‘Remember the music we spoke about?’ I said. Of course he didn’t, he had no idea what I was talking about. ‘There was the sound of traffic, it was playing in the background—’
‘Oh yeah, I remember,’ he said, getting with the programme.
‘What happened?’ I asked. ‘Somebody was supposed to be drilling down, trying to identify it.’
‘I don’t know, I haven’t heard.’
‘Get on to it, will you? Make some calls.’
‘Sure,’ Bradley replied, offended by my tone, immediately getting as irritable as I was. ‘When do you need it by?’
‘Now,’ I replied. ‘A few hours ago would have been better.’
Hungry as hell, I was on my third stale candy bar from the mini-bar, and sitting in the chair, staring out at the town and thinking about the woman, when the phone rang. It was Bradley, and he said that the music was pretty much a bust.
‘They’ve filtered out the noise of the New York traffic,’ he said. The reference to New York was meaningless packaging. ‘And they’ve enhanced the music. It’s Turkish, of course. It seems it’s being played on a kaval—’
‘A what?’ I asked.
‘A kaval. A wind instrument, like a flute apparently – seven holes on top and one underneath; they’re the melody keys. It’s a folk thing. The story is that shepherds would use it to lead their flock.’
‘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
I had thought: at the back there was a cabinet full of restored turntables for those who still believed in needles and valves, a better range of modern guitars than most stores in New York and enough vinyl pressings from the seventies to have made Whisperer weep.
I indicated his collection of Turkish folk instruments and told him I had a piece of music played on a kaval that I was hoping he could identify.
‘A lot of other people have tried,’ I said, ‘but nobody seems to be able to nail it.’
‘I wish my father was alive,’ he said. ‘He was an expert on the traditional stuff, but I’ll give it a shot.’
I cued up the MP3 player and watched as he listened. He played it four, maybe five, times. Then he put the player into a docking station and played it through the store’s sound system. Three tourists who had wandered in listened.
‘Not exactly foot-tapping,’ one of them, a New Zealander, said. He was right – the music was haunting, more like a cry on the wind.
The owner played it again, his dreamy eyes focused. Then he shook his head, and I wasn’t surprised: it had always been a long shot. I started to thank him, but he interrupted.
‘It’s not a kaval,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘That’s why you’re having difficulty identifying the tune – it wasn’t written for a kaval. Almost anybody would have made the mistake, but I’m pretty sure it’s a far older instrument. Listen …’
He played it again. ‘A kaval has seven melody stops on top and one underneath. This is hard – you’ve really got to listen – but the instrument that’s playing here has only got six stops on top and one below. There’s no seventh stop.’
I listened one more time but, honestly, I couldn’t tell – I had no idea how many stops it had. ‘You’re sure?’ I asked.
‘Yeah,’ he replied.
‘What is it then?’
‘I can’t tell you anything a
bout the tune,’ he said. ‘But I think we’re listening to a çigirtma. It’s virtually forgotten – I only know about it because my father loved the old stuff. I heard the instrument once when I was a kid.’
‘Why are they forgotten, though – they died out?’
‘Not exactly – the birds did. For a kaval you need the wood of a plum tree, but a çigirtma is made from the wing bone of a mountain eagle. The birds have been endangered for years, so the instrument faded away – and so did the music written for it. That’s why you can’t find the tune.’
He removed the MP3 player from the docking station and handed it to me. ‘You know the Hotel Ducasse?’ he asked. ‘You might get some help there.’
Chapter Thirty-nine
THE HOTEL DUCASSE was one of the places I mentioned earlier – SO fashionable, people were drilling holes in the wall to get inside. It was on the waterfront, with a private beach, cabanas you could rent for the summer for a small fortune and a dozen flat-bottomed boats that ferried waiters, food and drinks out to moored cruisers. That was the low end of the establishment.
