Chapter One ONE Across the bay the yachts of the city''s rich lingered motionless all summer, never seeming to arrive or depart. The Hotel Halicarnassus lay on the eastern side of Gündogan Bay, surrounded by dry hills and the olive trees which Herodotus might have known as a child. When Tyler took his orta kahve in the morning, the air was always the same, dry and hot, the pines planted by the Greeks in their heyday stood somber in their shade, and down by the edge of the swimming deck the more vigorous of the guests ate feta and bread before launching themselves into the waters. It was there that Tyler Sedgewick, an American on a mission, hoped to catch sight of Chana Simavi Knight fresh from her sleep, alone or with a boyfriend. When and if she did appear, his Celestron binoculars and Leica camera would be ready as he held vigil at the window of his room on the upper floor of the hotel. But it was already well into July, and although the days lengthened and the expenses he billed to her father grew ominous, they passed without her appearing and his prowess as an investigator began to be called into question. When James Arthur Knight Jr. gave Tyler her picture at the beginning of the year, the investigator was sure that he had seen her before.
He didn''t say anything to Mr. Knight then but deep down he was persuaded of it. He had seen her in the street, maybe, in a bar somewhere on a forgotten summer night, in conditions of half-light and alcoholic ease. They had lived at the same time in New York and they might well have crossed paths. The images which Knight had given him for reference had reminded Tyler of a line of poetry he had read at school somewhere about a woman''s eyes resembling "forests forever under the axe." What is wounded cannot be hidden. Even in the photograph which Tyler had pinned to the wall, the "forests" in those eyes could be seen and felt. They watched him as he lay numbed with raki on the bed under the mosquito nets after sundown, or working at the desk during the day.
From somewhere in the middle distance the adhan sounded, the call to prayer, probably from the Tarihi Mosque in Gündogan, and that "echo of the dead," as he liked to think of it, chimed perfectly with the face on the wall. She was the stranger you''ve seen before at close quarters but who never made contact with you, the ship that passed yours in the fog bank and didn''t care about your four-second proximity. "You know," her father would say to Tyler during their periodic consultations by phone, "she never got over the death of her mother." No one could say if this was hyperbole or excuse, but it did occur to Tyler that the wound in the eyes came from that. Still, everyone''s mother dies. It didn''t explain anything. It didn''t explain why she had disappeared or why her own family felt it necessary to find out why. She had "gone revolutionary" was all her father claimed to know.
She had always been left-wing, at war with her family and her social class, a precocious teenager with ready reasons for why her own society should be destroyed. The Knights had assumed that all bookish teenagers were a little like this. But Chana had never grown out of her radicalism. On the contrary she had grown into it. Dismaying, but what could one do? It was an affliction of certain generations. Meanwhile Knight had discovered that the house she had been living in with some of the comrades had burned to the ground in the desert somewhere near a small settlement in California. After which willful, persuasive, impossible Chana had gone to ground. In the mornings Tyler ordered an orta kahve from room service and sat by the shutters of his open window looking down at the hotel decks with the Celestron that he had bought in a mall in the Istanbul neighborhood of Etiler near where he had been living.
Youngish couples in terry cloth robes, solitary middle-aged men dark as Onassis from a lifetime on the yachts. He didn''t know the scene down in Bodrum, it was his first time, and yet one could see how it worked. The Halicarnassus was in all the rakish guides. And so he watched them like a birder waiting for the American heiress on the lam to appear like some rare African chaffinch. Although he knew Chana''s face, he assumed that she had changed the color of her hair. One never knows the lengths to which self-styled radicals on the run will go. Every other evening at 7 p.m.
he checked in with the anxious father who was then staying up at Montauk. Knight was a businessman who had taken on the weight of a dynastic petrochemical enterprise and there was something lugubriously burdened about him, as if he had been given a great industrial task to which by nature he was not very well suited. He labored for others. His daughter also seemed to be a burden to him. Chana was the fruit of Knight''s marriage to a wealthy Turkish society girl and as a result she had grown up both in Turkey and her father''s country. She was bilingual, bicultural, like many of her generation; she was able to slip between places and societies with ease. Perhaps this had contributed to a rare form of schizophrenia. She was mercurial, haughty, unusually attuned to other people''s needs and wants, altruistically volatile, genuine and manipulative, chaotic and secretive, a lover of masquerades and shams.
