I had met him a week earlier when, after Control had made the arrangements, I was sent to test the route. He had been told I was a tour guide escorting a group of Americans through the area who might need, in the unlikely event of an emergency, his assistance. I don’t think he believed a word of it but, by all accounts, he didn’t like the Turkish authorities very much and our substantial cash advance encouraged him not to ask any questions.
‘Hello, Mr Jacobs,’ he said. Jacobs was the name I was using in Turkey. He looked at Mack draped over my shoulder and saw the blood-soaked jacket tied around his waist. ‘Quite a tour you must be running there – remind me not to take it.’ In my experience, most Australians aren’t easily rattled and I was deeply grateful for that.
Together we carried Mack into the kitchen and, though the doctor’s breath reeked of booze, there was something in the way he straightened his back and cut away Mack’s clothes and damaged tissue that told me he had once been a surgeon of discipline and skill.
I used whatever of my medical training I could remember to act as his theatre nurse and, with the hot water running, the kitchen bench swept clear to provide a table, the reading lamps from his study and bedroom pressed into service to illuminate the wound, we tried desperately to stabilize the shattered body and keep Mack alive until the chopper with its specialists and bags of plasma arrived.
Not once through that harrowing time did the doctor’s hand shake or his commitment falter – he extemporized and cursed and dragged out from beneath the layers of booze and wasted years every idea and strategy he had ever learned.
It didn’t work. Mack faded, and we fought harder, we got him back, then he faded again. With the chopper barely eighteen minutes away, the bluesman seemed to sigh. He lifted one hand up as if to touch our faces in silent thanks, and flew away. We fought even harder, but there was no calling him back that time, and we both fell still and quiet at last.
Dr Sydney hung his head, and it was impossible from where I was standing to see whether his body was trembling from fatigue or something far more human. After a moment he looked up at me and I saw in his eyes the despair – the anguish – it caused him to have someone die in his hands.
‘I used to operate on injured children,’ he said quietly, as if in explanation for the drink, the run-down cottage, the life in exile and the acres of pain he carried with him. I nodded, finding at least some understanding of what it must have been like to lose a young kid under the knife.
‘He was a friend of yours?’ he asked.
I nodded and, with a decency that no longer surprised me, he made an excuse and found something to do in another part of the house. I drew the sheet over Mack’s face – I wanted him to have all the dignity I could give him – and said a few words. You couldn’t call it praying but, out of respect, in the hope that his spirit was somewhere close at hand, I said what I needed to about friendship, courage, and hopeless regret for breaking the rules up on the cliff-top.
The doctor returned and started to clean up, and I walked out into his living room. It was fourteen minutes until the chopper arrived, and a message on my cellphone told me they had identified a garbage dump behind town where they could land without being seen. Keeping the tremor out of my voice, I called and said they could stand the medics down: it wasn’t a patient they would be evacuating, it was a body.
I got rid of the vehicle by giving it to Dr Sydney – it was small recompense for the effort he had made to save Mack – and my remaining concern was the Turkish cops. Trying to discover what they were doing, I turned to the TV playing softly in the corner of the living room.
It was showing a Turkish news programme, but there was nothing about the killings at the rave or of a police operation heading my way. I used the remote to surf through the local channels – soap operas, Hollywood movies dubbed in Turkish and two more news programmes – but nothing to cause alarm.
Nor was there anything on the BBC, CNN, Bloomberg or MSNBC …
Chapter Thirty-six
I COULDN’T BREATHE for a moment. I was still standing on the bluff above the ruins, remembering the past, but the thought of looking at the TV in the doctor’s old cottage had stolen the air from my lungs.
If Dr Sydney could get the English-language news channels in a far more remote area, how come they weren’t available in Bodrum?
I ran for the Fiat.
It was still early, there was little traffic and the drive into Bodrum was almost as fast as when I had had Mack lying in the seat beside me. I parked on the sidewalk outside the hotel, sprinted up the steps and saw the manager coming out of the dining room.