The copper pots strapped to the eşek’s side clanked and bumped the entire journey, all three kilometers to Kavaklidere from the pasha’s shrine. Meryem chose the paths through open fields that riddled the fringes of Ankara rather than follow Atatürk Bulvari, the spine of the city.
She’d had to leave behind one of her gold bracelets in order to escape past the MP’s nose without annoying questions. Umit would pay her back, she’d see to that.
Meanwhile, it did not bode well with her that the eşek had lost its blue beads in that tussle back there with the gunman at Anit Kabir. How would she and Umit ward off the evil eye without the beads? She needed them now more than ever. Already, evil sought her out.
She knew. The high-low cry of sirens pounding through the city center in the distance told her so.
It was too late for her to go back for the beads. Not even she could slip unnoticed, once again, past the MPs. By now they would’ve added reinforcements to plug the holes that had allowed her escape.
Here in the fields she could breathe, at least for now. The fields offered a more direct route to the profitable neighborhoods of settled homes to the south and west. Out here, she could blend amongst peasants. They smelled the Rom in her and gave her room to pass. The city gadje with their prying eyes, on the other hand, would never leave her alone.
Meryem would’ve welcomed the shade from the boulevard’s thick line of chestnut trees. Sweat seldom bothered her, except for a ring around her belly, but now she felt the drips of moisture coat her skin like a slick undergarment, binding her. There was no shade out here in the open, and the sun’s rays scorched through the heavy folds of her costume that covered her body except for her face and her hands.
Still, this was a better route for peasants, not that she was one herself. She was Rom, first and foremost. If it suited her needs to disappear into the background, she could be a peasant.
Except for her hands.
Hers were not the coarse, red hands with crooked, bumpy fingers of peasants who worked the fields, threshing wheat. She prided herself on her hands, the way they could tempt money away from the gadje. Hers were a dancer’s hands, with smooth, soft flesh and long, graceful fingers that knew how to melt seasoned men into hapless puppies. Her fingers could undulate through the air and read a gadje’s fortune, all for lira.
Beads of sweat glistened along her fingers that clutched the rope leading the eşek. She reminded herself that today, without Umit, the fields were a necessary choice rather than the central boulevard. Atatürk Bulvari housed embassy after embassy, where enough MPs to fill an army observed the comings and goings of passersby. She did not want anyone as observant as they to hear the rhythmic bump of her pots and wonder what out-of-place object might be hidden inside one of them.
Better, not to arouse any questions. Not until she could find a more secure hiding place, one that would not give away the presence of the gun. She must keep it hidden until she found Umit.
And she would find Umit.
He owed her.
He would know what to do with the gun, although she thought it would be better to get rid of it. She had no idea how much it would fetch, but at least a few hundred lira, more than a night’s work of dance.
She knew of someone, an old, retired asker, who worked the black market from the rich neighborhood on the hill ahead. Those military men could never resist weapons, never purge their love of violence from their blood. But he would ask questions. Her mind danced through different stories to explain how she’d acquired the gun.
By the time Meryem crossed her last field and led the eşek out onto the pavement of Güven Evler, where the terrain was still flat, she settled on one of the stories. The gun had been a gift to her brother from their grandfather, she would say, a family heirloom that he had to sell in order to feed his children.
“Shine your pots!” she called out in Turkish as she strolled down the middle of the street. Her sing-song voice disguised her Romani accent.
Nothing moved. No cars, not that very many cars ever wandered here to the residential neighborhoods in the first place. Not even other hawkers were out in this blistering heat. She watched for movement at the windows of the few apartments scattered through this scanty neighborhood where there were more fields than cement, but no one moved in them, either. No one seemed interested in her services today.
Just as well. It was Umit’s job to handle the pots. She didn’t care to ruin her hands, doing his work for him. Besides, shining pots wasn’t the real reason they came here. It was a way for them to look for more lucrative jobs requiring her talents.
