The Favorites of the Sun

by Mac Pope

  They were a mix of people attracted to Jamel and Shamika: a Turk with a doctorate degree, Shiraz Bey, who worked as a NATO interpreter was there with his wife, Ana, who was dressed in an evening gown. There was a young black couple, Jamel’s co-worker, Reginald, and his wife, Gladys, both draped in African dashikis, two French tourists, in jean shirts and shorts, who Shamika had met on the street, came along. Ahmet, Jamel’s black market dealer was there with a lithe belly dancer he was obsessing over.

  The background music was an old Modern Jazz Quartet record, and everyone looked cool to each other under the soft glow of red lighting and burning incense.

  Isabel was telling the group about an incident that morning at the Consulate. “This Sergeant from Puerto Rico comes running in,” she said, "eyes wide as dinner plates, and he’s shouting:

  “There are spies in my building—I’m a target!” I asked him what happened, he says he was standing on the street outside his apartment building and his wife calls down from the third floor, saying something in Spanish, he couldn’t hear. After a couple of repeats, a little girl of a Turk family sitting dignified on the second floor exchanged glances with her elders and leaned down to tell him, in pure Spanish: “Dijo que ‘vayate pa’ la tienda y traiga pan y leche… y da te prisa—vago!” (She said: ‘Get to the store and bring me bread and milk and hurry, you lazy…!’)

  “They tipped their hand!” the sergeant cried.

  “They got lifelong training schools in Russia set up for this…” Isabel said that she tried to tell the man about the wonderful time warp he’d stepped through; that he’d encountered a rare family of Ladino’s—direct descendants of the Spanish Jews that his Spanish ancestors had driven out of Spain in the fifteenth century. The Turkish sultans had given them refuge and over the centuries, they had quietly passed their language down along with their culture and religion. “The sergeant wasn’t buying any of that,” Isabel said.

  “When they turn out to be spies it’s on your egghead butts!” he said as he slammed the door behind him.

  “The dummy ratio in the Army has risen above the forty-nine percent mark…” Reginald said, so, matter of fact-like it took a moment for everyone to break out laughing at his joke.

  “Excuse my US Army,” Shamika drawled, “we owe a lot to the system. It’s been good to my man and me; not just these material things either. I took Marisa on a bus trip with other Army wives and kids to the old Greek ruins at Ephesus, down the coast. Well, the bus broke down and we’re standing around near the well in this tiny village and the villagers are staring at us like we Aliens… Anyway, these Turkish women sees my Marisa and goes to pick her up, all smiling and stuff—and suddenly one of our group, a white woman from Iowa, or somewhere, ran over and blocked the women from touching Marisa. ‘Back off,’ she said, ‘give your hepatitis and your TB to your own kind, ladies—this is our kind!’”

  “I guess I had mixed emotions?” Shamika said. “On the one hand, I hated to see the shame on those women’s faces as they backed off… Lord, I recognized that… but I’ll say I never felt so included in being American as at that moment. I talked to the other colored girls on the bus and they said about the same thing… ‘Our kind’—goddam!”

  Shiraz Bey and Ana said they had not been so happy in years as they were with the young Americans, both were from aristocratic families that stretched back into Ottoman Empire times. Shiraz Bey was an Islamic scholar; knew Greek, Latin, German; English was his weakest language and Americans thought him fluent. He had left a professorship to become an interpreter for the US Forces because it paid three times the money … that fact haunted him all day as he sat at his small desk in the NATO support facility office. Unless some officer or civilian needed a Turkish regulation translated or an explanation of a local custom, there was no one for the sixty-two year old scholar to talk to, nothing to do except reread Islamic poetry verses. When Jamel signed into the unit, Shiraz had his mission: young Jamel knew basic Arabic after six years at a strict Black Muslim school. He knew some Koran passages and enjoyed Shiraz coaxing him to learn more.

