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.