“Like the SS,” Tuna said.
“More like the Brownshirts,” Ismet said in his precise way.
As the conversation made this alarming swerve, Dagmar cast a sharp glance at the driver, who of course might well be a fanatic supporter of the junta.
The driver was behind a glass window, impassive. He probably hadn’t heard anything.
But still.
“Maybe,” she said, “we should change the topic of conversation.”
Tuna made another disgusted noise. A faint smile touched Ismet’s lips. He adjusted his glasses.
“Many of the hills here,” he said, “are covered with illegal settlements. People move onto vacant land and build their homes—entire neighborhoods, small towns. When you came here from the airport you probably saw them.”
Richard looked up, calculation glittering in his eyes.
“You have earthquakes here. Do those off-the-grid buildings survive?”
Ismet shrugged. “Usually not,” he said. “Sometimes the government resettles entire communities because they’re so worried about earthquake. But they can’t afford to do that with everyone.” He made a gesture that took in the city, the surrounding country. “In Istanbul the problem is worse. They have eighteen million people, and maybe a third are illegal. They vote for the politicians who promise to give them infrastructure.”
“Who do they vote for now?” Richard asked.
Silence answered him.
Dagmar was trying to wrap her head around the idea that one-third of a city could be squatters. They’d be squatters with jobs, or a hope of a job, and families and at least some money, just without a place to live until they’d built it themselves. And they’d come for the same reason that all immigrants came, because even a fragile jerry-built home on an earthquake-prone hillside was better than the poverty and lack of opportunity in the place they came from.
She’d seen it before, in all the developing world. She’d run games or consulted with other game designers in India and China, and she’d seen a revolution firsthand in Indonesia, where the children of poverty had overrun the glittering hotels and office blocks of the privileged.
Overrun them and dismantled them and carried them away to build new things with the scraps.
“We’re coming up to the palace now,” Ismet said.
A pair of armored cars squatted before the stone walls on either side of the bronze gate. Soldiers with white helmets and gaiters and chromed assault rifles stood on guard. An officer spoke briefly to the driver, glanced into the back of the car, and then signaled his soldiers to open the inner gate and pull up the spike strip.
Once they were past the barriers, a large, brilliant park opened on all sides. Ankara seemed to specialize in parks, but this one was truly exceptional. The grounds blazed with scarlet gladioli and purple lilac, brilliant lilies and soft-petaled lavender. There were several buildings, ranging from the old Ottoman mansion where Atatürk had first lived to modernist office blocks, but the reception was to be held in the president’s residence, a pillared mansion called the Pink Villa.
Dagmar tried to imagine an American president living in a pink building, and failed.
Pink stone pillars loomed above them as the Mercedes drew up to the steps. Functionaries in white jackets and aides-de-camp in uniform clacked their way down the stairs in hard leather heels to open doors and offer hands to the passengers.
Dagmar emerged into bright August light and blinked. The scent of lavender wafted to her nostrils. “This way, please,” someone said, but Dagmar waited for her party to join her before she followed the young uniformed man up the stairway and beneath the mansion’s pink pillars.
Here there was another security check and the party had to surrender their phones. Richard had to offer his chronograph and shoes for inspection; the rest passed. And then they were shepherded into a drawing room, where a trio of somber, dignified photographers snapped their pictures while other cameramen pointed video cameras at them. Dagmar patted her hair and waited, feeling unnecessarily self-conscious. Functionaries ignored them and talked to each other. Dagmar saw that two plush chairs had been placed on either side of a side table. She wondered if she was supposed to sit.
Then there was a stir among the onlookers. The military men clicked to attention, and everyone else straightened. Dagmar turned to the far door and saw the junta march in.
President Bozbeyli hadn’t been seen in a uniform since assuming office: today he wore a soft gray Italian suit and a dignified blue tie. He was very short, seven or eight inches shorter than Dagmar, which put him at an inch or so over five feet. He smiled warmly, took Dagmar’s hand, and bowed over it with olde-world politeness.
