by Parker Bilal
‘We are offering you one of our most popular rooms,’ said Haluk triumphantly, as he handed over the key.
A bellboy led the way and Makana followed his suitcase around a corner past a long slab of marble with the names of some of the more illustrious visitors who had stayed here carved in gold lettering: Kemal Atatürk, Grace Kelly and Ernest Hemingway among them. It made it feel less like a hotel and more like a mausoleum.
An ancient elevator with its own operator awaited. The iron gate was squeezed open, doors rattled shut and the operating handle swung into place. They rose shuddering through the building. The room was reassuringly drab after the excesses of the lobby, and Makana tipped the bellboy with some of the money he had changed at the airport. He opened the double doors and stepped out onto the balcony to smoke a cigarette only to be hit by a blast of traffic from a highway that ran just below. So far, so familiar.
A brief survey revealed an electronic safe in the wardrobe. Usually they were left open so that the guest could set their own four-digit code. In this case it was locked. Makana keyed in the last four digits of the telephone number Winslow had given him and it gave a satisfied whirr as it unlocked itself. Inside was an envelope containing five thousand dollars and a small nylon case that held a 9mm pistol: a Turkish-made Yavuz that looked like a local variant of the Browning automatic. There was a spare ammunition clip. He checked that it was clean and the mechanism working smoothly before he replaced it in the safe. Makana had been a good shot back in his days in the police, but as a rule he disliked guns. They created more problems than they solved and he hoped he wouldn’t have need of the weapon. Was Winslow preparing for the worst, or had he understated the level of danger Makana was facing?
He found a couple of envelopes in a folder on the dresser, along with more stationery and a room-service menu. He divided all the money into three parts and locked two envelopes inside the safe. After that he lay down on the bed and stared at the ceiling. The hotel was, he realised now, one of the biggest and best-known in Istanbul. Atatürk himself, father of the nation, had stayed here, as well as all those foreign celebrities, writers and actors. It wasn’t the kind of place you would stay if you wanted to keep a low profile.
Makana closed his eyes and tried, unsuccessfully, to catch up on the sleep he’d missed the night before. Whenever he was about to slip away he found his eyes opening. A glass cabinet on the wall housed a couple of shelves laden with dog-eared paperbacks. Over it hung a large photograph of a middle-aged English woman. No matter where he stood in the room she was staring at him. Abandoning all hope of rest, Makana got to his feet and lit a cigarette before wandering over to investigate. The cabinet was locked with a cheap padlock and there was no key in sight. Under other circumstances he might have been curious as to who this woman was. As things stood she served only to remind him that he was here in the service of the British government – not something he felt comfortable about.
He decided to unpack the bag Winslow had prepared for him and discovered a new set of clothes. Cotton shirts, trousers, a light grey suit. All Egyptian-made. All very nice. After emptying the bag of its contents he ran his fingers around the lining, looking for anything that shouldn’t be there. Satisfied the bag was clean, he hung the suit up in the wardrobe and studied it for a moment. Perhaps this was the start of a new life.
After that he called the number for Nadir Sulayman’s office and spoke to an assistant of some kind who arranged for him to meet Mr Sulayman that evening after office hours. Taking the street map Winslow had placed in his bag, Makana decided to avoid the rickety lift and instead took the staircase to the lobby, where he circled looking for anything that seemed out of place. He sat in the Orient Bar and ordered coffee. A crowd of elderly Japanese women tottered in twos and threes past his table wearing transparent plastic ponchos and sun visors. They smiled at him and bowed as they went by.
When he’d finished his coffee Makana left the hotel. It was early afternoon. He spent the next hour or so exploring the immediate vicinity, and walked a couple of blocks either way, to orient himself. He located the Iskander Grillroom on the main avenue of Istiklal Street and started towards it.
Although the city was alien to him, Makana could already sense enough that was familiar for him to feel at ease. He didn’t understand the language but there were words that he recognised, in speech, in the names along the street. He even saw a shop selling dendourma, which took him back to childhood memories of the ice-cream man who used to cycle around his neighbourhood. The Ottomans had left their traces in many places far from here. In that sense being here was like calling in on some distant, forgotten relative.
