Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [5]
“What did you do?”
“Well, I finally gave them something. I sat there and sat, and then I thought, what the hell. I have nothing to lose. He really jumped when I told him my tidbit—it was one name. ‘Right, right, that’s just what I need. Thank you very much. Write the name on a piece of paper, would you please?’”
“Have they promised you anything at all?”
“No, nothing. Go to the hotel and wait. Well, now whatever happens, let it happen.” His indifference was a poor disguise for his tension. I tried to imagine how I’d feel in his place, at the mercy of my look-alike on the screen, with so much at stake and not knowing what to do. Tell all or keep my mouth shut? And what was the name that he gave them?
Our dinner that night was a pathetic sight. Tolik was cranky, Sasha was silent, mulling something over, and Marina and I tried to keep up the conversation. Sooner or later I had to go home. In fact, my return flight to New York was booked for the next morning, but I did not dare tell this to them.
Suddenly Sasha said, “They’re here already. See the guy with a newspaper at the bar? He was in the lobby on our floor and then came down here. Let’s check it out.”
He left the table and went to the men’s room. The man turned so that he could see the men’s room door. Sasha came out and went to the lobby. The man shifted again, to keep an eye on him.
“Idiots. If I worked like that, I’d have been fired a long time ago,” Sasha said, handing me the free English-language paper he had picked up in the lobby. “What’s the news?”
I glanced at the front page of the Turkish Times. “Rounding Up Russians” was the headline. The article reported that there were two hundred thousand illegal Russians in Turkey who were involved with prostitution and transporting asylum seekers into Europe, and the authorities were rounding them up and deporting them to Russia. Not exactly the kind of story Sasha needed to hear. “You think he’s alone?” I asked, changing the subject back to our tail.
“Yes, he is, otherwise he wouldn’t have run after me from floor to floor. You don’t need more than one—where would we go from the hotel at night? They probably caught up with us at the embassy. We have to get out of here.”
We looked at each other and said at the same time, “Good thing we didn’t return the car.”
“Marina, take Alex’s room key, unobtrusively,” Sasha said. “Go upstairs, get packed, move everything up to Alex’s room and wait for him. If that guy is alone he will stick with me.”
Marina yawned, said, “See you tomorrow, boys,” and dragged sleepy Tolik to the elevator. Half an hour later, Sasha and I got up. The man at the bar stayed put.
Our rooms were on different floors, theirs on the seventh, mine on the eighth. As the elevator stopped, our eyes met, and I sensed the panic in him: the distance to his door he would have to walk alone—an ideal target. He stepped out.
When I entered my room, Marina was watching TV. Tolik, dressed in his street clothes, was asleep on my bed.
It took us two trips to the underground garage and a quarter hour to get all the baggage, along with the sleepy Tolik, into the car. Finally, I called Sasha’s room: “We are ready. Go.”
Three minutes later, he jumped into the car, and we shot out of the hotel. It was 1:30 a.m. I kept peeking in the rearview mirror for pursuers, but Sasha told me not to bother: it’s impossible to know if you are being followed in city traffic. Once we were out on the highway, we would see.
“If I only knew which way to go,” I said. We didn’t have a map of Ankara.
There were several yellow taxis at the corner. A group of cabbies stood around, discussing something heatedly. I pulled up.
“Which way to Istanbul?” I asked in English. “Istanbul, Istanbul!”