I Am Pilgrim (49 page)

her boobs straining against a tight blouse, her make-up, her ass in a pencil skirt. The moods, too, one suspected. As I waited for her to finish, it occurred to me that, in many ways, she represented the contradictions of modern Turkey – she was young in a culture wedded to the past, unabashedly female

in a society dominated by men, irreligious and Western-looking in a country where one face was always turned east towards Islam.

And, of course – for a deeply conservative nation – there was one last contradiction, the biggest of them all. Drugs. Turkey had become the critical link in the most lucrative trafficking route in the world, a modern Silk Road which transported opium, semi-refined heroin and fine-grade hash from

Pakistan and Afghanistan into Western Europe, over the border to Lebanon or across the Caucasus mountains into Russia. If drugs were just another modern commodity – like oil, pumped down transnational pipelines – Turkey had become the biggest interchange in the world.

I knew about it because of Christos Nikolaides, the Greek drug dealer whose death I had ordered in

Santorini. In pursuing him I had learned from the DEA that Patros Nikolaides and six other major cartels were wound tight into Turkey – especially this part of Turkey – and despite valiant efforts by some fine Turkish officers, corruption had blossomed and profits had become ever more spectacular.

The secretary showed no sign of finishing the call so I pulled up a chair and fell to thinking about Patros and his Albanian enforcers. Once I had returned to the safety of America, the man had slipped from my mind but I had to admit it was ironic how, under the pressure of the crisis we were facing, I had been drawn back into a corner of the world he knew so well. I wondered where he was – still behind his twelve-foot walls in Thessaloniki, tending to his lavender plants and mourning the loss of his son, I hoped.

I was wrong not to have thought harder about it – spectacularly wrong – but the woman finally hung up, turned her appropriately extravagant smile on me, straightened her blouse in case I hadn’t

yet noticed what she considered her two best assets and asked if I was Brodie Wilson.

I nodded, and she told me that her boss was running fifteen minutes late. ‘She takes the little dude to a corner park every morning. Her car, it just got up and died. It’s Italian – the car, I’m talking about –

which explains why it’s a piece of shit.’

I deduced from this that she must have had a boyfriend who was Italian. It also seemed that most of

her English had been gleaned from modern American music, summer blockbusters and chatting on the Internet.

‘“The little dude”?’ I asked.

‘Her son.’

‘Is her husband a cop too? That’s the way it usually works in this business.’ I didn’t care much, I

was just making conversation – you know, shooting the breeze.

‘No, she’s divorced.’

‘How old’s her son?’

‘The little dude’s six.’ She obviously liked the expression; I guess it made her think she was just as hip as any visiting American.

‘That’s hard, being a single mom with a boy that age.’

She shrugged – I doubt she had ever thought about it. Out of nowhere, disaster arrived and tried to

shake hands with me. ‘You have children, Mr Wilson?’

‘No, no little dudes,’ I said, not concentrating and inadvertently telling the truth – at least the truth about myself but in direct contradiction to my legend. I immediately realized the mistake, thought of trying to bite the words back but dispensed with that stupid idea. Somehow I managed to keep my cool.

‘Not that live with me,’ I continued with a smile. ‘I’m divorced, that’s why I know how difficult it is

– my former wife keeps telling me.’

She laughed, not noticing anything untoward. Good recovery, I thought, but my palms were damp

and I gave myself a metaphorical slap across the head to wake me up. ‘Is that your boss?’ I asked, trying to change the subject, pointing at a photo on the other desk.

It showed a smiling woman dressed in a headscarf and coveralls halfway up a ladder, whitewashing

the side wall of a small Bodrum house. It must have been shot down in the old port – a large building next door carried a sign in English and Turkish: GUL & SONS, MARINA AND SHIPWRIGHTS.

‘Yeah,’ the secretary said, coming to my side. ‘That was a couple of years ago, just after she arrived.’ I looked more closely at the photo – she was a beautiful woman, in her thirties, sort of exotic too: high cheekbones and large almond eyes.