The Iskander Grillroom was a simple, unremarkable restaurant. He had already passed half a dozen almost identical places. The façade was brightly lit, with the name emblazoned in cheap lettering painted on red glass. The interior was gloomy, lending the place a desolate air. The tiled floor and steel counter gave it a dated look. The bar ran along the right-hand side of the room and a glass-fronted display cabinet offered refrigerated shelves of prepared dishes. Behind this a young man shaved thin slices of meat from a rotating column of lamb using an electric knife. The buzz of the knife competed with the hissing of steam from the coffee machine and a radio that emitted bursts of song broken by excited talk.
Makana chose a table close to the wall, about halfway back, and sat facing the street. The waiter was a surly man with hollow cheeks peppered in black stubble. He dragged himself away from the paper he was reading and wandered over. Makana pointed to the gyrating meat, and the man grunted something that sounded like a question.
‘Çay,’ replied Makana, having learned that the Turkish word for tea was, unsurprisingly, the same word as in Arabic. Satisfied, the waiter retreated, calling out the order.
People came and went. There was nothing remarkable about the place, but it was clearly popular. A steady stream of visitors came and went. Young men in leather jackets ordered sandwiches, more smartly dressed people in suits stopped by for a snack, clutching bags of takeaway food as they left. Along the window a couple of solitary old men lingered over coffee as they watched the street go by.
Along the wall to Makana’s right hung a row of black and white photographs of the city back in the Fifties. From reading the guidebook on the plane he recognised the Hagia Sophia, Topkapi Palace, and the six minarets that provided the Blue Mosque with its distinct silhouette. The stark monochrome images restored some of the dignity the present seemed to have lost.
Makana drank his tea and dug his way through the heap of sliced kebab. As he ate, with the slow deliberation of a man who has nowhere to go, he realised how hungry he was. The food was not bad, familiar and yet slightly different from what he was used to. The waiter had settled himself back on his bar stool, where he sat smoking and flicking through a magazine, lifting his eyes only to follow a pretty woman walking by.
As he ate, Makana went back over the reason he was here. Ayman Nizari. This place represented the weakest link in the plan. Sitting here day after day would make him a target, and there was no guarantee that Nizari would actually show.
He inspected the rest of the clientele. In the far corner a man in his sixties chewed on a toothpick and stared at the street. His face showed what looked like three days of stubble. He was clearly a regular. From time to time he made a loud comment. It wasn’t clear who these were addressed to, but they were generally ignored. The waiter carried on with his work. The man behind the counter occasionally replied but most of the time pretended to be busy with something.
Two tables away sat a young woman reading a book. She made a point of not looking at the old man, who was clearly seeking an audience. The waiter came by once in a while but was respectful of her space. All the way over on the other side of the room sat a couple of tourists. They were consulting a guidebook and asked the waiter for advice. A French flag on the girl’s rucksack suggested where they came from. None of them looked promising.
By the cl
ock above the bar it was one o’clock, the time for the arranged rendezvous. Makana ordered more tea. The whole idea was flawed. It wouldn’t take long for anyone running surveillance to figure out what was going on. They would have two or three days at the most; after that the whole operation would be at risk.
He drank his tea. Nobody showed. The restaurant emptied and then filled again – shoppers pausing to sit for a while eating pastries, families with children clamouring for ice cream and Coca-Cola. The old man in the corner departed, casting him a wary glance as he went. Makana understood why: he was the incongruous element. It was plain he was waiting for something or someone.
An hour after the rendezvous, Makana decided he needed to leave. He left the café and circled the block, pausing to look in shop windows and doubling back until he was sure he wasn’t being followed. It was always possible that Nizari was keeping his distance, watching from some vantage point. He was again reminded how little he knew about the Iraqi.
