by Diana Renn
The dad silhouette put his arm around the son silhouette. The mom silhouette, a willowy woman wearing a shawl with lots of fringe, laughed uproariously at something the dad silhouette said. Even after the three of them disappeared through a door and went back into their apartment, the rich notes of the mom’s laugh hung in the air like thick perfume.
I swallowed hard, suddenly aching for my parents. For the family I once thought I had.
Too soon, I was woken up again as Mom banged on my door. “Rise and shine! Kitchen patrol!”
Groggily, I sat up. “What?” The clock on the nightstand read 6:00 a.m.
“We’re fixing a buffet breakfast for the guests. Apparently the staff who just quit were also the morning cooks. Chop chop! Up and at ’em! Let’s go, let’s go!”
Could she be more annoying? “Unghh. Okay. Let me just take a shower.”
“No time. Shower later. We are needed immediately.”
I sat up and peered out through the diamonds in the window lattice. The world was already coming to life, with shopkeepers tossing buckets of water on the cobblestones outside their shops, as Selim used to do on the teak wood deck before we ate every meal. Suddenly I missed that routine. The Arasta Bazaar at the end of the street was awakening, too, with vendors arriving to work.
There was no sign of Lazar or Vasil. But what was to stop them from returning and simply walking in? If they needed to talk with me, they’d find a way—it was only a matter of time. I could only hope Inspector Lale had gotten some of her trusted colleagues on their trail.
I threw on some clothes—long pants and long sleeves, no surprise—and took a couple of extra minutes to slather on concealer.
When I got downstairs to the kitchen, Mom and Aunt Jackie were waiting for me. Mom was taking bins of food out of the fridge. Aunt Jackie was perched on a stool in front of a cutting board with onions, but she was massaging her lower back instead of chopping them. She looked pained and exhausted, as if she hadn’t slept so well either.
Mom shot me a disapproving look. “You’re late. Get cracking.” She gestured with her chin to a bowl and the stove. “And by that I mean not cracking. I need you to hard-boil two dozen eggs. Guests will be coming down soon. We’ve got eight rooms occupied right now. Some Italians, some Swedes, and some Canadian guests. Early risers and big eaters, Mustafa said.”
Yawning, I somehow got the eggs going in four separate pots of bubbling water. Then Aunt Jackie switched me to feta cheese duty, crumbling it into a bowl. After that, I put olives in bowls and sliced up halvah, which was thicker and softer than the kind we got at home, like a mocha-colored brick of sugar. It all looked amazing. Aunt Jackie picked up her knife and finally started chopping the onions. Working by her side, in silence, felt peaceful. It was satisfying to see the plates stack up with food and know that everything I did was helping her in some way.
“Do you always start work this early?” I asked.
“Only when the cook has quit.” Aunt Jackie laughed. “We do run early around here in the summers, though, because guests usually like to start their sightseeing early. Mustafa and Nazif will get in close to eight,” said Aunt Jackie. “And the cleaning staff soon after. That is, they would be arriving soon after, if they hadn’t quit,” she added, remembering yesterday’s news.
Eight. That didn’t leave me much time. Between Nazif’s watchfulness and Mom’s work schedule for me—which she’d written out and posted on my bedroom door—it was going to be a huge challenge to work on finding Sage. First, I needed to get to the computer to see if Sheila Miller had responded to my email. If she hadn’t, I needed a new plan.
“Can I ask you something?” I said to Aunt Jackie, as soon as my mom went down to the laundry room to get some fresh towels.
“Anytime, Zan. What’s on your mind?”
“Nazif said something weird to me yesterday.” The Lycian Society remark was on my mind again.
She smiled. “Nazif’s a good kid. He’s an introvert and can be a little awkward with the guests, though, so I’m not too surprised. What’d he say?”
“He mentioned the Lycian Society had some bad people in it. Why would he say something like that, do you think?”
“Bad people?” Aunt Jackie thought a moment. “I don’t know about bad people—maybe he’s trying to translate from Turkish. Maybe he meant dishonest.”
