City of the Lost

I

Huge crowds had been expected in Taksim Square. But not this huge. Marchers kept pouring in by the thousands, the tens of thousands, and the bridges and the approach roads and arcades were thronged as far as the eye could see. There were thousands of policemen too, many already dressed in riot gear, and dozens of empty paddy-wagons waiting for arrestees. Yet the mood was buoyant. And why not? It was spring, it was sunny, it was Friday. There was free music and treats for all the family: iced drinks for the children, roasted chestnuts and charred corn cobs dandruffed with salt.

There was purpose in the air too. These were proud people. They didn’t ask for much. They harboured no wild ambitions for wealth. All they wanted was a fair wage for their hard work, enough to live on and raise their families. But fair wages weren’t the norm any more. The economic crisis had been bad enough; the recent bombings been worse. Tourism was devastated. Property prices had slumped. New construction projects had been mothballed, multitudes of workers laid off, undermining wages elsewhere. And don’t even mention the price of food and fuel and all the sneaky tax hikes that the politicians had thought they could slip through without anyone noticing.

Even so, they might have borne it had they felt their troubles were being taken seriously. They didn’t. The new Prime Minister seemed sympathetic enough, but he was hapless; he didn’t have the balls. And the rest of his cabinet were a venal lot, career politicians in it for what they could get their hands on. So, for all the good humour, there was an edge to the singing that made the police nervous. And that nervousness gave the marchers extra voice, and made them bang their pots and pans all the louder, for it was a fine thing to be a part of such a vast movement, a fine thing to feel this kind of solidarity with so many good people just like themselves.

Surely, this time, someone had to listen.

II

The stairwell was tight and poorly lit, the stone steps polished and slippery. Karin grabbed the rail to turn the corner, but she was going too fast and her ankles slipped from under her and she crashed into the wall and went tumbling. The double doors above her burst open again and two of the men came charging through together, followed by the third, limping badly but pointing his knife at her in promise of horrific revenges. She hauled herself up by the rail, ran down another two more flights only to take another tumble. Her hard heels were ideal for impressing bank managers and stomping the feet of abducting thugs, but hopeless for taking polished stairwells at speed. She kicked them off, ran on barefoot. Swing doors ahead. She punched through them and stumbled out into the hotel’s dining room, fighting to keep her balance. The place was empty except for an early lunch table giving orders to a waiter. They stared blankly at Karin as she raced past. One of the men closed up behind her, scrabbling at her shoulder, his wheezing sounding perversely like strained laughter. She crashed through more doors out into the hotel foyer. The receptionist was talking to a man who looked miraculously like Iain. He saw her and came racing over. She swerved at the last moment and he clubbed the man with his fist, sent him tumbling to the ground. But the man staggered back to his feet and then his two friends burst through the dining-room doors, and she grabbed Iain by his wrist and dragged him out of a side door into the hotel’s car park. There was a narrow alley to its rear. They fled down it onto a side road, jinking left and right until finally they reached a fringe of park across from the Old City and she couldn’t run any further and she stopped and put her hands on her knees and looked fearfully around, expecting the men to appear behind them. But they didn’t. ‘What the hell’s going on?’ she gasped. ‘What are you doing here? Who were those people?’

He ignored her questions, gestured instead across the park at Nicosia’s Old City, a minor labyrinth of narrow streets and alleys. ‘There might be more of them,’ he told her. ‘We need to get off the street as soon as we can. They’ll be looking for couples. So you go first. Briskly but not too fast. I’ll be directly behind you. If you hear me shout, do exactly what I tell you. Okay?’

She felt conspicuous without her shoes, but she began walking and didn’t look around. They reached the Old City without incident, went through a gate into a cobbled alley of tourist shops and pavement cafés. There was a boutique hotel ahead, its courtyard ablaze with baskets of blooming flowers. A woman with fleshy arms and a plastic red apron was clearing plates and cups from a table. ‘Do you have rooms?’ asked Karin.

‘We’re a hotel,’ she said, frowning down at Karin’s bare feet. ‘Of course we have rooms.’

‘Terrific,’ said Karin, as Iain arrived behind her. ‘Then perhaps you’d show us one.’

III

The jamb had splintered beyond easy repair. Zehra barely had to lean against the front door for it to give. She slipped inside, closed it behind her. Her overpowering first impression was the smell, as though something had died beneath the floorboards. No wonder the police had laughed and left in such a hurry.

The note they’d left was a terse invitation to call the local station. She left it where it was, set straight to work. She photographed indiscriminately, not sure what might prove significant. There were pale patches on his walls where pictures had once hung. The furniture was old and shabby, crudely mended with black tape. Several of his floor tiles were broken and his oven and refrigerator were almost as old as Zehra’s own. His cupboards contained a few jars and tins of food, but nothing fresh. His study was lined with learned-looking histories in a variety of languages. She photographed their spines. His desk drawers and filing cabinet were empty. Either he’d packed everything up before he’d left, or someone had beaten her here.

The wooden lean-to against the side of his house proved to be his workshop. Rakes, spades and mattocks were lined up against the wall like irregular soldiers, while saws and chisels and hammers hung from pegs. He had a number of electrical and motorized tools too, all of which looked old and very well used, other than a heavy-duty hand-drill still in its original box, along with a selection of drill-bits whose perfect black finish suggested they’d never been used at all — except for the largest, which was already worn down to the grey steel beneath, and which was lightly powdered with cement dust, as though he’d used it to dig up his floor.

Upstairs, now. Yellowed walls in his bathroom, an unflattering mirror, smears of black-spot mould in hard to reach places. No toothbrush, toothpaste or soap. The first bedroom was so dusty that it couldn’t have been used in months. A cobweb caught in her hair. She brushed it off. A matching set of wheeled suitcases stood against the far wall, except that the two largest of them were missing, to judge from the patches of dust-free floor. Nothing in the wardrobe but a cardboard box containing several empty picture frames that perhaps explained the pale patches on the walls downstairs.

The next room along was clearly where he’d slept, though it lacked personal touches. Surplus hangars in his wardrobe and empty spaces in the drawer beneath both suggested he’d packed for perhaps three or four days, certainly not enough to justify two large suitcases. And she couldn’t find any socks or underwear, which was odd. She looked around. His bed was covered by a tatty white spread that dropped almost to the floor. She checked beneath it, one side and then the other. Yes. There were two drawers in the bed’s base. The first contained his missing underclothes; the second was half filled with photographs and documents, print-outs from the Internet and handwritten letters in multiple languages, some of which were still in their envelopes. Perhaps these were the missing documents from the desk and filing cabinet downstairs, or perhaps whoever had taken those had simply not found these. She sat on the bed and skim-read a few of the letters. His name appeared to be Yasin Baykam. He had a sister in Istanbul. He’d been at loggerheads with some local farming commune over who should pay for the—

Something banged loudly outside. She went to the window. An old truck was passing along the road. Her nerve was shaken, however. It was time to leave. She fetched the smallest of the wheeled suitcases and packed all the photographs and documents into it. It was so heavy that she had to bump it downstairs one step at a time. She closed the front door behind her then ducked her head and hurried back through the citrus grove, dragging the case after her like a sulking child.

An army Land-Rover drove by just as she reached the road. Her heart went crazy on her. They were sure to stop and ask her to explain her flustered appearance and odd behaviour, demand to see inside the suitcase; but they simply gazed past her as if she wasn’t there. Nothing in this world was quite so invisible as an old woman in widow’s black struggling with a suitcase. Normally, this would have infuriated Zehra. But sometimes, she had to admit, it had its benefits.