by null
Smith stood to show his bloodstained jeans, his blood-spattered T-shirt, and the ugly checkered jacket from the Stamboul Palace, also spattered with blood. All this was so far beyond the realm of his experience as to be scenes from the life of another man. He took a deep breath, cleared his throat. “Vatran shot himself through the heart. Right here”—he thumped his chest—“made a hole all the way through. So big you could put your hand in the back.”
“Suicide,” Inspektor Biryak murmured, and jotted something on the blue pad at his elbow.
“Yes.”
“What I am after now, as a policeman, you understand”—he hesitated—“is at once simple, yet complicated: Why did he do it?”
Smith looked up at the man, baffled. “Well, he just killed”—Jessica, he tried to say, but found he couldn’t speak her name out loud—“his, my ex-girlfriend. You know that, right?”
“I don’t mind telling you we have a confession in this particular case,” Inspektor Biryak admitted. “Another man, one Ahmet Kuluk, has admitted to the crime.”
“Yes,” Smith said. “He was Vatran’s servant. Vatran told him to strangle her.”
The inspektor made a stern gesture that seemed to brush this comment aside.
“You see, suicide is illegal in Turkey, Mr. Smith,” he continued. “As it is in France or England or any other modern country. Here it is deemed extremely un-Turkish. Thus, if you have contributed in any way to this act of suicide, you might be yourself guilty of a crime. I shall have to investigate thoroughly, to ascertain where the blame lies. In the meanwhile”—he consulted a small, sinister-looking book, bound in black morocco and very thick—“I shall have to charge you with . . . yes . . . suspicion of encouraging suicide. And also with, with . . . ah, behavior designed to undermine the Turkish national character. That should do nicely for now.”
Smith stared at the policeman, aghast. “But the dude tried to kill me! Ask anyone. He almost got me twice. He came that close . . .”
“So you insist.” Inspektor Biryak nodded. “We shall discover the truthfulness of these facts presently. But for now, I must ask you to surrender your passport.”
Smith reached into his pocket, withdrew the precious, battered blue document stamped with the American eagle, and handed it to the inspektor, who tossed it atop a random pile of papers on his desk.
3.
A police sergeant secured Smith’s wrists and ankles with primitive-looking manacles and drew him along, hobbling, out of Inspektor Biryak’s office. He was led to a spiral staircase that he descended with great difficulty and was taken to an interrogation cell, and there stripped of his clothes and his father’s old Rolex and his cowboy boots and subjected to a thorough cavity search—an indignity to which he submitted with as much dignity as possible. Then he was issued a clean striped cotton shirt like a pajama top and striped cotton pants and a pair of Chinese-made rubber-toed sneakers without laces, and he shoved himself into these clothes and was manacled again and put in a gorilla-sized mesh cage set in the middle of an echoing, high-ceilinged room. He waited there, trembling, for what would happen next.
An hour later, a clamorous gaggle of media types entered through a side door—newspaper reporters, photographers, TV news cameramen—and pushed up to the wire mesh of Smith’s cage. Flashes snapped in his face, these bright explosions recalling for a terrible moment the flare of gunfire; questions were shouted in Turkish and English.
“Are you a murderer, Mr. Smith?”
“Do you work for the American CIA?”
“Namussuz insafsiz garbli!”
“Do you revile the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him?”
“I didn’t do anything,” Smith shouted above the din. “The guy tried to kill me!”
One of the newspaper reporters, a fox-faced young man, his hair cropped short, his eyebrows arched up sharply like the eyebrows of a pantomime devil, rattled the wire mesh of Smith’s cage in an aggressive manner.
“Isn’t it true that you violated Kasim Vatran’s wife?” the fox-faced reporter shouted.
Smith looked down at him, alarmed. “No!” he shouted back. “And she wasn’t his wife! She used to be my girlfriend!”
“Did you not lure this woman to the notorious Klub Uyutucu Bahce, an illegal place of opium consumption, and there sexually violate her behind curtains under the influence of said illegal substance? Did you not in fact rape the poor woman?”
“No!” Smith shouted helplessly. “That’s not how it happened!”
