Gorgeous East (13 page)

“How long ago was that?” Jessica shot back.

“Tell you what”—Smith put an exploratory hand on the curve of her ass, which she shrugged away impatiently—“come back to New York with me and I’ll go to law school. I’ll join the Marines. I’ll do anything you want.”

“You’re completely pathetic,” she said, but she leaned over and kissed him on the cheek.

9.

T
hey emerged arm in arm from Buyuk Londra into the cool air a little before midnight, pausing for a moment at the summit of one of the narrow streets that led out to the Bogazkesen Cadesi. Across the Bosphorus hazy with low-lying mist, along the Asiatic shore, the closed summer palaces of Uskudar sat crumbling and derelict.

“Everything’s spinning,” Smith said, leaning his head against a shuttered garage. Its metal door showed layers of spray-painted graffiti: Islamist slogans, the hammer and sickle of the PKK—the Kurdish Workers Party—and an odd symbol, so recently done Smith could still smell the sharp tang of the paint: An eye or a fish, crossed with three dark lines.

“Take some deep breaths,” Jessica said. “If you’ve got to puke, puke. But I don’t think I can carry you home.”

“I’m fine,” Smith said. “Just resting . . .” Then he spun around suddenly and put his arm around her waist and kissed her on the lips. She pushed him away, but didn’t seem particularly annoyed, so he tried it again a moment later. This time, she kissed him back and he felt her tongue gently in his mouth and the erection stiffening in his pants before she pushed him away again.

“Whoa!
Tamam, tamam!
” she said. “Blast from the past. If Kasim saw us now”—she shivered with genuine fear—“he’d kill us both.”

“Fuck Kasim,” Smith said.

“Oh, I do.” Jessica grunted. “He wants it all the time, like three or four times a day. He’s a fuck machine. Comes home from work sometimes in the middle of the day just to fuck me. And let me tell you something, his cock”—she made a fist—“fat as a baby’s arm holding a sausage.”

“Oh, shit.” Smith grimaced. “Did I need to hear that?”

“You asked for it,” Jessica said.

Smith deflated, sagging against the metal garage door. He felt tears of self-pity welling up from the weak place in his soul, soft as rotten wood, and didn’t bother to stop them coming. His mission to Istanbul had been a failure; his dreams of Jessica, delicate as castles carved out of ice, were melting away as he stood there in the dark. Kasim was rich and exotic and he had a cock like an elephant. What could he do against such a man?

“Look, I better be getting back to the hotel,” he managed. “Thanks for dinner . . .”

“Don’t be such a kid.” Jessica made a face. “It’s only midnight. Kasim’s already pissed as shit. Might as well stay out ’til dawn.”

“No thanks,” Smith said mournfully. “I’m tired. Just tell me where I can get a cab—”

“One more place,” Jessica insisted. “I’m more or less off the booze lately, for various reasons that I won’t discuss, but booze isn’t the only game in town.”

At that moment, as if on cue, a taxi pulled up at the curb. It was an old, rakish Citroën DS, its sleek shark nose much dented and deformed from encounters with crazy Istanbul traffic. Jessica pushed Smith into the back and slid after him across the patched leather seat. She directed the driver to Kurtulus, a dangerous, impoverished neighborhood beyond the Tarlabasi Bulvari—she wasn’t sure of the exact address, she said, but would know it when they got there. Smith opened his mouth to protest, but didn’t, and let himself be driven along through the steep, narrow streets to an address on the wrong side of town.

10.

C
urtained booths lined the walls of the vaulted underground chamber, so full of fragrant smoke and so dimly lit, Smith could barely see Jessica’s face. They waited a while in the dark, narrow antechamber, where Jessica pushed him against the wall and kissed him openmouthed, this time without being prompted.

Finally the attendant, wearing an illegal fez and striped pantaloons like an old-fashioned harem master, led them to a booth in the corner that had just been vacated. He prepared the narghile—an ornate Turkish water pipe—changing the water and replacing the ivory mouthpiece. Jessica handed over a neatly rolled wad of lirasi; the attendant secreted this money somewhere in the folds of his pantaloons, padded off into the dim recesses of the place, and returned a few minutes later with a black, pasty mixture in a small rosewood box. He kneaded the stuff into a little black ball, pressed the ball into the bowl of the narghile, and lit it with a long fireplace match. Then he withdrew, closing the curtains discreetly behind him as he went.