Dagmar gazed in surprise at the general’s lavish use of cosmetics. The makeup and rouge failed to entirely conceal the lines and spots of age—and she couldn’t help but see that his hair and mustache were suspiciously black.
Bozbeyli straightened. He and Dagmar held hands and smiled while the photographers’ flashes went off, the cameras went click-click-click, and Dagmar scrutinized the general’s makeup.
The cosmetics were clearly intended for the cameras, not for someone standing a short distance away. The effects were too glaring at close range.
Neither of them had yet spoken a word. It was all dumb show for the cameras.
Words might not even be necessary. The picture of Dagmar shaking hands with the president was probably enough for the regime’s purposes.
“Adoring American media figure endorses president.” That’s the caption they’d put on it.
Unlike the caption she’d use herself: “Dagmar Shaw sells integrity to keep dream job.”
The cameras stopped snapping as if someone had given an order. Then Bozbeyli introduced the prime minister, a white-haired former air force general named Dursun—he wore his age without quite so much cosmetic—and again Dagmar clasped an age-scored hand and gave a close-lipped smile while the photographers clicked away.
Bozbeyli introduced his minister of defense—an elderly admiral who still wore the uniform, along with rouge—and the photographers clicked again. Then there was a pause while the junta looked expectantly at Dagmar, and she realized she was supposed to present her team. She did so—the cameras clicked only a few times for each of them—and then with a gracious gesture Bozbeyli offered Dagmar a seat.
They sat opposite each other. Each entourage stood behind its principal. The cameras clicked some more. The admiral, distracted, fished in his pockets for cigarettes and a lighter.
“I would like to thank you for the work you are doing in bringing modern Türkiye to the attention of the world,” Bozbeyli said, in very good English. “Your efforts are inspiring many of the brightest minds of the nation. We are always conscious that the road to the future is paved with technology.”
Perhaps, Dagmar thought, that metaphor worked a little better in Turkish.
“The technology infrastructure here is very good,” Dagmar said. “We’ve had very few problems.”
She figured that Turkey’s IT backbone was a safe subject for conversation.
The little president gave a grand wave of his hand. “I gave orders that you be allowed to proceed without interference.”
Dagmar was startled.
“Thank you,” she managed. “Everyone has been very cooperative.”
“You wished to have your game in Anıt Kabir Park,” Bozbeyli said. “My security people said—” He changed to a mocking voice. “ ‘No, that’s too close to the Atatürk Mausoleum. There might be terrorists hiding in this game, and they might destroy the monument.’ ” Bozbeyli made an abrupt gesture. “I said, ‘No! This game will be good for Türkiye! Many people will play this game and see this film and then come to see our beautiful country!’ ” He shook his finger at imaginary security officers. “ ‘You must put more guards on the Mausoleum to keep it safe, but do not interfere with this game!’ ”
Bozbeyli sat back, crossed his arms like Napoléon, and smil
ed.
“That was very good of you,” Dagmar said.
“If anyone offers you trouble,” he said, “you will let me know.”
What power, Dagmar wondered, was Bozbeyli handing her? The power to have someone arrested? Beaten? Jailed?
Whatever power it was, Dagmar decided to ignore it.
“Everyone,” she said, “has been very kind.”
Behind Bozbeyli, the admiral lit his cigarette. Tobacco tanged the air.
“Under the former regime,” said the president, “I could not have guaranteed your safety. Extremists and terrorists were allowed to proliferate. Radical Muslims were on the verge of a coup d’état. It was necessary to act.”
His hands made a series of chopping movements as he spoke. Maybe, Dagmar thought, he was simply unable to sit still.
“I’m afraid,” Dagmar said, “that your country’s politics are a little beyond my scope. I design Internet puzzles.”
She hoped to detour around the whole subject of the regime and its announced purposes. It was regrettable that she was here at all—but if she had to be in the Pink Villa with the generals, at least she could avoid an explicit endorsement of their rule.
