The Favorites of the Sun

by Mac Pope

  Soldiers received several vouchers a month, validated by the Kerahane cashier. Other males paid cash; men scanned newspaper arrest reports for news of new arrivals.

  The gravity of her job crowded out Isabel’s other concerns: The distraught Turkish General’s predicament could derail new NATO plans for the area, already shaky from the never-ending Turkish/Greek feud. She had to go to the police station and drink Chai, a strong, thick tea served in exquisite, hot little glasses. The serving of Chai, made thicker by multiple sugar cubes, was the police chief’s only claim to civility; it had to be drunk earnestly before any negotiation could begin.

  Experience kept Isabel from gagging.

  She charmed the policemen by silencing her interpreter and addressing them in careful Turkish. They wanted to know more about American Law Enforcement; which to them was Telly Savala’s re-runs and chase scene movies.

  Police Chief Ergun was the shrewd one though; unreadable eyes in a puffy, swarthy face framed by sideburns and moustache.

  He could release the kids, but he had to weigh the value of the U.S. Consulates’ fierce gratitude and the gracious nods of aristocratic Turkish senior officers against the national notoriety and the new house he could get by selling the story to the press.

  Isabel knew.

  She used just the right adjectives to hint to him of a new house and even a vacation cottage near the beach at Bodrun—all that upon the families’ return from a stay in New York.

  She brought the kids home and had a little period of good feelings with the families and with her Consulate peers. Even her nightmares tapered off for a while.

  Shamika, meanwhile, had paced her apartment until she had to get out. Jamel was still confined to a room at the headquarters, under guard by investigators. Marisa was at the American daycare center all day and Shamika was stressed by her night dreams and her daydreams. The apartment was a wreck. They had used knives to cut open her leather couches, the mattresses, even their clothes… searching. They were rude; two of them were Barney’s colleagues, introduced to her by Barnibel in better days, guests at her place even. Bastards!

  She needed to be with someone; she was forbidden contact with Isabel and other people she knew stayed away…

  She wanted to go to the Lord. The American church—the beautiful Basilica downtown hosted Protestant services in part of the space—was filled with accusing eyes and she shied away from Little America altogether.

  Shamika went to Fatima, her maid. They’d always had a good relationship. Shamika sat with her for girl talk so often that Fatima learned to speak broken North Carolina English. Shamika informed her that she came from a long line of maids and had done some maid work herself. They joked about cheapskates and arrogant madams, dirty old man husbands and ‘souvenirs’ they took home. She wrapped her head and neck in a scarf, put on a long coat and went with Fatima to services at the Mosque. It was peaceful there, in the women’s enclosure, she could focus on Allah, as she knew Him, trying to make a plan. During a break from the rituals, Fatima nudged her arm excitedly, pointing out an old woman they both recognized: Birket Ana, Shiraz Bey’s mother. She was part of a group attending a funeral ceremony in an outer courtyard. Shamika stared; it was obviously a family member’s rites and she searched the covered heads of the women for a certain shape and face: Ana—she saw her! Ana, behind dark glasses and veil didn’t notice olive-complexioned Shamika in the crowd.

  “We gonna follow the bitches,” Shamika told Fatima, “You with me, girl?”

  “We do it!”

  “Ana’s people got to be Turk and she must have sneaked back here to bury her kin—stinkin’ heifer grinned in my face all the time she was helping screw us—backstabbin’ people!”

  “Some people no good,” Fatima said thoughtfully, “Koran say…”

  They saw Ana kiss her relatives goodbye and hurry to a boxy shaped Anadol taxicab.

  The two women took the next taxi in the rank, ordered the driver to follow at a distance.

  The destination was the noisy, crowded central bus station. They dismissed their cab and shadowed Ana as she bought her ticket and joined a long line at a bus marked for the northern border town of Kurlya.

  “Fatima… I’m gonna track her to Barney if I can; I want you to go back and take care of Marisa for a few days…”

  “But you need me for to speak the Turkish…”

  “No, I’m going to be a mute woman…” Shamika held her palm across tight lips. “I’ll be OK—just take care of my little girl.”

  “I will have her to my house and to my heart,” Fatima said. They parted and Shamika tightened her headscarf and bought a ticket to Kurlya.

