Chapter Thirty-five

WE SANG. MACK and I sang ‘midnight special’ and all the old Delta blues standards as we barrelled south through the deepening night, down roads I had only travelled once before in my life, terrified that I would miss a turn or take the wrong fork and finally cost him his life just as certainly as I had cast it into the balance up on the clifftop.

We sang to keep Mack’s creeping unconsciousness at bay, we sang to thumb our nose at death, our unseen passenger, and we sang to say that we were alive and we loved life and that nobody in that vehicle was going to be taken easy or without a fight. It started to rain.

We had driven south, moving fast into an increasingly remote area with only the scattered lights of small farms to tell us where the land ended and the sea began. At last I saw the turn-off I was looking for, took it in a shower of gravel and started a long descent towards a secluded fishing village. We came round the tip of a headland, met the rain full on and saw lights huddled together at the water’s edge. I reached the village and found a narrow street which looked familiar.

Mack had slipped into a kind of half-world, my jacket was soaked with his blood – and I drove one-handed, constantly trying to keep him awake and fighting.

Hoping to hell I hadn’t made a mistake in my navigation, I turned a corner and saw a communal water fountain surrounded by dead flowers and with an old bucket tied to a rope and knew that I was close. I drew to a stop in the darkness, grabbed my flashlight from my key chain and shone it on the front gate – I didn’t want to have a half-dead man over my shoulder and knock at the wrong door.

The beam of the flashlight picked out a brass plaque on the gate. Unpolished and faded, written in English, it gave the occupant’s name and the details of his degrees – in medicine and surgery – from Sydney University. In light of the nature of the guy practising there, it probably wasn’t the best advertisement for that august institution.

I opened the passenger door, lifted Mack on to my shoulder, kicked open the gate and headed towards the front door of the rundown cottage. It opened before I got there – the doctor had heard the car stop outside and had come to investigate. He stood on the threshold peering out – a face like an unmade bed, skinny legs in a pair of baggy shorts and a T-shirt so faded that the stripper bar it advertised had probably closed years ago. He was in his early forties but, given his love of the bottle, if he made fifty it would be a surprise. I didn’t know what his real name was – thanks to the plaque on the gate, all the Turks in the area knew him simply as Dr Sydney – and that seemed to suit him fine.

I had met him a week earlier when, after Control had made the arrangements, I was sent to test the route. He had been told I was a tour guide escorting a group of Americans through the area who might need, in the unlikely event of an emergency, his assistance. I don’t think he believed a word of it but, by all accounts, he didn’t like the Turkish authorities very much and our substantial cash advance encouraged him not to ask any questions.

‘Hello, Mr Jacobs, ’ he said. Jacobs was the name I was using in Turkey. He looked at Mack draped over my shoulder and saw the blood-soaked jacket tied around his waist. ‘Quite a tour you must be running there – remind me not to take it. ’ In my experience, most Australians aren’t easily rattled and I was deeply grateful for that.

Together we carried Mack into the kitchen and, though the doctor’s breath reeked of booze, there was something in the way he straightened his back and cut away Mack’s clothes and damaged tissue that told me he had once been a surgeon of discipline and skill.

I used whatever of my medical training I could remember to act as his theatre nurse and, with the hot water running, the kitchen bench swept clear to provide a table, the reading lamps from his study and bedroom pressed into service to illuminate the wound, we tried desperately to stabilize the shattered body and keep Mack alive until the chopper with its specialists and bags of plasma arrived.

Not once through that harrowing time did the doctor’s hand shake or his commitment falter – he extemporized and cursed and dragged out from beneath the layers of booze and wasted years every idea and strategy he had ever learned.

It didn’t work. Mack faded, and we fought harder, we got him back, then he faded again. With the chopper barely eighteen minutes away, the bluesman seemed to sigh. He lifted one hand up as if to touch our faces in silent thanks, and flew away. We fought even harder, but there was no calling him back that time, and we both fell still and quiet at last.

Dr Sydney hung his head, and it was impossible from where I was standing to see whether his body was trembling from fatigue or something far more human. After a moment he looked up at me and I saw in his eyes the despair – the anguish – it caused him to have someone die in his hands.

‘I used to operate on injured children, ’ he said quietly, as if in explanation for the drink, the run-down cottage, the life in exile and the acres of pain he carried with him. I nodded, finding at least some understanding of what it must have been like to lose a young kid under the knife.

‘He was a friend of yours? ’ he asked.

I nodded and, with a decency that no longer surprised me, he made an excuse and found something to do in another part of the house. I drew the sheet over Mack’s face – I wanted him to have all the dignity I could give him – and said a few words. You couldn’t call it praying but, out of respect, in the hope that his spirit was somewhere close at hand, I said what I needed to about friendship, courage, and hopeless regret for breaking the rules up on the cliff-top.

The doctor returned and started to clean up, and I walked out into his living room. It was fourteen minutes until the chopper arrived, and a message on my cellphone told me they had identified a garbage dump behind town where they could land without being seen. Keeping the tremor out of my voice, I called and said they could stand the medics down: it wasn’t a patient they would be evacuating, it was a body.

I got rid of the vehicle by giving it to Dr Sydney – it was small recompense for the effort he had made to save Mack – and my remaining concern was the Turkish cops. Trying to discover what they were doing, I turned to the TV playing softly in the corner of the living room.

It was showing a Turkish news programme, but there was nothing about the killings at the rave or of a police operation heading my way. I used the remote to surf through the local channels – soap operas, Hollywood movies dubbed in Turkish and two more news programmes – but nothing to cause alarm.

Nor was there anything on the BBC, CNN, Bloomberg or MSNBC …