Dancing for the General

by Sue Star

  He scanned the paper, then folded it up and slipped it into his pocket. “We will check out these places, but I am afraid we will find that this list is false.”

  “Whatever do you mean?” Alarm pounded through Anna’s veins.

  “What I mean, Miss Riddle, is that the Burkhardts have vanished. They were last seen on a plane to Frankfurt. The plane arrived, but there is no record of them anywhere, not in any of the hotels there. Nor leaving Frankfurt on a connecting flight. Not even on a train. They have simply vanished. You must tell me where they are. As guardian of their child, you must know.”

  “Noooo...” Anna felt her legs give out, and she sank into the nearest chair. “You must’ve missed something. My sister wouldn’t just disappear. She’s in Nairobi, I tell you. That’s why you can’t find her in Frankfurt.”

  “Are you sure you cannot think of anything else that would help us find the Burkhardts? Something that is, perhaps, connected to the activity at the tomb today? Something, perhaps, that you are not telling us?”

  Anna’s spine stiffened. Rainer’s medallion burned in her mind. “Now that you mention it, there is something. But it’s another matter. Not about Mitzi and Henry. It’s not related to what happened at the tomb today, either.” She took a deep breath.

  “Go on.”

  “I didn’t wish to speak about it in front of Priscilla and alarm her unnecessarily. It’s only a feeling, you see. I have no proof. And there’s been no damage.”

  “What is it, Miss Riddle?” The gold lenses studied her.

  Then the story poured out. She was only reporting her suspicions to gold lenses, after all. She told them about her belief that someone had entered her room, touched her things, and no, she had no proof. There was no damage. Nothing missing.

  “May we have a look?” he asked.

  “Really, Detective, I don’t think that’s necessary.”

  Yaziz spoke rapidly to his assistant, then turned back to Anna. “Is there something of interest that someone might have been searching for? Something, perhaps, of your lieutenant’s? Another letter?”

  “No, Detective.” Anna tightened her jaw muscles. Her fingers fluttered to her collar, but she’d removed the Saint Christopher’s medal and hidden it safely away in her purse. Now, her purse was upstairs in her room. Still, Yaziz was presenting her with an opportunity to hand over the medallion to the police, as she’d promised her nosy neighbor Cora she would do. It was really none of Cora’s concern, was it? Anyway, the medallion had originally belonged to Aunt Iris, which made it Anna’s now, on account of her inheritance. Aunt Iris had only loaned the medal to Rainer. To keep him safe. As Anna was continuing to do.

  “There is nothing of Rainer’s,” she said, feeling heat rise to her face. “But maybe something else of interest. Our maid carried off a package from her broom closet. She was in quite a rush. I’m quite sure it was something she didn’t want me to see.”

  Yaziz lifted an eyebrow, instructed his assistant to write a note, then rose. “Thank you, Miss Riddle. If you will be kind enough to show us the closet and your bedroom, then I will speak to the man who is assigned to watch your house. Have no worry. You will sleep safe and sound tonight.”

  She wasn’t so sure about that, but she rose, too, and led them to the closet first. They could look if they wanted. They could even keep Henry’s itinerary, since she’d had the foresight to write out a backup copy that she kept in her purse. Anything, to divert their interest from the medal. She had a right to keep a trinket in honor of Rainer’s memory. She had a right to her own privacy.

  * * * * *

  Meryem shook her hips, and the gauzy fabric she’d tied low around tawny flesh rippled, along with the muscles of her bare belly. Her arms ringed in gold bracelets lifted above her head, and her long, tapered fingers caressed the air, keeping time with the beat of the music that throbbed repetitively in the general’s sitting room. She laughed behind her veil, knowing that her laughter would bring a sparkle to her eyes.

  Old, fat men sat on rugs and carefully tracked her movements with their eyes, trying hard not to turn their heads to follow her prances across the room. They wore looks on their faces as if the breath had been squeezed out of them. Except for one of them, the general, who was hard in all of the wrong places.

