The Sudden Appearance of Hope

Chapter 26

The flight to Istanbul took just over an hour and a half. The knife; the threat of the knife; the thought of the knife. What was a girl to do?

I took control of myself.

My breath, my heart, my mind, my blood.

By the time we began to descend, I had every part of my body at my command, and could run my awareness through every inch, reporting on muscles — relaxed; knees — loose; arms — ready; fingers — casually curled.

Gauguin didn’t attempt to talk on the plane, but sat straight against his seat, eyes half closed, a businessman on a trip, maybe a tourist heading home. Speculation is unhelpful; assumptions will only create problems.

He stayed with me as the plane landed. People got off, and we didn’t. The stewardesses glanced at us from the door, then left. The air conditioning shut down, the engines were silent, and only we remained.

He said, “Stay calm.”

“I am calm.”

He looked at me now, the first direct look in over an hour, taking all of me in, and seemed surprised. “Why,” he murmured, “I do believe you are.”

Feet on the stairs up to the door of the plane; two men, white shirts, black trousers, sunglasses, dark hair, sweat patches on their backs. They knew Gauguin, he knew them. They weren’t overtly armed, but when three people wish to threaten a woman on an empty plane, they don’t need to be.

Gauguin climbed to his feet, stretched, pushing against the small of his back, bending his spine in a crescent curve. He said, “Coming?”

I followed.

A car was waiting on the tarmac by the stairs, Turkish plates, a man in the driver’s seat, engine ticking over in the heat. A smell of jet fuel, two men in yellow bibs unloading the luggage, a truck pulling up to refuel. No one seemed disturbed by the picture being painted in their midst. I considered running, calling for help, but Gauguin stayed close and it didn’t seem smart. Sooner or later he would need to piss, eat, drink, sleep, phone a wife, have a minute by himself. Sooner or later, they’d have to forget.

Or they wouldn’t, and this was a stupid way to die.

I got into the car. Someone threw my luggage in, tagged by the paper strap around the handle, and started going through it. They went past the pot of sun cream without a thought, but that wouldn’t last. I was losing interest in the diamonds. No point being rich, if you can’t spend it.

We exited through a gate in the metal fence that enclosed the runway, no passports shown, and drove along a straight road surrounded by scrubby grass until we hit the motorway. The sky was grey-yellow, shimmering with haze. The taxi drivers were deadly, the buses were full, honking horns and grubby exhaust. We drove towards the city, then turned and began to twist through industrial sprawl, houses of unpainted breeze block, warehouses of corrugated iron. I watched it all, tracking the direction of the sun, counting miles, noting signs, landmarks.

Ads: the newest kitchen utensil for the perfect housewife, the perfect clothes, the perfect car for the perfect family, a picture of Daddy (manly driver), Mummy (holding baby) and three grinning children (all destined to be doctors and lawyers) before the sleek silver curves of their newly purchased vehicle (The Journey is Everything).

Perfect: complete and correct in every way. Without fault.

Fault: a flaw, a failing.

At fault: blameworthy. In a dilemma.

Gauguin watched me watching, then said, “Have you been to Turkey before?”

“Sure,” I replied, not taking my eyes from the road. “I’ve eaten sheep brains.”

“I’ve seen them served, but never tasted.”

“You shouldn’t be put off when they’re presented to you — in this town it’s customary to show you your food before you eat it. Raw meat, raw fish, raw brains. It’s a practice which is unpalatable to our plastic-packaged sensibilities.”

“Are you a gourmet?”

Gourmet: cultural ideal in the culinary arts; haute cuisine, meticulous preparation and presentation of food, often expensive, though that may be an economic irrelevance, often served with rare wines.

A gourmet: a person of refined taste and passion.

“I like to lick the icing sugar up from round the edge of the dessert dish,” I said. “Also I lick the plate when there’s good gravy.” He didn’t reply.

An industrial workshop in the middle of nowhere.

A long concrete wall surrounding an internal courtyard of yellow pressed dirt. A pile of old tyres against one corner of the yard, within which a pair of skinny kittens yawned, reluctant to leave their den.

