by Sue Star
“But honey,” Anna said, taking the thumb-sized block. It was both soft and firm like a gumdrop. “Is it safe to eat?”
Make sure you don’t eat anything from a street vendor, Mitzi had warned her.
Priscilla bit into her piece and munched happily. “I’ll have yours if you don’t want it.”
Anna didn’t hesitate long. She nibbled a corner of her Turkish Delight and followed Priscilla.
They weaved through the crowds up the street and around a corner. They must’ve lost the man with the bird nest hair, and so she relaxed enough to savor the rosewater and almond flavors of her candy. As they continued up the hillside streets, the crowds thinned. Each alleyway grew narrower than the one before. Shade cast into the tight space, lowered the temperature several degrees, and eased the strain on her eyes from the glare of the outdoors. The last drop of powdered sugar from the candy melted away, and she was breathing deeply by the time they reached a cramped row of shops.
Priscilla stopped before one of the open doorways, festooned with tiny trinkets of silver and glass. “Ozturk Bey?” she called, stepping inside.
No one responded. Anna lingered in the doorway, where her attention fell instead to the copper shop next door. A shelf beside the open doorway displayed copper and brass items—pots and vases and trays and candleholders and ashtrays...
Brass ashtrays were shaped like miniature shoes. Their toes curled up like the slippers they’d just bought. Like the design on Rainer’s wine glasses.
Priscilla returned to her side. “He’s not here.”
Just then, a young, lanky man sauntered out of the back of the copper shop and smiled at them with a grin that split his thin face from one prominently pointed ear to the other. “May I help you?” he said in hesitant but hopeful English.
“Where’s Ozturk Bey?” Priscilla asked.
The man’s grin slid off his face, and he shrugged. “In back.”
Priscilla darted inside, calling out in her sing-song voice, “Ozturk Be-ey!”
The man with the pointy ears turned to Anna and brightened, nodding at the ashtray shoes. “These pieces are little. Come inside my shop, and I show you big samovar instead.”
“Very nice,” Anna said, “but we’ve come to speak to Ozturk Bey.”
Furrowing his brow, the man placed one hand over his heart and gestured into the gleaming interior of his shop with the other. “He is my uncle. I am Emin Kirpat. Come in. You wait. You want me to show you trays, maybe? You like copper or brass?”
“I’m afraid I didn’t come to buy anything, but I do find these items rather interesting.”
“Please,” he said, sweeping his arm along a path into the shop. “You look. We have the best copper and brass of all Turkey. Because of Ozturk Bey, we have the best shops for Americans.”
“I expect it helps that you speak English.”
Emin laughed, a joyous sound that came from his heart and infected Anna with its warmth. Sugar danced in her veins. “You like?” he asked.
Anna glanced up from the brass slippers, whose curved shape she’d been tracing with her fingers. “I’ve noticed these curious curled toes in more than one place.”
“Hittite.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Very, very old. They are people who lived here long ago.”
“Yes, I know who the Hittites were, but what do curled toes have to do with them?”
“They are Hittite. You like I show you our museum? Is not far from here.”
“Thank you, that’s kind, but today I need to talk to Ozturk Bey. Or, rather, Priscilla will talk to him for me. I need to ask about a young man named Umit Alekci. Maybe you knew him as well?”
Emin’s face darkened with a scowl. His ears pulled back and his head snapped backwards in the “no” gesture. He ticked his tongue. “He tschingaine. Gypsy. No good. Better that he is dead.” Emin shuffled away from her, no longer the helpful clerk wanting to sell her his merchandise.
“Wait,” she called after him. “So you knew him? And you know about...what happened to him?”
“Nobody knows gypsies. They lie.”
“You mean he lied to you?”
“Not him,” he said with another tick. “Her.”
There was a sister, Yaziz had said. Was that who he meant? “Look, maybe you could help me. I only have a few questions about him.”
Emin slowly turned around, keeping his distance from her. “You must not ask.”
“But why not?”
“He is dead now. You no want same for you.”
A chill worked its way down her spine in spite of the heat of the day. “Have the police been here already to talk to you?”
“Yes. They come for pictures.”
“Pictures? What pictures? I thought the police might’ve shown you something, instead. Something that Umit might’ve had. Something Umit might’ve told you about, like where he’d found it.” Her letter.
Emin cocked his head and frowned, and she realized he didn’t understand her. He wasn’t following the way she danced around her letter to Rainer, the letter that Detective Yaziz had stubbornly kept.
“I am also photographer,” Emin said. “But not always. I am student, you see. My uncle finds work for me sometimes. Ozturk Bey knows many people. Some, from police. They called me to Anit Kabir yesterday, where you were. I saw you there. Later, I developed pictures and police came here for them.”
“You were the photographer for the police?”
He shrugged.
“And you knew Umit.” She was trying to understand. This man had been the photographer with the flash the day before. And he’d known the victim, his subject. How awful for him, even if he had feared the gypsies.
As if he could read the despair on her mind, he said, “They no good.”
She wondered how well he’d known Umit. If he knew about the letter, or maybe about Rainer’s medallion. “He was trying to give me something, and I want to know why. Maybe he was trying to tell me something.” Why did he die for it, she thought.
“Who knows why?” Emin shrugged again.
“Did you see anything?” The killer, maybe.
The ends of his mouth turned down, and he took a few steps backwards into the shadows of his shop. “I see nothing. You see nothing.”
“Wait.” She followed him into the shop. “If you knew him, then maybe you know where he lived. Did he live with his family? I’d like to speak with them. That’s really what I’ve come to find out from Ozturk Bey. Where Umit lived.”
Emin’s gaze rolled in the direction up the hill from the shop.
“Did he live nearby?” Anna said, thinking yes, just up the hill from here.
“Too close. My uncle, he help tschingaine. I tell him no, they are no good, but he never listens to me. Thinks I will marry her.” Emin snorted.
Marry whom, she wondered. The sister? “Since you speak English, maybe you can tell me how to find his family.”
“They live under...how you say? Leylek.”
Stork, she remembered. That’s what Paul had said the word meant, only the day before in his car. The Alekcis lived under a stork’s nest, up the hill from here.
Emin ticked his tongue and snapped his head backwards. “You stay away from them. They are... danger.”
Anna’s pulse raced. Danger to her because of what they knew?
Chapter Twenty-One
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 da
y, 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 ba
ck 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.
