Daisy Gumm Majesty 06-Ancient Spirits

by Alice Duncan

  The waiter, who was infinitely more dignified than I and reminded me of Mrs. Pinkerton’s butler Featherstone, led us to a table beside a window where we could have a view of the outdoors. Of course, by that time night had fallen, so we couldn’t see much. I have to admit I was looking forward to our trip to see the sights the day after tomorrow.

  “Your hotel is called the Bosphorus, Sam. Is it on the banks of the Bosphorus or something?”

  He shrugged as he reared back to allow the waiter to put his napkin in his lap. Sam was no more accustomed to being waited on than was I. “I don’t know. Didn’t look. First thing I did after I checked in was come here to find you two.”

  “Oh. That was nice.”

  “Yes. Thank you,” said Harold.

  Then Harold and I glanced at each other. I do believe neither of us could figure out exactly why Sam was so dedicated to my welfare when we didn’t even know why I was being pursued. If I was being pursued—although it did appear as if someone wanted something I had. But he’d been worried about me even before he knew about the room searches and break-in and so forth. Very strange. Unless he was carrying his loyalty to Billy’s last request to an extreme degree.

  “Don’t look at each other like that,” Sam growled. Trust him to notice anything a body didn’t want him to notice. “We’ve been getting reports of strange goings-on in these parts, and it looks like you’ve managed to get yourself mixed up in some of them. I’m here to fix that.”

  “Right,” I said, and I regret to say my voice was quite sardonic. “Too bad we don’t know what exactly the strange thing is that we’re mixed up in.”

  “Not we,” said Harold, the rat. “You. You’re the only one who’s been bothered.”

  I heaved a sigh. “Thanks for reminding me. I just wish I knew what it was the crooks wanted of me. I’d hand it over in a minute.”

  “Maybe it’s you they want,” grumbled Sam. “Want to hand yourself over to a gang of white slavers?”

  I frowned at him. “Oh, come on, Sam. Those tales of white slavery are nonsense. The stuff of fiction and the flickers. Aren’t they?”

  “No,” he said emphatically. “They are not.”

  His answer sent a jolt of panic through me, but before I could ask any questions, a waiter appeared. He was another dignified bloke wearing a grand Turkish costume rather like Ali’s only without the dagger thrust through his sash. I liked the way Turks dressed a lot more than the way Egyptians dressed, and I began to get ideas for spiritualist costumes. Perhaps this trip wasn’t going to be a total waste after all. I forgot the white slavery question as I considered what to sew for myself when I got home. It only occurred to me later that this moment in time might have been the turning point in my recovery, both physical and emotional.

  “Want a drink, Detective Rotondo? You can drink booze here, you know. Not like at home.”

  “I thought Moslems didn’t drink alcohol,” said Sam, something I’d been curious about, too.

  “Perhaps they don’t, but tourists do,” said Harold pragmatically. “And the natives want our money, so they serve the forbidden stuff. So do you want a drink?”

  “No, thanks,” said Sam, who appeared uncomfortable with the very idea of consuming something that was blatantly illegal in his own country. “I’ll just have coffee.”

  “Turkish coffee?” asked Harold, a glint in his eye—and I knew why. Turkish coffee is nothing at all like its pale and pallid cousin we Americans drink. I smiled, hoping Sam might choke on his choice of drink, or at least gasp once or twice.

  “Sure. Sounds okay to me.”

  “I’ll have a dry martini,” Harold told the waiter. “Daisy, you want tea, don’t you?”

  He knew me so well. “Yes, please.”

  “Tea for the lady, and Turkish coffee for the other gentleman.”

  The waiter bowed and went away to fetch our drinks. Harold and I exchanged another speaking look.

  Sam said, “What?” in a most suspicious voice.

  “Nothing,” Harold and I chorused.

  “Huh,” said Sam, as ever.

  When the waiter returned with our beverages, Sam stared at the teeny cup of coffee the man set before him. “What’s that?” he asked. I was glad he’d been polite enough to save his question until the waiter had left.

  “That’s your Turkish coffee, Sam,” I said sweetly. “Take a big gulp.”

  “A gulp is all there is of it,” he muttered.

