Black Amber

by Whitney, Phyllis A. ;

  They ran in a diagonal toward the opposite shore.

  17

  On the far side Miles’s car awaited them near the wide stone landing. While he paid the boatman, Tracy stood looking across the water toward the yali. There were lights on that had not burned when they left. Near the house landing a light bobbed as if from a boat pushing out upon the water. She touched Miles’s arm.

  He stared across the water. “Someone’s up after all. Let’s move along. At least we’ve got a head start.”

  They got into the car and he backed onto the road and turned in the direction of the inland highway. The road was almost free of traffic and Miles knew it well. They picked up speed, leaving the Bosporus behind as they reached the crosscut into the city.

  “Where are we going?” Tracy asked.

  Miles was curt. “To the airport.”

  “But what about your book? All your papers?”

  “I’m not leaving,” he said. “I’m going to put you aboard the first plane possible—a plane to almost anywhere. Then I’m coming back.”

  “I won’t go,” Tracy said. “I won’t get aboard a plane alone.”

  His face was grim as he watched the car’s headlights pick out the road ahead. “You’ll go. You have no choice. Do you think I want you to wind up in a sack the way Yasemin did? You know too much for your own safety.”

  “But not enough!” she wailed. “I won’t go away and leave you. Do you think you’re not vulnerable too?”

  He reached out his hand and covered her own. “Hush. Be quiet. Listen to me. I want to tell you about your sister.”

  She slid down in the seat and closed her eyes. She did not know what was coming, or whether she wanted to hear it or not. But the time for the truth had come. She could turn from facing it no longer. He began without emotion, and as he spoke she could conjure up her sister’s secretive green eyes watching the world with their sidelong glance.

  “I first knew Anabel when she began to work for me as a model,” Miles said. “Her contrasts, the elusive quality of her fascinated me and I kept trying to capture it on paper. While I painted, she used to talk to me about her friends and about her life in New York.”

  “Did she tell you about her family?” Tracy asked.

  “Never about her family. Never about anything that had happened to her at home in Iowa. I found that she was running with a worthless crowd in New York and I tried to get her away from them. I didn’t know for a while that she had been taking narcotics. When I found out—I married her.”

  Tracy sat up and stared at him in the dim light from the dashboard.

  He nodded. “Fairly insane, I’ll agree. Against the best of advice, I had to play the rescuer of a lady so obviously in distress. I was in love with her then—though in my own way, not in hers. Partly, I suppose, I was in love with the way I had painted her on canvas. After we were married, I took her out of New York to be cured. She was loving and grateful and, for a time, devoted to me. I suppose we were happy in an uneasy sort of way. I painted her as I saw her that first year and put more into the portrait than I knew.”

  “She came to see me before you were married,” Tracy mused. “She believed that everything was going to be wonderful from then on. She thought she was going to be happy—and safe.”

  “I remember too.” His tone was dry. “I believed in all this and I thought I could keep her safe.”

  “Yet she went back to drugs. Why?”

  “Who knows? Who can say whether it is childhood environment, or the accident of circumstance, or something in the genes that drives a person like Anabel? In spite of all I tried to do, she took up the habit again whenever she found an opportunity. I saw her through two more so-called cures. That’s when I came to abhor the creatures who are behind this vicious traffic.”

  Sylvana, Tracy thought—that miniature of evil he had painted.

  “When Sylvana’s invitation came to visit her here in Turkey, I seized on it,” he went on. “Anabel was pulling out of her last bout, and I thought we’d be safe for a time in that quiet place on the Bosporus. For more than a year I hadn’t been able to give myself to painting. I’d been going downhill for a long while anyway. I didn’t care enough any more. I had always been interested in Turkish mosaics, and I decided to do a study of them for my own satisfaction. Sylvana was generous and made us welcome. Or so I thought. And I believed the trip would offer a haven for Anabel. But at the yali someone began giving her heroin again. Someone who wanted to destroy her.”

  There was silence in the car. Tracy hugged her arms tightly about herself, waiting.

  Miles’s eyes were on the rear-view mirror. “There’s been a car on the road behind us for some time. Up in this rolling country, I can see for a couple of hills back. It means nothing, perhaps. But that was a boat leaving the yali.”

  Tracy turned and saw the distant headlights. Miles stepped up the car’s speed and the other lights fell away.

  “Was it Sylvana who gave her the heroin, do you think?” Tracy asked. “Because she wanted you herself? Because it was an easy way to be rid of Anabel? I saw that picture you painted—the reflection in the samovar.”

  “I’m not sure about Sylvana’s infatuation. Sometimes I think she has used me mainly to torment Murat and let him know he lacks the money to be master in his own house. Once you’d called that reflection to my attention, I could see the portrait in no other way. I found something I wanted to paint—my hatred for the predators.

