Siro
Page 27
“Go ahead,” said Hoffman. “Read it.”
“ ‘Moscow. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency was blamed by a Soviet newspaper today for Italy’s current wave of political violence. The daily Sovietskaya Rossiya said CIA agents were inspiring gangs of left-wing and right-wing extremists to throw bombs and shoot around corners at democratic leaders.’ ”
“Get that? ‘Shoot around corners.’ Finish reading.”
“ ‘At CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, the agency’s covert-operations section is working night and day on plans for provocations, murders and political divisions in Italy, the commentary said.’ ”
“Wonderful! The local paper in Athens, capital of one of our NATO allies, is printing raw KGB press releases. Oh well, another fuck-up. What can we do? So let’s see what’s happening on the home front, with the world turning to shit and us taking all the blame. Bingo, here’s a story on page six. You’ll like this one. ‘Lesbian Policewomen Win Back Pay,’ reads the headline. And I quote: ‘Six former Boise policewomen fired by the city in 1977 for alleged homosexual activity have been awarded $103,000 in back pay, tax payments and attorneys’ fees.’ Isn’t that nice? Aren’t you glad to see our law-enforcement community worrying about the really important things?”
“You really are an asshole, Mr. Hoffman,” said Anna. She stood up.
“Hey, sit down. We were just getting down to business.”
“Not me. I’m leaving.”
“Calm down.”
“I am calm,” said Anna. She walked to the door and opened it. “Boy, was Stone wrong about you. He said you were a crank, but that you were worth the trouble. I feel sorry for you, to be honest. You really are pathetic.”
Hoffman countered with an obscenity, but it didn’t matter. Anna was gone.
The phone rang in Anna’s room the next morning at seventh-thirty. “This is your wake-up call,” said a male voice.
“I didn’t leave a wake-up call.”
“Okay, this isn’t your wake-up call. It’s Frank Hoffman. I’m calling because I owe you an apology.”
“That’s okay,” said Anna. “Forget it. Goodbye.”
“Don’t hang up. I mean it. Let’s have breakfast and we’ll talk about it.”
“No.”
“You gotta have breakfast, honey.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Yes. You do. I already ordered it.”
“You what?”
“I already ordered breakfast for you. I hope you like scrambled eggs.”
“You can’t do that.”
“I already did. I know people here at the hotel. It’ll be up to your room in about fifteen minutes. So will I.”
“You can’t come up to my room.”
“Why not? You have a suite, right?”
“How do you know that?”
“I told you. I have friends at the hotel. See you soon.”
Anna was tired of arguing and hung up the phone.
Hoffman arrived bearing flowers, in addition to the breakfast tray. Not just a bouquet, but a whole trolleyful of orchids and gladioli and tulips. Anna wasn’t sure she would open the door until he started singing. It sounded like an impromptu medley from Kiss Me, Kate, but it was hard to tell because Hoffman’s voice was so gravelly and he dropped so many words. Anna decided to let him in—breakfast, flowers, Cole Porter and all. What else could she do?
“You were right last night,” said Hoffman when he was seated and attacking his share of the breakfast tray. “I did act like an asshole. And I’m sorry. Really. I feel terrible.”
“Stop apologizing,” said Anna. “You’ll make me feel guilty.”
“Good,” said Hoffman, shoveling scrambled eggs into his mouth with a piece of toast. “I want you to feel guilty. Guilty enough that you’ll renew your offer.”
“What offer? I never made an offer.”
“The offer you were going to make, to have me help you and Stone in your little Soviet caper, whatever it is.”
“Why do you want to help?”
“Because I’m bored. And patriotic. And because you people need me.”
“I thought you didn’t like Stone.”
“Stone’s all right. Too smart for a dumb guy like me. But it’s not his fault the world’s fucked up.”
