A commotion outside the toilet broke through the lice of Meryem’s memories. Arguing voices. No, only one of them carried a querulous tone. The other...
The asker flung open the door of her toilet, and blinding light stabbed the dark interior. “Get up. The general wants you.”
Sniffing an opportunity, Meryem anchored herself against one wall and pushed herself up.
He reached for her, and she pulled away. “Come here,” he said, then swore at her as he grabbed her bound wrists and worked at the knots.
Suddenly, a deep voice rumbled from behind the asker’s shoulder. “What’s this?”
“Pasha! A thousand pardons. The girl does not cooperate.”
“What have you done?” The general’s hearty voice grew to a roar. “I only wished to speak to her. Such treatment as you have given her is not necessary, and I will not tolerate it in my house.”
“But pasha, since she has been waiting for you out here, in my quarters—”
“Silence! You will untie her at once, and leave us. I will deal with you later.”
“Yes, pasha.”
The asker’s fingers trembled as he undid the knots. Freed, Meryem rubbed her raw wrists. Her liberator had come for her, as she’d always known he would.
Stalking past the asker, she spit in his face. She float-stepped across the room to the general, although her joints protested with brand-new aches. The general stood over her and surveyed her silently while the asker, shooting glances of hatred at Meryem, flounced past them. As soon as he left for the garden, slamming the door behind him, the general spoke.
“This is an outrage,” he said, his gaze sweeping across the torture room. “You have been held here against your will, and I won’t have it. Regardless of who you are.”
“He did not pay me what he’d promised for my dance.” When Meryem realized she did not know when she’d danced for the general—only the night before or many nights ago?—a sinking feeling of panic flitted through her.
“He is a crazy old man whose mind has turned, but I did not think he would harm anyone. We will send for a doctor.”
“No! I mean, that’s not necessary. I’ll take my money and go.” She had to find the gun. Before the gunman did anything foolish to Mustafa.
The general’s bushy eyebrows knotted as he frowned. “About last night—”
“I heard nothing.”
“Of course you didn’t. There was nothing to hear. A few of my closest friends were invited to dinner. Sometimes the raki makes men imagine things. Especially in the heat of their excitement. But they are only stories, you understand?”
She nodded, and her glance darted to the door. She thought she saw movement at the window. The asker was prowling, trying to listen. He was good at that—spying.
“You will need new clothes,” said the general, pulling her attention back to him. His steel gaze drifted from the cut on her cheek to the tears of her costume. “And a bath. I will have my maid prepare a room for you in the house.”
“No! I mean, that’s very kind, but...I must go.”
“Of course. Your family must wonder what’s happened to you.” His hand thrust into a trouser pocket and withdrew a wad of bills.
She watched carefully as he counted out five of them. He paused with his thumb in place between the fifth and the sixth bills and looked at her once again. “And what will you tell them to explain your absence?” he asked.
She shrugged. “I could tell them that I danced for very important men, who—”
He counted out five more bills.
“Who no longer hold any positions of power, and so no one pays any attention to what they say.”
“Excellent.” He handed her the ten bills.
“But in their fever of excitement, as men can become, they ruined my costume, which is my only means of income...”
Swiftly, he thumbed out five more and handed them over.
“On the other hand, I could say I fell asleep in the fields on my way home, but that would not explain my injuries, which will surely cost a hundred more lira for a doctor to heal.”
He pushed more bills into her hands and gave her a frown, besides. “Is that all?”
“There are my friends next door, who might be interested to know—”
He grabbed her arm and squeezed hard. “How do you know the Americans?”
“I have clients.” She stomped on his foot and glowered at his hand. “You are hurting me.”
He released her at once and, without counting, pulled a handful of bills from his diminished wad and passed them over. “You will say nothing to them or to anyone, do you understand?”
She shrugged. “If you wish.”
“It is not as I wish, it is as I command. And my man will escort you home, to see to it.”
No! Quickly, she sidestepped away from the general and slipped out of range of his lunge, which followed a heartbeat too late.
She sprinted for the door, praying that she wouldn’t slam into the asker as she rounded the corner. She didn’t. He wasn’t there, but his scythe leaned up against the wall of the cottage that had served as her prison. She grabbed up the iron tool, whose awkward length was half as tall as she was, and she pressed herself flat against the rough prickles of stucco.
