A Dangerous Crossing--A Novel

by Ausma Zehanat Khan

  Shukri tapped the table with her palms, exasperation plain on her face.

  “She was meant to come to Lesvos and assist us. To coordinate efforts between the two islands where we have set up offices: Lesvos and Chios. She was supposed to take over management of the budget, but she spent so much money. So many supplies. Where did they all go? I began to notice discrepancies.”

  “With the medical supplies?” Rachel asked. Her first thought had been of prescription drugs, an easy thing to traffic to raise additional funds.

  “No,” Shukri said, surprised. “The medical supplies are kept under lock and key—I hold the key. I’m careful about inventory because the authorities do spot checks. Your paperwork has to be in order, everything has to add up.”

  “Where were the discrepancies, then?”

  “Life jackets, office supplies. What a girl she is for using up our office supplies. Our printers running until the generator blew out. I don’t know how many boxes she filled with what she was printing, and when I asked her, what is this, where is it going, she didn’t have anything to say. And what she did say I didn’t believe.”

  Rachel edged forward in her seat, the pastries on her plate forgotten. “What did she say, Ms. Danner?”

  “She said it was shadow paperwork for the Greek immigration authorities.”

  “Shadow paperwork?” Khattak frowned. “I’m not familiar with the term.”

  “No one is, Inspector. Audrey said the Greek government wanted copies of every application we filed for asylum in Canada—additional registration paperwork.” She shook her head doubtfully. “Even if that were true, it wouldn’t have added up to material that needed to be stored. And it’s a violation of an applicant’s privacy. Refugees get registered in Greece so they can move on. They don’t need to make their case with the authorities of two separate countries.”

  “How big were these boxes?” Rachel was thoroughly intrigued.

  “Not that big. The size of shoeboxes, I suppose, perhaps a little wider. But there were so many of them, twenty, maybe twenty-five in all.”

  Khattak rose to his feet. “We’d like you to show us these boxes. And if you could point out anything else that you may have found odd, that would be helpful.”

  Shukri rose as well, adjusting the flowing yellow scarf with a practiced flick of her hand. Rachel noticed a colorful hairpin near her ear: a clump of white-and-yellow daisies.

  “I wish I could, Inspector. Those boxes are no longer on Lesvos. Audrey moved them from the island two weeks ago. The day before she disappeared, in fact.”

  Khattak paused to look at her. “They’re at your offices on Chios, then?”

  Shukri folded the remaining pastries into a napkin. She tucked them into her capacious yellow handbag. “Waste not, want not,” she said with a smile. “No, not on Chios either. I don’t know where she took them—perhaps, as she said, to Athens. That girl is never in one place for long.”

  “She was back and forth from Athens, you mean?” Rachel said.

  Shukri looked from Rachel’s face to Khattak’s. “You really don’t know very much about what she was doing here. I thought you’d come to ask me where Audrey has gone.”

  Khattak tensed. “You don’t think she was taken?”

  Shukri shook her head with emphasis. “The arguments we had were not about me taking Audrey in hand, though perhaps this is what you were led to believe. I was trying to rein in Audrey’s tendency to distraction. And more importantly, to extravagance.”

  Rachel was flummoxed by this. It didn’t sound as though they were talking about the same person. To be sure, she pulled up a photograph of Audrey on her phone and held it up to Shukri Danner. “This is Audrey Clare. Is this the woman you mean?”

  Shukri’s beautiful, round eyes widened. “Yes, of course. I know Audrey, I’ve known her for many years. She hired me personally as W2W’s refugee resettlement coordinator.”

  Then why had Audrey lost faith in Shukri’s efforts on Lesvos and Chios? What had prompted her to send her complaints to Nate via e-mail?

  “You said you were worried by Audrey’s extravagance. How was Audrey spending the NGO’s money?”

  Shukri led them to the door, her yellow head bobbing. “She was supposed to oversee our efforts to fast-track cases. But truthfully, she’d been taking holidays, booking plane tickets with the funds set aside for refugees.”

