by Alice Duncan
“Why did they hit me?” I squinted at Harold. “And why are you all wet?”
“We realized you weren’t with us after we left the harem rooms. Sam and Ali and I rushed back to see what had become of you.” He gave me a fierce scowl. “For God’s sake, Daisy, after everything that’s gone on, didn’t you think it would be wise of you to stay with the group?”
“I didn’t realize you were going when you went. Where’s Sam?”
That’s when two other men approached my bed. I saw Mr. Ozdemir standing in the back of the room, wringing his hands. Shoot, the only people missing were Ali and Ahmet. And Sam.
“Missus Majesty?” a crisp English accent asked.
“Yes?”
“I am DI Albert Foxcroft, with the London CID. Detective Rotondo, I fear, has been captured by the men who were trying to kidnap you.”
My eyes practically bugged out of my head. “Sam? Sam has been kidnapped?” Then, even though it made my aching head hurt worse, I cried out, “Will somebody please tell me what’s going on?”
“Let me try to explain,” Harold said, jostling his way past the London policeman. “Sam and Ali had just gone back to the harem to see where you were when they saw Stackville and his two pals carrying you off. Sam let out a roar that echoed through the whole palace, I’m sure, and that’s when I ran into the room. Then he, Ali and I ran toward you and Stackville’s crew. There was a huge scuffle, and I think Ali managed to slice one of the bad guys with his dagger. I ended up in the pool, and the villains somehow managed to carry Sam off while Ali picked you up after they dropped you. I don’t know if that’s when you cracked your head or if they conked you before they tried to carry you off.”
I pressed a hand to my head. “Good Lord,” I whispered. “We have to get Sam back. Great heaven, where could he be?”
“Before you go haring off anywhere, young lady, I need to make sure you didn’t suffer a concussion,” said Dr. Weatherfield, sounding as though he were trying to hold his emotions in check. Whatever those emotions were, they seemed to be strong. “How many fingers am I holding up?”
“Fingers? Fingers?” I hate to admit it, but I slapped his hand away. “I don’t care about your cursed fingers! We need to get Sam back! Oh, my God, didn’t anybody see where they took him?” I sat up, my head swam, and Dr. Weatherfield caught me before I could clunk back down onto the bed. “Oh,” I whimpered, sounding pathetic to my own ears.
“Lie still, Missus Majesty. People are working on getting your friend back. We have to make sure you haven’t permanently damaged yourself.”
I resented that. “I didn’t damage myself at all, darn it! Those horrid men damaged me.”
“Yes, well please lie quietly.”
“I can still talk while you look at my head, can’t I?” I swear, my heart, which had been behaving like a deflated balloon ever since Billy died, was now flinging itself around my chest cavity like a crazy thing. First it pounded like mad, then it sank to my toes, then it raced, then it thudded out a funereal cadence.
“No, you may not talk. At least wait until I finish examining you.”
“Harold!” I wailed, reminding myself of his mother. “We need to get Sam back!”
Dr. Weatherfield turned abruptly to Harold. “Can you calm her down? I have to make sure she didn’t suffer a concussion, and she’s having hysterics.”
“I’m not having hysterics!” I screamed.
“Can you give her a sedative or something?” asked Harold doubtfully.
“I don’t want a sedative! I want Sam back!”
Those words, which I screeched for all the world to hear, finally shut me up. Astonished at myself, I closed my mouth and looked bleakly up at the doctor.
“Are you through?” he asked politely. I don’t think he felt polite.
“Yes.” My voice was tiny.
“Thank God,” muttered Harold.
“Indeed,” said Dr. Weatherfield. “Now, Missus Majesty, can you tell me how many fingers I’m holding up?”
After shooting a pleading glance at Harold and watching him mouth Just do it back at me, I submitted. “Two.”
“Fine. And can you tell me the date?”
“August twenty-ninth, nineteen-twenty-two.”
“Very good. And where did you go on your jaunt this morning?”
My nerves were ganging up on me once more, but I strove to keep them at bay. Hollering at the world that I wanted Sam back had shaken me to my very soul. Therefore, I said meekly, “First we went to the Blue Mosque, and then we went to the Topkapi Palace. That’s where . . . it happened.”
