Godstone

Side was indeed full of German tourists as well as carpet shops and stalls selling Turkish delight. The tourists were younger than we had encountered earlier, fewer retirees and more backpackers.

Salim seemed delighted. I was bored. It was 16 October, and I still had three weeks to kill before my scheduled meeting with Gee in Bethlehem. What’s more, I had finished the Thomas Hardy books that Kivanç had given to me as a good-bye present.

Salim disappeared to “explore,” and I decided I should do something positive with my month of enforced hanging around; I didn’t want to just waste a month of my life. Besides, not being able to drink made life so boring and time pass so slowly. I decided I would try to get in shape.

I set out from the hotel in search of a shoe shop. I wanted to buy some proper running shoes so that I could run on the streets as well as on the beach.

I also wanted to find a tourist centre that would tell me how to get to the Roman ruins that I’d heard were just outside of the town. If I couldn’t drink, I could at least try to learn something.

I first went to the tourist office, where I found out where to catch a minibus to the ruins. They also directed me to a shop that sold running shoes. I was trying on a pair when the man from the campsite and the beach—the giant that I thought had been following me—walked in.

He chose a pair of sandals from the rack and asked the salesman in English if he had them in size 50. The salesman said he didn’t think he did but went to look for them in the storeroom at the back anyway. The giant sat next to me.

“Weren’t you at the MoCamp the other night?” I asked. “I think I saw you having breakfast.”

“Yes,” he replied, stretching out a giant hand in greeting. “I’m Ivan—a Russian name. My mother was Russian; well, actually she was from Uzbekistan, a republic within the Soviet Union. She was born near the Afghan border. She is Muslim; so am I. My father is English, an engineer. They met in Uzbekistan.”

That was a lot more information than I had been expecting. I shook Ivan’s hand—or rather he shook my hand—and the salesman came back to say that he didn’t have the sandals in size 50. Ivan didn’t seem surprised.

“I am here to look at the ruins,” he told me. “I am a bit of an amateur archaeologist—accountant by trade in the Isle of Man. Not very interesting, I’m afraid.”

“I’ve never been to the Isle of Man,” I said, largely for the lack of anything else to say. “Is it nice?”

“Fifty thousand alcoholics clinging to a rock in the Irish Sea,” he replied. “It’s where rich northerners go once they have made their brass—their money. Nothing ever happens there; if a sheep dies, it makes the headlines in the local paper. I don’t drink alcohol, and the quietness of the place suits me down to the ground.”

“If you don’t mind my saying,” I told him, “you don’t look like an accountant. You look more like a bouncer.”

“I actually worked in a nightclub as a bouncer while I was studying for my accountancy exams,” he replied. “Some drunk took exception to me throwing him out of a club. He ran me over with his car when I was walking home. He fractured a couple of vertebrae in my back. I have to work out with weights now to keep my back muscles strong.”

I didn’t know how to reply. He had given me far more information than I had expected or wanted.

“And you?” Ivan asked me. “What do you do?”

Oh, me? I thought, I am an alcoholic, out-of-work commodity trader with a priceless piece of blue rock that may or may not have been part of the tablet that Moses brought down from the mountain. I am completely out of my depth, and I have no idea what I have got myself into and no idea what I am supposed to be doing.

“Just here for a holiday,” I replied. “Work in finance, in London. Needed some time off.”

“Jolly good,” he said, getting up to leave. “Well, maybe I’ll see you at the ruins. Off to see them tomorrow. Weather is supposed to be fine. Better wear a hat; could be quite hot. Nice to meet you.”

I went back to the hotel with the intention of going for a run. Side has a longer beach than I had thought, so I didn’t really need the shoes; I could have just run on the sand.

I set off on my run but stopped almost immediately. I suddenly had no energy and felt sick; it was either something I had eaten or a bug that I had picked up. So instead of running, I went back to the hotel and slept all afternoon. I didn’t feel much better when I woke up.

Salim was nowhere to be seen, so I had dinner on my own. I had found of copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in the hotel lobby and took it up to my room to read.

The next morning, I felt a little better, but there was still no sign of Salim, so I set out alone to the ruins.

A brochure I had picked up at the tourist office said that Greek settlers had founded Side in the seventh century BC. Largely because of its natural harbour, the settlement had developed into a regional trading centre, particularly for slaves. I had always associated slavery with cotton and sugarcane in the Americas and hadn’t realised that the Roman Empire had also largely depended on slaves to function.

