Behind a barricade of brass and copper, Anna spied one certain large pot, covered with a lid, sitting on the floor in a far corner of the shop. It looked like the one Anna had seen the day before, the one that held the package Ozturk Bey had tried to pass to Priscilla.
A surprise, Priscilla had called it. A package of spices for Fededa, but Anna had spoiled the surprise.
Now, Anna glanced at the beaded curtain to the workroom, where Ozturk Bey and Yaziz had disappeared. They were nowhere in sight. Anna rose from her stool and tiptoed across the shop, threading her way around tables displaying copper and brass. She knelt down and lifted the lid. Inside, there was—
“What have you found now?” said a woman’s voice in English from behind her.
Anna glanced over her shoulder and stumbled to her feet. Fran! “I didn’t hear you come in.”
“Obviously.” Fran nodded at the copper lid Anna still clutched. “What have you got there?”
“Nothing.” She peered into the pot. There was nothing inside it today.
Fran snorted. “You expected to find something.”
“Yesterday, Ozturk Bey kept something inside this pot. I’m pretty sure it was this one. He wanted to give it to Priscilla.”
“It didn’t belong to him,” said Fran.
“How would you know that?”
“I don’t. I’m guessing. What did it look like?”
“It was a small package, about the size and shape of a pocketbook, wrapped in newspaper and tied with string. Fededa kept one like it in the broom closet at home.”
Fran’s gaze flickered past Anna. “Don’t worry about it. We’ll take care of it for you.”
Anna started to protest that she wasn’t helpless, but just then, something crashed in the workroom that connected Ozturk Bey’s two shops. Sounds of metal clattered. There was a yelp of pain followed by a breath of silence. Then, a rush of voices.
Anna dropped the lid back onto the copper pot with a clang, and then ran to the cramped space of the workroom. She blinked a few times to adjust to the dim light filtering through the thick glass of a narrow window.
“Fededa!” Ozturk Bey was shouting and waving his arms. He hovered beside Yaziz who doubled over, waving away any assistance. Ozturk Bey shouted a stream of Turkish, either at the detective or at his absent wife, who failed to appear. Anna didn’t know.
“Hayir,” Yaziz mumbled, among other mumblings. He flung his arm up to block his head. His sunglasses were missing. Without them, his face looked naked. The twisted frames lay on the floor, and their tinted lenses sprinkled in pieces beside a brass coffee grinder. Spots of blood speckled the back of his hand as he shielded his face.
“You’re hurt!” Anna said.
“No, it is nothing.” Yaziz waved her away and squinted hard, keeping his eyes closed. He groped his surroundings as if he were a blind man.
“But you got hit with a piece of brass,” Anna said, shuddering. “That’s what happened to me.”
“In this case, no one hit me. This was an accident.” Yaziz broke free of their attention and dropped to his knees. He picked up shards of glass and stuffed them in his jacket pocket.
“Let me help,” Anna said, kneeling next to him.
“It’s done.” He rose, pulled his handkerchief from another pocket, and dabbed it against his brow. Crushed, blue beads spilled to the floor from his handkerchief.
Anna scooped them up. “Are these the same beads you showed me the other night?”
“They came from here. That’s what I was asking about when that brass fell off a shelf and conked me on the head.”
Ozturk Bey shouted once more for Fededa, who finally pushed through the beaded curtain from the trinket shop. She jabbered something back at him in a scolding tone of voice and passed a damp rag to Yaziz.
Fran swept aside the strings of beads hanging in the doorway of the copper shop and stood there, watching.
Ozturk Bey snapped out instructions to his wife, who glanced nervously between Anna and Fran and muttered something in return. She scurried away, back into the trinket shop.
Ozturk Bey jerked his head backwards and ticked his tongue. He glared at Yaziz, then bowed a greeting at Fran and fussed over selecting a chair to unfold for his new customer. Still bowing, he carried the selected chair into the copper shop, set it up next to Anna’s, and motioned the women into their seats.
Anna lingered in the workroom, trying to examine the cut on Yaziz’s forehead, but he kept dodging her efforts. At least it didn’t seem to be bleeding anymore.
“It took me a while to find a place to park,” Fran said, “but I see that I’m in time. The gang’s all here. What’s wrong with your face, Detective?”
“An accident, I regret.” He broke away from Anna and limped past Fran into the copper shop.
“All in the line of duty, I presume,” Fran said with a deep chuckle. “Did you come seeking more information, or was it merely to break the sad news to Emin’s employer? I see that he’s heart-broken.”
