No Place of Refuge Read online

  ‘Perhaps.’ Roux lit a cigarette as she waited for her coffee. ‘There are other reasons she may have been taken. She comes from a wealthy family, her brother is well known.’

  ‘To you?’ Rachel’s voice sharpened.

  Roux smiled a smile she didn’t find in the least encouraging.

  ‘Yes. He bought his sister a gun, after all. Why did he think she would need it? What was he expecting, I wonder?’

  Rachel’s poker face was no good. She knew it telegraphed her fear. She took a moment to collect herself, to stop a defense of Nate from tripping off her tongue.

  ‘You’ve just mentioned kidnappers,’ she pointed out. She looked around the bustling square – ordinary families doing ordinary things, the absence of police. ‘This doesn’t seem like a place where someone could be kidnapped.’

  Roux leaned over the table, blowing smoke in Rachel’s face. ‘I wasn’t thinking of Izmir. Audrey took a trip to the border with her Syrian friends in tow. The border areas are not as controlled as one might think. If Audrey went there, she was at risk.’

  ‘Why would she take that risk?’

  ‘Think it through for yourself, Rachel.’ The older policewoman spoke kindly, as if she regarded Rachel as a protégée. But Rachel couldn’t think of an answer.

  ‘Do you think it’s tied to these trips she took to Europe?’

  Roux nodded, stubbing out her cigarette in her saucer. ‘The question you should be asking is this: What was Audrey looking for at the border?’

  Rachel picked up on this thread. ‘We haven’t explained Sami al-Nuri. Surely he’s the missing link.’

  Roux shrugged. She gazed in the direction of the mosque, impatient for Khattak’s return.

  Rachel studied her air of distraction; she was beginning to suspect it was an act. Roux wasn’t interested in Khattak. She was interested in what he might know, or what else he might uncover. Her eyes flicked back to Rachel with an undercurrent of warning. Rachel’s mouth went dry.

  Roux knew more than she was telling them.

  Or she wasn’t what she seemed.

  29

  Çorakkapi Mosque

  Izmir, Turkey

  The urge to tell Esa the truth was pressing against Ali’s thoughts. Esa was a man of faith; he’d shepherded Ali to the mosque, finding them a place on the prayer rugs without seeming to feel out of place. The Çorakkapi mosque was lovely and elegant in the manner of Turkish mosques, but on a quieter scale, with a miniature five-domed façade and a simple, emerald green carpet. The mosque had opened its doors to refugees. Ali’s little company had slept in its courtyard for weeks.

  After he made his supplication, Esa turned to Ali. ‘I prayed for Israa and for you all.’

  He wasn’t looking for thanks. He was reminding Ali he wasn’t alone, that the ummah hadn’t abandoned the Syrian nation.

  Ali had done the same, praying for the ummah in Iraq, in Palestine, in Burma and South Sudan – wherever he knew there was suffering. Once he’d come to know the boys at Moria, he prayed for the people of Afghanistan. Nor was his compassion restricted to those who shared his beliefs. Syria was a multi-ethnic, multi-faith society; an Armenian family had been his family’s closest neighbors. The bombs had fallen on them both.

  Whether you were against Assad or against the jihadis who’d usurped the revolution, one way or another, you ended up on a list.

  He thought maybe he could trust Esa, because Esa hadn’t asked him to explain his affiliations, or to account for the war. He treated Ali as a friend, not as a boy boxed in by his past, defined by a history in which he’d had no part.

  He was ready to talk to Esa. Especially when Esa added, ‘I also prayed for Audrey. Did you know I’ve known her all her life?’

  Esa hadn’t said this to win his confidence. It was something he wanted to share in case it helped Ali to know. Ali wanted to trust him, but the last time he’d been in this mosque, it was Sami who’d been at his side. Sami had warned him they couldn’t trust anyone – the imam, the smugglers, the Turkish guards, the Syrians at the checkpoints. The one person Sami had trusted was him. They were bound together now by a bond that couldn’t be severed.

