like I say it every day.
I’ve got it right. I swear I’ve got it right.
If the numbers are right.
They are. They must be.
But there’s so much to keep track of.
The two Turkish pilots are no trouble. None. They’re crouched in their seats wishing for nothing more than to see their children again as Emin grips that suitcase with the button on its handle that, if pressed, will send a brief shortwave pulse to the gray suitcase in the baggage hold. To the blasting cap embedded in the six pounds of C-4 explosive Peter Husak passed to him in the restaurant of the Hotel Metropol.
He repeats himself. “Jirair, what is this?”
What I’ve said has terrified poor Jirair. How can she know? What is this woman? So he will leave us in peace for it to be done.
“This woman, she needs to speak with you.”
“What?” says Emin. He’s had trouble keeping control of his frightened men these last several days and says what I know he’ll say: “Get her out of here. I don’t have time for her.”
Because he doesn’t remember me. Because all I said to him was Excuse me, but are you Armenian? I have a cousin who’s Armenian and watched as he tried to get rid of me. Watched and learned.
Jirair isn’t sure what to do, and so it’s time for me to speak. Calmly, now. Don’t show a thing.
“Your father told you the stories, Emin. He told you about what happened in Trebizond on the Black Sea coast, back in 1915. One day, the streets were filled with Turkish soldiers holding bayoneted rifles, who searched the Christian Armenian houses for weapons that did not exist. The town crier told the inhabitants that in four days all Armenians-there were about a thousand in Trebizond-would be evacuated for the duration of the Great War, and that any Muslim caught hiding an Armenian would be killed by hanging.”
His grip on that briefcase is loosening. Slowly now. Down to a whisper.
“Your father was ten years old at the time of the march inland, and he told you that when people fell behind they were bayoneted and tossed into the river, which would wash them back out, past Trebizond, to the sea. The river was choked with bodies that had caught on branches, the stink of decomposition hovering over their long march. Your grandmother fell during that march, was stuck through with a bayonet and tossed into the water; four days later your grandfather was shot. Your father escaped from an internment camp in the desert, where the starving rolled in the sun, cut apart by dysentery, and made his way back to Trebizond, where he found an apartment picked clean by Turkish peasants. Even the linoleum had been ripped from the floors.”
The surprise on Emin’s face-wide-eyed, mouth gaping-is almost comical. Don’t laugh. Don’t smile.
“That wasn’t the end, because your father and other stray boys were gathered and auctioned off to Muslim families so they could be converted to Islam. Again he escaped-which was lucky for him, because in the coming weeks even the converted Armenians were shipped off to their deaths.”
Emin’s face is apoplectic, shifting through emotions. All the power he’s been trying to sustain leaves him quickly. Right. His eyes are wet, but he’s not crying. Not yet. He says, “What are you, a spy?”
“That’s exactly what I am,” I tell him. “A spy into your soul.”
Emin turns abruptly to Jirair. “Go.”
Jirair leaves and will walk back to the corner where Libarid is sitting in terror. They will speak, but briefly, because Jirair wonders who I could be- what I could be-and Libarid will sympathize with his confusion. That’s the nature of this. Confusion. With confused people you can do anything.
“Who are you working for?”
“For so many people, Emin. For Wilhelm Adler.”
“Wilhelm? But he’s…”
“He was never on your side. He works with Ludvik Mas, as do I. Remember that name. Ludvik Mas.”
He dwells on that a moment, and it connects to a memory he has of an early girlfriend, Yeva, whose father sabotaged their relationship, turning the young lovers against one another. “You’re here to ruin me,” he says.
“Yes, I am.”
He raises his gun to the side of my face, presses the cool barrel into my cheek.
Do it.
He won’t do it yet. Shooting a woman is not what he’s come here to do.
He must be forced.
“Yeva was a bitch. You know she was.”
“What?”
Keep him confused. “I’m not scared of you. Yeva wasn’t scared of you. No one is. Go ahead, pull the trigger. Your bullets can’t hurt me.”
This close, his face is coarse with all the sweat.
I spit into it.
He snaps back as if bitten, furious now. He’s going to do it. I know he will. First he’ll try to get answers wherever he can.
He steps back and snatches the radio handset. He’s weeping now. “She told me,” he says. “How did she know?”
“What did she say to you?” asks the radio.
“They’re lying,” I say quietly. “They know me.”
He peers through teary eyes at me as he speaks into the radio. “Just that…that…” He raises the pistol.
A gunshot.
But not his.
Another pistol, from beyond the door.
No.
I grit my teeth as the numbers fall apart and then line up again.
Emin’s head jerks around. He squeezes the handle of his briefcase.
Out there among the passengers. Could only be Adam, my guard, or-
Childhood in Turkey. Slaughter by troops. Family on the run, then landing in a strange country with nothing to their name. Hatred grown old over the years and replaced by pragmatism. Pragmatism gives way to disappointment-where is the tough young man now? So he leaves the family, looking for that youth, and is put in the middle of a situation where he can rediscover that tough, angry young man.
Libarid
I was wrong.
Another gunshot, and then the plane shifts, the floor tilts, I fall back-
I never saw this.
Gripping the suitcase detonator, he reaches for the door.
Which opens before he can touch it.
Libarid. You idiot.
But I’m the one who lost track. I’m the one with the bad wiring. Now I know.
And in that final instant I show him with my face that this was not how it was supposed to be.
Emin’s hand seizes up, thumb on the button.
Katja
For a week I do not return. I stay in a coastal village east of Kilimli in a small pension that doesn’t bother asking for papers. Each night a heavy woman with dark hair on her upper lip brings my hot water in a pail for washing, and that first night I use it to clean Stanislav’s knife. Afterward I sit on the terrace wrapped in a towel,
