Liberation Movements (15 page)

Brano drove
him back to the Metropol to retrieve his car. They rode in silence until Gavra cleared his throat. “There’s something wrong with this.”

“I know,” said Brano. “There’s a lot wrong with this.”

“Then what are you doing about it?”

Brano turned up Yalta Boulevard. “It’s best you’re kept in the dark, Gavra. I know you don’t like this, and despite what you may believe, I don’t enjoy keeping things from you. But I am working on it.”

“Tell me about Ludvík Mas.”

Brano took a breath. “He used to be like you, Gavra. Some years ago I brought him into the Ministry. He was young, intelligent, and eager to please. But he was also desperate for power. I didn’t see that; it’s my fault. Once I realized my error, it was too late. He had gone over my head—and against my orders—when he set up Room 305. This office began with the operation you’ve just heard about, a fraud around parapsychology, but has since expanded considerably. The Lieutenant General calls it ‘Disruption Services,’ because its various operations also work to disrupt capitalist countries’ internal workings. Often by funding dissident groups.”

“Like terrorists.”

Brano nodded. “Once Ludvík had set it up, under the protection of the Lieutenant General, I could do nothing to stop him.”

“So you disagree with the operation.”

“Like I said, I told him not to begin it. It’s always been my belief that the Ministry should not be involved in the haphazard murder of foreign agents. But others above me felt differently.”

He parked behind Gavra’s car and turned off the engine, then stared out the windshield at the opaque windows of the Hotel Metropol. “Gavra,” he said, “I want you to be very careful. I don’t trust that Mas won’t try something again, and you’ll be in danger. He knows as well as I do that you’re a homosexual, and for that reason he places little value on your life. He’s that kind of person.”

Gavra felt as if his chest were being squeezed. His vision was fuzzy. “You know?”

Brano surprised him by patting his knee. “Of course I know. And I knew that was no girl in your bed back in Istanbul. My only concern is that you keep such things quiet. You can’t afford to be…” He paused, as if the next word were not part of his vocabulary: “Flamboyant. It could ruin your career. Or worse.”

Gavra was at first unable to think of a reply, but then it occurred to him. “Thank you, Comrade Sev.”

Brano placed his hands on the wheel again. “It’s nothing, Gavra. Though I do suggest you avoid becoming involved with Adrian Martrich.”

“Of course.”

“But watch him. Make sure Katja stays away. This doesn’t need to spread any further than it already has.”

“Yes, comrade.” Gavra opened the door and climbed into the hot sunlight.

He returned to find Katja and Adrian in the living room, drinking cans of Zipfer beer. Katja was in a state. She was pulling at her hair, making it dirty, and when she noticed Gavra she spoke with an unfocused voice. “Okay, you can tell me now.”

“What?” Gavra asked as innocently as he could manage.

She pointed at him. “Everything.”

Adrian shrugged at his questioning glance.

She said, “I don’t appreciate being left in the dark. You’ve been meeting with a man named Peter Husák, correct?”

“I don’t know who that is,” said Gavra.

Katja stood, the beer in her hand. “Either you tell me what’s going on, or I’m walking out of here right now, and you can take care of this yourself.”

Perhaps it was Brano Sev’s half-remembered training coming back, but Gavra became hard at that moment. His jaw tensed, squaring his face. He said, “I can’t tell you. If you want to leave, then fine.”

Katja walked over to him and emptied the rest of her beer on his shirt. Before leaving, she said, “Sorry about the floor, Adrian.”

“No problem,” said Adrian.

Seven years
later, with a new life, a family, a position and a new name, Peter sat at an outdoor café table between the Blue Mosque and Aya Sofia, on Mimar Mehmet Aga Caddesi. He did not like Istanbul. It was unbearably hot, packed with the unwashed wretches of Islam, and the noise—what they generously called “music”—was inescapable. Even the mornings were filled with mournful muezzins who climbed their minarets and moaned wobbly prayers for the whole city to suffer through. And this was the city where, eight days ago, he’d stood in the airport waiting for a plane that would never arrive, wondering if its absence marked the end of his career.

He’d arrived badly, of course. A rough flight followed by a swarthy taxi driver who charged him three times the going rate to get to the Sultan Inn, then a hot room that opened onto the noise and stink of Mustafa Pasa, allowing him no sleep.

But his career had not ended—not yet—because he’d recovered swiftly, explaining to the Comrade Lieutenant General that the entire Rokošyn operation would be cleaned up, and soon. That was why he was here. It would be as if the operation had never existed, and the other departments of Disruption Services could continue unabated.

And the old man, always a sucker for easy solutions, only told him,
Just clean it up fast
. Had the Lieutenant General known what he knew about Zrinka Martrich, and how the Armenians ended up on
her
plane, he would have said something entirely different.

Up the street, a
tablah
-and-
buzuq
street duo made terrible sounds, and Peter felt again that all this could be dealt with, were it not for the music. That incessant, moronic percussion and those tinny, agonizing strings doing their best to remain out of tune. All in praise of fat, coin-adorned belly dancers.

The sweating man at the table with him—another fat one—no doubt loved all the chaos. That music was made for him. Like the music, this Turk lacked any trace of subtlety. After shaking Peter’s hand, he patted the table and spoke in his heavily accented English. “So you have it? The money?”

Peter admitted that he did have the money.

“I can see?”