  “Daisy’s teasing you, Detective. Take a small sip. That stuff is potent.”

  “Potent?” Sam stared at Harold. “Do you mean to tell me Moslems put booze in their coffee? I thought only the Irish did that.”

  “Do the Irish put alcohol in their coffee?” I asked, genuinely curious.

  “There’s no booze in the coffee,” Harold assured Sam. “Trust me.”

  Sam didn’t appear to trust Harold any more than he trusted me. Nevertheless, he spooned a lump of sugar into his coffee cup and lifted it to his lips. His huge paw dwarfed the itty-bitty cup. Then he took a sip of the coffee. And then his eyes opened wider than I’d ever seen them, he carefully replaced the cup on its little saucer before him, and he seemed to struggle for breath. After a second or two of silence, during which I prayed Sam wouldn’t blow up and explode all over the restaurant, he turned to me.

  “Take a big gulp, eh?”

  I shrugged. “Just a suggestion.” I tried to appear impish but probably didn’t, given that according to all reports, I looked more like the wraith of a human being than the genuine article at the time.

  “Don’t mind Daisy, Detective Rotondo. She’s been sick.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Said Sam grumpily. “She hates me. And call me Sam, will you? Can the ‘Detective Rotondo’ thing. We don’t want anyone who might be watching to know I’m with the cops.”

  “Thanks,” said Harold. “And please call me Harold.”

  Stung and feeling oddly ashamed of myself, I said, “I don’t either hate you, Sam Rotondo.”

  Sam looked hard at me. “You could have fooled me.”

  And, darn it all to heck and back, I felt like crying again. Lord, I was a mess!

  Chapter Twenty

  In spite of the coffee incident, I managed to eat a fairly substantial meal, considering I hadn’t consumed anything but pared apples, soda crackers and ginger ale for days and days. I put away a whole bowl of chicken soup with some big beans in it—the Turks favor lentils as do the Egyptians, but since I don’t, I’d passed on that choice—and some delicious flat bread that we dipped in some kind of yogurt sauce. I’d never heard of yogurt before, but I guess it’s quite common in those parts and is used in all sorts of different dishes, from breakfast to supper. This particular yogurt dish was kind of like thick sour milk, but it was seasoned with garlic and tiny cucumber bits and I don’t know what else. It was good. That’s all I knew, and I hoped I’d be able to discover a Turkish cookbook, only in English, to take home to Vi when we went on our tour of the city.

  Sam, who’s culinary experiences were greater than mine, as he’d grown up in New York City where, he claimed, you could get just about any kind of food you could imagine, enjoyed his meal of lamb skewered on spikes and grilled over an open flame. He called them shish-kebabs and, given his wider knowledge of the world’s foods than mine, I saw no reason to doubt him. Harold had the same, and made me eat a bite of lamb from one of his skewers. I had to admit it was delicious, but my stomach was so full by that time, I couldn’t eat another bite.

  Gazing at me critically—the only way he ever gazed at me—Sam said, “Well, I’m glad you managed to eat something, but you still look like hell. Harold and I have to put some meat on your bones before we take you home to your family, or you’ll give ‘em all spasms.”

  “Surely I don’t look that bad!” cried I—softly, out of respect to our being in a classy restaurant.

  “You want to risk your father’s heart on it?” Sam asked.

  My mouth fell open.
Fortunately, it was empty at the time. “That’s plain cruel, Sam Rotondo! You know I love my father with all my heart, and I’d never do anything to hurt him. Besides, it’s not my fault I got sick just when I was already so . . . vulnerable.” I refused to use words like skinny or gaunt or any of the others that had been flung at me recently, including skeletal, which had been contributed by Sam himself.

  Sam said, “Huh.” I glowered at him.

  “We’ll get her to eating again, Sam,” Harold said in a bolstering sort of voice. “It’s encouraging that she was hungry tonight.”

  “I guess,” Sam grumbled.

  The waiter brought us some kind of dessert, which he called boreck and which was flaky and fabulous, according to Sam and Harold, although I had to take their word for it, since my abused stomach couldn’t hold a single other thing, not even a flake of the pastry that looked so good and which the men gobbled up like candy.

