Perhaps our plan is being outpaced by events, he said cryptically, stabbing out his cigarette and lighting another. Or, he said brightening, one can finally see God’s hand in the plot.
Earth to Dad, she said.
Right, he said, smiling apologetically. Mary Beth was distressed, as you might imagine, to be falsely informed of our fate by the Turks, and damn happy to hear otherwise. Then she was right back to business, something in the works for months, and now, apparently, we are looking at a green light, all systems go as they say in Houston, except for the lack of one, most crucial player.
So, can you tell me, asked Dottie, or is this one of those hush-hush things?
I think we can say this is very much one of those hush-hush things, he said, pausing for the waiter to deliver their plates of grilled fish before adding, Can I tell you? Actually, I’ve already told you.
Oh, you mean—
Believe me, I’ve thought long and hard about this, the risk involved, et cetera—I’ll ask once more and I promise never again: Would you consider helping us out?
You mean the Pope thing . . . somebody trying to hurt the Pope. That thing?
He picked up his tableware, methodically deboning his fish and then switching plates to debone hers, and thus began his rant, sotto voce, deliberate, unbreachable except by a forkful of sea bass, the obsessive unscrolling of his universe, the politics and theology of its underpinning, which she barely listened to as she ate, not bored but restless, her attention not quite synchronized with what he was telling her. She had been overly inducted into his sophistry, its sideline audience for so many years, his beliefs invading and occupying her metabolism until they had become, without the virulence, her own.
With that with which you cannot compromise, she heard him say, it is impossible to be too aggressive, and her attention sprang back at the shift in his tone, the serene marshaling of details, as he finally resolved to lead her through the gates of his conspiracy. Of course she did not need to be reminded of the man who shot Pope John Paul II—Mehmet Ali Ağca; a Turk. Her Turkish friends, when they learned she was Roman Catholic, were embarrassed to say his name. Did she know why this man attempted to assassinate the Holy Father? I guess so, she told her father, whose heavy-lidded eyes seemed to smolder with impersonal anger as he corrected her: No, the crime was not religious except ostensibly; here was a case of a contract gunman recruited by government security agents. My God, said Dottie, what government would want to kill the Pope?
And he told her: the Soviets, the Soviets, the Soviets. The Soviets, who will stop at nothing to eliminate the Almighty’s presence on this earth; the Soviets, who instructed their surrogates in Bulgaria to orchestrate this diabolical crime; the Soviets, who, having failed, are prepared to try again, this time with a more effective cast of puppets, the blood-sucking Yugoslavs, some of whom I know very well, he said, and you must never breathe a word of this, what I’m telling you . . . and the fish would be better with raki, I think. Would you like something else? he asked and she said, Just water.
Her mind was empty as blue sky. She picked absently at the last spice-laden morsels of crispy skin on her plate while they waited for the waiter to leave. You have questions, her father declared, but she did not, not yet. The magnitude of what he had asked her seemed beyond the scope of her direct involvement, although it amazed her to think of her father as the one person in the world employed to stop this terrible thing from happening.
What am I asking you to do? her father rushed ahead. The man the Yugoslavs are sending to Istanbul to organize this atrocity has a well-observed weakness, and I need the assistance of someone like you, I need your assistance, to exploit that weakness. Why you, you ask, rather than someone like you? Here is the answer: to keep it in the family, so to speak, makes everything easier to contain.
Someone like me?
I will say it straight out, keeping nothing from you, said her father. The weakness they would exploit—he started to explain but succumbed to a quote. He liked green fruit, imported from the west. Who wrote that?
I have no idea.
That’s our man Conrad, one of the Asian novels. It means this Serbian bastard I’m referring to has a taste for young women, young Western women, most notably blondes. I hope to God I’m not offending you, he said.
She scoffed at his presumption. At times her father was shock incarnate.
Now is the time to say you’d rather not get involved. There are alternatives.
But you have to tell me, she said, what the operation is, and when he finished describing the plan she said, Oh, you want me to pretend to be a prostitute.