  “But there was more than possible infatuation to furnish a motive. I believe that Anabel stumbled on some dangerous knowledge. It’s even possible that she was actively involved. By playing on her need for the drug, she could have been made a useful tool in this beastly undercover affair that was going on. In any case, she must have known where the heroin was coming from. The source, that is, behind those needle marks on her arms. Once she brought me some beads. A black amber tespih. Nothing unusual. But she sounded strange when she asked me to consider it. I didn’t pay much attention at the time, and she changed her mind and took them away. When I asked her about the tespih later, she wouldn’t explain.”

  “The beads were a warning,” Tracy said.

  “Perhaps. But I think they were more than that. I think they must have been used as a signal. Though I’m not sure exactly how.”

  By now they had reached the sleeping suburbs of Istanbul, though Miles hardly lessened his speed. The tiered white balconies of new apartment buildings came into view, and the road dipped at length toward the water. They passed the great white cake ornament that was Dolmabache Palace and followed a narrowing road.

  Tracy, lost in her own thoughts, hardly noticed the increasing traffic that was slowing them down at last. There was still so much that she wanted to know.

  “Why have you kept Anabel’s picture on your wall ever since her death?” she asked.

  His voice was cool again. There seemed no emotion left in him but fury, and he kept that hidden from view a good part of the time.

  “Because I wanted to stay angry,” he told her. “I didn’t want to lower my guard, or to forget what had been done to her. But when I started that portrait of Sylvana, I had a far stronger reminder and I could let Anabel rest.”

  It was hard to imagine Anabel resting, or at peace. In life she had always been moving, seeking. Even her joyous moments were never quiet.

  “Tell me what really happened that night when Anabel came to Sylvana’s party,” she begged him. “You’ve told me you were giving her drugs, but you haven’t told me why.”

  He hesitated so long that she began to think he would not reply. Then he lifted a hand from the wheel as if in relinquishment.

  “It’s not something I like to talk about to Anabel’s sister, but perhaps you had better know. I don’t suppose you’ve ever seen a heroin addict in the throes of what they call the withdrawal syndrome? It’s pretty ghastly. Sweats and chills. Running nose, running eyes. Pains in the back and the abdomen. Twitching and shaking and r
epeated vomiting. In England addicts are treated a bit differently than they are in America, you know. They are permitted doses of drugs to keep them going as they taper off. Sometimes they’re able to lead almost normal lives. I’d got myself a hypodermic syringe and a medicinal supply in case I had to deal with an emergency. With a serious addict the drug must go directly into the bloodstream. I tried to relieve her suffering until I could put her in professional hands. I went to Ankara that last day to consult a man I knew there about her.”

  So he hadn’t simply abandoned her, after all. “But if someone in the house was giving her heroin—”

  “The supply was suddenly stopped. To make her suffer, I suppose. Perhaps to keep her under control. She came to me in desperation. But she wouldn’t tell me her source. My endurance was nearly at an end. I said I would help her this time, and then there would have to be an end to it. I’d see her through once more—but after that I wouldn’t try again. Or at least I told her that. I thought I might shock her into taking hold of herself. So I gave her one more shot. I hadn’t marked the veins in her arms as she tried to make everyone believe that night. That had taken years to accomplish, and I’d given her only occasional shots. She took care to wear long sleeves most of the time. When the drug began to wear off, she remembered what I said and she chose that way to punish me, to put me in the wrong with all those who were present. Indeed, if it hadn’t been for Sylvana’s discreet intervention, I might have found myself criminally liable, while the real culprit went free.”

  “How could Anabel do such a thing if she loved you?” Tracy felt sickened, revolted.

  “Love is not an emotion the narcotics addict is capable of. Except love for the drug he’s taking. Nothing else matters. Eventually he becomes incapable of loving or responding to love. Everything of that sort had been dead between us for years. I owed her the best I could give her because she was desperately in need, and she was my responsibility. But I couldn’t love her as a man loves a woman. When a heroin addict is sober, he’s full of terrible guilt and rage and self-pity. After a shot he becomes lethargic and sleepy. All he wants is to indulge his dreaming. In either state she had no feeling left for me, unless it was occasional anger.”

  A bitterness she had never felt before surged up in Tracy. An unfamiliar bitterness against her sister. “My father was right about her! When I remember how I envied Anabel and how I believed in her and tried to help her in all the small ways I could—”

  “You did help,” Miles said.

  “I shouldn’t have! It would have been better for me if I’d let her go. Better for you if you’d never tried to save her!”

  He was silent for a little while. When he spoke again his tone had changed, as though all anger, all the old bitterness had drained from him. “Have you forgotten what you said to me a few days ago when we went across the Bosporus for tea? You were the one who said somebody had to try. You said most people were too ready to give up with the ones like your sister.”

  “But I didn’t know the truth then,” Tracy said miserably. “If I’d known, I couldn’t have—”

  He touched her hand lightly, quieting her. “If you’d known, you’d have tried even harder. You aren’t the giving-up sort. Anabel was worth trying to help, you know. In spite of everything.”

  Tears were wet upon her cheeks. What he said was true. Even though the goodness and worth had been somehow lost and all effort hopeless in the end, it had been necessary to keep on trying, to keep on loving. Miles had given her sister back to her.

