Siro

by David Ignatius

  “I have to go to the ladies’ room,” he said to George.

  Taylor took another long drink of vodka, rose from his chair, and headed toward the bathroom. His course led him near the table where the mystery man was sitting. He was tall and tanned, with blond hair and an athlete’s body. As Taylor passed the table, he noticed that the man was talking in Turkish—not perfect, but not bad either. He gestured when he talked, reminding Taylor of one of those slick young television preachers on Sunday mornings before the football games started. Taylor visited the men’s room and then returned to his seat, curious for more information about the Turkish-speaking American but wary of tipping his hand.

  “Georgie,” said Taylor, putting his hand on his friend’s shoulder.

  “Do some reconnaissance for me, will you? Find out who this guy is.”

  “Who am I, workwise?”

  “An expat businessman based in Athens.” George nodded and strode toward the American, grinning like a Shriner out for a night on the town.

  “Hey, asshole!” said George as he approached the table. The blond-haired man bolted upright in his chair and whipped his head around.

  “Who are you calling asshole?”

  George broke into a broad smile. “Sorry, pal,” he apologized. “Just wanted to see if you were a fellow American.”

  “North American,” said the blond.

  “How’s that?”

  “I’m a Canadian.”

  “No kidding. Wow!”

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  “Take it easy. My name’s Henry. I’m just in from Athens.” George extended a meaty hand, waiting for the younger man to introduce himself. He didn’t.

  “You visiting, too?” asked George, compulsively friendly as only an American traveling abroad can be.

  “I work here.”

  “No kidding. What do you do? I’m a salesman myself. Electronics, from Korea.”

  “I make films,” said the young man, obviously hoping that George would go away. He nodded apologetically to his two Uzbek guests.

  “Oh yeah? What kind?” asked George, leaning on the table.

  “Documentaries. I’m working on a film about Soviet refugees in Turkey.”

  “Hey. Wow. No kidding. Who are these guys?”

  “Some of my subjects. They are Uzbeks.”

  “Hi, fellas,” said George. “Can I buy you guys a drink?” The Uzbeks smiled and nodded uncomprehendingly.

  “No,” said the filmmaker abruptly. “I have to leave soon. We were just finishing our conversation when you interrupted us.”

  “Oh, sorry. Hey, I’ll leave you alone then. You got a business card?”

  The Canadian grudgingly handed him a card, hoping to get rid of him. It identified him as one Jack Rawls, employed by a concern called Filmworks, with an address in Vancouver.

  “I’m from Ohio myself,” said George.

  The Canadian cut him off. “Nice meeting you, asshole,” he said. He gave George a thin smile and turned back to the Uzbeks.

  George returned to the dark booth, where Taylor, sitting alone, had nearly finished the bottle of vodka.

  “He’s a Canadian,” said George. “His name is Jack Rawls. Or at least that’s his work name. He says he’s a filmmaker.” He handed Taylor the Filmworks business card. Taylor studied it a moment.

  “Bullshit,” he said. “Whoever heard of a Canadian filmmaker in Istanbul? It’s ridiculous.”

  “Definitely.”

  “What’s he like?”

  “Spooky,” said George. “He talks a little funny. Like a Canadian, I guess.”

  “Company man?”

  “Maybe,” said George. “He does sort of have the look, doesn’t he? What’s he doing here anyway?”

  “Beats me. But if someone back home is running a NOC into my territory, I want to know about it. I’m sick of being jerked around.”

  “Calm down, Al.”

  “Fuck you,” said Taylor. He was drunk and angry, and looking to make trouble. It was a mood like the one twenty years earlier when he had stood up in his dormitory room one Saturday afternoon, unzipped his fly, and urinated out the window. Across the room, Rawls was getting up from his table and going to the bar to pay his bill.

  “Listen,” said Taylor, his eyes lighting up. “Why don’t we find out where Mr. Jack Rawls lives when he’s not in Vancouver.”

  “How?”

  “Follow him.”

  “He’ll catch us.”

  “No, he won’t. My driver is a pro.”

