The town center of Kofinou has a neat little stone church and pretty much nothing else. The refugees are well away from town and with minimal bus service, because it’s one thing to let a few refugees in, it’s a whole ’nother matter having strange people with not-white skin speaking strange languages touching the vegetables down at the local AlphaMega. Above the sign pointing to the refugee center there’s still a small sign for the abattoir.
Reception and Accommodation Center for Applicants of International Protection, the big sign reads.
It’s rolling hill country, kindling-dry straw interrupted by carob trees. In the distance, the mountains loom, the most prominent being Stavrovouni mountain, which is topped by the Stavrovouni monastery of the Holy Cross. I wondered if the monks up there used telescopes to spy on the Muslim residents of the camp.
From the wide-open gate, I could see most of the original camp, two dozen half-sized shipping containers set in a herringbone pattern on both sides of a paved street. The containers had doors and small windows and air conditioning units resting on the slab foundation. They were painted in pastels now faded by the relentless Cypriot sun.
I knew from the satellite view on Google Maps that there was an addition in the form of another two dozen containers that essentially mirrored the first part but with a single covering tin roof. But not shown on the satellite imagery was the tumorous growth that was the result of what was happening in Egypt. Syria had calmed a bit, but Syria was small beer next to Egypt which acted as a conduit not just for its own explosive population, now approaching one hundred million, but for Libya, Chad, Sudan, Yemen, Somalia … It seemed at times as if the entire population of Saharan Africa was trying to push its way up the Nile to the Mediterranean. There were refugees who had walked fifteen hundred miles from Congo, and that is not a Sunday stroll.
Most of the refugee flow had gone to the Greek islands, Italy or Turkey, but thousands had found their way to unwelcoming Cyprus. As a result, the original camp and the first extension were now utterly overshadowed by the white, UN-supplied tents that extended down the gully, then up onto the hills on either side, eighty, maybe even a hundred tents, pitched at inconvenient angles and in no particular order.
There was an incongruous fishing boat resting just before the camp gate, looking like evidence of some Noahanic flood that had left this tiny ark behind. Just in front of the forlorn boat was a green sign announcing that this was an emergency assembly point. A dozen or so cars were parked there, baking in what was turning out to be a beastly hot day. Workers were busy installing wiring and plumbing in the concrete shell of what was presumably to be a three-story administration building. Bulldozers were parked on the hillside to the left, having begun the job of terracing the hill to create flat spaces.
Around this rustic campground sprawl a chain-link fence snaked. Chain link is only effective when backed up by razor wire, electrical charges, mines, dogs and/or gun towers, and Europe still has too many memories to go quite that far. It looked like a minimum-security prison in New Mexico, but a noncommittal one.
We’d kind of like you to stay within the camp and not wander into the hills, unless you have a pair of wire cutters …
An official SUV in United Nations white moved slowly through languid gaggles of women in hijabs, some in colorful saffron robes, and men in salvaged jerseys from American and British sports franchises.
I pulled up to the gate. The guard, an unarmed civilian, challenged me and I showed my passport and dropped the name Fotos had given me: Calix Petrides. I had assumed ‘Calix’ to be a male name and was surprised to find that the name belonged to a middle-aged woman dressed in jeans and a tan utility vest. She had gray hair pulled back hard, matching eyebrows, and the face of a determined beaver.
‘Father Fotos sent you to me? Did he mention that I scarcely have time to eat lunch, let alone entertain guests?’
It wasn’t so much hostile as harried and challenging. She wasn’t dismissing me, she just wanted me to justify my existence. I held out a small pink cardboard box and lifted the lid revealing half a dozen little pies filled with spinach and feta, or cheese and bacon, or something the bakery had listed as ‘traditional’ meat.
‘I brought lunch.’
‘Nothing to drink?’
‘Not unless you drink whiskey,’ I admitted, sliding a flask from my pocket.
‘I’ll put a kettle on.’