  “I think she tried to free herself at the end,” she told him. “She telephoned me in desperation the very day she died. She tried to tell me about some dangerous secret.” She did not add that Anabel had spoken out against her husband as well. Now Tracy understood why that had been. “I think she wanted to break away and save herself. That’s why she wanted me to come. Because I’d always given her support, even though I didn’t know how much was going wrong. I want to believe that she tried at the end. What do you think happened that day when she went out in the boat?”

  “I don’t know,” Miles said. “That’s one of the reasons why I’ve stayed in Istanbul.”

  “Just as it’s the reason that brought me here,” Tracy said. “I don’t want to go home yet. I can’t go home without knowing.”

  “What good will it do you to know? This part is my job, not yours.”

  There was no use in arguing with him. Time enough for that when they reached the airport. She couldn’t change his mind while they were in the car. Her eyes were dry now, her determination strong.

  The traffic on the streets had increased as the sky brightened with early light. They were hardly moving now. Behind them cars were crowding in, slowing everything to a crawl.

  Suddenly aware of what was happening, Miles looked about in dismay. “Good Lord! I’d forgotten the bridges. They were opened at 4:00 A.M. to let boats get in and out of the Golden Horn. Now they won’t close to permit traffic across until six o’clock. We’ve got to get out of this.”

  He searched for a turnoff into a side street, but it was already too late. Gradually all movement had come to a halt. The traffic leading to Galata Bridge penned them in. Unless they got out of the car and walked away, they would be here until the bridge swung shut again. Down near the water men with small boats were offering to ferry pedestrians across, but that would do them no good.

  Miles glanced at his watch. “Another half hour at least. What a stupid thing to do. I’ve been concerned with other matters.” Tracy turned anxiously to see what lay behind in the brightening light of dawn.

  “At least, if there’s someone following us, he’ll be caught too,” she said.

  Miles nodded grimly. “We’ll make up time on the road to the airport.”

  Over the Bosporus behind them the sun was rising out of Asia, and a soft rosy light touched the city that lay ahead across the Golden Horn. Rounded domes and the spires of minarets were turning to glinting rose and gold. The towers of the Seraglio glowed in the rising sun. All about, napping car drivers stirred, restless now and eager for traffic to move again. But still the bridge had not closed the gap.

  “At least this gives me a chance to show you something,” Miles said.

  He opened a compartment in the dashboard and took out a brown paper parcel.

  “Look inside,” he said and handed it to her.

  She unwrapped the paper and saw that it held one of the large shepherd bags, wool-embroidered and fringed, that Sylvana liked to ship abroad. She looked at it, puzzled.

  “I got curious the other night as to what Ahmet was up to,” Miles continued, “and I began to put two and two together. Before Anabel’s death there was an accusation made that she had been stealing articles from Sylvana’s shipments, though she denied everything when anyone asked her. After her death nothing was found among her possessions to indicate that the claim was true. Perhaps because someone else got there first and cleared everything out. I can guess now what she was about. She must have been collecting evidence. Like this bag.”

  Again Tracy looked at the bag in her lap, but it told her nothing.

  “When things quieted the other night I went back and stirred around in the stuff Sylvana was planning to wrap for mailing the following day. I was curious enough to look pretty carefully, but perhaps, because of my earlier interruption, the job wasn’t finished. This was all I found. Look inside.”

  Tracy opened the bag and saw that instead of the rough self-material that usually made up the interior of such bags, this one had been given a plain cotton lining. When she reached into the bag she found that a bit of the lining had been ripped up to reveal a sheet of plastic underneath. She looked at Miles.

  “That inner plastic bag is filled with white powder spread out carefully over the whole,” he said. “It’s a hundred per cent pure heroin. I checked with a laboratory friend, who tested it for me. These shipments are not likely to be too carefully examined by Turkish customs, since they go out un
der Sylvana Erim’s philanthropic protection. Nor have the U.S. customs caught on as yet. The concealment has been clever, and the shipments always seem above reproach. Probably most of the things shipped are innocent. Whoever manages this at the yali must take the stuff to his room, where he can work on it at night before a shipment is made.”

  “So that’s what Ahmet meant to do?” Tracy folded the package, feeling a certain repugnance about handling it. “For Sylvana, or for Murat?”

  “I can guess, but I’m not positive. You already know what I think.”

  Tracy remembered the portrait and nodded. “Then there must be an accomplice in New York?”

  “Undoubtedly several. This is no small operation. It could be that the buyers who accept these things to sell in their stores aren’t necessarily involved in what is happening. Seemingly casual purchasers in the stores could have the stuff spotted and pick it up.”

  “But—how would they know what to choose if most of the shipment is untouched?”

  “I think we’ll have evidence of that shortly,” Miles said. “I’ve made a phone call to New York. There will be someone on watch for whoever buys that strip of calligraphy Sylvana sent by airmail to a. Third Avenue dealer. I noticed the address on the mailing tube. Remember those marks you spotted on the script? I think there’s a code involved. Whoever receives that strip will know exactly which goods to buy to get the smuggled heroin.”

  “And Anabel knew,” Tracy said.