Black Day at the Bosphorus Café

by M. H. Baylis

  ‘Let him judge you then,’ Rex said, ‘And leave the legal system alone.’

  Peter made a wan face. ‘It’s what my friend says, too.’

  ‘I didn’t realise Jan Navitsky was so wise.’ The change in Peter’s eyes told him he was right. Navitsky had lied about his sudden departure. But it was to help his friend. ‘Or so generous,’ Rex added, patting the thick coat.

  Something seemed to strike Peter – he straightened suddenly on the bench. ‘The man. That man that…’ He mimed a gripping hand. ‘He has a one of this kinds of coat. I remember. Big, big, like balloon coat, for very cold. Yes.’

  Rex wasn’t sure that helped much, but he thanked Peter, and they parted soon after. He was a few yards up the hill before something struck him and he turned around. Peter was still there. Rex asked him one more question about the day at Sky City and suddenly, as if he’d triggered an avalanche, the truth was in his ears and his eyes and his mouth, taking his breath away for a while. Because he knew, then, why Mina had really died.

  He went straight home, half-expecting to find the place ransacked, or to be hauled into a van along the way. Nothing happened, except that a man asked him for a light. Number three, he thought. Was he supposed to start smoking?

  Inside, he filled a glass with raki, and took the stolen phone from the cushion he’d zipped it into as a precaution. It had been Sybille’s, of course – what man brought cushions to a marriage? He felt it still smelt of her, sometimes, but tonight was not one of those nights. It was as if even the traces of her were going.

  It wasn’t a warm evening, but he felt hot, partly because the pills did that to him sometimes, but also because of his internal state: one composed of fear, elation, grief and doubt. He opened the French windows onto the front yard, just a crack. Then he went back to Mina’s recording. He had a strong idea what she’d said in her closing moments, but he needed to be sure.

  This file is no longer available.

  Someone had deleted it from the Cloud. Very, very recently. Someone who didn’t want the truth to be known.

  He went into the kitchen to add some water to his drink, lost in thought. Was it possible to hack into this storage site and find files that had been deleted? He knew a very gifted, vaguely illegal Russian by the name of Vadim who had helped him more than once before, but he’d heard Vadim was back in Vilnius, improbably, teaching HTML to ten year olds. Could he still contact him?

  Then he realised there was a simpler way than that – or at least there might be, if the gods were on his side.

  He hurried back into his sitting room and picked up the phone. He ran through the various menus and functions now considered essential to life, from pedometers to talking compasses, until he found the folder he needed.

  He had just clicked on it when he felt something that seemed to be the opposite of an explosion – it was an implosion, a remarkable, almost human sigh which was really the drawing-in of all the air, and of every seen and heard thing into one, tiny point. It felt like the beginning of the universe. And then it was the end of the universe, as a wall of flame tore into the room, glass shattered, wood cracked and the smell of petrol blinded him.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Brown, cardboard boxes stored in stacks: the abiding symbol of the weeks before and after the time it happened. At the end of 2003, the living room of the flat they shared in Camden had been packed into a tower of these cardboard containers, because Sybille had been suddenly seized by a desire for home improvement.

  Rex dreaded these passing passions – dreaded them because, for all her enthusiasm and intelligence, Sybille was no good at DIY. Each task, whether it be sanding the floors or re-tiling the bathroom, began with days of careful research, but ended in tears and fury. Part of that fury reserved for him, because he wasn’t there to help, or because he’d have been no use even if he had helped, or because he’d advised against it from the start.

  On this occasion he’d suggested that, what with her going to a conference, her hard-drinking sister threatening to visit, and a big Press Awards do on the horizon, the painting could wait. His wife had gone ahead anyway, and in the early days of December, there’d been a tense atmosphere in the household.

  That wasn’t just down to the painting. She’d been tired, complaining of nausea and headaches for some time, and there’d been more than one night when he’d slept on the sofa rather than disturb her. Other nights, too, when he’d passed out, drunk, and just woken up there. Onto this strained, but not exactly unhappy landscape, had arrived Sybille’s conference, and the text message, apparently Sybille’s also, that Rex had never seen the like of before. Wot u up to? Xxx

  And then Aurelie: a typhoon of vodka and tears and chaos. While Sybille was away at the conference, she’d got into their bed in the night, and while the confused Rex had sat up and stuck the light on the moment he realised whose hands and lips were on him, there’d been a moment or two before when he hadn’t. Aurelie fled, very early, the next morning, but Rex had a sense, later, that she’d said something to his wife, something his wife was intending to bring up, some time. She’d been like that, Sybille: patient. She nursed things.