But Bozbeyli persisted.
“Surely,” he said, “you must recognize the danger of religious terrorists.”
“The whole world has recognized that danger,” Dagmar said.
“Then you understand”—again the chopping gesture—“the need for action.”
“Civilization here is five thousand years old,” Dagmar said. “Can it seriously be threatened by a few madmen with bombs?”
Bozbeyli twitched his sable mustache. Behind him, the admiral drew on his cigarette.
“Public safety can be threatened,” the president said. “Lives of ordinary people can be put in jeopardy. The existence of our secular republic was in danger.”
“Indeed,” Dagmar said, “the danger exists.”
That danger, she thought, chiefly being the president and his clique.
Bozbeyli stared at her, as if seeing into her secret thought. As she looked back at him, a mad giddy urge to laugh possessed her. These people—this ancient trio of military mummies, held together with cosmetics and cellotape—they wanted her approval. They had gone to all this effort to get it. And now Bozbeyli was badgering her because she hadn’t provided what they desired.
She leaned close to the president and lowered her voice as if in confidence. “You know,” she said, “I’m really just here to help James Bond.”
Bozbeyli laughed and chopped the air with his hand.
“Well,” he said, “we must give him all the help we can! He fights the terrorists in our country!”
Dagmar responded with her wordless smile.
Bozbeyli turned to view his colleagues.
“My colleagues and I—we did not want this terrible responsibility,” he said. “But the nation was in danger—it was necessary to step forward and act to prevent a catastrophe.”
Dursun and the admiral looked a little bored by this. Perhaps they had heard this speech too many times.
“Every time the military has intervened in our nation,” Bozbeyli went on, “we have stepped down once the country’s security was assured.” He tapped a finger on his knee. “I assure you, we all wish for the day on which constitutional government may be restored.”
Dagmar nodded and smiled.
“Then we have something in common,” she said.
She knew immediately that this was the wrong thing to say. Bozbeyli’s face hardened, and he stood.
“This way, miss,” he said, and marched out without waiting for her. His colleagues followed.
And that was it, as far as hospitality was concerned. Dagmar and her party followed the junta into another room where a long table had been laid with a buffet. Others were there, men and women, to meet the guests, but Bozbeyli’s attitude was very clear, and no one approached.
Dagmar and her party stood at one end of the long table and Bozbeyli and a score of others at the far end. They talked to one another in low voices and every so often turned to look at Dagmar’s group as if sizing them up for their coffins.
Even the waiters didn’t approach. Dagmar helped herself to a glass of tea from a buffet.
“And here I thought it was going so well,” she said.
“Fuck him,” said Tuna darkly. Dagmar glanced at the other party, to make sure no one had heard.
No one was looking at them at the moment.
The grim standoff ended after twenty minutes, when a man in a tailcoat approached and told Dagmar that her car was ready. The group was reunited with its cell phones and returned to the Mercedes and its silent driver.
“Screw it,” Richard said. “It’s been a long day, and I’m hungry.”
Dagmar decided that Richard had the right idea. She turned to Ismet.
“Can you see if the driver will let us off someplace other than the hotel?” she said. “Let’s see if we can’t find someplace good to eat.”
A few minutes later, standing outside a bustling restaurant in Kizilay, Dagmar hit Lincoln’s speed dial.
“Hi, Dagmar,” he said. His voice was languid, and Dagmar imagined him stretched out on a divan, tingling with the aftereffects of his massage.
“I pissed off Bozbeyli,” Dagmar said.
There was a moment’s silence. Lincoln’s voice, when it returned, was less languid than before.
“You’d better tell me about it.”
Dagmar described the conversation as well as she could remember it.
“He said he was longing for democracy,” she concluded. “All I did was agree with him.”
“Where are you now?”
Dagmar glanced up at the restaurant sign. “Restaurant Harman,” she said. “Turkish-International cuisine, whatever that is.”
