An Aegean April

by Jeffrey Siger

  “Are you suggesting my cop boyfriend might have friends on the other side of the law?”

  “Depending on which side of that line you place our politicians, I’d say he’s got a healthy following in both camps.”

  Maggie smiled and threw Andreas a kiss. “I’ll have him call you in the morning. Yassou.”

  Andreas waved. “Bye.”

  He picked up a pencil with his left hand and began tapping it on the desktop as he scrolled with his right hand through the document on his computer screen. It was one of many he’d read that afternoon discussing the refugee situation. This one, though, came from FRONTEX, the European Border and Coast Guard arm of the EU responsible for border management. His eyes fixed on the first two sentences under the heading, “Eastern Mediterranean Route:”

  In 2015, 885,000 migrants arrived in the EU via the Eastern Mediterranean route––17 times the number in 2014, which was itself a record year. The vast majority of them arrived on several Greek islands, most on Lesvos. Virtually all were seeking asylum as refugees entitled to protection under international law from situations where their life or freedom would be under threat.

  The route ran directly through Greece’s Northern Aegean islands, and although the EU’s March 2016 agreement with Turkey had dramatically reduced the flow along that route, it also emboldened Turkey to threaten to open the refugee floodgates any time its government felt displeased with the EU.

  Andreas read on.

  People-smuggling has developed into an important industry in Turkey, with networks active not just in Istanbul but also in Izmir, Edirne, and Ankara. The nationalities of people smugglers vary, frequently mirroring the nationality of their customers.

  “An important industry in Turkey,” struck Andreas as an understatement. Depending on whether a migrant wanted to make the promised two-hour crossing to Greece in a rubber boat built to hold twenty passengers but packed with fifty, or upgrade to a metal boat built for forty passengers filled with ninety, the price varied from a low of 500 euros in winter for the rubber boat, to a high of 2,500 euros in summer for the metal boat. Other traffickers offered a different proposition: 900 euros per person for a landing involving a two-day walk to where processing asylum applications began, or 2,500 euros to arrive closer by.

  He already knew that stiff prison sentences for smugglers kept traffickers out of the boats, requiring refugees to pilot their own way across the sea––hopefully, but not always, with enough gas to reach their destination. Some smugglers, though, did risk piloting jet boats across to Greece in a much faster crossing, but the associated risk of capture commanded a price two to three times the normal fee.

  Before the Turkey-EU agreement went into effect, the price for smuggling a family of four from Turkey via Greece’s islands into Europe cost on average between eight thousand to twelve thousand euros, or two to three thousand euros per person.

  Andreas used his pencil to make some quick calculations. Those nearly nine hundred thousand migrants who made the sea crossing in 2015 generated approximately two billion euros in revenue for the traffickers. Assuming the EU-Turkey agreement reduced crossings by as much as eighty percent in 2016, and without taking into account all that the traffickers managed to steal from the refugees, they still made hundreds of millions of untaxed euros in 2016.

  God knows how much they’re making now.

  Andreas put down his pencil. The most mind-numbing figure of all for him he found in a report from the European Commission’s Office of Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection: 65.2 million people worldwide were in dire need of protection and assistance as a consequence of forced displacement from their homes.

  Sixty-five million. That was six times the population of Greece.

  Andreas blinked. Lesvos dealt with a half-million refugees in 2015, nearly six times its population, and they’re still coming. Amazing, he thought, how things have stayed as calm as they have there.

  He shook his head. The money made by arms-traffickers in fomenting wars that cause millions to flee for their lives leads directly into moneymaking opportunities for refugee-traffickers and their labor- and sex-trafficking colleagues looking to extract the most desirable and vulnerable of the fleeing.

  Trafficking enterprises generated tremendous cash volumes, requiring huge money-laundering operations that inevitably brought down legitimate businesses. After all, a bakery, restaurant, or you-name-it sort of retail establishment, set up in a high-volume, upscale location that existed primarily to clean black money, ultimately forced businesses needing to make a profit to survive to choose between closing down or selling their businesses and properties to their money-laundering competitors on desperation terms.

  It’s not just the smuggled refugees this trafficking scum victimizes. It’s all of us.

  Andreas leaned back in his chair. A lot of money must be behind whoever killed Volandes. His killer was too smooth and professional to work cheap, and not one likely to leave tracks. Without a break, they’d never find the killer. Make that a damn big break.

  Andreas turned off his computer and headed for the door. Now he had something else to pray for in church.

  Chapter Four

  In his experience, if you tried very hard, you might get Greeks and Turks to agree that they shared a common sea. But good luck at getting one or the other of them to admit they shared much more, such as food, coffee, or some rather distinct cultural practices. Four hundred years of Turkish rule, and decades of bloody wars, slaughter, and unrelenting conflict, had irreparably soured the two nations on each other.

  Maybe things between Greeks and Turks weren’t that bad these days on a person-to-person basis, but he didn’t care if they were. He couldn’t have cared less what happened to any of them. Or to Syrians, Afghans, Iraqis, Pakistanis, you name it. They were all the same. Sub-groups of the same lot, trying to pass themselves off as something better than they were.

