by Sue Star
“Of course not.”
The theft of the bag was a ruse, Yaziz decided, for passing the information he’d known all along that she would pass to her contact. He hadn’t found anything suspicious when he examined the contents of the bag back in the rug shop. He’d missed the transaction after all. Thanks to the incident of the woman’s purse.
But the wound to the head puzzled him. He didn’t think she would have gone so far as to arrange an injury to herself.
“I’ll tell you something that would have interested a thief,” Orhon said, rippling his fingers through the unwrapped bundles of jewelry scattered on the floor. “Harem rings. I know Ozturk Bey sells them because the Americans from the embassy always want them. Those rings are worth a lot of money with their rubies, sapphires, and emeralds.”
“Who are some of the American customers?”
“Miss Fran Lafferty has recently placed an order.”
Yaziz lifted his notepad, but his pencil remained poised in mid-air. His attention had been caught by the movement of red curly hair, a flicker he’d glimpsed beyond the wall of hanging evil eyes, out on the street. He was about to tell the woman, whose back was turned toward the street, that she could stop worrying. Her niece was returning. Then the red-haired one stopped before the display of brass and copper pots and trays next door.
Ozturk Bey stepped out of the crowds and ducked beside Priscilla. He lifted the lid of a brass brazier and withdrew a small bundle about the size of his hand. It was wrapped in newspaper and tied by string. While Yaziz watched, the old Turk passed the package to the American child.
The detective glanced at Miss Riddle. Perhaps he’d been wrong about her. It wasn’t Miss Riddle who worked with Henry Burkhardt but the Burkhardt child herself.
But Yaziz refused to believe such abomination was possible. He would find the explanation, for surely another one existed.
Chapter Twenty-Four
“Priscilla!” Anna’s head pounded, keeping time with the pain that throbbed through every cell of her body. “There you are! You had me worried.”
Priscilla whirled around, bouncing her red curls. She dropped a package wrapped in newspaper and tied up with string into a copper pot and then stepped away from it. “I was only helping Ozturk Bey.”
“I can see that now.” Anna decided to back down. She didn’t want to jeopardize the feelings of warmth that had started to grow between them the night before. Besides, all was well now, except for Anna’s head.
And the Saint Christopher’s medal. She hadn’t found it in her purse after Yaziz had returned it to her. That’s where she’d put it.
The purse thief—only a boy, the detective had said—hadn’t touched her money or her little red book, her official document giving her diplomatic immunity. Both items were worth more than the necklace. Perhaps the boy thought the jewelry valuable. He was wrong. Its value was more sentimental than anything else.
Rainer... If only...
Confusion in her heart matched the agitation surrounding her. Yaziz shuffled over to Ozturk Bey’s side and asked a series of questions in curt-sounding Turkish, while Ozturk Bey raised his voice to answer, flailing his arms as if to better illustrate his tale. Hayati stood off to one side with his hands in his pockets, quietly listening. Priscilla flitted through the shop, touching the evil eyes one by one. Anna would deal with her niece later.
For now, she slipped next to Hayati and whispered, “What are they saying?”
“Ozturk Bey confirms that one of the coffee boys is your culprit. He says the boy must be new here in the city, recently arrived from the country, because he doesn’t remember ever seeing him before with the other boys. Or else he is protecting him.”
“Accusing him is not a very effective means of protecting him.”
“He’s just a child. What is more important is his name. That is what Ozturk Bey is protecting. His identity.”
“Why does he protect him?”
Hayati shrugged. “Ozturk Bey is well known around here for his connections. He finds work for people who need it, and they give him their loyalty in return. The boy is probably the son of one of them.”
A ripple of anxiety washed over Anna as she wondered about Priscilla’s loyalty. The package her niece had tossed inside Ozturk Bey’s copper pot looked like the package that Fededa hadn’t wanted Anna to see in the Burkhardts’ broom closet.
“Are you ready to go to the doctor,” Hayati said, “now that Priscilla has returned? I will take you. I believe the detective is done with you for now.”
