"Just for my help?" Vasylyna asked, then gulped at her soda.
"I'm trying to find Arzu," I said, deflecting the question. "I need to talk to him. Do you know where he is?"
She set the can down, eyeing the kebabs. I nudged them closer to her.
"The money first," she bargained, quietly. "You give me the money first."
"You think I won't give it to you after?"
"What if you don't like what I tell you?"
I brought out my wallet, emptied it of cash into my hand, then folded over the bills and slid them to her. "You have your passport?"
"Arzu took it. I don't know where it is."
"I can take care of that, too. We can get you a new one. Tell me where I can find him."
"You can't." She choked on a sob, caught herself, staring at the money on the table. "You can't find him."
"He's dead?"
"In jail. He got arrested a couple of weeks ago, but they let him go, he paid the police. But then he got into a fight last week, with another pimp, and he was arrested again." She pushed the money back at me, tears shining in her eyes. "You won't let me have it."
I pushed the money right back.
"Vasylyna," I said, "you're going home."
CHAPTER
Twenty-four The man who ran Trabzon's jail was a Turk named Besim Celik, in his early forties, average in height and maybe twenty pounds overweight. He carried it well enough, and when we met at the Trabzonspor Club two days after I'd promised Vasylyna a way home, he moved himself with the certainty of a man used to pushing around others. The bar was the clubhouse of Trabzon's football team, and despite the fact that there was no match in the offing, the place was bustling when I arrived, and I was afraid I'd have trouble spotting him, but I needn't have worried. He was the only person in the place wearing a police officer's uniform.
"Anthony Shephard?" He spoke in heavily accented English.
"Captain Celik?"
He picked up his glass of beer and motioned to the back doors of the clubhouse that opened onto the patio. I nodded and followed him, and we took seats at one of the corners. It was quieter outside, but almost as crowded, patrons enjoying the pleasant July weather.
"I appreciate you coming to meet with me, Captain."
"The message-yes, message?-my assistant gave me made me curious. You want to talk about a prisoner?"
I nodded. It had taken the rest of the previous day and another five hundred euros to simply get this far, and I was having a hard time controlling my mounting impatience. Every hour that passed seemed to take Tiasa further away from me, not closer.
"What is it I can do for you, Mr. Shephard?"
"You're holding a friend of a friend of mine. His name is Arzu Kaya."
Celik pursed his lips, then took a sip of his beer. "We have this man."
"My friend is very worried about Arzu. I hate seeing him like this, I really do, and I was hoping I could discuss with you some means of getting them together, if only for a few hours. Maybe by making a donation to a charity you support, something along those lines."
With absolute seriousness, he remarked, "It would need to be a large donation."
"I was thinking around ten thousand euros," I said.
"That would be an acceptable amount."
"The thing is," I said, "I want to surprise them both, Arzu and my friend. I want it to be a gift."
"A gift?"
"Yeah. Maybe I could even get it wrapped."
Celik didn't blink. "Gift-wrapping is extra."
"I'd expect it would be." I took out the piece of paper I'd been carrying folded in my pocket, handing it over. "If I could get him delivered to this address."
He took the paper, opening it one-handed. "Not a very busy location."
"I want the reunion to be private."
Captain Celik nodded sagely, drank some more of his beer, looking past me, at the clientele. "He couldn't be away for more than two or three hours."
"I think that'll be more than enough time for them to discuss what they need to," I said.
He checked the address on the paper I'd given him again, then folded it and tucked it into his breast pocket, beneath his badge. "Also it would need to be at the right time."
"Of course. Wouldn't be a surprise otherwise. I was thinking around two in the morning."
"Then he will be dropped off at two, and picked up no later than five." He looked at me impassively. "Half of the donation will be expected when he arrives. The rest of it when he is picked up."
"That'll be fine. There's one other thing."
He fixed me with his dead brown eyes, bored.
"I'm wondering if someone could provide me with some information about his family," I said. "My friend wanted me to speak to his wife, and I don't know where I can find her."
"I'm sure we have that information," Celik said. "In fact, I'm sure I could get that for you now. But I would have to see some sort of gesture on your part, that my charity will actually be rewarded."
"Would five hundred euros be enough?"
"No. A thousand." He finished his beer, then rose. "I will make a call, see if I can find out about his family for you."
He walked back into the clubhouse, and I took out my wallet. I'd restocked it since meeting Vasylyna, but was going to have to restock it again. I put ten one-hundred-euro bills in a stack, and then slipped the stack into a paper napkin. I moved the napkin over to where Celik had been seated.
After six minutes, he returned, sat, and put the napkin on his lap. He kept his head down for a few seconds, counting the money, then shifted in such a way I knew he was pocketing the bills. From the same pocket that he'd stowed my little piece of paper with the delivery address on it, he produced a new one, handing it to me.
Then, with no other word, he rose and left me with the address of Arzu Kaya's family. Two in the morning meant I had ten hours before I'd be seeing Arzu, and there was a fair amount I needed to do between now and then. First, I found a bank and withdrew the cash I was going to need. Next, I did some shopping. Finally, with the aid of a map, I found the address Celik had given me. That took the most time, and I was there for nearly three hours before I had what I needed and could depart.
It was already dark when I returned to the hotel I was staying at on Gencoglu Street, a place called the Otel Horon. One of the two women manning the front desk called out to me as I came through the lobby, saying that a package had arrived for Anthony Shephard. I thanked her and took the UPS pack back to my room, then dumped the new papers Nicholas Sargenti had sent out on the bed.
There were two sets of documents, a fresh set for me, in the name of Matthew Twigg, a citizen of the United States who lived in Tukwila, Washington, just south of Seattle. Along with the passport and the Washington State driver's license was an Amex and a Visa. The second set of documents were all Ukrainian, two passports-one for domestic travel, the other for international. I checked these carefully, using the lamp at the desk to verify the laser imprinting on the photographs, and was impressed that everything looked perfectly in order. Then I flipped through the two documents, noting the stamps.
Nicholas had outdone himself.
I moved my new set of papers to my bag, then took the Ukrainian ones with me down the hall, to the room where Vasylyna had spent much of the last two days. I knocked on the door twice, identifying myself, and after a few seconds she let me inside, cautiously backing away as I shut the door behind me. I showed her the documents, each of them in her full name, Vasylyna Pavlina Kozyar. She took them with wide eyes, opening each in turn, gazing at the photographs of herself. I'd taken the pictures of her with the camera on the BlackBerry, using the shower curtain in the bathroom as a backdrop. Then I'd emailed the pictures to Sargenti.
"The stamps say you came to Turkey two weeks ago," I told her. "This room is paid for until tomorrow morning. You could be in Kiev by tomorrow afternoon, if that's what you want."
She looked up from the documents in her hand, bewildered. Bathed, wearing garments that she had picked herself, clothes that fit, with two safe nights of sleep behind her, she looked better, but, sadly, younger.