Customs was closed. A ferry from Greece had come and gone. The customs office wasn’t going to open until that ferry showed up again, tomorrow or the day after. Things work like that in Turkey. With everything coming down at once, I sure didn’t feel like being left blind, deaf and dumb at sea without the sat-comm system.
As for provisioning, the task was mind boggling, nothing like snagging a few veggies off a farmer’s wagon and going sailing. I had no option but to force myself to let that task go to Anna and Sinem. The hard part was trusting them with it. I’ve never been big on trust when it comes to getting things done. Probably the teachings of my father; “If you want it done right, you’ve got to do it yourself!”
I leaned against a flagpole jutting from a patch of dead lawn in front of the customs office. An hour earlier, Omar had called the customs official to set up a meeting for me. At home, celebrating his birthday at the time, he’d told Omar, in no uncertain terms, that the inconvenience of going all the way to the customs office had better be worth his time. Hanging up, Omar apologized to me, saying it was all he could do. He explained that the government had its business and he had his. There was a line that not even Omar would cross, and waiting for the agent to show up and take my bribe, I felt like my neck was stretched across it.
I was about to give up and walk away when a Fiat Panda flattened a sandwich board, mounted the curb, then coughed and died in front of the customs office. The driver rolled out and staggered toward the building muttering something unintelligible. I watched him without moving from the flagpole.
“You have money?” He asked.
“I’m here to get my customs cleared package from the USA.”
“You pay to me for special trip on my birthday.” He concentrated intensely on getting a key into the deadbolt. The bolt turned and he steadied himself on the door before opening it. “Office closed! I come just for you. You must pay.”
I followed him inside, past a front counter, down a corridor to an office door he had more trouble unlocking. Once inside, he rummaged through what I assume were confiscated goods, for a bottle of vodka. Setting two glasses upright on his desk, he sat heavily in the wooden chair and filled the tumblers to the rim. “It is my birthday — we drink!” He drained his glass and banged it on the desk. With the back of a swollen index finger he pushed the other tumbler toward me. “Drink!”
I sat in a banged-up gray stacking chair by the corner of his desk and reached for the glass.
“Thousand euro. You have it and I have your package.” He worked on sounding businesslike.
“Right, that’s what you said on the phone.” I saw my package by the door. It was adorned with a bright orange “Customs Cleared” sticker. The date, scrawled on it in marker was several weeks prior. “You’ll take dollars?”
“Of course. One thou… no! Two thousand dollars. You know… the exchange, of course.”
“Most certainly.” I bent forward and surreptitiously poured my vodka onto the floor. “A fair exchange, I’m sure.” I leaned back putting my empty glass on the desk by his. “But first, a toast to your birthday.”
The official, swaying like a cobra, refilled both tumblers. Shaking, he raised his glass to mine, and congratulated himself. “To me!” He tilted his head back and drained his tumbler in several swallows.
I grabbed his empty glass, arcing toward the desk on its return trip, to prevent it being smashed. Seeing both of his hands safely at rest, I switched his empty glass for my full one and proposed another toast. He stared deliberately at the full glass, carefully wrapped his fingers around it, and tilting his head back, he drained it with ease.
I’m not even sure he was aware of me when I stood and snatched his empty glass a second time. He was fighting hard to stay conscious and in some sort of control. “Dollars! I, do o ooon ’av all da’ay.” He slurred. One of his eyes made a heroic effort to stay focused on me. The other had given up and wandered somewhere under his right brow. He was wilting onto his elbows as I reached for my wallet.
On the spur of the moment, I pulled out a wad of Russian rubles I’d been dragging around for who-knows-how-long, and started slapping down hundred ruble notes, counting them out, one at a time. They were barely worth three bucks apiece, but I guess all those hundreds looked pretty good to the official in his inebriated state. When I’d slapped down twenty of those bills, he snatched them up with a grin, stuffed the rubles clumsily into his pocket, and struggled to get up. Trying not to vomit, he slurred something about needing the toilet and that I should wait. As soon as he had staggered from the office, I grabbed my package and, as an afterthought, the big wad of keys on his desk. Then I simply walked out the front door. The Fiat was still parked half on the sidewalk. Walking by, I tossed the keys through an open window into a pile detritus behind the back seat.
When I’d left the marina, Shadow had been tied, on its own, to the seawall in front of Omar’s yacht sales. A shortcut back from the customs office had me crawling under the marina’s chain-link fence where I noticed Shadow’s new twin. As planned, another yacht, nearly identical — minus the long haul equipment — was rafted to Shadow. A form of double parking that left our yacht sandwiched between the new boat and the seawall. It looked like someone was doing sail repairs on the twin because its deck was piled with mounds of lightly crumpled sailcloth. It dangled haphazardly from the rigging, over the bow, and nearly into the water.
A couple of burly men were unloading plain white delivery vans when I spotted Tom approaching. “Jess, wait. We need to talk.” He waved me over with one hand. He was somehow bent, holding himself up with a hand on one knee.”
Activity aboard Shadow stopped. Sinem stood on deck, Erdem popped his head out the companionway, the mountains of muscle put their boxes down. Everyone was looking at me.
Tom noticed. “Just carry on, this boat’s gotta be ready to sail.” Then to me, “Your broker and I, we just moved that other boat on over. Made it look like someone’s drying out the sails.” Tom took a deep breath, watching the muscle-bound men passing boxes of canned goods down to Shadow’s deck. “Just the thing for a little camouflage and privacy.”
I stepped toward Shadow.
“Aw gall dang it Jess, Anna’s not there.”
My heart sank.
Tom took the boxes I’d liberated from customs. They were light and he handed them to Sinem. “She’s on my boat.”
“What’s going on?” Panicked, I spotted the catamaran from Bodrum tied where we’d seen it that morning. I didn’t see anybody on it.
“Yup, those two.” Tom took a breath, still trying to get caught up on what he missed intercepting me. “They came by while we were loading. Started speaking with Anna in Russian. I don’t know what they said, but they gave her an envelope.”
“Of what? What’s she doing on your boat? Why didn’t they just take her?”
“I reckon they think they don’t have to after what they gave her.”
“Is she okay?”
“She’s fine, but I don’t think you’ll be if you don’t keep moving.”
“I need to see her. This is crazy!”
“Jess, you need to listen to me. Whether or not she’s going with you, you have got to ready Shadow and get out of here. Now.”
I had stopped listening. Last thing I heard Tom say as I bolted for his well loved old sailboat was, “Sure, you go on ahead. I’ll catch up…”
Anna saw me coming. She was already over the side of Tom’s boat and onto the dock where I intercepted her. “Jess, I can’t.”
“Are you okay? What’s going on? What happened?”