Gorgeous East (16 page)

6.

W
hen the police sergeant came to take Smith from his cell, he refused to go. He wanted to stay buried there, suspended like an embryo between his old life and whatever unpleasantness lay ahead.

“Immediate! You, please,” the sergeant said in broken English. “Must go Inspektor Biryak.”

But Smith shook his head and crawled beneath the cement slab he’d been sleeping on for a week and wrapped himself firmly around the metal supports. Swearing, the sergeant went off and returned with two burly cadets—both former wrestling champs in the All Istanbul League—and these young men wrenched Smith from his hole and, seizing his arms and legs, carried him, sagging between them like the corpse of a drowned man pulled from the Bosphorus, up the stairs to the inspektor’s office. They entered respectfully, bowing their heads—it was the first time they had been in the office of such an exalted personage—lay Smith gently on the floor faceup, and exited, still bowing.

Inspektor Biryak came around his cluttered desk, hands in the pockets of his uniform jacket, and stared down at Smith staring up.

“Come now!” he said sternly. “Get up off my floor, Mr. Smith!”

Smith, who had been studying a water stain in the ceiling, met the inspektor’s gaze with some effort. What he saw there—concern, amusement, mixed with a healthy dose of justified contempt—caused him to get up, dust himself off, and take a seat in the chair opposite the inspektor’s desk.

“Good,” the inspektor said. “Now . . .”

He turned and began shuffling through a pile of papers on his desk until he found Smith’s passport, casually tossed there a week before: Smith almost burst into tears when he saw this familiar document and reached out for it as one reaches for the hand of an old friend. The inspektor ignored this gesture. He leaned back against his desk, tapping his glossy fingernails against the passport’s blue cover.

“I have completed my investigation of your lamentable case and have concluded that you bear no direct legal responsibility for the death of Kasim Vatran and his wife.”

“They weren’t married,” Smith croaked, interrupting, his voice crackling with disuse. “Jessica never married the man.”

“Ah, but she did,” the inspektor said. “A civil ceremony performed last month at a private resort on the Black Sea. Would you like to see the documents?”

“No,” Smith said, deflating. So she had married the monster after all.

“Of course, there are certain crimes I can charge you with. Adultery, for one,” the inspektor continued. “Or use of banned substances, or various other anti-Turkish activities—perhaps including possession of forbidden headgear, should I by chance discover a fez in your luggage. But I have decided not to pursue any of these possibilities.”

“
Te
ekkür ederim
,” Smith said humbly. “No doubt you have had some time to reflect on the damage you have caused here in Istanbul.” Inspektor Biryak’s tone now was deadly serious. “Is that correct, Mr. Smith?”

“Yes,” Smith whispered.

“And do you regret your role in this tragedy?”

“Utterly,” Smith said, with as much sincerity as he could muster. Then: “Sir, do you think I might see the body? Jessica’s, I mean. To say good-bye.” He felt a gothic impulse to throw himself across her strangled corpse, to plant one last kiss on her decomposing lips, to beg her forgiveness, as if dead flesh could forgive the living.

“I’m sorry.” Inspektor Biryak shook his head. “Madame Vatran has been cremated along with her husband. Their ashes were spread yesterday over the sea at Ince Burun, where they were married. This was the family’s request.”

Smith swallowed a lump in his throat. Jessica was completely gone. Even her ashes, a fine gray powder, dissolved into the great shroud of the sea. She might have found happiness with Kasim, with her half-Turkish baby, and her plush, circumscribed life in Istanbul. She might have converted to Islam, taken to wearing the veil, discovered the peace of Allah. It no longer mattered. Jessica, Kasim, the baby—they were all equal now.

A pause. Inspektor Biryak studied Smith for a long moment, then nodded to himself, confirming something.

“Some friends have come for you,” he said at last.

“Friends?” Smith looked up, surprised. He couldn’t think of any friends, at least not in this hemisphere.

