Godstone

My British Airtours flight landed at Atatürk International Airport at 4:35 a.m. on Wednesday. The immigration officer at the airport asked me how long I would be staying and didn’t comment when I told him that I was only staying one day. He stamped my passport and waved me through.

I tried to breeze through customs just as quickly but was stopped by a uniformed officer. He first spoke to me in German, but when I looked blank and shrugged my shoulders at him, he switched to almost-perfect English. He asked me to show him the contents of my small backpack.

I emptied the bag’s meagre contents out onto the metal table in the customs hall. Before I had left England, I had put the stone and its leather box into a Sainsbury’s plastic bag, partly to protect the old leather and partly to disguise it a little.

“What is this?” the Turkish customs officer asked, picking the plastic bag up from the table where I had placed it. “Open it, please.”

“It’s an antique,” I replied, taking the leather box out of the bag and handing it to him. “Very old.”

The officer opened the box and took out the stone. It might have been my imagination, but he seemed to sway a little on his feet as if he were going to faint. Just as I had done in the restaurant, he put one hand on the metal table to steady himself. He weighed the stone in his other hand; he also seemed intrigued by how light it was.

“What is this?” he asked.

For a second time, I shrugged my shoulders. “I don’t know,” I replied truthfully. “But there is an expert in Turkey who might be able to help. I am bringing the stone to her so she can look at it.”

The officer didn’t look convinced. “Wait here,” he said and then disappeared behind a partition. I could hear voices but had no idea what they were saying. The customs officer was obviously showing the stone to a colleague or a superior. After what seemed like the longest time, he returned to the table. He went to hand the stone back to me, but as he did so, he held on to it and looked me straight in the eye. I looked back at him.

“OK,” he said, finally releasing the stone into my care. I put it back in the box and then put the box back into the plastic bag.

“Enjoy your stay in Turkey,” he called after me as I bolted out into the arrival hall. Once there, I didn’t know what to do. I could see that it was still dark outside. I didn’t want to arrive in the city centre in the dark.

I settled on a hard, plastic bench to wait for dawn. The bench was shaped to stop people from lying down on it. I had no alternative but to sit. None of the airport shops or cafés was yet open. My head hurt, and I could have done with an aspirin of some sort. Really, though, I would have preferred a drink.

I had arrived at Gatwick at around 6:00 p.m. the previous evening and settled into a bar in the departure area. I knew that I had four hours before I had to be at the departure gate and had planned to drink beer for the first two hours and vodka for the last two. I met four blokes at the bar; they were from Essex and were going on a stag weekend in Spain. I bought them all a round of drinks and then spent the next four hours with them.

By the end of the evening, Eric, the bridegroom, was pretty drunk. He told me he wasn’t sure he was making the right decision. He said that the engagement and the wedding “just sort of happened by itself” but that he was too much of a coward to call it off. I didn’t think that was a good way to start married life, but I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t even run my own life, let alone anyone else’s.

I thought about my dinner the previous evening with Alex—beautiful, kind, understanding, and terribly sad Alex. After too much champagne, I almost proposed to her. I didn’t love her, and she didn’t love me, but we were best friends. And at that particular moment, it had felt better to go through life with a friend rather than alone. She seemed to feel the same.

“Maybe we should make a pact,” she had suggested to me. “If neither of us has fallen in love by the time we’re thirty, then we should get married and start a family.”

I was going to shake hands with her to seal the deal, but instead I gave her a hug. My thirtieth birthday was too far away to think about now.

Predictably, I nearly missed my flight. In the rush and the confusion, I also nearly left my backpack in the bar; if one of my new Essex friends hadn’t called me back, I would have forgotten the stone at Gatwick Airport. My uncle had been right not to trust me.

But this morning, even in spite of a slight headache, I was in good spirits. I had slept a couple of hours on the plane and was looking forward to my day in Istanbul. My instructions were to meet Geraldine, the daughter of my uncle’s business partner, in the Pudding Shop Café in Sultanhamet at 11:00 a.m. Once I had given her the stone, I would be free to have what I hoped would be a nice lunch and a casual walk around the city before returning to the airport for a 6:00 p.m. flight home.