  In addition to that, Rex had accepted a job in New York – a fact that only emerged when he and his wife were seated opposite one another at the Press Awards. This, and all the other tensions and doubts between them, seemed to billow out like poison from a gas canister as they drove home that dark rainy night, and Rex ploughed the car into some scaffolding. Their lives, as they had been lived, came to an end at that moment.

  The days and weeks after were not, as people liked to say, a dream or a haze; they were an awful, pin-sharp, Reality 2.0. Rex felt every step, not least because he’d smashed three metatarsals, the cuboid and navicular bones of his left foot. He heard every sound as if he himself were some kind of oscilloscope, his own soul bunching into jagged graph-spikes each time a nurse ripped open a sterile tube package, each time someone, further down the corridor, let the lid on the metal bin slam. On the icy streets, when he hobbled out for relief from the stifling room and the machine making her breathe, he saw how people looked at him. Drunken office workers, in Santa hats, roused from their revels in the Wetherspoons to stare and whisper. Babies in the Tesco glared, as did the skull-faced women in wheelchairs in the hospital lobby, and the normally welcoming nurses.

  They all knew, even if the police didn’t, that the crash was his fault. He tried walking without his crutches, to see if that was causing the stares. He collapsed from the pain, on Tottenham Court Road, and the shoppers, laden with presents, just stepped over him, confirming all his fears.

  It wouldn’t be long before Rex ended up in hospital himself – a hospital where they nobly tried to cure his mind, then gave up, and prescribed him drugs, on top of the drugs he was already taking for the pain in his foot. They left him with a love of feeling high, but no love for himself. Before that, though, just five days after the accident, he returned to the flat, urged to by doctors and nurses and in-laws who were all sensing the sickness he carried with him to Sybille’s bedside.

  The place stank, and it wasn’t the paint. It was something more akin to what he smelt in the corridors of the hospital where the shell of his wife lay: a sweetish, cloying, human fug. He thought perhaps it was just stuck in his clothes and hair, so, hobbling around with difficulty, he opened all the windows, despite the cold, took off his clothes, wrapped bags around his plastered-up foot and showered. But, shaving at the mirror over the sink, he could still smell it, and he looked down to the bin they kept there, normally bulging with exclusively feminine detritus. It was the same today – cotton pads, cleansing wipes, things he didn’t truly grasp the purpose of. But on top of them now was a wad of some absorbent material, thick as a small loaf, which had obviously been soaked with blood, and was now dried solid. He retched into the sink. He wondered why he hadn’t noticed this before.

  Then he remembered: he’d been up north on assignment, pulling in a couple of all-n
ighters, hadn’t, consequently, been in the flat for four whole days before the accident. There’d been a complex affair, involving Sybille dropping dinner jackets at the office, and posting a pair of shoes, so that he could meet her at the Press Awards without making a detour to Camden. She hadn’t been happy about it.

  He wondered if a person would be ill from losing so much blood. If it was Sybille’s – and he couldn’t see who else might have let themselves in, bled heavily and left – then she’d given no sign of physical discomfort at their final night out. She had looked a little pale, he thought, but that was because she was a redhead. She went pale when she was angry and, for one reason and another, she’d spent much of the past four months angry.

  He tied up the binbag and hopped outside with it, in his boxer shorts, bagged-up foot and one slipper. He opened the bin, and the stench hit him like a blow. There were flies – even in December. And there was another bag, loosely tied, full of still more bloody material, and as he put the new one in, the first one shifted, letting some of its contents fall out onto the more usual refuse below. He let the lid slam. He couldn’t work out why his wife had lost so much blood.

  And then, suddenly, he could, and he just stood there, near naked in the quiet, freezing fog, rocking back and forth from his bad foot to his good one, thinking about the child she’d lost, before they lost each other. And who Sybille had found, since Rex and his wife hadn’t made love in four months.