  An odd note in his voice, Khattak asked, “Was she going anywhere in particular?”

  “Everywhere,” Shukri said firmly. “France, Austria, Germany, Holland. And back and forth to Turkey nearly every week, as if we didn’t need her help here on Lesvos.” She made her hand into a fist. “We need volunteers, we need paid staff so badly. The major relief organizations—they’re hardly present on Lesvos. Everything you’ll see at camp is managed by volunteers.” She paused, taking in the island’s green hills. “And of course, by the great kindness of the Greek people. The islanders have shown a compassion beyond anything we expected.”

  Though Rachel wanted to know more about the crisis, she directed Shukri back to the subject of Audrey.

  “Do you have any idea why she went so often to Turkey? Was that where she purchased supplies?”

  “I think it was more than that, because she had those two children in tow.” She paused for a moment. “They might even be here now, they haven’t been processed yet, at least not through Woman to Woman.”

  “Two children,” Rachel said in a neutral tone of voice. Sami al-Nuri may have been the first. Who was the other?

  “Yes. I guess that’s something else Audrey didn’t tell her brother. There was a boy with her—a young man, I suppose. And a very pretty little girl. To see a child in these conditions—cold, hungry, frightened—to see any of them suffer what they’ve experienced, and what they don’t yet know is coming—it breaks your heart, Sergeant Getty. It breaks your heart every damn day. So if I don’t seem too worried about a woman who couldn’t commit to the work she came here to do, that’s the reason why.”

  She wasn’t callous or indifferent, Rachel thought. She was overwhelmed. And when they reached the gates of Kara Tepe, Rachel understood why.

  Kara Tepe, Lesvos

  They’d been described as hordes, as swarms, as a flood, as an invasion, as groups of gangs, as “rapefugees,” with the British press leading the charge. These debates framed refugees as migrants: in England they called for gunships to be used to intercept the boats at sea. For the Calais Jungle in France, the prescription was sending in dogs.

  It was the flipside to the mainstream Canadian coverage of the same issues, though perhaps this was because the crisis was so far from Canada’s shores. Canada was upholding its Refugee Convention obligations, and the angry counterpoint to this proud internationalism was a murmuring many Canadians had rejected.

  It could change, Rachel knew. It would change if refugees were accused of serious crimes. The voices of the extremist right would emerge. Part of Rachel’s work at Community Policing was to keep track of the impact of hate groups on minority communities. She wasn’t oblivious to what had transpired in the country in the past decade. She’d seen the effect of creeping anti-Muslim hate on her partner; she knew it affected his work. Elements of that sentiment had bled into the parliamentary inquiry, and into Khattak’s suspension from Community Policing. She was on the watch for it now, in a way she hadn’t been before she’d started to care so deeply for Khattak, making his burdens hers.

  The little taxi driven by a friendly local resident named Dmitri pulled up at the gates of the camp. Her first look at Kara Tepe gave Rachel reason to reconsider the framing of these issues. She was brought face-to-face with the urgent realities of the crisis.

  Two things struck her at once: the muddy ground beneath her feet and the securitized aspect of the shelter. The Kara Tepe camp was designed to host a thousand refugees transiting through, in hopes of resettlement in another country. The camp resembled a miniature town, with shelter tents laid out like hous
es on a street grid, and designated waiting areas for those who needed their paperwork processed. But the entry point for those hoping to enter was presaged by a concrete border that ran below a barbed-wire fence.

  A drizzle of misery coated the camp: people stood in long lines where makeshift cardboard signs designated a long list of country names. Whether these were processing directions, or someone’s humorous attempt to point the way home, Rachel couldn’t tell. She had expected the camp to be a hub for Syrians fleeing their country’s civil war. But the list was more expansive than that: Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Libya, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sudan, Yemen, Somalia, and Eritrea were all represented on the sign.

  Rachel began to question her knowledge of current affairs.

  It wasn’t just young, single men who formed the queues. There were mothers and fathers, grandparents, cousins—dozens and dozens of children.