  Meryem laughed again, thinking of the promised lira, and only wished that Umit were sitting downstairs in the kitchen, waiting to escort her safely home. But he wasn’t, and she had to go on without him.

  For now, she pushed the worry of Umit from her mind and wiggled closer to the general. She bent over his bald pate, ringed with steel hair like a crown of olive leaves. Her breasts were even with the mole on his face, and her upper body undulated. Bangles shimmied and jingled from the silk cloth that outlined her nipples.

  Gasps filled the air. One old man with hair as white and feathery as a stork’s and as long as a horse’s mane turned loose of his glass of raki, spilling drops of its clear liquid. The general’s guests reached for their pockets and rattled coins. Then, groping hands tucked silvery lira pieces and worn bills into the wedges between her body’s curves and the fabric stretched tautly across them. Fingers lingered against her flesh, brushed across her breasts, but she didn’t mind as long as they left behind their tips.

  Their breath surrounded her with a taste of licorice, and then the general suddenly shot up from his cushion to his feet. He lifted his chin and puffed out his chest military style. His medals and ribbons, earned while in service to Atatürk, sparkled under the glow of crystal lamps. Bits of brass decorated his uniform as thickly as the bangles on Meryem’s costume. His guests, always aware of their host above all, fell away from Meryem as the general clapped his hands at a servant, dressed in a white coat and waiting patiently by the phonograph. The servant whirled around faster than a dervish, and the music came to a scratching halt.

  “That’s enough for tonight,” the general said. His stern gaze swept down his hawk nose at his guests. “It is time for the nargiles, efendi.”

  The men pulled handkerchiefs from their pockets and mopped their brows as the servant bent low over a table of equipment to spin dials and adjust this and that. Now would come the part of the evening where Meryem entered new territory. Without Umit, she would have to create her own rules.

  She lingered as a new band of servants entered the room with hookahs and began setting them up. A filthy habit, she thought, but a necessary one for men who needed a little help loosening up their thought process.

  Men! Let them think they could control anything!

  Just then, the servant in charge of the phonograph pounced on her, grabbing her by the arm. He pushed her to the door of the grand hall, and his grip pinched her in a familiar way. She scowled up at him in protest, then sucked in her breath, as she recognized his hairy face and the firm clamp of his fingers on her arm. The dull glaze of his all-knowing eyes. The tight coils of his black hair, thick as a lamb’s.

  But he was no lamb. He was the secret police, the same one who’d caught her earlier that day. Outside the general’s gate. What was he doing here inside, dressed as a servant? Then she remembered the coins he’d thrown down at the feet of the asker, the old guard who patrolled the grounds. And the cloth bundle. Bribes? That’s how he’d entered the general’s house tonight.

  This was information Meryem could use.

  The policeman in disguise shoved her through the doorway into the hall. He slammed the door of the meeting room behind them, shutting the two of them alone together under the crystal chandelier of the grand hall. “You waste your time spying here,” he said. Irritation rolled off his forehead in the form of sweat beads.

  “What business do they discuss while they smoke those silly water pipes?” she asked.

  He jerked his head back and clicked his tongue, giving a sharp, smacking sound that meant “no” in the highest degree of negativity. The general’s business, and his business with the general, were none of her business. All the same, it could b
e profitable for her as well as for the secret police.

  “Get out,” he said, pointing to a narrow staircase at the back of the mansion. Then he waited, trying not to eye her as she plucked bills from the tucks of her scarves and shook out coins that rattled to the marble floor.

  She felt his eyes ogle her as she gathered up her money and stuffed it into the pouch she kept hidden inside her underwear. Her tongue ticked against the roof of her mouth to express her disapproval, and she whirled away in a flutter of scarves to clatter down the steps.

  Meryem’s step slowed as she descended the stairs. The secret police had let her go too easily. He’d promised her only that very afternoon that he was not done with her. And now he dismissed her, just like that.

  Why did he no longer need her?

  She puzzled over this, for surely it meant something she could turn to her profit. Deep in thought at the bottom of the stairs, she reached up to the wooden peg by the outside door where she’d left her tsharchaf.