‘She’s very attractive,’ I said.

‘Thank you,’ a voice said icily from behind. ‘People say I get it from my mother.’

I turned, and it was the cop, of course. She put her handbag and cellphone down and turned to the

secretary. ‘Go to your desk, please, Hayrunnisa.’

Hayrunnisa didn’t need to be told twice. The cop was dressed in a headscarf that was tucked into a

high-collared jacket that fell to her knees. Underneath it she wore a long-sleeved blouse and wide-legged pants that brushed the top of a pair of high heels. Everything was of good quality – stylish too

– but there wasn’t an inch of flesh exposed except for her hands and face. This was the other side of Turkey – conservative, Islamic, deeply suspicious of the West and its values.

‘My name is Leyla Cumali,’ she said. She didn’t offer her hand, and you didn’t have to be a detective to work out she didn’t like me. Maybe it was because I was an investigator trespassing on her patch, maybe because I was an American. Probably both, I decided. Apparently, in Turkey, two strikes and you’re out.

‘It’s a pity you’ve come so far for so little,’ she said, sitting down at her desk. ‘As I said in the note, the death of the young man was clearly an accident.’

‘When do you intend to finalize it?’ I asked.

‘Today. The case file will go to my superiors later this morning. Assuming everything is in order,

it will then be forwarded to the department head in Ankara, who will close and seal it. That’s a formality.’

‘I’m afraid it will have to be delayed,’ I said. ‘I need to review the investigation before any decision is made.’ I’m not usually so abrupt, but I couldn’t let it get away from me; somehow, I had to buy some time.

She tried to mask it, but she was instantly angry – I could see it in the almond eyes. She fixed them on mine, trying to make me offer some conciliatory gesture, but I had been stared down by better men than her.

‘I don’t think there’ll be any need to delay,’ she said finally. ‘Like I mentioned, I can take you through this in twenty minutes. Less, probably. That’s how clear cut it is.’

She opened a filing cabinet, pulled out a stack of files and found a photo of the lawn at the back of the French House. She slapped it down on the desk.

‘This is where he fell,’ she said, indicating a hundred-foot drop down the face of a sheer cliff.

The crumbling precipice was rendered safe by a double-bar wooden fence which ran around the entire private headland and terminated at a beautiful gazebo on the tip of the point.

‘Four metres north of the gazebo he either climbed on to the fence or stepped over it,’ she said. ‘We know the exact spot because one of my forensic team found a single thread from the chinos he was

wearing snagged on a splinter.’

Her English was damn near perfect, but she hit the term ‘forensic team’ a little too hard – still seething, she was letting me know she wasn’t from the backwoods and they had done their work in a

thorough and modern fashion. I started to ask a question, but she rolled over me.

‘You asked for a review, let’s finish it. The young American died at 9.36 p.m. We know because his

cellphone was in his pocket and the clock stopped when he smashed on to the rocks. That was six minutes after a large phosphorous star exploded above the headland. It marked the start of a firework display. I doubt you would know but Saturday night was—

‘Zafer Bayrami,’ I said.

She was surprised. ‘Congratulations,’ she replied. ‘Perhaps you’re not as ignorant as most of your

countrymen.’

I let it ride – what was the point? I had far more difficult problems to deal with than her attitude.

‘The victim – Mr Dodge – had been sitting in the library of the house, drinking alcohol and taking

drugs – the toxicology report shows it – when the phosphorous star exploded and marked the start of

the evening’s festivities.

‘He picked up a pair of binoculars – we found them just inside the railing – and walked down the

lawn to watch the fireworks.’

The binoculars set an alarm ringing – my radar said there was something wrong – but I didn’t have

time to think about it: I wanted to concentrate on what she was saying, and she was going at warp speed.

‘To get a better view of the fireworks, he either stood on the railing or swung himself over it.