  Their credentials passed inspection, and as they left the checkpoint behind, the sprawling nature of Kara Tepe became apparent to them both. Khattak was as silent as Rachel, watching families gathered around bonfires contained by sleek black oil drums, and children darting out to play from the haphazard shelter of their tents.

  The UNHCR had organized a few neat rows of their sturdiest, most spacious white tents. Beyond these, scattered across a horizon of dirt-brown, shrub-studded hills, were thinner, colorful tents pitched upon patches of land. A handful of NGOs had attempted to impose order upon the confusion: there were tents for food and clothing, tents that dispensed tea, tents for medical evaluations and paperwork.

  The cement wall that supported the official complex was covered in graffiti and slogans. Children had painted hopeful pictures of sunshine over gardens of bright purple flowers, others had written slogans: No Borders, No Walls. Freedom of Movement. Those who were too tired to wait in queues, holding children or a fragile bundle of possessions in their arms, had slumped down against the barrier, exhausted by the journey they’d taken to arrive here.

  Volunteers moved around the camp, most with purposeful expressions or cheerful smiles of welcome. A few looked frazzled as they were asked for help with translation; Rachel could see translation was one of the greatest needs of the camp.

  She found the sights and sounds overwhelming. Laundry hanging from the stunted branches of trees, families huddled together in the cold, children inadequately dressed for the weather. A startlingly pretty child crossed in front of her path, beaming a smile at Rachel. She was wearing a heavy black coat that was too big for her—she might have been seven or eight years old, petite for her age but with a bold personality behind her mischievous eyes. She cupped her hands together to form a heart above her own. Rachel smiled back at her and waved.

  Shukri showed them the tent that formed Woman to Woman’s base of operations. It was cordoned off by official police tape, though the seal at the entrance was broken.

  Khattak looked around the camp, searching for something he didn’t find. “Where did Audrey sleep? Where are her personal possessions?”

  Shukri nodded at the tent. “Everything is there. Audrey stayed on Lesvos, I was over at Chios. We haven’t been allowed back in, so Audrey’s things should still be there.”

  “You haven’t been allowed in on whose authority?”

  A woman came out of the tent. She was dressed in a blue jacket with the Interpol insignia: a globe held by a pair of branches, not dissimilar to the United Nations logo, if one discounted the sword thrust down behind the globe.

  “My authority,” she said. “Come in, I was told to expect you.”

  “The scene’s been cleared?” Khattak asked.

  “Yes. The technicians have been and gone.” She pointed a dismissive finger at Shukri in her pretty yellow headscarf. “You can come back when we’re done.”

  To Khattak she said, “Follow me.”

  Rachel entered last, a shivery sensation causing her to glance over her shoulder.

  The child in the black parka was watching her, her large dark eyes unblinking.

  16

  Kara Tepe, Lesvos

  The Interpol agent was a French national of the same rank as Khattak in her nation’s police force. She had the whipcord energy of a greyhound, and a narrow-eyed, edgy approach to international cooperation. Her name was Amélie Roux, and because she treated him so brusquely, he took his time looking over the tent, ignoring her bristling impatience. He wanted to set the tone for the interview, to settle the ground at once.

  The tent was partitioned into two sections: a front area for intake work, consisting of two tables and a handful of chairs, and a back end with several cots and additional blankets spread over another plastic chair and the ground. Audrey’s suitcase was missing, as were her laptop and any personal effects, though he spied a familiar pair of sunglasses on a pillow on the cot. At the very back, a locked cabinet displayed a selection of first-aid supplies: bandages, tubes of antiseptic ointments, an assortment of over-the-counter medication. Khattak frowned at this. Did the meager contents of this cabinet match the inventory Shukri had described? He didn’t think so, though he didn’t say as much.

  Officially, he’d been sent to cooperate. Unofficially, he would not support either the Greek authorities or the French in an assumption of Audrey’s guilt. When he’d satisfied himself that he hadn’t missed anything, he offered Roux a plastic chair, helping Rachel to another before he took one himself.