  Sami wasn’t from Damascus. He’d been sent to Damascus by Military Intelligence in Aleppo. He didn’t explain his situation further. His description of his work served as explanation enough.

  Sami had nightmares, calling out the names of his friends. His small, close group had lived together in Aleppo. He was a paramedic with the Aleppo Civil Defense. For two years, he’d lived at a factory in disuse, a station protected by a wall. The station was at risk of mortar fire, exposed to frequent bombardment. Sami’s group had survived the season of massacres, to find it followed by another.

  Their truck was riddled with bullet holes, the windshield splintered like a web. Any day it would give, but otherwise the truck was sturdy enough to cope with the massive craters on the road. Sami had been to more impact sites than he could count. His work had centered on search and rescue. When the bombing of Aleppo was reinforced by Russian jets, the group’s priorities had changed. The Civil Defense was the only active group to rescue survivors from the blast zone. Sami’s team had learned to be wary of the double-tap: the site bombed again after rescuers arrived. They’d lost two team members before they’d adapted. From the sound of aircraft they’d learned to identify, they could forecast the scale of the attack.

  Barrel bombs were taking out the city’s apartment blocks. The station had been hit by mortar shells, but it had been spared the thousand-pound bombs packed with shrapnel. When the collapse of their station house had come, the team had been out on a rescue. Sami’s home had fallen behind regime lines – they couldn’t take shelter there. His brother Shahoud had suggested they establish their new base inside an abandoned school. More experienced in the war’s barbarities, Sami had warned against it. ‘Schools are a target. They’ve almost gotten them all.’

  No functioning hospitals were left; even the underground clinic had been shredded. The most dangerous job in Aleppo was working as a doctor or nurse.

  The sky had fallen in Aleppo. No corner of the city was spared. There was nothing Sami hadn’t seen over the course of the war: barrel bombs, clusters, Scud missiles, mortar fire, snipers, chemical weapons. From one day to the next, a house on a well-known route would disappear. And now that their station house was gone, they’d have to begin again.

  They were committed to the people of Aleppo.

  Just as well that they were.

  Nobody else was coming.

  It had taken Sami time to gain the strength to risk the journey to the border. Ali didn’t know the details of Sami’s experience – Sami refused to describe it, so Ali left it alone. He knew East Aleppo had been starved out by the siege. Sami had admitted as much. When Israa had cradled Sami’s head in her lap, he’d let slip, ‘I’ve been dreaming in fruit.’ Another time, doubled over with stomach cramps, he’d said, ‘Hunger is the real assassin.’

  He hadn’t told them the worst until Ali had confided his horrors. When they took Sami to see the ruins of Israa’s house, Sami didn’t react.

  ‘It’s just like this in Aleppo. Every block, every house. There are no more roads left to walk on. When you come back from digging out the wounded, there’s no water to wash off the blood.’

  Ali didn’t ask who Sami had fought with or where his loyalties lay. Since he was a member of the Civil Defense, they couldn’t be with Assad. As for the rest, the rebels who held the east, the increasing fundamentalism that characterized the different groups who were the backbone of the rebellion, it had been enough for Sami to say, ‘Nothing’s worse than the black flag of ISIS. We saved Aleppo from that.’

  But what was left of Aleppo? When he posed the question to his friend, Sami’s response was hopeful, underscored by his courage.

  ‘As long as we resist, they can’t s
ay they’ve beaten us down.’ He smiled at Ali. ‘Even if Aleppo is gone, they can’t defeat Saladin.’

  But Saladin couldn’t save them now. His legacy was shrouded by phosphorus gas.

  Sami refused to concede. ‘It matters that you survived. You owe it to us to resist.’

  Ali shook his head. ‘I’m guilty of things that will send me to the fire.’

  ‘We’ve already been through the fire.’

  He wanted to be consoled. He wanted absolution from Sami, so he said, ‘There’s nothing worse than what I’ve done.’

  ‘You think so?’ Sami lit a cigarette. He passed another to Ali. ‘You know my brother was with me in the Civil Defense?’

