“Why do you have your bed turned at an angle?” he asked.
She shrugged: too long to explain. “I’m an angular kind of person,” she said.
Dagmar turned off the light. Ismet was outlined by the yellow streetlight seeping through a chink in the curtains. His glasses seemed to glow, like the eyes of a cartoon villain. Dagmar stepped closer, put her arms around him, and began to kiss him. He responded with enthusiasm. Myrrh swam through her senses. His glasses mashed her cheek. She took them off, along with everything else he was wearing. He was preposterously erect, and she was flattered by this diverting evidence of his desire.
A metaphorically apt jet roared along Akrotiri’s long runway and hurled itself into the sky. The windowpane trembled to its acceleration.
Suddenly impatient, she tore off her own clothes and composed herself on the bed. Unable to judge the irregular angle of the bed in the dark, he barked his knees on the frame, then lay by her side. She kissed him again. His flesh warmed hers; his touch lit up her nerves. He shivered as she licked the sensitive flesh of his throat. She began to remember, after this long hiatus, what this sex thing was all about.
Ismet turned out to be something of a technician. He offered experimental caresses, observed her closely, then either increased his efforts or went on to something else. Five minutes of this and Dagmar felt her body on the verge of dissolving into magma.
Dagmar took a breath and decided to let the Wanassa, the Queen, take over.
Which famous sixties spy are you? The old Internet quiz came to Dagmar’s mind as she lay curled on her bed, with Ismet sleeping in the fetal position inside her arc, his pale body outlined by the streetlight outside. The sheet was rucked up under them, tangled about their feet. They were two commas, side by side on crumpled paper.
Not spy, she corrected mentally. Special ops.
It wasn’t like she’d encountered sixties operatives on their first go-around. She’d been born over twenty years after the first Bond film. But she’d seen all the films and read all the books, as homework for the Stunrunner game-and the other spies she’d encountered here or there on DVD or late-night cable, and in many cases read the books that had inspired them. The sixties interested her, as the decade when everything that hadn’t gone right had gone so horribly wrong.
Ismet wasn’t James Bond-he lacked Bond’s glamor and gadgets. He didn’t have John Steed’s brolly or wardrobe. Briefly she considered Quiller-Ismet possessed something like Quiller’s omnicompetence, but ultimately he lacked, so far as she knew, his tragic spirit.
She considered and dismissed the Man from U.N.C.L.E. Thoughts of the Man from O.R.G.Y. made her smile and impelled her to kiss Ismet’s shoulder. She would have to subject Ismet to more testing before she could report on that hypothesis.
She mentally paged through John le Carre’s works. Ismet was too young to be George Smiley and furthermore had never been miserably married to some bitch-queen of an upper-class vampire. She wondered if Ismet could be any of the other characters at le Carre’s Circus, but she couldn’t remember enough about any of them. (There was a Hungarian named Esterhase, right?)
And then she recalled Deighton’s nameless spy from The Ipcress File. That role seemed to fit Ismet better: quiet, unassuming, competent, and rather exciting once he took his glasses off.
Well then. Perhaps Ismet should get Ipcress as a new code name.
Ismet shifted in his sleep, rolling onto his back. Dagmar put an arm across his chest and rested her head on his shoulder. One arm came around her, held her close.
She breathed in the scent of him, myrrh and sweat, breath and sex, and closed her eyes, content to be in the circuit of her lover’s arms.
Ismet left after breakfast to bathe and change clothes, leaving Dagmar and Judy across the table with its litter of teacups, its plates of goat cheese, olives, bread, fruit, and Judy’s jar of Nutella. Judy looked after the departing Ismet, then turned to Dagmar.
“I wasn’t entirely surprised,” she said.
“You probably heard us,” Dagmar said.
“Not me. Slept like a rock.” She carefully spread Nutella onto a piece of bread. “Still, I’m a little envious.”
“No luck with Rafet?”
“I can’t seem to ever find him,” Judy said. “He’s either over across the Green Line doing training, or in conference with Lincoln or with Alparslan the government guy, or working out in the gym, or doing tai chi-I guess it’s tai chi-in his backyard. And now he’s off to… to wherever the next target is.”