Disoriented by the cocktail of drugs and alcohol, on unfamiliar territory, perhaps confused by the constant explosions of light, he lost his footing on the crumbling cliff edge and couldn’t recover. He fell. Are you with me, Agent Wilson?’

I nodded.

‘We re-created the scene with a dummy of exactly his height and weight. One point eight seconds

after he fell, he crashed through some bushes clinging to the cliff. You can see the broken branches, and we found several tufts of hair in the foliage. You may find this interesting: his trajectory was totally consistent with a man slipping.

‘Here are the records of those tests.’ She slid a small pile of technical graphs across the table.

‘We think he tried to grab on to a branch – there were lacerations on one hand – but he kept falling until he hit the rocks one hundred and four feet below. That’s a ten-storey building. Among many other injuries, he broke his spine in two places and died instantly.’

I nodded – that was what the State Department file had given as the cause of death. I had to admit it –

she and her forensic team had done an outstanding job. God help us, I thought. I had no choice except to keep attacking.

‘There were security people on the estate,’ I said. ‘Plenty of people on boats. Some of them must

have been close to the headland. Who heard him scream?’ I was just probing.

‘Nobody. Even if he did scream, the sound of the exploding fireworks would have drowned it out.

Was that the question you were going to ask?’

‘No, actually, it wasn’t,’ I replied testily. ‘I wanted to know exactly who else was on the estate that night.’

‘That’s funny,’ Cumali replied, her voice freighted with sarcasm. ‘Exactly the same question occurred to us. Apart from the security detail, there was nobody. He was alone.’

‘How can you be sure?’ I asked. ‘It’s a huge estate.’

She gave me a withering look. ‘Six point nine acres in total,’ she said, opening another folder and

taking out more photos. With them was a wad of blueprints.

‘The only people who rent it are hugely wealthy – as a result, there are one hundred and eight cameras which monitor and record the perimeter. The system was installed by one of the world’s leading security corporations – American, you’ll be pleased to know – and it’s impossible to step on to the grounds without being seen and recorded.’

She dealt out photos showing dozens of different cameras – cameras mounted on poles, on the sides of buildings, hidden in foliage. Some were fixed, others pivoted; all were equipped with infrared and night-vision hardware. Looking at them as an expert, I knew it must have cost a fortune.

She followed up with some of the blueprints. ‘These are the specifications of the system – you can

see there isn’t an inch of the perimeter that isn’t covered.’

Next came a series of reports which showed that the cameras had been working perfectly. I didn’t

look at them – I was sure she was right. Things were getting worse by the second. I might be able to delay her by a few days but, beyond that – well, it was looking impossible. ‘What about the cliff?’ I asked. ‘What was to stop somebody climbing up it?’

She sighed. ‘There is a small beach at one end – the German Beach, it’s called – which has a boat

ramp, a salt-water pool and boathouse. It is part of the estate and attached to it is a guardroom.

‘Two men were inside and four cameras monitor the steps up to the estate and the entire cliff face.

You want to know how good the motion-controlled cameras were? There was a slight blur recorded

by one of them that took our interest – then I realized it had captured the victim’s body plunging past.

One fiftieth of a second and it got it.’

I looked out at the frangipani trees, buying myself a moment, trying to gather my thoughts for another assault. ‘So you say Dodge was alone – except of course he wasn’t,’ I said. ‘There was the security detail. What was to stop one of them approaching from behind and tipping him into eternity?’

She barely looked at her notes; she could have shot it down blindfolded. ‘There were eighteen men on duty that night.’ She laid out mugshots of them all; more than a few gorillas in their ranks.

‘Like many people in that business, some of them weren’t good men, but that wasn’t important: they

were not allowed to patrol the grounds. They had to stay in the security posts, monitor their TV

screens and only leave in groups of six with a supervisor if the perimeter was breached.

‘All the posts were under camera surveillance,’ she continued. ‘The recordings show nobody left

any of them for an hour either side of Mr Dodge’s death. I’m sorry to disappoint you, but the security team are clean.’