Children of Wolves

by Lawrence Osborne

Genres: International Crime & Mystery; Psychological Thrillers

Synopsis

From the author of The Ballad of a Small Player—now a Netflix film starring Colin Farrell and Tilda Swinton—The Secret History meets The Talented Mr. Ripley in a literary thriller about an American private investigator who travels to Turkey to track down the daughter of a wealthy family, unwittingly setting off a sinister plot.

Four children from wealthy families are sent to a strict prestigious boarding school for troubled teenagers. Disgusted with the power that allowed their parents to get away with abandoning them to the school’s oppressive regime, they form a close bond, vowing to disrupt the status quo by all means necessary.

Years later, Tyler is a private investigator with a failing career who has been hired by petrochemical billionaire James Arthur Knight Jr. to find his run-away daughter, Chana. At a seaside hotel in Turkey, he finds Chana lounging with her three wealthy friends and living with a fake name.

Enthralled by Chana’s shyness and elegance, Tyler decides to keep his discovery to himself, accepting Mr. Knight’s payments while feeding him elusive information and partying with Chana and her friends over wine and raki. One night, when Tyler lets slip his relationship with the American consul, Chana lights up with interest and asks if he can orchestrate a meeting.

With a backdrop of glitzy ex-pat parties and diplomatic galas, Chana conjures a plot involving the consul that sets into motion a dark chain of events. Tyler naively trails along as Chana and her friends suddenly become part of a violent conspiracy barreling toward a shocking conclusion.

Publisher: S&S/Summit Books

Print pages: 224

Sample

Chapter One ONE
Across the bay the yachts of the city’s rich lingered motionless all summer, never seeming to arrive or depart. The Hotel Halicarnassus lay on the eastern side of Gündogan Bay, surrounded by dry hills and the olive trees which Herodotus might have known as a child. When Tyler took his orta kahve in the morning, the air was always the same, dry and hot, the pines planted by the Greeks in their heyday stood somber in their shade, and down by the edge of the swimming deck the more vigorous of the guests ate feta and bread before launching themselves into the waters. It was there that Tyler Sedgewick, an American on a mission, hoped to catch sight of Chana Simavi Knight fresh from her sleep, alone or with a boyfriend. When and if she did appear, his Celestron binoculars and Leica camera would be ready as he held vigil at the window of his room on the upper floor of the hotel. But it was already well into July, and although the days lengthened and the expenses he billed to her father grew ominous, they passed without her appearing and his prowess as an investigator began to be called into question.

When James Arthur Knight Jr. gave Tyler her picture at the beginning of the year, the investigator was sure that he had seen her before. He didn’t say anything to Mr. Knight then but deep down he was persuaded of it. He had seen her in the street, maybe, in a bar somewhere on a forgotten summer night, in conditions of half-light and alcoholic ease. They had lived at the same time in New York and they might well have crossed paths. The images which Knight had given him for reference had reminded Tyler of a line of poetry he had read at school somewhere about a woman’s eyes resembling “forests forever under the axe.” What is wounded cannot be hidden. Even in the photograph which Tyler had pinned to the wall, the “forests” in those eyes could be seen and felt. They watched him as he lay numbed with raki on the bed under the mosquito nets after sundown, or working at the desk during the day. From somewhere in the middle distance the adhan sounded, the call to prayer, probably from the Tarihi Mosque in Gündogan, and that “echo of the dead,” as he liked to think of it, chimed perfectly with the face on the wall. She was the stranger you’ve seen before at close quarters but who never made contact with you, the ship that passed yours in the fog bank and didn’t care about your four-second proximity.

“You know,” her father would say to Tyler during their periodic consultations by phone, “she never got over the death of her mother.” No one could say if this was hyperbole or excuse, but it did occur to Tyler that the wound in the eyes came from that. Still, everyone’s mother dies. It didn’t explain anything. It didn’t explain why she had disappeared or why her own family felt it necessary to find out why. She had “gone revolutionary” was all her father claimed to know. She had always been left-wing, at war with her family and her social class, a precocious teenager with ready reasons for why her own society should be destroyed. The Knights had assumed that all bookish teenagers were a little like this. But Chana had never grown out of her radicalism. On the contrary she had grown into it. Dismaying, but what could one do? It was an affliction of certain generations. Meanwhile Knight had discovered that the house she had been living in with some of the comrades had burned to the ground in the desert somewhere near a small settlement in California. After which willful, persuasive, impossible Chana had gone to ground.