The only light here was given off by a small, red-shaded oil lamp, Jessica reduced to a voluptuous shade, pressed back against the high-backed divan. An unmistakable moaning emanated from the booth next door.

“You want to go first?” Jessica said, holding out the mouthpiece.

“I don’t know,” Smith said doubtfully. “What is that stuff?”

“Specialty of the house,” Jessica said. “Dried rose petals, opium, a chunk of myrrh, and a small black pearl, crushed. The Ottoman sultans smoked it all day, then fucked their harem women all night long. Gets you high and makes you superhorny”—she leered—“it’s the big reason they lost their empire and everything went to hell.”

She took the first hit, taking the ivory mouthpiece between her teeth and drawing in. Smith leaned close and watched her face go slack with pleasure, eyes fluttering as she exhaled a narrow stream of gray smoke.

“Nice,” she murmured. “Very, very nice.”

Smith picked up the mouthpiece from where she let it fall and took a hit. The smoke was cool and flavorful, like roasted apples, like roses, like cinnamon with a pinch of something terribly bitter, an assassin creeping up behind. He felt things go loose around the edges, felt himself shedding some of the sorrow he’d been carrying around like a tight, black tumor in his heart. It floated up with the smoke and was gone; a definite prickling in his loins accompanied this lightness.

“Wow,” he said, when he could speak. “If you could smoke a quaalude, that . . .” He couldn’t finish the thought. A second thought flapped around the inside of his head on powdery blue moth wings and flew away.

“Lie here with me, baby,” Jessica said lazily, easing herself back on the divan.

Smith lay down beside her, his head on her shoulder.

“Put your hand on my tits,” she breathed.

He did so at once, gently kneading one, then the other. They felt solid, heavier than he remembered. Then he trailed down and pressed his hand firmly between her legs. He felt the dampness there as she angled up to meet him.

“Oh . . . ,” she breathed, excited. “This . . . this is just what Kasim was afraid of . . . oh!”

After a while, she took his face and held it between her hands, her blue eyes dark and glassy in the dim light of the oil lamp.

“You can’t fuck me,” she whispered. “Absolutely not. Swear you won’t try and fuck me.”

“Why not?” Smith said.

“You just can’t,” Jessica repeated. “Swear!”

“All right,” Smith said. “I swear.”

“Kasim would know if you fucked me. He’d smell you on me. I could take a shower, I could take two showers, it wouldn’t matter. He’s got a nose like, umm—” She paused, thinking hard, but just couldn’t say what kind of nose he had. “But listen, he won’t . . . I mean he refuses to . . .” She hesitated. “He won’t go down on me.”

“What? That’s crazy!”

“Yeah, he says men don’t do that in Turkey, some macho bullshit. So would you . . . I mean, you know how I like, umm . . . would you please . . . I mean that’s not fucking, right?”

“Only fucking is fucking,” Smith said. “Look at Clinton.”

“Just swear you won’t fuck me. O.K.?”

“O.K., O.K.,” Smith said.

“You swear?”

“Jesus! Do you want me to go down on you or not?”

Jessica smiled and arranged herself across the cushions and Smith knelt between her legs and peeled her out of the beige pants embroidered all over with paisleys and a pair of matching paisley panties underneath. She had stopped shaving down there—the way Kasim liked it, she said—and as Smith lowered himself to his task, he began working surreptitiously on the buckle of his belt. A few minutes later, he pulled up and slid out of his jeans and boxers and was inside of her in a single efficient motion. She thrashed against him, pounded her fists on his back.

“No!” she said. “Stop! Now! Get off me!” But not loud enough for anyone beyond the booth to hear her. “No! You swore! Bastard! I told you, no! I . . . ah! Ah!”

A long, violent spasm overtook her; arms flailing, she nearly knocked the narghile off its stand. Smith followed a moment later, releasing two years’ worth of pent-up frustration, longing, mental anguish, sleepless nights, the dark and bitter juice of his broken heart, deep into her body.

11.