Anna looked carefully at the large man eating breakfast so enthusiastically before her in the sitting room of her hotel suite. He was still wearing the same peculiar gold ornament around his neck that she had noticed the night before. It looked like a small life preserver.
“What’s that?” asked Anna, pointing to the gold piece, changing the subject and giving herself time to think.
“A doughnut,” said Hoffman.
“Why?”
“Because I like doughnuts.”
“Oh.”
“I tell some of my Saudi friends that it’s an award I got from the agency. I say the ‘O’ stands for operations. They like that.”
“But it’s not an award.”
“No, like I said, it’s a doughnut. But it doesn’t matter what it is. The Saudis like it because it’s big and heavy and expensive. They’re very size-conscious, the Saudis. One of them actually offered to buy it from me. Can you believe that? How can you respect people like that?”
“I see,” said Anna.
“So listen. What kind of job do you have for me?”
“I didn’t say I had any job.”
“I know. But if you did, what would it be?”
Anna was thinking, as he talked, that since joining the agency, she had met only one person who was as outrageous as Hoffman, though in a much nastier and more dangerous way, and that was Ali Ascari. It occurred to her suddenly that these two gentlemen might make a perfect match, Frank and Ali.
“I can tell you a few things about the operation,” said Anna. “The rest is code word.”
“Yeah, yeah. Sure. Code word.”
“We have an Iranian asset. His family is from Baku, in Azerbaijan. He claims to have contacts who are operating across the border, smuggling radios and VCRs and Korans. And maybe also some guns. We’d like to tap into his network and use it.”
“For what?”
“For our operation.”
“Remind me what that is again. I don’t remember too much from last night.”
“I didn’t tell you much.”
“Well, tell me some more. Can I borrow your jelly, by the way?”
“Sure,” said Anna, handing him the jelly container.
“Go on, tell me. While you’re at it, let me borrow a piece of your toast.”
Anna laughed. Hoffman was impossible not to like, at least in the morning, when he hadn’t been drinking. “Stone starts from the same place you do, actually,” she said.
“Does he, now?”
“He thinks the agency is dead in the water.”
“He’s right.”
“He thinks the only thing we can do, for now, is try to scare the Russians and buy some time.”
“How?”
“By using people like the Iranian I was telling you about, to make the Soviets think that Central Asia and the Caucasus are coming apart.”
“And you’re looking for someone to run the Iranian and his smugglers.”
“Correct.”
“That’s wild. It doesn’t sound like Stone, though. It’s too crazy.”
“I don’t know. Maybe Stone has gone to seed, too.”
“What a happy thought.”
“So? What do you think?”
“It’s weird, and it’s dangerous. And I have a sneaking suspicion that it ain’t legal. But who cares. I like it.”
“What do you mean, that it isn’t legal?”
“Forget it. What do I know? I’m no lawyer. The point is, I like it. Count me in.”
“But I haven’t asked you yet.”
“I know, but you will. Face it. You need a cranky old woman-hating son of a bitch like me.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“Ali Ascari.”
“Where does he live?”
“London and Tehran. But he travels a lot, on three passports. One of them is Greek, as a matter of fact.”
“Oh, is it really, now? That little detail ought to come in handy.”
“As leverage?”
“Fuckin’-A right. When can you arrange a meet?”
“I still haven’t offered you the job.”
“Well, why don’t you think about it while I get rid of the breakfast dishes.”
Hoffman picked up the trays, knocking over a coffee cup, and walked to the door. He deposited them outside the room and returned. Anna didn’t have to think very long. She recognized that Hoffman’s raw energy—the crude, blunt, burnt-out rage of the man—fit the operating style of the odd little enterprise doing business as Karpetland. It functioned off the books, and so did Hoffman.
“So what’s the verdict?”
“So how would you like a job, Frank?”
“I think I’m in love,” said Hoffman.