  The wrap was gone.

  Her arm fell to her side, and she glanced between the empty peg and the door. A glass panel showed a square of deep night from the gardens behind the general’s palace. She couldn’t leave the house without her tsharchaf. The black robe covered her from her head to her toes, hiding her near nakedness and allowing her to slip across the city with minimum stir.

  Meryem, the family’s only hope now without Umit, had an idea.

  She turned a corner and tiptoed down a narrow hall that ran alongside the stairs. At the end of the hall shone a light bulb hanging loose from the ceiling of the kitchen.

  Spread across the wooden table in the center of the room was a puddle of black cotton—her tsharchaf. The asker, a grizzle-whiskered old man, sat there, pawing through the folds. Years beyond his official service, he still wore the undecorated khaki uniform of an ordinary Turkish soldier, not that any soldier was ever ordinary. He looked up from his work and his glass of raki as she entered the room, and his eyes settled slowly from their swimming circles into a tight focus on her.

  “Where is it?” he said, his voice a snarling slur.

  She snatched her garment out from under his grasping clutches and wrapped it around her like a cloak. “We had a deal,” she said, then marched around the table to where he sat. She rubbed her fingers together under his nose and wished Umit were here. He had handled the business end of their partnership.

  The old soldier jerked his head back. “You already got your money. You lied about the weapon.”

  You old fool! “I softened the general for you, as I said I would.”

  “The general does not bargain with gypsy trash.”

  “You promised me lira.”

  “You promised to dance tomorrow night, too. That’s when you’ll get your money. And do not come back empty-handed.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Wood creaked. Soft cries floated through the night.

  Anna jerked upright in bed. Hot, dark air pressed against her.

  The air smelled wrong...like used shoes...instead of the cedar that usually permeated her bedroom at home.

  She wasn’t at home anymore.

  The events of the day tumbled through her mind. She closed her eyes against the image of the dead gypsy with his arm outreached to her.

  To Priscilla.

  Anna held her breath and listened to the silence. Something scratched and chittered overhead—the storks! That’s what she’d heard and thought was a cry.

  Rainer used to write to her about the storks where he was on his last mission, somewhere in the Balkans. Birds went about with their lives, not knowing there was a war on. Anna would have to find a way to have them chased off her roof.

  Then she heard something more. A breath. And a muffled sob. Anna swung her legs out of bed and groped with her feet for the spot on the rug where she’d left her slippers.

  Armed with the flashlight she always kept beside her bed, she opened her door to a dark hallway and switched on the flash. She stepped carefully down the stairs from her attic bedroom and followed its lurching beam as it drilled into the darkness.

  Priscilla’s door stood ajar. Anna nudged it gently, and a hinge creaked.

  Sheets rustled like a whip through sagebrush. “Who’s there?” Priscilla said, her voice high-pitched and thin.

  “It’s me. Aunt Anna.” She brought her hand holding the flashlight slowly around the doorframe, illuminating one corner of the bedroom.

  “Turn it off,” Priscilla whispered.

  “What, this?” A light, she thought, would soothe a child. She was wrong.

  She clicked off the flash and stepped into the room. “I thought I heard you.” Beyond the doll-laden dresser, a balcony door stood open, admitting light that shone from the general’s house next door. “Are you all right?”

  “Hnuh.”

  Anna couldn’t tell from the choking gasp exactly what Priscilla’s answer meant to be, but the sound of fear came through clearly enough. She crossed the room in three strides and bent over Priscilla’s bed. “You had a bad dream,” she said, putting her face close to Priscilla’s.

  Priscilla rolled over, turning her back to Anna.

  “Sometimes talking about bad dreams will make them seem less real.”

  The child lay still.

  “Would you like anything?” Anna asked, wondering what. Warm milk? Mitzi had instructed her that milk had to be made from a powdered mix and boiled water. Anna thought it only produced a disgusting pitcher of cloudy water with white residue at the bottom. “Mineral water, perhaps?” No. The bubbles would only unsettle her more, instead of soothe her.

