A Dangerous Crossing--A Novel

by Ausma Zehanat Khan

  “I’m sorry about Sami.” Benemerito patted his shoulder. “That’s why you look so sad. Two of your friends are gone. It could be it’s time to move on.”

  “The borders are closed. Even if I could get through, how could I leave Israa?”

  The Italians exchanged a glance. Last week, six hundred people had drowned on the crossing from Libya to Italy. Ali’s belief that Israa had survived flew in the face of these realities: he couldn’t give it up, no matter how they tried to persuade him.

  “You have to think of Aya.”

  Ali couldn’t muster the energy to argue with the commander, so he offered, “Don’t worry. I’ve been writing letters to God.”

  They didn’t recognize Qabbani’s poem. He tried again. “He only responds to letters of love, I know He’ll find her again.”

  Eleni Latsoudi entered the bar, her grave eyes searching for him. She’d just come in from the sea. When he got up to meet her, hopeful of news, Benemerito murmured, “When will he learn? The dead are the lucky ones.”

  11

  Scarborough, Canada

  Esa’s conversation with Nate took place on the terrace at the back of the house on the Bluffs. The weather had turned fine and Esa, after excusing himself to pray, had returned to his comfortable lounger to look out at the waves whispering under the crescent of the moon, the night sky spangled with currents of swirling stars. Leaves rustled on the wind, the first scent of spring edging the purity of the air.

  Nate was on edge, his hand clutched around a balloon-shaped glass, its contents lending a smoky flavor to the night.

  “I’m coming with you,” Nate warned him. His half-packed suitcase was sitting on a chair. When Esa had arrived at the house, he’d been flinging personal items into it with scant regard for what he actually needed. Esa had asked him to take a break, and now, at Nate’s words, he didn’t demur. There would be things Nate could do on the Greek islands that would be useful to their investigation, people he could approach without offering the specter of authority, a lesson Esa had learned from his interview with Ahmed Fakhri.

  But before they got to that place, there were several questions he needed to ask Nate—clarity he needed in his own mind, a certain frank communication that had always been possible in the days before Laine Stoicheva had come between them. His former partner still cast a shadow between them, a shadow Esa hoped to banish.

  He began with what seemed to him to be simpler things. He asked Nate about his deleted e-mails. As he’d guessed, Nate was surprised to hear them mentioned.

  “Did your tech expert say I’d deleted them recently?”

  “Didn’t you?”

  Nate looked a bit sheepish. He hitched a shoulder at Esa in a shrug, a familiar gesture that was easy for Esa to interpret, given the history of their friendship. Nate’s motives had been personal; he hadn’t been double-dealing.

  “So?” Esa studied his friend keenly. “What’s been on your mind, other than Audrey’s lack of communication? What else could be on your mind?” He tried to imagine himself in a similar scenario: understanding was swift. “This was about Rachel? You thought the e-mails would reflect badly on you?”

  Nate kept his gaze fixed on the ragged shoreline of the Bluffs. The waves left it whole, then erased it in spiraling loops, the Bluffs that rose from the shore, a series of sharp, white cliffs.

  “Nate?” Esa prodded. “If you want me to find Audrey, you’ll have to tell me everything.”

  “Yes, all right.”

  The two men were childhood friends. They had seen the best and worst of each other, the bond between them deeper for it.

  “I’m not proud of myself,” Nate began.

  “You never are.” There were a handful of people Esa felt comfortable enough to tease. Nate was the first outside family. Rachel had become another.

  “Esa, listen. You’re going to be angry. And of course, you’d be perfectly within your rights.”

  Esa could guess where this was heading. He picked up his glass, and muttered his doubts into it. “I’m far from perfect at anything. Who knows that better than you?”

  When Nate didn’t take that as an invitation to come clean, Esa brought matters to a head.