27
Fortunately Hoffman had to leave that afternoon for a business engagement in Dubai, so he was gone before he could do anything that might have caused Anna to change her mind. This sudden conclusion of her business in Athens left Anna with a free day on the town before her flight back to Washington. Her first thought was to spend it sunning herself at the swimming pool maintained by the Athens Hilton. But after a stroll through the cabanas, which were filled with men in too small bathing suits and women falling out of their bikini tops, she decided that the Hilton pool was not her scene.
Anna’s scene was something closer to a library. So after studying a map, she set off walking from the hotel in the general direction of the National Library, a place she had wanted to visit on previous trips to Athens but had never quite gotten around to. She made her way past Syntagma Square and its touristic jumble of airline ticket offices and tacky cabarets, toward Omonia Square.
The library was an immense neoclassical pile, just past the university and the Hellenic Academy. A little man in a uniform at the front desk asked where she was going; Anna, without thinking about it very much, said she wanted to see the Ottoman history collection. The oppressive burden of graduate school was by now far enough in the past that she actually did want to see the Ottoman collection. Other people collected ancient coins or catalogued species of bugs. Anna’s area of useless specialization was late-nineteenth-century Turkish history. The guard at the front desk directed her to another guard, up a flight of stairs and down a very long hall, who in turn directed her to an owlish man who sat in the shadows of a large, cryptlike office. The man in question was the curator of the Ottoman history collection. His name was Jannos.
“What are you looking for?” he asked Anna dubiously. He spoke in a very precise, clipped English.
“Just browsing.”
“This is not an area for browsing, madame. You have to know very much even to know what to look for.”
Anna decided to lie. “I’m a doctoral candidate in Ottoman history at Harvard.” It wasn’t a big lie; more a change of tense.
“I see,” said the curator, still dubious. “What is the topic of your dissertation?”
“Administrative Practices in the Late Ottoman Empire, with special emphasis on the management of ethnic conflict.”
“I see,” said the curator. He finally seemed convinced that she was legitimate.
“How extensive is your collection?”
“Very extensive, madame.”
“Any new acquisitions?” she asked idly.
“No,” said the curator. “Only the Albanian material, which is temporarily on loan to us.”
Anna almost missed what he had said. “Excuse me,” she asked. “Did you say the Albanian material?”
“Yes, madame. From the Bibliothèque Nationale in Tirana.”
“You’re kidding!”
He was offended. “I assure you that I am not kidding. Why are you surprised? We have reciprocal exchanges with many national libraries. We may not be Harvard University. But we are quite modern here, you know.”
“I wasn’t being critical. I was just surprised. The Albanians have some documents I was looking for—am looking for, I mean—for my thesis.”
“And what documents might those be?”
“The Ibrahim Temo papers. He was one of the founders of the Union and Progress Committee.”
“Ah! I am sorry.”
“You don’t have them?”
“Not anymore, madame.”
“What do you mean?”
“We did have some of the Temo documents, but only very briefly. It was necessary to return them to Tirana, one month ago.”
“Oh no!” said Anna. “That’s awful.”
“You see, we are quite a modern library.”
“Now I’ll never see them. The Albanians don’t give visas to Americans.”
“I am very sorry.”
Anna was disconsolate, suffering under that special weight of regret that comes from discovering—too late—that you might have had something, had you only known it was available. Even the snippy curator could see that she was upset.
“Madame, if I may suggest. Perhaps you would like to see the Greek scholar who worked with the Temo collection while it was here?”
Anna’s eyes brightened. “Yes, I suppose I would, if that’s possible.”
“Let me see if he is here. Please sit down.”
The curator disappeared down a dark corridor and was gone for ten minutes. He returned with a tall, thin young man who had the colorless skin and sunken, affectless eyes that marked him as a denizen of the library.
“I’m Lucy Morgan,” said Anna. The young bibliophile trembled slightly as he shook her hand. His name was Andreas Papadapoulos; it turned out that he was a doctoral candidate himself, whose dissertation—if he could ever finish it—was to be on nothing other than the life and works of Mr. Ibrahim Temo. Anna began to quiz the young Greek about the documents, but the owlish curator put his finger to his lips.
