite so invisible as an old woman in widow’s black struggling with a suitcase. Normally, this would have infuriated Zehra. But sometimes, she had to admit, it had its benefits.
The uniforms and helmets were copies rather than the real thing, but you’d have needed a close examination to tell. They had no badges or tags, of course, though that wasn’t the give-away it might have been, because it was standard practice among riot police to remove or cover up anything that could identify them on days like this, precisely to avoid being caught by some do-gooder with a camera-phone.
They chose a young man with a union banner, a pronounced limp and lips reddened from drinking pomegranate juice from a fat-mouthed bottle. He had soft plump features and the wary eyes of the picked-upon. They seized him and dragged him down an alley cluttered with bins and black bags into a boarded-up shop. They punched him to the ground and kicked him in the stomach and face while their comrade filmed through a broken window so that it would look like some random passer-by had stumbled upon the incident by chance.
The young man soon fell unconscious. They carried on kicking him anyway, then left him for dead. They uploaded the footage anonymously onto YouTube and the unofficial Facebook page for the Day of Action, then sent out alerts and links on Twitter and other social media. Within an hour, it had been viewed over 100,000 times; and those who hadn’t yet seen it had been told about it through the grapevine. And suddenly there was a new edge to the chanting in the squares.
Suddenly there was anger.
The concierge showed them to a snug double with powder blue walls and pink-and-white chintz bedclothes. She took their passports to copy and tried to tell them about breakfast. Karin thanked her and hustled her out the door. Then she turned to Iain. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘What the fuck’s going on? Who were those men? What did they want with me? And what are you even doing here? You’re supposed to be in Egypt.’
‘I ran into these guys last night. Friends of theirs, at least. They pretty much admitted they were the ones behind Daphne. They wanted to shut me up before I could go public.’
‘Shut you up? You mean …?’
He nodded but didn’t elaborate. ‘I got away from them. They threatened to come after you if I blabbed. I tried to warn you but I’d lost your mobile number so I caught a flight here then had a colleague call you at your hotel.’
‘They left a message with reception. I was reading it when those guys jumped me.’ She sat heavily on the bed. ‘Jesus. What do we do? Do we go to the police?’
Iain grimaced. Going to the police would inevitably lead to the whole story coming out, including the taxi-driver locked in his own boot. That was certain to bring a shit-storm down upon his head unless he could first find a way to establish his innocence. ‘It’s not that simple,’ he told her. ‘They’re bound to call the Turks to check our story. But these people have got good connections in the Turkish police.’ His bruises had stiffened; he winced as he sat beside her. ‘And if they find out where we are …’
She frowned at him. ‘What’s up? Are you hurt?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘The way you grimaced just now. And when we were running earlier.’
‘Like I said, I ran into these people last night.’
‘Take off your clothes,’ she said.
‘Now you’re talking.’
‘You have injuries,’ she said severely. ‘They need attention.’
‘They’re fine.’
‘Show me.’ He shrugged and stripped off his shirt, revealing the welts on his forearms and wrists, the bruising on his chest. Karin’s initial shock hardened into anger. ‘Stay here,’ she said. ‘I’ll be back in a moment.’
‘You’re not going out,’ he said. ‘Not on your own.’
‘Those cuts will infect.’
‘I don’t care. You’re not going out on your own.’
She sighed, relented. ‘I’ll ask the concierge for a first-aid kit.’
He sat on the edge of the bed, gingerly pulled off his trousers. His socks had glued to his ankles with blood and other seepage. He went to the bathroom to wipe away the worst of it. Karin returned. He wrapped a towel around his waist and went back out. She held up a red first-aid box in mock triumph but stopped smiling when she saw his ankles. ‘Those fuckers,’ she said. ‘I
hate
them.’
‘It’s not that bad,’ he told her. ‘Truly, it isn’t.’