“No ecstatic drumming?”
She looked forlorn. “No ecstacy of any sort, unfortunately.”
Dagmar was tempted once again to remind Judy that they were on an air base loaded with single men, but the thought was interrupted by total surprise at what Judy said next.
“I guess you’re just lucky,” Judy said, half-yawning as she stretched her tattooed arms out wide, “that you’ve got your two men.”
“Two?” Dagmar said, too startled to manage more than the single syllable.
“Ismet and Lincoln,” Judy said.
Dagmar barked out an astonished laugh. “You think I’m involved with Lincoln?” she said.
Judy stuck a finger inside her spectacles and wiped sleep from her eyes.
“Not sexually,” she said. “But-you know-it’s clear that you’ve got a special relationship with him.”
Dagmar was alarmed. She wondered if everyone was thinking this.
“He’s the guy I work for!” she said.
“He’s a smart, charming older man,” Judy said. “And you’re someone in need of a father.” She cocked her head, considering. “I’m a bit attracted to him myself on that account, my own dad being absent most of my life.”
Dagmar couldn’t decide whether to laugh or express outrage. She ended up saying nothing.
Judy took an olive from a plate, bit it, grimaced, and swallowed. Apparently her palate wasn’t ready for olives for breakfast.
“Put some Nutella on it,” Dagmar advised.
“He’s not your father, is my point,” Judy said. “He’s here to do a job, and if getting it done means treating you like a favorite daughter, then that’s what he’ll do. But if the job called for it, he could be someone else’s daddy tomorrow.”
“Our relationship,” said Dagmar, “is professional.”
“That’s for the best,” Judy said, her tone skeptical. “Because Lincoln isn’t just some eccentric old geezer with a game fixation, he’s a general trying to start a revolution. And that means he’s going to get people killed.”
“He’s not bloodthirsty,” Dagmar protested. “He’s not sending out assassins.”
“No,” Judy said, “not that we know about, anyway. It’s our own people that are going to get killed if these demos go wrong. It’s Lincoln who’s decided to accept that loss, if it happens.”
So have I, Dagmar thought. Instead she just repeated what Lincoln had said on that last day in Istanbul.
“That would be the fault of the bastards who kill them.”
Judy shrugged her inked shoulders.
“I’d say there’s enough responsibility to go around.”
Dagmar looked at Judy, her eyes narrow.
“And your responsibility?” she asked.
A tremor crossed Judy’s face. “I’m complicit,” she said. “I got carried away by the sheer coolness of it all.”
“Well.” Dagmar rose and reached for the teapot. “From this point on, I’m going to be heavily invested in keeping my boyfriend alive.”
Judy looked at her with bleak sleepy eyes.
“May you succeed,” she said, “in all your endeavors.”
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There was Rafet, his brilliant yellow hair covered by a sun hat, dancing at the he
ad of several thousand people. He was holding a double-ended drum and was banging away and jumping up and down and everyone around him was singing.
Ecstatic drumming indeed, Dagmar thought.
The new anti-government action was under way. It was ten A.M. on Saturday, and the demo had been swollen by thousands who had the day off.
The action was taking place in Karaaliolu Park, in Antalya, Turkey’s largest city on its Mediterranean coast. The park was blessed with a spectacular location, perched on a cliff above the sea, so every video on Dagmar’s array of flatscreens showed a spectacular view of ocean, cliff, clouds, rows of palm trees, sailboats, fountains, the ochre-colored walls of a castle, all dominated by the Tauros Mountains, snowcapped even this early in autumn. There was also some of the oddest public art Dagmar had ever seen-a statue of a bellicose mustached man with Popeye arms and what looked like a baseball cap tilted back on his head; an ancient spear-carrying warrior with a flat helmet, Don Quixote perhaps as conceived by Picasso; something that resembled in silhouette a two-horned Maurice Sendak monster; and strangest of all a huge groping hand apparently called Blessing Agriculture, Geology, Earth, Ground, Land, Soil, probably every synonym available in a Turkish thesaurus for dirt.