“I don’t need a doctor. I’ll be fine. Besides, I already took an aspirin from the tin I keep in my purse. Luckily, Detective Yaziz returned it to me. What I mean to do, since I’ve come this far, is to find the Alekci family. I need to ask Ozturk Bey how to find them.” That’s why she’d come here in the first place, and she wasn’t going to be led astray from her purpose. “How much longer is he going to be tied up with the detective? I’ll have to wait.”
She glanced at her wristwatch. The day was slipping away, and she hadn’t given Priscilla any lunch yet. “I don’t suppose... Since you’ve been handling all the paperwork... Do you know where the Alekcis live?”
Hayati grinned. “You never give up, do you?”
She couldn’t afford to, not with all the questions on her mind. She must settle the question of Rainer before his ghostly reminder drove her mad. But she couldn’t tell Hayati any of that, so she smiled as winningly as she knew how. “You do know. Would you take me there, please? Miss Lafferty says there’s no address, but you know where they live, don’t you? If you don’t have enough time, perhaps you could just point out the way to me, and I’ll find the family myself.”
He smoothed the narrow lines of his mustache and rolled his eyes. “Well...if I were to take you... You would owe me a favor.”
She frowned. “Is there something you’d like for me to pick up for you at the PX?”
“No. But I would like the honor of taking you to dinner some night.”
Anna gasped, letting out the sound before her sense of decorum could cover up her initial shock. “Oh, no, Mr. Orhon, that’s quite impossible.”
“Not at all. We have a few decent restaurants, even here in Ankara, in some of the modern hotels.”
“No. That’s not what I meant. I’m sorry. You don’t understand.” Heat flushed up her throat and cheeks.
“Never mind. You’re not ready now, I can see that. But when you are ready, the invitation is still open.”
“Thank you. I mean... Really, I appreciate the invitation, I really do. But you see... That is—”
“It’s all right,” he said in a soothing tone of voice, like the one Anna had used the night before to calm Priscilla from her night terrors.
She realized, from her shaky knees and furious patter of her heartbeat, that she felt terrified, more terrified by his invitation than the blow on her head.
“Orhon!” said a woman’s voice, scolding through the fog of doubts that threatened Anna. “Get back to the office toute suite. Mr. Wingate needs you. I’ll take over here.”
Anna looked up and saw Fran’s pencil-thin figure outlined in the doorway, her hands planted on her hips and a smug grin on her face.
* * * * *
They were all bastards, Meryem thought, glaring at the general’s pink palace. She tugged on the eşek’s reins, hauling the donkey up the hill with its load of clinking pots. The mid-day sun scorched her skin, and the dust in the air dried the insides of her nostrils and throat. A mirage flickered before her.
She blinked and for a moment the jagged cliffs of the Carpathians rose from her past, replacing these worn-down Turkish hills of the present. In a flash, she thought she was seeing that other palace, not the general’s, but the Romanian palace with its skinny towers of wooden spindles and its overgrown gardens that the Nazis had captured for their own. The memory still lived fresh in her mind, smothering her.
She could still see it now, as clearly in her m
ind as if those Carpathian mountains rose before her. Each mountainous hump jutted with a bold thrust to the sky. At their base lay a slanting meadow, and for the rest of Meryem’s life, she would always see Tereza, Elena, and Andrei in her mind, stumble-running toward the safety of the forested hillside. The peaks appeared near enough to reach out and touch.
But they could not.
Meryem watched her siblings go. She was the youngest, only a child in the nightmare that haunted her, but even then, she was the wisest.
Even as the gap between her and her siblings widened, she heard the desperation of sobs that caught in their throats. Sobs wasted good breath, breath they would need if they were to make it away from their captors. Into the shelter of firs.
Her distraction with the Nazi bought her siblings time. Not enough time.
Beside her, he suddenly stiffened. His eyes widened with... (Surprised, are you, Nazi? To see gypsies escape?) His pants, down. Round his ankles.