  Twelve years on, Rex stood, remembering, in the trees outside the convent, wet and shivering, looking at the pile of boxes in the porch. What remained of his wife’s life was in that teetering tower, waiting to be picked up. It was 7 am, and he had wandered the streets all night.

  Opening the French windows had been a life-saver. The blast had come from the right, from the kitchen, and he’d almost surfed at the fringes of it right out into the front yard, tripping over a broom. As he ran, singed and scalded, on legs so useless he felt as if he was in a dream, he could see the yellow blaze raging in the kitchen, spreading, gradually, to the room he’d been sitting in. Thank God for theft, he thought, seeing that Bilal’s phone was still in his hand. He rang 999 and then he limped away.

  There were at least half a dozen places and people who would take him in. But if he was being watched, as it seemed, then those people would be at risk, too. Not even the deserted office would be safe. And the police? He couldn’t trust them to keep him safe.

  There’d been a few, blessed hours of relief on empty night buses, but eventually people had embarked to disturb his peace. They’d usually been lone, dozing shiftworkers, or gangs of giddy students, but still he’d found himself staring at them, over-alert, wondering if they’d been sent to get him. So, for the most part, he had circled the borough on his lame feet like a pilgrim, soaking in the frequent showers as he tried, in a sort of fever, to piece it all together.

  So he found Mina? Concentrate! How? Why? And he poured petrol on Mina – to set light to her? Just to frighten her? Into doing what? Out of doing what? But she ran, remember? Yes. Ran and caught Peter’s cigarette in her clothes. Went up in flames. Died. Afterwards, he altered her last web post, stitching an earlier one in so her death made sense to people who wouldn’t look closely, would just see the Kurdish girl and the politics and make up their minds on the spot. So is he the one who’s after me? Does he only want to frighten me, or stop me for good? Or is there someone else who wants me to stop? Think! The paper… the man in the German paper. Did that happen to Mina’s mother? The PKK used a hitman to kill her with his speciality – a traffic accident made to look like a hit and run. But why kill the sister of a hero? To get to the hero, maybe. So what if they came after his niece, too? And anyone else who looked too closely? Why is that van reversing so fast…

  Comfortless thoughts like these rattled around his mind like ghost trains, all the night, each question only answering itself with another until he arrived, aching, exhausted, in the solace of the wooded grove. He wanted to be with his wife, before she went. But this was as close as he dared to get, hidden here, in the trees, watching her boxes in the porchway. He sat down on the wet earth, stiff twigs biting into his legs, too tired to care. He remembered the phone.

  He pulled it out, uselessly pulled the collar of his sopping shirt up in search of comfort, and stared at it. He remembered what he’d been doing, just before the blast. The folder he’d found.

  It was there. The killer could delete it from the cloud, but they couldn’t do anything about copies already saved onto phones. Crouched in the trees, he watched Mina’s true, unedited speech on the little rain-flecked screen, clamping one hand with another to stop the shaking. And at the truth, a freedom did, at last descend on him. Because he’d answered his questions now, and he knew. He looked something up. Sent a message. To Mina’s killer. And he fell asleep, there, on the earth, in the rain.

  He woke in darknesss. But it sounded like daytime, from the traffic noises and the shouts of the kids in the distant park. He was in a dark place, an earthy smelling tomb of sorts. He had a memory of hands pulling him, some fabric, like a towel, going over his face. Had they kidnapped him?

  As his eyes caught up with the rest of him, Rex realised he was alone, in a shelter in the woods. There were hundreds of these conical structures, dotting every patch of woodland in the Borough – built by kids, or more likely, by their dads, after watching some survival show on the TV. Most were only branches grouped vertically around a tree-fork to create a draughty wigwam. This was a more serious affair – the logs lashed together, sheets of sacking or tarpaulin woven in and out to form a proper barrier against the weather. It smelt in there, smelt bad – of tobacco and feet and rotting leaves. A Bible in Cyrillic sat on a red bottle crate, next to a filthy sleeping bag. He knew who had dragged him in here.

  There was no sign of Peter now, but he had left a full, unopened bottle of some Sports Energy drink on the floor, and Rex took the hint. It would be the first and only time such a thing passed his lips. As his head cleared, he heard sirens and he remembered his house. They’d have to let him put his skylights in now.

