Richard House - The Kills

As they drew into Narapi, Ford suggested that Nathalie take a walk to the fort. ‘My coach departs in an hour.’

‘I’ll wait with you.’

‘Take a break,’ he whispered, ‘he’ll be back before long.’

Nathalie shook her head. There would be no result from any further search, she was certain. ‘You know, maybe this isn’t so strange. This is what his father did. When he was a boy his father walked away. He just left.’ She convinced herself.

Martin said he’d return with Mehmet to the pension to make his calls, she might as well continue looking if she wanted. Perhaps there would be some news. Nathalie hung her head, unable to make a decision. Ford opened the passenger door to say goodbye and leaned into the car unsure of the most suitable farewell. Nathalie wrapped her arms about him in a lethargic gesture, oddly mismeasured, and patted his shoulder. Maybe he was right and Eric would just return. Ford didn’t doubt it, and guessed, privately, that this kind of drama was not rare between them.

* * *

As the coach drew away from the square, Ford looked back at the town. His eyes ran along the broken outline of the fortifying walls above the market. None of this mattered, he told himself. It wasn’t important.

The coach moved softly, as if through water. Wind struck the bus and Ford imagined the coach winding slowly and steadily away from the town.

3.15

Heida argued with herself for four long hours, persuading herself out of love, or rather, out of the relationship, as she was not in love — clearly not at this moment. At Birsim a student took the seat beside her. Pleased to have someone to talk with, Heida began to share what was on her mind. The student appeared keen to listen.

Their problem, Heida began, was that they worked together, day and night. Grüner came with the job. More or less. Theirs was a partnership built on travel, long working nights, deadlines, which encouraged a kind of intimacy. The practicalities which destroyed other relationships made theirs viable, regardless of other attachments which she did not mention (Grüner’s wife, Heida’s long-term partner), so even if their couplings had become distastefully mechanical they were couplings nevertheless, they were something. At the very least Grüner was company. If she broke off the physical side of their relationship she couldn’t guarantee that they’d return to their former working relationship. Did this make sense? While they depended on each other for work their physical relationship had corrupted this. It really was that simple.

She couldn’t guess Grüner’s thinking, never knew, and suspected (kilometre after kilometre, riding through bright dust in a rising landscape, the girl beside her nodding, nodding, nodding) that the threat of an end would make him keen again. Grüner was that kind of a man. Endearingly sentimental when it came to women who despised him.

At the start of hour five Heida had to admit that there were other factors. Maybe her recent indifference had nothing to do with Grüner, because it wasn’t just Grüner; everything about her had the same colour, tone, texture, taste. It’s like this, she waved her hand at the land — even at night the landscape appeared dusty, endless, flat. Pointless.

‘This is how I feel. This.’

The young girl nodded and Heida wondered how much she actually understood.

As the coach came into Ankara the student began to gather her bags. Heida felt relieved that the girl was leaving as she didn’t want to think about these things any more. They said their goodbyes a little early and sat silent. The student looked expectantly up the central aisle, and Heida looked out of the window waiting as the coach drew at a crawl into the bay. Light spilled from the pavilion. Heida sat parallel to a man who walked along the pavement keeping pace with the coach, her knees to his shoulders. A slick movement, inside, outside, which she found funny in a small way as she could look down on the man without him being aware.

It wasn’t the backpack, so much, but the man’s rounded shoulders and his way of walking, dopey, as if medicated, slightly absent. As soon as she saw the man in profile she immediately recognized him: Stephen Lawrence Sutler. Without doubt.

The bus drew slightly ahead. Beardless, shorter hair — shorn in fact — cleaner clothes, almost fashionable. Three-fifty in the morning and she was looking down on Sutler. The man had no idea. He really didn’t. She squinted, took a good long look and did not doubt that this was the same man they had picked up a week earlier at the Turkish border. Sutler. Stephen Lawrence Sutler.

* * *

She followed after the man, feeling conspicuous in sunglasses, her hat pulled low, her hair tucked up. Two in the morning, the air becoming cold, thin, the fine atmosphere of the higher plains.

Sutler dodged through the waiting passengers and wandered into the waiting room, a little dazed by travel, his backpack over his left shoulder. As he approached the men’s restroom a soldier called to him, clicked his fingers for attention then pointed at a sign. No packages, no luggage. Sutler could not take his pack into the toilet. The officer shook his head and while Sutler waited, evidently confused, the policeman stopped another man going forward. Beside the doorway lay a loose stack of luggage. Clearly uncomfortable with the demand, but not ready to challenge it, Sutler dropped the pack from his shoulder. Heida turned away as he squatted next to his bag, and she watched his reflection in the long glass windows as he fumbled for a shirt. She waited for him to walk into the restroom, breath held, his bag leaning against the wall; one among a number of packages, bags, and suitcases.

This was too good to miss.

Heida hurried forward, a pantomime of chaos, her own bag heavy in her arms. She gestured at the entrance to the women’s restroom and the policeman pointed to the luggage strewn across the floor beside him. Heida dropped her bag right next to Sutler’s and turned her body to block the policeman’s view.

While at school Heida had stolen clothes from the KaDeWe: skirts, stockings, a good number of fashion tops, and once a pair of shoes, pink pumps that were two sizes too small. When she spoke about this short-lived habit, which lasted only the one summer, she blamed the guards at the store for sparking this urge, for treating her as suspicious and inciting the habit, as if they had challenged her, taunted her, dared her. It was the 1980s, she justified herself, everyone was stealing something. Everybody was on the make. And besides, I wasn’t happy. Chubby and inept, she discovered a natural talent for thievery. And so, as she knelt beside Sutler’s bag, the physical memory of this habit ran through her again, a sense of precision, of focus, a quickened heartbeat, the sensation that her hands were too large, a thrill that ran down her neck as she slipped her hand into Sutler’s bag.

She was done in a matter of seconds. Both hands at the zip, one inside, deep and digging through clothes, a book or something, discovering an internal pocket at the back. A quick exploratory swipe and she withdrew, zipped up and straightened up, saddled her bag over her shoulder as she walked away, unsure of what was in her hand, but guessing that it was a set of keys.

Heida stood on the concourse, hid behind a pillar, and looked at her hand to find a chain and five military dog tags with no names but a line of numbers on each one. Surely an important find? She rolled the chain into a ball, then slipped it in a side pocket of her own bag. Ahead, the sky began to brighten. An orange horizon reflected rose-red in the tinted pavilion windows. The cold began to seep from the air. She waited for Sutler to come out of the restroom, watched him tuck his old shirt into the bag, then walk, the bag at his side, without any knowledge or suspicion, to join a queue waiting for the Istanbul coach. Once in line he set his bag at his feet and stretched, looked about, a little sleepy perhaps. When he yawned a small shiver ran through him.