  Shamika sat in a back seat of the bus, sleepless and scared as she crossed the panoramic, endless landscape of Turkey’s volcanic valleys and mountains. The bus stank. It was a relief to arrive at way station stops; the driver’s helper would spray the cabin with a citrus perfume and leave the doors open for a while. Toilets at the stops were a little trench in the floor and ‘toilet paper’ was a trickle of water from a spigot next to the trench.

  But Ana was in sight at all times, and though she had no idea what she would do in the end, Shamika intended to stay on her like a scab on a sore.

  The agents cross-examining and guarding Jamel had begun to believe him; that he was clueless about Barney’s disappearance and that he was worried sick about his friend. Jamel had passed lie detector tests with ‘credible’ ratings. He even kept to his story when they injected him with hypnotic drugs… but that wasn’t the information headquarters and Interpol needed to hear, so the agents bided their time, keeping Jamel in custody but loosening their hold on him.

  They played cards with him, shared their ‘soguks’—take-out Turkish pizza, and brought in beer and videotapes of recent football games. They even let him take walks outside in the courtyard. It was there he overhead two Americans passing by talking.

  “Now that GI turncoat’s wife done took off to the other side!”

  “They ought to airmail his butt over to Leavenworth! Treason’s still a death penalty offense!”

  “I’ve never really trusted those people…” the other man said. “They’re sorta’ like a knife at our nation’s throat, you know…”

  Jamel went over the courtyard’s metal fence as soon as the men passed.

  Isabel was so happy to see him that she screamed and she hugged Jamel, forgetting the warning orders the Consulate had given her.

  “I had nowhere else to go…” he said, “I need to find my Sham and my Marisa—I need to know who’s doin’ this to us, Bel?” “Me too,” she told him, “but Marisa’s OK, your maid Fatima was keeping her; she brought her to me yesterday. She’s here Jamal, she’s fine, she asked me to take her to her daycare this morning and I did.” Jamel collapsed into a couch while Isabel put on some coffee. “There’s something else you need to hear!” she called from the kitchen. “I made Fatima tell me where Shamika’s gone…”

  The ugly little town of Turiya was in sight of the bus.The end of the bone aching trip down rollercoaster mountain roads and across endless plains wasn’t much of a comfort for Shamika; she had fought back nausea and terrible boredom, their place taken now by mounting fear. It was night and the bus passed along unpaved roads, chased by packs of mongrel dogs (if not wolves) past shabby buildings towards the town center. In the far distance, Shamika could actually see the lighted guard shacks marking the border crossings into Iraq.

  Shamika realized that she wouldn’t be able to trail Ana Shiraz Bey into Iraq. Even if she slipped past the Turk guards, suppose she got caught on the Iraqi side? So had she come all this way just to watch that back-stabbing heifer step out of sight and go where they were probably torturing poor Barney?

  No. Staring at Ana’s confident straight back, she thought of the mess everyone she loved was in, she thought of the funk and the bumps she’d endured for thirteen hours and her Brooklyn instincts took over.

  As the bus pulled into the terminal
lit up with technicolor light bulbs and blaring loud rural folk music, Shamika calmly made her plan. She saw a sign on a squat building nearby that said ‘Pansiyon Omar’ and ‘Hos Geldeniz!’ She knew that meant it was a small hotel and that there were rooms available. When they dismounted the bus, she stood in the shadows as Ana claimed her baggage and hailed a taxi to take her to the border. Shamika saw her chance when Ana impulsively rushed over to a public toilet shack. Shamika was right behind her, in her hand the three-inch kitchen knife she always carried in her purse. Shamika pushed her way in with Ana, who was too shocked to yell.

  “You mine, bitch!”

  “Allah Bey!”

  In Turkey, the sight of two women (or two men) walking arm in arm indicates long friendships and gives onlookers warm feelings about life. Shamika walked to Ana’s taxi locked at the elbow with her, the knife poking secretly in Ana’s armpit. They checked in at ‘Pansiyon Omar’; the traumatized Ana doing as she was told. When they were safely behind the door of their room, Shamika tied her up with her nylon stockings and sealed her mouth with tape from a first aid kit. But first, she ordered her to telephone her husband: he was to come for her, he was to bring Barney Chapin unharmed and trade him for his wife, unharmed.