“And isn’t it true that Kasim Vatran attempted to exact revenge for this terrible crime against his honor when he tried to kill you with a gun at the Hotel Stamboul Palace?”
Smith stared at the man, speechless. How did he get this information, by and large—he had to admit—completely accurate?
“I have spoken to the taxi driver personally who drove you to Terebasi.” The fox-faced reporter grimaced. “I have also spoken to . . .”
But Smith drew away from the mesh, feeling dizzy, and the reporter’s words were drowned out in the general cacophony of prejudice and recrimination.
After a while, the police sergeant returned, unlocked the cage, and hustled the overwhelmed Smith out through the media gauntlet and into a long, windowless concrete corridor. Smith glanced back and saw the pack of journalists climbing over one another to get to the table where the cops had tossed his clothes and battered cowboy boots, camera flashes snapping; then the door slammed shut behind him and he was taken down the windowless concrete corridor to an equally windowless concrete cell lit bright as day with powerful fluorescents protected from the wrath of the incarcerated by a steel box.
The cell, scrupulously clean, was bare except for a concrete slab for sleeping and a five-gallon plastic bucket for slops. The sergeant closed the cell door gently and shot the bolts home on the outside with a heavy clanking sound and Smith was alone. He slumped down on the concrete slab, bewildered, bathed in hard green light, the faint shadow of superheated gas snapping back and forth in the long glass tubes overhead. He stared up at the fluorescent tubes for a long while, his mind blank. Then he curled up in a fetal position and closed his eyes and the glowing tubes made bright stripes like luminous bars against the inside of his lids, dimming gradually to a pale green darkness as he fell asleep.
4.
The newspaper kiosks in Sultanahmet and around Taksim Square the next morning were full of pictures of Smith’s battered old cowboy boots taken from various, sinister angles. It was a case of journalistic synecdochism. Smith’s used Noconas (handmade in Texas, black on red, white stitchery, originally $375, but found—a coup!—at Domsey’s in Williamsburg for $19) standing in for Smith himself: the Ugly American Cowboy. He in turn standing in for aggressive Bushite foreign policy in the Middle East, for Western decadence, for what was going on in Iraq, Afghanistan, for everything.
Every major paper carried a shot of the boots beneath an alarmist, anti-American headline: AMERICAN COWBOY SHOOTING AT STAMBOUL PALACE said prosaic Hurriyet; COWBOY LOVE MURDERS SULLY TURKISH HOMELAND said patriotic Akit; LECHEROUS AMERICAN COWBOY CAUSES DEATH OF BRILLIANT TURKISH ARCHITECT, this from the arsty-fartsy Gir-Gir. COWBOY KILLER A JEW? asked the anti-Semitic Zir. Beneath these headlines, each paper contained detailed and mostly fictitious accounts of the violent episode at the Stamboul Palace, where, apparently, Smith was heard calumnizing the prophet at the top of his lungs, screaming “Down with Muhammad!” and “Death to all Turks!” and “Up with Israel!” in the moments before gunfire erupted. The evening editions ran a reproduction of Smith’s passport photo, illegally obtained from police files and digitally enhanced to add a touch of vicious Neanderthal to an already awful mug shot.
Ironically, the most accurate account of events appeared in the radical Islamist and anti-Western Hakikat, although the conclusions reached by their editorial writers (that Turkish men should beware of corrupt, sex-crazed Western women; that such women generally deserved to be strangled and raped for exposing their h
air and other odds and ends in public; that Smith himself deserved to be flogged and castrated, then flayed alive), were deemed unpalatable by the other major dailies and part of a plot to delay Turkey’s entry into the European Union. The government-sponsored Cumhurriyet even went so far as to accuse Hakikat of being secretly funded by the Israelis for this purpose.
Such is the subtlety of the Eastern mind: shadow puppets projecting not their own shadow, but the shadow of their shadow; betrayal leading immediately to antibetrayal, leading back to more of the same like a chameleon chasing its tail while compulsively changing colors; every motive haunted by another motive that was the exact opposite of the first, as if by an evil twin.
5.
