Dancing for the General

by Sue Star

  Yaziz staggered a bit on the last flight of stairs.

  He was in better shape than this. His weakness was the result of festering problems. Erkmen, with the newspaper. Erkmen, caught examining Miss Riddle’s purse. Erkmen, prowling the neighborhood tonight, too.

  Left Yaziz with a sense of foreboding.

  Which only doubled when Yaziz saw Erkmen leave the general’s house and cross the street. Enter the house that belonged to the assistant minister, Ahmet Aydenli.

  Instead of going home. Most people would go home. After leaving a party.

  Then, his apprehension was realized. Like a bad dream come to life. With the scream.

  Yaziz shouldn’t have been surprised. To find the troubling Miss Anna Riddle at the American party.

  All the same. He was. Trouble followed that woman. Like stray cats after a piece of meat. During the days of sacrifice.

  With a deep sigh, Yaziz took the last step. Onto the fifth floor landing. He stumbled into darkness. The light bulb had apparently burned out again. He groped for the lock, rattling his keys, stabbing at the dark. Finally his door creaked open and Yaziz tripped inside to the sour smell of unwashed dishes.

  “Nasreddin!” he called, throwing his key ring with a clatter onto a small table by the door.

  The Angora cat didn’t respond. He usually sulked when Yaziz left him this long—twenty hours, this time. The storks, in their nest overhead, reminded him of their presence with a clap of their bills and a rustling of sticks.

  Yaziz stepped closer to the table and reached for the lamp. Something crinkled and squished underfoot, which made his fingers hesitate over the lamp’s switch. He flicked it on.

  Dim light cast about the disaster of the room. Books and papers and dirty cups and plates spilled across table tops. Pillows and soiled shirts tossed across the sofa. His open gym bag by the door reeked of sweaty underwear.

  The place was just as he had left it.

  He never thought of himself as being untidy. As long as the floor remained free of clutter, then he was content. Sometimes Nasreddin bounced things onto the floor and chased them around. A cat toy. That’s what Yaziz had stepped on.

  But he didn’t recognize the bundle on the floor, wrapped in newspaper and tied with string. Similar to the package he’d seen Ozturk Bey attempt to hand over to the red-haired Burkhardt child in his copper shop today.

  He bent down and picked it up. Carried it to the table and brushed aside bread crumbs from his breakfast. The string that tied this package was the thin, green kind that shopkeepers often used to tie up their customers’ purchases. The knots were too tight and tiny for his thick fingers, and he had to rummage in a drawer for a knife.

  With a snip, the string fell aside, and the newspaper wrapping unfolded. It was a sheet of that day’s Republic News. He unwrapped the bundle the rest of the way and stared at a note, handwritten in a crude pencil scrawl: “More of this if you drop the matter of the gypsy.”

  He lifted the note, and underneath lay a cube of raw opium.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  A cock crowed somewhere in the distance, then crowed again. And again. Until Meryem finally opened her eyes. To the dark. She was still alive.

  Although, the afterlife would surely be a better choice than this place.

  This was not the Carpathians, but a prison all the same.

  A narrow stall encircled her with no windows and a cold, hard floor was her bed. Cement? A sewer stench hung in the air. Arching her back, she scrunched away from

  the hole in the center of the floor and pressed herself against a wall of wood that enclosed her. Imprisoned her.

  The dream, not really a dream, haunted her sleep, such as it was, dozing in fitful bursts throughout the hours. She was the asker’s prisoner now. Not the Nazi’s. It was all the same.

  Bindings chafed against her wrists and feet. Pain sliced through her flesh like a knife. She banged her head against the wall.

  When no one responded to her thudding noise, she sucked air from her lungs, summoning a scream that burned in her chest. “Let me out, you bastard!”

  But her words came out a gargled muffle. A wad of cotton plugged her mouth. Spit dribbled down her chin. A knot full of her hair tore from her scalp each time she twisted.

  She could do nothing.

  She, who had escaped impossible odds before, would end her days now, bound up in a toilet.