  “Not now,” pleaded George. The lights were dimming. It was almost time for Sonia’s last set of the night. The band was beginning to tune up.

  “Yes, now,” said Taylor. “Come on. This is important. It’s for his own good. Rawls could get in trouble. He doesn’t know the neighborhood.”

  Taylor looked over his shoulder. Rawls was near the door.

  “Come on, goddammit! I promise I’ll make it up to you. I introduced you to Sonia, didn’t I?”

  George moaned at the mention of her name.

  “Move it!”

  George was a soldier. He dutifully picked up his canvas bag and walked out behind Taylor, who was weaving slightly from the booze. As they neared the door, George caught a glimpse of the chanteuse in her stage costume, looking even more beautiful than before. “Come back,” she said, blowing him a kiss.

  Rawls was already in the street, hailing a taxi. Taylor waited in the shadows until Rawls was safely off, then summoned his driver and told him to follow the taxi at a discreet distance.

  The trip confirmed Taylor’s suspicions. Rawls took the taxi back across the Galata Bridge to Pera, then pulled over when he reached the divided highway that ran along the edge of the Golden Horn. He then crossed the median strip and caught another taxi—a Murat sedan with a dented door—heading in the other direction. Taylor watched carefully as this little street ballet was played out. He didn’t think Rawls had detected them, but if they continued to follow him in the same car going the other way, he surely would.

  “This guy is definitely a spook!” said George. “I learned that same trick at the farm.”

  “Fuckin’ A.”

  “Now we’re screwed.”

  “No, we’re not,” said Taylor.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I got the tag number of the second cab.”

  Rawls’s cab had almost certainly headed back across the Ataturk Bridge to the old city. Taylor told his driver to wait several minutes and then head for the taxi stand in Sultanahmet Square, across the water, which was a gathering spot for cabbies at this hour. When they arrived, Taylor wrote the license number of Rawls’s taxi on a piece of paper. He gave it to his driver along with five thousand liras and told him to make some inquiries. The inquiries turned out to be rather brief. For just then a yellow Murat sedan with a dented door cruised to the end of the taxi queue.

  It took just a thousand liras to encourage the taxi driver to confide that he had just dropped off a tall blond man at an address just off Yeniceriler Street. When they arrived there several minutes later, Taylor realized to his chagrin that they were back almost to where they had started, in the immigrant district near the university.

  “This guy is beginning to piss me off,” said Taylor. He had the driver continue on another two blocks and park the car. Then he and George returned on foot to Rawls’s apartment building.

  The only light on in the building was the one in the right-hand apartment on the third floor. That must be Rawls’s place, reasoned Taylor. Now they knew where he lived. So what? Taylor was standing in the shadows, wondering what to do next, when the light on the third floor went out.

  “Night-night,” said George.

  But Rawls wasn’t going to bed just yet. A few seconds later he emerged at the front door and, after glancing quickly up and down the street, set off again, heading back toward Yeniceriler Street. Where the hell was he going? What was he doing in Istanbul?

  “Now what?�
�� queried George. “Follow him again?”

  But that wasn’t the right answer. An odd look had come over Taylor’s face, a smile so wide that the moonlight seemed to glint off his teeth. It had dawned on him that for the second time in forty-eight hours he had been presented with one of those moments of serendipity—so inviting that it almost compelled a mischievous response.

  “Let’s piss on this guy,” said Taylor. He meant it as a term of art. George nodded. It would not have occurred to him to question Taylor’s judgment. Second-guessing was for lawyers and congressmen.

  “You got your tools?”

  George nodded again. Of course he had his tools. He had lugged them along all night long, from whorehouse to Central Asian cabaret.

  “What else have you got?”

  “Everything.”

  “Mike?”

  “Yup.”

  “Recorder?”

  “Yup.”

  “Then let’s wire this son of a bitch up and teach somebody a lesson.”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “Absolutely.” said Taylor.

