A Dangerous Crossing--A Novel

by Ausma Zehanat Khan

  “What’s that?” Rachel asked. “An arrest warrant?”

  Almost pityingly, Inspecteur Roux said, “You think we are some kind of international spy force—James Bond with French accents, n’est-ce pas? It is not so. We are mainly bureaucrats, technocrats. We do not have supranational powers, we do not make arrests. A Blue Notice is the equivalent of looking for someone who can help with an investigation. You call this a person of interest, I think. I watch American television programs. I like them, in fact.” A hint of humor transformed her attitude. “I am sorry, Sergeant, to disappoint you.” She mimed a shoot-’em-up action with her hands. “We are liaison officers coordinating officers in different jurisdictions. We also serve as a clearinghouse, do you follow?”

  Rachel nodded, interested in this explanation.

  Khattak saw an opening. “Am I correct in thinking that homicide doesn’t fall under Interpol’s mandate?”

  “You, at least, are well informed. Yes, Inspector, you are correct.” She didn’t elaborate.

  “Then your presence on the island…?”

  Amélie Roux glanced around the tent, her gaze lingering on the stained plastic tarp.

  “Aude Bertin was a friend. I recruited her, I trained her—I want to know how it came to this. Who did this to her? Her death may be inconvenient to my government, but it is a tragedy to me. Your condolences, I appreciate them, but they are not enough.”

  Khattak felt ashamed. How quickly he had judged her and how sensitive he’d become. He resolved to do better at once.

  “I understand better than you may realize. Audrey Clare is a friend. I know she couldn’t have done this, just as I know that if she fled, it was to protect herself. If Agent Bertin and Sami al-Nuri were killed at Woman to Woman headquarters, to me it’s very likely that Audrey is in danger. That’s why we’re trying to establish this connection between Audrey and your friend. Why was Agent Bertin on Lesvos? What was Interpol’s reason for sending her?”

  He thought of the likeliest possibilities: drug trafficking, piracy, organized crime. But there were other possibilities, including genocide, terrorism, or war crimes. It was possible that any of these things connected the boy, Sami al-Nuri, to the others.

  What had brought these three people together at the camp on Lesvos?

  “Come.” Inspecteur Roux got to her feet. She led them out of the tent to a smaller tent behind it, this one with an armed Greek police officer at the door. “Let me show you something.”

  The police officer stood aside. The interior of the tent was just a collection of seemingly random materials stacked on a plastic table, each in a labeled plastic bag with a sign-off sheet attached. An expensive black suitcase was open under the table, its contents half displayed: a woman’s clothing and her personal toiletries—simple, sensible items.

  “She didn’t take it with her, but two things are missing: her laptop and her phone.”

  “That’s not all,” Khattak said. He told her about the missing boxes, and about Audrey’s expenditure of funds. Roux already knew. She handed him a plastic bag that contained a clipboard.

  “It’s been printed.”

  “What is it?” Rachel asked.

  “I pieced together her itinerary—everywhere Audrey Clare traveled since she arrived on the island. Look at this.”

  Khattak followed her pointing finger. Apart from a list of travel dates to European cities, Roux had flagged three bus tickets to a place called Hatay. It was a trip she’d taken four days before she’d disappeared.

  “Hatay?” The name was unknown to him. Rachel didn’t know it either. Khattak remembered that Shukri had mentioned the Netherlands.

  “Is it in Holland?” he asked her. “She took the bus from Germany, perhaps?”

  But he could tell from Inspecteur Roux’s posture, the intensity in her narrow face, that Hatay was the key to Audrey’s disappearance.

  “No, cher Inspecteur, Hatay isn’t in Holland. It’s a city in Turkey, close to the Syrian border. What’s more … one of us will have to go there. I’d rather it was you.”

  Then she picked up another file on the table. She placed it before them with a warning: its contents were confidential.

  When they read the file, they knew why.

  * * *

  By the time they’d finished going over the elements of the case, Roux’s manner had transformed. She took Khattak by the elbow.

