'Do you want a coffee?'
'Wouldn't mind.'
The principal strain on the marriages was the refusal of officers to confide in wives who were not in the family. He could tell Gloria. She did the secretarial in the embassy office, but still grumbled and complained of under-employment. What would he tell her, when she brought back the mugs of coffee?
He was Fuat Selcuk, believed to be forty eight years old. He was from a village on the Aras river near to Erzurum. His territory stretched along the old Soviet border, now Georgia and Armenia, from Artvin and Kars in the north to Mount Ararat and Mount Tendurek in the south. It was where he had his refineries, where he employed the best young chemists from the universities. The product in which he dealt, raw opium, originated in the poppyfields of Afghanistan. In sacks, lashed to the backs of mules, the cargo was brought north from the collection point at Taloqan then was ferried across the Pjandz river, where the escort of machine-guns was changed, then taken overland across Tajikistan, and shipped over the width of the Caspian Sea, unloaded at the Azerbaijani harbour of Sumqayit, then moved on to the border posts close to Igdir and Ardahan. There Fuat Selcuk waited for the cargo's arrival and paid for it with cash, dollars. The money, cut and cut and cut – as the cargo would be – returned on the trail and paid off the lorry drivers, the middlemen, the ferry crews, the border guards, the machine-gunners, the Taliban leaders in Afghanistan, and the farmers who grew the crops of poppies in their fields. He was never cheated. The cargo was never stolen en route, sacks never fell from the backs of the lorries or the mules. Hiss arm reached from western Turkey all the way back to the hill fields of Afghanistan. To cheat him would have been the same as tying a heavy stone around the neck and wading out into the Pjandz river. Neither was he cheated in the refineries by his chemists, nor as the lorries rolled off the Bosphorus ferries for the long drive north across Europe and the ultimate destinations in Holland, Germany, France, or Green Lanes in north London. In his younger days, when his reputation as a businessman of honour was not yet confirmed, Fuat Selcuk's speciality was to slice off a man's testicles and stifle the screaming by placing them in the victim's mouth, then stapling his lips together so that they could not be spat out. He was also a man of charity: he had built hospitals and schools, and he paid for the repair of mosques.
The call in the night that had woken Ivor Jowett had been a whispered communication. The men he dealt with always dropped their voices when they spoke of Fuat Selcuk, because they knew the reach of his arm. T hat morning, Fuat Selcuk had left Erzurum by light aircraft and had flown to Ankara. At the airport, a bright, brave young spark on surveillance duty had chanced his luck and moved close enough for an
'overheard'. The spark's target had met an Ankara-based associate and had said: 'It'll be a dog fuck of a day. All the way there to meet a bastard from England, who thinks he is the top fuck. I'll eat him. .. ' and the associate had said, 'Or he'll eat his fucking balls.. . ' and they'd gone beyond the hearing of the listener.
Fuat Selcuk had caught an afternoon flight to Damascus, then an evening connection to Zurich – his caller had told him.
Why would he do that?
She brought the tea, and Ivor Jowett told his wife about the call.
Her eyebrows arched. 'Taking a hell of a risk, isn't he, the Brit, dealing with a man like that?'
Maggie was hunched over the recorder, listening hard, pressing the phones against her ears. A tight little frown dented her forehead. Frank watched her.
Salko and Ante pushed themselves up from the far wall and sauntered towards her table. Her eyes were screwed tight, she concentrated, then she shrugged. 'I can't make it out.'
She passed the earphones to Frank. He listened, scratched under his chin. 'There's a problem… something about the peach-bottom boy.'
Frank gave the earphones to the men; they were slipped to each in turn.
Salko said, 'Serif has lost the boy, Enver. He took the dogs out. They have come back, but not the boy.'
Ante said, 'He's talking about an accident. They are going to telephone the Kosevo Hospital. Such a thing has not happened before.'
Fahro said, 'You can hear the worry of him.'
Frank translated and Maggie scribbled down what they'd said. Moments like these always brought a slight joy to her. She pried into her targets' lives. She heard their happiness and she was with them in crisis.
At the other end of the tap, she sensed the panic. The first search party had gone out. She imagined them, in their black jeans, black T-shirts and black jackets, the gold chains garlanding their necks, coming back and reporting failure – they were sent out again. She was the witness to the growing chaos. All the days in the basement workshop at Ceausescu Towers, and the evenings whiled away with the foremen technicians at Imperial College, the nights curled in her chair with her dog and the electronics magazines, had a value when she played the voyeur. She had no interest in the whereabouts of the boy, it did not matter to her if he was prone on a hospital bed, or had gone walkabout, or was drinking himself stupid in a bar, or was in a morgue on a slab. It was her position as an intruder that thrilled her, did now and had in the past. It was her power to insert herself under her target's skin Those who controlled her walked blind without her skills.
She had neat copperplate handwriting.
My dear Mister,
Tonight a man came to see me. He told me who you were. He described your career as a criminal of importance. I asked his name and how did he know such things and why he told me them, but he did not give me answers.
I hate criminality and its exploitation of the weak, and its very selfishness. Therefore, Mister, I should hate you (I see no reason why the man who visited me should have lied), but…
But I think it is impossible for me to hate you.
The man said that you had sought me out as a recipient of charitable goods in order to create an authentic alibi of good works; you used me; you wished to create respectability for your Bosnia with Love lorries which would return to the UK loaded with the class A narcotic – heroin. That is cause for me to hate you, b u t…
But I am a good judge (I hope) of a genuine man.
I see many who come here with insincerity.
Whatever were your first motives for bringing the lorry to the UNIS Building, Tower A, I wish to believe they were replaced by a spirit of true friendship and true affection.
I was not with a criminal in the village of Visnjica. A criminal would not have played cards in the village with the old men, and given them dignity, and would not have held the hand of a child without a father, and given him kindness. A criminal would not have come with me to Gorazde and shown such sympathy for the plight of unfortunates. I was with a man who cared, who had a love for fellow human beings – that is my judgement and it is precious to me.
Perhaps, Mister, when you came here you did not bring sympathy and love. Perhaps you learned them here, in my company (if I am wrong then I am a simple and stupid woman but I think you gained a softness here that you did not travel with)