Chapter Thirty-eight

TWENTY MINUTES LATER, after I had finished showering, I walked out of the bathroom and found a new email on my laptop. It was from Apple, telling me that twenty-seven dollars had been charged to my credit card for music downloads.

I hadn’t bought any music and my fear was that some jerk at the CIA had thought it might be useful to add to Brodie Wilson’s already extensive collection of fucked-up music. I went to iTunes, saw a group of new tracks had arrived and realized that most of them were just packing – there was only one that mattered, and I knew it was from Whisperer.

On the night before I flew to Turkey – when we were working in his study – I saw on the wall an autographed copy of the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street, which, despite our fatigue, had led to a spirited discussion about whether it really was their greatest album. Who would have guessed that the country’s Director of National Intelligence was a closet Stones expert? In scanning the new tracks, I saw that Bradley hadn’t been joking when he said he had told our friend I was cracking up. Whisperer had sent me the Stones’ ‘19th Nervous Breakdown’.

I put my cursor on it, hit play and listened for thirty seconds before it morphed. Planted in the middle, stripped of traffic noise and the woman’s strange message, was the kaval music. Twice I played it through – it lasted for a little more than two minutes – then downloaded it on to my MP3 player. I thought it might give me inspiration as I headed out again to locate phone box after phone box.

It didn’t; it gave me a headache.

By the time I had photographed the fourth one and decided to ask groups of neighbourhood women if they recalled seeing a woman waiting for a phone call and drawn nothing except confused looks or a wary shake of the head, I knew it was going to be a very long day. What was that Turkish expression? Digging a well with a needle?

Still, if you wanted to drink, sometimes that’s what you had to do. I was walking down a narrow street, listening to the kaval and wondering again why none of the experts could identify it, when I stopped: something had just occurred to me. I was following the map on my phone, looking for the next phone box, and it meant I had to make a right. Instead I wheeled left and headed towards the centre of town.

Up ahead, I saw the purple fronds of the jacaranda tree I was looking for and, moments later, I caught sight of the guy from the record store, opening up the shutters that covered the glass windows. When he saw me, he smiled.

‘I thought you’d probably come back, ’ he said, and indicated one of the classic guitars in the window. ‘You look like a Stratocaster kind of guy to me. ’

‘I’d love to buy a Strat, but not today – I need some help. ’

‘Sure, ’ he replied. I helped him raise the rest of the shutters and then he led me through the front door and into the dark cavern of the music store. It was even better than

I had thought: at the back there was a cabinet full of restored turntables for those who still believed in needles and valves, a better range of modern guitars than most stores in New York and enough vinyl pressings from the seventies to have made Whisperer weep.

I indicated his collection of Turkish folk instruments and told him I had a piece of music played on a kaval that I was hoping he could identify.

‘A lot of other people have tried, ’ I said, ‘but nobody seems to be able to nail it. ’

‘I wish my father was alive, ’ he said. ‘He was an expert on the traditional stuff, but I’ll give it a shot. ’

I cued up the MP3 player and watched as he listened. He played it four, maybe five, times. Then he put the player into a docking station and played it through the store’s sound system. Three tourists who had wandered in listened.

‘Not exactly foot-tapping, ’ one of them, a New Zealander, said. He was right – the music was haunting, more like a cry on the wind.

The owner played it again, his dreamy eyes focused. Then he shook his head, and I wasn’t surprised: it had always been a long shot. I started to thank him, but he interrupted.

‘It’s not a kaval, ’ he said.

‘What? ’

‘That’s why you’re having difficulty identifying the tune – it wasn’t written for a kaval. Almost anybody would have made the mistake, but I’m pretty sure it’s a far older instrument. Listen …’

He played it again. ‘A kaval has seven melody stops on top and one underneath. This is hard – you’ve really got to listen – but the instrument that’s playing here has only got six stops on top and one below. There’s no seventh stop. ’

I listened one more time but, honestly, I couldn’t tell – I had no idea how many stops it had. ‘You’re sure? ’ I asked.

‘Yeah, ’ he replied.

‘What is it then? ’

‘I can’t tell you anything about the tune, ’ he said. ‘But I think we’re listening to a ç igirtma. It’s virtually forgotten – I only know about it because my father loved the old stuff. I heard the instrument once when I was a kid. ’

‘Why are they forgotten, though – they died out? ’

‘Not exactly – the birds did. For a kaval you need the wood of a plum tree, but a ç igirtma is made from the wing bone of a mountain eagle. The birds have been endangered for years, so the instrument faded away – and so did the music written for it. That’s why you can’t find the tune. ’

He removed the MP3 player from the docking station and handed it to me. ‘You know the Hotel Ducasse? ’ he asked. ‘You might get some help there. ’