  “Inspector Khattak, I am sorry, eh? What I said about the Afghan boys. You didn’t like it, I think, this comparison. I apologize, it was discourteous.”

  Khattak’s expression warmed. “Not at all. In fact, we likely do share a wider heritage.”

  He sketched a movement in the air. “Do you remember the imaginary line the British drew to delimit their sphere of influence—the Durand Line?”

  Inspecteur Roux nodded.

  Khattak smiled. “Sometimes it’s hard to know on which side of it you belong.”

  17

  Moria, Lesvos

  Rachel’s long walk from Kara Tepe to Moria had left her alarmed and disheartened. She’d intercepted any number of volunteers, but no one had answers to her questions. Though Audrey had made an impression on everyone she’d met, the urgencies of camp life, and the sheer volume of people transiting through, meant that very few volunteers could recall their encounters with any precision. She kept at it, trying to orient herself, trying to understand what had motivated Audrey—what she’d thought she could accomplish at either camp.

  The more she witnessed of camp life for herself, the harder she found it to accept the good cheer of the volunteers, or Moria’s system of management, tumultuous yet evidently functional. She’d followed the signs up Afghan Hill, where she’d been surrounded by a circle of children, boys and girls alike, pestering her with questions before their parents had caused them to scatter and leave her alone.

  She’d learned that Syrian refugees were processed separately at Kara Tepe because the war in their country had given them priority: at Kara Tepe, well-established crisis organizations played an important role. Refugees were registered at a steady, streamlined pace and referred to numbered tents or offered medical care by Medicins sans Frontiers or Medicins du Monde. Most moved on quickly to the ferry at Mytilene’s port.

  But the camp at Moria had been a prison before taking on its new incarnation as a hub for refugees. The need was so great that this modest attempt at bureaucracy was overwhelmed. The facilities were inadequate, far outmatched by need. Whether this was deliberate or whether it was a symptom of a crisis that knew no comparison in terms of scale, Rachel wasn’t well-informed enough to know. She could question why the UNHCR had erected so few shelters when there were thousands of people in need. It was possible, she supposed, that there was a concerted effort by the authorities not to make Greece more welcoming as a destination.

  And she wondered what lies the people who’d undertaken the perils of the journey had been told—what refuge or earthly paradise they’d been promised.

  People were mainly encamped in the muddy rows of the olive groves, where campfires soldered the darkness in bursts of hot orange light. The olive trees were sparse, the grove stripped for firewood; when there was nothing else to burn, plastic was fed to the fire, creating an acrid haze above the camp. She found herself coughing and wondered at the respiratory effects. Because shelter was so limited, people slept outside huddled around the fires.

  Worse than all of this was the fact that no adequate arrangements had been made for human waste. A strong stench permeated one section of the camp where outhouses and portables had descended into disaster. There was no question of dignity or privacy; it had become a matter of survival and anything extraneous to that thought had been discarded.

  The children played like children: teenage boys engaged in a game of volleyball, a pair of little girls shared a coloring book under a bank of barbed wire. Rachel eavesdropped on a volunteer who was speaking to a translator she’d dragged over to the girls. With them was an olde
r man in scarcely adequate clothing, without shoes. He’d taken the turban from his head and wrapped it over his hands to warm them.

  The volunteer explained something to the translator, who tried to convince the man of the sense of the volunteer’s earnest words. She was wearing a jacket with a patch on one shoulder: the Danish flag. Though she looked young, she spoke with an air of experience.

  “Don’t leave your daughters alone,” she warned. “There are too many strangers, people you don’t know. Anything could happen.”

  The translator offered a few blunt phrases to the man.

  When he stared at the young woman with his empty, exhausted eyes, she insisted, “You must protect them. You must not let a stranger approach your daughters.”

  His look of surprise was such that Rachel wondered if he had fled a place where, despite its dangers, the thought of close community causing harm to their own was unthinkable. Or whether he was a man to whom life had offered no opportunities for education or for coming to terms with the cruelties of the world.