The airport began to come to life at 5:00 a.m., and I moved from my hard, plastic bench to an equally hard, plastic seat in an airport café. I ordered a coffee and some sort of pastry thing; I took one bite and then left the rest. I added four sugars to my coffee, and my headache dissipated as I drank it. The customs officer who had inspected my backpack came into the café with a colleague or friend—more likely a friend because he wasn’t wearing a uniform. They sat at a table in the corner, where they could get a good view of everything, including me.

I waited in the café until 6:00 a.m. and then took a taxi into the city centre. I enjoyed the ride into town; the rising sun was slowly evaporating the early morning mist that shrouded the fishing and cargo boats on the Bosporus. I had a good view of the mosques in the old town, and I had the added bonus of seeing two dolphins swimming and jumping in the bay.

The taxi driver dropped me off at the Pudding Shop. It didn’t look like much of a place, but it had apparently once been famous as the first stop on the hippie trail to India and Afghanistan. On one wall, there was a notice board full of messages left by travellers. I had a quick look; most seemed to be looking for lifts to Munich.

I ordered a coffee and was disappointed when I was served a lukewarm NESCAFÉ. I asked the waiter if he had any alcohol, and he offered me a local beer, Efes Pilsen. The beer was also lukewarm, but a lukewarm beer is better than a lukewarm NESCAFÉ. I downed it quickly and ordered another. Istanbul was suddenly beginning to grow on me. Perhaps I would forget the tourist walk I had planned for the afternoon and just stay in the Pudding Shop.

The server’s name was Yigit. He spelt it for me, since he pronounced it “Yi-it.” He had a thick, black beard and a kind face. He told me that he had worked part time in the café for the past year; the owners were friends of his family. The rest of the time he studied engineering at a technical college and hoped to be a motorbike designer.

He loved motorbikes and showed me a Polaroid of his bike, a Honda VT1100 Shadow. It looked an expensive machine, and I wondered how a student working part time in a café could afford it. Either the Pudding Shop had swapped its hippie clientele for a richer crowd, or Yigit had supplementary revenue.

As I drank my second beer, Yigit told me that he was restoring a 1970 Norton Commando that had been in an accident. I asked him if he had been riding it at the time of the accident, but he shook his head.

“Friend,” he said. “Broken leg and broken shoulder but alive. Good.” Each time Yigit spoke, he swallowed first. I guessed it gave him more time to formulate what he wanted to say in English.

I told him doctors in England called motorbikes “donor mobiles.” He didn’t understand what I meant, and I couldn’t be bothered to try to explain it.

Yigit fetched me a third beer and asked me where I was staying. It was 7:30 a.m. by then, but I was still his only customer. I told him that I was only in Istanbul for one day and that I was supposed to meet someone called Geraldine at his café at 11:00 a.m. He looked at me and then looked over to the notice board. I followed his gaze but couldn’t see what he was looking at. He shuffled his feet and then swallowed hard.

“Are you William?” he asked me.

“Yes,” I replied, shocked that he knew my name.

“There is a message for you on the board,” he said.

I had looked at the board when I had first come into the restaurant, but I hadn’t noticed any message for me. Yigit walked over to the board, unpinned a faded blue envelope from its bottom right-hand corner, and brought it back to me. The envelope had my name on it and that day’s date, Wednesday, 24th September.

“I don’t believe it,” Yigit said, a look of incomprehension crossing his face. “This is incredible.”

I opened the letter and took out a blue sheet of paper. On it, in what looked like a girl’s careful handwriting, was this simple message:

Dear William,

Meet me in the Belde Hotel in Ürgüp on Thursday evening, 2nd October.