The ruins were moderately interesting with a Roman amphitheatre, temples, baths, and something called a nymphaeum, a fresh-water spring guarded by nymphs, minor goddesses.

As I was walking along the ruined city walls, I ran into my new best friend, Ivan, the giant accountant.

“So many stones,” Ivan said, waving his arms at the ruins. “So many old stones: each one has a story to tell. If only they could speak.”

“But isn’t that the job of an archaeologist, to make old stones speak? To get them to tell their stories?”

“And to know which stones are important and which ones aren’t. Some hold the clues, the keys to history. Others are just rubble.”

Ivan looked at me in a strange way as if he was trying to decide if I was an important or an unimportant stone.

He then made a comment about my not having a hat. He was right: the sun was hotter than I had expected, and it was making me feel a little lightheaded and giddy. I made my way back to the gate at the entrance to the ruins and then caught a taxi back to my hotel. I should really have walked back rather than taken a taxi, but I didn’t have the energy. Once at the hotel, I went to my room and again slept all afternoon. Either I was finally getting the alcohol out of my body, or I had caught the flu again. I felt terrible.

Salim woke me up a couple of hours later by banging noisily on the door. He told me that he had met a couple of Pakistanis from Lahore who had invited him to go with them to a mosque for Friday prayers.

The thought of Salim going to a mosque seemed odd to me; as far as I knew, he had never gone before. In any case, he said he would have dinner with them afterwards. He hoped I didn’t mind. I told him that I didn’t care, as I didn’t feel that well anyway. He seemed genuinely concerned.

“Probably your body adapting to no alcohol,” he suggested. “You’ll feel better in a few days.”

I wandered downstairs to the street and was going to have dinner by myself in the café in front of the hotel but bumped into Aaron again. I suspected that he had come looking for me.

He said that the receptionist at his hotel had recommended a restaurant up on the cliffs above the town and asked me if I wanted to join him for dinner. “There’s a lunar eclipse tonight,” he added. “We will have a clear view of it from there.”

We took a taxi to the restaurant at around seven o’clock and got the last table on the terrace overlooking the sea. The moon was full, and the sea below us was sparkling silver.

The restaurant was packed. The eclipse started about 7:30 p.m. and lasted until 11:00 p.m. For most of that time, everyone had crowded onto the terrace, and the waiter had a hard time getting through to our table. Aaron had ordered various salads, which looked all right, but I wasn’t hungry.

As the eclipse progressed, an English voice that I thought I recognised said, “The eclipse—my mother always told me that it means someone is about to die.” I turned and recognized Ivan the accountant. He came over to the table, and I introduced him to Aaron.

“Someone is always about to die,” Aaron told him. “People die all the time. It’s the way the world works, eclipse or no eclipse.”

At the end of the evening, the three of us shared a taxi back into town with Ivan folded uncomfortably in the front passenger seat.

The taxi driver told us that a tourist had left the restaurant earlier and had been knocked off his scooter. The police were still at the site of the accident when we drove past. On the roadside, next to the mangled scooter, I saw what looked like a body covered by a white sheet. None of us said anything.

Even though I hadn’t eaten anything that evening, I threw up when I got back to the hotel.

I spent the next day in bed with a headache and diarrhoea, but I felt a little better by Sunday. I went down to breakfast and saw Salim for the first time in a couple of days. He told me he had spent the past two days with the two Pakistanis he had met.

He told me that they worked as security officers at Karachi airport. He also said there had been a hijacking at the airport at the beginning of September. Four armed Palestinian men of the Abu Nidal Organization had boarded a Pan Am Boeing 747 while it was on the ground. The aircraft had been on its way from Mumbai to New York via Frankfurt. Twenty of the passengers had been killed in the attack, some by the hijackers and some when the Pakistani Army stormed the plane. He said that his two new Pakistani friends had been shaken by the incident and decided to take a week off in Turkey.

I was confused as to why Salim was telling me this. I had heard about the hijacking before I had left England but hadn’t really taken in any of the details.

I wanted to change the subject, so I asked Salim if he had found any peaches.

He shook his head. “No peaches,” he replied. “Mosque.”

There was a copy of the Turkish Daily News, an English-language newspaper, on the table in the café. It was the first time I had seen a newspaper since I had left Istanbul.