  She wouldn’t have come to the general’s house in the first place, bartering away the gun that had killed Umit, if not for Umit. She wouldn’t have been unlucky enough to overhear plans of revolution. Not on her own.

  Bah! Let the men do as they would with their government. It was all the same to her. As long as they did not disrupt her life again with their wars.

  Their plans of revolution did not concern her, and for a few lira, she would never speak of it. Would never even know what she’d once known, having the misfortune to overhear such talk.

  But the gun. She needed that gun. For Mustafa’s life. She hadn’t saved her sisters and brothers, but she could still save her nephew.

  She banged her head against the wood and yelled again. “Let me out! OUT!” The words, however, existed nowhere but inside her throat and head. Not in the actual sounds she voiced, which resembled more the howls of a wounded animal.

  Something crunched. Footsteps slugged through gravel. A clink...keys. Rattling around inside a lock. Then the creak of a door opening. Footsteps thudded across a cement floor, coming closer to her prison.

  “All right, all right,” said the asker from the other side of her wooden wall. “Keep it down in there.”

  The wall she’d leaned against—a door—suddenly whisked away from her, spilling her onto the floor of a light-filled room. The light hurt her eyes, and she blinked several times.

  The room she fell into was the same cramped size as one of the rooms of her apartment. Narrow windows framed leafy branches on four walls and suggested that this was a detached building in someone’s garden.

  The general’s.

  But the general didn’t live here, not among such simple furnishings. A narrow bed with rumpled covers that smelled of dung pushed up against one wall, next to a brazier and a collapsed hookah. A wooden table with three chairs stood against the opposite wall. In its center, a crusty loaf of bread.

  Her stomach growled.

  The asker filled the middle of the room with his brawn and towered to the wooden ceiling. He held a scythe in one hand, and he scraped its cutting edge against the floor.

  “I will have to untie you, if you want to eat,” he said. “But I warn you. One sound out of you, one attempt to run, and I slice your pretty flesh.” He demonstrated with a sweep of his scythe. “Understand?”

  She nodded, saliva clogging her gag and smearing her chin.

  He pulled some of her hair loose when he undid the gag, but she refused to give him the pleasure of a flinch. He stared deep into her eyes, his own, bloodshot. As if he waited for a reaction before proceeding with the knots round her wrists.

  But she was not stupid enough to give away her reaction. Instead, she returned his stare with her own seething stare of permanent hatred. Her jaw muscles quivered as she resisted crying out.

  Anything, for bread.

  “I won’t say anything,” she said, testing her voice. The song was flushed from her soul, but the words still formed.

  “Save it for the general when he returns later today. You will tell him what he wants to hear.”

  “What does he want to hear?”

  “That you weren’t listening at his window. That you have nothing to give the Americans next door.”

  “Why do the Americans worry you so much?” She usually wasn’t that direct, but she’d had a rough time, all the hours she’d spent in the toilet, and her thoughts moved sluggishly.

  The asker made an evil sound. Then she realized it was his attempt at a laugh. “The Americans are in bed with the government in power. They want to stomp a
ll over any ideas that the general and his friends might have about unseating the prime minister.”

  She was not so sluggish that she missed the implications. Or the error of her previous threat of going to the Americans with her information. The asker, she realized, would never let her go anywhere ever again if he suspected her claims of friendship with the Americans were true. The prospect of forceful escape from that toilet seemed bleak considering her aching weariness.

  “I lied about the Americans,” she said.

  The scythe clicked as he laid it down on the floor and reached for her bound wrists. “Gypsies always lie.”

  “For a price, I will have nothing to say, not to the Americans or to anyone.”

  He backhanded her across one cheek. Slivers of pain needled through her neck and head. “Do not dare to bargain with me! The only price you should be bartering is your life.”

  “Then, what do you want?”

  His gaze roved her body. The tip of his tongue wet his lips as they curved, although it could not be said to be a smile. “I have an idea,” he said, reaching once again for her.