As he made his way down through the town, Makana reflected on the fact that he was in a strange city, doing a job for someone he wasn’t sure he trusted, looking for a man he didn’t know. That made him wonder about Nizari. How was he surviving in Istanbul? Did he have friends here? Money? A place to stay? There were too many unanswered questions, too many loose ends. Makana had been hoping for a quick resolution. Now he had the sense that wouldn’t happen.
In one of the sidestreets near the Galata Tower he found what he was looking for: the Sultana Harem Hotel was a simple establishment with a modest two stars to its name. The narrow entrance presented a squeaky aluminium door and a narrow set of stairs leading up to a reception area on the first floor that was just about big enough to turn a suitcase around in. Behind the desk sat a young man with earplugs fixed and his eyes set on the flashing colours of a computer screen. He looked surprised, as if he had no idea where he was or what he was doing here.
‘Do you have a room?’ asked Makana in English.
‘Room?’ echoed the man cautiously. He got to his feet and leaned over to yell something through the doorway behind him. He waited for a time and then, muttering to himself, he sat back down.
‘You want room?’
‘That’s right.’
‘One room. How many peoples? How many nights?’
‘One people,’ said Makana, mirroring the other man’s English in an attempt to ease communication. ‘Three nights, maybe more. I can pay in advance. Cash.’
The sight of the money seemed to resolve whatever doubts the receptionist had. The young man was not concerned that his new guest did not have a bag, nor did he bother to record his details. He barely glanced at the card Makana filled in before tossing it to one side. He seemed to be sitting in for someone. A key was handed over and Makana climbed a narrow, twisting staircase that had recently been painted a drab shade of green with purple stripes. On the third floor he wrestled with the lock before edging into a narrow room the size of his bathroom at the Pera Palas. He tested the bed cautiously. A television mumbled in a neighbouring room. As for the view, it was possible to glimpse a little patch of blue sky above the gap before the next-door building. It was noisy and cramped and somewhat run-down, but it would serve his purposes.
He looked at his watch: time to go. Another advantage of the hotel was that it was possible to take the stairs all the way down to the street without passing the reception desk. He glanced through the open doorway and saw the young man, now busy chatting on the telephone. He didn’t look round as Makana slipped by. At the foot of the narrow staircase Makana pulled open the aluminium door and stepped out into the busy street. Again he took the precaution of walking a roundabout route, doubling back on himself several times. None of these manoeuvres revealed anyone who appeared to be following him.
It was strange, the idea that he could be under surveillance – a reversal of his usual situation. As he turned through the cramped locality Makana began to get a sense of the city closing in on him. The steep, narrow streets rose and fell, dark grey buildings loomed on either side. Cats pooled together in doorways, waving their tails softly as they watched him go by.
Back at the Pera Palas, Makana spent the next couple of hours listening to the sound of the traffic droning by down below. He used the telephone in his room to call Sami’s journalist friend, Kursad.
‘I’m trying to find someone who was involved recently in a traffic accident.’
‘Can you be more specific?’
‘Not really,’ said Makana. He gave him the dates for when Ayman Nizari would have arrived in Istanbul. ‘This accident would have involved a couple of vehicles at least, and there may have been something unusual about it. I’m afraid I can’t tell you what.’
Kursad laughed. ‘Sami said working with you would be interesting.’
After that Makana went back over the scene in the Iskander Grillroom. He tried to recall the faces of the people he had seen in there. The old man sitting in the window. The people who came and went. The noisy ones, the quiet ones, the tourists, passers-by. Nothing had attracted his attention, but maybe he hadn’t been looking properly. He tried to think of anything that might have spooked Nizari from approaching. Nothing stood out, but he filed away the faces in his memory.