  After everything had been taken away, Sam pushed his chair back a bit, looked from Harold to me, and said, “That’s about the best meal I’ve ever eaten, except at your house, Daisy.”

  “I’m going to see if I can find a Turkish cookbook for Aunt Vi,” said I. “Only it’ll have to be in English or she won’t be able to use it.”

  “And when did you say you’re going to take this sight-seeing trip of yours?” he asked.

  “Day after tomorrow,” said Harold. “Ali is going with us to guide and guard us. Along with you, of course.” He added the last sentence hastily as if he worried Sam might berate him if he didn’t. Which he probably would have, given that Sam was Sam.

  “Good. We’ll plan our strategy tomorrow then.”

  Harold and I exchanged one last glance for the evening.

  * * * * *

  Yet the following day wasn’t so bad. Sam wasn’t as grumpy as he’d been the day he arrived, and he was polite as the three of us went down to breakfast, which he took with us at Harold’s invitation of the previous evening. Harold and I both brought the travel brochures and maps Mr. Ozdemir had given us, and it was fun going over them together in the hotel lounge after breakfast—which, by the way, I ate. It perhaps sounds rather odd to other Americans—it sure sounded odd to me—but I had a warm yogurt soup flavored with mint.

  According to Dr. Weatherfield, who had paid me a last visit the night before and who’d recommended it to me, the soup was called yayla corbasi and, also according to him, “It’ll fix you right up. It’s the perfect food for people who’ve been sick with dysentery.” He then went on to give me something of a lecture about the joys and benefits of yogurt, but I won’t go into the matter here, since you probably aren’t interested in fermented milk products and so forth.

  Anyhow, the soup was good, and it settled into my formerly disturbed tummy as lightly as a butterfly landing on a leaf.

  “Are you sure that’s all you want?” Harold asked, frowning at my empty yogurt bowl.

  “Positive. I’m stuffed. Don’t forget that last night and this morning, I’ve taken the only solid food, except apples, for almost a week.”

  “That stuff didn’t look very solid to me,” he grumbled.

  “It was, though. And it was delicious, too,” I assured him.

  “Well . . .”

  “It’s all right,” said Sam, eyeing me severely. “We’ll make her eat more for lunch.”

  My gaze paid a visit to the ceiling, but I didn’t scold or object, because I figured there would be no point in doing so. As for Sam and Harold, they both ate man-sized breakfasts that included some kind of spinach pie and another form of boreck, only this time made with vegetables (Harold said eggplant; Sam said zucchini squash; take your pick). I guess you can do a whole lot with pastry dough besides make desserts out of it.

  At any rate, we had a good time planning for the morrow’s visits to various sites, including the Blue Mosque, the Topkapi Palace and—at my insistence—the Grand Bazaar. “I’m still pretty weak, you know. I don’t want to do too much in one day. We can see the city gates and some of the other sights the next day.”

  “Very well,” said Harold meekly.

  Sam, who was never meek, grunted and said, “I’m going to hire a car to take us around. I don’t want Daisy walking on the crowded streets. Not only might she get sick again, but I don’t want her getting snatched.”

  “I don’t think anyone’s interested in snatching me, Sam,” I said, and quite calmly, too. “Whatever these people are after, it seems to be something I have, not me.”

  “You never know,” he said darkly, and I decided we’d both said enough on the subject.

  After breakfast, Harold and Sam went out for a while. Sam wanted to introduce Harold to his police cronies from London, and Harold wanted to see some of the city. Poor fellow, he’d been trapped in the hotel caring for me ever since we’d arrived in Istanbul.

  As for me, I was directed in no uncertain terms to “Go to your room, lock the door and rest. You have to be feeling well enough to do some sightseeing tomorrow.”

  I saluted Sam, said, “Yes, your majesty,” and watched Sam roll his eyes. Then we all trooped back up to my room, where Sam and Ali greeted each other in Turkish—I swear, the man was totally unsociable to the rest of the universe, but he’d already made a friend of Ali—and I entered my room.

  “Lock your door,” Sam commanded for about the ninetieth time.

  “Yes, sir. Will do.”