Knight had contacted Tyler at the end of the previous year to ask if Cyclops Eye might consider trying to locate this twenty-seven-year-old chimera. He had done so because he knew that Tyler had been at Groton with the man just appointed to be the American consul in Istanbul, a David Meltzer whom Tyler was sure to remember from school. It was surely a connection which Tyler could use to his advantage if he agreed to take on the assignment and move to Turkey for a few months at the command of the Knight family. "I am sure," Knight said during a long lunch for two at the 24 Club during the winter, "that she has entered a period of what I will call vagabondage. Global vagabondage. She failed to show up for a family wedding in Maryland. There were hints that she was in Bali. There was even a credit card transaction in Shanghai from a bar called Sober Company.
" "And you haven''t seen her in a year?" "My people have been looking for credit card transactions. But they are few and far between. She seems to be running on cash." "And where was the last transaction?" "There we have it. Turkey. It''s hardly surprising. She has connections in Istanbul, she can blend in. She speaks the language as a native.
But here is my bind. I don''t want a professional Turkish spy following Chana. I need someone who can pass for a clueless tourist." So that would be me then? Tyler thought. He didn''t want to admit that he barely remembered David Meltzer. He wanted the assignment and he was happy to play along with this garrulous egotist shoveling crab ravioli into his mouth as he talked. He said he could certainly play a clueless tourist. "Not play, Tyler.
Just actually be one. I''d like you to find her but not reveal anything. Just befriend her if you can. I want you to find out what is making her embrace her own disappearance." "And then what?" "Inform, Tyler, inform. I want to be informed. I think you could gain her confidence, even if you are a bit of a shamus." "A what?" "Never mind.
I was thinking you could pretend to be something ordinary while you were over there. A writer. A writer drifting about. She would like that. She would find it attractive. Can you pull that off?" "It''s better than playing a solitary tourist." "Good man. I''ll pay you double whatever you''re getting at that miserable agency of yours.
I''ll get you a nice little house in Istanbul too. It won''t be bad at all. It''ll be refreshing. Think of it as a working vacation." Afterward they walked together through Bryant Park in the snow, where Knight gave vent to his frustrations. It was a tricky matter, as families always were. The Simavi family in Istanbul had been no help. They claimed to have not seen Chana in years.
She was as alienated from them as her mother had been after she had married an American. Knight himself wanted to know what Chana was really thinking, what had gone wrong with her. This way, he would keep it "in the family," though not in the actual family. He added something else that was more private to the Knight family. When she was fifteen, he''d had her sent to a disciplinarian boarding school in the California desert, a therapeutic reform school as they termed it. It was a place cut off from the outside world where wayward children of the rich learned how to recalibrate their lives. They were taken out of their privileged milieu where drugs and sex were an everyday diversion, and forced to give up phones and media, to clean stables, swim in cold rivers and observe strict laws of silence among themselves. It was a harsh cure for the ills of their time and he had often wondered if it had done more harm than good.
"She came out of there at eighteen more violent--I mean mentally violent--than when she went in. All that was good was that she stopped taking cocaine for three years." From Tyler he might get information about his daughter''s current mental state, and without arousing her contempt should she ever discover, later in life, that her father had put her under surveillance. He wanted to retain her respect if that was at all possible. Respect, he kept repeating as he stepped in the snow so as to avoid the puddles, was the cornerstone of every relationship. "Just as I respect you, Tyler. I know how highly your colleagues speak of you." THIS WAS UNTRUE.
Tyler was in the middle stretch.