Blown Circuit (6 page)

Shouts and screams echoed down the maze of corridors as I proceeded past the stalls of antiques and rugs and jewels until I eventually found my way to Sipahi Caddesi. Pushing through the crowds of backpackers and garden-variety tourists, it wasn’t long before I found a shop specializing in the product in question—Turkish Eyes.
 

“
Salaam
.”

The scratchy, low voice of the shopkeeper greeted me. He was old and wore a rough, checkered turban that looked right at home next to his leathery, heavily creased skin. Beckoning me near with a gnarled hand, he gestured to the thousands of amulets hanging from the ceiling of his shop. The amulets were everywhere, their black pupils staring back at me, the muffled roar of the bazaar gradually replaced by a chorus of their tinkling.

I recognized a Kurdish flag at the back of his small shop. The flag had a blazing golden sun in the middle of it with a red stripe at the top and a green stripe at the bottom. The flag wasn’t big enough to draw undue attention, but it wasn’t hidden either. It simply hung on the far wall beside the amulets. I shouldn’t have needed the flag to identify the guy anyway, his turban gave him away as a Kurd.
 

I knew from my background reading that the Kurds were among the world’s most dispossessed people. No nation-state to call their own, yet possessing a firm ethnic identity, they tended to be maligned by the majority wherever they lived. The Iraqis didn’t want them, the Syrians didn't want them, and the Turks sure didn’t want them, which meant, that like all dispossessed people everywhere, they did a good job sticking together.
 

From what I knew of Turkish history, Turkish politicians had not been kind to their most sizable minority. I wouldn’t presume to speak for the Turkish people on the matter, but the current crop of officials was not about to give the Kurdish population what they truly desired—an autonomous homeland. And in their defense, why would they? Nobody likes to give up what’s already theirs. The fact that the man before me had hung the flag and wore the traditional turban told me that I was dealing with a proud man. Perhaps even an honorable one.
 

“England, France, Germany?” the shopkeeper asked.

I had no flag on my backpack, but I wasn’t sure that I could pull off a British accent. I decided I’d raise the least suspicion by staying as close as possible to the truth.

“Canada,” I said.
 

Everybody thought Canadians were harmless. There was no harm in impersonating one.

“Yes, Canada. Beautiful place. Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver?”

“Montreal,” I said. I’d been there once. They spoke both French and English. It was a nice enough place if you could stand the cold.

“My uncle, he too lives in Montreal. Saint-Laurent? Westmount?”

The line of questioning was getting a little too specific for my liking.
 

“A suburb outside the city,” I said.

“Ahh, yes. Montreal. Good place. A fine, fine place. How may I help you today?”

“Just looking at your Eyes.”

“Yes. The nazur is a powerful talisman. It keeps evil at bay.”

I stared at the hanging amulets.

“Are they all the same?”

“Some are the same. Some different.”

“What about this one?” I said.

I pulled out my broken amulet. There was no need to say anything else. The shopkeeper’s brow furrowed as he stared at the thin silicone strip still protruding from the baked clay. Then he took out a business card and scribbled an address on the back. After that, I recognized the Turkish word for good-bye.

“
Güle güle,
” the shopkeeper said.

Chapter 10

I
KNEW
I’
D
taken a risk by putting my cards on the table with the shopkeeper. He could call ahead and warn the people I was going to see. But I needed a break. And even though there was a chance I’d be walking into a trap, at least I’d be walking forward. Sometimes you needed to sacrifice safety in favor of momentum. So I followed the Eye.

The address on the card was on a nearby street of dirty cobblestones, sandwiched between a textile factory and an ironworks. The building was long and narrow with about twenty feet of street frontage. Inside the door was an old telephone sitting on a dusty wooden desk, behind which was a long table of artisans painting Turkish Eyes. I didn’t see the actual clay being worked, but there were kilns at the back of the space as well as a doorway leading to the adjacent ironworks.
 

I walked in the front door and past the desk to the table where people were painting. A man of about fifty approached, sweat stains under the arms of his threadbare tailored shirt. He headed directly for me, the look in his hardened gray eyes deliberate, but not malicious. I was expecting to have to try out my guidebook Turkish. Instead, he simply pointed across the narrow room to the doorway of the ironworks. Clearly the old man from the Eye shop had called ahead.
 

I continued around the long table and across the narrow room, cautiously crossing the threshold between the two shops. It looked like there was a washroom built out at the back of the ironworks, but other than that, there were no partition walls. Just the three walls of the building and a half-open metal roll-down door in the front. I glanced back at my host. He indicated I should keep walking to the rear of the washroom.
 