She had him lie on his back on the bed then sat beside him and attended to his feet. She swabbed them with cotton wool and iodine, rubbed in antiseptic cream, covered them with gauze and bandage cut from a roll. Her back was to him, her T-shirt tucked into her waistband, tautening each time she leaned forwards, emphasizing the ridge of her spine, the strap of her bra. The way Tisha had looked after him in hospital had played a big part in his falling for her: that potent combination of concern and not taking any of his shit. Without thinking, he placed his hand upon Karin’s lower back, began caressing her with his thumb through the thin cotton. She glanced around at him. ‘Stop that,’ she said.
‘Sorry,’ he said, taking away his hand. ‘Damned thing has a mind of its own. It can be really embarrassing sometimes.’
‘I’d imagine.’ She finished his ankles, turned to face him. She rested a hand on the bed the other side of him to take her weight as she checked his chest. Wisps of hair spilled forwards over her eyes. She tucked them back behind her ears. She took a tube of heat-rub from the first-aid kit, squeezed a thin white worm of it onto her fingers, massaged it in to his chest, making his heart go hot. A little double crinkle appeared between her brows whenever she concentrated. Her eyes were a slightly paler blue than he’d remembered. She locked her elbow to take her weight so that her arm was bent slightly beyond the straight. Light freckles ran down to her wrist before dispersing into the darker tanning of her hand. She had silver rings set with semiprecious stones on many of her fingers, but not on all. ‘So do you have a boyfriend back in the States, then?’ he asked.
She smiled but shook her head. ‘Nathan kind of made it impossible.’
‘Good,’ he said.
She laughed at his directness. ‘It wouldn’t work,’ she said. ‘Like I said the other day, I don’t do flings any more. And we live halfway across the world from each other.’
‘I thought you were going back to Holland.’
‘I’m thinking about it. I haven’t decided yet. It depends where I can get work.’
‘Come in with me,’ he said. ‘I’m about to set up on my own. We can pool our skills, set up the world’s first Homeric-themed business intelligence agency. It’d be our edge. Our USP.’
‘Someone must have tried it before,’ said Karin. ‘It’s so obvious.’
‘That’s what they say about all the breakthrough ideas.’ He put his hand on her waist, stroked her with his thumb. She didn’t stop him this time but rather put her hand on his as if intending to remove it, but then simply kept it there. There was uncertainty in her expression, that old struggle between appetites and good intentions.
‘Are you serious?’ she asked. ‘About setting up on your own?’
‘I was,’ sighed Iain. ‘Until that fucking bomb went off.’
‘What difference would that make?’
‘My colleague Mustafa, the one who was killed. I promised him I’d see his wife and daughters okay. Only it turns out my bastard boss scrapped his life insurance.’
‘You can’t blame yourself for that.’
‘I recruited him to the fucking company. So yes I can. But that’s beside the point. He was my mate, I gave him my word and that’s the end of it. And it’s not as if I can’t afford it. I earn a good whack, I own my own place and I’ve got savings. It’ll just set my plans back a bit, that’s all. Unless I can come up with something clever.’
She still had her hand on his. Now she drew it slowly up her side to her chest. He looked up at her in surprise. ‘I thought you didn’t do flings any more,’ he said.
‘I lied,’ she said.
Even wheeled as it was, the suitcase was too heavy for Zehra, especially as the pavement was so broken that she had to lug it half the time. The cheap handle made her fingers swell and turn alarming colours. She found a bench by a children’s playground then set the suitcase on the ground in front of her and rummaged through it. But the chaos of photographs, letters and documents overwhelmed her. She didn’t have the right kind of mind for it. Her son Taner would be able to make sense of it, but he was in prison. Professor Volkan would too, but he was under house arrest.
She struggled back to her feet, trudged to the nearest bus-stop. The first bus took her to Famagusta’s central bus station, then she caught another out along the Salamis Road. ‘Who is it?’ asked Andreas irritably, when finally he answered his buzzer.
‘It’s me. Zehra. Taner’s mother. I need you to look at something.’
‘I’m busy,’ he told her. ‘I’ve got classes to prepare. Papers to mark.’
‘Please,’ she said.
Andreas sighed heavily. ‘Fine. Come on up.’ He buzzed her in. She took the lift to the top floor. A sulky young woman with dishevelled hair was waiting by the doors.