  “I haven’t read the e-mails you deleted, Nate, I wouldn’t without your permission. But I realized at once in Ottawa—you’ve seen Laine, haven’t you? You’ve slept with her. That’s why you’re concerned about your e-mails.” There was a break in his voice he couldn’t control. “I don’t want you to do something stupid, but as far as it concerns me, I don’t care.”

  “Dammit, Esa. Is there anything I can tell you, you don’t already know?”

  “I am a detective, Nate. The concierge at the Chateau wasn’t what I’d call discreet.”

  “No.” Nate’s response was sheepish. “I didn’t mean for it to happen. When you were in Iran, I thought I could help by reaching out to Laine. Stupidly, I thought I was immune—she’s different now, not that I’d try to convince you of that…”

  Esa shrugged. “You don’t have to. She helped me over that business in Algonquin, but frankly, I don’t care what her motives are. I do care about Rachel.”

  “Rachel?”

  “She’s the reason you deleted those e-mails, isn’t she? Unless there’s some other reason?”

  “None whatsoever. I wish I’d known you’d take it this well, I would have told you as soon as you returned.”

  “Tell me now.”

  “It’s nothing. It happened once. It was the thought of Rachel knowing that made me feel a bit … shabby.”

  “Rachel is the last person to pass judgment.”

  Nate glanced over at him with a sudden frown. “Of course, you know her better than I do. You’ve grown very close.”

  Esa shook his head at Nate. “Don’t make me your excuse, I’m not in your way. I’m only making it clear to you that I need to read Audrey’s e-mails.”

  Nate didn’t take this in. He looked up at the clouds assembling over their heads, the familiar rolling darkness that collected over the Bluffs, blanking out the white light of the stars.

  “Yes, fine. Read anything you want. Read it all, there’s nothing there.”

  Esa got to the point of his visit. “There were a lot of e-mails about financials.”

  “You mean the boat? Surely you think it’s reasonable that I refused her the boat.”

  “I do.” He said this with the certainty of a man with two younger sisters, neither of whom he wanted out on the Aegean attempting the work of the Coast Guard. “But I wasn’t thinking of the boat. Woman to Woman burned through several hundred thousand dollars in the past four months. Do you know where that money went?”

  “Every cent of it. We didn’t burn it, Esa. It went to relief and resettlement work.”

  He looked shamefaced as he said this and Esa grinned. Nate hated being praised. He would do anything to avoid congratulations.

  “And plane tickets?” he asked, recalling something Rachel had told him.

  “Plane tickets?” Nate looked at him. “To come home, you mean. I booked Audrey an open ticket so she could come home when she was ready.”

  “What about that withdrawal from her personal account? And why are you notified when Audrey spends money from that account?”

  “Why do you move into the Forest Hill house whenever your mother is away?”

  Their eyes met in acknowledgment of their brotherly guilt. They were prone to overstep their bounds; Ruksh and Audrey frequently fought their interference. In Nate’s case, the intrusiveness was understandable—he’d become Audrey’s guardian when their parents were killed. Esa preferred not to examine his own protectiveness too closely.

  “So you’ve been monitoring her bank account,” he said. “What else? Credit cards?”

  “And a satellite phone.” Nate anticipated his next question. “The last time she called me was two weeks ago. Since then, the phone’s been out of service. No one picked up at first. Now the phone is dead.”

/>   Khattak took the number down. He would get Gaffney working on phone records, and assign Declan to sort out Audrey’s financials.

  “You think she bought a boat?”

  “I do.”

  “What do you think she did with it?”

  Nate’s sigh was deep and worried. “I’d like to think she used it to help this boy in some way. Perhaps he had family on the Turkish coast that she wanted to bring across. Knowing Audrey, she wouldn’t stop there. What if she was doing her own patrols?” He swallowed. “What if her boat capsized at sea, and she drowned like so many others?”

  Esa was following his own line of thought. He used it to distract Nate from his fear.

  “I can think of a reason why someone would kill a French Interpol agent. Agent Bertin may have been asked to stem the tide of refugees en route to Calais—she would have been a threat to smugglers. But what I can’t fathom is why someone would shoot the boy. What threat could he have posed? And why were they shot with Audrey’s gun?”