“But it wasn’t the tour packager’s fault that neither of their guest speakers could make the cruise.” I frowned. “And Erdem Tabak was really nice about getting the company to make up for it.”
“That’s the tour packager. That’s a different part of it,” said Aunt Jackie. “The society itself, the group of scholars and enthusiasts, must be what Nazif was referring to. I personally do find them dishonest. I never liked the way they treated Berk.” Aunt Jackie sighed and set down her knife for a moment. She massaged her belly, wincing slightly, and then continued. “They paid their consultants and lecturers decently, so Berk did some work for them now and then. And he gave a guest lecture at their annual conference in April. That got him invited to talk on the cruise. But they always kept him at arm’s length, and they rejected his membership application.”
“I thought anyone could pay to join. That’s what the website says, anyway.”
“That depends. There are different levels of membership for difference price points and commitment levels,” said Aunt Jackie. “The organization is financed mostly by donations and membership dues, and now these educational tours, which they started offering last year. But there’s an elite level, called Onyx, which costs an arm and a leg to join and requires an application.”
Onyx level. I knew onyx was like obsidian, a pitch-black gemstone. I thought of some of Mom’s rich clients, and Dad’s campaign donors, and the black credit cards they used—black was code for “loaded,” Mom had told me once. Those were the people she went after most aggressively for donations.
“The Lycian Society is a complex organization,” Aunt Jackie continued. “And the Onyx level is a bit mysterious, kind of like the Masons. The members have codes of honor, and passwords, and other ways for members to identify one another. Honestly? I think it’s a little bit silly. Most members at the elite level are rich intellectual dilettante types who probably just toss the name around to impress their friends. But there are some serious scholars, collectors, and museum personnel in that group as well, and that’s who Berk was really trying to connect with.”
“Why?”
“For business-networking opportunities. He thought it might lead to a more permanent and stable job somewhere.”
I frowned. “Yeah, but . . . why wouldn’t they take him? I mean, he had a PhD. He wrote articles. I bet he could have run their whole organization!” I was surprised at how loyal I was starting to feel toward Uncle Berk, whom I’d hardly known when he was alive. Now that he was dead, I was getting to know him better, and I could see what he meant to Aunt Jackie and how much they’d loved each other.
“I suspect he wasn’t independently wealthy enough,” she said. “And he wasn’t affiliated with any institution. It’s a vicious cycle. He needed the society for networking opportunities, but he wasn’t plugged into a network enough to be accepted.”
“That’s totally unfair.”
“It was unfair,” Aunt Jackie agreed. “And so yes, I do think some people in the Lycian Society are ‘bad.’ They’re snobs. I’m glad I’m done with them. It’s the only silver lining in this whole miserable business of Berk dying.” She scooped all the chopped onions into a bowl in one swift motion. “Hey,” she added, glancing toward the door, “do you mind giving me Lale—I mean, Inspector Lale’s—business card? I want to give her a call.”
“Sure. Why?”
She glanced at the door again. “Okay. I hate to ask you to keep another secret from your mom. But just between you and me? I want to get in touch with her about Berk’s de
ath.”
I froze. This decision seemed huge.
“I know she’s in the anti-smuggling division, not homicide,” Aunt Jackie went on, “but I figure she might have some pull, given her title. And I know she’s got her hands full with the racket on the coast right now, but maybe she can help me to get the case reopened. I mean, she was a friend of Berk’s, and she did say she’d do anything for him. It can’t hurt to ask her.”
“Yeah. That’s a really good idea.” As long as Inspector Lale didn’t tell Aunt Jackie about my seeing Lazar and Vasil outside the hotel yesterday, I thought.
“What’s a good idea?” Mom came back in with a stack of fresh towels.
“Nothing,” Aunt Jackie and I said together. We exchanged a quick, knowing smile.
Mom raised an eyebrow. Then she noticed I was no longer chopping. “What are you doing, Zan? Let’s go, let’s go!” She clapped her hands. “Guests are waking up. Time’s running out!”