The exclusive section, up on the roof, was called the Skybar. I had come straight from the music store, and I passed through the hotel’s art deco front doors, crossed several acres of Cuban mahogany flooring and skirted extravagant settings of Philippe Starck furniture before I found the Skybar’s dedicated elevator. As I approached, I saw the guy operating it – dressed in designer black pyjamas – note my cheap FBI-style clothes and ready himself to say it was reservation only. But I have a pretty good death stare when I need it, so I set it to Defcon 1 and saw him decide that keeping me out wasn’t worth dying for.
He zoomed me to the top and I stepped into a zoo. The Skybar’s centrepiece was a pure white, vanishing-edge pool with a glass bottom and a huge view across the bay to the Crusader castle and – fittingly enough – the French House.
Facing the pool were a handful of ultra-luxurious cabanas which seemed to be occupied by several of Eastern Europe’s leading kleptocrats and their families. Slightly elevated, they commanded the best view of the pool and its huge expanse of flesh and silicon: scantily clad women of all ages with bee-stung lips and bolt-on boobs, and young, hard-bodied guys in swimsuits so brief they were generally called banana hammocks.
At the opposite end to the cabanas was the bar and a small stage for a five-piece band. One of the guitarists was my objective, but getting there wasn’t without its obstacles. The first of them was approaching me with a sympathetic smile and his hands spread wide in silent apology. It was the maître d’ and, unlike his clientele, he was class all the way: French was my guess, Berluti handmade shoes, lightweight Brioni suit, gold-rimmed eyeglasses.
‘I’m sorry, sir,’ he said. ‘Today, we are fully booked.’
I looked at the two dozen empty tables – it was early – and even more vacant stools at the bar. I smiled back just as pleasantly. ‘Yes, I can see that.’
He already had his arm around my shoulder, guiding me back towards the elevator where the ninja was waiting to whisk me back down to the street where I belonged. I reached into my jacket pocket, and the maître d’ assumed I was going for my wallet and a handful of bills to bribe him.
‘Please, sir – don’t embarrass us both,’ he said, with genuine pain.
‘I wasn’t going to,’ I replied, pulling out my gold shield.
He looked at it for a moment and put aside the shepherding shit while he considered what to do.
‘Are you arresting someone, Mr Wilson?’ he asked.
‘Probably.’
He leaned closer – you could tell he was a terrible gossip – and dropped his voice. ‘Can you tell me who?’
I leaned in equally close and dropped my voice to match his. ‘Sorry, not allowed.’
‘No – of course not. But you could probably say what the charge would be.’
‘Sure,’ I said, and indicated the pool area. ‘Bad taste.’
He burst out laughing and shook my hand. ‘Fuck, the place will be empty. You’ll need a bus.’
He dismissed the ninja with a glance, raised his hand in a gesture to the distant barman and guided me back towards the acres of flesh. ‘Be my guest, Mr Wilson – Anton at the bar will take care of your drinks.’
I thanked him, walked beside the pool and settled myself on a stool at the bar. I asked Anton for a coffee and turned my attention to the band. It was the bass player I was interested in – his name was Ahmut Pamuk, and he was in his fifties, neatly dressed, a guy who had obviously decided years ago just to play the groove and not look at the crowd. At the Skybar, that was probably wise. He was good, he knew his shit; the sort of man who had already given music the best years of his life and would probably be playing just one more gig until they laid him in the ground.
But the owner of the music store had warned me that he was one of the most unpleasant people you could meet and, watching him on stage, seeing him at his lifetime’s work, I had some understanding why. For a real musician, a man who had been full of hopes and dreams, playing endless versions of ‘Mamma Mia’ and ‘Yellow Submarine’ would be enough to embitter anyone.