  “Turiya…” Jamel shouted when he heard Fatima’s story, "Oh—that girl got guts!

  “Bel, can you get me a car? Rental, government—anything, and a gun?”

  Isabel recalled that she had motor pool privileges to check out a Jeep for business or stress relief trips. And she’d once discovered Barney’s hiding place in the apartment for his code safe and nine-millimeter pistol.

  She went out to secure the vehicle while Jamel scanned maps of Northern Turkey.

  “Shiraz Bey demands to speak to you,” Ana told Shamika.

  She pulled the phone back from Ana’s face and hissed at the man, Brooklyn-style. “You piece of shit, you heard what I want, you do it, now!”

  “Let Ana go, Shamika…” His voice was calm, scholarly.

  “Barney’s case is in powerful hands now. He and others will be under Iraq’s protection for the capital city against air attacks and missiles. He is insurance for hospitals and schools… As Allah is Merciful, we believers must provide the routes for His mercy…”

  “Insure his mercy on your own house! Ana’s gon’ bleed until you come for her.” She pulled Ana’s hair and let her scream pass through the receiver.

  “I come,” Shiraz Bey said, gravely.

  “On my terms, Shiraz?”

  “Yes, you dung of a black rat!”

  Jamel would have to leave Izmir by night. People were always watching from hundreds of balconies, and his picture was in police patrol cars. Isabel had gotten a military jeep and found the Walther pistol. She wanted to go. She said Marisa was happy with Fatima who could walk her to and from school. Besides, Jamel would be highly visible alone on the long road trip North.

  “No,” he said.

  She tried tears. “I’ve been left behind all my life, Jamel,” she said grasping his sleeve, “the four of us are in this… don’t leave me here wondering.”

  “No,” he said again with a little less force.

  She went to hardball: “My jeep and my gun… and if I stay, I’d be honor-bound to tell my boss about the chance I’m giving you… I won’t deceive…”

  “OK. Pack out like you’re going to Bodrun on a beach trip. I’ll curl up under a blanket at the back of the seats, we’ll leave now, and when we get there, you can have the half of Shiraz Bey I leave behind…”

  Shamika fretted for twelve hours in the little room with Ana, waiting for the next contact from Shiraz. Ana was getting on her nerves, complaining about being tied up, and explaining how logical and strategic it was to take Barney hostage for ‘the good of the Islamic world and for black people everywhere.’ Besides wanting to gag her again, Shamika worried that Shiraz’s masters wouldn’t give up for Ana’s sake. They could either storm the hotel and take them both or cheat on the prisoner exchange.

  When the call finally came through, Shiraz said that Barney had been brought to the Iraqi side of the Turiya frontier, she willed herself not to panic. It was like a major Brooklyn drug deal, she told herself; each side is a player with something to lose or win. She vaguely remembered a documentary film she’d seen on the Panmunjom prisoner exchanges during the Korean War.

  She’d set things up like that.

  “Bring yours to the Iraqi side blockade at 9 in the morning, broad daylight so we don’t swap no frontiers. It’s a short distance between the border guard shacks so we’ll release our, uh ‘assets’ eyeball to eyeball, at the same time, so Barney and Ana can say ‘how do’ as they pass. OK?”

  “Nine o’clock.”

  Now all she had to do was get through the night. Shamika checked and found the room across the hall was unoccupied and unlocked. She moved herself and Ana over there and kept watch on the corridor from the peephole in the door. She even plumped the blankets up with pillows in the old room, expecting whatever.

  They came in the night, heavy, swarthy men in thick turtleneck sweaters and black masks covering their entire heads. Shamika had stayed awake and saw them attack the other door, moving swiftly and professionally. She saw the steely glint of long knives in their hands, heard the grunting desk clerk being forced to unlock the door and then heard outraged shouts from within the room. The desk clerk was shrugging and showing the palms of his hands as they pushed him aside and left as quickly as they came.

  “Traced us, phone traced us,” Shamika mused, biting her lower lip. Good thing she’d got pissed off and gagged Ana… She cried—she never cried, but they were tears of fear and frustration, and she let go. She was hunted, hungry, and alone; she may as well have stayed in Brooklyn.