We went into Calix Petrides’ office in the existing administration building, a half-sized container like the others, but overrun with hurrying bureaucrats and NGO workers. Her office, occupying a partitioned third of the container, was likewise overrun, the window shaded against the sun, with papers in stacks on shelves and even on the floor. She lifted a stack of folders off the one visitor’s chair, set my box of pies on the desk, and hit the switch on the electric kettle.
Waiting for the water to boil we chatted about Cyprus and food and the weather. She made tea and for the second time in just hours I drank the vile stuff, and we got down to the job of murdering some pies. She wolfed in a very un-European way, a busy woman, impatient, wondering who the hell I was and why the hell I was there feeding her.
I drew out my phone. ‘This will probably sound crazy, Mrs Petrides, but I have become fixated on this photo. This refugee boat.’ I held it so she could see the picture, then swiped to an enlarged still of a boy, maybe six or eight. Then I swiped to a second picture of another boy. And finally, a picture of a girl.
She nodded. ‘Yes, the most recent boat from Alex. Sorry, Alexandria, Egypt.’
‘I can zoom in enough to see faces on a few.’ I tapped and swiped. ‘These three kids, are they here?’
‘Mr Mitre, we currently have one thousand, eight hundred and five souls here in a facility originally designed for four hundred, expanded to handle a thousand, and nearly double that now. They are mostly men, some women and a few children. I do not believe …’ She took the phone from me, swiped forward and back, pinched to enlarge, peered carefully. ‘I recognize one, this boy.’ She showed me. ‘The other two may be here, or they may have disappeared into the local population. Or perhaps some have made their way to the Turkish side, looking for passage to mainland Turkey.’
‘Of course. It must be impossible to keep track of all of them.’ I nodded sympathetically.
But now she was interested. She swiveled to an aged computer and with a meat pie held up and away in one hand tapped on a folder labeled in Greek. She tapped various filters, then started mouse-clicking through file photos of kids.
The door to the office opened abruptly for a thirty-ish man, tall, wearing light-sensitive glasses that were still dark from the sun outside.
‘Calix?’ he said, voice anxious. A look at me, leery but not surprised: he expected to see me there. ‘May I have a moment of your time, love?’ Irish. The Irish are always overrepresented in NGOs. They have long memories of the potato famine and the Irish diaspora. There but for the grace of God, and all that.
Calix heaved herself up, regretting that she had to set the last of the pie aside, and went after him, closing the door behind her. I was up like a shot, pulling my keychain from my pocket, fiddling quickly to find the thumb drive. I stuck it in an open USB slot, picked the folder up, and dropped it in the drive.
The counter said it would take eight hours and nine minutes. One hour and eighteen minutes. Thirty-seven minutes. Four minutes. And settled down at two minutes. If she came back before that, I was caught. A diversion might be necessary.
I opened my phone, hit video and slowly did a three sixty around the room, recording a map of the camp, various workplace instruction sheets having to do with obscure EU regulations, hanging clipboards and the like.
The counter was down to nineteen seconds when the door opened again, and I, in reaching for the box of savory pastries accidentally knocked a big pile of paper to the floor.
‘Oh, my God, I’m so sorry, I was being greedy and now I’ve made a mess.’
She h
ad chilled toward me. We both picked up files but she took them from my hands as quickly as she could. I stood up, asked her about a poster on the opposite wall and with nimble burglar’s fingers retrieved my thumb drive. A surreptitious tap on the space bar and I blinked away the computer’s warning of an improperly ejected drive.
All in all I was pretty pleased with myself. I might be fairly pitiful at coping with daily life, but if you give me no time to think, I can be a quick, decisive little bunny.
‘Mr Mitre, I have work to do, so thank you for the pies.’
She extended a hand.
‘But … I’m still wondering—’
‘Policy does not allow us to share information with, um … people who have not been cleared.’ She frowned, not liking her own choice of words.
I protested. I asked whether I couldn’t just ask around among the refugees.
‘Impossible, I’m afraid.’ She glanced toward the door on the word ‘afraid.’
So, I shook her hand and went for my car. I was almost to Limassol before I noticed that a Land Rover had been in my rearview mirror for too long. One of the advantages of having a chronically heavy foot is that it forces pursuers to reveal themselves. That’s my rationalization, anyway, and I’m sticking with it.