  After giving me a good hot scowl for form’s sake, he, Harold and Ali waited for me to turn the key in the lock, and then I heard two sets of footsteps taking off down the hallway and Sam and Harold talking to each other as if they, too, were fast friends. Would wonders never cease?

  I spent the rest of that day sleeping and catching up on correspondence. Although I wanted to, I didn’t brave Sam’s temper by toddling downstairs and looking for postcards, but wrote my letters on the stationery provided by the hotel. I apologized to everyone for not having written for a few days, explained that I’d been sick but that I was better now, and told my family in their letter that Sam had joined us.

  I don’t know why the man thinks I need a bodyguard, but he’s here, and he’s determined to make sure nothing bad happens to me while I’m traveling. I hate to admit it, but it was nice to see him. He, Harold and I are going to see some of Constantinople’s many treasures tomorrow, and I hope I can write a more interesting letter tomorrow night.

  Which just goes to show, I suppose, that one should be careful when putting what one thinks are newsy little quips down on paper.

  * * * * *

  Sam arrived the next day at nine o’clock. Harold and I had taken our breakfast in the hotel’s dining room—more yogurt soup for me, and I sampled some of Harold’s spinach pie, which was quite tasty.

  Ali joined us in the lobby, and we traipsed out of the hotel and to the machine Sam had hired to take us around the city. A huge old Hudson Phaeton met our eyes as we walked down to the street. The machine looked like it had once maybe belonged to a sultan or something but had hit hard times since then. However, it was large enough to hold us all, and Sam had hired a Turkish driver to go along with the motor, so we seemed to be set for the day. Ali and the driver, a fellow named Ahmet Bayar, sat in front and Sam, Harold and I took the back seat. The two men sat on either side of me.

  “Because I don’t want anyone to be able to get at you without going over us,” said Sam in his usual gruff manner.

  I merely shrugged. “Whatever you say, Sam. I think they’re after my luggage, though, not me.”

  “Huh.”

  Typical.

  The Blue Mosque was absolutely . . . well, I don’t have words to describe it. Fabulous, maybe? I made sure I was covered from tip to toe and wore a hat, and we all removed our shoes before Ahmet and Ali preceded us into the place. We didn’t linger, since it was a site holy to Moslems and except for the two Turks, we weren’t Moslems. I certainly didn’t want to offend anyone, but I was awfully glad that we’d visited the place.


  Harold politely asked if it was all right to take pictures with his Kodak and was told to go ahead, but he didn’t take many on the inside of the mosque. The outside was another matter. That place is huge, and we spent a good deal of time walking its perimeter and stopping every second or three for Harold to take more pictures. He made Sam and me get into a couple of them, which made neither one of us awfully happy.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Harold snarled at one point. “It’s to give perspective. I want people to know how big this place is, and the best way to do that is to show the two of you standing in front of it. You don’t have to look as if you’re being sacrificed, you know.”

  So I smiled. When Harold showed me the photos later, I learned that Sam didn’t. He looked, in fact, as if he were sorely aggrieved to have to stand next to me. By the way, Sam had shed his copper duds for the day and wore a typical white linen tourist’s suit. It actually looked good on him, although, of course, I didn’t tell him that.

  We must have spent an hour or more at the Blue Mosque, and then Ahmet drove us to the Topkapi Palace. Boy. It was definitely a palace. And talk about your more-than-Oriental-splendor, as Rudyard Kipling might have phrased it. I could have spent the entire day studying the tiles alone. In fact, I became so fascinated by the tiled pool in the area that used to be set apart for the harem that I didn’t notice my companions had moved along. When I glanced up from staring at the amazing tile work and discovered myself alone, a spasm of alarm struck me.

  An instant later something else struck me.

  After that I didn’t know anything at all until I awoke on my bed in the Sultanahmet Hotel and saw Dr. Weatherfield peering down upon me with a worried frown on his face. My head ached something awful. Then I noticed Harold, who was drying his hair with a towel. That seemed extremely odd to me. And where was Sam?

  “What happened?” croaked I, once more wishing I were dead.

  “You were attacked,” said Harold. “By three men. You were right. Stackville was one of them, and I’m pretty sure his French pal and that other fellow were with him.”