“Yes. Mister Kincaid told me all about it. Now, can you tell me your birth date?”
Wanting to bellow at him for asking inane questions, I answered him anyway. “November thirtieth, nineteen hundred.”
“Very good.”
Then, instead of explaining my condition to me, he turned to Harold. Men. I swear.
“Missus Majesty has a nasty lump on her head, and I fear her head will ache for some time. Perhaps a few days. I’m leaving some chloral hydrate for her to take when the pain is particularly intense, but make sure she uses it sparingly, because it’s a powerful medication.”
Oh, Lord. Just what I needed. I, whose beloved husband had become addicted to morphine after he was shot and gassed during the war and had ultimately killed himself with the stuff, had just been handed a prescription for my own death should I care to use it for that purpose. The way my heart had taken to aching in time with my head, death sounded pretty good to me just then.
But not until we got Sam back. After I knew Sam was safe, I might just decide to heck with this stupid world and go join Billy in his.
Sam came first, though. He, who’d rushed across an ocean to save me from then-unknown foes, was now in peril himself. If he’d worried about how my family would react if I came home thin, I didn’t even want to think about going home and telling them we’d managed to lose Sam in Constantinople.
I absolutely hated life in that moment.
Chapter Twenty-One
I behaved myself for the rest of that day and didn’t cause another single stir. The doctor ultimately relaxed and smiled at me. Harold finally got his hair dry and put on another white linen suit, and the London coppers finally told me what they’d traveled all the way to Constantinople with Sam to discover.
Only it soon became apparent to me that they still didn’t know what it was. DI (which stands for detective inspector) Albert Foxcroft and DCI (which stands for detective chief inspector) Lawrence Miller had been lured to Turkey by Sam himself, who’d told them of the perils I’d faced both in Egypt and Istanbul—only they called it Constantinople—and they’d come along with some vague notion of discovering a gang of antiquities thieves.
So, whatever it was the bad guys suspected I had, it was probably something old. Big help. And nobody would allow me to get out of bed and search for Sam as I wanted to do.
“Where would you look?” asked Harold. And reasonably, too, curse him.
“I don’t know. Please tell me that Ali or Ahmet saw which way Stackville and his cronies carried him.”
Harold heaved a large sigh. “I wish I could, Daisy, but I haven’t seen Ali or Ahmet, either one, since the dust-up at the Topkapi Palace.”
I gazed at my friend in dismay. “You mean they deserted us in our time of need?”
“I don’t know. All I know is that I haven’t seen either of them since then.”
“Oh, Lord, Harold.” Tears threatened, and I blinked them back. I’d cried too blasted much in the past two and a half months. Darned if I’d cry over Sam Rotondo, of all people.
But, oh, did I miss him! And oh, was I worried about him! I couldn’t believe that Sam had allowed himself to get captured by the bad guys.
“The London police are working with the Turkish police,” Harold said, probably in an attempt to make me feel better, although his ploy didn’t work.
“Yeah?” I didn’t tell Harold so
, but I didn’t have a whole lot of faith in either set of police officials. For one thing, the coppers from London didn’t know their way around Istanbul, and for another thing, the Turkish police had proved singularly uninterested in my problem when my room had been broken in to. “I wish Ali and Ahmet would come back. I’d trust them over the cops any day.”
“You would?” Harold seemed astonished.
“Darned right, I would. They know Istanbul better than the London police, and I don’t trust the Turkish coppers to give a rap that Sam’s disappeared.”
“You’d be wrong there,” said Harold in a decisive voice. “The authorities always become extremely interested when anything bad happens to a tourist.”
That was vaguely comforting.
“How’s your head?”
Dr. Weatherfield had left cold compresses—which had lost their cold long since—along with the chloral hydrate, which I wasn’t aiming to touch with a ten-foot pole until after we found Sam. Good old aspirin was my remedy of choice, thank you. I removed the current compress and tenderly felt the back of my head. Ow. “It hurts. But my headache is better since I took some aspirin.”