And waited. For the opportunity to lash out with her weapon. She would not hesitate to use the scythe, while the asker had only threatened her with it.
Bah! Men and their hollow promises.
The general didn’t follow her around the corner of the asker’s cottage. Instead, he marched to the back door of his pink palace, yelling all the while for the asker to come with him. She threw down the distasteful weapon. Thought about the other one.
The gun.
It really was not possible that someone had followed her across the fields from Anit Kabir. She would’ve noticed. Therefore, someone had accidentally stumbled across the gun, after she’d hidden it away inside the hollow stump.
Another vendor, hawking his wares up and down the street? Possibly. Others must use the vacant lot with the water hole to rest, as she and Umit did. Her mind skimmed over the milk man, and the bread man, and the vegetable man, and...
Then she remembered the turtle.
The red-haired American child—Priscilla—hunter of turtles.
Meryem darted along a garden path, to the retaining wall at the corner of the general’s property. She climbed up onto the rim of the wall and stepped across the wire fence, onto the creaking roof of the American children’s shack. She jumped down to the ground, landing in a dust cloud of aches and pains. So many bruises already knotted her body that she could not determine if this jump damaged anything new.
Wincing, she slid aside the board that served as a door and crawled inside the smelly, sandy hideout. Something more in the air, this time. Fear. Holding her breath, she sank onto the sand, soft as silk after her bed of cement in the toilet. She sifted her fingers through the sand. Dust rose in the air from her scrabbling search, tickled her nose, and forced a cough from her.
Then her fingers bumped against smooth metal. She pulled the gun out of the sand.
* * * * *
White light of a poker-hot, midday sun blinded Anna. People surrounded her, buzzing with questions she didn’t understand and couldn’t answer. Her head spun. She wasn’t sure where her flight, chasing the boy, had taken her, except to the top of the cone-shaped hill.
Ulus, where Paul Wingate had warned her not to go.
She didn’t care where she was, because she had Rainer’s medal again. She closed her fingers around the silver piece, gripping it tightly. Her heart raced. Breathing slowly, she tried on a smile of reassurance, more for herself than for the curious Turks who paused nearby.
“Everything’s all right,” she said, backing away, but not knowing exactly where to go. She slipped her hand into her pocket, dropping the medal inside, clinking it against her house key. “Thanks very much. Teşekkür ederim.”
She pretended to be a tourist, studying the ruined wall that followed the contours of the hilltop. Eventually, the curious onlookers gave up, muttering under their breath. Crazy American, she imagined was what they mumbled.
Soon, the flow of people resumed as they went about their business. The boy was gone by now. Or else hiding from her, watching her. He hadn’t been Mustafa, Umit’s son. She wasn’t sure why that information pleased her.
Exactly where in Ulus had her chase taken her? She evaluated her position on the hillside overlooking Ankara. The panorama of the city spread out below like a crust where none should exist, across dusty, rolling terrain, a sandy brown. The faint sound of hammers floated across the gap from the new part of the city away in the distance to the old city, up here on the hill. Ruins crumbled around her.
She’d read about some of these ruins in her guidebook. There was a fortress crowning the hill, and it had been used by the Byzantine, Roman, Hittite and many other cultures to defend against their enemies. Here was the center of their old power, and she absorbed some of that radiating strength now.
Her pulse rate evened, and time slowed around her. Yes, she did feel something. Maybe not power, but timelessness. Nearby, Turkish women balanced pitchers, presumably of water, atop their heads as they glided silently past her, never missing a step over the rough cobbles. For how many centuries had this same scene of activity gone on, without change? Anna could almost hear echoes of the voices of lives long past. History breathed in the air, as alive as she was. For an instant, she had to remind herself that this was 1957—A.D., not B.C. She was living in the midst of live history.
Under other circumstances she would want to explore further, but now she shook herself out of the spell that the reminders of history always cast about her. What was she going to do? She needed to find her way back to Priscilla, and she had no means to do so other than her own two feet.
If she headed downhill, she would eventually intersect Atatürk Boulevard, and if she just followed that main artery of the city, she’d eventually get home again.
Home! Had she called it that?