  Greeks could claim they were European all they wanted, but not to him. Line Arabs up on one wall, true Europeans on another, and put Greeks in the middle. No question where they belonged. And toss in the Italians, too. They’re just like the Greeks. They even shared the same phrase for describing how much alike they were: “Same face, same race.”

  He looked at his watch. They were late. They should have been here with his money twenty minutes ago. Naturally, they’d been right on time when they needed him. Now that he’d done the job and it was time to pay up, they were nowhere to be found.

  He sat sipping his Turkish coffee. It tasted the same as the Greek coffee he’d had in Mytilini that morning, as he waited for the ferry to bring him back to Turkey on the hour-long crossing to Ayvalik.

  Same people, same coffee. They didn’t deserve his services. But they paid well. At least promised to.

  He watched a dark van drive slowly past the park lined in palm trees on the other side of the street. The second time he’d seen it. If his contacts were inside, they should have stopped. They’d told him to sit and wait on a bench in the park across from the café, but they couldn’t be so amateurish as to have expected him to do that. A stranger sitting in an empty, darkened park draws attention. This was Turkey. Police were aggressive here.

  Not like in Greece. He hadn’t seen a cop the whole time he’d waited outside the harbor for the ferry. And the one who’d checked his papers when he boarded barely looked at him. He probably could have carried the sword on board and no one would have said a word. But it was better to have hidden it. Maybe after things cooled down he’d go back for it. It was his favorite.

  He looked at his watch again. If they didn’t show soon, he’d go find them. He knew where one of them lived; the stocky one with the limp hadn’t been careful after their last meeting. Sloppy.

  The van turned around at the end of the park, and headed back in his direction on the café’s side of the street. He noticed a sliding door along the rear of the v
an’s passenger side; there’d been none on the driver side. He glanced at the young couple sitting at the table directly in front of him, casually rocking a baby carriage between them. He slowly slid his chair to the right, toward three huge ceramic planters sprouting palm trees.

  He’d picked this table because of the planters, leaving the more desirable table in front of the palms to the couple with the carriage. They’d thanked him as if it were their lucky day.

  The van slowed as it pulled up parallel to the café, and the side-panel door slid abruptly open.

  He dived for the planters as muzzle flashes exploded just ahead of the characteristic spurting clicks of an AK-47 running on full-auto. He hugged the ground while bullets sprayed the café, cracking the planters into bleeding soil, but not collapsing. Ten seconds later he heard the door slam shut and the van speed away. He heard no other sounds. Not from the couple, not from the carriage.

  He crawled to the edge of the closest planter and tentatively peered around it to see whether they’d left a man behind to make sure he was dead. That’s what he would have done.

  No one. Sloppy. Very sloppy.

  He stood and glanced at the couple and the carriage. Bad luck.

  He walked away.

  l l l l l

  From the tiny balcony off the third-floor apartment atop the tired, yellow-stuccoed hotel, you could see across the sea to the lights of Lesvos. The promised land for so many seeking a way into the EU from Turkey.

  A man in his underwear sat in the dark in front of a soundless, flickering television, his tightly braced left knee propped up on an ottoman in front of his chair. He flicked his cigarette ash into a saucer on his lap and took another slug of beer from the can in his other hand, his eyes glued to the muted screen.

  Even as a low man in the organization he’d made a fair amount of money off the kebabs, his favorite nickname for refugees. Others in the smuggling trade called them fish or cement blocks. He’d like to have been one of the middlemen working the streets of Izmir or any of the other places along the coast drawing refugees looking to hook up with smugglers. That was how you made real money, steering them to your boss for commissions, but he didn’t speak their languages or have the necessary relationships in the migrant neighborhoods. Those sorts of jobs fell to Syrians, Afghans, Iraqis, and Tunisians. Some of them were so good at what they did that they partnered with Turks who owned the staging points used to launch the boats toward Greece.

  But that would never be his life. He’d have to settle for doing the grunt work for his boss’ business, like finding places for refugees to stay until the launch, getting them food, life jackets, and other equipment.

  He wasn’t complaining. He made side deals with the various suppliers, and as long as they kicked back to him, he didn’t give a damn if the food sucked or the life jackets sank. That, plus what he managed to steal from the migrants while herding them into the boats, made him a good living. Sometimes near the end, they’d resist and he’d have to stab one or two, or even pull a gun to get the others’ attention.

  None of that bothered him because they’d all likely end up having to swim for their lives anyway, losing their possessions in the process, or being robbed by someone else along their route north. Why shouldn’t he profit, rather than a Greek or some other Balkan-type laying hands on them on their way to Germany, Sweden, or another of those prosperous places in northern Europe?

  Northern Europe. That’s where that blue-eyed blonde came from. He even went by the name Aryan, according to his boss.

  He shook his head at the TV. Still no news.

  If Aryan is an important enough assassin for his boss to recruit him from northern Europe just to kill one old Greek shipowner, why did he want him dead too? The assassin’s fee was the rough equivalent of what they made off a boatload of refugees on a busy day. It made no sense to kill him. His boss should have paid him and been done with it.