  Taylor and George crossed the street. The front door was unlocked, which seemed like a further provocation. Taylor looked for a doorman, who might be trouble, but there was nobody in the dim and dusty hallway. So he led George gently up the stairs to the third floor and stood guard while George once again tuned his little orchestra of electronic gadgets. It was absurdly easy to bug the room. He drilled a hole and inserted a contact microphone that could pick up sound from the other side of the wall. It had a built-in transmitter, and when George had covered the hole, it was invisible from either side. All that was left was to put the receiver-recorder somewhere out of the way. George put it under a floorboard on the stairs heading up to the roof of the building.

  “This one is a beauty,” said George. “It should be good for a month, unless this guy talks in his sleep.”

  “That’s nice,” said Taylor. By this time, he had sobered up. The pleasure of this last, entirely unauthorized adventure had given him a second wind. They found the car, awakening the poor driver from a sound sleep. Taylor told him to go back to Omar’s. But by the time they got there, it was almost five o’clock. Sonia had left long ago and the only person still there was the night watchman. Taylor suggested other possibilities. He knew a call girl in Cihangir who liked to work mornings. He knew a club on the Asian side that never closed. But George wouldn’t hear of anyone but Sonia.

  Besides, admitted George, he was getting a bit tired.

  George flew back to Athens the next day. Taylor hadn’t planned it that way. He had instructed George to spend the day in bed, dreaming of Sonia, with whom he would absolutely, positively have a date that evening. But Taylor called just after eleven to report that the chief of station in Athens was grumbling about what he claimed was George’s unauthorized absence and wanted him back immediately. Taylor didn’t mention that he had received a similar call from Timmons in Ankara, in which the good name of headquarters was invoked.

  Taylor gathered he was in the doghouse. Apparently he had not covered his ass quite enough to suit the paper pushers. Probably best not to make matters worse, he advised George, by telling anyone about the little caper the previous night with the mysterious Mr. Rawls. They would keep that to themselves, wouldn’t they? Of course they would. George told Taylor how to retrieve the tape from the recorder outside Rawls’s apartment, and he gently reminded Taylor that he would at some point need another microphone and recorder to replenish his inventory.

  “No problem,” Taylor assured him. And he was sure it wouldn’t be. The little flap over George’s not quite authorized visit would pass like a summer rainstorm. The management-by-objectives crowd might be momentarily peeved. But wait until they began reading the take from the bugged chair in the Soviet consulate and the tales of Bulgarians and smuggled guns. Someone might even get a promotion.

  10

  The Ottoman chair, it turned out, wasn’t for Kunayev’s office at all. After three days in the basement of the Soviet consulate, where it transmitted the sound of rodents and blackbeetles, it was moved to Kunayev’s residence in Bebek, a suburb of Istanbul just up the Bosporus. Taylor took the news stoically. The operation wasn’t a total loss. Kunayev seemed an interesting fellow. Perhaps he was screwing the maid at home. Or better yet, the chauffeur.

  But Kunayev unfortunately was not such an interesting fellow, after all. The Soviet diplomat appeared to lead an ordinary and relatively blameless existence: He liked to drink whiskey, he shouted occasionally at his wife, he played Benny Goodman records on a scratchy phonograph, and he entertained a string of Eastern bloc diplomats who were surely among the dullest people in Istanbul. His Lithuanian wife listened to a better class of music, but otherwise her life seemed as unexceptional as her husband’s. She was a busy woman, who left the house often to go shopping or run errands. But there was no reason to suspect that she was seeing a lover.

  Kunayev’s real problem was the company he kept, Taylor decided. That first week, he gave two formal parties at his home. One was for a visiting delegation of metallurgists from the Ukraine who were attending a conference at Istanbul Technical University. The transcript went on for pages of obscure shop talk about the latest trends in international metallurgy. Eventually one of the Ukrainians got drunk and insulted another member of the group, bringing the evening to an abrupt close. The other big event of the week was a dinner in honor of the Yugoslav consul general and his wife. Kunayev turned out his version of the A list: The East Germans were there. So were the Romanians, and the South Yemenis. Kunayev did his best to try to elicit information from the Yemeni diplomat, but it was evident that the poor man had no idea what was happening back in Aden. Taylor felt sorry for Kunayev. His work seemed even more boring than Taylor’s own.