Geraldine (Gee)

I was immediately annoyed. I didn’t like surprises, and I’ve always hated it when people changed their plans at the last minute. What’s more, 2 October was in more than a week away. What was I supposed to do until then? I would have to fly home and come back in one week’s time.

“Where is Ürgüp?” I asked Yigit. “Is it in Istanbul?”

“No, it is in Cappadocia,” he replied. “In the middle of Turkey, about seven hundred, maybe eight hundred kilometres from here. About three or four hours south of Ankara.”

I turned the blue stationery over; it looked faded—as if it had been on the notice board for a long time. “Did you see who put the letter there?” I asked him.

“No, no,” Yigit replied, shaking his head. “This envelope has been on that board for years,” he told me. “I started here only one year ago, but my friend Vadik has worked here for five years. He said the envelope has been there for as long as he has worked here. You can ask him; he will come in later. He will be so excited. We have been looking forward to today—the date, you see, is on the envelope. We wondered if you would come. And here you are. More than five years…incredible.”

He left and went back into the kitchen, still shaking his head and talking to himself. I turned Gee’s letter and the envelope over in my hands. They were faded and brittle; it really did feel as if the letter had been on that notice board for years. I was intrigued by the magic of it, but I was also suddenly afraid. I just couldn’t understand how Gee’s letter had been waiting for me for years.

The midday call to prayer woke me up. The loudspeaker for Istanbul’s Blue Mosque was just outside the Hotel Pirlanta, a one-star affair with a shared shower room and toilets but with a washbasin in the room, lino on the floor, and a bed that, like all hotel beds, sank in the middle. The window in my room on the first floor didn’t close properly, and the room was full of traffic noise and diesel fumes from the busy road outside.

Yigit had taken me to the hotel at around ten o’clock. I had wanted to stay in the Pudding Shop until eleven, just in case Geraldine showed up, but he had persuaded me to get some sleep instead. My plan had been to sleep for a couple of hours and then find a post office and call my uncle. But now my head ached, and my throat was beginning to burn from the pollution. Although I had slept for less than thirty minutes, I knew I had to get out of that room.

I threw some water from the tap in the corner over my face and ventured out into the city. I had no idea where to go but figured that if I walked around long enough, I would find a post office. So I just walked, turning down side streets at random.

It was hot, much hotter than in London, and I realised that I smelled. I hadn’t changed clothes since I had left home the day before. I began to look for some sort of a clothing shop but failed to find one. I was completely disorientated. Everything seemed so strange; nothing was as I had imagined it to be.

I came out of a narrow street into a square, where young boys pestered me, wanting to polish my canvas shoes. I pushed on, down the hill, and ended up at what I guessed was the Bosporus. I headed to a pavement café with a red awning, where I found a table next to three old men drinking tea out of small glasses. As I sat down, two men about my age took the table on my right-hand side. I looked around the café and saw that a number of people were drinking something that looked like Pernod.

A waiter came over, and I pointed at the Pernod-like drink on an adjacent table.

“Raki?” the waiter asked.

“Yes, raki,” I replied. I had no idea what raki was, but it had to be better than tea. The waiter moved over to the table next to mine, where the two men ordered beers. They were American.

“Holiday?” one of the two men asked me when the waiter had left. I nodded but then looked away. I didn’t feel like making conversation. What I really needed was to think.

It seemed to take ages for the waiter to bring me a small, frosted bottle of Yeni Seri raki. He put it down on the table along with a jug of water and two glasses full of ice. He poured two fingers of raki into one of the glasses and topped it with water. He then filled my second glass with water before moving across to the next table, where he poured the two beers.

“Cheers,” said one of the Americans, raising his glass to me. I raised my glass back and was about to take a drink when he put out a hand to stop me.

“When you drink raki, you have to say cheers and then hit the table with your glass before you drink from it. It is a Turkish tradition. And then, once you have taken a drink of raki, you have to take a sip of water. One sip of raki and one sip of water; that is the way the Turks do it.”

I tapped my glass on the table and took a sip. It tasted like Pernod. The American pointed a finger at my glass of water, and I took a sip as instructed.