  * * * * *

  Yaziz hunkered low, shifting his weight carefully so as not to crack the tiles of the roof of his own apartment building where he squatted. He’d come up here to search for answers, but so far he’d found only storks. Aside from their jumble of twigs where they slept, and aside from a few broken tiles and a gritty layer of dust, he found no clues that his visitor had dropped, nor footprints crossing from one rooftop to the next. The storks knew nothing about the writer of the note who had accessed Yaziz’s locked apartment, leaving him a bribe of opium. One bribe led to another, he guessed.

  And no, he would not drop the case of the gypsy.

  From the murky gray distance came the pre-dawn warbling of the muezzin, who’d climbed minarets to call the faithful to prayer. These days the call was delivered in Arabic, rather than Turkish, as decreed by Atatürk.

  But that was another matter.

  Yaziz felt impatient for the sun to rise. With the muezzin and the faithful out of their beds for the day, he decided it was not too early to start. He crawled across the tile ridges to the open window and the ladder, leading down to the hallway before his apartment. He hesitated before reaching for his phone, but his mind was made up.

  He rousted several other residences from sleep.

  First, his landlord denied having unlocked Yaziz’s apartment, but then he would, with the offering of an opium bribe.

  Then, a house servant informed him that Murat was away at his horse farm today. No, he would not attend the nargile salon at their usual time.

  Erkmen could not (or would not) see Yaziz for lunch later today. But Yaziz suspected that even if he did gain an audience, Bulayir’s man would refuse to divulge what he might have learned from his hours of surveillance.

  Mr. Wingate already supervised his team, who searched his grounds for the missing film from the broken camera the night before, thank you very much, but he welcomed the Turks to go over it again. If they insisted.

  Yes, Yaziz insisted.

  And finally, Doctor Vardarli suppressed his anger at being hauled out of bed. He promised to do what he could in the police lab, although he was in no rush to track down the source of the opium. He would not even begin until the day after tomorrow. Never mind. Yaziz was fairly certain that the opium had come from Ozturk Bey, who claimed he was no longer a poppy farmer. The question remained, what interest was it of the old smuggler-turned-merchant to see that the police drop the investigation of a gypsy?

  Yaziz did not know, but he would find out.

  * * * * *

  Anna tossed and turned the rest of the night with one thought dominating her mind. Rainer had come here, into her bedroom, searching for something.

  It had taken some time to settle Priscilla, but even after the child slept, Anna still could not. She replayed the scene with Rainer over and over. She reviewed the sound of his voice, the scent of his skin oils, the feel of his arms around her. The way his breath tickled her ear.

  What had he been looking for in her desk drawer?

  After he left, she tucked her letters there, the packet of letters Fran had given to Anna. They had still been in her pocket when he’d been searching. Tossing through the night, she felt tempted to get up and re-read those old letters, but her doubts surfaced again. Joy—the revelation that he lived—should tingle through her.

  She felt no joy. Only shivers, from the coldness of his words. And from his actions.

  Rainer had been searching her desk, not to touch her things but to search her things when she interrupted him. He hadn’t been waiting for her at all, not as he claimed. Hadn’t missed her at all.

  He’d lied. All those years, a lie.

  He was a spy. What did he think he would find in Anna’s bedroom except for Anna?

  The Saint Christopher’s medal.

  Which was gone.

  Stolen, by the purse thief in the market.

  But this was Henry’s house, and Fran claimed that Henry and Rainer had worked together during the war. Was it something of Henry’s that Rainer had searched for? He’d spoken of Henry with a hard edge to his voice. Henry had left Rainer for dead...

  Then she remembered what she’d found while looking for a cocktail dress in Mitzi’s closet. Mitzi’s calling card with the note of an appointment had fallen out of the jacket pocket of Henry’s suit. A meeting, perhaps, between Henry and Rainer.

  It seemed that no time at all had passed with her thoughts of Rainer spinning through her mind when the distant roosters crowed. Their pre-dawn call startled Anna from her thoughts, and finally her weariness won out and she slept.

