City of the Lost

I

The policemen escorted Iain to his departure gate, where he joined the line for hand-luggage checks. He nodded farewell to them but they sat on a metal bench across the corridor, intent on seeing this all the way through. His bribe had bought him a change of destination. Charm evidently cost more.

He took off his belt to pass through the scanner, unzipped his holdall and parted his clothes for a woman security officer with a broken front tooth. A flash of manila at the bottom of his bag gave him a start, and he feared for a moment that his two policemen had set him up. Then he remembered Karin’s package, taking it from her after the blast and stashing it in there himself. He was waved through. He went to a far corner to open it. There was a toughened black plastic case inside, the size and weight of a hardback, with a handwritten note taped to it.

The case had twin clasps. He opened it up. There were eight sealed glass jars embedded in protective grey foam inside, along with a memory stick. The jars were labelled A to H and each contained a small shard of pottery, a lump of corroded metal or fragments of charred wood.

Boarding was announced. He still hadn’t arranged to be met in Tel Aviv. He called Maria from a payphone for Uri’s contact details. He tried him on his mobile first, got straight through. ‘Hey, mate,’ he said. ‘It’s Iain. You up for a visit?’

‘To London? Always.’

‘No. Me to you. In fact, I’ll be landing at Ben Gurion in about two hours.’

Uri laughed. ‘Thanks for the notice, mate. What’s this in aid of?’

‘You heard about Daphne, right?’

‘Shit, yeah. Terrible thing. Mustafa was good people. But why would that bring you here?’

‘One of the victims was Israeli.’

‘So they’ve been saying. That history guy, yeah?’

‘That’s the one. Can you run a background on him? Doesn’t have to be too deep. Work history, where he lived, family, friends and colleagues. You know the score.’

‘I’ll get on it now. Anything else?’

‘I could use a spare phone or a laptop, if you’ve got one. I keep losing mine.’

‘I’ll see what I can find. What about actual help?’

‘This is an off-piste kind of thing,’ said Iain. ‘Quentin won’t be happy.’

‘Fuck Quentin,’ said Uri. ‘Mustafa was one of us.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Iain. ‘He was.’

II

Zehra’s feet were by now in an openly mutinous mood, rapidly gaining support from her thighs and back. Yet she pressed on all the same until she reached the edge of the Forbidden Zone itself — the lost city of Varosha.

It had to be at least forty years since she’d been here last. Her uncle had worked in the kitchens of an expensive restaurant on the seafront, and they’d sometimes come to visit him on holidays. Varosha had been so glamorous back then, dazzling with film stars and European royalty, with millionaires and sporting legends. On one visit, she’d even seen Elizabeth Taylor coming out of the Argo hotel in a gorgeous blue dress and a wide-brimmed white hat.

It wasn’t like that any more.

Tall apartment blocks lay derelict, their windows broken, their façades riven by gigantic cracks. A cross had collapsed onto its side atop an Orthodox church, and its terracotta dome was sieved with holes where tiles had fallen in. Houses were overrun by vegetation, while cacti pressed up against the perimeter fencing in the forlorn manner of prisoners in a concentration camp. She remembered what Professor Volkan said about all those people who’d gone missing during the war, whose bodies had never been found, and suddenly this place appeared to her their symbol: not a lost city so much as a city of the lost. It gave her the chills, and she was glad to turn away from it again.

She came across a general store. The owner grunted when she showed him her photograph. ‘What do you want with him?’ he asked.

She looked up in surprise. After so many failures, you stopped expecting success. ‘Do you know him? Does he live here?’

‘Why do you ask?’

‘He owes me money.’

‘Sure,’ scoffed the shopkeeper. ‘To you and those men in the cars, I’ll bet.’

‘What cars?’

‘The ones watching his house. Three days now. What’s going on? What’s he done?’

‘Nothing. He owes me money.’

The man shrugged it off, gave her directions. She reached a patchwork of fields, orchards and allotments. The houses were in small clusters here, but there was one all by itself that matched the shopkeeper’s description: compact and shabby white, with a wooden lean-to against its side. It was set in a little citrus grove with a pair of tattered polythene greenhouses nearby, vegetation sprouting like straw from old mattresses. A rutted track connected it to the road, and a black SUV with tinted windows was parked near the junction.

She shuffled past the SUV, muttering to herself like a crazy woman. Two men were in the front, both wearing dark glasses and looking monumentally bored. Neither paid her any attention whatsoever. But the man in the back gave her a long, hard, piercing stare. Then he laughed scornfully and looked away again. She reached the next junction, turned right. The moment she was out of view, she bent double and fought for breath. It had been years since she’d suffered a panic attack. She’d thought herself over them.

As a young woman, the local PASOK thugs had eyed her in a different way, yet with that same fusion of entitlement and contempt. One day, four of them had pounded on their front door and demanded she come out. Her father had gone out instead to remonstrate. They’d beaten him into unconsciousness then forced their way inside. She’d hidden in the narrow space behind her wardrobe. For the next twenty minutes she’d had to listen as they found her mother and younger sister instead. Their cries haunted her still, as did the knowledge of such men. And the truth was that she’d been in hiding from their kind ever since.

Zehra didn’t know why such men would bother to watch the small white farm-house in the shadow of the lost city. Nor did she much care.

She was out.