Pretend, he assured her, was the operative word. Honey to trap the bear. The man only has to believe he can have his way. I would kill him before I would ever let him lay a hand on you.
No kidding, she said facetiously.
I’ve never been more serious, Kitten.
God, she said, I know.
He took the napkin from his lap to wipe his lips. I’m having a coffee and cognac, he said. Would you like some dessert? Without any hesitation she said yes, a chocolate fudge sundae, and when it was put before her she held her spoon in the air, turning her wrist with alluring dips and batting her eyelashes in a parody of a coquette.
So Daddy, she said, feigning radiant breathlessness, how would a prostitute eat her ice cream? and her father smiled enigmatically and said, Good question, assessing her with incipient prurience before he seemed to remember himself. You’re a natural, kiddo, he told her, but I think you might be overplaying it.
In her bed an hour later she lay on her back with her eyes closed, wondering who the woman was, the winner of his nocturnal competition, as she listened to the sounds of her father’s surreptitious jerking off, the barely audible piston-like rhythm, the familiar soft methodical pump of friction climaxing in a sharp suck of air as if he had inhaled a hot ember and she thought, sarcastically, Glad that’s over with, and turned on her side away from him, tense and agitated, her left hand sandwiched idly between her thighs, a finger rolling the tiny hard pearl, thinking, Who’s behind the door—prostitute or daughter? Well, not Mom, that’s for sure.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
His quick sidelong glance her way warned of discretion and she watched him sign the hotel receipt, Lawrence Budd, his copperplate penmanship a beautiful thing, an airy old-fashioned cursive—Lawrence Budd?—understanding the mission had been initiated prior to her own induction, a revelation that made her feel and act capricious throughout their breakfast on the promenade. Sitting at one of the café tables under a blue-and-white-striped umbrella, she was jealous of the sea and its sailboats, her sunglasses obscuring only half of her morose expression, grumpy monosyllables all she offered her father who, trying again for an insight into her mood, solicited a lie. I’m getting my period, okay? she said, unwilling to declare he should not always count on her to say yes to everything, and after that he had the sense to ignore her as she crumbled a pastry into her untouched tea. Then a white Mercedes-Benz sedan, a much older model than Mr. Maranian’s and not well-kept, edged slowly up to the curb, and the driver lowered his window and stuck his head out—Excuse please . . . Mister Budd?—and her father said, Time to go. And like who the fuck am I? she thought. Rose Budd? Very funny.
She had lost track of the days and did not realize it was Sunday morning until her father told the driver to take them to a Catholic church—No, no, this one’s Orthodox, he said, and they eventually arrived at the cathedral of St. John the Evangelist at the top of the city, the two of them dashing inside to the ringing of bells, joining the shuffle of an oddly mixed congregation, elderly women, European bureaucrats, and military personnel, toward the richly decorated altar. NATO, her father whispered. I believe they have a headquarters here. With love flowing in his eyes, her father pulled her to her feet as the mass end
ed and they walked arm in arm outside into the Aegean sun and back to the car, his voice cracking with emotion, recalling that here in this city, Homer’s birthplace and apostolic sanctuary, once stood the first of the seven churches of Revelation. Without Turkey, her father reminded her, there would be no Christianity. Not without Rome, not even without Jerusalem, but without Turkey. And then they were on the road south to Ephesus, the once-great city of Asia Minor, where her father seemed to have a nervous breakdown.