In the mornings Tyler ordered an orta kahve from room service and sat by the shutters of his open window looking down at the hotel decks with the Celestron that he had bought in a mall in the Istanbul neighborhood of Etiler near where he had been living. Youngish couples in terry cloth robes, solitary middle-aged men dark as Onassis from a lifetime on the yachts. He didn’t know the scene down in Bodrum, it was his first time, and yet one could see how it worked. The Halicarnassus was in all the rakish guides. And so he watched them like a birder waiting for the American heiress on the lam to appear like some rare African chaffinch.

Although he knew Chana’s face, he assumed that she had changed the color of her hair. One never knows the lengths to which self-styled radicals on the run will go. Every other evening at 7 p.m. he checked in with the anxious father who was then staying up at Montauk. Knight was a businessman who had taken on the weight of a dynastic petrochemical enterprise and there was something lugubriously burdened about him, as if he had been given a great industrial task to which by nature he was not very well suited. He labored for others. His daughter also seemed to be a burden to him. Chana was the fruit of Knight’s marriage to a wealthy Turkish society girl and as a result she had grown up both in Turkey and her father’s country. She was bilingual, bicultural, like many of her generation; she was able to slip between places and societies with ease. Perhaps this had contributed to a rare form of schizophrenia. She was mercurial, haughty, unusually attuned to other people’s needs and wants, altruistically volatile, genuine and manipulative, chaotic and secretive, a lover of masquerades and shams.

Knight had contacted Tyler at the end of the previous year to ask if Cyclops Eye might consider trying to locate this twenty-seven-year-old chimera. He had done so because he knew that Tyler had been at Groton with the man just appointed to be the American consul in Istanbul, a David Meltzer whom Tyler was sure to remember from school. It was surely a connection which Tyler could use to his advantage if he agreed to take on the assignment and move to Turkey for a few months at the command of the Knight family.

“I am sure,” Knight said during a long lunch for two at the 24 Club during the winter, “that she has entered a period of what I will call vagabondage. Global vagabondage. She failed to show up for a family wedding in Maryland. There were hints that she was in Bali. There was even a credit card transaction in Shanghai from a bar called Sober Company.”

“And you haven’t seen her in a year?”

“My people have been looking for credit card transactions. But they are few and far between. She seems to be running on cash.”

“And where was the last transaction?”

“There we have it. Turkey. It’s hardly surprising. She has connections in Istanbul, she can blend in. She speaks the language as a native. But here is my bind. I don’t want a professional Turkish spy following Chana. I need someone who can pass for a clueless tourist.”

So that would be me then? Tyler thought.

He didn’t want to admit that he barely remembered David Meltzer. He wanted the assignment and he was happy to play along with this garrulous egotist shoveling crab ravioli into his mouth as he talked. He said he could certainly play a clueless tourist.

“Not play, Tyler. Just actually be one. I’d like you to find her but not reveal anything. Just befriend her if you can. I want you to find out what is making her embrace her own disappearance.”

“And then what?”

“Inform, Tyler, inform. I want to be informed. I think you could gain her confidence, even if you are a bit of a shamus.”

“A what?”

“Never mind. I was thinking you could pretend to be something ordinary while you were over there. A writer. A writer drifting about. She would like that. She would find it attractive. Can you pull that off?”

“It’s better than playing a solitary tourist.”

“Good man. I’ll pay you double whatever you’re getting at that miserable agency of yours. I’ll get you a nice little house in Istanbul too. It won’t be bad at all. It’ll be refreshing. Think of it as a working vacation.”

Afterward they walked together through Bryant Park in the snow, where Knight gave vent to his frustrations. It was a tricky matter, as families always were. The Simavi family in Istanbul had been no help. They claimed to have not seen Chana in years. She was as alienated from them as her mother had been after she had married an American. Knight himself wanted to know what Chana was really thinking, what had gone wrong with her. This way, he would keep it “in the family,” though not in the actual family. He added something else that was more private to the Knight family. When she was fifteen, he’d had her sent to a disciplinarian boarding school in the California desert, a therapeutic reform school as they termed it. It was a place cut off from the outside world where wayward children of the rich learned how to recalibrate their lives. They were taken out of their privileged milieu where drugs and sex were an everyday diversion, and forced to give up phones and media, to clean stables, swim in cold rivers and observe strict laws of silence among themselves. It was a harsh cure for the ills of their time and he had often wondered if it had done more harm than good.

“She came out of there at eighteen more violent—I mean mentally violent—than when she went in. All that was good was that she stopped taking cocaine for three years.”