She picked her way carefully down the steep slope of the cobbled lane, no wider than a donkey’s path. Choosing a route that appeared to follow the general direction she needed to go, she soon dropped from the exposed crown of the hill into cool shadows, where the winding lane tunneled through dilapidated buildings that tilted this way and that. Narrow porches hung out over the street on their supports of long poles and looked as if they could come crashing down atop her head at any minute. She hoped there were enough hours of daylight left to find her way, as she had no idea how far she would have to trek or how long the journey would take her.
Damn that Ahmet!
Descending deeper into the canyon of buildings that framed both sides of the narrow alley, she remembered that the Alekci family lived in an apartment on a lane like this one. Anna wondered if she could find them again in this maze. Mustafa wasn’t the boy who’d hurt her, and she wished she could make amends for having believed he was.
As long as she was already here, in the neighborhood, she searched for the leaning building with the stork’s nest atop. She called into her mind the butcher’s hastily sketched map and oriented herself to the slope of the hill.
She surprised herself when she actually found the stone portal leading off the street. She stepped into its cool shade and gazed up the wooden steps into the darkness of the upper floor, where the Alekcis lived. No wailing floated down the steps today. Instead, a slice of light from an open doorway up there let out the sound of soft voices. She wished she could understand what they were saying.
She thought she recognized one of the voices as Mrs. Alekci’s. And a man’s voice. What man? There were no other men in the family, now that Umit was gone. There was a visitor today.
Curious, Anna crept up a few steps. Then a child’s voice spoke to her from behind, stopping her in mid-step. She whirled around and saw the boy standing in a puddle of light at the edge of the courtyard, watching her. She felt her cheeks flame, and she was grateful for the dark interior of the stairwell.
“Merhaba,” she said, a little too forcefully. “You’re Mustafa, aren’t you?” She could tell that he was. Although his head was nearly bald from his close haircut, he was shorter than the boy she’d tackled, the coffee-carrying boy who’d hit her over the head and run off with her purse the day before.
“I was about to visit your mother,” she continued. “An-ne.” She remembered the word that Ahmet had taught her and pronounced it slowly.
Ahmet! He was responsible for her predicament now, and she cursed him again under her breath.
Mustafa curled his finger, motioning for her to follow him. He was the one Alekci who might know the boy thief. Perhaps he knew who had hired him. She tiptoed down the stairs and followed him through the open portal. A dusty yard squeezed between the jumble of buildings, and in its center, a donkey grazed on dried weeds. Mustafa ran to the donkey and rummaged through a basket strapped across its back. When she caught up to him, she spoke in English, even though she knew he couldn’t understand. She illustrated her words with pantomimes of being hit over the head.
“Who was he?” she asked, shrugging her question and rubbing her fingers in the gesture for money. “Who paid that boy to steal my purse?”
Her efforts appeared to be in vain, though, as Mustafa wasn’t paying her any attention. He kept glancing over his shoulder as he dug farther into the donkey’s basket. He spoke rapidly, breathlessly, but she didn’t understand his words any more than he’d understood hers. He must want money, she decided. He wouldn’t give her any information until he saw her money.
She had no money with her, and she doubted that he would understand her promise of money. But she did have something of value: Rainer’s Saint Christopher’s medal. How fitting to use the medal as payment for the information she wanted. Information, she realized, was actually more valuable to her than Rainer’s medal. She pulled the medal out of her pocket and dangled it on its chain before Mustafa.
“Who was he?” she repeated.
Mustafa’s wandering attention focused on the dangly piece, and he licked his lips, withdrawing his hand from the donkey’s basket and reaching out for the medal. But Anna pulled it back, out of his grasp. “No, you tell me first who he was, and then I’ll give this to you.”
But then she realized the coffee boy had ended up not handing over the medal to whoever had hired him to be a purse thief. Maybe there’d been no such person. Perhaps she’d been wrong all along. It had just been a random act of thievery. Hayati had been right.
“Never mind,” she said, dropping the necklace into Mustafa’s outreached palm. “You keep it, anyway. I don’t want it anymore.”
Just then, a door slammed. A woman’s voice screeched from the second floor, and footsteps pounded downstairs. Mustafa clenched the medal between his fingers and darted away, back across the yard, and into the passageway. He nearly bowled over a man in sunglasses, standing in the shadows at the edge of the portal.