He held out the hard drive with the email addresses on it.
“It’s now or never,” he said. “You need to tell everyone to head for Ankara. It’s time the people took their government back.”
He followed as Dagmar took the hard drive to her office and invited everyone on the list to come to Ankara and be slaughtered. She unplugged the drive and gave it back to Lincoln.
“I want a memorial for my friends,” she said.
“Of course.”
“Tomorrow afternoon, but we’ll let everyone know first thing in the morning, so they’ll have time to decide what they’re going to say.”
He bowed his shaggy head gravely.
“Whatever you like,” he said.
The RAF Police escort took Dagmar to her apartment. She nodded to the corporal from the RAF Regiment at the bottom of the stair, then walked up the stair to her own floor.
“This is bullshit!” Byron’s angry voice boiled out of an open window. “We’re not safe here! Packed in like this, one RPG could kill us all!”
Consistency, she thought, was certainly Byron’s strong point.
Ismet opened his door as she passed.
“I got a pizza on my way home,” he said. “Shall I come over?”
Ismet, she realized, had lost a roommate as well. Tuna’s belongings were still in the apartment, a reminder of the friend who would never return. Like the Nutella that haunted Dagmar’s fridge, a visitation from Judy that she would never eat but never remove.
“Give me time to shower,” she said.
Under the stream of water she tried to scrub away the sweat and sorrow, the mourning and misery. The result was only an increased consciousness of her own wretched failure. She dried her gray hair, put on a new T-shirt and underwear and a pair of khaki shorts. Trailed by the scent of green tea shampoo, she made herself a gin and tonic and sat by the window and tried to make sense of the thoughts that gyred in her head.
Byron too angry, she thought, Lloyd too calm. Helmuth and Magnus too stoned.
This wasn’t data; it was just noise. There wasn’t a pattern to be found in it.
Tuna and Judy too dead, she thought. There was your pattern.
Ismet knocked and called softly from outside. Dagmar let him in. The cardboard box he carried smelled of garlic and oregano. When the toaster talked to him, he gave a jump, then laughed.
She rattled her glass at him. “Want a drink?”
He raised a can of lager. “I brought my own,” he said.
He put the cardboard box on the kitchen table, and Dagmar brought plates from the cupboard. She freshened her drink and brought it to the table.
The pizza had been made with feta and chunks of a local sausage that tasted of fennel and goat. It wasn’t entirely awful. Dagmar discovered that she was ravenous and ate her first piece very quickly.
“We’ll be doing a memorial for Tuna and Judy tomorrow afternoon,” Dagmar said.
“I won’t be able to attend,” he said. “I’ll be on my way to Ankara.”
She looked at him in shock, then looked away.
Of course he’d be going, she thought. The time for the final confrontation had come, the time when the demonstrators would either take their government back or be crushed in blood, and Ismet was a part of that.
She’d sent out the orders for everyone else less than an hour before. She didn’t know why she hadn’t realized that Ismet would be included in the next action.
“I won’t be going across the Green Line this time,” Ismet said in his matter-of-fact way. “They might have my description. So I’ll have to fly to Athens, then to Sofia, and take the train to Istanbul and on to Ankara.”
“I’ll pack you a lunch,” she said. It was only a practical thing, but it was all she could manage to say. She couldn’t ask the questions that were really in her mind, like Do you think it’s hopeless? Or What are your odds of survival?
She reached for her drink, and it almost slipped through her grease-stained fingers. She wiped her fingers and the glass with a paper napkin.
“Bozbeyli knows about us,” she said. “Why hasn’t he told everyone?”
Ismet reached for another piece of pizza.
“He must have other plans,” he said.
“Can we guess what they are?”
Ismet, mouth full of pizza, gave a jerk of one shoulder, a Turkish way of saying, “I don’t care.”
She decided that she shouldn’t harass him: he’d had a worse day than she had, and his days weren’t going to get better anytime soon.
So she asked him if he’d heard from his grandmother and what she’d think of his having an American girlfriend and more about the nomad life on the Anatolian south coast. The change of subject seemed welcome.
They went to bed and his touch set her skin alight. She pressed herself to him, desperate for the reassurance of his body, the solid businesslike whole of him that she could cling to. Ismet was hers, at least for the next few hours.
Even through her pleasure she could hear the whisper in her mind, the voice that suggested that she might already be in mourning for him.
The rioters came in the night, breaking down the wards that Dagmar had so carefully set. Suddenly they were there-bare-chested Indonesian men, rags tied around their heads, hands brandishing machetes or Japanese swords or wavy-edged blades.
She lunged out of bed screaming and fought her way through the intruders into the living room. Ismet called her name over and over and tried to catch her, but she flailed at him and broke free. The coffee table caught the backs of her knees and she tumbled over, still thrashing at the weapons that menaced her… wheezing for breath, she backed into a corner of the room, hitting and kicking at Ismet when he came too close.
There was a pounding on the front door, and shouting. Dagmar shrieked at Ismet not to open the door and let in more of the enemy, but he did anyway, and there was the guard from the RAF Regiment. She screamed at the sight of his assault rifle. His radio crackled loud in the air.
Dagmar shivered and wept and flailed her fists as the Indonesian men circled her. Ismet and the guard had a brief conversation.
“Could you get her a blanket, perhaps?” the corporal said. “I don’t like to see her naked like that.”
Ismet went to the bedroom and returned with a sheet. He approached Dagmar carefully and offered the sheet. Dagmar snatched it and covered herself. The Indonesian men leered at her.
“I don’t know what to do,” Ismet said. “I tried holding her, but-”
“Will you stop talking like idiots and help me!” Dagmar demanded. Ismet reached for her.
The corporal shook his head. “No,” he said. “Don’t touch. She’ll read it as a threat.” He unslung the rifle from around his neck and put it out of sight in the kitchen.
“Let me try something,” he said. “One of my mates was in Afghanistan-came back with a similar problem.”
He crouched near Dagmar’s feet. Dagmar drew her legs up, away from him, and threatened him with her claws.
“Miss,” he said. “I’d like you to look at the sheet. Could you do that for me?”
She considered the request and wondered if it was a way to divert her attention so that he could attack. But she decided she could spare the sheet a glimpse and look at it.
The sheet, left behind by the apartment’s actual tenants, was fine white cotton with a wide blue Mediterranean stripe. There was the faint aroma of myrrh, Ismet’s scent.
“See how stripy it is, miss?” the corporal said. “How smooth?”
“Yes,” she said through clenched teeth. Light gleamed wickedly on the Indonesian blades that menaced her.
“Blue and white,” the corporal went on, “that’s the Greek national colors, miss. It’s like their flag.”
Dagmar wiped tears from her eyes and considered the sheet and the Greek flag and wondered if she was going to be buried under the Greek flag.
“Maybe you’d like to look at the couch?” the corporal suggested. “It’s a different shade of blue, isn’t it?”
Slowly the corporal called her attention to the actuality that surrounded her: the couch of robin’s egg blue, the lamp with its parchment shade, the ceiling fan with blades that shone with their brass fittings. It was the reality that Dagmar had all along knew was present, lying like an underground river running quietly beneath a surface filled with overwhelming terror and menace. Once her attention was drawn to the quotidian world, the horrors-the Indonesians with their knives and ferocious eyes-began to seem less plausible.