Meryem seized the opportunity. She lingered long enough to spit on the Nazi. To scratch his face. She bit his chapped hands that tasted of chicken feathers and blood. Or was it her sisters’ blood? She did not know.
Blood splatted onto the rumpled heap of the bastard’s pants. He collapsed to his knees, his bare butt flashing in the gray gloom that saturated the air before the dawn.
From somewhere behind Meryem’s shoulder came the garlic-breath smell of someone new. Not Umit, who was busy pawing through the pockets of a dead guard beside the open gate. Then came a voice, along with the breath, and it snapped out a terse order in Meryem’s ear: “Run!”
Not “stop,” as she would’ve expected, but “run!” An offer of freedom.
The offer came first in German, then in Romanian. But Meryem could not move. Umit, neither. Fury overwhelmed her—Umit, too—left her immobile in the fire-ice of her hatred.
Meryem did not know the newcomer with the garlic breath, nor why he wanted to help the gypsy prisoners of war. That he did was enough for her. He sounded German but appeared more Greek with his thick, black hair. Desperation wrinkled his face, and his broken-nose profile told her of his fearlessness.
Once again she looked down at her Nazi torturer, who writhed in the pile of his clothes. A knife handle protruded from his back. The newcomer-savior had put it there, and he whispered again, “Hurry! There’s not much time!”
The Nazi clawed at the ground, groped through his clothes, then pushed himself up, swinging a pistol, firing again and again at Meryem’s fleeing siblings. They cried out and fell. One by one.
“Tereza! Elena! Andrei!” Meryem wailed.
Grief exploded, bursting like the flame that ignited their grandmother’s campfire. Blood and air circulating through Meryem’s body became a tidal wave of surging rapids, sweeping her over the cliff of no return. She lunged at the bastard, fell on his arm of pure evil. One more shot fired as his arm resisted her, and the newcomer, their rescuer-savior-liberator, grunted. Stumbled to the dirt beside her. He was bleeding, too.
She was a rabid animal, a feral nomad of the mountains, and she leeched onto the bastard’s arm. Ripped his flesh for the gun. Twisted it from the Nazi’s dying fingers. Turned it on the bastard. Fired.
Again and again.
Tears sluiced down her cheeks. Each time she closed her eyes, her strength slipped away, and she saw it again. That ugly dawn in the Carpathians, that last day of the person she once was.
It was dawn no longer, but the middle of the day. And she was alone. The Black Sea lay between her and those distant memories. Trudging on up this Turkish hill, she thought that her revenge was not yet done.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Anna felt relief at Fran’s interruption. The woman had saved her from the embarrassment of stumbling through an inadequate explanation for turning down Hayati’s invitation. She couldn’t accept a dinner date with him.
Hayati grinned at Anna, as if amused by her discomfort. She felt ill. Mere moments ago he had appeared concerned about her physical pain, receiving that blow to the head, and now he was making matters worse. The pain in her head thumped even harder.
Before she could find an acceptable excuse, he slipped past Fran, standing in the doorway of the trinket shop. Fran turned her head, her gaze following him as he disappeared, blending into the stream of people on the street. Ozturk Bey, gesturing with his hands at Detective Yaziz, seemed too immersed in that interview to notice anything else happening, and certainly not the women. Emin, the young photographer who helped next door in the copper shop, still had not returned. Anna wondered briefly if his absence was due to the police presence. She felt certain he’d had something to hide when he’d expressed his dislike for gypsies in general and Umit in particular.
“Let’s go,” Fran said with a nod of her head at Anna. “I’ll take you and the kid home.”
“That’s very kind,” Anna said with a shiver of annoyance, “but we can take a cab home when we’re ready to go.” She wasn’t done here. She still had to find a stork’s nest.
“Suit yourself.” Fran surveyed the disturbed interior of the shop. “I’ll be here shopping for a while, in case you change your mind and want a ride.”