  She awoke to Priscilla’s tugging on her arm. “C’mon, Aunt Anna, wake up.”

  Light flooded her attic bedroom, and Anna flung one arm across her face. “What time is it?”

  “I dunno,” Priscilla said. “You’ve been sleeping forever. C’mon, you’ve got to get up. He wants us to come for tea!”

  “He?” Anna’s voice caught. Rainer. Had Rainer really been here in the night, or had it been a dream? “Who?”

  “Gulsen’s father. He just phoned and said so himself. If me and Gulsen want to play. We can go over there. He says it’s okay. So can we?”

  Anna yawned and smiled. “Can I get dressed first?” It was good to see Priscilla act with such child-like enthusiasm now, after the frightening way last evening had ended. Anna didn’t have to consider the request very long.

  She shooed Priscilla away and climbed out of bed, heading for the bathroom and a long, soaking bath. Water gurgled through the pipes and thundered into the tub. She wondered what she should wear to tea with an important Turkish neighbor. He’d said he was Assistant Minister of the Interior, she thought, not sure what that meant exactly, but it sounded important. Perhaps she should borrow a daytime dress of Mitzi’s, complete with hat.

  She’d seen hatboxes in her sister’s closet.

  Still in her pajamas, Anna moved swiftly into Mitzi’s bedroom, crossed to the closet, and pushed aside the folding doors. There on the top shelf was a row of blue and white striped hatboxes. With an addiction to opium, her sister had lost her right to privacy.

  Anna pulled down the largest of the boxes. It felt heavier than a hat should make it, and something clunked within. Her curiosity aroused, she undid the ties and lifted the lid, exposing the flowered brim of a yellow, straw hat with velvet ribbons. Priscilla’s Easter bonnet, no doubt. Something lay underneath, separated by a layer of white tissue paper. The paper crinkled as she dug down, her fingers touching something cold and metallic. She pulled out a high-powered lens for a camera.

  She gasped and glanced up at the two remaining boxes on the shelf. She grabbed the next one and yanked off its lid. Inside, a white fur pillbox sat on top of another bundle of tissue paper. Flinging the hat to the floor, she tore at the paper. With her fingers, she could feel the hard edges of the heavy object wrapped within. She fumbl
ed and clawed and ripped the paper away from...a camera. Old equipment, she could tell from the nicks and scratches. But hidden, all the same.

  Her sister had hidden photographic equipment.

  Anna pulled down the last hatbox from the closet shelf. This one felt lighter, but something jingled inside. Lifting the lid, she found a black hat with a wide brim. A glimmer of orange fabric tucked out from underneath the hat. Anna yanked the hat away and discovered a pile of silk and chiffon.

  She pulled it out, and coin-sized bangles clinked from an orange bra. The rest of the costume unfolded into frothy swirls of veils and fully gathered pants. It looked like a belly dancer costume.

  Mitzi’s?

  “Aunt Anna, your bath is running over!”

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  It was a short walk to Gulsen’s house. Priscilla tried to persuade Anna to take the shortcut through the backyards, but Anna preferred the respectable approach, via the street. Besides, she didn’t want to pass the crime scene again, nor risk arousing curiosity from Cora.

  What in the world had Mitzi been up to?

  They followed the same route in reverse that they’d taken with Don Davis the night before. They passed the general’s pink mansion and turned the corner. Across the street was Gulsen and her father’s modest house. Off-white with curtained windows, it faced both the general’s and the Wingates’ houses.

  Had Mitzi’s secret something to do with her opium addiction?

  Gulsen’s father, dressed in a navy blue suit shimmering with silken threads, met them at the front door with a smile as wide as his face. His chin glistened, recently shaved, and his forehead shone, where his hairline receded. Behind that line, long, wispy hairs slicked back from his face.

  Anna and Priscilla traded their shoes for slippers and followed him across thick carpets to a room of reds. Shades of crimson, maroon, and purple swirled across the rugs, low sofas, and heavy tapestries hanging on the walls. A sweet fragrance filled the air, reminding Anna of orange blossoms.