Meanwhile, Smith malingered in solitary confinement in the brightly lit cell in the basement of the Galatasary police station. The fluorescent lights were never turned off and no one spoke a word to him; but he was well fed with platters of meze catered out of the rather good local mehayne frequented by members of the Galatasary District constabulary, and he was not molested in any way or subjected to any Midnight Express–style abuse. Twice a day, police cadets wearing sanitary masks and surgical gloves entered to remove the plastic bucket of slops. They never spoke and were even forbidden to look in Smith’s direction.
Despite the brightness and constant buzzing of the fluorescent lights, Smith slept or napped lightly like a cat most of the time, dreaming vivid, half-awake erotic dreams: Jessica’s body moving beneath his own in the shuttered light of their cramped bedroom back in Brooklyn; Jessica on the beach on vacation at Frisco on the Outer Banks of North Carolina three years ago in the excellent pink bikini that made her look naked; Jessica on the cat-walk at the Yvan Guest show in Milan way back in her modeling days.
But after a while, these troubling images faded. In their place came comforting backyard dreams of his lost Iowa family, of Wiffle Ball played in the scrubby grass behind the old house on Blue Bird Lane in Montezuma. He saw his father, still in post office blue, fresh from work, waggling the plastic bat over a crushed cardboard box home base in a comical manner; his mother wearing a frilly apron, cooking up brats on the barbecue grill. And there was his sister, Jane, premeningitis, her hair a mess, falling out of trees or eagerly tearing the limbs off her Barbies in the pile of leaves by the utility shed. All of them dead and gone. And Jessica dead too, and himself to blame.
During waking hours, Smith paced the cell, exactly twenty by sixteen, did push-ups and sit-ups, sang show tunes loudly to himself—“I get no kick from champagne, mere alcohol doesn’t thrill me at all. . . . But I get a kick out of you”—waited for the food to arrive (the main event of his day) and went slightly crazy, wavering between opposed magnetic poles—self-loathing and self-pity—constantly attracting each other and constantly repulsed. No one now alive loved him. This melancholy realization brought tears to his eyes. But the sound of his own sobs bouncing off the bare concrete block walls of the cell only made him more and more disgusted with himself. Thus, Smith wavered, a helpless particle caught in the emotional force field of a more or less unexamined inner life. Then the force field collapsed all at once and he was left with an accurate snapshot of his character for the first time in many years: He was indeed criminally self-absorbed, as Jessica had charged. Perhaps he had raped her, after all. He had certainly come thousands of miles to fuck her—mistaking, to quote the old Go-Go’s song, lust for love. And fucking her, he had contributed to her death. Guilty, then. He had not loved Jessica enough for herself, but mostly for her body, for her physical beauty that, as a reflection of his own, probably represented a deep-seated masturbatory impulse that was too horrible to contemplate. Now he was filled with shame and regret over Jessica’s fate, and in this bitter mood, came as close to truly loving her as he ever had in life. The poor woman, strangled by a vicious Turk! For a long time, maybe fifteen or twenty minutes, Smith, oppressed by guilt, could barely breathe. He didn’t spare himself or his own personal plight a single tear. He thought only of Jessica, how she was gone from the world, which had become in her absence a less beautiful place.
Actors are often vain—one of the hazards of the profession—or at least more so than the average tax attorney. Smith wasn’t a very good actor, a truth he was prepared to acknowledge now for the first time. But he did possess an excellent, flexible tenor voice, perfect for the musical theater, probably one of the best in the States. Unfortunately, he lacked the ambition, the sheer obstinacy to push his talents through the crowd of mediocre, driven people who assault the top positions in any creative field. He had allowed his good looks—his regular Midwestern features and excellent hair—to substitute for artistic conviction.
Self-examination is a torment. Despite the philosopher’s exhortations to explore all inner nooks and crannies, there exist dark corners of the soul better left to obscurity. The final thought regarding these painful matters, which occurred to Smith somewhere around day three of his captivity (impossible to mark an exact passage of time with no daylight and no Rolex) was also one of the hardest for him to bear: The acting-singing thing, as Jessica had said, was over. If he ever got out of this Turkish jail, he would need to find something else to do with the rest of his life.
6.