“I have a job to do, Miss Lafferty. Perhaps you will tell me what brings you here?”
“To shop, of course.” She trailed after him. “This is a shop, is it not? And I always buy something from my favorite shopkeeper. How can I make amends? I feel responsible for Emin’s untimely death, since I’m the one who talked him into being the photographer last night.”
“Doesn’t the embassy have its own cameras?” Anna asked, remembering the equipment she’d found in Mitzi’s hatboxes.
Fran stopped next to a stack of trays and whipped her attention from Yaziz to Anna. “Why on earth do you ask such a thing?”
Anna tried to keep her voice steady. “I found an old camera at home and thought it might have come from the embassy. Perhaps it was misplaced.” She didn’t want to confess that she’d been snooping. Hatboxes seemed an odd place to store a camera. Now, Fran’s sharp reaction made her suspicious, but Yaziz cleared his throat and interrupted.
“Why did you offer him the job?” the detective asked.
“My boss, Paul Wingate, wanted me to find someone. Everyone else that the embassy uses was booked, as it turned out. It was all rather last minute. Then I remembered Emin.”
“How convenient that he was available,” Yaziz said.
Ozturk Bey held up another finger to the coffee boys crowding the doorway. Then he rearranged copper pieces and dragged another table beside the chairs where he intended his customers to sit.
“Yes,” Fran said, lifting an eyebrow as she watched Ozturk Bey bustle around the shop. “Our friendly shopkeeper here was planning to dismiss him, you see.”
A hush fell over the room, and Yaziz looked up. Now Anna saw the problem requiring sunglasses. The detective had one brown eye and one blue eye. “You are in his confidence to know such a plan?” Yaziz said.
“Naturally, Detective.” Fran gave a sigh of exasperation. “On account of the opium he was smuggling.”
Anna gasped. “Opium?”
“That package you saw. It was a cube of raw opium. Paul and I suspect that’s how your sister got her supply.” She turned to Yaziz. “Well, Detective, go ahead. Aren’t you here to arrest him?”
* * * * *
Anna felt ill. Her knees gave out, and she wanted to collapse into the nearest chair, but Fran grabbed her, holding her upright.
“I’m all right,” she said, grateful for Fran’s support. The initial shock had come the night before, learning of her sister’s addiction.
Fran steered her out of the shop, into the blinding sunlight of the street, leaving Yaziz to deal with Ozturk Bey. The sounds of wavering voices and clip-clopping hooves swam around Anna, hammering her head.
Now she understood why Paul had wanted her to fire Fededa, who’d been the link between Mitzi and Ozturk Bey’s opium. Were there still more hidden packages somewhere in the Burkhardts’ house?
Anna’s concern focused on her niece. There was nothing she could do to help her sister. Henry was taking care of her. Meanwhile, Anna had to make sure Priscilla remained safe. Steeling herself, she allowed Fran to drag her along. She stumbled over cobbles as they wound their way along side streets to Fran’s parked car.
“Why couldn’t Henry have warned me of all this before they left?” Anna said as Fran opened the passenger’s door for her and guided her inside.
“Maybe he thought that if he removed Mitzi from the scene, there would be no further complications.” Fran slammed the door behind Anna and then crossed around to the driver’s side.
But Rainer was already here, Anna thought, charading as Viktor Baliko. Henry had known. He should’ve expected complications.
All along, she could’ve asked Henry about Rainer’s fate after the war.
“Thank you for telling me last night,” Anna said, once Fran climbed in behind the wheel. “You didn’t have to say anything about Henry and Rainer, that they’d worked together during the war, but you did, and I’m grateful. What I don’t understand is why Henry never told me. He knew Rainer and I were to have been married. Why didn’t he say anything?”
“I believe it has something to do with guilt,” Fran said. “Besides, none of them ever knew the real names of the people they worked with, people on whom their lives depended. Maybe he never realized who his partner was.”
Anna didn’t believe it.
“Anyway,” Fran said, “it’s all classified.”
“It couldn’t have been very classified, not if he told you about it.”
Fran concentrated on starting the car and pulling out into the street. She said nothing.
“You’re one of them too, aren’t you?” Anna asked.
But Fran continued to pay attention to her driving. She steered past an ox and cart, like the unattended one filled with rugs that had annoyed Ahmet.
“Classified,” Anna said. “Right? You can’t tell me.”
Fran smiled and looked in the rearview mirror. Anna glanced over her shoulder, too, but she didn’t see anyone following them.