I picked it up and read that the governing Motherland Party had won the Turkish parliamentary by-elections that had been held on 28th September, the day I had left Istanbul. The vote had been to elect eleven members of parliament to the Grand National Assembly. The Motherland Party had won six of the seats, and a fellow centre-right party, the True Path Party, had won four seats.

Further down the front page, a headline read, “Iraq: Kirkuk attack news unfounded.” The article said that Iranian claims that the Kirkuk oilfields were destroyed in a recent bombing raid were just propaganda.

I thought back to the warnings that the two Americans had given me in Istanbul. Tensions had evidently dissipated. Turkey was unlikely to invade Iraq, at least for the moment.

I showed Salim the article. He told me that Turkey wanted to rebuild the Ottoman Empire and once again become the spiritual leader of the Muslim world.

“You’ll see,” he said. “Turkey will slowly return to the true Muslim path. But it will never again be the leader of the Muslim world.”

I asked him why not, more out of politeness than interest. I really wasn’t feeling well.

“Pakistan is the only Muslim country in the world to have a nuclear weapon,” he answered. “That is why I am so proud to be Pakistani: we are the ones who have developed the Muslim bomb.”

“But I thought Pakistan wanted the bomb because India had the bomb,” I replied. “I didn’t think it was a religious thing.”

“You are right, my friend; for the moment, it is more a nationalistic thing,” Salim told me. “But Pakistan is the only Muslim country with nuclear weapons. When the Crusades start again, when it is Christian pitted against Muslim, then our bomb will become of utmost importance.”

“I don’t think that will ever happen,” I argued. “The world is becoming a smaller, more integrated place. As races and religions intermingle, people will become more tolerant of one another. People are afraid of what they don’t know. Once you get to know someone better, you are no longer afraid of them.”

I was repeating almost word for word what Gee had said to me on the afternoon that we had spent in bed together. I liked her argument. It had made me feel good about the world.

“Ah,” Salim replied with a mocking laugh. “That is wishy-washy Church of England stuff. Let’s solve the world’s problems over a cup of tea and a digestive biscuit in the local village hall. But such talk is a sign of weakness. The UK has become weak. English people want to ban the bomb. Pakistani people are proud of our bomb. It is a sign of our strength.”

“Pakistanis may be proud of their nuclear bomb,” I replied, beginning to get irritated, “but I still don’t see it as a Muslim bomb, and I don’t think Muslims see it as a Muslim bomb either. The Muslim faith is one of peace and of mutual respect for other faiths. I am sure that more than ninety-nine percent of Muslims want nothing to do with your bomb. You are delusional if you think that Pakistan will become the de facto leader of the Muslim world just because it has nuclear weapons. In fact, I think it’s just the opposite.”

“You are wrong, William,” Salim replied, becoming more and more agitated. “The world’s religions are at war. People will have to choose sides. You…you will also have to choose which side you are on.”

“Well, I’ve already stopped drinking,” I said bitterly. “I suppose that’s a step in your direction.”

Salim called the owner over and asked for some more tea. I didn’t want any and lit a Marlboro instead. The cigarette made me feel even worse. I wished Salim would stop bugging me with his talk of religious wars and nuclear weapons, but he wasn’t done yet.

“Did you know,” he asked, “that Pakistan is the only country in the world where the nuclear weapons are controlled by the military and not by the politicians?”

“Isn’t that worse?”

“No, Will, you should be afraid of politicians. Politicians start wars; soldiers rarely do. Soldiers know how bad war can be.”

“So which country’s politicians should I be afraid of?” I asked.

“The United States and the USSR,” he replied. “The big question is what other countries would do in the event of a war between the USSR and the United States. India would probably side with the USSR and launch a nuclear strike against China and Pakistan. They would both retaliate. The degradation would be total.”

“You are making me depressed. Even more depressed than I was before.”

“Sorry about that, old boy,” Salim replied, suddenly talking with a Prince of Wales accent. “But you know something? Nuclear war might not be that bad. There are already far too many people on this planet, so getting rid of some of them might actually be a good thing. Even getting rid of eighty percent of them would be a good thing.”

I looked at Salim in horror. “You can’t really believe that?” I asked him. “Surely nuclear war would make the earth uninhabitable even for the twenty percent who survived. In the end, no one would survive.”

“Actually, that’s a myth,” Salim replied slowly. It was obviously something that he had thought about a lot.

