The Sudden Appearance of Hope

Chapter 34

Why counting?

A lesson learned from my dad. A common trick in the police: when you’re sitting opposite the bastard who you knew did it and who won’t say a word; when you show that bastard the pictures of the old woman he beat, the child he robbed, the woman he raped and his face doesn’t even flicker, no surprise, no regret, just “no comment, no comment”, when you think you’re going to punch him in the face, shake him by the throat and scream, Say something, you bastard, show some fucking humanity!

at that moment, instead, let out a slow breath, and count backwards from ten.

Ten nine eight seven six five four three two one.

You can always get the fucker on forensics anyway.

Not that my dad ever swore. Not worth it, he’d say. People are just people, doing people things. Sometimes they’re stupid, and sometimes they’re desperate, and a lot of the time it’s just bad luck. Don’t get your knickers in a twist over people.

By midnight, Parker still hadn’t replied. Had these been normal circumstances, I might have found a casino, somewhere to count the cards; but Istanbul had shut its casinos years ago, and I didn’t have the contacts to find where the gambling was now.

Reluctantly, I went back to the bunk bed in Zetinburnu, and slept badly, and dreamed of sand.

Forty-nine hours after I’d contacted him, and thirteen stolen wallets later, Parker replied.

What did I feel?

I had no memories of this man, no face to hate.

Was he just a fantasy in my mind, a dream?

Was he real?

(Was I?)

If I had been in Newark, and had access to the box where I stored my memories of him, I would have torn them to pieces and, as they burned, I would have rejoiced in the murder of the flames.

I tore the dressings off my burns.

I walked through the street in three-quarter shorts and a strappy top so people could see my still-blazing injuries.

On the tram, I stole a wallet from a woman who’d looked at me with contempt, and fumbled the grab, and as she began to scream and cry thief, thief, thief, I slapped her across the face and ran away, until my lungs burned again and I couldn’t remember where I was or how I’d got there.

No one would remember me as I stood upon this corner, gasping for breath.

There was only now.

The now in which I opened the stolen wallet, tore the contents out, ripped the money to pieces, snarled like an injured animal, sat on the pavement, remembered I was alone.

This now.

I stand up.

The now is fading.

Those who saw it, forget it.

Now it is gone.

Now I am walking.

Counting my steps.

And gone.

On my seventh day in Istanbul, I bought a laptop, loaded up Tor, and went looking for Byron14.

He was hiding, tipped off perhaps by my silence, or by my looking, or by some other action of Gauguin’s. I posted up the following:

On the ninth day after a man called Gauguin nearly burned me alive in a warehouse in Istanbul, I struck a deal with a stranger by the name of Byron14.

I said: I need papers, cash, clean, untraceable.

Byron replied: I want the base code of Perfection. Do I take it you do not, in fact, have this?

Not yet, I confessed. But you help me, and I will rip Perfection apart. I will tear Prometheus to pieces, I will…

You seem to be taking this quite personally, Byron mused.

You’ve got some fucked-up shit with Gauguin, haven’t you? I retorted.

No answer for a while, then,

Fair enough, he said. Okay. Let’s make a deal.

Byron14 was as good as his word. Within twenty-four hours of making our bargain, fifty thousand lira in mixed bills was waiting for me in a brown jiffy bag at a post box in Beyoğlu, and twelve hours after that, a forger by the name of Emine contacted me informing me her services had already been paid for and when would I be able to meet?

We met that evening on a yacht on the Sea of Marmara. The boat was called Good Intention, had high white sides and wooden finishes, a steering wheel with the face of a dragon carved in its centre, and a mahogany cigar-smoking Indian by the door to the bottom deck. Emine was in her mid-fifties, with an almost spherical face framed by an almost spherical burst of grey hair. The walls of the yacht were hung with watercolour paintings of Istanbul, none very good, all homemade. She wore a blue chiffon robe over a white cotton shirt, and as she led me into her workshop beneath the waterline her ankles jangled with jewellery, wooden charms and silver bangles, blue glass eyes to ward off evil. “Come, come, come!” she barked, leading me downstairs.

Her business was passport reclamation. “I’m an artist,” she exclaimed, “but people don’t appreciate my work, so I do this on the side. Come, come!”

She sat me down on a stool by a long bench covered in inks and glues, magnifying glasses and bits of computer cable. Opening a blue Tupperware box she started flicking through passports — Turkish, American, British, French, Russian, Indian, Japanese, Egyptian — all acquired from the foolish, the naïve or the dead.

“Are you British?”

“Yes.”

“You want to still be British?”

I shrugged. There are worse passports.

“You’d make a lovely American,” she exclaimed. “But no, too many people hate America, no good, no good. Iranian? No — wrong face for an Iranian. I can do you Bhutan, no one knows anything about Bhutan, and it’s clean, totally clean, you can use it for eight years no problem, money-back guarantee.”

“British is fine.”

“British passports are tricky, tricky! Barcodes, and now they’re putting in chips, I have to get my nephew to help me out with that sort of thing, he’s very good, bang bang, new identity, passport programmed happy good! In the old days,” she added, voice dropping with a sudden wistfulness, “it was just about making beautiful documents. But computers get everywhere now, all the old skills, dying; dying for machines.”

I smiled my most beatific smile, and resisted pointing out that certain professions, including mine, had proven themselves both flexible and immune to change.

UK passport photo requirements: professionally printed, 45mm x 35mm; in colour on plain white paper, taken against a plain cream or light grey background. The frame must include your head and shoulders; your head can occupy no more than 34mm of the height of the space, and no less than 29mm. You must wear a neutral expression, with your mouth closed, looking directly at the camera, without any head covering unless it is worn for religious purposes.

I told her all this, and she looked bewildered. “Just stand still for photo!” she barked.

The passport she eventually doctored for my purposes was of a British woman who “Went to Bangladesh,” she sighed, “and never came back.”

I was on a flight for Tokyo the same night.