Some classes!
thought Zehra.
Some papers!
The lock was on the latch. She went in. Andreas was boiling the kettle at his kitchen counter, wearing only a loosely knotted blue-and-white silk kimono. ‘This better be important,’ he said.
‘Put some clothes on,’ she told him. ‘Don’t you have any shame?’
He vanished into his bedroom, came out a minute later, still barefoot, buttoning up a black shirt that he tucked into crumpled cream slacks. ‘What the hell?’ he asked, when he saw her decanting the suitcase onto his floor.
‘These came from the house of the man in that picture,’ she told him. ‘His name is Yasin Baykam. He had something to do with the bomb they’re blaming on my son. And you’re going to help me find out what.’
They lay in bed together afterwards, turned to face each other. Iain told her more about what had happened since the police had come for him in Antioch: his interrogation, his deportation, his time in Israel, his afternoon with Mike.
‘How did that go?’ Karin asked him. ‘Did he get anything from those samples?’
‘It’s going to take longer than I expected. Though there was some pollen. From here in Cyprus, as it happens.’
She pushed herself up onto an elbow. ‘From where, exactly?’ she asked.
‘Some place called Salamis. Ever heard of it?’
Karin laughed. ‘Of course I’ve heard of it. It’s one of the great sites. In fact, I was going to go visit it with Nathan. It was founded by a Trojan War veteran, you see.’
Iain gave a wry smile. ‘Except don’t tell me: the dates don’t fit, right?’
She looked curiously at him. ‘Why do you say that?’
‘Your boss wrote a note to Mike to go with the samples. He said you were all closing in on your Virgil Solution. I couldn’t figure out what he meant. But then I realized. What’s Virgil famous for? For Dido and Aeneas, the impossible lovers who lived four hundred years apart. Impossible, that is, unless the conventional chronology is fucked up. That’s what you think, isn’t it, you and Mike and Nathan? That the Dark Ages never happened. That’s why there’s no trace of David or Solomon in Israel, and how Homer described the Trojan War so accurately, and how the Hittites and Phoenicians and those other cultures all picked up so precisely where they’d left off before. You think Dido and Aeneas really were lovers, don’t you?’
Her expression was hard to read, as if torn between discretion and an eagerness to share. ‘Not exactly,’ she said.
‘Not exactly?’
‘There really was a Catastrophe. There really was a Dark Age. We simply think it didn’t last anything like as long as most people claim. But even if we could cut out 350 years, which is pretty much the upper limit, Dido and Aeneas still couldn’t have been lovers. Though they
could
have known each other.’
‘I don’t get it. Why all the mystery? Why not just tell me?’
Karin sighed. ‘Because you learn not to. It’s considered crank history, you see. An extreme variant of it was once proposed by this crazy Russian psychiatrist called Velikovsky who also blamed the planet Mercury for destroying the Tower of Babel and Jupiter for Sodom and Gomorrah. So no one’s ever had to engage with our arguments. All they’ve ever had to do is point at Velikovsky and sneer at us. But our arguments are
strong
. That doesn’t make them right, of course, but it surely makes them at least worthy of refutation. But of course the people who matter can’t admit even that much. To do so would be to admit that all their ridicule was unwarranted, which would be humiliating. So they exclude us from their academy instead. They ignore our papers and try to pretend we don’t exist.’
‘So I’m in bed with a crank, huh?’ grinned Iain. ‘Cool.’ He kissed her, threw back the duvet, grabbed his towel from the floor. He paused at the bathroom door, turned. ‘And no going through my stuff this time,’ he said, gesturing at his holdall. ‘We know how that ends. Watch TV or something instead.’
The signs had been there, in the minutes leading up to it, that the dam had been about to burst. The chants in Taksim Square had turned increasingly belligerent. Small surges of demonstrators towards the police lines, almost playful to start with, had grown in frequency and aggression. Parents who’d hoped for a fun and cheap day out grabbed their children’s hands and headed briskly for the exit roads. And the police stepped up their own preparations too, putting on masks in anticipation of tear-gas, picking up their shields and batons.