Liberation Movements

Gavra

Back in the arrivals lounge, Gavra lit another cigarette. His hand didn’t shake, but it seemed that it should. A plane had exploded. His stomach felt like it was working on a stone.

Claustrophobic Ludvik Mas was still by the mullein, trying unsuccessfully to look patient. Gavra scanned the other faces in the crowd, old women and young men and whole families. There was no concern in their sweating faces, only frustration. Some approached the information desk, and the girl did a good job with her smiles and sympathetic shakes of the head, as if she really didn’t know what was going on. Maybe she didn’t.

Ludvik Mas checked his watch. He confirmed it with a clock on the wall-6:48 in the morning-then walked over to the telephones. Gavra joined him, two down.

“…nothing, that’s what I’m telling you. And they’re not saying anything.”

Gavra tapped cigarette ash on the floor and began to dial.

“Who told you that?…I would have noticed something, some activity…Okay. Yes, comrade, you’re right. It does appear she didn’t play along.”

Then Mas hung up and walked out of the airport.

The morning sun was hotter than Gavra expected, beating down as he slipped on his sunglasses and followed Mas across the parking lot to where he got into a rented beige Mercedes. Gavra half-jogged to his Renault.

On the drive back into Istanbul, he convinced himself that Ludvik Mas was behind the hijacking. There was no reason to believe this, but he believed it just the same, and he was self-aware enough to know why. He was too attached to surfaces, always falling victim to that word Brano Sev enjoyed harping on-sentimentality. It is, Brano had told him numerous times, the demise of all good operatives, resulting in the most fatalities. But you’re young. You just don’t understand yet.

And that, as Gavra well knew, was true.

It had been true the previous winter, back in the Capital, when a young woman named Dora was discovered taking photographs of military documents at her office and delivering them to her lover, a West German with diplomatic papers. Gavra had been alone on that case-Brano was on one of his many Vienna trips-and had decided that she was, in the end, apolitical. She was simply in love, and thus capable of immense stupidity. So he didn’t bring her in. The next day, Dora flew to Bonn with her lover and was promoted to major in the West German secret police, the BND.

The Mercedes maintained an even clip, following signs to Beyo lu, yet sometimes Gavra had trouble keeping up. He swept around two car accidents, neither serious but both surrounded by small Turks shouting at one another and waving hands in the air.

Finally, after driving up Ataturk Bulvari and across Ataturk Bridge, spanning the Golden Horn, then rising toward the Galata Tower, Mas stopped at a surprising place: the splendorous cube of the Hotel Pera Palas, where he handed his car keys to a doorman and strolled inside. Gavra parked a little farther down the narrow street, then jogged back, narrowly avoiding an accident.

When he reached the ornate foyer, with Ottoman columns and a wall of coral marble, Mas was to the left, at the front desk, taking his key from a smiling clerk. Then he jogged up a few stairs and entered the century-old elevator.

For the next half hour, Gavra waited in the lounge with a copy of the International Herald Tribune, reading dismal editorials on Pol Pot’s recent proclamation of the “Democratic Republic of Kampuchea” in Cambodia before drifting to thoughts of Armenians.

Being at the top of his class in the Ministry academy, he had a strong grasp of history. He knew that, despite Turkish claims to the contrary, a series of forced movements took place in the early part of the century, coming to a head in 1915, when the ruling group known as the Young Turks took it upon themselves to rid their country of Armenian Christians while the Great War diverted the rest of the world’s attention. The expulsion was carried out so systematically that no one could reasonably deny that orders from above set it in motion.

The Turkish military was first purged of Armenian soldiers, often by group execution. Then cities and villages were taken over by newly purified Turkish troops, who killed Armenian men and forced the remaining women and children into overcrowded trains that spilled them into the desert, or sent them on death marches, where they died of starvation and disease under the summer sun. Reports from American and German officials at the time noted that the roads were lined and rivers choked with the rotting bodies of these ill-fated people. Later, according to a questionable American journalist, Adolf Hitler would tell his generals, Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?

Gavra believed most complex disputes to be hopeless, and this one was no exception.

Brano had often wondered aloud about his pupil’s innate pessimism when it came to international affairs. Then why are you working for the Ministry? If you don’t believe some sort of good can come from what we do, then why are you doing it?

Gavra had been recruited straight out of high school, by a man in his village he knew his father despised. He joined in order to make his father suffer for a childhood of humiliations. Even though it had begun in anger, over the years Gavra had found security in the shell of the Ministry that he nonetheless treated with suspicion. So why did he remain?