  Shiraz introduced him to important locals at Mosque services. Jamel even appeared on the covers of Turkish newspapers, in full uniform, kneeling amid a mass of Turks at evening prayers. Shiraz did whatever he could to mentor and assist Jamel, he even arranged a wild boar hunt when the men asked him to. Like most Muslims, Shiraz was repulsed by the wild pigs—‘Dolmus,’ that the Americans called Boars and that ranged wild in the Northern woods. But everyone remembered how a jeep filled with beer-brave off duty Army troops had gone into those woods on a night hunt and how the men had barely survived being slashed and gored by an evil-tempered boar pack.

  “I have arranged a guide and beaters for you,” he told Jamel, Barney, and Reginald. “They will make noises to drive the pack within your aiming range. They know the bush and I shall go along on the trip to translate.”

  “Yesss!” Jamel sighed, slapping hands with the others. “This won’t be no cheesy rod and gun club outing: this is man against beast, on the ground, in the dark! The prize: a couple hundred pounds of bacon; theirs or ours!”

  The women laughed uneasily; Shamika said, “You bring back some of those monsters and a barbeque cloud will hang over Izmir for a week. That pork’ll bring big money on the G.I. market—for those of us that don’t eat the stuff…” Shamika’s laugh was cut off as the room and all Izmir shook from a deep, long, loud rumble.

  “Earthquake!” someone screamed.

  Shiraz Bey, who knew Turkish earthquakes, thought differently. “Not an earthquake, more like an explosion,” he said, leading them onto the balcony.

  “Over there,” he pointed towards the palm tree-lined city boulevard of beige buildings called ‘Little America.’

  All the U.S. military and diplomatic facilities were located there; The Post Exchange, finance and administration units stood side by side with the Commissary, Supermarket, Hospital and Dependent School buildings. Sure enough, a cloud of black smoke rose near the area.

  The men, caftans lifted high, ran from the apartment building towards the area. Fearing the worst, they approached the damage scene. It was at the large U.S. Information Service library located near the edge of Little America. A once massive expanse of glass front was a sheet of millions of glass shards along the surrounding streets. A Turkish police captain was at the scene and Shiraz translated for him: “A work of God,” he said, breathless. “I had a man on duty in a guard booth along the side of the building. He reports that a single lightning strike hit the glass, and—you see! How foolish to use that much glass in a country with earthquakes and storms! Allah Bey!”

  Barney moved away from the group, he picked his way through the rubble, whispering tightly into a small recording device he’d produced from somewhere. He also entered the building’s vault room after punching in a code known to him. He shut the steel door behind him.

  Barney emerged only long enough to give Reginald instructions to relay to the Consulate. As he turned to re-enter the vault, Jamel grabbed his arm. “What’s wrong?” he asked.His friend had on a fierce, intent face he’d never seen.

  Jamel caught Barney’s quick glance towards a rear brick wall; between damaged bookshelves was a black crater the size of a basketball. Books, once neatly shelved, were laid out in a wide sunburst pattern.

  The crater was its nucleus. Jamel saw what Barney knew: there was no lightning strike. Someone had planted a book bomb on a center shelf, perhaps expecting it to explode while the building was alive with students and staff. Barney’s thoughts centered on the awesome power of a simple secret act. As he returned to the vault room, he gave Jamel a message for Isabel and when Jamel objected to leaving him there alone, he said in a chill voice: “Don’t sweat for me, pal… I’m very much strapped.”

  By the next day, life was back to normal along Little America Boulevard. Groups of GIs, U.S. Government civilian employees, and their wives gathered in the snack bars, bookstores, and at the bowling
alley had read the official findings about the damage in the ‘Stars and Stripes,’ an English language newspaper:

  “A powerful lightning strike,” the story said.

  “Unfortunate disruption of services.”

  “They oughta find the engineer who put up that much glass in a disaster prone spot like this,” someone said, to everyone’s agreement. People in Izmir had lots of time for discussions. It took a newcomer a while to realize that there was no real military mission there. There were supply units to bring in provisions, furniture, and office materials; there were clerks and cooks and finance people to service and pay motor pool operators, medics, and morale specialists but there were no airplanes, bombs, or guns. Moreover, the Turkish Unions made sure that a Turk performed most work usually done by trained military plumbers, technicians, mechanics, etc. So that the men spent much of the days in snack bars and on their balconies drinking beer and complaining about the slow loss of their cutting edge skills.