The inspektor tossed over the passport. Smith nervously let it slip through his fingers, then leaned over and scooped it quickly off the floor.

“I have decided to release you into their custody,” the inspektor said. “But your tourist visa has been revoked. You will leave Turkey within twenty-four hours.”

Inspektor Biryak turned away and resumed his seat behind a desk piled high with paperwork, with reports and affidavits, with far more important matters.

7.

T
he tea peddler and the letter writer stood waiting on the sidewalk when Smith, blinking, dazzled by the outdoor light, came down the steps from the Galatasary station. Smith, dressed again in his own clothes, now indelibly stained with Vatran’s blood, his boots and watch returned, smelled like an animal after a week in the cell without washing, but this didn’t seem to bother the waiting Turks. The tea peddler stepped up first and embraced him warmly, tears in his eyes.

“
Benim maalesef çocuk!
” the tea peddler lamented, wiping tears from his face. “
Benim çocuk!
”

The letter writer stood back gravely, like a concerned uncle, then reached out and took hold of Smith’s hand.

“Hakim and I have been concerned,” the letter writer said. “We have much found your photograph in the newspapers.”

Smith had never been happier to see anyone in his life than these two relative strangers.

“Geez, guys!” he managed, temporarily reverting to his original Midwestern self. “Oh, geez! Thanks so much for coming!”

“Did they beat you?” the letter writer asked, lowering his voice. “Did they beat you here”—he gestured to the blown-out wingtip he wore—“bottom of your feet?”

“No.” Smith shook his head.

“Because there exist laws against such practice.” The letter writer wagged his head adamantly. “Very strict laws against use of the
falaka
, which is a small but very terrible stick to beat the bottom of the feet. We are a civilized nation, we Turks. We have been civilized for many years and such practices are no longer allowed.”

“Really, I’m O.K.,” Smith said. “
Tamam, tamam.
” It was the one Turkish word he had adopted into his personal vocabulary. So neat and expressive:
Tamam
. It’s fine.

“Very good,” the letter writer said. “We go.”

The Turks each took one of Smith’s arms and walked him over to the tram station at Tünel. The tram came; the letter writer dropped a handful of coins into the till, enough for all three of them, and they clambered up and clanked slowly along Istiklal on this antique conveyance. Smith stared out the window dazed, nearly terrified by the crazy swirl of pedestrians and cars, but he couldn’t take his eyes away. Over the course of the week in the fluorescent cell, he had come to know every crack in its gray-green walls, every subtle gradation of color; his ears attuned to faint scraping sounds far away in the silence. All the noise and movement on the street now suggested the immediate aftermath of an explosion: He was glad for the watery hush of the Abdulhak Hamit Hamam—a dilapidated, old-fashioned steam bath—when they got there twenty minutes later.

Once again, Smith surrendered his clothes and was this time given a pair of wooden clogs and a striped towel to cover his lower half. He left the tea peddler and the letter writer in the antechamber, the peeling wood-paneled
camekan
, and followed the bath attendant into the steam room. Here he sat for a contemplative hour, sweating profusely, the foul stench of incarceration running out of his pores. At last, the attendant returned and led him to the marble
gobektasi
and laid him out facedown and went to work, slapping and kneading and twisting Smith’s limbs, his joints cracking, his skin pinkening beneath the blows. When he could take no more of this beating, he was lathered, rinsed, and released, wobbly and weak in the knees, into one of the outer rooms. Here, on a wooden bench, the tea peddler and the letter writer sat waiting for him. They had in the meantime gone to the Stamboul Palace and retrieved Smith’s duffel and the remainder of his clothes.

“Thank you, my friends,” Smith said, once again moved by their concern for his welfare.

He sat on the bench between them and tea was brought—strong and sweet, with mint leaves crushed at the bottom like a mojito.