Not even he knew the answer.

He closed the newspaper and tried to recall Libarid Terzian. He didn’t know Libarid that well-only through his file and a few casual conversations-but for the last year they had sat at desks in the same room, and Gavra couldn’t help but mourn him in some way. Libarid and his late mother had been part of that stream of Armenian refugees fleeing the terror today’s hijackers had sought to revenge.

Ludvik Mas returned to the front desk carrying a small suitcase. He handed over his key, paid his bill, then walked past his shadow and through the front door.

On Ataturk Bulvari, passing another accident, he considered running Mas off the road. This man, who no doubt brought down a plane full of innocents, was probably going home. It was one thing in this world that Gavra could point at and, without hesitation, call wrong.

He sped up, halving the distance.

Once they reached the airport, he and Brano would have to go through the Turks in order to do anything, but here on the open road, Gavra could take care of Mas himself. It was an appealing option.

Like during other moments of decision, though, Gavra flustered as the old man’s orders came back to him: Do not make contact, only follow.

“Shit,” he muttered.

Gavra loosened his grip on the wheel and let Mas pull farther ahead. He turned on the radio for comfort, and half-listened to pop music with lilting Arabic tones as they left town again. He tapped his finger on the steering wheel, trying to whistle with the tune, but found that it was always slightly different than he expected; it was unpredictable.

When he thought he’d finally gotten the melody down, Mas took the exit for Ataturk International Airport.

Gavra switched off the radio.

Mas carried his suitcase inside. He returned his keys to a car rental desk, then went to the small TisAir desk in the departures area. He bought a ticket and smiled at the heavyset Turkish woman who sold it to him, then walked through the security check to the gates.

Gavra approached the TisAir desk with his most winning smile. “Excuse me. I know you’re going to think this is rude, but you have the most beautiful eyes I’ve ever seen.”

She blushed. “Well…well, thank you.”

“I bet this is an interesting job.”

She snorted. “I wish. ”

“People going all over the world, and you’re the one who puts them on the path. That’s not so bad.”

“But I stay here.”

“That may be true, but you meet the world through this desk. Like that man who just left. Where was he going?”

In the arrivals lounge, the earlier frustration had become misery. Women wept beside the mullein plant, and men shouted as if they’d just wrecked each other’s cars. A squealing mother gripped Gavra’s arm, but he shook her off, heading down the corridor to the door marked GUVENLIK. The guard nodded at him, but still refused to smile.

Brano was alone with the fat man. On a table, a reel-to-reel tape player sat inert as both men smoked. Brano said, “Anything on Mas?”

“He cleared out of his hotel room in the Pera Palas, and now he’s waiting for a flight back home.”

“He’s still in the airport?”

“Flight leaves in an hour.”

The fat man grunted and said in his heavy accent, “I can not make the sense of it.”

“Play it for him,” said Brano.

The fat man got up to leave. “You do it. I can not listen more.”

Once he was gone, Brano rewound the tape and pressed STOP. Then PLAY.

The voice that came out was staticky, speaking English. “…and this is an order, from the Armenian Diaspora across the planet, sufferers of the genocide at the hands of the Turkish imperialists, in solidarity with our freedom-loving comrades in Palestine and West Germany…”

“He’s reading it,” Gavra said.

“Shh.”

“…a hundred thousand in United States dollars and the release from United States prison of the revered Gourgen Mkrtich Yanikian.”

Then came another man’s voice, clearer: “We understand. Just give us some time. You have enough fuel to remain in the air for-”

“I know this! We know everything. The Armenian nation has-”

The tape squealed as Brano held down the fast-forward button. “A lot of dogma here.”

“Who’s Gourgen Yanikian?” Gavra asked.

“American citizen, Armenian descent. Two years ago he invited the Turkish consul general and the consul to lunch at the Biltmore Hotel in Santa Barbara, California. He shot them both with a Luger. Killed them.”

“Right.”

“I suspect,” said Brano, “that these people are connected to the Prisoner Gourgen Yanikian Group.”

“I remember. Two months ago.”

“Yes, in February they committed two acts in Beirut. They tried to bomb the Turkish Information and Tourism Bureau-it went off while police tried to defuse it. Then they set off a bomb in the Turkish Airlines offices.”

“I thought the ASALA did that.”

Brano shrugged. “The Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia also claimed responsibility.”

