Yaziz lost the Americans in the crowd, something he’d never thought would happen. They were faster than he’d supposed. But he wasn’t worried, as he caught glimpses of Erkmen’s bouncing mat of black hair in the distance. Not Miss Riddle’s contact after all, Bulayir’s man was weaving around shoppers—following the woman. And keeping her path evident for Yaziz.
Suddenly, Erkmen slipped out onto a side street. Yaziz hurried his pace so as not to miss the transaction he felt certain the woman would make somewhere among the shops that lined the maze of alleys surrounding the bazaar. She seemed to like working in the middle of the day, under the public eye.
He bumped past a few shoppers, mostly Turkish women in the latest fashions of Paris, who scolded him for his disturbance. Men in silk suits, emboldened by their western enterprise, swore at Yaziz’s aggression. Adolescents, on break from one of Ankara’s many technical institutions, huddled together, forming an obstacle as they whispered and giggled at Yaziz’s frustrated attempts to pass them politely. They would all treat him with greater respect if he’d worn either his veteran’s badge or his National Police badge.
When he again spied the woman clad in checks, she was inside one of the shops of Ozturk Bey, who was one of the men Yaziz’s office routinely kept under surveillance. It was common knowledge that the old merchant smuggled opium in a thriving trade, but so far the National Police had been unable to prove it. Judging from the sharp tang in the air that hung over these narrow streets, Yaziz thought someone must be smoking a blend of it in his pipe just now. But Yaziz had to let that go if he was to see what Miss Riddle did.
He had not expected her contact to be Ozturk Bey. He had not figured that drugs would be involved in the Burkhardt-Riddle plot. But why not? A smuggling ring of illicit drugs would be far more profitable than the political problems of the struggling Turkish nation. Besides, he’d learned from his education in Indiana that Americans were more concerned with the profit in their pockets rather than who controlled the Dardanelles.
If what Murat had said was true about the Americans no longer courting Turkey, then the Americans wouldn’t care if the Soviets controlled Turkish access to the Mediterranean or not. Why should foreigners care about the outcome of this nation, anyway?
Suddenly, an outburst disturbed the placid flow of traffic along the lane. The crowd came to life, shouting, pushing. Movement streaked past, and Yaziz caught sight of a young boy darting around shoppers, producing a ripple of cries and flailing arms and shaking fists in the wake of his flight.
A thief, surely. Yaziz took pursuit, cursing the boy who would cause him to miss the woman’s transaction.
* * * * *
Following Emin, the clerk, into the cave-like interior of his copper shop, Anna heard rustling sounds coming from the back. She squinted her eyes in the shadows and saw Priscilla emerge through a curtain of stringed beads at the back of the narrow store about thirty feet away.
She shouted. “Come on, Aunt Anna! I found him!” The glass beads of the curtain clicked against each other, settling back into place after the disturbance of her passage.
Anna hurried her pace past gleaming brass tubs. She felt Emin’s gaze burning her back. She would have to find a way to uncover what he knew about Umit, what he wasn’t willing to tell or didn’t have the ability to tell.
She stopped before the beaded curtain and peered through. The clicking beads covered a doorway to a workroom, twice as wide as the narrow width of the copper shop. This back room appeared to service the trinket shop next door, as well. Priscilla stood in the center of the workroom with her back to Anna and spoke to an older man. Gray hair grizzled his thick beard and straggled out from beneath his cap. Dressed in the baggy black pants and white shirt of a traditional Turk, he sat cross-legged on a cushion on the cement floor and paid no attention to Priscilla. His attention focused instead on the gurgling water pipe before him. He puffed steadily away at his nargile. It looked like smoking a vacuum sweeper, Anna thought, the way its glass bowl, wrapped in silvery tubes, also sat on the floor and connected to his mouth with a hose.
“This is Ozturk Bey,” Priscilla said, glancing over her shoulder at her. “Fededa’s husband.” Then she spoke again to the man, and her gestures suggested that she was introducing Anna to him.
Anna nodded and smiled. For all of Atatürk’s efforts to build a modern capital, Ankara was still rather a small town. Why else would the wife of an enterprising merchant work as a maid in one of the American homes? Unless Ozturk Bey had a hidden agenda. She guessed him to be in his fifties, judging from the creases that lined his weathered face and the amount of his gray. He pulled the pipe from his mouth, and slips of smoke leaked into the air, scenting it with spicy tobacco.
“How do you do?” she said through the curtain. “We are so pleased that your wife works in our home, and I was wondering if—”
“He doesn’t speak English,” Priscilla said.
Ozturk Bey laid his pipe aside and climbed slowly to his feet to bow at Anna.
Before Anna could ask Priscilla to translate for her, the child darted away again, through a second doorway of beads, leading into the trinket shop.
Anna followed and found herself in a room filled with delicate baubles of glass and ceramic, sparkling and glittering. Little bangles of silver and blue suspended from the ceiling, looped around pegs, and stacked on shelves. They tinkled as Priscilla breezed through the store.
Ozturk Bey followed them, his shoes squeaking as he unfolded a canvas chair and plopped it down beside Anna. He smiled and nodded first at her, then smoothed away a speck of dust from the canvas surface.
Anna sat down, and he beamed with pleasure, exposing several missing teeth. Then he scurried to the doorway to the street. “Coffee,” he said, holding up three fingers at one of the boys who hovered outside. About Priscilla’s size, several of the bag boys waited with their attention fixed on the new customers. Anna wondered if they were the same boys from the bazaar, hustling for a wage.
