Even whisky on top of two pills barely touched him. The Turkish stuff tasted okay but there was no fire in it – it dulled but it didn’t warm and God he needed warmth, against the cold that sat at the heart of him and in every eye he caught. They knew. They all knew, and if they didn’t hate him for his complicity they scorned him for his weakness. He had lost his wife to disease and his daughter to the devil and at least one of them was his fault.
Tonight he was sitting at the bar, and for an hour or two or God knows how long Erol kept him topped up, and then there came a moment when he wouldn’t pour any more. Effendi, he said – home. Effendi, please. Abraham could see the pity and concern in the man’s face and knew they were genuine. Good for us we can’t communicate. If he knew what I’d done – what I’d let happen – he wouldn’t have me in here at all. He’s as much a fool as I am. All fools. All the drinkers, trying to drown our responsibilities in this muck and all we dissolve is our wits.
Why did she hate him? Being here forced the question that had been waiting beneath his thoughts. For taking away her friends and her life and dropping her on the edge of a vast, cold city, that was why, and it was enough, surely – even if it had been unavoidable, because the decision could have been made no other way; the help Ester had needed couldn’t be found in Cairo. But that wasn’t the reason. The reason wasn’t too much reality but not enough of it. He’d never mourned. His wife was gone as surely as if she were dead and he’d let the pain sit in a corner of his soul, screened off, unfaced, deadened to an ache that never left him.
There was poison. It had made them both sick, and when those men came to groom her they found traces in her system already.
They hadn’t started it. He had. All this was on him.
‘Erol. My friend. Tell me. You have children?’
It took a moment, but Erol understood.
‘Evet. Children. Yes. Two children, a boy and a boy.’
‘They are good children? Good boys?’
‘Very good boys.’
Erol said it gravely, as if no question could be more serious.
Abraham nodded, thinking and not thinking.
‘It is a tightrope. Understand? A rope you walk on like this and nothing either side. I thought I was on it. But I was so far away. So far.’
With an arm across his shoulder Erol helped him down from the stool and walked with him to the door.
‘Effendi. Taxi. Please.’
‘Erol, I can walk on my own. Thank you. Sorry. I have to walk on my own.’
He was asleep in his clothes when the door burst open and the light came on and the voices started shouting, and he felt it all before he registered any of it. There were men there, more than he could count, men in black clothes, and one of them, maybe two, pulled him off the bed and dragged him into the corridor and before they handcuffed him behind his back and marched him away he saw others emptying his case onto the floor.
‘Hey,’ he managed to say, and that one word brought him into himself and released a great pain in his head and a greater sickness in his stomach and it was all he could do not to vomit. The hands on him were strong, they gripped hard, and they took him past the lift and half hauled, half threw him down the stairs, just supporting him. The sickness mingled with fear. These weren’t Kurds. They had polished boots, proper uniforms, they looked like police, they had the same disciplined rage as that English pair who had come to see him in his old life that no longer existed. So they’d found him. Now there’d be an interrogation and in a place like this maybe they’d beat him and then what? A Turkish prison and deportation and a legal fight and his reputation shot? His reputation. He’d never had a reputation. He was about to get one.
And the worst of it was that he didn’t care. This crusade was always doomed. He’d failed as a doctor, he’d failed as a father and now he had failed in this. Even as he was being thrown about there was a sort of peace in knowing it. He had found his level.
At the first floor they didn’t shove him down the next flight of stairs but along the dark corridor that ran under his own. Some of the doors were open and guests, all men, had been drawn in their pyjamas and vests by the noise. At the far end three police officers stood by the last room, arms crossed, guarding whatever was inside, watching Abraham as their two colleagues drove him towards them, and now they stood aside so that he could see, or be seen.
Abraham didn’t hear the shouting back and forth that followed; even if he’d been able to understand it he wouldn’t have heard it. His eyes, which had been slipping around, were set on one thing, the body that lay hunched awkwardly in the corner of the wall and the wardrobe, its head dropped onto its chest, its blood soaked into a white T-shirt that was now barely white at all.
An officer was crouching by it. Now he stood and came to Abraham, stopped with his face only six inches away, chin up, eyes hard.
‘This man, you know?’
‘No. No, I don’t.’
The officer shouted back into the room and another policeman went to the corpse and pulled the head back by its hair. Abraham saw the dead face and the strange echo of fear in its blank eyes and turned away.
‘You know?’
Oh Christ. This was bad. Oh Christ. Why had they come for him? They knew something but in this fucking state he couldn’t work out what they could possibly know, this whole world was beyond him, he wasn’t made for it.
‘He came to my room.’
‘Who is?’
‘I don’t know. He came to my room with another man. They were looking for something.’
The officer jutted his chin, said something in Turkish, and the two men holding Abraham began to drag him away.
‘I didn’t do this.’
But the officer just turned and went back into the room.