“You don’t want any chloral?”
“Not on your life.”
“He didn’t leave you enough for you to become addicted to it,” said Harold, who had an unnerving ability to read my mind at times.
“I still don’t want any of the stuff. The aspirin is working pretty well.” My neck ached, too, but I figured that’s because when the villains smashed me on the head, my neck got twisted. From the moment I’d met him, I’d figured Stackville for an evil person, but it was proving mighty uncomfortable to discover I’d been right about him. “I’m hungry, though,” I said. Then I marveled that the words were true. How very odd.
“You are?” Harold brightened as if he were a lamp someone had suddenly turned on.
“Yes. By gum, I am hungry. I want some of that yogurt soup.”
“Doctor Weatherfield said it might not be wise for you to eat anything for a while. He doesn’t want you to get sick.”
“To heck with Doctor Weatherfield. He kept talking about fingers when I wanted to hear about what happened to me.” And to Sam. I didn’t mention that part.
“Right. Well, Mister Ozdemir gave us another guard until Ali shows up again, so I’ll go downstairs and see about getting you some yogurt soup. Anything else?”
I thought about it for a second or two. “Yes. Some of that flat bread and some of that stuff to dip it in.”
“Very good. Be right back.”
And Harold left me to fret alone on my bed.
Where was Sam? What would Stackville and his villainous cohorts do to him? Would they come after me again? If they’d lead me to Sam, that would be all right with me.
Then I decided I’d gone ‘round the bend and was stark, staring crazy. Sam Rotondo? My mortal enemy? Did I actually care about the man? After a while I determined I was merely worried about him because he’d been Billy’s best friend and, after all, had come to Istanbul to protect me—to his own peril. Guilt. That’s what it was. I felt guilty because Sam had been ‘napped in my stead.
Fortunately for the state of my mental health, Harold showed up about then along with a waiter carrying a tray laden with yogurt soup, flat bread, and some kind of stuff to dip it in that didn’t look the same as the kind of stuff I’d dipped flat bread in before. I lifted an eyebrow at Harold.
“Mister Ozdemir, who is very concerned about your health and welfare, said you’d be happier with this stuff, which is made with eggplant, or aubergine, as Mister Ozdemir calls them. He also sent you an order of what he called dolmas. I think they’re stuffed grape leaves.”
My nose wrinkled of its own accord. Aunt Vi occasionally fixed eggplant, but it was the one vegetable I didn’t care much for. And stuffed grape leaves? Good heavens, these people would eat anything. But what the heck. I’d liked almost everything else I’d eaten in Turkey, so I decided to give this meal a go. Couldn’t hurt; might help, and I had to keep up my strength if I aimed to get Sam back.
There I went again.
Carefully, I sat up. My head didn’t fall off. In fact, it didn’t even hurt too much. I considered that a good sign. As I arranged the pillows behind myself so that I’d have a comfy place to sit whilst eating, the waiter lowered a couple of legs on the back of the tray—I hadn’t noticed them before—and gently set the tray across my lap.
“Thank you very much,” I said, genuinely grateful. I thought the leggy tray was a keen invention.
The waiter, clad in one of what I’d come to recognize as the livery exclusive to the Sultanahmet Hotel—the same as Ali’s—and which I really liked, bowed, smiled, and backed away as if he were leaving a royal chamber or something.
“Dig in,” said Harold, looking as if he wished he’d brought a tray for himself.
“Thanks. Don’t mind if I do.”
I started with the soup, because I already knew I liked it. It was as yummy as ever. Then, bravely daring, I dipped a ripped-off piece of flat bread into the eggplant mush and stuck it in my mouth. I felt my eyes widen. That stuff was delicious!
“Oh, my, Harold, you have to try some of this.”
So he did. Then, because the flat bread and eggplant had worked out so well, I decided to try a grape leaf. Why not? I’d probably never see another one ever again after we left Istanbul. I didn’t care for it as much as the eggplant stuff, but it was tasty. I offered one to Harold, who was happy to oblige.