“Too many names,” said Gavra.

“Listen to this.”

Brano pressed PLAY.

The hijacker was crying now, and through the sobs he spoke Turkish that Brano translated in his monotone. “She said it. She’s one of yours. Yes. Because she knows even more. She told me. How did she know?”

A click, then the other man said in English, “What did she say to you?”

“Just that…that…” Brano translated, then stopped because the voice had gone silent.

“Hello?” said the other man. “Are you still there? Come in, five-four.”

There was no reply. Brano stared hard at the machine. “That was the last transmission before the explosion. It occurred a couple of minutes later.”

“‘She’?”

“I don’t know.”

Gavra sank into a chair. “A suicide. Then why the demands?”

“That’s the question.”

“Then let’s talk to Mas.”

Brano stood up.

The fat Turk’s name was Captain Talip Evren, and he found a guard to walk them through the security check. Mas was at Gate 5 with thirty other travelers, reading an old copy of The Spark, a leg crossed over his knee.

“Ludvik,” said Brano.

Mas looked up, then smiled easily, losing the claustrophobia of before. “Brano. What are you doing in Istanbul?”

“I’d like to ask you the same thing.”

“It’s the nature of our business we seldom get answers.”

“You were always philosophical, Ludvik.”

“Who’s the kid?”

Gavra said, “Captain Gavra Noukas.”

“Noukas?” Mas bit his lip. “I’ve heard about you.”

Brano sat in the chair next to him. “You were waiting for someone. Now you’re going back home. That’s correct?”

“Well, your boy was following me, so I don’t suppose I should lie.”

“I want to know what’s going on.”

Mas folded the newspaper into his lap and spoke with the patient confidence of a much older man. “Brano. Each of us has our orders, and we follow them. Yes, I was waiting for someone, but that someone didn’t arrive. I called my contact and learned what happened. It’s a tragedy, but the fact is that my job is now over. I’m going home. You’ll no doubt be asked to do the same.”

“How did your contact learn what happened?”

“My contact keeps his ear to the ground.”

A tone sounded, and a uniformed woman at a podium called, “Flight number 603-”

Mas stood. “Let the Turks take care of this. They have an admirable police force.” He shook Brano’s hand, then Gavra’s. His grip was sweaty. “Good to meet you, young man. And stick with Comrade Sev. He’s the best there is.”

That afternoon, Gavra sat at the Hotel Erboy’s small rooftop cafe, looking over the city while Brano used the telephone at the front desk. His vista included the mouth of the Golden Horn and thick-settled Beyo lu; in the foreground was a pair of handsome young Germans drinking vodka tonics by the ledge. One noticed him and smiled, then leaned to whisper to his friend, who glanced over and shrugged.

“They want us back home,” Brano said as he took the other seat. “There’s a flight at eleven in the morning.”

“What about the hijacking?”

“Nothing we can do here, and I suspect there won’t be much to do in the Capital. The Turks have the passenger manifest, and the Ministry’s looking into the records of four Armenians who were on the flight-we should hear something when we return.”

“Four Armenians with the exception of Libarid?”

“Yes.”

Gavra pulled out a cigarette as a ship in the Bosphorus moaned. “What about Mas? He could be connected to this. Maybe he was also waiting for Libarid.”

Brano shook his head. “It’s just a terrible coincidence. Libarid was on a plane that some Armenians wanted to use to get back at the Turks. It’s bad for us; it’s bad for Mas. It’s bad for everyone.”

“I see.”

“And I called the station. Gave the news to Emil. He’ll pass it on to Imre and Katja.” Brano was squinting in the light.

“Was it hard?”

The old man shrugged. “I’ve delivered this kind of news often enough. I think it’s going to be hard on him, though. Emil Brod does his best, but he’s not well equipped to deal with tragedy.”

“And you are.”

“Well, if I wasn’t, I doubt I’d still be alive.” Brano paused. “There are only two of us now.”

“Two of whom?” Gavra noticed that the Germans were paying their bill and leaving.

“Two veterans.” He frowned. “Stefan was killed back in the fifties, and at the same time Ferenc-Ferenc Kolyeszar, you’ve heard of that samizdat of his, The Confession — he was sent into internal exile and has been in a work camp the last three years. And now Libarid.” Brano blinked a few times, coming out of his reverie. “You’re not going out tonight, are you?”

“What?”

“I don’t want to have to kick some poor girl out of your bedroom in the morning,” Brano said, but without scorn.