“Silence in the library, please,” he said.
But Anna was determined to share, at least vicariously, in the Temo archive. So with gentle prodding, she prevailed on the skittish Mr. Papadapoulos to join her for lunch.
“Did you really get hold of Sukuti’s trunk?” Anna asked him when they were seated in an outdoor café near the university.
“Excuse me?” The poor young Greek looked as if he might jump out of his pasty white skin.
“Oh, come now, Mr. Papadapoulos. You know very well what I’m talking about. The trunk in which Ishak Sukuti kept the early records of the Union and Progress Committee. The trunk he tried to send to Temo, which Temo finally picked up at Yildiz Palace and took back with him to Romania, and which finally ended up in Albania.”
“Oh, that trunk,” said Andreas. “How do you know so much about Sukuti’s trunk?”
“Because I spent a summer chasing it myself, in Istanbul. In Beykoz, to be precise, where Temo’s daughter was living. I thought she might have it.”
“Natalia Temo.”
“Yes, Natalia.” She nodded. Evidently he knew the whole story. Rationally, Anna knew that she had no reason to feel jealous. She wasn’t a graduate student anymore. She had no academic subspecialty to protect. Still, it bothered her that someone—this frightened Greek scholar she had never met or known the existence of until a few minutes ago—had found and appropriated to himself something that ought to have been hers.
“So tell me. I’m curious to know what’s in the great Temo archive.”
“It is hard to say,” he answered warily. “I am still working on my research.”
“Don’t worry, Mr. Papadapoulos. I won’t steal your material. If you want to know the truth, I’m not really a graduate student anymore. I’ve dropped out.”
“Oh,” he said. He seemed slightly reassured. “Well, I can tell you a few things. The Al
banians didn’t let me have all the papers, and I only had several months to examine them. But I have found a few interesting things.”
“Tell me whatever you can. I’m dying to know, actually.”
“Yes, perhaps I can tell you a little,” said the young Greek. He wanted so much to be nice, especially to an attractive, if slightly intimidating American woman. “What I have found is that the Temo papers include most of the Young Turks’ international correspondence from 1889, when they were founded, until about 1895.”
“I already know that, Mr. Papadapoulos. That was the period I was examining in my dissertation.”
“Yes, of course. So what is interesting about these papers is that they show the Young Turks had a network of contacts throughout the provinces of the Ottoman Empire, and even in many areas of the Russian Tsar’s empire. I have found among the papers much correspondence among branches or affiliates of the Union and Progress Committee. They had branches in Salonika, in Izmir, in Paris, in London.”
“What about the branches in the East?”
“Yes. I have found correspondence with them, too. With affiliated groups in Baku, in Tashkent, in Bukhara—all places that were at that time controlled by the Tsar. And most interesting of all, I have found correspondence with affiliates in Christian areas—in Yerevan in Armenia and Tbilisi in Georgia.”
“So the committee had a network throughout the Caucasus and Central Asia?” asked Anna. As she spoke, she was thinking of another network. One that existed, for now, only in the mind of Edward Stone.
“Yes, that is right.”
“And it cut across the ethnic boundaries.”
“Excuse me?”
“I mean, the network included people who, in other contexts, didn’t get along. Armenians and Azeris. Georgians and Tatars. Greeks and Turks.”
“Yes. I suppose that is true.”
“Hold on. Is it true or not?”
“Yes. On one level it is true. The Union and Progress Committee said that it was for equality of all ethnic groups that had lived within the boundaries of the Ottoman Empire. Armenians, Kurds, Greeks. Bulgarians. Copts. Even Jews.”
“But on another level it wasn’t true?”
“You must understand, Miss Morgan. These people in the Union and Progress Committee, they were spies. They always operated on several different levels.”