The old hotel hummed around him. He could hear the lift rising, stopping and then descending again. Like slow steady breathing. How much danger was he in, he wondered. Marcus Winslow had been cautious, but the chance of Mossad involvement did put a certain slant on things. He checked that the money was still in the safe, then removed the Yavuz, unloaded it and took it to pieces to make sure it was clean and in good working order. He took his time. The exercise brought back memories of when he was a cadet, of his days as an inspector, when he had an office of his own and reported to Chief Haroun. Makana was not given to nostalgia, but the action of dismantling and reassembling the Yavuz had a therapeutic effect. By the time he was finished he felt calmer. It wasn’t much, he reflected, as he returned the gun to the safe, but he felt as if he had actually achieved something.
By six o’clock the sky had grown dense and overcast. It felt as though it was about to rain. Makana circled the lobby, which was crowded with retired Americans wearing baseball caps and chequered trousers. They studied him with the wary look of those who expect to find a terrorist behind every unfamiliar face.
On his walk earlier he had noted the location of three call shops, all within ten minutes of the hotel. The nearest, the Mukarrameh, had a view of Mecca daubed on the front window. The interior was divided by plywood partitions and a counter that could have been built by a one-armed gorilla. The man who lurked behind this was pale enough to be Slavic. He had a broad red beard that came halfway down his shirt. He wasn’t big on conversation, wordlessly indicating a row of booths in the back. Makana dialled the number on the card Marcus Winslow had given him and it was answered on the third ring.
‘Everything all right?’
‘Nothing to complain about so far. I had a look at the place. I’ll be there tomorrow.’
Through the little porthole in the door Makana watched the counter. Redbeard was talking to a young man wearing sunglasses.
‘Remember, you must make contact with Nizari as soon as possible. If we’re lucky, he’ll be as keen to leave as you are. Take in the sights, whatever, just make sure you are at the rendezvous on time every day.’
On the wall, just in front of his nose, was a sticker bearing a printed page from a Quran. Surat al-Qamar: The Moon.
‘Did you notice anything out of the ordinary?’ asked Winslow.
‘Everything is out of the ordinary. I’m in a city I don’t know, travelling under another name.’
‘I see what you mean.’
‘Is there anything else I should know?’
There was a pause, not long and not short, but it was there. ‘All you need to do is focus on doing exactly what I told you. Everything else will take care of itself. When are you planning to meet Nadir Sulayman?’
‘Then I won’t keep you.’
The line went dead. Makana sat for a moment with the receiver in his hand. Then he hung up and stepped out of the booth. The man with the sunglasses had vanished. A noisy group of teenagers were gathered round a computer in one corner doing something immoral, or so it appeared from the look on Redbeard’s face. He handed Makana his change without even looking at him.
Chapter Seven
Outside, night had fallen and the air was damp with a light drizzle. Makana turned up the collar of his jacket against a chill wind that blew in from the sea. With the sun gone, the temperature was dropping. Persians, Spartans, Byzantines, Romans, the city’s history was a parade of kings, emperors, conquerors and pretenders; this was the grand prize. Constantine, Tamerlane, Suleyman the Magnificent, Alp Arslan. All of them tried, only some of them succeeded, The weight of history clung here the way damp clung to the stone walls. It had the romance of a seaport, a place of departures and arrivals, of loves lost and battles won, of distant palaces and forgotten kingdoms. For centuries this had been the centre of the known world. Leave here in any direction, and you were sailing into darkness.
Nadir Sulayman’s office was on the third floor of a ramshackle building close to the Çukurcuma baths. The entrance was in a covered alleyway. A worn staircase, the steps rounded by time, led up to an open gallery that ran around the building’s inner court. He felt as if he was entering a medieval fortress. Cables and old washing lines looped across from one side to the other. Canned applause from a television echoed through the space overhead. On the far side of the gallery a heavy wooden door set in a stone archway displayed a brass plaque: Sulayman Enterprise Company. Over the door a naked yellow bulb glowed faintly. When he pressed the doorbell a hatch slid open to reveal a face framed by the square-cut metal grille. Before he had time to explain who he was the hatch slid closed again and a moment later the door opened to reveal a thin-lipped woman dressed in a housecoat. Clearly in a hurry, she sped away from him, speaking over her shoulder as she went. Makana took it as an invitation to follow her.