When the police sergeant came to take Smith from his cell, he refused to go. He wanted to stay buried there, suspended like an embryo between his old life and whatever unpleasantness lay ahead.
“Immediate! You, please,” the sergeant said in broken English. “Must go Inspektor Biryak.”
But Smith shook his head and crawled beneath the cement slab he’d been sleeping on for a week and wrapped himself firmly around the metal supports. Swearing, the sergeant went off and returned with two burly cadets—both former wrestling champs in the All Istanbul League—and these young men wrenched Smith from his hole and, seizing his arms and legs, carried him, sagging between them like the corpse of a drowned man pulled from the Bosphorus, up the stairs to the inspektor’s office. They entered respectfully, bowing their heads—it was the first time they had been in the office of such an exalted personage—lay Smith gently on the floor faceup, and exited, still bowing.
Inspektor Biryak came around his cluttered desk, hands in the pockets of his uniform jacket, and stared down at Smith staring up.
“Come now!” he said sternly. “Get up off my floor, Mr. Smith!”
Smith, who had been studying a water stain in the ceiling, met the inspektor’s gaze with some effort. What he saw there—concern, amusement, mixed with a healthy dose of justified contempt—caused him to get up, dust himself off, and take a seat in the chair opposite the inspektor’s desk.
“Good,” the inspektor said. “Now . . .”
He turned and began shuffling through a pile of papers on his desk until he found Smith’s passport, casually tossed there a week before: Smith almost burst into tears when he saw this familiar document and reached out for it as one reaches for the hand of an old friend. The inspektor ignored this gesture. He leaned back against his desk, tapping his glossy fingernails against the passport’s blue cover.
“I have completed my investigation of your lamentable case and have concluded that you bear no direct legal responsibility for the death of Kasim Vatran and his wife.”
“They weren’t married,” Smith croaked, interrupting, his voice crackling with disuse. “Jessica never married the man.”
“Ah, but she did,” the inspektor said. “A civil ceremony performed last month at a private resort on the Black Sea. Would you like to see the documents?”
“No,” Smith said, deflating. So she had married the monster after all.
“Of course, there are certain crimes I can charge you with. Adultery, for one,” the inspektor continued. “Or use of banned substances, or various other anti-Turkish activities—perhaps including possession of forbidden headgear, should I by chance discover a fez in your luggage. But I have decided not to pursue any of these possibilities.”
“Teekkür ederim,”
Smith said humbly. “No doubt you have had some time to reflect on the damage you have caused here in Istanbul.” Inspektor Biryak’s tone now was deadly serious. “Is that correct, Mr. Smith?”
“Yes,” Smith whispered.
“And do you regret your role in this tragedy?”
“Utterly,” Smith said, with as much sincerity as he could muster. Then: “Sir, do you think I might see the body? Jessica’s, I mean. To say good-bye.” He felt a gothic impulse to throw himself across her strangled corpse, to plant one last kiss on her decomposing lips, to beg her forgiveness, as if dead flesh could forgive the living.
“I’m sorry.” Inspektor Biryak shook his head. “Madame Vatran has been cremated along with her husband. Their ashes were spread yesterday over the sea at Ince Burun, where they were married. This was the family’s request.”
Smith swallowed a lump in his throat. Jessica was completely gone. Even her ashes, a fine gray powder, dissolved into the great shroud of the sea. She might have found happiness with Kasim, with her half-Turkish baby, and her plush, circumscribed life in Istanbul. She might have converted to Islam, taken to wearing the veil, discovered the peace of Allah. It no longer mattered. Jessica, Kasim, the baby—they were all equal now.
A pause. Inspektor Biryak studied Smith for a long moment, then nodded to himself, confirming something.
“Some friends have come for you,” he said at last.
“Friends?” Smith looked up, surprised. He couldn’t think of any friends, at least not in this hemisphere.
The inspektor tossed over the passport. Smith nervously let it slip through his fingers, then leaned over and scooped it quickly off the floor.
“I have decided to release you into their custody,” the inspektor said. “But your tourist visa has been revoked. You will leave Turkey within twenty-four hours.”
Inspektor Biryak turned away and resumed his seat behind a desk piled high with paperwork, with reports and affidavits, with far more important matters.