*
His cell had damp walls that had once been white, a filthy mattress on a metal frame, and a single bulb in a cracked yellow plastic casing that gave out a sickly light. Bars ran across the foot of the bed; at its head the end wall had been stained brown where a thousand prisoners’ heads had rested, and above it, like a taunt, hung a photograph of forested mountains in a white plastic frame. Abraham sat with his knees drawn up and his head in his hands and did his best to breathe in the airless stench that filled the place, a heated stink of damp and disinfectant and piss.
Time passed, he had no idea how long. Once, someone came for him, and despite the bleakness of his situation he felt the most intense surge of hope; but the policeman who stood there just said four or five words in Turkish through the bars and then left before Abraham could ask the questions he desperately wanted to ask. The waiting for heaven-knew-what resumed.
The next time, two policemen came and took Abraham up through the police station and along corridors to a bright office where dawn was beginning to show through the blind that covered the one high window.
Vural was there. Dressed in his creased suit, and as lively as Abraham had seen him. His eyes were sharper, whiter, less hooded. He nodded at Abraham, and said something in Turkish to the two policemen, who hesitated for a moment, unsure. Then he nodded, and waited, and thanked the pair of them as they left, shutting the door behind them. He had a white mug in his hand and now he set it down on the desk in front of him and pushed it towards Abraham, gesturing to him to sit. Black coffee. If anything, the smell made things worse.
‘Abraham, I know this will happen. Something like this.’
‘Vural. Is that really your name?’
Abraham’s tongue stuck in his mouth as he said the words.
Vural nodded.
‘Vural, can I have some water? I need water.’
Vural frowned.
‘I can see you need. Is thirsty, your work last night. One moment. But please, no tricks, yes?’
‘I don’t want any trouble.’
‘I know this.’
Vural stood and left the room. Abraham looked at the open door and wondered what was going on. Was it an invitation? Did they want him to run so that they could shoot him in the back?
Before any answer came, Vural was back, a small bottle of water in each chubby hand.
‘Here. Drink.’
The water was ice cold and brought him back to himself, a degree. Vural waited for him to finish with his forearms resting on the desk, hands clasped together. Somehow, he was transformed. No sniffing, no oiliness. His voice was hard and his eyes shone.
‘Vural, I didn’t kill that man.’
‘You are here to go to Syria, to be ISIS, to be with your daughter.’
‘I . . . I don’t want to be with her.’
‘The dead man, he knew this, and last night he exposed you. So you killed him.’
‘I didn’t kill him.’
‘Where were you last night?’
‘At the hotel. I went to that bar, the Golden Lion, and then I went back to the hotel. To my room.’
‘When were you there?’
‘I don’t know. I . . . I drank a lot. I was drunk. I had some bad news.’
‘What news?’
‘My daughter. She’s married.’
‘You see? So you must join her in Raqqa.’
‘No, I don’t—’
‘What time you were in your room?’
‘I don’t know. Nine. Ten. The bar owner, Erol, he would know when I left.’
‘Someone saw you at the hotel?’
Each question came quick and crisp.
‘No. I don’t know. I didn’t notice.’
‘How much you drink, Abraham?’
Abraham closed his eyes tight. Enough.
‘I don’t know. A lot.’
‘You go right to bed?’
‘I passed out.’
‘What time?’
‘I told you. I don’t know.’
Vural paused, nodding, then set off again.
‘Abraham, do you keep a knife?’
‘A knife? No. Of course not.’
‘There is no knife in your room?’
‘No.’
‘If my friends in the polis look in your room they will not find a knife?’
He smiled as he said it. It wasn’t a question, it was a hypothetical. A new avenue of fear opened up. They could do that. Of course they might do that.
‘No. No knife of mine.’
Another pause.
‘What if someone saw you come from your room at two a.m.?’
‘No one saw me. I didn’t leave my room until those men arrived.’
‘Which men?’
‘The police. Your colleagues.’
‘I am not their colleague.’
Vural reached across the table for the mug of coffee.
‘You don’t want?’
Abraham shook his head. He was beginning to think that his mind had really unravelled. Vural thanked him and took a sip.
‘Perhaps I saw you.’
‘I didn’t leave my room.’
‘Perhaps I saw you and went after you to the first floor and saw you and the dead man in a fight.’
Abraham was still shaking his head, and when he spoke again his voice sounded loud and twisted in his ears.
‘You didn’t. I never left my room.’
‘I heard noise, the door of your room. I had concern, because you had trouble last night. I came in the corridor, and I saw you, and I went after you.’
‘What do you want?’
Vural slurped coffee once, twice, then drained the cup and set it on the desk.
‘I know you do not kill this man. But they, they think it. They want it. Someone has seen you, they say. The Egyptian, last night, on that floor.’
‘I haven’t . . .’
‘I am sure. They are not. The polis do not like ISIS. Kurds they hate more but you are second.’
‘I’m not ISIS. You know that. Help me.’
Nodding, Vural sniffed, like a man steeling himself to do his best.
‘Abraham, I am not polis. They are different kind of man, not like you or me. But I will try.’
‘Please.’
‘I try.’