Maybe the Turks just hadn’t gotten the hang of statues yet. Ataturk had imposed statues on his nation, which had previously adhered to the Islamic ban on human representation-and so the newly liberated citizens had started off by planting statues of Ataturk everywhere, which no doubt earned the Gazi’s approval. Since then they seemed to have gone a bit off the rails.
Maybe, Dagmar thought charitably, they all made better sense in context.
The crowds had been told to bring DVDs and towels, and they did. The DVDs were held high, glittering in the sun, and Dagmar caught glimpses of packages bearing the images of Rocky, Celine Dion, Sean Connery, ABBA, and Cuneyt Arkyn, the actor who had achieved a kind of international infamy as the Turkish Luke Skywalker… The towels, mostly huge beach towels striped green and yellow and pink, were wrapped around faces to conceal identities. Brilliant color danced in the morning light.
“It looks like a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy convention,” Dagmar said.
“I was just thinking that,” said Richard.
Signs with bloodred letters waved against the blue sky. The crowd sang. The Star and Crescent flapped in the sea breeze. The video jerked and wobbled.
In Istanbul the cameras has been concealed in hotel rooms across the street from the demo. Here there was no way to hide them, so Rafet’s crew of support techs wandered amid the crowd. Some carried cameras, others wore sunglasses with video and audio pickups, and they lacked the motion-inhibiting qualities of camera tripods. These did their best to stand still and pan the scene, but every so often they’d get jogged by a member of the crowd or have to move from one setup to another or just get carried away and start dancing. More video came in from the drones of the Anatolian Skunk Works.
Oh well. Dagmar knew they could stabilize the video in postproduction.
Still rapping on his drum, Rafet led the group of dancers away from the cliff, somewhat to Dagmar’s relief. Her imagination, the one that obsessed on every conceivable thing that could go wrong, had foreseen a line of bayonet-wielding soldiers driving the protestors over the cliff into the sea.
But, Tuna and Lincoln had pointed out, there would be a lot of foreigners in the park. Foreigners provided a measure of protection: even Bozbeyli would see the disadvantage of conducting a bayonet charge where foreign visitors would be caught up in it. The bad headlines he’d gotten from the hippodrome riot should have been an object lesson to him.
So far Tuna and Lincoln had been proved right: the watchers on the local police stations hadn’t reported any movement at all. Maybe no one had even called the police or the army.
Rafet danced along the path, the tails of his towel floating out behind him. He was wearing video shades, but the image he broadcast was a hopeless bouncy blur-looking at it was like jabbing needles into Dagmar’s eyeballs. The audio feed delivered a complex series of drumbeats, Rafet’s panting breath, and the sound of shoes crunching on gravel.
Rafet led the group past a round fountain that shot a tall spear of foam into the sky, then into the square in front of the Antalya City Hall. The place was a tidy white structure with balconies and a portico and looked as if it had been put up by some European power’s Colonial Office-even though Antalya hadn’t been colonized since the Turks themselves had done it a thousand years ago, they had somehow locked into the colonial style perfectly well.
It was the weekend and no one was inside the building-the place wasn’t even guarded-but that didn’t matter as far as the audience for the video was concerned. What the pictures would show would be thousands of demonstrators waving their banners in front of the center of local power… and they would also see no response from the authorities.
The demonstrators began a new song, a triumphalist slow march. Sonorous chords boomed out. Turkish flags waved. Everyone stood still for the song, even Rafet.
Dagmar looked over her shoulder at Ismet. “This would be the national anthem?”
“Yes. ‘I-stiklal Mars?i.’ ”
Dagmar nodded. “It just sounds like a national anthem.”
The song came to a resounding conclusion after two stanzas. Then Rafet rapped for attention on his drum. The sunglass-cameras resolutely pointed away from him: no solid image of the dancing dervish would make it into any of the Lincoln Brigade’s videos. Rafet shouted out in Turkish, and the crowd responded. They made the same sort of spontaneous art made at the other demo in Istanbul, DVDs laid out in patterns on the square, stacked in interesting ways, layered on the town hall steps, or set winking in the windows. Enterprising young men scaled the pillars supporting the portico and draped towels off the portico rail. More towels were hung from the rail that topped the wings of the building. Anti-government banners were raised on the town hall’s three flagstaffs.
