How to Betray Your Country by James Wolff (spicy books to read .TXT) 📕

with my bags. By ten it’s turning into a quasi-military operation out there. The black Corolla is parked in plain sight opposite, and when its tracksuited driver emerges – first for cigarettes, then for coffee – he glares at my third-floor window with no attempt to conceal his hostility. Every thirty minutes the team leader patrols the street to check everyone is in place. There can be no mistakes this time. I can’t begin to imagine how crowded the lobby must be.

Everything is laid out on the bed. But in view of what’s happening outside I’m going to have to adapt the plan, and so instead of hiding it all away in the rucksack I put it on now, in the hope it’ll act as a crude disguise of sorts, except for the shoes, which I’ll carry under my arm until I get there. It’d be hard to walk in the shoes. The door hinges squeak but to my relief there’s no one on the landing. Two voices – male, authoritative, bored – float upwards from the floor below. I climb the stairs in my socks to the padlocked metal door at the top of the hotel. It takes less than a minute to open, and then I’m out under a startlingly clear night sky. To be honest, I’m surprised it’s been this easy – I’m surprised they didn’t anticipate that I might try to escape over the rooftops. The only person who seems to have been expecting this is the old lady standing at the window of her apartment across the street, whose reaction to the sight of a grown man dressed in red spotted trousers, braces, a bow tie and a multicoloured wig is to wave, as though she’s seen far stranger things up here than a clown.

The first thing I have to do is find a way down. After that I’ll have to trust my sense of direction and hope that I can lose myself in the crowds, just another partygoer in fancy dress. I’ve studied the maps and I have a fair idea how to get to the prison. As for what exactly to do once I’m there, well, I assume the one thing every prison will have is walls, and in one pocket I’ve got a bundle of rolled-up photographs of detained journalists that I printed this afternoon, and in the other a pot of glue, so I’m hoping that events will take care of themselves once I get there. It’s not the most painstaking plan ever devised, but then I wouldn’t claim that I’m thinking particularly clearly today. I know I won’t have it all my own way. I remember Martha telling me in our first conversation about a protest she helped organize outside the Bakırköy women’s prison in the south of the city, and so I imagine they’ll be used to this kind of thing – there’ll be cameras, there’ll be police. It is a prison after all. If only it wasn’t so hard to run in these shoes. The clown suit was her idea, though, and if I’m going to do this then it feels only right that I do it the way she wanted.

But it turns out my escape from the hotel hasn’t been as neatly executed as I thought. The metal door clatters open and suddenly three men are standing less than ten paces away, including the surveillance team leader, with an expression on his face that turns from anger to confusion as he sees how I’m dressed. We all stand there, unsure what to do next. One of my socks has a hole in the big toe, and the trousers barely reach my shins, and the bow tie has slid around to the back of my neck. I straighten the wig. A mobile phone starts ringing. He searches his pockets for the culprit, puts it to his ear and in the silence I can hear Elif shouting at him down the line. He tries to explain what is happening and she shouts even louder. I sympathize with him, that’s the truth. What can he do? Should I offer to speak to her? I want to tell her that I’m sorry, that everything is all right, that Youssef is on his way to find his daughter, that the world can be a surprisingly beautiful place, that I’m willing to accept this might be the beginning of a long-overdue nervous breakdown. Church bells peal at the approach of midnight and a faraway ship’s horn sounds on the water. The sky fills with swirling snow. The old woman watching from her window breaks the impasse for us. Drawing her pea-green dressing gown around her, she launches into an angry tirade in Turkish at the three men and then turns to me. “What are you waiting for?” she says, and since I don’t have a good answer I start to run. I don’t know if this is what she meant. But for the first time in a very long while I feel that I am doing something straightforwardly good, that this is something I won’t regret, that in some new and unexpected way this is me. The men are shouting. There are another ten metres to the edge. In the darkness it’s hard to see how far it is beyond that to the next rooftop, or how long the drop is to the street below, but just when I start to feel afraid and think of slowing down I remember Martha, pedalling fearlessly on her bicycle, and as I finally come to the edge I tighten my grip on the clown shoes, and with my other hand I reach out for her, and together we jump.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

James Wolff grew up in the Middle East and now lives in London. He has worked for the British government for over ten years. His first novel, Beside the Syrian Sea, was published in 2018.

COPYRIGHT

BITTER LEMON PRESS

First published in the United Kingdom in 2021 by

Bitter