  Priscilla still didn’t respond, except for a swish of her sheets.

  Anna sighed, not liking the way she felt helpless. These night terrors were surely caused by the man at the tomb today and exacerbated by the detective’s appearance shortly before bedtime. I won’t tell you now, Priscilla had threatened. Priscilla was holding in a worry all to herself, and Anna couldn’t help her.

  She straightened and stared down at her niece, curled up in the fetal position. Then she turned away and tiptoed across the room, this time heading toward the balcony. Through the filter of leaves hanging over the balcony railing, she could make out the source of the light from the general’s house, a crystal chandelier in a central room of the upper floor. Anna reached for the handle of the balcony door.

  Sounds of thrashing erupted from the bed behind her. “Don’t close it!”

  Anna’s fingers hesitated on the cool brass of the handle. Over in the general’s house, people—all men—milled about under the chandelier and one by one disappeared from sight, as if they filed through a receiving line into an adjoining, dark room.

  Lowering her hand, Anna left the door open and tried to keep her voice calm in spite of the urgency in Priscilla’s. “You’re right. It’s such a hot night, you need a little air.”

  The air wasn’t moving. The fragrance of something sweet thickened the air from the garden next door, and she imagined something exotic. Night blooming jasmine?

  “Are you sure you don’t want a light?”

  “No! Then he’ll see in!”

  “Who?” Anna felt her heart thud in her chest.

  “The man who’s chasing me.”

  “But it was only a dream.” Anna tensed and peered out at the night, like a dark tarn between her and the party next door. A spark of light pulled her attention to the street lamp on the corner where she glimpsed a shadowy figure holding a glowing cigarette—Yaziz’s watchman, she supposed. It was too dark to make out any details about him other than the outline of a fedora pulled down low over his head. “There’s no one chasing you,” she said with perhaps too much emphasis.

  “Not me. Someone’s chasing Daddy, though.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I saw him.”

  “Where?”

  “Here.”

  “I’m sure you misunderstood,” Anna said, then bit her tongue. She didn�
�t want to patronize Priscilla, but her niece did have an active imagination. If Anna could convince her that her fears were groundless, then perhaps she could allay them.

  “Why would anyone chase your father?” Anna said, trying again.

  “Because of what he does.”

  Anna tried to laugh, but her voice cracked. “Your daddy’s an important man who works at the embassy. He must have lots of meetings with different people.”

  “I don’t care if you don’t believe me.”

  “But dear, it’s not that I don’t believe you—”

  “Because of him, Mama and Daddy went away. They’re not coming back.”

  “Nonsense! Of course they’ll be back.” Anna’s duty was to maintain a sense of normalcy for her niece. She mustn’t let Priscilla’s fears or the detective’s disturbing news interfere with that duty. In the morning, she would locate Mitzi and Henry herself, since Yaziz was apparently too incompetent to do so. Of course they were in Nairobi. Why had the detective fixated on Frankfurt, instead?

  When Priscilla didn’t respond, Anna probed further. “Was this the thing you said you wouldn’t tell me?”

  Still, no response.

  “Would you like for me to stay with you, just until you fall asleep?”

  “If you want.”

  Priscilla fidgeted again in her bed, and Anna hurried back to her side. She sat down on the edge of the bed and listened to Priscilla’s uneven breathing and thrashing movement.

  The still air stirred, carrying with it the exotic fragrance from next door. “Would you like to hear a story?” Anna asked after a while.

  “About what?”

  “About a princess who had to tell a different story for one thousand and one nights in order to stay alive.”

  “Was someone chasing her?”

  “No, dear. No one’s chasing anybody.”

  Priscilla flipped onto her back, then lay still. Attentive. Anna retold one of the tales in the dark, lowering her voice to a soothing level.

  Midway through the story, Priscilla relaxed into a curl edging closer to Anna. “What does it mean?” she asked all of a sudden, interrupting Anna’s story. “That necklace the gypsy gave me at Atatürk’s Tomb?”