As Anton brought my coffee, Pamuk was in the middle of a set – the hits from Titanic – and I waited for him to finish. The owner had told me the guy had been collecting traditional and folk music for years. His father – a musician himself – had started it, worried that if it weren’t collected and written down it would be lost for ever and, in later years, his son had picked up the baton. Apparently, Pamuk got by however he could – playing at the Skybar, pumping gas – all the time finding lost music, playing some of the instruments himself, noting it down like a lost language and sending it to the Turkish National Archives. According to the guy at the music store, if any local could identify the çigirtma tune, it would be him.
The set finished, the band left the stage to no applause, and I stood up. I gave Pamuk my name and told him that I had a piece of music I was hoping he could help me with. My idea had been to ask him to listen to the MP3 player, but I never got the chance: the store owner hadn’t been mistaken about Pamuk’s personality.
‘It’s the brunch crowd, and I’ve been on stage for an hour already – you heard the deafening applause, right?’ he said. ‘I’m gonna eat, I’m gonna have a coffee and then I’m gonna rest.’ He turned to walk away.
‘Mr Pamuk,’ I replied, ‘I’m not a musicologist or some foreign academic.’ I flashed him the shield. He wasn’t sure how to react but decided it might be wiser to at least pay lip service to cooperation.
‘Okay, I’ll give you a phone number. Call me tomorrow, we’ll set a time,’ he said.
‘Tomorrow’s not good enough. It’ll have to be today,’ I countered. He glared at me, but he had never met the Defcon 1 before and buckled.
‘From four o’clock I work at 176—’ and he rattled off the name of a street that I had no hope of pronouncing, let alone finding, as I was sure he knew. Asshole.
‘Write it down, please,’ I told him, and motioned to Anton that I needed a pen. Grudgingly, Pamuk complied and, as I walked away, I slipped the address into my pocket.
I almost didn’t bother: in light of his personality, I was certain the meeting was going to be a waste of time.
Chapter Forty
APART FROM HAVING to stab him through the fleshy part of his hand, my follow-up conversation with Ahmut Pamuk actually turned out to be quite pleasant.
After I left the Skybar I walked along the harbour, found a bench in the shade, slid the battery back into my phone and called Cumali at the station house. I hadn’t spoken to her since Florence and I wanted to check any progress on the newly launched investigation into Dodge’s murder.
As it turned out, very little had happened. Hayrunnisa picked up the call and told me Cumali had left just after 11 a.m. and wouldn’t be back for the rest of the day.
‘Where’s she gone?’ I asked.
‘Just a few private things she had to attend to,’
she replied.
I was about to press her when I realized it was Thursday and that Cumali’s son had invited me to see the Grand Parade and the clowns. She had taken him to the State Circus.
I said I would call back in the morning and then spent another hour checking with people working near phone boxes – again to no avail – and realized that, with lunchtime approaching and most offices and stores closing, it was about to become a near-to-hopeless task.
With little choice but to take a break, I decided to turn my attention to the French House. My confidence had been badly shaken by the mistake that Whisperer and I had made: we had jeopardized our entire mission by assuming that the death of Dodge would be a case worth investigating. Such errors rarely went unpunished in the secret world and, on the plane back from Florence, I had resolved never to let it happen again. Come what may, I was going to stay one step ahead of the cops. Knowledge is power, as they say.
The core question was simple: how did the killer manage to enter and leave the estate without being seen? Included in the files about Dodge’s death that Cumali had given me was a reference to the company responsible for letting the mansion, and I figured that was the best place to start.
Prestige Realty was its name, and I had seen its flashy storefront a number of times during my walking tours. I glanced at my watch and saw that, if I hurried, I had a chance of getting there before it too closed for lunch.
I got within hailing distance just as a man was locking the front door. When he heard me calling to him in English he turned and switched on the smile that realtors reserve for someone they think might have just got off the boat. As soon as he saw me, he switched it off.
He was in his early forties with a full pompadour, an open-necked shirt and a rope of gold chains around his neck big enough to anchor a cruise liner. I liked him immediately. In a strange way, there was no guile to him – if you got ripped off by a man who looked like that, I figured you only had yourself to blame.