Long after the American woman left and the reports started coming in from his junior officers, Veli Yaziz brooded alone in his office. Alone except for the ever-present shadow of Atatürk’s guiding spirit. The Eternal Leader.
Absently, Yaziz reached into his back pocket and pulled out his tespih, as he always did when he had worries to carefully turn over in his mind. His thumb slipped across and around the first bead of jet, feeling the trace of a groove in its cool smoothness.
She was hiding something, obviously. Although she’d witnessed the shock of death, she had not shrieked or wailed or succumbed to hysteria, as he would expect most women to do. As, for instance, her foolish but very attractive sister, whom he had met at numerous embassy receptions, would almost certainly behave. Miss Anna Riddle, he suspected, was not as innocent as she pretended to be.
He slid the bead along its string and fingered the next one. Henry Burkhardt was mixed up in this murder. That diplomat had provided the suit that the dead man had been wearing. Burkhardt’s name, although frayed from the bullet’s passage, was sewn into an inside pocket.
And Burkhardt had brought the woman here, under the pretext of caring for his daughter. Why? It was abominable to think the man had used his own child for another purpose. Yaziz had never trusted the diplomat, and with good reason.
Someone was lying, that much he knew for certain. His sergeants had already confirmed through their American embassy friends that the Burkhardts had left the day before from Esenboğa Airport, as Miss Riddle claimed. However, they had left for Frankfurt, with no connection to Nairobi. In fact, the airline had no record of any ticket purchased for departing West Germany at all. Why, then, had they not taken their daughter, in keeping with the woman’s lame argument of birthplace?
Then, there was the matter of Henry Burkhardt’s mission. It was common knowledge, that is, common under the table, that the reason he had been posted to Ankara was to keep an American eye on the Soviets. The Turks gave their unspoken approval to those affairs by not intervening. Turks did not want the Soviets to expand into Turkish territory, a strategic land bridge the Soviets had always coveted for its access to the Mediterranean.
The Americans did not make a public announcement of Burkhardt’s mission, but they hardly kept it secret, either. Yaziz couldn’t help but wonder what they did keep secret. What the Turks did not know.
Whatever the diplomat was up to, with perhaps Miss Riddle as his accomplice, Burkhardt had now crossed the line into Yaziz’s territory. An unknown man lay in a Turkish mortuary. Unknown, but not for long. Already Yaziz knew that the dead man was no Moslem. His genitals had told him that much.
A knock on his door pulled Yaziz from his thoughts, and he looked up at Suleyman, one of the junior officers with tireless energy.
“This is all we found, efendim,” Suleyman said, dropping a small bundle wrapped in newspaper onto Yaziz’s desk.
Yaziz unfolded the paper. In its crumpled center lay a jumble of blue beads, some of them crushed and slipping off their shredded string. “Where?”
“Behind the north wall of the Lions’ Road.”
With his tespih entwined around his fingers, Yaziz lifted the bundle to his nose and flinched at the faint animal stench. “Any identification yet?”
The ends of Suleyman’s mouth turned down. “The beads are coarsely made, like the type that would belong to work animals. Probably came from a source in Ulus. We’re showing the victim’s photo around there now. We’ll find him.”
“Good work, Suleyman.”
The officer left, and Yaziz returned to his brooding. The angle of the shot that had killed the non-Moslem told Yaziz that the shooter had stood to the north of the victim. Had the beaded animal in question belonged to him? Or to the victim? And what had happened to the animal? Perhaps there’d been another witness.
He set the newspaper bundle of beads beside the letter—his other piece of evidence—and resumed stroking his own slick beads of jet.
Whoever the victim was, the American woman hadn’t killed him. The shot had come from behind him, not at point-blank range. Furthermore, Miss Riddle was too much of a lady for such bloody business.
Yaziz prided himself on his ability to judge character. His wisdom came from his being koreli, a tag that gave him extra respect, all because of his army experience in Korea. The first time that Turks had gone to the aid of another nation had made them national heroes. But there were many things he still did not understand.
For instance, why had Miss Riddle attempted to meet the dead man at Anit Kabir? For an exchange of information? The question was, which one of them had intended to give the letter to the other? And, why? She had almost surely known the dead man, since she was anxious to have the letter. Perhaps it was her connection to him that she was hiding, rather than any involvement in Burkhardt’s plot.
But Yaziz suspected the two of them—perhaps all three—were connected in some way. He’d detected guilt on her as if she’d worn it in the form of a heavy perfume.
With his free hand, Yaziz picked up the plastic encased envelope and held it up against the light from the single bulb dangling above his head from the ceiling. Had she planted her own letter on the dead man? For what purpose?
Already, his sources at JUSMMAT, the Joint United States Military Mission to Turkey, had told him that the U.S. military could not find any records for any Lieutenant Rainer Akers. They were still placing phone calls, but Yaziz suspected that the records did not exist at all. The lieutenant was a fabrication on the woman’s part. That’s why the little miss was told not to talk about him. Miss Riddle’s face had gone white as Tuz Gölü—the salt lake—when he’d asked her about him. Fear. Of what was she afraid?
For her life, or for the coded message contained within the letter? Perhaps “Lieutenant Rainer Akers” was the code itself, and already a plan was set into action by the mere drop of this otherwise unimportant letter.
He sensed that some larger plot was brewing. Allah would reveal it when He was ready, but Yaziz could not wait until then. He had studied in the U.S. and learned too many western ways as a result. He’d learned western impatience.
The mid-afternoon call to prayer warbled in the distance. Automatically, he dropped his tespih and the letter next to the broken blue beads on the desk and pulled open his bottom drawer. Within lay his rolled-up rug, but then he remembered his student days in Indiana. He’d learned there that praying was a habit he no longer needed. He slammed the drawer shut.
What he needed now was information. He suspected the American woman was a key instrument in Burkhardt’s plot. Yaziz would get that information from her one way or another.