  The volunteer broke it down into two simple words.

  “Bad men.” She said it again. “Bad men.”

  She pointed around the camp. Then she bent down and hugged the girls, much to their surprise. They giggled at the embrace.

  “Keep them close.”

  Finally, the man understood. He sank down beside his daughters on the muddy ground, staring into the distance at something the others couldn’t see.

  To the translator, the Danish volunteer said, “It’s not getting better here, is it?”

  The translator—Rachel didn’t recognize the language he’d spoken, but she thought the man was an American either of Arab background or Iranian. He nodded.

  “Believe me, Freja. I’ve tried to warn them. I heard there was an incident in Kara Tepe.”

  The volunteer named Freja sighed. “There are so many people here, it’s hard to keep track of who’s coming or going. There have been thefts, and occasionally fights have broken out, but this is new.”

  “Why? What happened?”

  “Someone grabbed a girl, she fought back pretty hard. She couldn’t say who it was, but she scratched him up pretty bad.”

  They told each other to keep a weather eye out.

  None of it surprised Rachel. Stealing from those with nothing to steal. Harm done to those who were desperate. Refugee status wasn’t a badge of sainthood any more than it was a choice. She couldn’t discount that crime and predation were possible in the camp. She viewed the world through the lens of a police officer, the lens of someone who’d imagined terrible outcomes for her brother. She expected cruelty from the world, she’d known her share of it, though she’d done her best to move past it. She expunged her father’s violence from her mind: it had made her who she was. She was lucky it hadn’t unmade her.

  As she watched at the girls playing in the mud, her despair was overcome by self-contempt. Each person in this camp could likely tell her a story more painful than her own.

  Children under barbed wire, an image that would never leave her now.

  She asked herself what else she didn’t know as she left the camp for the beach, the scene of other disasters. The temperature had dropped and the water was cold, the pristine shoreline marred by detritus on the beach: black flotation devices resembling rubber tires, stacks of orange life jackets, the occasional dinghy that would never float again, odd bits of clothing, mismatched shoes, a single sock.

  She had left the stench of Moria behind, breathing in great, gasping gulps, trying to focus on Audrey, when suffering was all around her.

  She wondered how Khattak felt—could his composure rise to this occasion? He’d said nothing as they crossed the gate, nothing outside the parameters of the case, until he’d spoken to Roux about the Afghan boys.

  She’d tried to decipher his emotion and failed. Whether he felt anger, regret, bitterness … he was often a mystery to her. But he couldn’t be indifferent to what they’d witnessed. He’d left her at the hill to put his language skills to use. Boys had urged him to join in their game. She’d seen another side to Khattak, laughing and affectionate with children who were thrilled to find someone who spoke their tongue—someone who looked like them, as Amélie Roux had observed. They’d teased him mercilessly, delighted to be teased in return.

  “Walk around,” he’d said to Rachel. “Get a feel for what we’re dealing with here.”

  Doubtfully, she’d warned him, “They might become too much for you to handle.”

  He’d waved her off with a grin, teasing her as well. “They’re not as fearsome as you think. I’m certain I can manage.”

  * * *

  Maybe Khattak’s life wasn’t as sheltered as hers; maybe he’d been to places like Moria before. Kicking aside a life vest with her toe, Rachel asked herself if there were other places like this. She needed to educate herself. Until she did, she wouldn’t be able to figure out the motive behind the murders, or to puzzle through the role Audrey might have played. There had to be someone on Lesvos who could tell her why Audrey had risked a trip to the Turkey-Syria border, and why she had taken two children to such a dangerous crossing.

  She was also thinking of the missing boxes. What was in them? Who had taken them? Sehr had made it clear that the local police were choosing not to be helpful. Rachel wondered if she should try speaking to them as a colleague.

  “The boats come here at night.” The voice spoke to her from nearby.

  Rachel looked over her shoulder. A boy and a young girl were picking their way along the shore. She recognized the girl. She’d been watching Rachel at the Woman to Woman tent.