Anna didn’t have to ask Priscilla twice. Her niece seemed as eager to escape the shop as Anna. She gathered up her purse, and Priscilla carried the string bag, which held the wrapped package of slippers. Outside, they mingled with everyone else walking in the street. Very few cars came through here, and besides, there were no sidewalks.
“Where do you want to go now?” Priscilla asked.
Anna pointed up the hill. “I’m looking for a stork’s nest. Want to help me find it?”
“Sure! There’s one,” Priscilla said, pointing. “And there’s another.”
“I think the one I’m looking for is actually farther up the hill from here.”
“You don’t know?”
“Not for sure, but we’ll find it. Maybe along the way you can tell me about that package back there. The one that Ozturk Bey tried to give you. What was inside it, and why did you throw it into that copper pot?”
“It’s just some stuff he wanted me to take to Fededa. It’s supposed to be a surprise, but you spoiled it.”
“Shall we collect it on our way back? I’ll act as if I didn’t see it.”
“If you want,” Priscilla said with a shrug. She fell silent, and Anna marveled at the sights along the way.
There were donkeys carrying baskets of wares across their backs and clip-clopping behind their owners along this narrow lane of cobbles. Women balanced baskets on their heads, and men stooped over, hauling bundles of sticks on their backs. Music, with rhythms as sinuous as this alley, floated through the open doorway of a butcher’s shop. Carcasses the size of sheep hung from ceiling hooks in the doorway, releasing their pungent odors.
“Maybe we can ask inside for directions,” Anna said. Flies lifted into the air as she stepped inside, and she waved their buzzing circles away from her face. A man with a bloodied apron was busy slicing a slab of meat on a table.
“Merhaba,” she called out over the music. “Do you speak English?”
He laid down his knife, wiped his hands on his apron, and grinned at her. He turned down the radio and responded in French.
She smiled, relieved that just this once she didn’t need to ask Priscilla for help. In faulty French she asked if he knew of an Alekci family and where she might find their apartment.
He waved and pointed and fired off words she didn’t understand. Then he held up a finger in the universal signal to wait. Shuffling behind his counter, he rummaged for a pencil and scribbled a map in the margins of a newspaper. Newspaper sheets stacked up beside bundles of twine, apparently used to wrap up a side of mutton. He ripped off the map and handed it to her.
“This is where I can find the Alekcis?” she asked.
“Oui.” He beamed with pleasure.
Back out in the street, she took Priscilla’s hand and followed the butcher’s direct
ions. After winding through the shadowy labyrinth of wooden buildings, she thought she finally found the place. A stork’s nest tucked against a tilting chimney above. Women’s agitated voices streamed through open windows.
Anna ducked into a passageway leading off the street. It was a stone tunnel with a floor of packed dirt, where a stairway led to the upper levels. The passageway emptied into an enclosed courtyard, a square of sun-drenched weeds, but Anna took the stairs. They creaked as she and Priscilla climbed to the top floor. The door of an apartment stood open, and waves of wailing rolled out into the hall.
Inside the barren room stood a huddle of women. Behind them, a gauzy curtain served as a door into another room, and through its sheerness, Anna glimpsed other faces peering at them.
A withered woman with no teeth broke away from the huddle and approached Anna. She dropped to her knees before her and murmured anxious streams of words between bursts of tears. A forgotten head scarf fell around her shoulders.
“Do you speak French?” Anna asked hopefully, but she got no answer.
She stood helplessly by, despairing that she might not find out what Umit’s family knew about Rainer. Priscilla, meanwhile, murmured with the children of the family. Anna recognized hayir. No. A boy with a buzzed head who was almost the same size as the boy who’d brought coffee to them in the shop a short while ago, drifted closer to Priscilla. The children eyed each other. Anna rubbed the sore spot on her head and wondered if this boy was Umit’s son. Had he been here all along, with his widowed mother and grandmothers and aunts and neighbors? Or had he been out on the streets serving coffee and conspiring with purse thieves?
Priscilla finally translated. “The little boy saw the bad man, just last night. He thinks the bad man is going to come back for the rest of them. Isn’t there anything we can do?”