  But his boss told him, “No loose ends.” Like they were in some American gangster movie.

  Aryan hadn’t been where they’d told him to meet them, and that turned things messy. They’d had to drive around the neighborhood until they found him. But they had, and they got him. They’d seen him fall.

  The man heard the neighbor’s dog bark, as it always did when a stranger walked by. That was a good thing, because living directly across from the beach you wanted to know when strangers came around. It barked again. Then stopped.

  Whoever had been out there must have moved on. Good doggie.

  Still no news on the TV. He had to hand it to Aryan, he knew his business. He’d personally delivered his boss’ instructions to Aryan that he wanted a meaningful message sent. Slicing the old man in half sure as hell did that. It even made the Turkish news.

  He shook his head, took another slug of beer, and dropped the empty can on the floor.

  His boss saw the shipowner as intent on destroying the sea- route smuggling business he’d worked so hard to develop into Greece. The damn Greek would have done the same thing to every sea-trafficker’s business into Greece, and into Italy, too, if given the chance to show the Italians that his anti-smuggling plan worked.

  There wasn’t nearly as much sea-trafficking business into Greece these days as in the glory days of past. Smugglers had been forced back to using old land routes across Turkey’s narrow Evros River border with Greece, and then north skirting FYROM’s notorious fence with Greece, or along new routes through Albania. According to his boss, though, sooner or later the big money would flow again into everyone’s pockets. But only if the rich shipowner’s plan never came to pass. The shipowner had to be stopped to protect the future of his and every other smuggler’s business.

  The TV flashed a banner across the screen. Here it comes. He grabbed the control and turned up the volume.

  “Just in,” said a young man wearing a dark mustache in the manner of President Erdogan. “Local police report a drive-by shooting in a seafront town south of Ayvalik. First reports have three killed. It has all the hallmarks of a PKK terrorist attack.”

  Too bad about that couple in front of Aryan in the café, but at least we got him, and their deaths made it look like a terrorist attack, not a hit. That should make his boss happy.

  “The victims have not been identified, but it’s been confirmed that the dead are Greek tourists, all from the same family.”

  “Family?” He turned up the volume.

  A photo appeared on the screen behind the anchor’s head. “The dead include a husband, wife, and their six-month-old child.”

  He stared at the screen, swallowed hard, and shut his eyes.

  We missed him.

  His mobile rang. He knew who that would be. “Yes, boss.”

  “You killed an entire family.”

  “Had to.”

  “And missed the only one I wanted dead?”

  “I don’t know how that happened.”

  “I do,” screamed the boss. “You’re a total fuck-up!”

  “The police will never trace this back to us. They think it’s PKK.”

  “I’m not worried about what they think, I’m worried about him.”

  “Aryan?”

  “He’s not going to let this go.”

  “He doesn’t know who we are or how to find us.”

  Pause.

  “I want you over here right away.”

  “It’s almost two in the morning.”

  “I know what time it is. The television has it posted across the screen, along with photos of a dead family. But no dead Aryan. Just get over here, and bring your numb-nuts van driver friend with you. Now.”

  The phone went dead.

  He drew in and let out a deep breath, then pressed a speed-dial number on his mobile and spoke the instant he had a connection. “Haydar, it’s Jamal. Pick me up at my place in fifteen minutes. The boss wants t
o see us.”

  “Why?”

  “Are you watching TV?”

  “No, I was sleeping.”

  “I’ll tell you when I see you. Just get over here.” He hung up the phone.

  This didn’t look good. Jamal knew first-hand what his boss did to those who failed him. He took a deep drag on his cigarette and tried to ignore his trembling hand.

  Good thing he’s married to my sister.

  l l l l l

  Jamal stood by a patch of tired oleander in front of the dimly lit hotel entrance, waiting for Haydar to pick him up. He stared up the road running along the beach, searching for headlights. Nothing. He looked at his watch. Ten minutes late. His brother-in-law must be going nuts.

  His sister had married well. They lived in an elaborate villa on a hillside overlooking the sea, surrounded by acres of green and no neighbors. That last part worried him. A lot of deep holes could be dug on that property without anyone being the wiser.

  He prayed his sister would be home when he got there.

  The neighbor’s dog barked loudly. Jamal spun around. He saw no one. He felt edgy; maybe the dog did, too. Could have picked it up from him, dogs are like that. He reached in his pocket for his phone and called Haydar.

  “I’m on my way,” came blurting out of the phone.

  “Where the fuck are you? I told you the boss wants us at his place right away.”

  “I had to find new wheels. The police are looking for the van.”

  “You saw the news?”

  “What did you expect me to do when you woke me up asking if I’d been watching television?”

  “Just get over here.”

  “I’ll be there in three minutes.”

  Jamal put the phone back in his pocket. He rubbed his hands together and hunched up his shoulders. It was cooler out than he expected.

  The boss is going to kill us both. He shook his head. No, not me. Maybe Haydar.