That was the time the cop who had signed the letter had suggested that I should call by and meet her.
‘You’ll have no problem in making the afternoon flight out of Bodrum,’ she had written. ‘It shouldn’t take more than twenty minutes to bring you up to date.’
Once inside, I was handed over to a young cop in a beautifully pressed uniform and the shiniest boots I’ve seen outside of a Marine honour guard. He couldn’t have been more than sixteen. He led me out the back, up a flight of stairs and into a warren of offices occupied by the detectives. At the end of a corridor we entered a room with two desks and a view into the courtyard of an adjoining house. The whitewashed home was falling down, plaster crumbling from its walls, broken tiles scattered across the roof, but it didn’t matter. It was rendered beautiful by virtue of two old frangipani trees in its courtyard.
Only one of the desks was occupied. A young woman with a tumble of dark hair – obviously a secretary – was behind it, with a phone to her ear and typing on a computer which was so old it had probably arrived pre-loaded with Pong.
The secretary was one of those women where everything about her was extravagant – her gestures, her boobs straining against a tight blouse, her make-up, her ass in a pencil skirt. The moods, too, one suspected. As I waited for her to finish, it occurred to me that, in many ways, she represented the contradictions of modern Turkey – she was young in a culture wedded to the past, unabashedly female in a society dominated by men, irreligious and Western-looking in a country where one face was always turned east towards Islam.
And, of course – for a deeply conservative nation – there was one last contradiction, the biggest of them all. Drugs. Turkey had become the critical link in the most lucrative trafficking route in the world, a modern Silk Road which transported opium, semi-refined heroin and fine-grade hash from Pakistan and Afghanistan into Western Europe, over the border to Lebanon or across the Caucasus mountains into Russia. If drugs were just another modern commodity – like oil, pumped down transnational pipelines – Turkey had become the biggest interchange in the world.
I knew about it because of Christos Nikolaides, the Greek drug dealer whose death I had ordered in Santorini. In pursuing him I had learned from the DEA that Patros Nikolaides and six other major cartels were wound tight into Turkey – especially this part of Turkey – and despite valiant efforts by some fine Turkish officers, corruption had blossomed and profits had become ever more spectacular.
The secretary showed no sign of finishing the call so I pulled up a chair and fell to thinking about Patros and his Albanian enforcers. Once I had returned to the safety of America, the man had slipped from my mind but I had to admit it was ironic how, under the pressure of the crisis we were facing, I had been drawn back into a corner of the world he knew so well. I wondered where he was – still behind his twelve-foot walls in Thessaloniki, tending to his lavender plants and mourning the loss of his son, I hoped.
I was wrong not to have thought harder about it – spectacularly wrong – but the woman finally hung up, turned her appropriately extravagant smile on me, straightened her blouse in case I hadn’t yet noticed what she considered her two best assets and asked if I was Brodie Wilson.
I nodded, and she told me that her boss was running fifteen minutes late. ‘She takes the little dude to a corner park every morning. Her car, it just got up and died. It’s Italian – the car, I’m talking about – which explains why it’s a piece of shit.’
I deduced from this that she must have had a boyfriend who was Italian. It also seemed that most of her English had been gleaned from modern American music, summer blockbusters and chatting on the Internet.
‘“The little dude”?’ I asked.
‘Her son.’
‘Is her husband a cop too? That’s the way it usually works in this business.’ I didn’t care much, I was just making conversation – you know, shooting the breeze.
‘No, she’s divorced.’
‘How old’s her son?’
‘The little dude’s six.’ She obviously liked the expression; I guess it made her think she was just as hip as any visiting American.
‘That’s hard, being a single mom with a boy that age.’
She shrugged – I doubt she had ever thought about it. Out of nowhere, disaster arrived and tried to shake hands with me. ‘You have children, Mr Wilson?’
‘No, no little dudes,’ I said, not concentrating and inadvertently telling the truth – at least the truth about myself but in direct contradiction to my legend. I immediately realized the mistake, thought of trying to bite the words back but dispensed with that stupid idea. Somehow I managed to keep my cool.