There was a moment of thoughtful silence.
“Call me before you come back to the hotel,” Lincoln said. “And I’ll check to see if there’s anyone hanging around outside.”
“And if there is?”
“You’ll check into another hotel for the night.”
“What about our things? All my work’s on my laptop. And I can’t wander around for the next few days in heels and a Donna Karan frock.”
“If necessary,” Lincoln said, “I’ll get your things myself.”
“How?”
Amusement entered his voice. “I’ll bribe the hotel staff,” he said.
Dagmar had to admit that this made perfect sense.
“Don’t let this spoil your dinner,” Lincoln said. “In all likelihood it means nothing.”
“I told you at the beginning,” Dagmar said, “that I have a bad personal history with military governments.”
“Noted,” said Lincoln. “Have a nice dinner anyway.”
The staff at the Harman seemed a little surprised at so well dressed a party so early in the evening but behaved with an impeccable, bustling courtesy that only mildly concealed their all-encompassing avarice.
In France, Dagmar reflected, you’d be made to feel second-class for dining so early, but the Turks didn’t care about such things. If you wanted drinks at nine in the morning, or dinner at four thirty, or breakfast at midnight, they’d do their best to accommodate you. They had an ancient tradition of hospitality to which they adhered with easy grace. Besides, good service was their way to a better paycheck, and they seemed to have no notions about either the proper time to eat supper or the proper time to earn money.
President Bozbeyli, she reflected, was the only rude Turk she’d ever met.
Dinner lasted a couple hours, and featured rakı and Efes, olives and anchovies, spiced meatballs and grilled fish, and a form of kofte that, according to Ismet, translated as “ladies’ thighs.” When the group left the restaurant the sun was just on the horizon and the first cool touch of evening was on the air. They walked along Atatürk Boulevard while the muezzins sang the call to evening prayer—a sound that sent a primeval s
hiver down Dagmar’s spine.
The people in the streets ignored the call. Kizilay was busy and modern and filled with young people just beginning their evening. None of the women wore headscarves. It was like any European city.
Dagmar called Lincoln, and he said he’d take a look at the hotel lobby and the street in front, to see if some kind of unpleasantness waited.
Buses and trucks rolled past. Dagmar recoiled from the scent of diesel.
Ismet glanced around. “Want to see something different?” he said. “Have you been up to the castle?”
“There won’t be soldiers?” she asked.
Ismet shrugged. “No more than anywhere else.”
He hailed a taxi. With the three men crammed in the back and Dagmar riding shotgun, they sped north to Ulus and turned where a big equestrian monument of Atatürk stood foursquare on its plinth. Illuminated by spotlights, birds circled over the head of the great man but dared not alight.
To the east rose the walled mass of the city’s old citadel on its steep hill. A spotlit Turkish flag waved above the ramparts. Cell phone towers and the masts of broadcasters speared the evening sky.
The overloaded cab chugged slowly uphill, past a pair of silent museums, along the ancient Byzantine wall, and then through the gates of the citadel. Crowding the road were mansions dating from the Middle Ages, all built with ground floors of stone and wooden upper storeys that jutted out over the street and turned the road into a dark canyon. Some salesmen stood smoking in the doors of souvenir shops, alert to the possibility of oncoming profit—but most of the homes were family residences in varying states of repair, and Dagmar realized that there was an entire self-contained town standing within the citadel walls, a town of children with footballs, men playing backgammon in front of their doors, and old women in headscarves carrying plastic laundry baskets up steep, narrow streets. A town where cooking smells floated on the air and where television’s blue light shone through upper windows.
It was an older presence that she sensed here and much poorer than fashionable Kizilay. Even the little girls wore headscarves, something Dagmar hadn’t seen anywhere else. The present was compounded here with the timeless, present-day Ankara with Hittite Ankuwash and Roman Ancyra, with Byzantine Ánkyra and Ottoman Angora, all blended together in the deep blue Anatolian twilight.
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