“The earth would survive, and in the long run, it would be better off. It would be better for the earth to go through a brief but total nuclear war rather than endure its current slow death, the slow strangulation that humans are inflicting on the planet. If we carry on like this, we will asphyxiate the world within a hundred years. Too many people, you see.”

I lit another Marlboro. I had met people like Salim before. Mary called them “eco-fascists,” people who believed that it would be better to kill most human beings on the planet rather than let the planet die. Funnily enough, they always imagined that they would be amongst the survivors. I had no time for people like that, and I had never imagined that Salim was one of them. I had had no idea that he thought that way.

As I stood up from the breakfast table, my head spun, and I fell on top of Salim. He sat me down again and gave me some water, but the water made me nauseous. He called the waiter over and asked for yet more tea. I drank it with plenty of sugar, and the restaurant stopped spinning. I told Salim that I must have picked up a dose of food poisoning somewhere and that I hadn’t eaten anything for a few days. He got me even more tea, added three teaspoonfuls of sugar, and sat there watching me as I drank it.

“So, old boy, what’s your plan?” Salim asked me.

“You mean my plan in the case of global nuclear war and the total destruction of the earth?”

“No, your plan for the next couple of weeks. I can’t go to Israel with you because I won’t be able to get a visa. I suggest that we stay in Turkey a little longer and work our way leisurely along the coast. I have heard that somewhere called Kaz is supposed to be pretty, as is Marmaris.

“From Marmaris, you will be able to catch a ferry to Rhodes and then on to Israel,” he said. “I will head back to Istanbul. I have a flight booked on first November back to London; that will work out perfectly.”

I said that was as good a plan as any. To be honest, I felt so ill that all I wanted to do was spend the next couple of weeks in bed. If giving up alcohol was this bad, it wasn’t surprising that there were so many alcoholics in the world. I desperately needed a drink at that moment, and I silently cursed Gee for what she had apparently done to me.

Salim took me back to my room and then helped me to get my few things packed up into my rucksack. He asked if I wanted to see a doctor, but I said no. I had never had much faith in doctors.

We checked out of the hotel and got a taxi to the bus station and a bus to Antalya. We then had to take another bus for the five-hour trip to Kaz. I was feeling very confused, but Salim took control of the situation and got us there. I slept pretty much the whole way but for, some reason, woke up as we passed through Demre, a dusty town where Saint Nicholas was reputed to have been born. The place was full of small hotels with names like Papa Noël and Christmas Lodge.

When we arrived at Kaz, Salim carried my rucksack for me, and we found a small hotel where we booked into a twin-bedded room with an adjoining shower, overlooking the harbour. I said something about wanting two rooms, but Salim told me that he needed to look after me. We went up to the room, and I passed out on the bed.

It was dark when I woke up—a candle burning on my bedside table. I guessed there had been another power outage. Salim wasn’t there. I managed to stand up. I needed to use the toilet, but the room spun, and I quickly sat down again. I had no choice, so I tried again. I did get there, but it felt like trying to walk along the deck of a sailing boat in a bad storm.

I made it back to bed and fell asleep again. When I woke up, it was still dark. The candle had gone out, but I could see Salim’s silhouette in the bed opposite me. I didn’t want to disturb him. I would ask him to get me a doctor tomorrow. Whatever it was that I had caught, it was getting worse, and I needed to sort it out.

Salim had gone again by the time I woke up again the next morning. I smelled terrible and tried to get to the bathroom for a shower. I failed, collapsing back onto the bed.

After I don’t know how long, Salim came back with some effervescent vitamin C, a small bottle of fresh orange juice, and a croissant. He helped me take the vitamin C, but I couldn’t manage the orange juice or the croissant. I reached out for the bottle of oligo-elements that was on the bedside table, but Salim stopped me.

“I think you have been taking too much of this,” he said. “I told you only to take a quarter teaspoon each morning. How much have you been taking?”

“I didn’t always have a teaspoon with me,” I mumbled. “So I just took a swig straight from the bottle.”

“Well, don’t take any more,” he replied. “I will go out in search of a doctor and be back as soon as I can.”

I stayed in bed all day in a confused state. My headache had got worse, and I was having regular bouts of diarrhoea and terrible stomach cramps. It was the worst food poisoning I had ever had. I didn’t know why it took so long for Salim to come back again, but it was dark when he did. He turned the light on, and the light made my headache worse. I asked him weakly about the doctor, and he told me that, as it was Sunday, the doctor would come the next day.