From Tyler he might get information about his daughter’s current mental state, and without arousing her contempt should she ever discover, later in life, that her father had put her under surveillance. He wanted to retain her respect if that was at all possible. Respect, he kept repeating as he stepped in the snow so as to avoid the puddles, was the cornerstone of every relationship. “Just as I respect you, Tyler. I know how highly your colleagues speak of you.”

THIS WAS UNTRUE. Tyler was in the middle stretch of a career which had not panned out as he had hoped. Restless and frustrated, he was eager to get any work outside the country. He could feel that his stock at Cyclops was fading as his enthusiasm for the profession wore off.

In recent years he had been doing mostly marital-affairs work in the tristate area, venturing out to a surveillance job in Monaco concerning an illegitimate American love child and then to Brazil for an insurance-fraud case. His success rate over the previous two years had been 60–40. He had let it be known to his partners that these foreign assignments were much more to his taste than merely spying on husbands in Manhattan hotels; when the Knight case came into the office, therefore, and they were discussing how to handle it, Tyler said to them that he had been at school at Groton with David Meltzer, the consul in Istanbul.

Tyler and Meltzer were from different social backgrounds but Tyler had a recollection of the lanky hockey player and timid snob against whom he had brushed from time to time. They had been in the same year. His colleagues offered the opinion that the consul could step in if things got difficult. Meltzer had gone on to become a star lawyer in Manhattan in his twenties while Tyler lived in the city beginning his work at Cyclops, but once or twice they had glimpsed each other in bars, or rather Tyler had glimpsed Meltzer. Meltzer had become a man about town in the gay scene while Tyler had fallen into the fringes of PI mundanity. From these widely separated perspectives they were bound not to mingle, but Tyler retained from school his slight feeling of inferiority toward the boy whose father attended the yearly Alfred Smith Dinner. He knew almost nothing about him, however.

The father was a politically connected banker, his mother might have been a friend of C. Z. Guest. She was said to have appeared in photographs of the Black and White Ball when very young. But the parents remained opaque. Nor was David ever in focus at such a distance, he was not quite real, just as the Knights were not quite real. They emanated from the same aquarium, brilliant little fighting fish who could only be observed from the other side of the glass.

Tyler admitted to Knight during their walk in the snow that he had no idea which parental connections Meltzer had pulled, but it was certainly also the result of Meltzer’s talent for social climbing. “Get to know him again then,” Knight said. Around the status-seeking and suave consul there was sure to be a rich compost of intrigues and subterranean stories out of which an enterprising investigator could make something that might well relate to a wealthy woman who could not be indefinitely invisible. But even if the consul spurned him, Knight was sure Tyler could come up with something solid eventually. He just had to float about the city’s party scene.

“The consul will probably welcome you with open arms and take you into his circle. Old Grotonians stick together. It’s preposterous but I like it.”

Thus Tyler moved to Istanbul, knowing no one and gladly giving up a bolt-hole in the West Village. He found a house waiting for him on a side street on the crest of the Etiler hill and he set about researching his quarry. For a while she eluded him.

WHEN KNIGHT INFORMED him that Chana had made a charge on her card at the Halicarnassus, he flew down to Bodrum and found a room at the same hotel. Yet to his surprise she didn’t appear, nor was there any sign of her in the hotel registry. Naturally she was using a false name. There were American girls there traveling alone but none of them matched her description. No forests under the axe, no anxious loners seeming to bide their time. It didn’t matter as much as it should have done because he was getting paid and he had begun to enjoy the dolce far niente of a Turkish summer. It did not escape his sense of irony that if Chana Knight had disappeared, then so had he. Her disappearance had set in motion his own.

He wondered about this obviously dysfunctional family. The old man was a boor and a vindictive tyrant to the people who worked for him. Little wonder his errant daughter had disappeared—probably to save her own sanity.

He took an electric bike every day after coffee and trawled through the cafés of Gündogan or Türkbükü hoping to spot Ms. Knight. He never saw her, but he didn’t care. The summer heat had arrived and the Istanbulites had arrived with it, the fat men with yachts and the women with personal hairdressers. The blue days had returned after a long winter and the roadside lemons could be smelled. He was bound to reflect, eating ice creams and îles flottantes on another man’s dime, that there are worse ways to spend the hot months. He realized that it didn’t matter whether he found her or not. He had his reprieve from mounting bills and debts at home. Nor was it even a realistic mission. He would probably never find the errant daughter among the tourist masses gathered like thirsty animals at the Mediterranean’s edge. With a light heart, then, he had packed a small bag with binoculars, bandannas and the collected poems of Nâzim Hikmet.