“Name’s Mike,” he said. “And this is Rick.” Rick raised his glass to me a second time without speaking.

“I am Bill,” I told them. When I was in New York, I had gotten into the habit of introducing myself as Bill rather than William. Americans seemed to have difficulty with names of more than one syllable.

“Are you staying long?” Mike asked me.

“No, just a few days,” I replied. I still didn’t feel like making conversation.

“We are leaving today,” he continued. “We should have been staying another week, but the situation is becoming too unstable.”

I asked Mike what he meant by unstable. He told me that there was an election the following Sunday, and “things could get a bit violent.” He explained that the Turkish economy was in the tank and that inflation had been running at over 10 percent for the past ten years. The ruling Motherland Party was expected to lose the election, but no one knew what would happen next. There was some doubt as to whether they would accept the election results and step down.

“The Iran–Iraq War is a major problem,” Mike told me, apparently happy to have someone to talk to. “The Kurds are fighting with the Iranians, and they have been kicking the shit out of the Iraqis. They are now attacking Iraq’s oilfields in Kirkuk and may already have destroyed some of the installations.

“The Turks are worried that the Kurds will take control of the oilfields and use the revenue to fund their own independent state. The last thing the Turks want is an independent Kurdish state,” he explained.

“The Turkish government won’t allow the Kurds to over the oilfields and they will invade Iraq if they try. Everyone is worried that the Turkish government will lose the election, refuse to stand down, and then invade Iraq as a diversion. So yeah, the situation is unstable.”

I looked at the two men properly for the first time. They were fit and looked as if they were military advisors of some kind. The Americans were financially supporting Saddam Hussein in the war against Iran, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if they were also supporting them militarily. But then Russia was also supporting Iraq in the war, as was Saudi Arabia.

“You sound very well informed,” I told them.

“Only what I read in the papers,” Mike replied, but his smile told me that he knew more than he had read in the papers.

“I don’t know how long you’re staying,” he continued, “but I’d suggest that you stay in Istanbul; don’t go south.”

South was exactly where Geraldine had asked me to go.

The waiter came over with another bottle of raki. I hadn’t even made a dent in the first bottle. “This is from your friend over there,” the waiter said, pointing across the restaurant.

“What friend?” I asked him. “I don’t have any friends.”

“He’s gone,” the waiter replied with a shrug. “He was there just now. Anyway, he bought you this bottle and left me two thousand lira to buy you more if you want it later.”

I stood up and scanned the restaurant to see if I could see anyone I knew, but I couldn’t. “Probably a mistake,” I said. “But I will take the bottle anyway. Please bring some more glasses. I’d like to share my good fortune with my new American friends.”

Mike and Rick became quite chatty after a few drinks. They told me that the Iraqis had been using chemical weapons against the Kurds. Although chemical weapons were banned under the Geneva Protocol, the Americans chose to just quietly ignore it.

We had a few beers after the second bottle of raki, but as we started our third bottle, Mike told me that the Americans were not only supporting the Iraqis but they were also supplying arms via Israel to Iran.

He explained that the Americans had tried to sell arms to Iran as soon as the war had started, but Iran had been able to buy everything that they had needed from Vietnam. Apparently the United States had abandoned huge quantities of arms and spare parts in Vietnam when the Vietnamese War had ended. These had been enough to maintain the military hardware that the United States had sold to Iran under the shah.

But the supplies of spare parts were now running down, and Mike had been helping organise new sales. He told me that the first shipment of “tube-launched, optical-tracked, wire-guided missile systems” had arrived in Iran from Israel the previous summer. He added that, since then, the Israelis had supplied Iran with “several major shipments including two thousand TOW missiles and eighteen Hawk missiles.”

Mary would have known what all those weapons were, but I didn’t. What I did know was that Mike and Rick would have gotten into a lot of trouble if their bosses ever learned that they had told me about those weapons. I thought it was really odd that Israel was helping their sworn enemy Iran, and I didn’t understand why they were. I did understand, though, that there would be a huge stink if the news ever got out.