  Ali hadn’t wanted to ask about Shahoud. ‘Is he with the Mukhabarat?’ Sami squeezed his eyes shut. ‘After we trained in Turkey, men signed up to volunteer – men like me, tailors, mechanics, schoolteachers like my brother. He had a fiancée on the regime side, did I tell you?’

  Sami hadn’t talked about his brother at all; it was one of those lines Ali knew better than to cross.

  ‘We divided the team into shifts. I was on the night shift.’ Sami mimed putting on eyeglasses. ‘Shahoud had bad eyesight, he thought he’d see better in daylight. The next strike, they dropped two bombs. Shahoud went out after the first hit. The damage was so massive, they called for another team. When we got there, you should have seen it. The bomb had peeled the city block like an egg. You could see inside the shell, bodies everywhere, a mountain of rubble – we were searching through the thickest fog. So many people called for help, each member of our teams was active. Their faces were caked with dust, some of them were bleeding. They went to the site too soon, they were lucky they missed the second strike.’

  Ali shook his head. No one in Aleppo was lucky.

  Sami dug out a staircase. He found a girl whose throat was sliced by shrapnel; she was holding her sister’s hand. The rest of her sister’s body was scattered under the stairs. He used the flashlight on his helmet for visibility. The staircase was in danger of collapse; someone was calling from below. He attempted a vertical rescue. It was like an excavation, digging through blocks of concrete, trying to avoid the twisted steel.

  After the strikes’ pulverizing roar, quiet engulfed the street. It was a kind of death, this absence of the people of Aleppo. So eerily quiet, it reminded Sami of that Friday, the first time in thirteen hundred years that the call to prayer hadn’t sounded.

  The war had swallowed the Adhaan, divesting the city of its essence, the moment of Aleppo’s death. Unless that moment had come later, with the building’s final collapse.

  They’d worked with too much urgency and not enough skill. By the time they reached the bottom, no one was calling out. The dust was so thick, he felt like he was swallowing metal. He’d never forget the taste, razor-edged and cruel. They found the body at the bottom; its legs were severed by the blast. Sami checked to see if the boy was still alive… his blood was the one bit of color able to penetrate the dust.

  Ali didn’t want to hear the rest.

  Sami’s recital was remorseless.

  ‘I turned him and found his glasses. It was my brother, Shahoud.’

  Behind them, Israa was crying, deep, convulsive sobs, Aya cradled in her arms.

  Sami stubbed out his cigarette. ‘There are worse sins than the ones you’ve claimed for yourself.’

  Ali tried to embrace him. He knew Sami didn’t like to be touched, but in that moment, he’d forgotten. His body stiff, Sami moved away.

  ‘There’s nothing left of my life in Aleppo. There’s nothing left of Aleppo. Well…’ A ghostly smile creased his mouth. ‘There was one thing I wanted to keep. Intelligence sent it to Damascus.’

  ‘What was it?’ Ali couldn’t disguise the anguish in his voice.

  Sami flicked his cigarette away. ‘It was my brother’s white helmet.’

  30

  Calais, France

  The Calais Jungle was every bit as oppressive as Sehr had expected it to be. In some ways she was reminded of Moria. From the neat white containers at the heart of the concrete grid, a forest of tents spiraled out, and farther out from the center there were mounds of garbage and abandoned plastic sheeting. The makeup of the camp’s inhabitants was more diverse than on the islands, but here the hopelessness had set in more deeply. There was little sign that the camp’s inhabitants had anywhere to go beyond the northern perimeter. Purportedly, there were mosques and shops available to the camp’s residents, though not all those who ended up in Calais were Muslims. There were also distribution centers, but not nearly enough to meet the need.

  Every road at Calais was blocked – there was no work to be had and no hope of a permanent address. No chance of crossing the Channel, and nothing but risk involved in trying to stow away on the vehicles crossing into England.

  She’d scheduled a meeting with Matthieu Arnaud, the French government’s liaison with the camp. He treated her to a breakdown of numbers and ongoing problems. He did his best to be fair, passing no judgment on those who sought the camp’s protection, or on those who were clamoring for the Calais Jungle to be destroyed.

