The Red Room

40

The funicular, dangling from its thread of twisted steel, floats down into the Tophane district. Grace feels like a spider off to mend her web. The street address and name of her contact are written on opposing palms — the scribble on her right nearly impossible to read.

Across the dark green waters of the Bosphorus, sliced white by wake and the occasional ship, she sees southern Istanbul on the Asian continent. Below her, a patchwork of rooftops spill toward the water, broken by the green of an occasional park. Its picturesque quality is opposed to her thought. She’s cranked and unable to appreciate it. If she knew more clearly the exact location of her destination — an electronics shop Xin has arranged for her — she could likely see it, so clear is the view. But it’s lost on her.

Forty-five minutes later, having ferried across the river and ridden the back of a hot taxi through a decidedly more Oriental Istanbul, she resents the lack of anything more from Knox. She has switched SIM chips and texted all three of his numbers.

Nothing. Asshole!

The wheels are coming off the op. They have only a matter of a few hours before the proposed meet with Mashe Okle and she has yet to determine what their secreted role is; what purpose the five minutes with the POI is to serve.

She is alone. Knox is alone. Together, they are alone. For a time, her mathematical mind could project a resolution to the op, but now it’s more ephemeral; Knox believes them both to be sacrificial lambs, and she has no evidence to dispute this. Dulwich has expected them to do this alone. There is no exit strategy in place.

A strong scent of cloves mingles in the air, tinged with cinnamon. It somehow permeates the taxi’s cigarette-stained interior to intoxicate her and remind her of life now past: leisure time in a Hong Kong café with a cup of chai, the Financial Times, under a clock with no minute hand. She can envision herself flipping through family photos she recently downloaded to her phone in order to make a birthday collage for her somewhat estranged father, who turns fifty in three weeks. Imagines herself smiling at memories. Laughing internally. Of shopping irresponsibly, of making herself feel pretty and feminine and maybe even available.

But she feels none of these things. Instead, she’s bound in servitude, rough and unkempt. She is predatory and hostile, optimistically ambitious enough to believe there may be a way out of this yet. Some heads will likely be broken before it’s over: Knox’s job. Which heads: her job.

The sidewalks are crowded, the Asian, southern side of the city more dense, more ethnic. Conflicting Middle Eastern melodies pour from shops and loudspeakers; the grating dissonance of half-toned scales that rub together caustically do nothing to prolong the fantasy.

She arrives at a shop with rain-gray windows and peeling forest green paint. It’s marked with a rusted sign, the letters faded until they’re unreadable. Taped on the inside of the glass is a computer-printed typewritten sheet with an oversized single word: ELECTRONICS.

The shop matches Xin’s description. She hadn’t fully trusted his information, given that she’d caught Xin in an inebriated state in a Hong Kong bar well past midnight.

Inside the shop, the air hangs heavy with the cloak of serviceability mixed with the sting of sour perspiration, tobacco smoke and a smell she doesn’t want to place. The atmosphere speaks of young men and Internet pornography and turns her stomach. She thinks she must be getting old: at university they laughed about places like this; now they merely disgust her. A man-boy is summoned from the back by the electronic chime that died with her entry.

“Xin,” she says.

“May I see please?” He speaks with a British accent. Wears an ill-fitting brown vest over a royal blue T-shirt. Stretch jeans. Thick-rimmed black glasses that enlarge dull brown eyes. He’s left-handed, according to his tobacco-stained fingers. Diminutive, his flesh has shrunken onto a frame that could and should support more.

She produces the pacemaker.

“You want?” he says.

“Is it operable? Correct voltage? Able to hold a charge?”

“Medical,” he says, turning the packaging over. “Cardiac.”

“A pacemaker, yes.”

He steps back, away from the device. “Such pacemakers are programmed and communicated with via radio waves. I lack any such equipment. I’m afraid—”

“The battery,” she says.

“Sealed. Interior.” He spins it over, examining it. “Without cutting open, primitive analysis, best offer.”

“Please.”

“You wait?” He cuts the plastic packaging with a box cutter. She doesn’t appreciate that being in his hand.

“How long?” She doesn’t like his question. She scribbles out the phone number of her least used SIM chip. Paranoia sickens her stomach. “Text me.”

She heads for the door.

“Please. One minute, ma’am!”

She gives him twenty seconds of the minute when his effort to touch the tester’s probes onto the leads from the pacemaker turns her once again for the exit. She’s crawling out of her skin. He’s so obviously nervous he can’t connect a probe to a wire. No matter that the wires are tiny, it’s a task he must have performed thousands of times. So why fumble?

She’s thinking: Xin, you bastard.

She turns the dead bolt. Hurries back to the counter with an urgency and energy that causes the technician to step back.

“Charge is complete,” the man-boy says, looking up at her. “Battery life — measurement of ampere-hours is calculation of voltage and known load. According to specs,” he says, indicating printing on the flip side of the disk, “this runs for years.”

“You are certain? A healthy battery?” Grace’s own internal battery is overheated and sparking. She expects someone to arrive at any moment, drag her kicking and screaming into the street.

“You make joke? ‘Healthy battery’?”

“It is a normal, working device,” she states.

“I not know this without opening.”

“Opening…” she mumbles, allowing the thought to escape her. “Yes. Please.”

“It is sealed unit. Replace unit, not battery.”

“No way to open it?”

“Correct. Short of destroying it.”

“Please.”

He studies her curiously. “It will be destroyed if—”

“An extra two hundred liras.” Grace digs out the cash as she glances toward the street. “Quickly, please.”

The technician takes a hacksaw to the device. The five minutes needed to saw off one end feels much longer to both of them. His face is perspiring. She doesn’t think he exerted himself enough to explain this.

“Your loyalty is to Xin,” she says.

Removing the internal circuits of the device, he pauses to meet her eyes.

“We both understand that,” she continues. “This work, it is a matter of a human life. You understand? Misinformation on your part could cost a human life.” She leans in, trying to penetrate the wall he has erected between them. “That will be on you. Not me, not if you misinform me.”

He nods, looks at the microcircuitry he’s holding. “This will take additional time.”

She wonders. “I must know!”

“Understood.”

She moves past him into the back of the shop.

He calls after her, “Please, lady. No customer in—”

“To be fair,” she says, interrupting, “tell Xin I was not expecting this of him. How long do I have?”

He doesn’t answer at first. “I cut open for you. You wait?”

“You will contact me. If you tell Xin or anyone else the condition of that device before you tell me, you could kill a man.”

She’s out the shop’s back exit and into an alleyway barely wider than her shoulders. It’s a place that, as a tourist, she would have loved to discover. As a possible target, she finds it claustrophobic.

Her feet seem to move independently of her brain, carrying her past terra-cotta urns meant to collect rainwater, now put to use as the skies have opened in a deluge. She’s soaked through by the time she escapes the space.

Gray rain bounces up off the sidewalk in a hypnotic display of fountain magic. Vehicles are pulled over, wipers throwing fans of water. The only people not waiting it out under doorways look like lost pets with their slumped shoulders and pathetic attempts to screen their heads using soggy newsprint. All but the well prepared, who carry their umbrellas so low they look beheaded.

One of these, a tall, wide-shouldered man whose canvas sport jacket she recognizes long before the umbrella angles to shelter her, approaches at a steady gait.

Everything about David Dulwich is steady, Grace thinks, tracking him with her eyes as he draws near. He likely came out of the womb that way.