  He didn’t break the silence. Though he and Rachel hadn’t been shown photographs of the scene, he could tell from discoloration of the plastic tarp what the position of the bodies had been. He made a mental map in his mind, trying to reconstruct the scene from the few facts in his possession. He waited until Inspecteur Roux had lit her cigarette, then he said, “I’m very sorry about your colleague, Agent Bertin. Please accept our condolences.”

  Inspecteur Roux held her cigarette away from her mouth, between the tip of her thumb and forefinger. It wasn’t a studied gesture or an elegant one; Khattak guessed it was second nature to the woman he’d already pegged as an adversary.

  She blew smoke through teeth that were stained with nicotine.

  “Tell me about Audrey Clare,” she said.

  “What can you tell us about your investigation so far? When exactly was Audrey taken?”

  “Taken?”

  He’d used the word deliberately to sound her out.

  “What makes you think she was taken?” Roux held up her hand, counting off on her fingers. “She was the last person seen in the tent. Two people were killed here—she was in contact with both. They were killed with her gun, and the next thing you know, our Canadian friend disappears from the scene. So I ask you again, police officer to police officer. What makes you think she was taken?”

  Rachel made an awkward sound of interruption. “I suppose my first response would be this. Two gunshots would resound through this camp—the way everything’s packed together so tightly, the sheer number of people. If Audrey Clare had shot two people in this tent, wouldn’t someone have seen her flee the scene?”

  Roux stared at Khattak. “You let your subordinate speak for you?”

  Khattak stifled a grin. He could almost see Rachel’s raised hackles.

  “Sergeant Getty is my partner. And I think she’s asked you some excellent questions. I can rephrase them, if you like, but it will come to the same thing in the end.”

  He caught Rachel’s startled expression from the corner of his eye. She hadn’t expected him to take this tack: direct and confrontational. And if Rachel thought he was being discourteous, he probably should recalibrate. He was still on edge from his disastrous conversation with Sehr—with the helpless sense of not knowing how to regroup.

  The crushing reality of the refugee crisis should have wiped his personal affairs from his mind; he was disturbed it hadn’t.

  Amélie Roux rested her palms on her knees, her cigarette precariously held. The cool insouciance of her pose reminded him of Marlene Dietrich. He could see she didn’t give a dam
n what they were doing here; she certainly didn’t intend to share her findings.

  “Where are you from, Inspector?”

  “Canada.”

  She dismissed this by flicking the ash off the tip of her cigarette. “You look like those boys on Afghan Hill.”

  Khattak made no reply. She must have seen his distaste, because she let the subject drop. If it had been a genuine inquiry into his background, he would have given her a forthright answer. It wasn’t, and they both knew it.

  She took a deep drag of her cigarette, stubbed it out, and now she leaned forward so that her face was close to Rachel’s.

  “The gunshots were heard just after midnight. It was dark, no one saw Audrey Clare leave the scene. No one saw anyone, for that matter, so that in itself is not exculpatory.”

  “What about those streetlights at the perimeter? They look like they light up the camp fairly well.” Rachel had noticed them on the ride in.

  “Not this far up the road. It’s nearly pitch-black at night here. These tents don’t have an independent electricity source, people muddle through as best as they can.”

  Rachel pointed to the generator at the back of the tent. “This one does.”

  “So the light goes inside, eh? Not outside.”

  Khattak could see this was plausible. And it was a little more cooperation than he’d expected. He decided to be more forthcoming.

  “The Canadian prime minister enjoys a close relationship with your president. It’s in the interest of both our countries to resolve these murders quickly. I’m happy to tell you what we’ve learned on our end, just as I want to assure you of the personal interest the prime minister has taken in the welfare of Audrey Clare.” He tried a smile—its only effect was a narrowing of Roux’s eyes.

  But she must have seen the wisdom of his remarks, because she offered more.

  “We are not at this point treating Mademoiselle Clare as a suspect. We have issued a Blue Notice.”