‘Great – we’re looking for a shepherd driving his sheep through rush-hour traffic,’ I said.
‘Not exactly,’ replied Bradley. ‘It’s pretty common – they say it’s very popular with folk-music groups.’
‘A kaval, huh? What was it playing on? A CD? Live? On the radio?’
‘After they took out the background noise and enhanced it, they lost what they call the signatures – they can’t tell.’
‘Christ! They don’t make it easy, do they?’
I looked across the rooftops and asked myself again: where had she been standing? Some place where you could hear traffic and music being played on a Turkish folk instrument called a kaval. Where?
‘Here’s another problem,’ Bradley continued. ‘They can’t identify the tune either. The sample’s not very big, but nobody seems to have heard it.’
‘That’s strange,’ I said. ‘You’d think if it was a folk tune, and with all their experts—’
‘Yeah, I guess.’
We were silent for a moment and, when it became clear there was nothing more to discuss, I broached another subject. ‘I’m sorry, Ben,’ I said.
‘For what?’
‘Being a dick.’
‘But you’ve always been a dick,’ he said, deadpan as always. ‘Anyway, I told our friends you were feeling the stress and starting to crack up.’
‘Oh good, that should further my career,’ I replied.
‘Glad to help,’ he said. He didn’t laugh – it was Ben Bradley, after all – but I could tell from his voice that I had put things right with him, and I was thankful for that.
‘One more thing,’ I said.
‘Sure.’
‘Ask ’em to work out a way to send the recording, will you? Just the music, not the traffic.’ I didn’t know why but I wanted to hear it.
Chapter Thirty-eight
TWENTY MINUTES LATER, after I had finished showering, I walked out of the bathroom and found a new email on my laptop. It was from Apple, telling me that twenty-seven dollars had been charged to my credit card for music downloads.
I hadn’t bought any music and my fear was that some jerk at the CIA had thought it might be useful to add to Brodie Wilson’s already extensive collection of fucked-up music. I went to iTunes, saw a group of new tracks had arrived and realized that most of them were just packing – there was only one that mattered, and I knew it was from Whisperer.
On the night before I flew to Turkey – when we were working in his study – I saw on the wall an autographed copy of the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street, which, despite our fatigue, had led to a spirited discussion about whether it really was their greatest album. Who would have guessed that the country’s Director of National Intelligence was a closet Stones expert? In scanning the new tracks, I saw that Bradley hadn’t been joking when he said he had told our friend I was cracking up. Whisperer had sent me the Stones’ ‘19th Nervous Breakdown’.
I put my cursor on it, hit play and listened for thirty seconds before it morphed. Planted in the middle, stripped of traffic noise and the woman’s strange message, was the kaval music. Twice I played it through – it lasted for a little more than two minutes – then downloaded it on to my MP3 player. I thought it might give me inspiration as I headed out again to locate phone box after phone box.
It didn’t; it gave me a headache.
By the time I had photographed the fourth one and decided to ask groups of neighbourhood women if they recalled seeing a woman waiting for a phone call and drawn nothing except confused looks or a wary shake of the head, I knew it was going to be a very long day. What was that Turkish expression? Digging a well with a needle?
Still, if you wanted to drink, sometimes that’s what you had to do. I was walking down a narrow street, listening to the kaval and wondering again why none of the experts could identify it, when I stopped: something had just occurred to me. I was following the map on my phone, looking for the next phone box, and it meant I had to make a right. Instead I wheeled left and headed towards the centre of town.
Up ahead, I saw the purple fronds of the jacaranda tree I was looking for and, moments later, I caught sight of the guy from the record store, opening up the shutters that covered the glass windows. When he saw me, he smiled.
‘I thought you’d probably come back,’ he said, and indicated one of the classic guitars in the window. ‘You look like a Stratocaster kind of guy to me.’
‘I’d love to buy a Strat, but not today – I need some help.’
‘Sure,’ he replied. I helped him raise the rest of the shutters and then he led me through the front door and into the dark cavern of the music store. It was even better than