  He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, and had a censorious cast to his face that wasn’t reflected in his straightforward speech.

  Sehr asked about Audrey’s visit to the camp earlier in the month, and the young man began to rummage through quantities of paper on his desk, searching for the agenda where he kept his appointments. When Sehr asked if his calendar was backed up on his phone, he gave a weary shrug. ‘My phone is stolen once a month like clockwork, so it’s best I rely on my notes.’

  His office had a view of the English Channel. He glanced out the window at the peaceful expanse of waves and the miles of untouched beachfront.

  ‘We built this camp for fifteen hundred people – it’s acquired a life of its own. We’ve had to work to contain the sprawl. We’ve had fires; we had to raze the southern part of the camp at the insistence of a certain segment of the population, and now there are tensions around the northern zone – what can I tell you, mademoiselle? We are heading to a point of conflict. These migrants cross agricultural lands, they fight with each other, there is a lot of violence spiraling out from the inside, and our trade unions and truck drivers have had enough. If migrants want to go to the UK, bien, the British government should build the camp on their side of the Channel, instead of telling us we aren’t doing enough. These are their words, not mine, but to be frank with you, the Calais Jungle is a nightmare.’

  Sehr’s family was from Afghanistan. Her parents had come to Canada as refugees fleeing the Soviet invasion. In a soft voice, she said, ‘If only they could have stayed in their own lands.’

  There was no judgment behind the words. Arnaud flashed a sharp glance at her, his hands stilling in their work, but as he saw her expression, he took her words at face value.

  ‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘If only. There’s a balance to be struck, but it seems to me it’s struck on the backs of those who have very little say in what’s decided.’ He paused for a moment in thought, then concluded with, ‘They are at the mercy of too many forces, with very few choices available. The making and unmaking of all of this – that is beyond my purview.’

  Yet he had a role to play, Sehr thought. A critical role, perhaps. His hands settled on his agenda. He snatched it up and paged to the week in question.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said to Sehr. ‘I should remember your friend, but the number of people who pass through this camp tests my personal recall.’

  He read quickly for a moment, half-whispering to himself.

  Sehr waited, her hands clasped in her lap.

  ‘She made an appointment to speak with me about the Jungle, though she never called it by that name.’ He gave Sehr a sudden smile. ‘I remember her now. She was very pretty, very charming, very much in command of her facts. She kne
w a lot about the camp before she arrived. And she came at a tumultuous time – two weeks after we closed the eviction zone. She was concerned that we had done that.’

  ‘Why? My understanding is that the French government bussed out the inhabitants of the eviction zone to other parts of France. The barrier to the highway, that’s relatively new, isn’t it?’

  He nodded. ‘To prevent stowaways from creating problems for our drivers, we cut off their access to the road.’ He sighed deeply. ‘Your friend wanted to look at our records. How many people in, how many people out at any given time.’ He paused. ‘She was interested in children, but we don’t keep records like that. It’s impossible – a lot of people are dodging the authorities, they don’t want to be pinned to a place.’

  Sehr thought of things her parents had confided about their journey to Canada, their long delay in north-west Pakistan.

  ‘It’s more than that, wouldn’t you say? Many of them come from places where the authorities are corrupt or dangerous. They may not know whom to trust.’

  Arnaud agreed. ‘Yes, we can’t discount that. The point is I couldn’t give Mademoiselle Clare the figures she was looking for – our response in France has been reactive, improvisational. The main concern has been “How do we get these people out?” A lot of the population has been transient, evading registration, so our estimates are just that.’

  Sehr wondered how Audrey had received this news. She thought she could guess what Audrey had been chasing. ‘Did she say why she was focused on children?’

  ‘There have been many unaccompanied children who’ve made the trek.’

  Sehr puzzled this through, staring out at the waters of the Channel. From here, the camp looked like a colorful assortment of blocks, flung carelessly over a patch of land. She could accept that unaccompanied children ended up in countries that neighbored Syria – Lebanon, Turkey, or Jordan. But it seemed unlikely that they made it as far as France. When she asked this question point-blank, Arnaud tugged at his tie.