Dagmar could only guess what General Bozbeyli would make of this.
DVDs in the windows? he might mutter. What DVDs were these? Were they anti-government DVDs? No? Rocky IV?
What do the DVDs represent? Is this supposed to be some kind of DVD revolution?
And what about the towels? Is this some kind of attack on Turkishness through the symbolism of the Turkish towel? What signals are these people sending?
Call the head of the Jandarma! Call the mayors! We need to find out what all this means!
Dagmar was in on the secret: the items meant nothing. They transmitted no message. In order to fully comprehend the meaning of the demos, you had to be hip enough to understand that the DVDs, the towels, the photographs, and the flowers meant nothing at all! They were just convenient articles that people could carry that marked them as part of the flash mob aimed at the government.
The generals would never grok that. Never. They’d grope in the dark for meaning and come up with nothing-which was in fact the answer, but they’d never understand that.
A picnic spirit had begun to possess the protestors. More songs were sung. People linked arms and swayed in time to the music. No warning was sent from Lloyd, whose drones monitored the police and army-either the authorities didn’t care or were baffled or were waiting for instructions from somewhere up the line or no one had let them know what was going on.
“This isn’t a demonstration,” Lincoln said, with apparent pleasure. “It’s a damn love-in.”
“Chatsworth,” Dagmar said. “What happens if the police don’t move? Do we let this go on?”
Lincoln leaned closer to one of the monitors, his Elvis glasses sliding down his nose. He frowned, leaned back.
“The wedges are going to run out of fuel,” Lloyd pointed out.
Lincoln settled his glasses back on the bridge of his nose. “No sense in waiting for the police to get their shit together,” he said. “We’ve made our larger point. Let’s send ’em home.”
“Right.�
�
She told Rafet to end the action and sent additional messages to his support team. Rafet looked at one of the nearby cameras, then nodded.
The demonstrators were enjoying themselves too much to leave right away; the demo trailed off in a diminuendo of song and dance and trailing towels.
Helmuth and Tuna nailed a towel and a DVD of The Guns of Navarone, David Niven and Gregory Peck painted in heroic pastels, to the wall next to the towel and bouquet of flowers.
“Who’s for a celebration?” Helmuth cried. “Ouzo! Dolmades! Pizza!”
Magnus turned a little pale at the prospect of an entire long day in Helmuth’s company. Thus far Helmuth was proving a match for all the cocktails, discos, and desperate Russian women of Limassol put together…
Dagmar looked at Ismet, then looked away.
“Maybe later,” she said. “Text me.”
She wouldn’t go. Helmuth’s Rabelaisian idea of a good time had never appealed to her.
And besides, she had to say good-bye to Ismet first.
He was flying away this afternoon to organize Monday’s demo in Izmir. He would cross the Green Line in his car and then fly on to Izmir. To account for the odd stamps on his passport he was writing a series of articles on the Cyprus situation. He had them all on his netbook, along with his notes, if anyone demanded proof.
They had time for a pensive half-hour embrace on the couch in Dagmar’s flat before Ismet’s departure. Ismet was distracted by his upcoming mission and Dagmar by the ton of melancholy that squatted on her heart.
She’d had two whole nights with Ismet and already she was seeing him off to war. Film scenes ran through her mind, scenes in which the tearful girlfriend, running alongside the train, sees her soldier boy off to the Great War, waving a handkerchief at someone named Clive or Sebastian or Reginald leaning out of his train compartment in his flat helmet, the gas mask container bulking up his chest like an extra layer of fat, one pale doomed hand waving as he chugged off to be turned into chutney at Wipers or Vimy Ridge or Passchendaele…
Each repeatedly reassured the other how astoundingly safe Ismet’s task would be, and then Dagmar walked with him to his car. She gave him a fierce kiss and a rib-crushing hug, much to the amusement of an RAF airman sailing past on a bicycle.
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