  Jamel and Isabel pulled into Turiya at about the same time the men arrived at Pansiyon Omar. They went to the bus terminal seeking leads and although all three taxi drivers were gone for the night, two of the beggars reclining outside on cardboard mats overcame their shock at Isabel’s clear Turkish and generous tips. They recalled seeing two women get shakily into Mustafa Kerman’s cab the previous day. One of the beggars even accompanied Jamel and Isabel to Mustafa’s one-room, clay-walled dwelling. He, Mustafa, dutifully got up and came outside to meet them but wouldn’t speak until his son fetched glasses of chai from an all-night ‘Chaiya.’ Mustafa said that he’d taken the women; one nervous looking, the other dumb; as a post to the Pension Omar—a flea-house he called it.

  They had parked the jeep and turned off the lights just as the assassins rushed out of the building. Theirs were the only two active automobiles in all of Turiya at past four in the morning, so Jamel and Isabel figured the angry men speeding away were danger. For the second time, the scared innkeeper showed the empty room against his will.

  Shamika saw them through her peephole and nearly fainted.

  She threw open the door and jumped on them whooping like a madwoman. “Allah be praised! Thank you, Jesus!” she cried, “Oh, Jam! Isabel!” The three of them hugged in the hallway. “We still got trouble,” Shamika told them and briefed on what she’d done. Jamel tied up the innkeeper alongside Ana. This time, Isabel put the call through to Shiraz’s location at the border. In a strained voice, admitting nothing, Shiraz agreed again to the prisoner exchange and the transfer time.

  At nine o’clock next morning, a haggard-looking Barney Chapin passed a haggard-looking Ana Shiraz Bey in the border corridor walkway. She didn’t look at him. He looked through her. Instead, he saw his Isabel and his friends and broke out in an end zone dance. They all did.

  An Old Child

  They wanted a child, Janet and Tom, wanted that more than anything. Their child was to be the next stage in their fast-paced but blessed and lucky, happy young lives. They had done everything right; they had been smart kids, then serious young adults, and later, lovers at Howard University, where they also became focused achievers in their career worlds: Janet was a chemical engineer for Pfizer
, Tom, a psychiatrist in private practice after post-grad work at Brandeis. They had always been the best-looking couple in whatever crowd they were with and they always seemed to end up the leaders—the trendsetters.

  Janet came from New Orleans’ quadroon people: butterscotch brown in hue; hair lanky, shiny, and brunette. Tom was just barely ‘stick around’ brown. He was Dr. Tom Rollins III; both his father and grandfather had been no-nonsense Down South physicians. The couple’s friends and co-workers thought a lot of them, looked up to them, and came around for advice, but most of their friends, some married more than a year after Janet and Tom, had kids. Since the Rollins’ were outgoing people, everyone knew that it was their biology that was blocking them from their greatest ambition: having children.

  After many visits to specialists and therapists, after too many disappointing ‘possibilities,’ they took deep breaths and went to the adoption agencies. They went with the determination that the child they took would be as close as possible to the child they might have had.

  On the first day of the first visit to the ‘Young Africa’ agency, they were peering through a one-way mirror at their dream child—children actually—they were twins, a boy and girl, golden eight-year-olds with silky curly hair, intelligent brown eyes and magazine cover faces.

  “A one in a million find,” the adoption specialist, Ms. Sadler told them. “Healthy! No diseases, bright—above-grade reading…" she said. Then her voice went confidential in tone.”I’d really like to match you two with those two, but I must let you know, there are others interested, very interested in those marvelous kids…"

  Janet noticed another child in the room, a dark-skinned, heavy girl about twelve years old with an oval face. She was vaguely pretty, wearing an ancient, patient half-smile. She stood motionless, dressed in an older woman’s shabby dress and institutional brogan shoes, while the twins, Paul and Sara, chased each other around her, swung from her arms, even punched her sometimes in their play. She looked to be thirteen.

  “The half-sister…” Ms. Sadler explained with a flap of her hand, “her name’s ‘Anastasia’… all these people give their babies are bad names and a long road. The mother and Anastasia’s father weren’t much and both went down from drugs, but the twin’s dad was a merchant marine seaman from Turkey or somewhere Eastern. Anastasia lives at a foster home for older girls, but we let her visit when we bring the twins in for ‘showing.’ Well, she sort of insists on being around to see who gets them.”