The Property of a Lady - Elizabeth Adler [18]
Waving to one of his henchmen to remove the money, the Laotian said, “Mr. Abyss had been traced from Kuala Lumpur to Singapore, and then to Jakarta, where, I understand from my contacts, he was seeking passage on a freighter heading for Istanbul. My research has gone no further than this. And since the debt has now been repaid, it will no longer be necessary. Good-bye, Mr. Warrender.”
As the guards grabbed his arms and marched him back along the corridor, Cal wondered how he had known his name. He must have heard he was making inquiries and made it his business to find out about him. The Laotian was not the kind of man to let anything pass him by.
The massage girls lurking behind their curtains eyed him silently as they hurried past, and then he was back in the red-and-blue neon glare and heavy disco beat of the bar. A thrust on his back propelled him suddenly into the street and he was breathing Patpong Road’s moist, fetid air as if it was the breath of life itself.
He took the next flight out to Istanbul, the ancient city that was formerly Constantinople and before that Byzantium. It was raining and the beautiful domes and minarets were hidden under a bank of low gray cloud. Even the famous Bosphorus was a depressing gray.
The harbor was surrounded by an area of peeling industrial squalor, filled with Russian freighters and rusting Turkish ships looking ready for the junkyard. Land and sea merged together in the ghostly gray mist and a fine rain soaked him as he walked along the docks, searching for the minor immigration official Interpol had told him might help—for a certain sum, of course. When he finally reached him it took him two more grim, gray rainy days of searching through papers until he found what he wanted.
He compared the picture of the man on the immigration documents with the one in the photograph given him by Interpol. There was no mistaking the round face stretched tight over layers of fat, shining with a film of sweat under the hot photographic lamps, nor the small eyes and fleshy lips. Abyss’s sparse hair was now dyed a strange reddish color and the mustache was a new addition, but it was the name that confirmed the identity. Gerome Abyss was obviously not very inventive. He had renamed himself simply “Mr. Gerome” … Georges Gerome, clothing manufacturer from Nimes in France. He had stated his business in Istanbul as seeking manufacturers of Turkish cotton goods for sale in Europe. And the address given was a small downtown hotel.
Cal had copied down the information, pocketed the photograph of Abyss, laid an extra fifty bucks on the nervous official who accompanied him thankfully to the door, and headed for the hotel.
A word with the clerk on Reception and another fifty got him permission to search the guest lists for the past two months, but no Mr. Gerome had registered there. A few discreet questions confirmed that no one of his description had set foot through the hotel’s portals, and Cal knew he was back where he started.
Behind the tree-lined boulevards of modern Istanbul a labyrinth of narrow, medieval alleys crisscrossed the city’s hills, filled with tumbling wooden houses and dark mysterious courtyards. It was a city where, if he wished, a man could simply disappear from the face of the earth. Cal knew one thing was certain: Abyss would not be pursuing his trade. He would have been paid lavishly for cutting the Ivanoff emerald and the odds were he was now busy spending it on the best scotch whisky and happily drinking himself to death. He shrugged. Whichever, he had drawn a blank.
Now he was stuck in snowbound Geneva, and without either the emerald or a clue to its owner—old or new. His brooding gaze shifted to Solovsky, still drinking at the bar with his fellow Russians. There was definitely something different about Solovsky. It wasn’t just that he stood head and shoulders above his countrymen physically; there was a sort of old-Russian quality in his bearing and his manner. Confidence combined with courtesy, he decided—the essence of a diplomat. Solovsky