At the end of this street was a vacant lot with a few trees, a cool place where she and her brother always sat and rested before climbing the first hill into Kavaklidere. He would know to meet her here. “Shine your pots!” she sang again. Her heart was not in the offer, but if she did not cry out her apparent reason for being here, she feared she would be discovered.
No one stirred in response, praises to Allah, not that he was her god. She’d taken the expression as her own. Her skill, after all, was in knowing how to blend in. In truth, she had no god but herself.
She turned off the street and into the dusty weeds of the vacant lot. A small path wound down to a depression in the center, where a ditch cut through, and trees lined a grassy bank. The eşek trotted happily around her, brushing past her to lead the way to water, but she grabbed it firmly by its harness and yanked the animal off the path.
“Here, you!” she said, tugging the animal toward a dry corner of the lot. She knew of a hollow stump over there, surrounded by a protective cover of brambles. A perfect hiding place for the gun. Then, she promised the eşek, they would settle down by the water, the rest of the afternoon if necessary, to wait for Umit.
* * * * *
Anna felt breathless with hope as Hayati led her and Priscilla out of Yaziz’s office, through a maze of gray hallways, and out onto the street. She’d already passed through more phases of grief than she’d ever thought possible, until she’d finally tucked away her mourning for Rainer to a corner of her mind. That was years ago. She’d learned how to shut it off from the rest of her daily functions. Now it seemed as if that door had opened, and the grief poured out once again. If Rainer still lived...
Did it mean...could the letter...could it possibly mean that Rainer still lived? If so, it was a message that the killer hadn’t wanted delivered.
It was too impossible. Her hope was futile. She stifled her hope and sucked in a lungful of the peculiar smells that overwhelmed her each time she stepped outside. It seemed that there were more animals pulling carts in the streets than cars, trucks, and buses combined.
However, a car parked in front of the police station. An American car, its dents and checkered trim indicated that it was now used as a taxi. As Hayati steered them towards the taxi, Priscilla broke away from Anna’s grip and raced to the back door. The three of them squeezed into the backseat, and Hayati spoke briefly to the driver. A string of blue beads dangled from the rear-view mirror and swayed as the driver put the cab in gear and pulled out into light traffic.
Hayati rested his arm across the top of the backseat, behind Anna’s head. How could he appear so relaxed? She tightened, unable to stop replaying the day’s events in her mind or to keep her hope stifled for very long.
Rainer...alive? The possibility left her feeling...confused...dazed...delighted. Then her anger flared, smothering out all the rest. If it was true that he was alive, then where in hell had he been all these years? Why hadn’t he contacted her?
Rainer was dead, she told herself. She wouldn’t let herself believe any other possibility. She wouldn’t grieve all over again.
“For a detective, he didn’t seem very interested in doing his job,” she said to Hayati, trying to shake Rainer from her mind.
“And what do you perceive is his job?” Hayati’s eyes twinkled, as if he laughed at her skepticism.
“Why, to investigate, of course.” The murder. She left that unspoken on account of Priscilla’s presence.
“He cannot help himself. He is a Turk. It is not Turkish to admit to not knowing something.”
“But that’s the point of an investigation.” She let out a sigh of frustration. “Finding out what you don’t know.”
“His methods may be different from what you would expect.”
“He thought I knew him, that man who died.”
“Did you?”
“No, of course not. And that’s another thing. Detective Yaziz said there was a name sewn into the label inside his suit, but he never would tell me what it said. Somehow, he thought I already knew.”
The driver glanced at her through the mirror, apparently curious about their conversation. She wondered how much English he understood, if any.
“We’ll find out soon enough who he was,” Hayati said. “The name in the suit was Henry Burkhardt’s. That’s why Bay Yaziz thought you’d know.”
Anna felt splinters of cold run up and down her spine. The detective had released that information to Hayati—or to the embassy—but not to her. “That man at the tomb was wearing Henry’s suit?” Her brother-in-law. “How on earth did he get it?”
