Authors: Terry Hayes
They were friends of the manager, he had rustled them up at a moment’s notice, and when I met them at the front of the house and told them I would pay them, they all refused.
‘These men peoples say that of the money today they have no kissing-love,’ the manager translated,
sort of. The more I heard him, the more he sounded like one of those online translation programs. ‘Is enough for them of the great estate they have the chance to see,’ he said.
It appeared that none of the men, like almost everybody else in Bodrum, had ever been through the
tall gates, and they were only too willing to heed the manager ’s call for help. As I led them around the house, heading towards the rear terrace, we encountered Cumali and her colleagues on their way out.
There was a moment of embarrassment when the two parties confronted each other, but the manager
stepped off the path and his workers followed suit to allow the cops to pass.
It so happened that I was in a position where I could see the manager ’s face clearly and the look of disdain as the officer walked by was almost palpable. The manager turned, saw me looking at him and
smiled. Once the cops were out of earshot, he walked to my side: ‘He is the name of a man we call
SpongeBob.’
All the workers nodded. ‘SpongeBob?’ I said. ‘Like the cartoon?’ The manager nodded and mimed
a sucking motion.
‘Ah,’ I said, ‘the big sponge,’ and rubbed my thumb and forefinger together in the universal symbol of bribery. The manager and his friends laughed, and one of the men spat on the ground. For
a moment we had transcended all language, and we turned the corner of the house.
After allowing them a minute to stare at the view, I led them through the French doors into the library. Two of the men were carpenters and, while they discussed the logistics of building crates to protect the mirrors, several others returned to their trucks for ladders and tools.
I wandered out on to the lawn and started trying to call somebody at FedEx who could organize, at
short notice, to pick up the mirrors and fly them to Florence. I was waiting for yet another customer-service rep to call back when the manager hurried to my side, obviously upset and wanting me to follow him into the house. For a moment I thought they must have dropped one of the mirrors, but I
realized I would have heard it smash and I put that possibility aside.
I temporarily gave up on FedEx, followed the manager up to the terrace, went through the doors
and into the library. I stopped. The men – silent and standing to one side – were watching me. They
had removed both mirrors, and I looked at the dressed-stone walls where they had been hanging.
When I first saw the mirrors, I had thought they were incongruous but I had put it down to someone’s eccentricity. It wasn’t – the mirrors had been used to cover two large swastikas that had been carved into the stone. They were the real deal too, beautifully chiselled, both surmounted by the imperial eagle of the Third Reich. I stared at them. As a child, I had seen swastikas in the Kommandant’s office at Natzweiler-Struthof and, for a terrible moment, I saw the woman again with
the baby in her arms and the two children holding tight to her skirt.
I walked towards the foul things, watched by the manager and his friends, all of them seemingly shamefaced. Turkey had been neutral in the Second World War, but they all knew what the symbols
represented and I think they were deeply offended at what had been found in their town.
I reached up – I really didn’t want to touch it – and ran my finger along the chisel marks. It came
away thick with dust: the mirrors had been put in place years ago.
I turned to the men. ‘Why do they call it the French House?’ I asked.
Chapter Twenty-six
IT WASN’T THE name of the house, not originally. When it was built, just after the end of the war, it had been called
La Salle d’Attente
. The Waiting Room. Waiting for what? I wondered.
I was sitting with the manager and his team on the steps leading from the terrace down to the lawn,
the Aegean Sea laid out in front of us and a warm breeze rustling through the palm trees above. The
men had brought out their lunch and insisted I share their meal of olives, cheese and wood-fired bread. It was only by showing them my FBI shield and telling them it was forbidden that I managed to avoid the wine and raki that seemed to accompany every mouthful. I was grateful they had got the mirrors down before lunch.
We were engaged in what was, to put it mildly, a chaotic conversation – and not because of the booze. All the men, the manager included, had their own version of the history of the house. None of them were old enough to remember its construction, so they relied on stories that had been passed from mouth to ear by their grandparents.
The one thing everybody agreed on was that the house had been built by a German woman. As far
as I could tell, that had been in 1946, barely a year after the war had finished when Germany – with seven million dead – was in ruins. The story was that her family had moved their assets to Switzerland before the outbreak of hostilities and that her fortune had survived intact. Maybe it was true: there were Germans who had done exactly that – ask the guys at Richeloud’s.
The consensus among the storytellers was that the woman had flown into the old grass runway at
Milas, was met by a car, inspected the site at lunchtime and flew out two hours later. After a few months, a construction team arrived.
Back then, there were hardly any roads, so all the tradesmen and engineers, as well as the building
materials, had to be brought in by barge. The gaunt men – all Germans – built bunkhouses and a field kitchen and, for reasons only they knew, had nothing to do with the villagers.
After two years, with the house complete, the last of them demolished their simple barracks, landscaped the gardens and pulled out. All that was left to mark their stay was the name of the small cove at the base of the cliff, inaccessible except by boat, where they had landed the barges and swum every evening. ‘This sand of the water,’ the manager said, ‘is what the Bodrum peoples call—’
‘The German Beach,’ I said.
The men told me that, despite all the effort and expense, nobody had lived in the villa – at least not permanently. At first, lights would come on every few months, stay lit for a week or so, then go dark again. Everybody assumed it was a vacation home, but the carefully planted foliage and the privacy of the land made it impossible even to glimpse the people who called the Waiting Room their temporary
home.
The Waiting Room, I thought again – such a strange name. ‘Why was it changed?’ I asked them.