The chosen boy, whose hair was shaved close to his head, scampered away. Then, Ozturk Bey disappeared around the corner, in the direction of the copper shop.
“When can we get around to talking about Umit?” Anna asked Priscilla.
“You have to let him do all this first. Mama says it’s not like shopping in the States.”
“But I’m not shopping.”
The sound of angry words suddenly rose above background noises, piercing the medley of bleating animals, rhythmic music, and laughing voices.
“Is that Ozturk Bey?” Anna whispered to Priscilla. “Yelling at Emin from the copper shop? What’s he saying?”
“Something about not remembering to do something the right way,” she said with an indifferent shrug. “Everything has to be right. That’s why he sells so many evil eyes here. Look at all of them!”
“Evil eyes?” Superstition was always the same, Anna thought, trying to keep her voice merely inquisitive and not derisive. This was a universal superstition in a Turkish manifestation.
From her chair, Anna glanced at countless strings dangling from ceiling hooks. There must be hundreds of round, blue eyeballs staring at her from every vertical inch of space.
Butterflies rippled through her. She had to remind herself that these eyeballs were glass. Ceramic. Plastic. Whatever they were, they weren’t real. Still, she couldn’t shake the uneasy feeling that they watched her.
That someone watched her, even now.
Why not? Someone had watched her yesterday at Atatürk’s Tomb, and then Umit was shot. Someone watched her at home and knew when to invade her bedroom to search her underwear. The man with the bird nest hair watched her, too. Yaziz’s man, she hoped.
“Fededa says I’m supposed to wear an evil eye because I’m a kid,” said Priscilla, “but Mama won’t let me because she says that’s silly.”
For once, Anna agreed with her sister. “I don’t understand,” Anna said. “If you’re trying to avoid the evil eye, why would you wear one?”
Priscilla gave a weak laugh, as if she wasn’t sure whether or not she believed the superstition. “These are good evil eyes. They look the bad evil straight in the eye and scare it off.”
“Deflecting evil away, in other words?”
Anna remembered from her university days, before the war interrupted her life, learning about the concept of an evil force that most cultures believed threatened life in one way or another. The Saint Christopher’s medal was really just a Christian version of the same concept of doom.
Ozturk Bey clicked through the beaded curtain, having apparently circled back through the copper shop. He carried a wooden tray that he set on top of a footstool by Anna’s side. Laid out in the tray were bundles of cloth that he unwrapped to reveal stacks of bracelets and rings and earrings of gold, decorated with amber and jet and sparkling gems.
“You like?” he said in English, perhaps the only two words that he knew.
Anna drew in her breath, then managed to say, “Very pretty. But I’m afraid I didn’t come here to buy anything.” Then she turned to Priscilla. “Go on, honey, you tell him why we’re here.”
“Mama says you have to let him show you the new stuff first. That’s how you find out what you want to know.”
“His jewelry certainly is beautiful, but...”
He nudged the tray closer to Anna, urging her to examine the gleaming gold. Her glance swept across the unwrapped contents, and she admired the jeweled bands and dangly pieces of jet shaped like crescent moons. Gold stars dangled in the center of the moons, little replicas of the star and crescent symbol of the Turkish flag. Hesitant to touch the treasures, she had no intentions of falling in love with anything that would require her to spend as much as these expensive items would surely cost.
Ozturk Bey seemed to read her mind. Holding up one finger, he said something in Turkish. Then he moved away, his shoes squeaking as he headed toward a stack of boxes. He bent down to examine them.
“Mama buys most of her jewelry here,” Priscilla said. “Ozturk Bey knows someone who makes it. Ozturk Bey knows everyone.”
“I hope he’ll be more helpful about Umit’s family than Emin was.” Anna sighed. “He’s gone to so much trouble that now I feel I have to buy something from him.”
“You’re funny,” Priscilla said, narrowing her green eyes at Anna. “You’re not like Mama.”
Thank goodness. Anna bit her tongue to keep from voicing her thought aloud.
Ozturk Bey chose one of the boxes from his stack and returned to Anna’s chair with it. He moved aside the tray of expensive jewelry and set his new box on the footstool. He pulled off the lid, revealing wrapped-up pieces of tissue paper. He grabbed one, unwrapped it, and held up a shiny ring of intertwined, silvery bands. With a flick of his wrist, it fell apart into four linked bands. Then his fingers worked it back into a single puzzle ring.
“You like more?” he said, presenting the ring to her.
“It’s charming.” She took the ring and tried it on with a laugh. “I wouldn’t want to let it drop and fall apart.”
Just then, the boy with the shaved head reappeared, carrying a round brass tray by its hook, like a balancing scale. On the tray were three demitasse cups of brass, and not a drop of the steaming coffee they contained had spilled.
The little boy passed the coffee around. Anna was about to protest his serving the adult drink to Priscilla, of all things, but a commotion erupted outside in the street. Someone was shouting above a babble of excited voices, and Anna heard the tapping sound of running feet.
“Hey!” Priscilla shouted suddenly, then sprang toward the door.
Anna twisted around in her chair in time to glimpse a piece of brass swinging through the air above her head.
Then pain.
Pain thudded into her head and sparked through her body, all the way down to her toes and fingers. The last thing Anna remembered was a smell of wool as her vision faded into a sparkly golden aura, then blacked out.