I also understood that the United States was two-faced in selling arms to both sides. Saddam Hussein would be mad as hell if he ever found out that the Americans had been selling arms to his enemy at the same time they were selling them to him.

I told Mike and Rick that—and added that the United States should stay out of the Middle East, that they didn’t know what they were doing, and that they were really messing up. Things didn’t go too well after I said that. Mike and I had some sort of a fight—more of a pushing match than a boxing fight—and the waiter asked us to leave the restaurant.

This time, it wasn’t the call to prayer that woke me but the smell of my own vomit. I wasn’t in my bed—or in any bed for that matter. I was outside on the street, and it was dark. I looked for my watch, but it was gone. There was a pain in my lower back, and my lips seemed to be stuck together somehow. I could smell vomit, but I couldn’t taste vomit; I tasted blood. I moved my tongue, suddenly worried that I had lost a tooth. They were all still there.

I struggled to my feet and felt a searing pain on the left side of my chest: a cracked rib, maybe two. I reached inside my jacket for my wallet, but it was also gone. I had been beaten up and robbed.

Slowly, I tried to piece together what had happened. I had spent all afternoon in the café with the red awning but had been thrown out at around seven in the evening, when I made my way back to the hotel. Before I got there, a restaurant tout had talked me into going to a small café instead, where I had ordered a beer. The place appeared to be a front for small-scale drug dealing. I ordered some food and then accepted the joint that the waiter offered me. The smoke had hurt my throat; I was catching a cold.

The only other clients that I had seen in the restaurant were three grey-faced English girls; they left without paying their bill. While I was there, a uniformed policeman had come in and talked briefly with whom I imagined to be the café owner. But apart from that, I had had the place to myself. The food had arrived, but I couldn’t remember eating it. In fact, I couldn’t remember anything else at all.

I limped back to what I hoped was the main street and found my hotel. The outside door was unlocked, as was my room. The contents of my rucksack had been emptied out on the bed. The stone wasn’t there, but my wallet and passport were. I was sure that I had taken them both with me that afternoon. How else would I have been able to pay for my drinks in the afternoon? I checked my wallet; my cards and my money were still there.

Someone must have brought my wallet and passport back to the hotel. But how did they know which hotel? And why hadn’t they brought me back or at least called the police?

It was then that I noticed that my watch was on the bedside table. I picked it up and slipped it onto my wrist. I pushed my bag to one side and gingerly lowered myself onto the bed. My ribs hurt like shit, but somehow I managed to sleep. Not even the early morning prayers woke me.

When I did wake, my ribs hurt even more than they had the previous evening; I could hardly get out of bed. Somehow, I made my way to the shared bathroom and saw that I had a black eye and a graze on the left side of my face. I showered carefully and put the same clothes back on. I still hadn’t bought any new ones. I still smelled terrible.

I limped carefully to the Pudding Shop, where Yigit was shocked to see me in such a condition. He gave me a lukewarm instant coffee and a pastry of some sort and told me I had to see a doctor. I said I would but that first I had to call England. He told me where the post office was. It was just nearby. If I had turned left instead of right when I left my hotel the previous day, I would have found it straight away.

Even so, it took me a while to get to the post office and then even longer to explain that I needed to call England. Once I got that all sorted out, I spoke to my uncle’s secretary. The line was bad, but she quickly realised who I was and put me through to my uncle. Once I had him on the line, I told him that his partner’s daughter had been a no-show and that she had left a letter telling me to meet her in a week’s time.

“The waiter in the café told me that her letter had been on the notice board for years before I turned up. It certainly looked as if it had.” There was silence on the other end of the line. “Do you have any idea why?” I asked him. “It makes no sense to me.”

There was another long silence. “I have no idea,” he replied.