  After two weeks, Taylor reluctantly concluded that the Kunayev bugging operation was unlikely to rewrite the history of the Cold War. Indeed, despite Taylor’s earlier claims to headquarters, it seemed doubtful that Kunayev was even an intelligence officer.

  The Turks didn’t seem to mind. Taylor delivered to Serif Osman, with great ceremony, a compilation of the first two weeks’ material. Serif was pleased. He made reference to the historic friendship between MIT and the CIA and promised to study the material with the utmost care. Headquarters didn’t seem perturbed either. Quite the contrary. Timmons was delighted. So were his bosses, and so were their bosses. Processing the transcripts gave them something to do back home, it seemed. They were “product.” It didn’t matter that it was gibberish, because no one with any common sense—no one who might dare to ask: “Who cares about Ukrainian metallurgy anyway?”—would actually read it.

  They assigned Kunayev a cryptonym, CKJACK, and began asking all kinds of questions about him. Did he gamble? How many glasses of water did he drink in an ordinary day? How many children did he have and where were they studying? Did he appear to have any unusual sexual interests? The more questions they asked, the more paper they generated, which in turn enhanced the status of the operation. Timmons suggested that one of his men in Ankara, a Russian speaker, take over the case and Taylor happily complied. The whole business had begun to embarrass him.

  The only thing that struck Taylor as the least bit interesting about the Kunayev household was the wife’s evident interest in Islam. She spent hours listening to tapes of what sounded like sermons, in a Turkic dialect that Taylor couldn’t understand. She talked often about the subject at home. Kunayev himself, half Kazakh, sounded uninterested. Taylor assumed at first that she was trying to impress him, trying to learn the culture and become a good Central Asian wife. But it was more than that. One day she actually put on a head­scarf and went to see a local mullah, who was said to be friendly with the Iranian ambassador. Another day she went to a lecture at the Islamic Literary Society at Yildiz Palace on the rites of the various Sufi orders, also known as the dervishes.

  Taylor tried to read the agent’s report with a straight
face. It seemed there were whirling dervishes, howling dervishes, barking dervishes, weeping dervishes, moaning dervishes. One order of dervishes instructed its followers to repeat the name of Allah 78,586 times to achieve enlightenment. Alternatively, the word wahid, expressing the oneness of God, could be repeated 93,420 times. Or the word aziz, expressing God’s preciousness, could be repeated 74,644 times. In addition to these eccentricities, the lecturer at Yildiz Palace had explained another interesting fact about the Sufi brotherhoods. They formed an invisible chain stretching from Turkey east across Central Asia, the lecturer said. And for that reason, the Soviet authorities had been working unsuccessfully since the 1920s to eradicate them. Through this long discussion, the Soviet consul general’s wife had taken careful notes, according to the surveillance report.

  An unusual woman, Taylor concluded. There was one more interesting fact about Silvana Kunayeva. She had a habit of disappearing. The Turkish watchers would be following her into a crowded store, or down a sidewalk jammed with people at rush hour, and they would lose the track. She wasn’t doing anything suspicious. She wasn’t doing anything at all. They simply lost track of her.

  Then, one day in late spring, it ended. A Russian workman arrived at Kunayev’s residence and put the Ottoman chair in a wooden crate. The sound of hammer and nails was almost deafening for the poor transcribers. The crate was taken back to the consulate, where it waited for several days. Then it was put on an embassy truck, taken to the airport, and loaded aboard a Soviet plane.

  Taylor at first assumed the worst: The bug had been discovered and they were shipping the chair back to Moscow Center for more study. But he was wrong. Inquiries at the airport revealed that the chair wasn’t bound for Moscow at all, but for Alma-Ata. And accompanying it was Kunayev himself. Discreet inquiries by several friendly diplomats revealed that the Soviet consul general was returning to his native republic for a brief home leave. He had even boasted to an Indian diplomat that when he went home he would be meeting with his cousin, the party first secretary of Kazakhstan. The chair, Taylor finally understood, was a gift—an elaborate piece of baksheesh. At last, Taylor felt a measure of respect for Kunayev. The corrupt little man was trying to kiss the ass of his political patron.