Anna sighed. “You don’t think you can make me wait until Henry returns, do you? Because you can’t. I’ll confront him, you know, whether I have to take Priscilla and go track them down in Switzerland myself, or whether I wait until they come back on their own. No matter which, I’ll force him to tell me all about his association with Rainer. So if you know anything about it, you might as well tell me right now. He won’t keep that kind of information from me much longer.”
Fran opened her mouth to speak, but Anna beat her to it and said, “Don’t tell me it’s classified. I have some rights, too. Besides, after all these years, it shouldn’t still be classified, should it?”
“Whoa,” Fran said. “I’ve already told you all that I know.”
“No, not what you know. You’ve only told me what you think you’re permitted to tell me. There’s a whole lot more than what you’re letting on.”
“You’re imagining things.”
“No, I’m not one to imagine very much. I overheard you with Paul Wingate last night, and I can put two and two together. There’s talk of a revolution, and that photographer knew something he wasn’t supposed to know. Now he’s dead. Henry is still spying, that’s why he’s been assigned here to Turkey. Is he spying on this revolution that’s in the works? Or is he just spying on the Soviets who are geographically so close? Maybe the revolution has to do with the Soviets? Anyway, regardless of what it’s all about, I can guess why Henry hasn’t said anything about it. If he confessed about an association with Rainer, a known spy, that would blow Henry’s cover here. Right? That’s why it’s classified information. And you can’t talk about it, not because you don’t know, but because you’re a spy, too. I’m right, aren’t I? Never mind, you can’t say.”
Fran burst out laughing. “You really believe all that? I think you underestimate your powers of imagination, and you’ve been reading too many spy novels.”
“Actually, that’s not my type of reading,” Anna said. She chuckled along with Fran, although her heart felt heavy. Fran’s lack of denial told Anna she was right. She wondered if she’d blundered into things she shouldn’t know, things that made young, healthy photographers die of so-called natural causes. She changed the subject, hoping to steer them into safer waters. “I know I’m right, even though I realize you can’t admit it. For now, at least tell me why you gave me the letters last night at the party?”
“I guess I felt sorry for you, but anyway, they’re yours, aren’t they? What do the police need them for?”
“What if Paul Wingate finds out that you didn’t do what he asked you to do?”
Fran shrugged. “Those letters won’t tell the police anything they don’t already know. Odd, that they surfaced after all these years.”
“Umit’s death must’ve made his sister want to get rid of them.”
“But how did Umit get them in the first place? That’s the real question.”
From Rainer, Anna thought, but she still wasn’t sure she could trust Fran enough to tell her the truth about Rainer and what he’d told her—how the Alekcis nursed him back to health. And that he was here today in Ankara. Maybe Fran already knew that, as Yaziz did. Probably. Still, it was safer to change the subject. “Last night you assumed at first that I was looking for opium. In Cora’s bedroom. Are you implying that Cora has an addiction problem, too?”
“Cora and Mitzi are in the same bridge group, and they meet several times per week.”
“Maybe they just play cards?”
“Maybe. Their latest venture is into belly dancing with their private instructor, Tonya Baliko.”
“Belly dancing!” Anna clenched her jaw, whether at the reminder of Rainer’s supposed wife or having found the belly dancing costume in Mitzi’s hatbox, she couldn’t be sure. “But why were you so certain that I wouldn’t find any...opium...among Cora’s things?”
“Paul already searched.”
All these years, they’d lied to her. Henry had lied as well as Rainer... It was too much for her to absorb.
“Don’t be so hard on Henry,” Fran said, reaching from the steering wheel with one hand to pat Anna’s arm. “What you’ve got to understand is that everything changes with war. War causes people to make mistakes that can fester inside them for years. Maybe Henry was only trying to make amends.”
Anna wasn’t sure she could ever forgive Henry for the lies, or Rainer for his betrayal, but maybe it was true what Fran suggested. War was the pollutant that modified history beyond repair.
They drove the rest of the way across town in silence. The feeling of intimacy that had blossomed between them, smothered.
At the Burkhardts’ house, Anna thanked Fran again and climbed out. She watched her new friend drive away, then turned to the house.
She thought it odd when she noticed the side door standing open to Priscilla’s playrooms. This door, which she had never seen used, now stood wide open. Priscilla must have come home from Gulsen’s house.
Anna would have to speak with Priscilla about leaving doors open like this. She hurried inside. “Priscilla?” she called.
But all that answered her was a stack of old newspapers, ruffling in the breeze.