I am still unclear as to what happened next. At one stage, I woke up. The light was off, but there was a lit candle by the bedside, so I guessed that there was another power cut. I don’t know whether Salim was there or not.

I must have fallen asleep again, and when I woke up, I must have somehow knocked the candle over. The curtains had caught fire, and I saw two men in the room. I don’t know who they were, but they seemed to be fighting. The fire was spreading, and I was having difficulty breathing. The air was so hot, so dense. Suddenly I felt someone pulling me from the bed and out into the hallway. There were sirens and lights…and then nothing.

When I woke up again, all I was aware of was the crispness of clean sheets and the smell of disinfectant. I opened my eyes. I was alone in what looked like a hospital room. The sun was shining outside. I still had a bad headache but no stomach cramps. I moved my arm and realised that I was attached to a drip. I thought I should try to call someone but drifted off back to sleep.

Sometime later—I have no idea how much later—a nurse woke me up to take my temperature and blood pressure. I asked her what had happened and where I was, but she didn’t understand what I was saying.

“Hastane,” she said. “Doktor…yakinda.” I shook my head to show that I didn’t understand.

She took a syringe, filled it with clear-yellow liquid from a glass capsule, and injected it into my arm.

“Dimercaprol,” she said, but I didn’t know what that meant. She then took a small pot of yoghurt off the bedside table, added two spoonfuls of sugar, and fed it to me. It tasted delicious.

I must have fallen asleep again. When I woke up, the doctor was there with the nurse. I asked him if he spoke English, and he told me that he did. He said that there had been a fire in my hotel room, a candle knocked over during a power cut. Someone had brought me to the hospital. “The fire wasn’t too bad,” he added. “You were lucky.”

I asked him if a Pakistani gentleman was also in the hospital, but he said I was the only one there. He told me it was more of a clinic than a hospital. He didn’t know anything about a Pakistani gentleman and said that he hadn’t been on duty when I had been brought in. He did however tell me that the man who had brought me to the clinic was a foreigner, a tourist.

The doctor reached over to the side table and picked up a small, white plastic bottle. It was slightly blackened by the smoke, but I recognised it as the oligo-elements that Salim had given me that first morning in Ürgüp.

“Poison,” the doctor told me. “The man who brought you into the clinic also brought this bottle in. He told the nurse that someone had tried to kill you. I have told the police. They will come later.”

My jacket and trousers were on a chair by the bed. I hadn’t been wearing them when the fire had started, and I had no idea how they had got to where they were. I asked the doctor if he could take a look in my jacket pocket. He took out my passport and wallet. Then he took out the stone and put it on the side of the bed.

The police came to see me the next morning, an inspector and an assistant. I didn’t catch either of their names. I told them everything that I knew; I didn’t leave anything out apart from the stone. I didn’t want them to start asking questions about it.

I told them that I didn’t know who had brought me to the clinic, but I gave them a description of both Ivan and Salim just in case. They said that my description of Ivan matched the description given by the duty nurse, and they asked lots of questions about him. I could answer virtually none of them.

They also asked lots of questions about Salim, and I told them everything I knew, including that he had a flight booked back to London on 1st November.

They told me that the fire service had been called to the hotel, and they had dragged someone out of the hotel room. They said that he had been pretty badly burnt but that he fitted the description that I had given of Salim. They had got him out of the hotel and down to the street, where they had laid him on the side of the road while they waited for the ambulance. Somehow he had disappeared before the ambulance arrived. No one saw him go, and no one knew what happened to him. He seemed, as the police inspector said, proudly showing off his English, “to have disappeared into thin air.”

He then asked if I knew why someone should want to poison me.

I shook my head. “It must have been accidental,” I told him. “Salim got the bottle from a French lady doctor at Guy’s Hospital in London. He told me that it contained oligo-elements—trace elements that the body needs to function. He said he had another bottle of the same thing, and he took it every day. I can only guess that there must have been a problem with the batch, maybe a slip-up at the factory where it was made. I don’t think he purposely tried to poison me.”

Maybe I was still in shock, but it made no sense that Salim should have been poisoning me on purpose. If he wanted the stone, he had had ample opportunities just to take it from me. There was no need to kill me in order to get it. What’s more, I had shared my flat with him for months before my uncle even gave me the stone. If he had wanted me dead, then why hadn’t he tried to kill me earlier?