The manager laughed and didn’t need to consult his colleagues. ‘It was of the nature very simple,’
he said. ‘
La Salle d’Attente
made a complication far too much for the fisherfolk to pronunciate. They knew of the language in which it was spoken, so they did the shrug and called it the French House.
Over the years, it did a catch-on and all peoples named it the same.’
The seasons passed, the men said, the foliage grew thicker and the villa seemed to fall into a long
sleep, eventually becoming unvisited for years at a time.
Slowly at first, then more rapidly, tourism changed the coast – marinas sprouted in the harbour and other beautiful villas were built on the headland. Then, about eight years ago, a man came – nobody
knew who he was – and opened up the house. A few weeks later, teams of renovators arrived from overseas and set about updating the mansion, even installing a state-of-the art security system. Finally, the twenty-first century had caught up with the French House.
A few months before that particular summer season started, a local realtor received a call from someone who said it was time the mansion earned its keep: it was available for vacation rentals at two hundred thousand US dollars a week.
The men smiled at the amazing figure and did the shrug.
‘Who was she, the woman who built it?’ I asked in the silence, thinking about the swastikas.
They shook their heads: it was a mystery. The manager looked at his watch and told the men they
had better finish loading up if the mirrors were going to make it to the airport on time. The team recorked their bottles, got to their feet and headed back to the terrace.
I turned and walked down the garden. Halfway, I stopped and looked back at the house. It was certainly sinister, and my impression had been right when I had first seen it from the driveway: it had been built for privacy. But the Waiting Room – why call it that? And what of the people who came and stayed briefly all those years ago? Who were they?
I don’t know why I thought of it – maybe it was the sweep of the sea, perhaps it was the sight of a
freighter on the horizon – but I have learned to trust my intuition. A ship, I thought. That was what they were waiting for: a ship.
The manager was on the terrace, waving to get my attention. ‘The loadings of the mirror are all system go and finished,’ he called. ‘We only need now the person of you.’
I smiled and headed up to join the convoy to Milas airport.
Chapter Twenty-seven
I FLEW INTO florence at dusk, not a cloud in the sky, the great Renaissance city laid out below in all its haunting beauty. I was in the cockpit of a FedEx plane that had been diverted from Istanbul to pick up two large crates as a special favour to the FBI.
The pilots, a pair of cowboys – one English and the other Australian – invited me to sit in the spare seat up front. Had I known they would spend the entire flight arguing about cricket, I would have stayed in the back.
A truck from the Uffizi headed on to the apron to meet us and, between the gallery’s three storemen
and the two cricket-lovers, the large crates were craned out of the belly of the plane and into the back of the truck in a matter of minutes. As much as any city on earth, Florence itself is a work of art, but seeing it again brought me little joy. The last time I had walked its streets had been with Bill and, once again, I found myself overcome with regret about the way I had treated him.
We entered the city in the twilight, travelled down narrow side streets little changed in five hundred years and stopped outside a pair of huge oak doors I dimly remembered. The workshop was located
in a separate complex to the museum – a group of old cellars and warehouses, their stone walls six
feet thick – which had once housed the Medicis’ vast stores of grain and wine.
Cameras checked every inch of the street before the oak doors swung back and the truck entered a
huge security area. I climbed out of the cab and looked at the hi-tech consoles, squads of armed guards, racks of CCTV monitors and massive steel doors that barred further entry into the facility.
The place bore little resemblance to the one I had visited so many years ago, and I wasn’t surprised –
the Uffizi had been bombed by terrorists in the early nineties, and the museum obviously wasn’t taking any chances.
Two guards approached and fingerprinted the storemen and driver with handheld scanners. Even though the men had known each other for years, the guards had to wait for the central database to validate the men’s identities before the steel doors could be opened. As the truck and its cargo disappeared inside, I was left behind. A guy in a suit appeared, arranged to have me photographed for a security pass and told me the director and his team were waiting.
With the pass pinned to my coat, a guard strapped a copper wire trailing to the floor around my ankle: any static electricity generated by my clothes or shoes would be carried away by the wire and sent to ground, avoiding any risk of a spark. After robbery and terrorism, a tiny flash igniting the volatile chemicals used in art restoration was what facilities like the workshop feared most.
The Uffizi specialized in repairing large canvases and frescoes and, though there had been many
changes since my previous visit, the director had told me on the phone that they still had the huge photographic plates and chemical baths necessary for that work. It was those that would very soon determine the future of my mission.
The man in the suit led me to an elevator, we went down six floors and I stepped into what looked
like a conference room: four opaque glass walls, a long table and, on one side, two technicians sitting at computer screens connected to a huge array of hard drives.
Three women and half a dozen men stood up to greet me. One of them extended his hand and introduced himself as the director. He was surprisingly young, but his long hair was completely grey and I guessed that the risk of ruining priceless works of art must have taken its toll. He said that, in the
few hours since we had first spoken, the people gathered in the room had put together a strategy to try to recover an image from the mirrors. None of them, he said, held out much hope.
‘Then again,’ he added with a smile, ‘sometimes even art restorers can work miracles. Ready?’
I nodded, and he flicked a switch on the wall. The four opaque walls turned completely clear. They
were made from a type of glass called liquid crystal – an electrical current had rearranged the molecules and turned it transparent.
We were standing in a glass cube, suspended in mid-air, looking down on a remarkable space.
As big as a football field and at least sixty feet high – arched, vaulted and pure white – it was probably even older than the reign of the Medicis. Standing in it, dwarfed by the vast expanse, were hydraulic hoists for lifting monumental statues, gantries to raise and lower oil paintings, stainless-steel cleaning baths big enough for an obelisk and a steam-room to remove centuries of grime from