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

I’ll never see them. The Albanians don’t give visas to Americans.”

“I am very sorry.”

Anna was disconsolate, suffering under that special weight of regret that comes from discovering—too late—that you might have had something, had you only known it was available. Even the snippy curator could see that she was upset.

“Madame, if I may suggest. Perhaps you would like to see the Greek scholar who worked with the Temo collection while it was here?”

Anna’s eyes brightened. “Yes, I suppose I would, if that’s possible.”

“Let me see if he is here. Please sit down.”

The curator disappeared down a dark corridor and was gone for ten minutes. He returned with a tall, thin young man who had the colorless skin and sunken, affectless eyes that marked him as a denizen of the library.

“I’m Lucy Morgan,” said Anna. The young bibliophile trembled slightly as he shook her hand. His name was Andreas Papadapoulos; it turned out that he was a doctoral candidate himself, whose dissertation—if he could ever finish it—was to be on nothing other than the life and works of Mr. Ibrahim Temo. Anna began to quiz the young Greek about the documents, but the owlish curator put his finger to his lips.

“Silence in the library, please,” he said.

But Anna was determined to share, at least vicariously, in the Temo archive. So with gentle prodding, she prevailed on the skittish Mr. Papadapoulos to join her for lunch.

“Did you really get hold of Sukuti’s trunk?” Anna asked him when they were seated in an outdoor café near the university.

“Excuse me?” The poor young Greek looked as if he might jump out of his pasty white skin.

“Oh, come now, Mr. Papadapoulos. You know very well what I’m talking about. The trunk in which Ishak Sukuti kept the early records of the Union and Progress Committee. The trunk he tried to send to Temo, which Temo finally picked up at Yildiz Palace and took back with him to Romania, and which finally ended up in Albania.”

“Oh, that trunk,” said Andreas. “How do you know so much about Sukuti’s trunk?”

“Because I spent a summer chasing it myself, in Istanbul. In Beykoz, to be precise, where Temo’s daughter was living. I thought she might have it.”

“Natalia Temo.”

“Yes, Natalia.” She nodded. Evidently he knew the whole story. Rationally, Anna knew that she had no reason to feel jealous. She wasn’t a graduate student anymore. She had no academic subspecialty to protect. Still, it bothered her that someone—this frightened Greek scholar she had never met or known the existence of until a few minutes ago—had found and appropriated to himself something that ought to have been hers.

“So tell me. I’m curious to know what’s in the great Temo archive.”

“It is hard to say,” he answered warily. “I am still working on my research.”

“Don’t worry, Mr. Papadapoulos. I won’t steal your material. If you want to know the truth, I’m not really a graduate student anymore. I’ve dropped out.”

“Oh,” he said. He seemed slightly reassured. “Well, I can tell you a few things. The Albanians didn’t let me have all the papers, and I only had several months to examine them. But I have found a few interesting things.”

“Tell me whatever you can. I’m dying to know, actually.”

“Yes, perhaps I can tell you a little,” said the young Greek. He wanted so much to be nice, especially to an attractive, if slightly intimidating American woman. “What I have found is that the Temo papers include most of the Young Turks’ international correspondence from 1889, when they were founded, until about 1895.”

“I already know that, Mr. Papadapoulos. That was the period I was examining in my dissertation.”

“Yes, of course. So what is interesting about these papers is that they show the Young Turks had a network of contacts throughout the provinces of the Ottoman Empire, and even in many areas of the Russian Tsar’s empire. I have found among the papers much correspondence among branches or affiliates of the Union and Progress Committee. They had branches in Salonika, in Izmir, in Paris, in London.”

“What about the branches in the East?”

“Yes. I have found correspondence with them, too. With affiliated groups in Baku, in Tashkent, in Bukhara—all places that were at that time controlled by the Tsar. And most interesting of all, I have found correspondence with affiliates in Christian areas—in Yerevan in Armenia and Tbilisi in Georgia.”

“So the committee had a network throughout the Caucasus and Central Asia?” asked Anna. As she spoke, she was thinking of another network. One that existed, for now, only in the mind of Edward Stone.

“Yes, that is right.”

“And it cut across the ethnic boundaries.”

“Excuse me?”

“I mean, the network included people who, in other contexts, didn’t get along. Armenians and Azeris. Georgians and Tatars. Greeks and Turks.”

“Yes. I suppose that is true.”

“Hold on. Is it true or not?”

“Yes. On one level it is true. The Union and Progress Committee said that it was for equality of all ethnic groups that had lived within the boundaries of the Ottoman Empire. Armenians, Kurds, Greeks. Bulgarians. Copts. Even Jews.”

“But on another level it wasn’t true?”

“You must understand, Miss Morgan. These people in the Union and Progress Committee, they were spies. They always operated on several different levels.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“They were spies. They were in a battle with Abdul-Hamid’s secret police. They did secret things.”

“I know what spies are, Mr. Papadapoulos.”

“Well, these Young Turk spies would do strange things. They would start a newspaper in Paris or London, in the expectation that Abdul-Hamid’s agents would bribe them to close the paper. They got 10,000 francs to close one newspaper in Paris. Then they would take the money and start another newspaper. They bribed the big European newspapers, too—Figaro, Le Matin—to write nasty stories about the sultan. They would deliberately plant false information in one capital of Europe, to make Abdul-Hamid’s men chase after it, and plant different information in another capital. They were very clever, these Young Turk spies.”

“But what about the network? You said the committee on one