Tilting his head to one side, he said, “Perhaps it’s an acquired taste. But that bread and dip are great.” He snatched another piece of bread and took a giant scoop of eggplant.
“Hey!” I said. “Go get your own meal.”
“Actually, that sounds like a good idea. You’ll be safe here, because there’s a guard at the door.”
“What’s his name? Do you know?”
“Gaffar something or other.”
“Gaffar. Hmm. I wish Ali would come back.”
“So do I. Well, I’ll see you later, Daisy. I’m going to get some chow.”
“Enjoy. I think I’ve liked the food in Turkey best of all the places we’ve been so far.”
Harold gave me a cynical lift of his eyebrow. “That’s because you refused to eat anything at all until we got here.”
I stuck my tongue out at him. Not very dignified behavior on my part, but I was tired of being ragged about my lack of appetite. Anyhow, it seemed to have come back with a vengeance, so Harold had no business teasing me about it anymore.
Just as I swallowed the last bite of the last dolma, a quiet knock came at my door, and I froze in my bed. Was the guard still outside? Surely, he must be. Had Harold locked the door when he left? Was Stackville out there ready to pounce on me? How had he got past Gaffar? Oh, I just knew Ali was the person meant to guard me! Not that he’d prevented Sam’s capture, but still . . .
I lifted my tray and set it on the bedside table. Then I crept out of bed—slowly, in order to make sure pain wouldn’t leap back into my head and send me reeling—tucked my feet into my slippers, and tiptoed across the sitting room to the door. I was still in the clothes I’d worn that morning, so I was decently clad. When I got to the door, I whispered, “Who is it?”
“Missus Majesty?” a voice whispered back.
“Who are you?” I demanded, refusing to give my name until I knew who was asking for it.
“Ali. Ali Bektas.”
“Where’s Gaffar?” I asked, although the voice calling itself that of Ali had indeed sounded as though it belonged to Ali.
“He’s here. I need to speak to you.”
“It is truly Ali, Missus Majesty.”
I recognized Gaffar’s voice, my heart leapt into my throat—it had been doing some exceptionally odd things recently—and I flung the door open. Sure enough, there he was: Ali! My Ali!
“Oh, Ali, I’m so happy to see you! Do you know where Sam is?” Now where in the world had tha
t question come from? I hadn’t even asked poor Ali if he was well or if he’d suffered any damage during the melee in the palace; I’d just popped out and asked about Sam. “I mean—”
He held up a hand as if to tell me I needn’t explain. “Missus Majesty. I know where your friend is. Ahmet and me, we follow the white men. They take him to a house in Beşiktaş.”
“Where?”
Ali glanced surreptitiously around him. Gaffar nodded, and Ali said, “Can come in? Need to talk. About getting friend back. Sam. Sam good man. He speak my language.” Then he tilted his hand back and forth in what I guess is the universal form of “more or less.”
“Oh, yes. Please, come in. Let’s do talk
Ali nodded and entered my suite, closing the door firmly behind him.
“Please,” said I, “take a seat.
He sat in one of the abundant chairs in the sitting room, and I sat in a chair facing his. He sat very stiff and straight, and I got the feeling he’d rather be sitting on the rug with his legs crossed, in the posture I’d seen so many Turks and Egyptians assume. I doubted I could even take the position, much less remain in it and then get to my feet again. It’s got to be some kind of learned behavior. But that wasn’t the point.
“So you know where Sam is? With that information, maybe we can get the police—”
“No police,” Ali said firmly.
“No police? But why not? The police from London have been after the men who took Sam for a long time. At least, that’s the impression I got from them and from Sam.”
“Police too much noise. We creep up. Must creep. Be silent. Ahmet, Mister Harold and me.”
“And me,” I said, every bit as firmly as Ali had just spoken.
“You woman,” he said.
“Yeah? So what? I’m as capable as any man!”
Ali rolled his eyes, thereby marking him a man of Sam’s stamp.
“Listen to me, Ali. You Turks gave women the vote two years before we women in America got it. You must think women are capable!”
“But not in a fight.”
A fight? Hmm. I hadn’t thought about a fight. Maybe Ali was right.