A
fterward in the same battered Citroën on the way back to Beyoglu, Smith watched the faltering lights of Terebasi pass out the scratched window, feeling drained but very pleased with himself. He had come all the way from New York just to fuck her and now he’d done it, the first personal goal he’d met successfully in several years. But Jessica sat trembling with anger, pressed away from him against the far door. Tears had blurred the mascara down her cheeks into a grotesque kind of Rorschach test—showing, perhaps, a cobra eating a mouse. Smith reached for her hand but found it clenched into a tight fist. She jerked away at his touch, then brought the fist up suddenly and coldcocked him, a powerful blow to the left side of his jaw. Smith actually saw stars—

“
Oww!
” he exclaimed, and the force of the punch knocked his head against the window. “What did you do that for?” Though he knew. He looked up, rubbing his jaw, and saw the driver watching them in the rearview.

“Rapist!” Jessica hissed. “You raped me!”

“Hey, come on, Jess!” Smith cajoled. “You can’t exactly call that rape.”

“Bullshit! You’re a rapist! I told you not to fuck me! You swore you wouldn’t, but you fucked me anyway. I told you not to! That’s rape!”

“Probably not in Turkey,” Smith said. “Given the circumstances.”

“You
bastard
!” she shouted. And she hit him hard on the side of the head and would have caught him on the jaw again had he not grabbed her wrists. They sat there like that for a long minute, tense, panting, then Smith let her go and she fell back into her corner and began to sob.

“Jessica, please,” Smith said. “I love you . . .” His voice trailed off. But it wasn’t exactly true—he knew that now. In the last hour his love had clearly revealed itself to be a kind of passionate narcissism—part sexual obsession, part illusion, part pride, part anger, part revenge. And now he was spent and empty and there was nothing left but the ashes and a puff or two of pale smoke drifting away, smoke that held the fragrance of rose petals, myrrh, opium, and a crushed black pearl nestled in a black shell dredged up from the depths of the Black Sea.

12.

T
he taxi stopped on Istiklal Caddesi, idling loudly at the bottom of Vatran’s street and the steps that led up to his house. From here, Smith could just make out the aquarium glow of the third-floor window, and a menacing figure pacing back and forth inside.

“Please, Jess.” Smith reached for her hand again. “Come back to New York with me. . . .” Even though the offer was no longer quite sincere.

“I’d rather go to hell.”

“I really worry about you over here,” Smith persisted, trying his best to sound concerned. “You don’t love Vatran. That’ll end too. If you won’t come back with me, at least come back to the States. Don’t waste too many years among strangers.”

“You don’t get it,” Jessica hissed. “I’m pregnant.”

“But . . .” How could it happen so quickly? he thought stupidly. And how could she be so sure?

“With Kasim’s baby, you fucking idiot,” she spat, reading his thoughts.

“Oh, shit!”

“Yeah. Shit.”

“That’s why Vatran didn’t want you to drink.”

She shook her head. “He doesn’t know yet.”

“Wait a minute—you’re pregnant and smoking opium?”

“I checked with a doctor, a little opium’s O.K. at this stage. Hell, the doctors here prescribe an opium derivative to ease morning sickness.”

“Come on! That’s fucked-up! You’re—”

Smith stopped himself suddenly. He felt his stomach churn, a sour taste in his mouth that wasn’t the aftertaste of opium at all but something else, some oestral hormone, and he suddenly called to mind the pleasant but unusual heaviness of her breasts and the rounded contours of her belly and felt sick to his stomach. He had just had sex with a woman pregnant with someone else’s baby! There was a gut-wrenching, existential horror in the thought.

Jessica burst into tears again and jumped out of the car and slammed the door closed.

“Rapist!” she shouted. “Self-absorbed asshole!”

She ran up the street, stumbling once, but catching herself, painfully, palms-out against the top step. Then, the front door of Vatran’s house sprung open soundlessly as if activated by an electronic eye and she disappeared inside and Smith sat there and watched her go. Now the taxi driver turned to him. He had a long, narrow face; a thick scar showed white against the dark skin of his forehead.

“We drive now, sir,” he said in English. “Many peoples here know this house. The man who live there”—he shook his head—“very violent man.”

At that moment a burly silhouette appeared in the doorway, a dark something clutched in his right hand. Vatran’s servant, Smith guessed. He didn’t want to stick around long enough to figure out what the man was holding.

“Stamboul Palace Hotel,” Smith said anxiously. “Go!”

The taxi driver lurched into gear and the car bounced over the tram tracks and down Istiklal Caddesi. A second later came a small burst of flame and sharp cracking sound instantly followed by the rattle of a bullet hitting the cobbled street a foot shy of the rear tire of the accelerating Citroën.