Around seven-thirty, guests began trickling down to the tables, just as Mom and I had finished setting up the buffet. We greeted them in the small dining area off the lobby. Mom dashed outside to the patio garden to pick flowers for bud vases we’d set on the tables. She was smiling and humming to herself; I hadn’t seen her so happy in a long time. Mom liked to work, and I could see that this lifestyle agreed with her more than a leisurely cruise. She bossed me around, and I scurried to get place settings on all the tables, managing to drop a whole stack of them on the floor just as Mustafa and Nazif arrived.
I was sure I saw Nazif smirk as I surveyed the scattered cutlery. I gave him my best glare.
But then he surprised me, stooping to help pick up forks and knives. “Let me help you,” he said.
“I got it,” I snapped. I bent down, too, and added, as we both picked up knives, “You know what you said yesterday? About the Lycian Society?”
He nodded.
“When you said there were ‘bad people’ there, you meant they were, like, snobby, right?”
“No.” He shook his head. “I meant exactly what I said. I do speak English, you know. My father made me take English classes starting when I was five. And I watch a lot of American TV shows.”
Now I was really confused.
“I cannot speak of it again,” he added, looking down. “I should never have said anything.”
“But why? Why are they ‘bad people’?”
Nazif looked around, chewing his lip.
“Come on,” I said. “You can’t just drop something like that and walk away. Just tell me why you think they’re dangerous. Or,” I added, with a meaningful glance toward Mustafa at the front desk, “I’ll tell your dad you were being rude to me.”
His eyes grew wide. “When? When was I rude?”
“Right now. I’m a guest who needs help, and you’re not helping me. I know how important hospitality is to him. Plus you could have offered your phone right away yesterday, when you saw that I needed to make a call and the connection didn’t work in my room.”
His face clouded over. “I thought maybe you were different, but I was wrong. You are a typical American.”
His words smacked me in the gut. “What does that mean?”
“You think the world revolves around you. You feel entitled to demand things. Like so many of the Americans we see in this hotel.”
“You don’t even know me!” I burst out. “How can you say I’m just like every other person from my country? I don’t think you’re just like every other person in your country. And I do not think the entire world revolves around me. Anyway, you’re changing the subject. This is really important to me. They hired my uncle as a guest speaker. I want to understand who he was working with.”
At the mention of my uncle, his face changed. His eyes met mine, unblinking. “All right. Because I cared about your uncle, and you say it is important for you to understand, I will tell you what I know of this group. But we must talk outside this hotel.”
“Why? What’s wrong with talking here?”
He looked around again. “Voices carry,” he said, “and I do not want guests to have the feeling that bad things could happen here. The guests are here to relax, my father says. We have had some negative reviews online and we must be careful to stay positive.”
“Okay, but my mom doesn’t want me leaving the hotel,” I said, thinking more about Lazar and Vasil than her. I didn’t want to meet those guys face-to-face in the street again.
“Sorry,” said Nazif. “But that is my condition.”
I hesitated. If I had Nazif with me, and saw Lazar and Vasil, maybe they wouldn’t approach me. “Okay,” I said. “We’ll talk outside. At lunch.”
“Good,” he said. “I’ll meet you at the front desk.” He stood up, handed me a handful of cutlery to put away, and hurried back to the lobby.
Replaying our strange conversation in my mind, I couldn’t believe the words that had come out of my mouth. I had acted like a snotty politician’s daughter who was used to getting her way.
But I needed to find out what Nazif knew. If there was something rotten about the Lycian Society, I had to know what it was.
22
All morning, Mom kept me in constant motion, which meant I couldn’t get to the computer to check for Sheila Miller’s response. After clearing and washing all the breakfast dishes, we pushed the housekeeping carts down the halls and tackled the guest rooms. I was grateful that only eight of the fifteen rooms were occupied, but there was still plenty to do.
