Siro by David Ignatius (short books to read txt) 📕

“No crisis,” she said. “I was bored. That was the main reason.”

Taylor looked skeptical. “Were you married?” he asked.

“No,” said Anna. “But close.”

“Too close?”

Anna nodded. “His name was Tom. He taught English at Harvard. Very smart, very gentle, very loving. When I met him, I thought I had finally met the man of my dreams.”

“But he wasn’t?”

“No, he was, actually. That was the funny thing. He really was the man of my dreams. He liked the same kind of music I did, the same places on Cape Cod, the same novelists, the same flavors of ice cream. And he took women seriously.”

“A New Age man.”

“Screw you. You can make fun of it, but those things matter. When I met Tom, I had been with so many half-baked, self-centered men, I couldn’t believe how lucky I was to have found someone smart who was interested in me.”

“Sounds like bliss. What happened?”

“Tom had a fatal flaw,” said Anna. “He was an intellectual, a man who liked abstractions. I began to realize that he liked his abstract version of me better than he liked the real person.”

“Mistake,” said Taylor.

“And it turned out he was selfish, too. For all that gentleness, he was as self-absorbed as the others. He would listen to what I had to say, and then say what he wanted to say. I was just a prop. He liked me because I was smart enough to understand him. But that got boring. I wanted something different.”

“What did you want?”

“I wanted a man who would connect, a guy who would walk up to me in a bar, look me in the eye and say: ‘Hey, little lady, let’s have some fun.’ ”

Taylor smiled. “Hey, little lady, let’s have some fun.”

“Don’t flatter yourself.” Anna pulled her coat tighter around her body. As the sun fell lower in the sky, it was getting chilly.

“So who have you found since Tom?”

“Nobody,” said Anna.

“Nobody?”

“I’ve been too busy the past year to think about relationships. And it’s hard to be honest and open with someone if you’re keeping as many secrets as we are.”

“Who says you have to be honest?” said Taylor. “A lot of our colleagues are liars, and they seem to get laid all the time.”

“Maybe,” said Anna. “But that doesn’t turn me on.”

Taylor thought a moment. “I know one thing we have in common,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“We’re both easily bored.”

They drove back to Istanbul at twilight. The beer and the talk had left them both easy and mellow. Sex was in the air, like moisture before a rainstorm; not talked about, not acted upon, just there. As they drove back through Beykoz, Anna recognized one of the houses and nudged Taylor.

“I’ve been there,” she said. “To that little house by the water, with the green shutters.”

“When?”

“Two years ago. When I was here as a graduate student, doing research for my thesis.”

“Who lives there?”

“A funny old woman named Natalia Temo.”

“How did you happen to meet her?”

“A Turkish professor introduced me. He thought she might have some old documents that would be interesting. But it turned out she didn’t.”

“What documents? If you can explain it to a non-Ottomanist.”

“They sounded pretty sexy, actually. This woman was the granddaughter of an Albanian doctor named Ibrahim Temo, who had been one of the founders of the Union and Progress Committee back in the 1880s.”

“Known to non-Ottomanists as the Young Turks.”

“Correct,” said Anna. “I was interested in Temo because he had attended the group’s first meeting in Istanbul in 1889, along with three other medical students: a Circassian from the Caucasus named Mehmed Resid, a Kurd from Arabkir named Abdullah Cevdet and a Kurd from Diyarbakir named Ishak Sukuti. That was the golden age for the Young Turks.”

“How do you remember all this stuff?”

“I have a memory for historical trivia. That used to be my job. Anyway, what I wanted was the group’s papers. They were relevant for a chapter in my dissertation about how the Young Turks lost their idealism. I wanted to find out what had gone wrong, how the members of this progressive organization turned into a bunch of killers by 1915. So I went to see Natalia Temo. And she told me an amazing story. A sort of detective story.”

“Tell me,” said Taylor. “I like detective stories. They’re about my speed.”

“Okay. But it’s complicated. It began when the original members of the group decided they would send their papers to Sukuti, who would act as their archivist. Temo sent him his papers until he fled to Romania in 1895. Eventually Sukuti was forced into exile, too, and he took the papers with him to San Remo, on the Italian Riviera.”

Anna looked at Taylor. “Is this boring?”

“No,” he said. “Quite the contrary. You can’t imagine what a pleasure it is to be talking about something other than tradecraft.”

“Okay,” she said warily, resuming her narrative. “Sukuti stayed in San Remo until 1905, when he became very sick. He knew that he was probably dying, so he arranged to send all the important documents to Temo, in Romania. He put them in a trunk and wrote Temo that they were coming. But before he could send them, he died.”

“Delicious,” said Taylor. “This is sounding like The Maltese Falcon.”

“Just wait. It gets better. The Ottoman consulate in San Remo had been watching Sukuti for years. When they learned of his death, they bribed the police, stole the trunk and sent it to Sultan Abdul-Hamid in Yildiz Palace in Istanbul. The trunk stayed there until 1909, when the Young Turks finally got rid of Abdul-Hamid. Whereupon Ibrahim Temo went to Yildiz, found the trunk, and took it back with him to Romania.”

“Where it remains.”

“No. That’s the problem. When Ibrahim Temo died in 1945, he left the trunk to his son. And when the son died, the papers should have gone to his daughter, Natalia. In which case they would have gone to me, for my thesis, because she liked me.”

“But she didn’t have the papers?”

“Nope.”

“Where are they?”

“Albania,” said Anna with