Except for her father’s sole instruction to the driver—Meryemana, House of Mary, my friend—no one said anything for three hours, her father content again to fumble with his mother’s rosary, his lips sipping the air with nine repetitions of the Memorare. Dottie stared out the window at the elysian countryside, her thoughts flitting around, unable to settle into even a rudimentary coherence, feelings attached to a parsimonious minimum of words—Osman, the Sea Nymph, prostitution, angels, shopping, evil, the storm, her lost Nikon, Jacqueline in France, Karim’s malicious sensuality—the elliptical survey of her reverie interrupted by the blink in her vision of a signpost announcing the archaeological preserve of Ephesus and the sudden wrenching heaviness of her father’s breathing. When she looked at him, his eyes and mouth were closed tight and twisted in a grimace and he had broken into a crosshatching of sweat. Daddy? she asked, brushing his knee with no response. The driver turned off the main road onto a narrow serpentine route looping up a pine-forested mountain and she tilted her head toward her father’s quivering lips to determine that he was asking her to tell the driver to stop.
In our hearts are the words, he said, scrambling out of the car, and she thought he was going to be sick but something else was happening. He told her with a deeply pained look that he would walk the rest of the way, to arrive at the house of the Mother of God as a penitent on his knees. Join me, he said, and she asked the driver how far it was and told her father her foot hurt too much to walk six kilometers up a mountain and he simply knelt down on the side of the road to pray, a mortification that made her stretch across the seat to shut his door. See you up there, she said, the heat of the afternoon and her father’s overheated faith and the length of these final miles intensifying her disapprobation. The chauffeur turned into the car park at the summit and kept the engine running as he got out to open her door, then unlocked the trunk to remove the dry bag and, without a word, got back in and left. She looked around, figuring it would take her weird-ass father—Saint Dementia, she had dubbed this stranger—the remainder of the day to crawl the distance, and what was she supposed to do in the meantime?
A busload of Muslim tourists disembarked, a preponderance of women in head scarves and black raincoat dresses, whom she trailed down a walkway into the pines, the air laden with golden motes. Her body began to respond, feathery shivers of electricity absorbed in her chest, some ancient lingering energy flowing up and through the limbs of her spirit, tendrils of holiness like climbing vines. Her heart felt gripped by this modest stone cottage ahead in the trees, a hut really, a woodcutter’s shelter, a place to hide from the world, where St. John had brought the Virgin away from the unforgiving barbarity of Jerusalem. These mortared walls in this lovely forest where Mary ate her bread and studied the dome of stars, wrestling with the miracle of her child, and, finally, died from so much yearning. In everything she looked at she perceived a mystical shimmer that could only be the mingling of auras, hers and Mary’s. Their feet on the same ground, the baked fragrance of pine needles the same, century after century; their ears buzzing with the same isolation, the Virgin’s parched throat cooled from this sacred spring whose water Dottie now drank from the cup of her hands. How could she have possibly foreseen what was being asked of her, what she had gotten herself into? Had she been carefully chosen or had it been more like, Okay, you, one womb as good as the next to carry light into the world? And whatever miracle could make that happen, Dottie thought, if a virgin has a baby, he better be the Son of God.
Her father had told her this: God sent his Son to experience time, the Achilles heel of creation, known only through the tribulations of mankind. The Virgin birth was meant to establish the bridge back across the cosmic chasm—time’s correction. Understand? The universe was not whole until Mary, the mother of our completion. Dottie was still a child when her father told her this and she had failed to comprehend why God didn’t just have the baby himself—why trouble poor Mary? And when she was older, and more understanding, Dottie wondered skeptically, Wait, did God rape Mary? which is when she stopped going to confession, afraid to confess the mortal sinfulness of such a thought.
But how crowded it was, she felt, entering the queue into the T-shaped building, peeking around the horde of bodies into its austere vaulted bedroom and dank kitchen and kneeling with so many others on the cobbley roughness of the floor, candles guttering in the dim light, at the shrine dedicated by the Polish Pope himself, her Pope. She stood up in a daze of profundity and walked back out into the dappled shade of the trees to find a place to sit down—a low stone wall to the side of Mary’s house, the mountainside plunging behind her—and sat there without being aware of anything much, her eyes blurred, staring at panels of an abstract fresco made from chicken wire fencing, its mesh crammed with the petitions of the devout—colorful bits of rag, scrawled notes, flower puffs, inscrutable totems: anything to make a wish—until the tranquillity she had discovered was blown apart by her father’s arrival.