I pulled off into the outskirts of Limassol and crept along narrow streets until I found a bar. I parked illegally and raced inside while displaying body language signaling that I really had to take a pee.
When I came out, the tan ten-year-old Land Rover, was half a block away, parked but with its engine running. A man with dark hair and beard all cut to a uniform half-inch and wearing a black leather jacket stood beside it, smoking. He spotted me and quickly looked away showing sudden interest in a butcher shop’s window. Then, making a show of finishing his cigarette, he climbed back into the SUV on the passenger side.
I wondered if this was the part where reality followed the Raymond Chandler rule and a man entered with a gun? I hoped not. I am not a gun person, guns being the way to magically turn three-to-five into life.
I pulled back out onto the A6 heading in the direction of Paphos, taking my time till I was sure the SUV was behind me. He was, and he was being a clever boy trying to keep two cars between us, just like he had no doubt learned from watching American crime shows.
I was doing one hundred twenty kilometers per hour, roughly, oh, seventy-five miles an hour, a pretty normal speed in that context, so I stepped on the pedal and the Mercedes responded with its usual smooth eagerness.
He stayed with me through eighty miles per hour. He stayed with me to eighty-five. At that point, he realized he wasn’t so much tailing as chasing, and was not likely to be able to keep pace. So, at ninety I saw the Land Rover shrinking in my rearview mirror. I took the off-ramp that led to the British Sovereign Base Area to the south (a holdover of the empire) and the Kouris Reservoir Dam in the other direction, drove until I saw a convenient gas station, pulled off and waited to see whether the SUV was still with me. It was not.
I drove back to Limassol and googled my way to a DIY store where I bought twelve feet of heavy chain, two heavy hinges, a padlock, some two-inch wood screws, a bolt cutter, a spool of heavy fishing line, and sand paper. At the register, I pretended to be French so as to avoid questions. The only things I wanted were the bolt cutters and the line, the rest was cover, so I’d look like a guy with a broken gate who meant to secure it once and for all. As I was French, I tried to look small and dyspeptic and tossed off a ‘Zut, alors!’ for verisimilitude. I paid cash.
Down the street I obtained a bottle of Johnny Walker black, an excellent blended whiskey that’s perfectly fine for people you don’t want to waste good single malt on. I also picked up a can of butane for my cigar torch and a set of brass knuckles. They were in the display case at the register, half a dozen models under glass, alongside wicked-looking clasp knives. I had no use in mind for the knuckles, but well, they’re evidently legal in Cyprus – I’d seen them frequently in gift shops – and I did not like the looks of the gentlemen following me.
In a little newsstand, I found a clipboard that was available. Not strictly ‘for sale,’ but available. It came with a dozen crinkly pages of computer print-out inventory. Very official-looking.
I drove back to the village of Kofinou and found a pleasant taverna with a nice outdoor patio. It was ‘Thai night’ at the taverna so I dined on the Cypriot iteration of Thai food – much less sugar and even less spice than the American notion of Thai food. I slurped up Tom Ka and stir-fried vegetables and washed it down with Orangina. I was pulling a job, and there’s no drinking when pulling a job. Alcohol is for after, when you need to soothe the shakes.
From my table it was a straight line of sight to the distant Stavrovouni monastery up on its mountain, with the camp hidden by the folds of the hills. The monastery is touted as one of the few places you can see a piece of the True Cross. The monastery was founded something like three hundred years after the True Cross was almost certainly recycled by practical Jerusalemites into support beams or perhaps a rustic mantel. Monasteries were the Hard Rock Cafés of the era, displaying various saints’ toes and Mary’s bra and Peter’s fishing rod and whatnot the way Hard Rock shows off Clapton’s guitar and Jimi’s shoes and Sid Vicious’ syringe. The historical record is vague on whether monasteries also served fajitas.
After dinner I found an isolated pull-off and caught a quick nap to sleep off the wine. Then, with full dark over the island, I drove back toward the camp, taking the turn-off to the abattoir. This proved to be a depressing spot, rusting, empty and yet, despite years without use, somehow still stinking of dead pig.
