Josef paced a moment, as if this news opened a whole new world to him. Then he stopped. “But you’re all right, Peter? They didn’t hurt you.”
Peter stretched out and intertwined his fingers behind his head. “Just questions.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“Did you give them anything?”
Josef had never wanted to bring Peter in on the marches in the first place. He’s got no political conviction, Josef had told Toman. Peter shrugged. “I don’t know enough to tell them anything. You never let me know.”
The pacing began again. “You see why now? If they’d gotten names out of you, there’d be hundreds more dead.”
“Yes, Josef.”
“They were around here, you know. Some bald bastard. Asking questions.”
“Yes, I know.”
“But at least Ivana and Toman made it. They’ll let the Americans know the truth.” He finally sat on his cot and clasped a knee. He sniffed. “Say, Peter…are you drunk?”
“A soldier bought me drinks.”
“One of ours?”
Peter shook his head.
“And you accepted his drinks?”
“I needed them. If you’d ever been in prison, you’d know.” He closed his eyes. “All he wanted was to tell me about his girlfriend.”
Gavra
Back in the arrivals lounge, Gavra lit another cigarette. His hand didn’t shake, but it seemed that it should. A plane had exploded. His stomach felt like it was working on a stone.
Claustrophobic Ludvik Mas was still by the mullein, trying unsuccessfully to look patient. Gavra scanned the other faces in the crowd, old women and young men and whole families. There was no concern in their sweating faces, only frustration. Some approached the information desk, and the girl did a good job with her smiles and sympathetic shakes of the head, as if she really didn’t know what was going on. Maybe she didn’t.
Ludvik Mas checked his watch. He confirmed it with a clock on the wall-6:48 in the morning-then walked over to the telephones. Gavra joined him, two down.
“…nothing, that’s what I’m telling you. And they’re not saying anything.”
Gavra tapped cigarette ash on the floor and began to dial.
“Who told you that?…I would have noticed something, some activity…Okay. Yes, comrade, you’re right. It does appear she didn’t play along.”
Then Mas hung up and walked out of the airport.
The morning sun was hotter than Gavra expected, beating down as he slipped on his sunglasses and followed Mas across the parking lot to where he got into a rented beige Mercedes. Gavra half-jogged to his Renault.
On the drive back into Istanbul, he convinced himself that Ludvik Mas was behind the hijacking. There was no reason to believe this, but he believed it just the same, and he was self-aware enough to know why. He was too attached to surfaces, always falling victim to that word Brano Sev enjoyed harping on-sentimentality. It is, Brano had told him numerous times, the demise of all good operatives, resulting in the most fatalities. But you’re young. You just don’t understand yet.
And that, as Gavra well knew, was true.
It had been true the previous winter, back in the Capital, when a young woman named Dora was discovered taking photographs of military documents at her office and delivering them to her lover, a West German with diplomatic papers. Gavra had been alone on that case-Brano was on one of his many Vienna trips-and had decided that she was, in the end, apolitical. She was simply in love, and thus capable of immense stupidity. So he didn’t bring her in. The next day, Dora flew to Bonn with her lover and was promoted to major in the West German secret police, the BND.
The Mercedes maintained an even clip, following signs to Beyo lu, yet sometimes Gavra had trouble keeping up. He swept around two car accidents, neither serious but both surrounded by small Turks shouting at one another and waving hands in the air.
Finally, after driving up Ataturk Bulvari and across Ataturk Bridge, spanning the Golden Horn, then rising toward the Galata Tower, Mas stopped at a surprising place: the splendorous cube of the Hotel Pera Palas, where he handed his car keys to a doorman and strolled inside. Gavra parked a little farther down the narrow street, then jogged back, narrowly avoiding an accident.
When he reached the ornate foyer, with Ottoman columns and a wall of coral marble, Mas was to the left, at the front desk, taking his key from a smiling clerk. Then he jogged up a few stairs and entered the century-old elevator.
For the next half hour, Gavra waited in the lounge with a copy of the International Herald Tribune, reading dismal editorials on Pol Pot’s recent proclamation of the “Democratic Republic of Kampuchea” in Cambodia before drifting to thoughts of Armenians.
Being at the top of his class in the Ministry academy, he had a strong grasp of history. He knew that, despite Turkish claims to the contrary, a series of forced movements took place in the early part of the century, coming to a head in 1915, when the ruling group known as the Young Turks took it upon themselves to rid their country of Armenian Christians while the Great War diverted the rest of the world’s attention. The expulsion was carried out so systematically that no one could reasonably deny that orders from above set it in motion.
The Turkish military was first purged of Armenian soldiers, often by group execution. Then cities and villages were taken over by newly purified Turkish troops, who killed Armenian men and forced the remaining women and children into overcrowded trains that spilled them into the desert, or sent them on death marches, where they died of starvation and disease under the summer sun. Reports from American and German officials at the time noted that the roads were lined and rivers choked with the rotting bodies of these ill-fated people. Later, according to a questionable American journalist, Adolf Hitler would tell his generals, Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?
Gavra believed most complex disputes to be hopeless, and this one was no exception.
Brano had often wondered aloud about his pupil’s innate pessimism when it came to international affairs. Then why are you working for the Ministry? If you don’t believe some sort of good can come from what we do, then why are you doing it?
Gavra had been recruited straight out of high school, by a man in his village he knew his father despised. He joined in order to make his father suffer for a childhood of humiliations. Even though it had begun in anger, over the years Gavra had found security in the shell of the Ministry that he nonetheless treated with suspicion. So why did he remain?
Not even he knew the answer.
He closed the newspaper and tried to recall Libarid Terzian. He didn’t know Libarid that well-only through his file and a few casual conversations-but for the last year they had sat at desks in the same room, and Gavra couldn’t help but mourn him in some way. Libarid and his late mother had been part of that stream of Armenian refugees fleeing the terror today’s hijackers had sought to revenge.
Ludvik Mas returned to the front desk carrying a small suitcase. He handed over his key, paid his bill, then walked past his shadow and through the front door.
On Ataturk Bulvari, passing another accident, he considered running Mas off the road. This man, who no doubt brought down a plane full of innocents, was probably going home. It was one thing in this world that Gavra could point at and, without hesitation, call wrong.
He sped up, halving the distance.
Once they reached the airport, he and Brano would have to go through the Turks in order to do anything, but here on the open road, Gavra could take care of Mas himself. It was an appealing option.