Wary-eyed pilgrims began to crane their attention toward a disturbance and when she stood to see what caused them to nod and point there was the spectacle of her father on the terrace, on his knees, shirtless, his torso slashed with angry stigmata, fists clenched over his weeping eyes, his chin wobbly with lamentation. My God, she thought, how did he become such a mess? She knew she should run to him but could not. And when he rose to his feet she gasped—can someone so dignified and handsome possibly look this wicked and unhinged?—tourists giving him a wide berth as he began to shout in English at the blameless Mary-worshipping Muslims—You fucking motherfucking mujos, you filthy wild beasts, you cockroaches—until a nun came flying like a raven out of the shrine and seemed to swoop him up in saintly wings and somehow pacify him.
Dottie held her breath, dreading the return of this crazy person to her side yet when she saw him straggle out the low doorway at the rear of Mary’s house at least his shirt was on and he no longer required a chaperone. His puffy eyes searched the terrace, spotting her on the wall. He tried to smile but failed, his face disfigured by renewed bawling, coming toward her with outstretched arms, streaming tears.
Daddy, just sit down, she said coldly, estranged by his psycho display of weakness, and he did as he was told. Stuttering in a strangulated voice, he said that today was his mother’s birthday, and Dottie pinned herself onto his tormented chest to console him and he clung to her until he regained his composure, the tremble of his hands receding, his jaw firm, eyes increasingly alert to here and now, the pathos draining out of him. I thank God for the joy of this day, he announced, a king’s proclamation, sealing his emotions back into the deep reaches of his darkness. I’ve waited all my life for this, he said. This what? she wanted to ask but instead said nothing and watched him stand resolutely and walk to the chicken wire panels and pluck out from its collage a black scroll of paper, its tube containing keys and directions to a house in nearby Selcuk, and she followed after him to search the car park for a green Toyota sedan and then they got in and left.
Disorder was still an illusion—there was and always would be a plan. Sometimes she forgot, but she had learned long ago to count on it. Never underrate Daddy.
In the days ahead she would sometimes complain about being stashed away, sequestered in the dreary bungalow—bare stuccoed walls, sagging beds, spattered taupe curtains suggesting a house with a history she would rather not know, cracked linoleum floors, smelly kerosene stove, cobwebs and spiders, mouse shit and the stink of rotting oni
ons everywhere. They could have easily rented something fabulous—a hip villa with a swimming pool—in the bustling seaside town of Kusadasi, some twenty kilometers southwest, where she was finally allowed her shopping spree and a trip to a bookstore (she picked out a used copy of Fear of Flying based on a startling chapter title—“Arabs and Other Animals”). But her objections were tempered by the return of her father’s happiness, his unflagging upbeat mood and his love affair with the village, Ephesus a thirty-minute walk through the dust and heat and fumes, their quiet neighborhood only a few blocks east of a hill crowned by a Byzantine citadel, which she could see from her streaky bedroom window, and the shorn ruins of the Basilica of St. John, containing the disciple’s grave—ground zero, the Ur-church, her father never tired of saying, John wrote his gospel up there. Her father’s newly acquired habit to awake and shower before dawn for a circuit of reverent wandering around Ayasuluk Hill before breakfast, returning in time for coffee and scrambled eggs with the man he called his uncle, her trainer or helper or whatever, the person readying her for what she prosaically called the Pope Thing.
Her indoctrination began the evening they drove down the mountain from Meryemana into Selcuk and found the house at the back of the village. The minute she walked through the front door there was Mr. Maranian, her eyes gladdened by the sight of him, his herringbone jacket and sweater vest (doesn’t he know it’s ninety degrees out), yellow tie, rumpled trousers, steel-framed glasses, dignified posture—Maranian, her mirthless surrogate grandfather. The dry bag fell from her hand and she skipped to kiss his cheeks but he accepted her affection rigidly, eyes slitted and his palms out flat at his waist to keep a tense distance between them.
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