  Izmir, being the site of a NATO headquarters, needed the U.S. colony to help provide support for the high-level U.S. officers and foreign officials who swarmed the headquarters. In turn, they shared use of facilities and ‘The Jolly,’ a leased grand hotel overlooking the bay, with restaurants, ballrooms, spas, and fine rooms at about fifteen dollars a night for military people and their families.

  Isabel told her friends about an incident in which some top Admirals and Generals of the NATO countries attended a ball at the Jolly. She recalled how the officers, in formal uniforms and gilded swords, their ladies in long gowns, went walking, in procession, from the bayside up the steep marble stairs that led to the teakwood and brass front doors. Suddenly, two drunken sergeants who had started a brawl in the upstairs bar and decided to take it outside, burst through the doors, locked together, and rolled down the broad stairway, bumping against the marble retaining wall, the only thing preventing them from rolling into the bay. Isabel said that immediately, some of the most powerful men in Europe ran down to pick the two up, examined them for injuries, and sent them stumbling on their way before rejoining their ladies and the aristocratic procession.

  “Izmir,” Isabel sighed, “is so weird!”

  She worried a little about Barney; since the night of the explosion, he’d seemed pensive, jumpy sometimes. She was glad when the hunt weekend came around; it was good to see him, Jamel, and Reg forget their work and concentrate on pumping up for their Wild Boar bonding trip.

  “Gonna kick some pork butts!” Reg growled (the men wondered why the women chuckled).

  They went off in a hired Land Rover at midnight, Macho talk died out about two o’clock and by four, all of them were nodding off, including the Turkish driver-guide. Shiraz Bey kept him on track as they made their way along unlit bush country roads to their rendezvous with ten hired local village men waiting with lit torches and metal clingers.

  Shiraz Bey explained that the guide would send the beaters out in a funnel pattern at the edges of a heavily wooded area known to be thick with ‘dolmus.’

  Their noise would stampede the beasts towards the hunters, placed at the ‘mouth’ of the funnel—shotguns ready. “Be careful,” he warned: the dolmus attack low and fast, if they get beneath a man’s waist, they’ll gore him by thrusting upwards… the hunters instinctively covered their crotches with their shotgun butts. But Jamel looked into Barney’s and Reginald’s eyes fiercely.

  “No fear!” he shouted. “No fear!” they answered back just as loud.

  They separated and spread out at thirty-yard intervals across the imaginary mouth of the funnel. Each was starkly alone and in blackness; couldn’t see more than six feet in any direction. Jamel, holding the center position, tried to shake off the shiver that only partially came from the chilly night air. From the distance, he heard the metallic noise of the lines of beaters, saw flickers of their torches through the trees and bush. Then he felt more than heard the muffled hoofs of angry, panicked beasts closing in, he cocked his weapon and dug his feet into the rough ground. He had a glimpse of red eyes moving, he heard deep rasping grunts as one of the swift herd took his scent and moved on him. A soundless scream shook his frame; he could see his attacker—steam rising from its hairy grunting dark mass… only his trigger finger escaped paralysis as he fired a single blast at the red eyes. The boar died instantly but the force of its forward charge propelled the carcass against Jamel’s legs, knocking him down and filling his nostrils with gamy, fetid stink.

  “Got mine,” he shouted, “got mine!”

  Jamel left a lighted flashlight to mark his kill and went looking for the others. He found Reg shaken but successful, standing over his still beast. They compared sizes and settled a side bet before they went looking for Barney. They couldn’t find him anywhere. At first they all joked that maybe Barney, under attack by a boar, had dropped his gun and his lunch and lit out into the woods or up a tree. But after four hours of searching the entire area, calling in a local Turkish army unit and its helicopter patrol, and after searching farmers’ huts and villages, they came together to admit to themselves that Barney had disappeared.