“Do you know the name of this doctor at Guy’s Hospital?” he asked me eventually.

“No, but there can’t be that many French lady doctors working there,” I told him. “I think he dated her for a while. Perhaps that will help.”

“We will check,” he said. “I’ll get back to you.”

The inspector came back to me the next day. In fact, he was sitting by my bed when I woke up. “We checked on what you told us,” he said quietly. “There’s only one French doctor at Guy’s Hospital. She is sixty years old and a grandmother. I don’t think your friend dated her.” He paused for a moment to let that sink in before adding, “The hospital has no record of a Pakistani patient by the name of Salim—or at least none that meets the description that you gave me.

“So either you are lying, or he was,” he said quietly. “My guess is that it was him.”

I stayed in the hospital until the following Saturday, slowly getting my strength back. I thought that if I had been in England, they would have wanted the bed back, and I would have been thrown out within a day. But maybe I really was their only patient.

The doctor told me that I had heavy metal poisoning, mostly arsenic, but that my kidneys seemed OK. I must have been feeling better because I told him that if my kidneys could survive all the alcohol I had drunk over the years, they could survive a bit of arsenic. He didn’t think it was funny.

There was some trouble when I did get to check out. A hospital administrator appeared in my room and insisted that I pay cash for my treatment. I told him that it was more money than I had and that I would need to get to an American Express office to buy some traveller’s cheques and then cash them. He didn’t trust me and eventually went with me to Amex. I prayed that the bank hadn’t cancelled my card, but it worked fine.

I had no shoes or socks with me, so the hospital let me keep the pair of plastic slippers that I had been using while I was there. My jacket and trousers still smelled of smoke. Even so, it was good to be outside again. The air felt cooler and fresher than I remembered, and there were fewer tourists there than there had been at Side. Once I had said good-bye to the hospital administrator, I went back to the hotel where I had been staying. I didn’t go in but stayed on the pavement opposite. My room was on the first floor; the window was missing, and the paint above the window was charred black with smoke.

I wondered if my rucksack and other belongings were still in the room, but I didn’t want to go in and find out. I was worried that they would ask me to pay for the fire damage. But I had promised the doctor that I would hang around in Kaz for another five days and go daily to the clinic for a check-up and an injection. I set off to find another place to stay.

I turned back towards the central square, where I bought some clothes and shoes. I bought a small rucksack in a different shop and asked at the tourist office if they could recommend a hotel. They suggested a small one just up a backstreet from the square, and I stayed there a week, slowly getting my strength back. I felt very alone. But I felt alive.

The weather had turned cold, and it rained the whole time that I stayed in Kaz. Like the rest of Turkey, the town ran on solar heating, and no sun meant no hot water. The sun did come out briefly on Wednesday, Democracy Day in Turkey and a public holiday. I ventured out of my hotel to watch schoolchildren parade through the crowded streets. A Turkish flag hung from virtually every window.

The hotel owner told me that there had been some political demonstrations over the previous couple of days, and he was worried that there might be some trouble in Kaz. The opposition True Path Party had held a rally against the Motherland Party in Antalya the previous Monday; over thirty thousand people had attended, and there had been some violence. But Democracy Day in Kaz passed without incident.

The previous evening, I had called my uncle in London. I got the impression that he somehow already knew everything that had happened, and I was a little peeved that he didn’t seem to be in the least concerned about me. His only concern was for the stone. He repeated that it was “of the utmost importance” that I get the stone safely to Jerusalem. He also repeated his previous warning that it would be catastrophic if the stone fell into the wrong hands.

I asked him if Salim was part of these wrong hands, and he replied, “Apparently.”

I let that pass without saying anything. I still couldn’t accept that my poisoning was anything other than an accident.

“William,” he began, after taking a deep breath that was audible even over the poor connection, “we understand that the presidents of the United States and the Soviet Union are working on holding a summit at the end of the month in Egypt. They want to continue the talks that they started in Iceland.”

“What has that got to do with anything, with the stone…or with me, for that matter?”

Again he paused before answering. “William, it is difficult to talk over the phone,” he eventually said. “All I can tell you is that some powerful people are planning on disrupting that meeting. If they succeed, it can only have terrible consequences.”

“What consequences?”