“Fededa knows him,” Priscilla said, swinging her leg against the back of the driver’s seat. “He came to our house and talked to her.”
Silence descended over the car like the aftermath of a bomb. Anna’s heart skipped a beat. She took a deep breath, then found her voice. “Fededa.” She let the name of the Burkhardts’ maid hang in the air. Then, “So you did know him. Why didn’t you tell us sooner?”
“No one would let me,” Priscilla said. “Besides, I don’t know his name. That’s what you want to know, isn’t it?”
Not entirely, Anna thought. The truth, she realized with a stab of dismay, was that she didn’t actually care as much about the victim’s identity as the information he’d possessed about Rainer.
Is he really alive?
She took a deep breath and turned to Hayati. “Maybe you can help us learn more about that man by speaking to Fededa. She doesn’t speak English.”
“It’s a police matter,” Hayati said. “They’ll find out how the dead man came into possession of Mr. Burkhardt’s suit.”
“The suit doesn’t matter.”
“Oh? And what does matter, if not that?”
Surely he knew about the letter, too, but she wasn’t going to inform him in case he didn’t. She didn’t want to bring up Rainer again. “His identity, of course, as Priscilla said. His family will have to be notified. That’s what I meant about your helping us find out who he was. So that we can locate his family.”
If he’d had information about Rainer’s whereabouts, then someone else in his family might know, too, she thought.
“The police will handle it,” Hayati said, “in their own way.”
Priscilla tapped Anna on the wrist, poking her again and again. “I can talk to Fededa. She’s my friend.”
Hayati chuckled. “Oh, you don’t need me after all, do you?”
He was still chuckling as the taxi pulled up in front of the American Embassy, a white building that looked as if it belonged among the monuments of Washington D.C., rather than here among the drab brown and gray blocky buildings along the chestnut tree-lined boulevard. Hayati led them inside to the clacking sound of typewriters echoing off what looked like marble walls and floors.
“Wait here,” Hayati said, then he strode across the entry hall to the receptionist. He leaned across her half wall and spoke so low that Anna couldn’t make out his words. The receptionist’s giggles were clear enough, though.
When Hayati returned to Anna, his face beamed with mischief. “She’s buzzing him now,” he said.
Anna’s spine stiffened. This man couldn’t seem to respect the somber nature of events that had brought them here.
Before he could say more, a commotion of rapid voices, doors slamming, and tapping footsteps echoed from a corridor behind the reception area. A man and woman emerged from the shadows and paused their conversation long enough to glance Anna’s way. He had a thick belly and she was thin as a stick. Both of them sparkled with American high energy and appeared middle-aged in their tailored suits. The man snapped a sheaf of papers into the woman’s hand, and she gave him a mocking salute in return. She turned on her high heels and clicked away, down another corridor.
The man carried a briefcase and marched over to them. “Ah, Orhon,” he said to Hayati, “very good of you to bring them here for me.” Then he turned to Anna. “Miss Riddle, I presume?” He didn’t wait for an answer but extended his hand and kept talking, blowing little puffs of onion-laced breath in her face with each word. “Paul Wingate, U.S. State Department. I’ll bet you’ve had enough adventure for one day. Ready to go home? I’ll drop you off, as I’m headed up to the neighborhood now. We can talk along the way.”
His handshake was firm, and his palm, clammy. The tempo of his baritone voice resonated with efficiency. “Hardly an adventure,” Anna said, but she sighed with relief in spite of her quibbles with his word choice. She didn’t mind handing off her worries to someone else, and now she felt the tension that had boiled up inside her over the course of the afternoon slowly begin to drain.
He turned away, storming toward the exit, flinging a remark over his shoulder. “I’ll expect that report on my desk first thing in the morning, Orhon.” Then he stopped, noticing that Anna and Priscilla weren’t following him. “Chop, chop,” he said with a pointed glance at his wristwatch.