  Part 2

  American Izmir, being a small and nosey place, had suspected that Barney Chapin was a Spook—especially when word of his quick moves at the U.S. library disaster went round.

  Yankee Izmir never bought the official ‘lightning’ story on that incident either.So, as soon as word of Barney’s disappearance went around, people convened at the local places: bars, bowling alley, and bookstore and the consensus was that Jamel was involved in the abduction. They teased out the ‘evidence’: There was Jamel’s Muslim background and his ‘special’ friendship with Shiraz Bey and other Turks.

  Then there was his upscale lifestyle on corporals’ pay.

  The strongest lead, however, came with news that Shiraz Bey failed to report back at work after their return. A messenger sent by the unit to contact him found the family’s apartment empty.

  Army Intelligence and ‘another agency’ sent in a team of interrogators to work on Jamel. He was ordered to move into a windowless converted storage room in the headquarters building. They ignored his wish to go back up in the woods and continue the search. Turkish Interpol got involved: They found that Shiraz Bey was no Turk but an ethnic Iraqi who had moved easily across the wide frontier separating the countries for many years.

  He had no history of involvement in terrorism, but the fundamentalist Islam he followed gave spiritual points for extreme acts in support of Allah. The Turks were angry; they had been duped as well as the Americans by Shiraz Bey’s backers and they wanted to question Jamel in their special way.

  Isabel went back to work. She had given herself no peace since the night Jamel came to her, filthy and exhausted from the woods to tell her that Barney was missing. She spent a long while doubled up on the floor, clutching her elbows; the same way she had ‘coped’ with bad times at the orphanage… Her superiors had forbidden her to contact Shamika upstairs. She heard that Barney’s fellow agents had raided the apartment, torn it apart, looking for whatever they could find to implicate Jamel and locate Shiraz Bey and Barney.

  She imagined a Shamika terrified and lonely as she was.When the Consulate message arrived, saying that she was the only officer capable of resolving a new dangerous mess, she barely hesitated—glad to focus her mind, respond, get busy.

  On her way to the Consulate, clipping along in low-heel shoes, powered by nerves, she cursed as she had to stop and wipe dark blood from her shoes. “I wish they wouldn’t do this,” she whispered as she found herself in the midst of a friendly crowd of Turkish men and their family members. They were holding an opening ceremony for a new store and as she tried to pass, they drew her attention to the fluffy white body of a lamb lying at the curb, its throat cut as a good luck offering for the new business. People gestured that she should finger a drop of flowing blood to her forehead for good luck. She just gave the Turkish equivalent for “I’ll pass…” and hurried on to work.


  Isabel’s co-workers at the consulate were genuine in their concern for Barney and herself. They briefed her on the crisis situation: An American civilian executive, Grey Winslow, and his wife had enrolled their sixteen-year-old son at the French Institute, a prestigious prep school in Izmir. Many upper class Turks and most French and European expatriates sent their teenage kids there and the school had an international Euro-Pop style. Blue-jeaned and good-looking kids temporarily away from their strict parents, danced to records, sneaked in wines and marijuana supplied by sleazy horse and buggy drivers, and had long crushes on each other. Young Andrew Winslow quickly took up with lovely Maryam, sixteen-year-old daughter of a Turkish General and when an opportunity for privacy appeared; her parents’ trip to NATO headquarters in Germany, the couple decided to explore sex with a passionate weekend.

  But Maryam told her best friend, who told her own mother, who notified the police. A Turkish maiden’s hymen is a police matter in Turkey: When it is suspected that an unmarried girl has been sexually active, she and her lover may be arrested, and the girl is whisked off to the local ‘Judicial Doctor’ to examine her. If not a virgin, the girl can be sent to a government-run public whore market called the Kerahane. Maryam had wound up there and Andrew was being held in Izmir jail.

  Isabel flashed when she recalled the government’s excuse for the old, inhuman practice: It held that an immoral Muslim woman is unclean to her family and Allah and might as well be put to work serving the needs of young army soldiers. The men have first choice in the doorways of the storefront windows where the girls sit on couches in their lingerie and wait to be selected.