somebody at the U.S. Consulate next door could be approached, though not till tomorrow.
I went out on the bathroom balcony and tried to peer through to the Golden Horn, a poor sister to the elegant Bosphorus. A few elegant old Ottoman buildings raised newly-painted heads above a clutter of slums.
As in every city, slums hold murk below the surface. I go into them to broaden my horizons, to get the other side of the story. Like their residents, I also look forward to leaving.
A car on the street below honked an imperious horn. I looked down. A small blue vehicle made its way through traffic with aggressive intent. After pushing others to the side, it stood still near the hotel while other cars snaked along.
I stepped back into my room and shoved the warning note farther into my purse’. Then I dropped onto the inviting bed without taking off my jeans or pulling the shabby drapes closed and fell into the deep sleep of those who have spent miserable hours flying across oceans and continents in steel conveyances with uncomfortable seats and less comfortable bathrooms and only their own apprehensive thoughts to keep them company—if you don’t count the loquacious water engineer sitting in your row.
The next-to-last thing I heard as I fell asleep was the insistent honking of a car horn under my window.
Sometime later, my door handle rattled.
CHAPTER 9
Tell me who your friend is, and I’ll tell you who you are.
Turkish proverb
Ahmet Aslan was eating mussels in the historic hangout of artists and poets, Ҫiçek Pasajı.
The name meant Flower Passage. The aromas of carnations and jasmine and gladioli blended with the fishier smells of bluefish and shellfish from the far side of the alley.
Tonight he was alone. It was too bad Peter Franklin could not join him. They had enjoyed many evenings together at Ҫiçek Pasajı.
Here, the drink of choice was rakı, the anise-flavored “lion’s milk” that turned white when water was added. It added to the masculine atmosphere of the Ҫiçek Pasaji, although here and there, at tables for four, a few avant garde women authors and artists enjoyed rebelling against the strict Muslim norms.
Peter Franklin, like Ahmet, had liked his rakı. They had come here together often. Ahmet missed Peter more than he had thought he would.
A black alley cat, beautiful as all Turkish cats are, waited politely near Ahmet Aslan’s table, tail curled around its body, hoping for a bite of his seafood.
Absently, he tossed a shrimp to the floor.
CHAPTER 10
“A lady’s imagination is very rapid…”
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
“Hello? Yes?” My voice sounded scared even to my own ears. The sound of the rattling doorknob, small, furtive, had wakened me from deep sleep and I leapt out of bed. I trembled, at once confused, alone, and vulnerable.
No answer. And I couldn’t see anyone through the peephole. I checked the lock yet again, to be sure. And I looked to see if another note had appeared. It hadn’t.
I plopped back on the bed, wide-awake and furious. I needed sleep after the trip. Who had dared to wake me up like that?
I took a deep breath. Get a grip, Elizabeth. No doubt some confused tourist was looking for his own room.
I dug through meds and took an Ambien to bring on the reluctant god of Morpheus—something I should have taken earlier to forestall jet lag. This way, I wouldn’t even know if someone tried the door.
But the medicine didn’t work the way intended. In a fitful dream I wandered lost through a snowy forest, shadowed by figures behind trees. Men? No. Wolves.
Heart pounding, I gave up, turned on the light, and pulled Pride and Prejudice to me. That’s what it was there for, to provide balance.
The immortal, familiar first words were as calming as usual: It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. The reader knows at that moment that she is in good hands. Safe hands. We all want truth universally acknowledged.
And in the midst of life’s other trials, how comforting to be worrying that much about marriage.
I’d rather have slept, but in lieu of that, my old friend Jane held me as she’s done in the past—transported to a different time and place, where finding husbands became the absorbing tale of a village—almost a matter of life and death.
Marriage is a little scary in its own right, but marriage made a better topic tonight than Peter. Murdered Peter.
And much better not to think of the slinking gray things in my nightmare. I do love wolves, but not in my dreams.
CHAPTER 11
At table keep a short hand; in company keep a short tongue.
Turkish proverb
Rays of early sunlight streamed across my newspaper in the dining room of the Pera. I sipped black, sweet Turkish coffee down to the grounds and then chewed the last bits, washing it all down with the bottled water on the table.
The jet-lag medicine had finally helped me get to sleep, but the night had been fitful. Was someone was after me? First on the ferry, then the note, and finally the movement of the door handle? How different things would have been if Peter were here with me.
And I don’t mean in a romantic sense. Peter had that dangerous edge to him that attracts women, but he wasn’t great in the intimacy area. We’d almost tried that once. Almost. And the reason it didn’t work wasn’t all Peter’s fault. I’m a fine one to talk about intimacy.
About half the headlines in Cümhüriyet were intelligible to me this morning. I sighed. My Turkish had been so good when I lived here…first on the Moda coast along the Asian side, where ferries made watery tracks across to the Princes’ Islands…on a good day, you could see across the Sea of Marmara all the way to the mountains of Bursa. Later in Bebek on the European side, where the glory of the Bosphorus lay at my feet, including ferries, tankers from Russia, Rumania, and Bulgaria, swift little American and Turkish spy boats checking on them, luxurious wooden yalıs along the coast.
Those had been days of free-lance correspondent work, commitment a foreign concept. Well, face it, commitment might never be a strong point with me. I could have enjoyed commitment a few years ago, when going to a restaurant alone felt strange and when I made an odd wheel at parties… At this stage of my life, when some of my friends were starting to worry over grandchildren, I found it exciting and stimulating to have no specific ties, no immutable partner. I rather liked my own company.
Still, it would be nice to have someone special again. I had plenty of girlfriends. It wasn’t quite the same.
One of the Cümhüriyet headlines announced that police had arrested a terorist in Istanbul. A fuzzy picture showed a man being led away by uniforms. With my rusty Turkish, I couldn’t understand the gist of his alleged crimes.
The unexplained term terorist probably meant the