  The girl had bright brown eyes, wide and long-lashed, and thick curly hair shaped into a mop. Her face and clothes were clean but her hands were dirty, her fingernails torn. She saw Rachel looking at them and shoved them behind her back.

  “Who are you?” Rachel asked the boy.

  “Let’s play a game,” he said. She tried to pin down his age. He could be anywhere from sixteen to twenty, she thought. He was slim and wiry, with a clever, suspicious face. The little girl looked hungry. Rachel offered her an apple. She took it with a bright, beaming thanks.

  “What kind of game?” she asked.

  “You tell me your name, I’ll tell you mine.”

  “Easy enough. I’m Sergeant Rachel Getty.”

  “Sergeant? You’re police?”

  “I am.”

  He looked at her plain blue windbreaker. “Not Greek,” he said. “Not Interpol. American?”

  “No, I’m from Canada.”

  A light went on in his eyes. “Then you came because of Audrey.”

  The little girl clutched his hand; he gave her a reassuring smile. He whispered to her in an undertone: something he’d said made the girl jump up and down.

  Rachel spoke to him sharply. “I’d like to know who you are.”

  “That’s fair,” he said, still watching her. “My name is Ali Maydani.”

  * * *

  They walked along the shoreline, the boy speaking to Rachel of his journey, the little girl playing a game of hop, skip, and catch up. Rachel noticed the way Ali kept his eye on the girl, even when his attention was focused on Rachel.

  “Is it slowing down?” She meant the arrival of refugees on the island.

  He nodded. “You wouldn’t think it’s only four miles across to Lesvos’s northern shore. There’s a moment when you’re out on the raft on the open sea, and you feel like you’ve fallen off the edge of the world. You can’t turn back, and you don’t know what’s ahead.”

  Rachel knew he wasn’t talking about geography.

  “You risked it anyway. With your little sister in tow.”

  The boy spoke English well, the little girl not as well, though she seemed to understand their conversation. She was so endearingly good-natured that Rachel wanted to hug her. She wondered if these were late-developing maternal instincts, then asked herself how she could think that with all she’d be
en to Zachary. All she’d had to be.

  “Aya isn’t my sister,” Ali said. “She’s my friend’s sister.”

  “And your parents?” Rachel asked. “Her parents?”

  “Gone,” he said, without elaboration. “They won’t be coming.”

  He asked her why she’d come to Lesvos, so Rachel told him the truth. Nothing she said seemed to surprise him. She had the feeling he’d known who she was, and that he’d expected her to come. When he told her he’d been on Lesvos since January, she guessed he’d found her for a reason.

  “You’ve been here a long time. Why haven’t you transited through?”

  Ali planted his feet. He faced Rachel squarely, studying her open face—making calculations, she thought, as he pulled a photograph from his pocket.

  “I’m waiting for Israa,” he said. “She’s Aya’s sister and my friend.”

  Rachel looked down at the photograph. If Aya was pretty, the older sister could have given Helen of Troy a run for her money. The wide, clear eyes, the stunning symmetry of her bone structure, the rich, dark curls that framed her face. It was a face that was older than her years, the expression anxious, her hand raised as if to stop the photographer from capturing her image. She was a girl in motion, sixteen or seventeen years old.

  “Friend?” she asked Ali, a humorous emphasis on the word.

  Ali flushed, his fingers curled around the edge of the photo.

  “I was going to marry her,” he said with all the stout conviction of first love. He met her eyes with such grown-up clarity that Rachel adjusted her perceptions. “She’s missing. We fled Damascus together. When the smugglers took us to the boats, we were separated. I’ve been looking for her ever since.”

  He took a deep breath, his words forced into a sharp, hard point.

  “Audrey Clare said she would help me find her.”

  He turned the photograph over and pressed it into Rachel’s hand. It was covered in a jumble of figures that resolved themselves into names.

  Rachel looked up with a frown. “What is this?” she asked the boy, alarmed by his sudden pallor.