Chapter 4 The Broker's Offer

Torvak was a market town at the meeting of two valleys, and on Thursdays it filled with trucks and livestock and men selling phone cases from folding tables, and on every other day it was a place where nothing happened and everyone knew it. Zeyla chose it because it was the nearest town with a working post office, a hotel with a lock on the door, and a bus out. She had learned, in the years since the committee, to plan her exits before her arrivals. The hotel was above a bakery. Their room had two beds, a window that looked onto a wall, and a radio that received one station, which played the same five songs in a loop until the power cut and then resumed wherever it had left off. Zeyla spread the notebook and Nirem's copies across the bedspread and worked by the window while Tufan went out to buy dinner and, she suspected, to ask questions. He came back with bread, cheese, olives, a bottle of water, and a face she had learned to read. "The Zeydan Consortium has rented the old granary at the west end of town," he said. "Six men. Two trucks. And a man who is not a laborer." "Kulin." "A man with glasses who does not like to get his shoes dirty. Yes." He set the food on the sill. "They are asking in the market for a woman with a camera and a notebook. They are offering money for information. Two of the sellers in the square have already taken it." Zeyla was not surprised. She was, in a way she did not examine, relieved. A consortium that moved in the open expected to win with resources. A consortium that asked about her in the market expected her to be found, cornered, and bought. The only thing she had that they did not was the shape of the whole system, and she had spent two days teaching it to herself. She was still working when the knock came at the door, three soft taps, unhurried. Tufan moved to the wall beside the door with the rifle. Zeyla put the notebook in her bag and stood where the door, if it opened, would hide her. "Miss Arkut," said a voice through the wood, calm, pleasant, faintly amused. "My name is Sermet Zeydan. I would rather not speak through a door. May I buy you dinner? I have brought it, in case you would rather not come down." She opened the door. He was, she had to admit, not what she had expected. Sermet Zeydan was a tall man in his fifties with a trimmed beard going gray and the careful, understated dress of someone who had never needed to look wealthy to be believed. He held a covered tray and a bottle of mineral water, and behind him in the corridor stood one man, unarmed, hands in view. Zeydan looked at Tufan and the rifle and did not change expression. "Your guide is a cautious man," he said. "Good. I would distrust a guide who was not." "You have sixty seconds," Zeyla said. "I have the rest of your career." He set the tray on the sill, uninvited, and folded his hands. "You are chasing nine stones. I have four of them, boxed, in the back of a truck, in a granary two hundred meters from this room. I will not tell you that finding them was difficult. It was not, for me. I have money and I have people who can work a shovel. What I do not have is the reading. That is you. That is why I have come here myself, instead of sending the professor, whom you dislike." "Kulin is not the problem. Kulin is the symptom." "Then blame me for the symptom. I accept it." Zeydan's voice dropped, and something in it changed, became less like a negotiation and more like a confession. "Here is my offer. Come with us. Read the four stones in the granary. When you have read them, I will take you to the fifth, which I have located and not moved, and you will read that too. Every stone you read, I pay you. When the cache is recovered, you will be listed as the surveyor of record, and the professor's committee finding will quietly cease to exist, because I will make a call and it will be made to disappear. You will be paid in full, and your name will be clean." "And the objects themselves?" "Will go where objects like these always go." He said it without apology. "Into collections. Some private, some public, some that you would approve of and some that you would not. They will not be destroyed. They will not be lost. They will simply leave, the way they have always left, because this country has more history than it can guard." Zeyla looked at the tray, at the water, at the man who had offered to buy her the only thing she actually wanted. "No," she said. "There is a second reason I came myself," Zeydan said, as if she had not spoken. "So that you would understand what you are refusing. The consortium has a patron. A man named Bekir Sundur, who commands a militia that answers to no ministry and controls three of the crossings on the south road. He is not a patient man. If I fail to bring him the reading, he will stop paying for my method. He will use his own." He picked up the tray. "Think about the ninth stone, Miss Arkut. Everyone who has looked at your grandmother's notebook has noticed that she wrote the ninth and then warned herself away from it. Ask yourself what she was afraid of. I did." He left. The corridor was quiet. Tufan lowered the rifle and let out a breath, and Zeyla went to the window and watched the tall man cross the square, unhurried, carrying a tray with food no one had eaten. She opened the notebook on the sill. Nine dots. Along the bottom, the sentence, pressed hard. "Do not trust the ninth," she read. "He thinks that means the stone." "What does it mean?" "It means the person who reads it." She closed the notebook. "Mehve knew someone would come for all nine. She was writing a warning, not a label." She looked at Tufan. "We leave before dawn. And we do not use the south road." "Why? The fifth stone is south." "Because that is where Sundur is," Zeyla said. "So we will not go south. We will go to the road that no longer exists. Nirem's tenth stone." Tufan was silent a moment, and then he nodded, and went to pack the mule. ---