  The phone had been carefully placed by his side as well, and he picked it up. No one had called on it, or replied to his message. He saw, to his alarm, that it was after 3 o’clock in the afternoon. He rushed out of the little shelter, banging his head painfully on an overhanging log. He hobbled through the trees, terrified a tubby, greying father trying to get his small son to pee in a bush, veered off in the opposite direction and arrived, panting, aching, at the doorway to the convent.

  The boxes were still there. He felt a flood of relief. Sybille had not gone. Then another thought struck him. She had gone. The boxes hadn’t followed yet. That would make sense – she wouldn’t be travelling in a van with her boxes. The nuns had a number he knew by heart, and he rang it. A Sister – not Florence, someone younger, brusquer – said that Sybille had not been ‘collected’ yet. There’d been no word from Aurelie, so far.

  And nothing changed, for five hours, as he stood with his clothes drying on his body, and as he sat and waited, focussing on the PAX sign and trying to steel himself for the fight to come. Two things would be happening soon, he knew that. Both promising trouble for him. He just didn’t know which was coming first.

  Then, around seven, he heard footsteps on the path behind him. He turned, and was shocked, momentarily, to see Rostam Sajadi.

  ‘I should have guessed you might come instead.’

  Briskly, Sajadi looked him up and down. ‘There are clothes in the car. And tea. Come.’

  Rex shook his head. ‘I have to stay here.’

  ‘Nobody is coming for your wife, Rex. Your sister-in-law checked into rehab this morning. Her husband has been ringing your telephone for hours.’

  Sajadi handed Rex his telephone. ‘It survived the blast. I sent someone to your house to take a look. Come.’

  He beckoned again, briskly, a commanding officer, not used to being disobeyed. Rex was unsure. It could
well be a trap. Something else in the car, besides clothes and tea. But the calls from France were true – seven listed on his phone.

  Sajadi cocked his head. ‘You don’t trust me?’ Then he chuckled. ‘Actually, don’t answer. I’m a man with a missing finger, standing in the woods at night and asking you if you trust me.’ He rubbed his hands together. ‘Look – you’ve got your phone. Call your friend in the police. Tell him where you’re going. Record it all, if you like.’

  ‘Where am I going?’

  ‘Kurdistan.’

  They shot down the hill, like passing royalty, pausing only in their tinted, upholstered comfort at the lights, where Wightman Road crossed Turnpike Lane. There was a big hoarding now where the doctor’s surgery had once been – mock-up photos and mock-up promises, like the bullshit he’d been writing for Shopping City: Ten, prestige dwellings in the heart of Wood Green. Some angry lyricist had sprayed ‘Wood Green Has No Heart’ across the hoarding.

  Rex had forgotten what Kurdistan had been called before. Halfway along Green Lanes, it was a new establishment, certainly, with a sign in the Kurdish colours, and in the window, a metal sculpture in the shape of an archer. The exposed brick interior boasted earnest-looking young men and women sipping coffee, playing backgammon, reading Kurdish newspapers. It was the sort of place Mina would have loved, Rex thought, as Sajadi led him through a door behind the counter, up some narrow, ungentrified stairs.

  This was where the fathers and the grandfathers of the kids below took their pleasure – with tea instead of coffee, real cigarettes instead of vapourisers, and some kind of cash-incentivised card game. The John Major man was much in evidence on the wall. And actually, Rex realised, with an opportunity to look longer, it was John Major.

  ‘What is it with him?’ Rex asked, as he sat, damp and aching at a table, and more tea was placed at his elbow.

  ‘The Karduchi were an ancient race of warriors. Fierce. They fought with bows and arrows.’ Sajadi could not resist performing a mime of an archer, pulling back the string. ‘You know? Like the statue in the window. The ancient Greeks described how every king wanted to have Karduchi in his army, but no king dared to go and recruit them. They were the Kurds. But over the centuries, you Europeans stopped being afraid of us. We became something to be used, divided up, deceived. The only politician in recent memory who has not taken that path is him.’ Sajadi pointed to the bland, precise, bean-counting countenance of the former Prime Minister. ‘In 1992, John Major fought for us as we died at the hands of Saddam. In the end, he could only send blankets. But he tried.’