I Am Pilgrim(130)

Satisfied that I was travelling solo, I turned my phone off, removed its battery, slipped both parts into my pocket and turned to the view. No wonder the café was crowded: the rugged hills tumbled down to the waters of the Aegean and the whole of Bodrum was laid out in front of me. It was late in the afternoon, the sunlight washing across the marinas and the two bays that hugged the town, highlighting the walls of a magnificent fifteenth-century castle built by the Crusaders which stood on the headland between them. The Castle of St Peter was its name, I recalled.

It was over ten years since I had last seen the town and it had grown and changed, but that didn’t stop the memories crowding in. For a moment I was a young agent again, watching as the lights from exclusive hotels danced on the water, listening to music from a myriad nightclubs fill the night air. How could a mission which had started with so much promise end in such disaster?

I tried to shrug the memory off and walked to one of several large pairs of binoculars that were fixed to tripods for the benefit of tourists with a few lire to spare. I slipped the coins in and saw in stunning detail expensive villas clinging to the cliffs and a host of remarkable yachts, all of them far too big for any marina in the Mediterranean or Aegean, riding at anchor offshore. I swept past them and tilted up until I found a mansion which stood alone in acres of gardens on a headland.

Built over fifty years ago and with tall colonnades, vine-covered loggias and cascading terraces, it had a faintly Roman air. Its shutters were closed and, with the headland losing the afternoon light, it seemed to sit in brooding shadow. As impressive as it was, I didn’t like the house: even at that distance there seemed something sinister about it. I had no particular knowledge of it, but I was certain it was the French House and that it was from the end of its sweeping lawn that Dodge had plunged to his death.

I returned to my car and drove down into Bodrum, heading back into my past.





Chapter Sixteen


THE HOTEL I was booked into wasn’t what anyone would call fashionable – I mean, people weren’t drilling holes in the walls to get inside. Those sorts of places were down on the waterfront with 24-hour champagne bars, open-air dance clubs, and Ukrainian models doing lingerie shows on private beaches.

Mine was in a backstreet with a car-repair shop at one end and a used-furniture shop at the other. Built out of cement block which had been painted a pale blue, ‘tired’ was about the kindest word that could be applied to it. When I drew up outside I was forced to admit that the staff in Whisperer’s makeshift back office had done an outstanding job – it was exactly the sort of place you would expect an FBI agent travelling on his country’s dime to stay.

Even as I walked up the front steps I knew what I would find inside: faded curtains, a limp buffet for breakfast and a pair of potted palms clinging to life. The man standing behind the reception desk, like the hotel itself, had seen better days. Over the years all his features appeared to have been battered every which way but loose. I learned later that he had once been one of Turkey’s most successful amateur middleweights. If that was the look of a winner, I certainly didn’t want to see the loser. Yet, when he smiled – and he smiled in expansive greeting as I walked through the door – his face was so full of vitality and goodwill it was impossible not to like him. Pumping my hand, he introduced himself as the manager and owner, pulled out an index card on which I was required to write my name, passport details and home address, and took imprints from three credit cards. ‘Just to be on the side of the safe,’ he confided happily.

Let’s just say his English was idiosyncratic.

‘It’s a great pity of the shame you weren’t here on the Saturday night, Mr Brodie David Wilson,’ he continued. For some reason he had decided that all English speakers had to be referred to by the full name given in their passports.

‘The fireworks were of a nature rarely by anyone to be seen.’

‘Fireworks?’ I asked.

‘Zafer Bayrami,’ he replied.

I had no idea what he was talking about. Maybe it was some kind of blessing. ‘Zafer Bayrami?’ I said.

‘The Day of Victory. All peoples of the world know of this date – the nation of great Turkey wrung the heads of enemies that were mainly of the Greeks.’

‘Ah,’ I replied. ‘No wonder there were fireworks.’ The Turks and the Greeks had been at it for centuries.

‘I went up for the watching on the roof. A huge bomb of the phosphorus exploded over the headland of the south. The Greece peoples probably thought we were attacking again.’ He thought this was a fine joke and laughed loudly.