Something made me think that he wasn’t telling me the truth. I didn’t know why he might be lying, but I realised that I should tread carefully. I changed the subject and told him about the mugging and the fact that my passport, wallet, and watch had somehow found their way back to my hotel room. I repeated that none of it made any sense.

“The stone?” he asked. The stress in his voice was audible, even with the poor connection. “Where’s the stone?”

“Gone,” I replied. “There was nothing I could do. If I had had it with me, they would have found it and taken it. If I had left it at the hotel, they would have found it. Either way, they would have got it,” I added. “Whoever they are.

“The fact that they didn’t take anything else must mean that they were after the stone. But how did they know that I had it?” I asked him. “No one apart from you and me knew I had the stone.”

“Geraldine knew,” my uncle corrected me. “So did her father.”

He was right. When I had gone to bed the previous evening, I had come to the conclusion that the only explanation for what had happened was that my uncle had had me beaten up to get the stone back. But now that I thought about it…well, it seemed ridiculous.

“What do you want me to do?” I asked him.

“Come back to London,” my uncle replied. There was no reproach in his voice, no blame. In fact, there was nothing there.

“I don’t think I can fly at the moment,” I said. “I’m pretty beaten up, and I think I’ve cracked a couple of ribs. I need to get them checked out before I travel. I also need to buy some new clothes. I can’t travel in what I have been wearing for the past three days.”

There was a long silence, and for a moment, I thought the line had gone dead.

“OK,” my uncle eventually replied. “But come back as soon as you are well enough to travel.” Then he hung up.

Yigit found me an English-speaking doctor who told me that my ribs were bruised, not cracked. He told me that otherwise I was OK and that I would feel better in a few days. He insisted that I report the mugging to the police, and I promised him that I would. He gave me some horse-size painkillers and told me there wasn’t much I could do except rest.

In addition to my aching, beaten-up body, my sore throat had turned into a full-blown fever. On the way back from the doctor, I found a clothing shop, where I bought a pair of traditionally baggy Turkish trousers, a couple of T-shirts, and a lightweight jacket. I then changed hotels, finding a more comfortable one around the corner from the Pudding Shop.

I then pretty much slept for three days straight, knocked out by the painkillers. Yigit brought me food from the café, but I didn’t touch a drop of alcohol for those whole three days. It was the first time for years that I had been dry. But then, the painkillers were so powerful that I didn’t need anything else. I wondered where I could get pills like that in England.

It was Sunday afternoon when I eventually surfaced from my room. The city seemed relatively quiet despite the election. There were a couple of small rallies but no more than thirty or fifty people at each one. I decided that the American in the café had been exaggerating. The place seemed as peaceful as ever; there was no danger.

I left Istanbul on Monday evening but not for London. Instead, I took a ferry to the Asian side of the city, where I caught the night train to Ankara. Stone or no stone, I had decided to meet the mysterious Gee.

I arrived at Istanbul Station an hour earlier than I had thought; no one had told me that the clocks had gone back an hour the previous Sunday. I enjoyed the short ferry ride across the Bosporus, but the train ride was tedious. I was crammed into an overheated carriage with five farting old men who kept trying to speak German to me. Once in Ankara, I checked into the Yeni Hotel; it was equally shitty. The room looked and smelled as if it hadn’t been cleaned for weeks.

I went for a walk around Ankara, but there was nothing to see. The weather had taken a turn for the worse, and a cold wind made the place even less attractive. For lack of anything better to do, I popped into a museum about the Anatolian civilization and then took a taxi out to see Atatürk’s mausoleum. The mausoleum was even colder and less friendly than the rest of Ankara.

I had returned to my shithole of a hotel, desperate for a drink. My painkillers had run out, but I was still in quite considerable pain. There was a little café next to the hotel where the owner spoke some English; he seemed pleased to see a tourist. There was only one other person in the place, a Turk who sat quietly in the corner. He looked strangely familiar, but I didn’t give it a second thought.