I learned a bunch of stuff, all right, but nothing I’d put in a college essay. For example, I learned that people leave hair in the sink, don’t flush the toilet, swipe toiletries, smoke in non-smoking rooms, and expect maid service to pick up their underwear. I learned that if you’re pushing a supply cart down a hallway, you are invisible. Guests chatting about their sightseeing plans on their way to the elevator don’t get out of your way, or say hello. They pretend not to see you.
“This hotel is operating at a total loss,” Mom complained, flicking a feather duster over a mantel. “I mean, it’s high season. This place should be full. People should be banging down the door and paying big bucks for this level of charm in the heart of the Old City. I looked at your Lonely Planet guide last night. The Hippodrome. The cisterns. The Blue Mosque. Hagia Sophia. All this history right in their backyard.”
“I know. And speaking of walking distance”—I snapped on a fresh pair of latex gloves and grabbed the toilet brush—“I was thinking of stepping out during lunch. Maybe go see the Blue Mosque, or even that bazaar at the end of the street.”
“No. We have a lot to do here. Your aunt cannot afford one more bad review.”
“I know. I’ll be fast. I just want to walk outside, up and down the street. Nazif said he’d show me around our block, just so I know where things are.”
Mom thought a moment. “I guess that would be okay. But no going over to his house. He seems like a nice boy, but you want to be careful not to step into a trap.”
I stared at her. “Why would I go into his house?”
“Because he just lives next door and he might feel inclined to, you know, seize the day.”
“Mom!”
“Pretty foreign girl? Empty house? It’s an opportunity, and boys are boys, the same all over the world. So I’d feel more comfortable if—”
“Wait. He lives next door?” This revelation was so huge it blotted out, for a moment, the fact that Mom still didn’t trust me enough to let me out of her sight for five minutes.
“Yes. I was talking to Mustafa earlier,” she said. “The Polat family are the hotel’s next-door neighbors. They have that gorgeous rooftop garden to our left.”
I stared at her.
“In fact, that’s how Mustafa originally got his concierge job,” Mom went on. “He got laid off from another hotel and had trouble getting wor
k at the same level. He said he was really happy to get this position, and to go home for all his meals and see his family.”
So it was Nazif’s family I’d seen playing a board game last night. Nazif’s family I’d envied. And I’d traveled halfway around the world to meet the boy next door.
Now I was curious about Nazif for an entirely new set of reasons.
Aunt Jackie came back from her doctor appointment just as the muezzin was singing the midday call. Mom and I were sweating it out in the basement laundry room, folding stacks and stacks of towels. Aunt Jackie sank into a chair, breathing heavily. “Bad news,” she said. “My doctor’s putting me on bed rest.”
“Oh, Jackie.” A towel slid out of Mom’s hand and she didn’t bother to pick it up. “I’m so, so sorry to hear this. For how long? Did she say?”
“Could be a couple of weeks, could be longer. It’s kind of a wait-and-see thing.” She sighed. “There might be a problem with the placenta. I don’t have to be flat-out in bed all the time, but no lifting, no stairs. They want me to exert myself as little as possible and avoid stress.”
Looking at my aunt and the dark shadows that ringed her eyes, I wanted to cry. What if she had to stop working for the remainder of her pregnancy?
I untied my apron. “Can I take my lunch break now?” I asked.
Mom nodded, pressing some Turkish lira into my hand. “Go ahead. I’ll get Aunt Jackie settled in her room. If you could bring me back something small to eat, I’d appreciate it.”
I ran up to the lobby, but I couldn’t find Nazif. Or Mustafa. And one of the Swiss guests was on the public computer terminal, so I still couldn’t check my email. I peered outside, looking in front of the plate and tile store. No Lazar or Vasil. That was good. But where was Nazif?
I stepped outside and looked up and down the street, in case he’d stepped away from the building. Suddenly the smell of fresh bread hit me. This was a welcome scent after a morning spent inhaling cleaning product fumes. So even though Inspector Lale had warned me not to leave the hotel alone, I decided to find that bread and get lunch for my mom and Aunt Jackie while I waited for Nazif.