“
Pek parlak degil
,” commented the tea peddler, by way of professional assessment, making a face, but he drank the stuff anyway and the three of them sipped for a while in companionable silence. Then, the tea peddler set down his cup and spoke at length. When he stopped speaking, he smiled sadly and patted Smith’s arm in a consoling manner. This gesture was the only thing that didn’t need translating:

“Hakim says many thing,” the letter writer began, after a moment. “But first he says to know you are a gentle person who is like his son to him, and he is sad such terrible events happen to you.”

“Thanks, Hakim.” Smith nodded. “Thank you so much.”

“Also he says about how he see your picture published in
Akit
where they write that you do terrible, un-Turkish, and anti-Islamic things. That you cause the killing of a good Turk, that you spit, so to speak, on the beard of the prophet, peace be upon him. Understand, following your arrest there was very many people shouting outside the Galatasary police station, they”—he hesitated, a flush coming to his cheeks—“wanted to take you, to beat you, they want to cut your”—he indicated Smith’s crotch—“your manhood away. They try to smash the door down so the police must come out with plastic shields, with helmets and clubs—but before this, Hakim comes. Hakim stands up and says how you are only such a sensitive boy brought low by the woman in the window. He tells what he has seen, the golden-haired woman almost naked there beneath a big piece of glass, but no one will believe him. They shout, they throw rocks. Finally there is a terrible fight and the police beat many people with clubs and the crowd goes away finally, some to prison, some to hospital.”

“My God!” Smith said, horrified. “I had no idea. How awful!” He’d caused a riot, he’d almost caused the lynching of his good friend the tea peddler!

“Very terrible,” the letter writer agreed. “So we come back four days ago to have you out of jail, because of course you have done nothing wrong, but Inspektor Biryak tells us they must keep you locked up until passions are forgot by the people, but not to worry because the people is so easy to forget—” He paused to take a sip of his tea. “The inspektor was indeed correct. Today, they shout and scream about another things, a few foolish cartoons of the prophet in a newspaper in Finland, and now you are here safe with us.”

“Oh, geez,” Smith began, but he couldn’t say more, again moved to tears by what these two men had done for him: The tea peddler had confronted a lynch mob on his behalf; both of them had sought his release from imprisonment in a country where such an action might have been construed as sedition and landed them behind bars with no tradition of habeas corpus to get them out again.

“How can I ever repay you—” Smith began, but the letter writer interrupted gently.

“Good men must help other good men,” he said. “In America, in Istanbul, doesn’t matter. Else the bad sleep well.” He made a gesture.

“Yes, you’re right,” Smith said, touched by the nobility of this sentiment—though he couldn’t think of himself at that moment as a very good man.

“
Nerede gidis?
” the tea peddler asked, and the letter writer translated.

“I don’t know.” Smith shrugged. “Back to Paris for now. Then, New York. Or somewhere to toughen up, emotionally, I mean. I definitely need to get my shit together. Maybe I’ll join the Marines,” he joked. “That’s what Jessica said . . .”

When the tea was done, Smith dressed quickly in clean clothes from the duffel, and the men took him on the tram to Tünel, where they transferred to the funicular down to Karakoy. From here, they walked arm in arm through the crowds across the Galata Bridge, the tower on Galata Hill receding behind. A stiff breeze lifted off the Golden Horn, whipping the blue-green water beneath the pilings into whitecaps. The wind and the water brought Smith’s spirits up a notch—I have never had such good friends, he thought—and they got back on the tram at Eminonu and rode it down one stop to the Sirkeci Station.

On trains departing from the echoing interior of this tile and plaster terminus, it was possible to reach Paris via Edirne, Sofia, Bucharest, Vienna, Brussels, and points in-between, an expensive trip even at its cheapest, with four or five transfers that would take several days and consume nearly all of Smith’s remaining funds. He didn’t have a plane ticket back to the States, hadn’t planned that far ahead. But he couldn’t allow himself to think further along than Paris—a city he knew well, where he had once lived for eight months during an AID-Amicale Etats-Unis-sponsored production of
Oklahoma!
(not a great gig); he’d only been in the chorus.