The camp was just a few hundred yards up and over a hill, but that would bring me back to the original camp, and that was not my goal. I’d gone over the video of Petrides’ office and been able to get a pretty good freeze-frame of her map of the camp. The original two sections were now reserved for women and children, with the far more numerous men pushed out into the tents. I was looking for something specific, a favored location, the presidential suite of the camp. It would have altitude, because altitude would first, translate to better cell phone reception; second, offer an improved possibility of catching the occasional breeze, and three, would signal by virtue of its position that it was dominant. And of course it would be farther from the administration areas and the main entrance.
I walked a good half mile over desperate scrub and rock, ducking beneath carob trees whose pods rattled in the branches and crunched underfoot, and came to a dirt track that passed through a field of trash and debris, the detritus of the camp. Having achieved some altitude of my own, I whipped out my trusty Carl Zeiss Victory compact binoculars and settled in to watch.
There’s a lot of watching involved in competent, high-end burglary. The difference between a rushed smash-and-grab and a carefully-planned burglary is a whole lot more loot and a whole lot less pursuit. Young kids just starting out in the business don’t always grasp the fact that the essential job of a burglar is to not get caught, followed closely by not stupidly turning a three-to-five-year sentence, where you’re out in eighteen months, into a life sentence for murder in the first.
Setting aside the morality of it, as a pure economic proposition risking eighteen months against twenty grand makes a whole lot more sense than risking life against the fifty bucks a fence will give you for a flat-screen TV. But until someone opens a Crime University and invites me as a guest lecturer, that wisdom will never reach the young, starry-eyed aspiring thief.
I watched male refugees coming and going and soon identified the bathroom tents and the kitchen tent in the section of camp I was surveilling. There was what looked like a patrol of some sort, three of the men walking the perimeter, smoking cigarettes, but nothing like armed guards. Which was a bit disappointing – I had prepared for a higher level of difficulty.
Still, just because the opposition is indifferent that’s no excuse for poor tradecraft. And oh, I felt it coming bac
k, that perverse pride in my more regrettable skills and accumulated wisdom. It felt good. Life as a fugitive is like living next to the North Korean border, there are no worry-free days. You’ll have several levels of alert, but you’re never not on alert. It’s a consuming job, and the really enervating part of it is the lack of control. You’re the guy on the tightrope, they’re the floor. You’re the system, they’re entropy. And however stylishly you pull it off – and I like to think I do it as well as anyone – you’re still a notch lower on the food chain than the law and in the end, you’re going to lose.
But now, this sneaking and hiding, surveilling, plotting, planning, composing the lies I might need, running scenarios, all by myself in the night in a place I had no right to be, this was what a master carpenter must feel like standing before a perfect block of wood, tools in hand. I knew this stuff. This was my craft, and I was good at it. I wasn’t just waiting for the voice that would say, ‘You’re under arrest,’ I was doing something. Sure the thing I was doing was probably something stupid, but I’ve seldom let that stop me. I wondered idly what the Cypriot prison was like and wondered whether each prisoner got his own rooftop cistern and a cat.
The chain-link fence was interrupted by a gate with a chain and padlock. Barbed wire coiled along the top of the gate, but only on the gate, and only an imbecile would have tried to enter there.
I could theoretically pick the padlock if I had twenty minutes to kill. I’ve picked locks. You can buy excellent lock-picking sets on Amazon and watch YouTube instructionals, but the way they show it being done on TV with a bent hairpin, wiggle, wiggle, all done? That’s not the way it works in reality. In reality, it takes a lot longer and requires quite a bit of cursing; rather like assembling an IKEA desk.
I could also theoretically cut the lock with my bolt cutters but that would be a big red flag. So, I walked north along the fence for a hundred yards and cut the chain link, snip, snip, snip.
I squeezed through the gap, turned, unspooled my fishing line and used it to tie the chain link back into place. It would take close examination to see my fishing line sutures. Again, probably not necessary, but it’s important to take some pride in your work.
A Sudden Death in Cyprus Page 10