Peter placed his elbows on the table. Beyond the shade of the café’s umbrellas, the unwashed throbbed, sometimes spilling in, grimy children bumping into the backs of chairs. “Not until I have my information,” said Peter.

The fat Turk frowned, then sipped his tea. He was a captain in their police force, used sometimes by this or that side of the Great Game for a nugget of information. It was perhaps the only trait that Peter shared with Captain Talip Evren: Neither had ever known the conviction of the zealot. Evren pursed his damp lips. “You like Istanbul, Comrade…?”

“I love it, Captain. And the music…what a people.” When he said this he made no expression to suggest he meant it.

Captain Evren grinned. “It is a sin…sin
cere
place, comrade. We are very open people. Sometime, sometime foreigners, they think we are very foolish. Stupid even. But you know in Ottoman time we are making algebra when you make fire with sticks.”

Peter leaned forward. “I don’t care what you were doing a thousand years ago. What I care about, Captain, is the reason I’m carrying two hundred Deutschmarks in my pocket right now.”

“You’re in the hurry, comrade! Why not a cup of tea?”

Peter hushed the shout before it reached his throat. Maybe it wasn’t the noise or the stink or the heat soaking his thin shirt that got to him; maybe it was simply that in Istanbul, the scene of his most complete failure, he so easily lost control of himself.

He took a breath.

He lit a cigarette.

“No, thank you, Captain. I’m not thirsty.”

The captain pointed at the cigarette pack on the table. “May I?”

Peter tapped one out, handed it over, and lit it for him.

Behind a cloud of smoke, the captain said, “You ask for this man.”

“That’s right.”

“According to the border record, this Adrian Martrich, he is on our Turkish soil.”

“Okay, then,” said Peter. “The hotel.”

The Turk scratched his cheek. “Well, this is not so…”

“Two hundred Deutschmarks,” said Peter. “Not a schilling more. So stop wasting my time.”

Captain Evren allowed himself a brief, admiring smile. “The Hotel Erboy, in the Sirkeci neighborhood. Ebusuud Caddesi, number 32. Check in two nights ago. Not by himself.”

“I know. What room?”

“Three-oh-five.”

Peter hesitated, never trusting coincidences. “Three hundred and five.”

“Yes.”

“And there’s no doubt about this?”

The captain shook his head. “The registration, it come yesterday. Of course, it is always possible he will have change hotel, but this very morning I call the Erboy. Is there still.” He put out the unfinished cigarette. “These are very rough for my pink lungs. You have the money?”

On his walk north toward the Golden Horn, crushed by the heat of all those bodies, he wished, as he often did, for his farmhouse. He wished for his wife, Ilza, and four-year-old Iulian, but most of all he wished for that house with its magnificent expanse of empty, rolling fields outside Baia Mare. No one in sight. It was ten in the morning, and at this moment Ilza would have driven Iulian to the village school—the only student in the village to be brought by car—and she would now be in the market, picking over vegetables still dirty from the fields. His wife was accustomed to his long absences—they both were—and she recognized that because of his absences they lived better than anyone they knew. She complained sometimes, of course, because life in the provinces could get to you, leave you longing for the kinetic life of the Capital. But he had explained it enough times. Their home was a refuge from the world. He knew more of the world than his provincial wife did, and she had to trust him when he told her that it was an unimaginably cruel and forbidding place.

He crossed the Galata Bridge lined with fishermen, rode the Tünel up the hill, and continued north to the small Union Church at the Dutch consulate. The inside was peaceful, clean like only the Dutch could pull off in this dirty city, with dark wood pews leading to a small altar. Ilza would have liked this. She was always taken in by the solemnity of religious cults. One lone tourist shared the chapel with him, a young woman reading a guidebook in a pew, no doubt escaping the heat. He ignored her and took the stairs up to the balcony, which held the chapel’s pipe organ.

Father Janssen, whose real name was something entirely different, was eating an egg sandwich at the organ’s stool. He looked like he didn’t appreciate the interruption of his lunch.

“Evet?”

Peter glanced around, but they were alone. He said in clear English, “Are you Father Janssen?”

The priest squinted and laid down his sandwich. “Again?”

“Again what?”

“I am called Father Janssen.”

“Has the harvest come down from the mountains?”

Father Janssen shook his head. “This isn’t an armory, you know.”

“Of course. I just know that—”

“Your people already have it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just what I said. Someone came this morning and picked it up. I haven’t had time to replace it.”

“Who?”

“How should I know? I don’t even know who you are.” He wagged a finger at Peter. “And I don’t want to know.”

It was simple bad luck. Poor timing. As he made his way south again, back across the Galata toward his hotel, he almost found it amusing that even such a straightforward cleanup operation could always, in a city like this, unravel.

He could still get hold of a pistol, but it would take time. He could walk to the
Kapali Çarsisi
and search for the men who floated on the edge of the Grand Bazaar’s teeming crowds, their eyes attuned to extravagant tourists and undercover policemen. He’d find one who looked willing, then explain his need. A meeting would be arranged, somewhere discreet, and terms would be established. The price—that would require an hour of hateful but obligatory haggling. Then, and only then, would a final meeting be arranged. But by that point it would probably be too late; the queer would have made his way to another city.

At least he’d had the foresight to bring along the old hunting knife he’d acquired seven years ago. He’d brought it for sentimental reasons, as he always did when leaving the country for work, but never thought that he’d have to depend on it to kill Adrian Martrich.