“Worse than you can possibly imagine. William, please do your best to get the stone to Gee. And stay alive in the process,” he added, almost as an afterthought.

After I hung up with my uncle, I called Simon. I wanted some news on the sale of the flat, but more than that, I wanted to talk to a friendly voice. My conversation with my uncle had made me feel even more alone.

“Simon, you may have been right about Salim,” I told him once he was on the line.

“Why, what happened?” Simon asked me. “Nothing bad, I hope.”

“I lived to tell the tale,” I replied. “And I will tell you the tale over a pint or two when I am back in England.”

“I look forward to it,” he said with a laugh. Just hearing his voice made me feel better. “By the way, I have a family interested in buying your flat; we went there yesterday for a second visit. I am optimistic.

“But, Will,” he continued, “you may have to lower your price expectations. The market is very uncertain at the moment; no one really knows what effect the deregulation of London’s financial sector will have on London property values. Some people argue that it is the end of the City of London as a global financial centre.”

Frankly, I didn’t care whether it was the end of London as a financial centre. It is funny how things can appear so important, so fundamental, in a particular time and place, but once you are out of that context, they aren’t important at all. London seemed a long way away; it was part of a previous life.

I told Simon that I had no choice but to sell the flat and asked him to do his best.

“Before you hang up,” he said, “you should know that your smoke detector is causing some concern. The electrician replaced the unit, but the new one is also beeping. That is, unless the beep is coming from somewhere else. It’s a mystery.”

“It’s not the only mystery,” I replied a little bitterly. “Right now, a beeping smoke detector is the least of my worries. In any case, there is little I can do from here. You’ll have to get the electrician back again to sort it out. I will call you when I get to Israel. Good luck with the sale,” I told him before hanging up, “and with the smoke detector.”

I left Kaz on Thursday morning, taking the ten o’clock bus for the three-hour trip to Marmaris. It was pouring with rain again, and the bus wasn’t heated. For the first time in a long while, I didn’t feel tired; I was slowly recovering from my arsenic poisoning.

It was still raining heavily when we arrived at the Marmaris Bus Station, and I got soaked trying to find my way to the centre of town. Once there, I checked into a small hotel by the harbour.

The sun came out briefly in the evening, and I ventured out of the hotel. The harbour seemed to be popular with the English yachting crowd. At least half the boats were flying the British Red Ensign, and most of their elderly owners were on deck enjoying their evening cocktails. I was just a scruffy backpacker; I went unnoticed.

However, at one point I did notice—or at least I thought I noticed—Aaron on the other side of the harbour quay. He appeared to be looking in my direction. I waved at him, but he didn’t respond. So I decided it wasn’t him.

I had found out from the tourist office in Kaz that a ferry operated each day from Marmaris to Rhodes, leaving at 10:30 a.m. and arriving at noon. A bigger ferry ran from Athens to Haifa every Friday, calling at Rhodes and Cyprus on the way and leaving Rhodes at 2:00 p.m. I went to the harbour office and bought my ticket to Rhodes.

It started to rain again, and I headed back to the hotel. The wind picked up, and a storm raged with fury all night. I was concerned that the ferry might be cancelled, but it wasn’t. I was on the quayside in the pouring rain at eight with a motley collection of fellow backpackers; nearly all of them were as sick as dogs during the crossing to Rhodes. I wasn’t sick. I really must have been feeling better.

Once in Rhodes, I caught the bigger ferry to Haifa. On board, the ferry looked like the aftermath of the Isle of Wright pop festival. People were lying everywhere, and there wasn’t a single space on the deck to sit down. I made my way below deck, where I queued up to rent a cabin for the two nights of the trip. The ferry left an hour late, but then it broke down before it reached Limmasol on the southern coast of Cyprus. A tug towed us into port, and we transferred to another ship. During all the confusion, I thought I noticed Aaron again, but there were so many people milling around that I wasn’t sure.

The replacement ferry didn’t have as many cabins, and I spent a miserable night lying on the floor in one of the boat’s passageways, but at least I was inside. I felt sorry for those braving the cold and rain on the outside deck. The ferry arrived in Haifa at ten in the morning, and I was through customs without any difficulty. I was one among two hundred unwashed backpackers crammed into the customs hall. I blended into the crowd. The customs official didn’t even ask to look in my bag.

Then I was through. Somehow, more by luck than by judgement, I had succeeded in getting the stone to Israel.