A square, one-storey building; shutters that could be rolled back to allow a truck inside; metal doors, windows high and barred. Broken glass, weeds growing from the cracks in the bricks, extractor fans above that extracted nothing.

A tatty sofa, once adorned with the images of water lilies, yellow foam now coming through. A new purple kettle on a small stand; several chipped mugs, also adorned with images of flowers, trailing weeds dotted on one bright green pixel at a time, purple buds.

Doors that could be locked.

Gates that could be guarded.

A very unfashionable secret base for secret men.

One of them sat on a beanbag by the door; another sat outside on concrete steps, smoking a thin brown cigarillo, the stench drifting through the broken windows. Gauguin waved me to the sofa. He opened up my suitcase and prodded idly at the contents therein. I folded my arms and waited. A tube of toothpaste squeezed in the middle earned the tiniest crinkle of distaste in the corner of his mouth; my American passport was scrutinised in detail, and when he found the Australian passport at the very bottom of the case, tucked into a book on trekking in Oman, he went so far as to permit himself a smile.

Both passports and my wallet were handed off to one of his men, who took them away. I added up the value of the accounts that were about to be compromised, the identities about to be exposed. The sum was considerable. How much of my digital life would I have to destroy, when all this was done?

Then a woman with a headscarf depicting birds in flight against a cloud-skimmed sky came and took my fingerprints, a sample of my hair, a swab from the inside of my mouth, and the damage to my career worsened.

“In many ways, you are rather inept, for a thief,” mused Gauguin, as the woman bottled her samples and took them away. “How have you survived all this time?”

“I have a forgettable face.”

“You do yourself an injustice.”

“No,” I replied, crossing my legs, my arms. “I don’t.”

His fingers brushed the tub of sun cream, and I became aware of how defensive my body language was, how tightly my hands gripped the tops of my arms, how heavy my legs felt. I wanted to uncurl, and didn’t, not while he held the diamonds.

He undid the lid, peered inside, looked up, studied my face, his head tilting a little to one side, wondering.

I met his eye, let him wonder.

His expression didn’t change, his eyes didn’t move, but he reached down into the tub, rummaged around inside, and without a sound, pulled Princess Shamma’s necklace from within, laying it, still coated in vanilla-coloured goo, on the table between us.

He put the tub to one side.

Stood up. Walked to a stainless-steel sink against a wall, cabinets below, pipes running up the chipped sometime-green concrete to the side.

Washed his hands.

Returned to his chair.

Sat down.

Silence.

I said, “I think I would like to be arrested now.”

Silence.

Gauguin shifted a little in his seat, leant forward so his elbows rested on his knees, his fingers knotted together in the gap between his legs. There was a silver pen in an inside pocket of his jacket, briefly visible as the jacket drifted forward. It seemed an ostentatious, silly thing for a practical man to carry.

I unfolded myself, one limb at a time. Feet flat on the floor, hands flat in my lap.

“I think you should call the police,” I said.

Silence.

I listened to the silence, and all the words within.

Silence.

Awareness, in the silence, of sounds around. Distant traffic, the dripping of the tap, the crunching of footsteps outside the room, buzz of a fly trapped on sticky blue paper by the light. We waited, until the muezzin began to sing, out of tune through a loudspeaker, and a few minutes later, a rival, more tuneful but further off, calling the faithful to prayer.

Allah is the greatest, Allah is the greatest.

I bear witness that there is no God but Allah.

I bear witness that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah.

Hasten to worship.

Hasten to success.

Allah is the greatest, Allah is the greatest.

There is no God but Allah.

Then Gauguin said, “Tell me about your relationship with Byron14.”

I heard the words as if they were spoken through water, slowed down and deepened as they travelled to my brain, and turned my head to look at him more closely, waiting to see if he’d speak again, if there was a meaning I didn’t understand within the sound.

“Did you accept any employment from Byron14?”

Louder, clearer, his head rising.