Sparks flew, but the welders seemed more intent on their work than on me. Behind the washroom was an open wooden door with a high sill set in the stone wall. I continued through the door to find myself in a tight alley between buildings. It was no more than five feet wide and maybe sixty feet long. Thorns and grasses grew next to the rocks and discarded bricks in the long, skinny space. Looking north toward the street, the face of the alley had been blocked off to make it appear as though the buildings simply butted up against each other with nothing between them.
 

On the south end of the alley was a decaying wooden fence and another building. It was impossible to say what was beyond it. But the factory owner had definitely pointed back here. He obviously expected me to know what I was looking for, so much so that he seemed surprised that I didn’t immediately walk outside.
 

It made sense. Whatever it was I was supposed to find, I had to assume that my father had already given me the information I needed. But he hadn’t given me much. Just a Turkish Eye which happened to come from the factory, the coordinates of the ship, and, of course, the message that he had left in the Eye like a half-baked fortune. I mulled over the message’s meaning again. I’d always had an eidetic memory, or one that at least approached photographic recall, so there was no need to fish out the broken amulet to read the silicone strip. I simply pictured it in my mind’s eye.

TelD CaNtIVE OON SHEPs

It read like a text from a bad typist. Or a tweet. Maybe he had limited characters. I already knew that my dad was held captive. What the message was saying was obvious. Could there be something else? I looked at the letters. Upper and lowercase. I had no cipher key, so I played with what I had, uppercase first.

I got a few possibilities. The capital letters could be rearranged to spell out the words:
 

NET

or

PITS

or

DEVICE

But none of those words really told me anything. I looked at the lowercase combinations. Among others, I saw the words:

seal

or

let

or

stela

If I combined upper and lowercase, I could go on, but without a key it hardly seemed worthwhile. If I ignored the obvious meaning that he was held captive on a ship, there were just too many possibilities. Of course, the logistics of baking a message into a ceramic medallion while held captive were also an enigma. Did my dad have an ally on the outside? Did he know he would be held captive on that ship? Everywhere I looked there were more questions.
 

The noon sun was just high enough in the sky to shine over the roofline and into the alley. It lit the imperfections in the quarried rock wall revealing the decaying mortar. I shelved the message and turned my attention to the exterior wall of the building containing the ironworks. There was an exhaust fan on the far end of the wall, the hiss of welding torches audible from within. The rock wall itself was in much better shape than the worn brick of the alley wall or the mottled plaster of the adjoining building. It was maybe thirty stones high by sixty wide. Good, solid stones, twelve inches long and nine high. The building was built to last.

My thoughts drifted back to the coordinates of my father’s ship. I had memorized the digits upon seeing them in Hanoi:
 

4101643329008169

Broken out into latitude and longitude they would read like this:

41.016433 NORTH

29.008169 EAST

Those coordinates had directed me to the ship in the Bosphorus, but I supposed there was no reason they couldn’t do more. With appropriate planning, they could harbor a code. And my father was a planner. He always had been.

I stepped back through the thorns and grass until I was flat against the opposite building. It gave me a little more perspective on the wall I was staring at. Numeracy had always been a priority of my father’s. He wanted me to be literate, sure. Nothing wrong with being able to read. But he also wanted me to be numerically literate. When the other kids were learning to add, he pushed me to learn to multiply. When they moved on to multiplication, I started algebra. I thought about the problem from my father’s point of view. From a numerical perspective. Then, instead of a rock wall, I saw a grid of stones.

I counted them. My initial estimate had been close. With a little legwork, I discovered that the building was fifty-eight stones wide. I began to count upward, but ran into a problem There was no way I could properly count to the top of a three-story building. Again, I could estimate, but that wouldn’t be accurate. And I’d need accurate numbers if I wanted to apply any kind of logic to the coordinates he had left me. Back to square one. I looked down in frustration, kicking at an old Coke bottle on the cracked, dried ground. Focus. This was my father. He wouldn’t have left a problem that couldn’t be solved. Not if he could help it. I stared back up at the wall.

That’s when I saw it. The line. The thin mortar crack that ran between the first and second stories of the structure. It hadn’t seemed significant before, but it did now. Because I needed a hard limit—somewhere I could accurately count to, and the crack provided that. I counted down from the crack to the bottom stone. The grid was now twelve stones high. Twelve by fifty-eight. Six hundred and ninety-six stones to work with.

The grid could represent a map of Earth, but I didn’t think so. To plot the coordinates on such a roughly defined space would be too imprecise. No, my father would want each stone to represent a point on the grid. So I decided to treat the digits in the coordinates as though I was making a graph. The bricks were offset, so I knew that I’d have to establish a rule for vertical movement. I made the decision to stick to the right while counting upward and to the left while counting downward. It was an arbitrary designation, but there was no way to follow my hunch without establishing some simple rules.

 
I began with the X-axis, the horizontal. Four. I counted four stones along the bottom of the building.

One. I counted one stone up.
 

Zero. I did nothing. One. Another up.