  “I shouldn’t have given it to her,” Nate said with great bitterness.

  “How did you get it?”

  “Legal means. I applied for a license for Audrey, I had her take the test. I picked the gun myself, to clear international customs.”

  “There was no forensic report in the file I received,” Esa mused. “How did the Greek police connect the gun to Audrey?”

  They made their way back into the house. Little arrows of lightning had begun to pierce through the clouds. The rain would be on them soon.

  “Another stupid decision. I had the gun engraved with Audrey’s name.”

  Esa bit back the words that rose to his tongue. Nate blamed himself as it was. He didn’t need to tell him he should have consulted Esa.

  “There is one other thing, Nate.”

  Nate stopped to look at his friend. His face was tired, his gold hair uncombed, his shirt and slacks were rumpled.

  “You reviewed Audrey’s requests for money—you flagged the money for the boat. Did anything else strike you? Any smaller, regular transactions?”

  Nate frowned, trying to remember. “There was payroll—I was a bit embarrassed at how little we spent on payroll, but Audrey wanted the bulk of the funds to be spent on the people she’d gone there to assist, not on administration. Most of our staff are volunteers. We pay expenses, but we don’t pay salaries.”

  “So on the islands you’d have how many salaried staff members?”

  “Only one, I think. Shukri. Audrey didn’t take money from the foundation. We have offices on two islands: Lesvos and Chios. Audrey split her time between them, but I don’t know if she had some particular reason for being on Lesvos that day.”

  “Maybe something took her there,” Esa said. “Something that involved Interpol and this boy that nobody knows.”

  Nate walked him to the door. “You don’t think Audrey is involved, do you? You must know there’s a reasonable explanation for her disappearance.”

  “She didn’t kill an Interpol agent, I know that. But she’s involved in this somehow—we’ll figure it out, Nate.” He gripped his friend’s shoulder. “Try and get some rest before the flight.”

  He was almost at his car when he looked up at the house again. The outdoor lights were on, illuminating the circle of the driveway. Nate stood on the porch, his eyes reflecting a curious amber light.

  An unaccustomed impulse flickered through Esa’s mind. He hadn’t been entirely honest with Nate. Nate caught his mood at once.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s really done this time, isn’t it. You and Laine.”

  Nate came down the steps, his face oddly anxious under the outdoor lights. Rain was falling in a drizzle, glazing the stones on the driveway. Diamond drops studded Esa’s hair.

  “There’s something wrong with Laine, something different about her. I have to admit I’m worried, I wish I could say otherwise.”

  Esa had noticed it too, though he didn’t view it as his business. And he wondered if this was ground they were going to tread again, when they both had more pressing concerns.

  “What?” Nate looked worried, this time on Esa’s account.

  “You care what Rachel thinks of you, you’ve taken an interest in her.” He held up a hand before Nate could deny it. “It’s none of my business, I know. But I know Rachel better than you do, and I can tell you she hasn’t had it easy.”

  “I know about Zach, I’ve met him.”

  Esa shook his head. “It’s not just Zach, so you need to be careful.”

  He unlocked his car, searching for a way to say what he meant, thinking of both his friends. He decided to be frank even if it caused Nate some injury.

  “Don’t hurt her,” he said. “The things you break aren’t easily repaired.”

  Toronto, Canada

  Khattak let himself into his mother’s house. He knew she would rouse herself in the middle of the night if it meant she could see him before he left for Greece.

  The lights in the entrance hall were on; he heard the quiet clink of china from the living room, accompanied by feminine laughter. His mother was entertaining. He must have been so preoccupied with making arrangements that he missed the car on the street.