My turn to be silent. I closed my eyes and tried to assemble thoughts, weave a path through obscurity.

He interrupted. “Miss Why, wondering what you should or should not say is irrelevant at this juncture. The truth will come.”

“We both have something to offer,” I replied. “You want information; I want out.”

“You are mistaken; there is no negotiation.”

I looked round the room. Only one of Gauguin’s men remained, chewing gum, seemingly uninterested in all that happened. Outside there would be more men, guarding the way, but they would be forgetting me already, just strangers lounging in the sun.

I stood, but Gauguin didn’t move. I walked round the back of the sofa, turned, walked the other way. I scanned the room for weapons: a biro, a cigarette tray, a mobile phone, anything. Somewhere he still had a knife. My shoes were flat but not ideal for running in. “I’m a liar,” I said at last. “I lie when scared.”

“Are you afraid?”

“I’m calm,” I replied. “As you can see. Can I make a suggestion?”

“If you want.”

“I think you’re a liar too, Mr Gauguin, mugurski, whatever we call you. I think we are dancing around each other when we should speak plainly. You’re not interested in the diamonds.” How wretched the jewels looked now, covered in cosmetic goo, dripping on the table between us. A proper barney for a few lumps of carbon. “Sure, you need to get them back to Dubai so your boss doesn’t look like a twat, family honour, business acumen, all that. But you don’t really care, do you? Not your business.”

His lips narrowed, then broadened again into a tight smile. “No,” he admitted softly. “Not really.”

“But Byron14 is?”

“As I said — Byron14 is a killer, a terrorist. The darknet is not infallible, as you know. I know you’ve been in communication; now I need to know what was said. Did Byron hire you to steal the Chrysalis?”

“Why would he?”

“You tell me.”

I turned on my slow amble, walked the other way, paused by my chair, didn’t sit, walked to the walls, walked back to the chair, stopped. “Reina bint Badr al Mustakfi — do you know the name?”

“The young woman who died; I heard of her.”

“She was a cousin of Princess Shamma bint Bandar.”

“That is why I heard; her death was flagged at a briefing.”

“She had Perfection.”

A half shrug, Gauguin waiting for me.

“I stole the Chrysalis because it was a challenge. Then when she died, I stole it because I wanted to piss someone off, and the guys who make Perfection seemed about right.”

“Why?”

“She had Perfection.”

“You said, but Perfection didn’t make her kill herself.”

“Do you have Perfection, Gauguin?”

“No, though I am familiar of course with its system.”

I paced again, a few steps, stopped again, chose my words very carefully. “I think…” I murmured. “I think you’re wrong. I think it helped her die. She was nice. I liked her. Even though she didn’t remember, I felt… affection… for her. I think I might be prone to making these things more important than they are, but still, that’s my thing, it’s a side-effect of… everything. What’s the opposite of perfect?”

“Imperfect?” he suggested.

Synonyms: flawed, defective, faulty, bad.

I looked at Gauguin, and didn’t see any sign that he cared or understood, so closed my mouth and kept on walking.

After a while, a little shifting, a little sigh, Gauguin tried again. “Byron…”

“Wanted to know if I had Perfection. Why are you so interested, Mr Gauguin?”

“What did Byron want?”

“To warn me about you.”

“What else?”

“That was all. I get the feeling you guys like to fuck with each other, more joy me.”

“I need you to contact Byron14.”

“Why?”

“To request a meeting.”

“You request a meeting.”

“I don’t think Byron will talk to me.”

“So you want me to be your stooge? I don’t think there’s much honour amongst thieves, Mr Gauguin, but even by my standards that’s a bit shit.”

“Yes.” He sounded wistful, a good man in a dirty world. “I think it might be.”

I paced again, walking it through. Walking helped thinking, thoughts without words for now, but words coming, ideas growing.

I looked at Gauguin, watching me from his crooked plastic chair.

I looked at the man on the beanbag in the corner.

I said, “I need a laptop and a cup of coffee, please.”

Gauguin smiled.