The owner said he would prepare me a special meal, which he did, but my fever had returned, and I could hardly eat any of it. I drank raki instead. It slowly made me feel better, but the next day, my headache was back. I didn’t know whether my headache was the result of the fever or the alcohol, but I blamed the fever. I tried to take a shower, but the water was cold. The hotel was shitty, right to the end.

The owner of the café had given me instructions as to how I could catch the bus to Ürgüp. The next morning, I took a shared taxi to the otogar, the bus station, where I had a coffee and managed to eat something while I waited for the bus. The wind was howling outside, and dust was flying everywhere. When the bus arrived, I sat in the front seat so as to give me a better view of the countryside. I quickly fell asleep and didn’t see anything but was woken up by the driver once we had arrived in Ürgüp.

The Belde Hotel in Ürgüp was a small, twelve-room affair built out of wood. It looked and felt a little like a Swiss ski chalet: carpets on the floor, dried flowers by the reception, and lace curtains at the windows. It looked a little old and dusty. The receptionist checked me in. I had supposed that he was the owner of the place, but when I asked him, he told me he wasn’t.

He said he had moved there from Ankara because he couldn’t find work in the capital. He told me that there were more tourists here. “More money,” he said with a smile that revealed a missing tooth on his upper right side. He told me his name was Demir; he said it meant “iron” in Turkish.

I went to my room, took a hot shower, and then sat in the hotel lobby from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. pretending to read a two-month-old TIME magazine. I was waiting for Geraldine—or Gee, as she called herself—to show up. She didn’t.

I asked Demir if he had a room booked under her name, but he told me he didn’t. I asked him if there was another hotel with the same name in town. He said there wasn’t. I checked with him that I was in the right town; I was. And then I checked that I had the right day and the right date. All checked out—everything, except that there was no Geraldine.

She had stood me up for the second time.

Demir suggested I eat something in the café next door. He said he would tell my friend where she could find me when she showed up.

“If she turns up,” I corrected him. I went to the café next door and ate lamb kebabs and drank raki. I watched the door, expecting Gee to show up at any minute. She didn’t.

I didn’t sleep well that night, and I was down early for breakfast the next day. I asked Demir if anyone had checked in to the hotel, and he looked concerned as he told me that nobody had.

“It is the end of the season,” he explained. “We aren’t expecting many more tourists now.”

I ate my breakfast in the hotel’s small dining room and considered my limited options. Either I could hang around for a couple of days in the hope that Geraldine would turn up, or I could head straight back home. I couldn’t decide what to do.

I went back to the lobby and sat in the same seat as the previous evening. This time I didn’t even bother to pretend to read the TIME magazine. I just sat there, and at some point, I must have fallen asleep.

When I woke up, the sun was shining through the lace curtains of the hotel-lobby window; it cast a strange light over the reception area, making everything look different—somehow brighter and newer. Someone had moved the TIME magazine from the table, and my friend Demir was no longer behind the reception desk. A younger man had taken his place.

A girl was sitting opposite me with her back to the window; she had her eyes closed and hadn’t yet noticed that I had woken up. I wondered if she, too, had dozed off.

The sunlight from the window made her look like one of those old, religious paintings where the saints all have halos. But if she was a saint, she certainly wasn’t dressed like one: Dr. Martens boots, blue jeans, a white T-shirt, and a black leather jacket.

Despite the sunlight behind her, I could see that she had black hair and a narrow, almost-chiselled face. She wasn’t beautiful in a traditional sense, but there was something about her that was definitely attractive. The most striking thing was how small she was. I guessed that when she was standing up, the top of her head would barely reach my chest.

However, there was a wiry thinness about her that hinted at toughness and hours spent at a gym—possibly a boxing gym, maybe a Thai boxing gym. She didn’t look older than eighteen.

I shifted in my chair, and she opened her eyes.

“Gee…Geraldine?” I asked.

“That’s me,” she said without a smile. “I thought you would never wake up.” I looked at my watch, but for some reason, it had stopped.

“Let’s go and get something to eat,” she said. “I’m hungry.”