  When he’d placed his keys on a table in the hall and entered the room, his mother’s face brightened with joy. He walked over and embraced her, kissing the soft skin of her cheek. He greeted her guest, a dynamic woman his mother’s age, by the name of Emily Banks. A retired defense attorney, she was married to Justice Kelly Morgan, a luminary of the court. Khattak had never appeared in her courtroom without wishing he’d been better prepared. Kelly Morgan and Emily Banks were known for hosting salons where the glitterati of the legal world gathered to gossip and to drink unfathomably expensive champagne. His mother had met Emily at one of these salons, invited by mutual friends. Emily and Judge Morgan were two members of her group.

  When Khattak had met Emily before, he’d found the encounter as challenging as when he’d crossed swords with Judge Morgan. She was a well-dressed, elegant woman with an imperious manner of speaking that made him feel like a boy. He smiled inwardly when he realized he was gripping his mother’s hand. He kissed it lightly and settled her in her seat.

  The preliminary courtesies concluded, he explained he’d be leaving for Greece, but wasn’t expecting to be away long.

  Angeza Khattak passed him a cup of tea and placed a bowl of savaiyaan at his elbow. This was a dish of vermicelli noodles cooked in milk and saturated with sugar. It was Khattak’s favorite dessert: he associated it with his mother’s love, and with his father’s joyful return to their home in the wake of Friday prayers.

  His mother was wearing a Kashmiri shawl over traditional clothing. Embroidered with soft pink paisleys, it made her look young and fresh. She was telling Emily that Esa had been summoned by the prime minister, and as always in his mother’s hands, his accomplishments were embellished in the telling. Emily inquired about his trip with a skeptical lift to her brow.

  “Are you conducting the prime minister’s business or your own? Or are you looking for another family for your mother to sponsor? Come to think of it, Inspector, why aren’t you a member of our group? Or of any other private group?”

  He finished his dessert before answering, taking a moment to consider. Emily was too sharp to be given a hint of what he was about. He couldn’t lay the blame on Nate, and he couldn’t mention Audrey’s disappearance.

  He settled for the briefest explanation by calling it a routine inquiry, and focused on the second part of her question. “My line of work is quite sensitive. It’s possible that because I’m a police officer, my involvement in a sponsorship group would raise a conflict of interest. But if you don’t mind, I’d like to ask you some questions about the process.”

  He’d realized that Emily might be able to shed some light on the Fakhris’ refusal to speak.

  “I know you sponsored a family as part of a private group. Is there a difference between
a private application and one with a family sponsor?”

  Emily Banks set her teal and gold cup in its saucer with a clink. Esa’s father had purchased the Elizabethan Lucerne tea set on the occasion of Esa’s birth. His mother used it whenever he came to see her.

  “You’ve really kept yourself aloof, haven’t you?”

  This was too much for his mother to bear. “Emily, please. I rely on Esa completely. He’s too modest to tell you the details.”

  Embarrassed, Esa brushed aside this praise. He’d given his mother the funds to support the sponsorship at the level she wished, but it was an action he preferred not to advertise.

  He waited for Emily to continue. A little surprised, she did.

  “Yes, there’s a difference. A private effort can be difficult. You raise the funds and you volunteer your time. There are also other issues—interfering in the lives of strangers isn’t easy. Family cases, on the other hand, are fast-tracked because sponsors are invested in the outcome. There’s less pressure on the government, so the sponsorship process is streamlined.”

  A distinct advantage, then, to the boy who’d hoped to come to Canada. An advantage the Fakhris had refused him. If there was no family connection, it made sense. There was also the possibility that the responsibilities Emily was describing—emotional and financial—were too onerous for the Fakhris to handle. Denying the connection might have been their only way out. He couldn’t shake his impression that Dania Fakhri had lied.

  “Do private sponsors take on individual applicants?”

  Emily Banks looked doubtful. “Girls, maybe. Otherwise, I wouldn’t think so. Our group, for example, sponsored a family whose circumstances were extreme.”

  “In what way?”

  Emily waved a hand. “Their medical needs. The children still need counseling. They were traumatized by the crossing. Their father suffered an injury—a peculiar one for a lifeboat passenger.”

  Esa frowned. “A near-drowning? Not so peculiar, surely?”