With this, he paused. Lucine had been watching him as if from the back row of the orchestra seats. But now she leaned a little in his direction.
“The matter at hand,” she said to him with surprising gentleness.
He nodded in acknowledgment without looking at her. He said, “Three weeks ago, three hundred of the elite Armenian thinkers and leaders in Istanbul — writers and priests, politicians and publishers, teachers and artists, all of our best minds — were arrested by the government and deported overnight from the capital. They were imprisoned beyond Angora. Those that got that far. We’ve been told reliably that a group of them — twenty or so, ones with voices, writers like you — were murdered on the way to Ayaş.”
“But they all will die,” Lucine said. “Soon.”
Her voice faltered ever so slightly. She paused. She was about to speak again when we all heard feet scuffling on the fieldstones from the direction of the courtyard door.
Two men stood there. They were suited up looking like Turks but I knew somehow they belonged. They could have been Tigran’s sparring partners. One was a light heavyweight, one a welterweight. All three of them were swarthy and rough featured, of the same blood as the boys in the bar on the London Docks.
Part of me sensed trouble.
Tigran and Arshak stood up at once. Lucine looked to me and she rose. I rose with her. She stepped to me.
“I’m going back to the hotel now,” she said.
“Who are these men?” I asked.
She looked in their direction.
“They’re with Tigran,” she said.
“Look me in the eyes,” I said.
She did.
They were steady. But she was an actress.
“I thought you and your father had something to explain,” I said.
“A thing has come up,” she said. “They’d like to take you a little farther.”
“Not you?”
“You can ride a horse?”
“Yes.”
“Where you will go is out of the way. I need to get back to the hotel and prepare for Enver Pasha.”
Her eyes lost their focus a little now, drifted. But not from lying. “First impressions,” she said. “This one for him has to be distractingly good.”
Arshak was beside me now. “Will you come with us?” he asked, as if I had a choice. But he was an actor.
“If I say no?” I said.
“Why would you?” he said. “You have come a very long way with us already.”
I looked at Lucine.
I had.
But as far as I’d come, I didn’t yet instinctively trust her. And why would I trust her father? Or these three Armenian toughs? She could have made her own arrangement with the Pasha, letting passion overrule protocol.
My only alternative was to walk away. Or if I couldn’t simply walk away, then shoot my way out. But to go on with them now seemed more or less what I’d signed up for when I said yes to the secret service of my country. This was a rough-riding charge up a hill.
I looked at Arshak. “Let’s go,” I said.
54
The welterweight Armenian — he and the other had shaken my hand but no names were exchanged — led us farther up the hill, he and Arshak talking low and intensely up ahead. Soon the wooden warrens abruptly gave way to a several-acre market garden. We turned toward the center, moving through an orchard of apricots and peaches, and we came out of the trees in an open space with a central, span-roof greenhouse growing lemons and oranges. We circled the building and five horses awaited us, a boy tending them.
Arshak nodded me to a brindle and I stroked his nose and puffed in his nostrils and whispered in his ear and he nodded and gave me the eye like we could be pals for a few hours. I went up on him and the other boys mounted, and as they did, the sack suit coat of the welterweight fell open and I could see a pistol in a shoulder holster. I suspected the light-heavy and Tigran were armed too. Maybe even Arshak, all this time.
My little Mauser suddenly — reasonably — ceased being much of a comfort. If I needed it, I’d simply go down fighting. But I shrugged this off in my head. I’d made my decision some time ago.
And we rode away on a back path out of the gardens and we were soon beyond Ortakiöi, beyond greater Istanbul, beyond Turkey for all you could tell from the rising country and the upspringing of forests of sessile oak and oriental birch and hornbeam and chestnut.
This was a very good thing. I hadn’t realized how full my lungs and my head had gotten with the stink and yowl of Istanbul. Of cities in general. We climbed a trail until the air grew cool in spite of the high sun and then we were plateaued for a short time and then began to descend, picking up a quick-running stream.
And we didn’t talk. We had a clear enough way for much of the time to keep up a nice hand gallop, and my brindle was a good boy, very responsive to the lightest press of a calf, a heel, a shift of my center of gravity.
We rode till the stream gave way and the land grew flat again and we cut across an open stretch of meadow grass and onto dirt road. Arshak and the guy who was leading us were just ahead of me, and they exchanged a few words, the first words of this hour and a half we’d been riding.
The road was canopied in oak for a quarter mile or so and we rounded a bend and the trees fell away and we entered a village. A gathering of small houses, some of stone, some of mud and wattle, though these were nicely whitewashed. Then a fieldstone threshing floor. And some more houses on both sides, all stone. And the striking thing was the silence. And the emptiness. My first thought: Everyone has run away.
We were riding slowly now. The men around me turned to look from the waist, their shoulders swinging around; these guys had gone stiff, gone vaguely urgent, vaguely agitated. And there was something in the air. A battlefield smell when the ground was contested and lost and the action moved elsewhere and the dead had been dealt with but a faint afterstench remained.
The silence in this village changed its pitch.
I glanced at a passing house, and in the street before the door lay a single flower-brocade slipper. A fancy slipper, in a village like this, from some special time in a young woman’s life. A wedding perhaps. She’d once slipped her foot into this shoe to wed. My eyes followed it as I passed. I turned my head to look at it lying there, unretrieved, in a muddy rut on the village street.
Something very bad had happened here.
A hundred yards ahead was a small village square.
Arshak raised his hand and we all stopped.
No one spoke. We just sat. And even though not a head cocked, not a head inclined even slightly to the side, I could sense these men listening.
The horses shook a little and nickered a little and also fell silent.
The treetops hissed with the movement of air. Someone’s saddle creaked with the shift of a body. Nothing else in this moment. Or the next.
And I was struck by this: there was no sound of birds. Not in this street or in the stand of trees around us or in the fields beyond. The birds had fled.
Then a stronger leather sound: Arshak was turning in his saddle, throwing his leg over his horse to dismount. The others followed his lead. So did I.
“Mr. Cobb,” Arshak said.
The light heavyweight took my reins, holding his own in his other hand.