this point, Andover excused himself to take a telephone call, leaving Aslan and me to do the homo sapien equivalent of dogs sniffing around each other.
“Does your family live along the Bosphorus, too, Ahmet Bey?”
“My family roots are in the southeast of Turkey, in Diyarbakır.”
Interesting. Coming from there, he could be Kurdish.
He continued. “And you, what does your husband do?”
Oh, for heaven’s sake. Would the world never get past this kind of sexism? I decided to throw it back at him. “I am not married. Does your wife work?”
“If I had a wife, she would take care of my children and cook my meals. That is the way of the East.” The smug, infuriating words were accompanied by such charm I couldn’t take them seriously. I didn’t think Aslan did, either. He was trying to rile me.
So I laughed. “Well, it may once have been, but, after all, Turkey has beaten the United States in having a woman head of government. Aren’t you overstating the case?” I licked butter off my fingers as I spoke. The same old boring argument, the role of women. When would we get past it?
When it’s no longer an issue, I guessed.
Andover returned and glanced at the table.
I had already had far too much and wanted to get back to my primary mission.
“Did you know Peter Franklin?” I asked Ahmet Aslan.
“Of course! Terrible thing. Awful.” Aslan’s thoughtful frown morphed into concern for me. “You also work for the Tribune?”
Andover confirmed this with a sympathetic nod. “Elizabeth knew Peter well, Ahmet. I gather they were friends.”
I composed my face. “Yes. We were friends and long-time colleagues. All of us at the paper miss him very much.”
All of us looked at the floor and there was a moment of silence in the room. A tribute to Peter. I turned to Andover. “I suppose Peter was pretty much a novice when you knew him in Cairo.…”
“Peter and I were both novices!” Andover’s pleasant laugh broke the solemn silence and went well with the perfect room. “I was in the consular section and he was reporting freelance. But we at the Embassy knew Peter was a good source for finding out what was going on.” Andover gestured us into the comfortable chairs arranged in a conversational ell around the carpets, facing the windows toward the water. He sat in a sleek leather chair. I shared the couch with Aslan.
“Yes,” I agreed. “He was always first with a story! Tell me more about what he was doing here.” I addressed the question to both men, trying to sound nonchalant.
Ahmet answered first. “Istanbul’s a complicated city and Peter was one of the few correspondents who got past the surface. I always read his pieces. Sometimes I, as a Turk, learned things from his writing. In fact, I saw Peter at parties. I knew him. I would say we were friends. Nice. He was nice.”
“Nice” was not a word I’d ever heard used in relation to Peter Franklin.
Andover uncrossed his trim legs. “I didn’t know him well. Of course, I read his stories in the Trib clippings at the Embassy every morning. Sometimes we had drinks.…”
I knew I was skating on thin ice, but went ahead: “There wasn’t any police follow-up to his death? I haven’t heard much about that.”
Andover answered. “I guess you probably saw the official cable we sent to your paper. The police assumed it was an overdose. They didn’t want to get dragged into another country’s affairs. They were only too happy to have us arrange to cremate the body.”
Why hadn’t I organized a group from the Trib to meet the plane carrying Peter’s ashes? We should have done that, out of respect.
“Where did you send the ashes? To his parents?” It occurred to me I knew absolutely nothing about Peter’s family life, even after working with him for years, after being friends with him.
“His sister. Lives in New Hampshire, apparently.” Andover got up again and headed for the kitchen.
So Peter didn’t have much in the way of family. I sighed and dug once more into the meze, dropping börek crumbs on Andover’s beautiful Hereke carpet.
CHAPTER 29
“The more I see of the world, the more I am dissatisfied with it…”
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
Haldun Kutlu’s wife, Ayla, waited every evening for both her husband and the white cat they called Sultana. Sultana always came last, as she wanted out of the basket as soon as Haldun stepped off the ferry. Ayla had no idea where Sultana spent the next hour. But she would come by for supper, as regular as clockwork.
Ayla worried about Haldun. The newspapers were full of dramatic headlines about this terrorist group or that. And Haldun, as a journalist, was a target. He was also a target as a liberal, Western-leaning intellectual.
And he was all she had.
The door opened. Oh, good. He was home safe.
“Allah korusun,” she whispered, as she did every time Haldun left or came back. “God protect him.”
CHAPTER 30
She listened most attentively to all that passed between them, and gloried in every expression, every sentence of her uncle, which marked his intelligence, his taste, or his good manners.
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
The atmosphere in Andover’s home was charming, both inside the old-fashioned windows and outside, where flickering lights had appeared in many places on the water. A laziness stole over me—maybe a combination of jet lag, rakı, and excellent food—and I yawned.
But I had to get back to work. Andover was still out of the room. I turned to Aslan.
“Tell me about being Kurdish in Turkey—you are Kurdish, I assume, since you come from the Southeast?—and how you have managed to succeed.” The rakı must be taking effect. I’d abandoned diplomatic skills. I didn’t actually take out a notebook and pen, but I’d remember crucial elements for future stories on Turkey’s most volatile minority, should Aslan choose to confide.
I received a sharp glance from my handsome companion at the bald-faced assertion that he must be a Kurd. But whether Aslan would have told me anything became a moot point when Andover re-entered the room. Picking up his drink, after checking to see if Aslan and I were still supplied, he draped himself artistically in a third armchair near where we sat looking out the windows. A huge tanker flying a lighted Turkish flag in front and the Russian flag aft made its ponderous way by.
“Now, Elizabeth. Tell us about yourself. How long have you worked for the Tribune? How well did you know Franklin?”
Andover’s fluid voice and face went well with the room. Had he decorated around himself? His eyes, as before, gave few hints of his thoughts.
Talk about myself,
