Gorgeous East (14 page)

4

THE UGLY AMERICAN

COWBOY

1.

G
rainy afternoon light slanted through the steel shutters into Smith’s room at the Stamboul Palace. He lay fully clothed except for his shoes and socks beneath the bedspread, farting in his sleep. The phone was ringing and had been ringing for some time, for hours maybe. He sat upright, head pounding, stomach raw, and all at once threw himself out of bed to puke in the bathroom sink. The phone was still ringing when he came out wiping his mouth on a towel and now he picked it up:

“Yeah?” he said hoarsely.

“She’s dead,” the voice said. “I thought you might want to know.”

“Who is this?” Smith said, though he knew.

“Come down, if you want to hear the rest of the story.”

“Wait a minute—” Smith began, but the voice was gone. He stood there for a long time, the empty humming sound of the line in his ear. It couldn’t be true; some kind of stupid joke. But against his better instincts, he pulled on a clean T-shirt, slipped his feet sockless into his cowboy boots, and went downstairs on the creaky wrought-iron elevator that had once been graced by the evanescent beauty of Garbo herself.

The lobby was thronged with people in their Sunday best—brunch at the Stamboul Palace had been a tradition with consular staff since the 1920s—and Smith pushed through the crowd of nicely dressed Europeans waiting their turn at the buffet tables in the restaurant, and went into the dimly lit bar, long and narrow and mostly empty. An old man just inside the door handed him a dingy checked sports jacket—required in the bar on Sundays—and Smith shrugged it over his shoulders and advanced down the line of high-backed banquettes set at right angles to the wall, his eyes adjusting to the gloom. Muted afternoon sunlight filtered through the stained-glass window at the far end: This ochre and red rosette showed a streamlined locomotive going at full speed. Stylized minarets hovering oddly to one side made it impossible to know whether the train was leaving or approaching Istanbul. Pieces of colored glass set into the border reflected an abstract halo on the worn carpet.

“Over here . . .”

Smith turned to confront Kasim Vatran sitting in the recesses of the farthest banquette from the door. They stared at each other for a moment. Vatran seemed perfectly composed, calm. He wore an elegant dark blue suit, neatly buttoned, a rose-colored dress shirt and a glossy pink silk tie. A pink rosebud decorated his buttonhole. He might be on his way to a wedding or a formal reception for someone in the government.

“I don’t think that jacket goes with your T-shirt,” Vatran said in an affable tone.

“What did you mean by what you said over the phone? What the—”

“First, a drink,” Vatran interrupted.

“No, thanks,” Smith said. “A little early for me.”

“If you don’t mind”—Vatran made a quick gesture and the waiter brought over a bottle of very expensive whisky—Loch Lomond Single Malt, fifteen years—and set it down with two glasses.

“I thought you didn’t drink,” Smith said.

“Special day today,” Vatran said. “I think I can be permitted a glass. Sit, please . . .”

Smith sat reluctantly. “O.K., what’s the gag?” he said.

Vatran poured himself a healthy three fingers of scotch from the bottle and drained it off. Then he pinched the lobe of his ear with his right hand and whistled softly through his teeth—an old Turkish gesture that was supposed to ward off the machinations of the devil.

“Jessica told me everything,” he said, his voice curiously flat. “She was very upset, you understand, even hysterical. She told me what you did to her—”

“Hold on a minute,” Smith said, bristling. “Don’t go flinging around the word
rape
because that’s not what—”

“Please!” Vatran held up his hand, a gesture that held such authority Smith shut up. “I am not talking about rape,” he continued. “She used that word, but it is not possible to rape a woman in such a position. She had already disgraced herself, utterly. Under the circumstances you did the right thing.”

Smith stared at the man, aghast. Then, he noticed something odd—a slight twitch that seemed to ripple from the left eye, down the side of Vatran’s cheek—then he saw the thin stream of red coming from between the fingers of the left hand, so tightly clenched the nails were digging into the palm, drawing blood. Smith gasped and began to be afraid.

“What the fuck?” he said. “What did you do to her?”

Vatran looked away, casting his eye toward the racing locomotive in the stained glass, which from his perspective, was definitely leaving Istanbul behind.

“I am a coward,” he said. “I couldn’t do it myself. So I called Ahmet and he did it. He is very strong, you know, a former wresting champion. He put his hands around her throat like this”—he demonstrated by taking up one of the white cloth napkins and twisting, blood from the gouges in his palm staining the fabric—“I think her neck snapped—there was a sound. In any case, it was over very quickly. She didn’t suffer much.”

Smith gaped. He couldn’t get his head around this bizarre confession. He couldn’t imagine the vibrant, voluptuous Jessica dead; his heart hurt with the thought. More, that he might have been the cause of it, however indirectly, filled him with new and painful sensations—shame, remorse. Then he rejected the possibility altogether. Of course it wasn’t true. Not true. No.

“Come on, Vatran,” Smith said. “Give me a break. You’re kidding, right?”

But the Turk’s black eyes were hard as stones. He reached into the pocket of his suit jacket and took out a small revolver and brought it level with Smith’s heart. Smith recognized the weapon from the guns and ammo magazines he sometimes perused at the CVS at Astor Place in Manhattan—a five-shot .36 caliber Taurus hideaway. It was usually loaded with hollow points to compensate for low muzzle velocity and would make a loud noise and a big hole, absolutely lethal at this distance.

“W-wait a minute,” Smith said, trying to sound reasonable and failing. “What’s going to happen if you shoot me here, in public?”

“That doesn’t matter to me,” Vatran said, still calm. “You have insulted my personal honor and the honor of my family, and this insult must be avenged. I loved her. You tore her from me—”

“Hey!” Smith interrupted. “You tore her from me first, remember?”

“Jessica has already paid with her life,” Vatran continued, ignoring him. “Now you will pay.” And he pulled back the hammer, which made a precise racheting sound.

“Don’t do it,” Smith said desperately. “They’ve got the death penalty here. This is Turkey, remember?”

“Yes, this is Turkey,” Vatran said, smiling faintly. “Honor is important in Turkey as it is important in every civilized country in the world, as it is no longer important in America, which is therefore no longer civilized. Let us suppose I am somehow convicted of premeditated murder for killing Jessica and for killing you, which is unlikely, given the current temperament of Turkish justice. You see, the private honor of a Turk is worth more than the lives of two corrupt foreigners.
Tamam
, perhaps I am convicted. So I will be given six months, a year, no more for killing a Christian whore and her American lover.”

“Wait, wait if you just . . .” Smith couldn’t bring forth the words he needed to keep this fanatic from pulling the trigger. Then a single thought occurred to him: “You killed Jessica,” he said, bringing twenty years of acting experience to steady his voice. “You’re going to kill me. O.K., maybe we were both a little guilty and who the fuck cares, right? But you also killed someone else. Someone entirely innocent, you know that, right?”

Vatran raised an eyebrow. “Keep talking if you want,” he said, grinning ferociously. “I’ll give you ten seconds. . . .”

“I’m talking about your
baby
!” Smith shouted this last word. “Jessica was pregnant! You didn’t know that, did you, stupid asshole? She was pregnant with your
son
!”

Smith had no way of knowing the gender of the opium-addled fetus—but this speculation was just the right touch. Vatran blinked crazily for a beat, digesting this information, just long enough for Smith to throw himself backward, and the banquette went crashing over to splinter on the tile floor. Smith rolled away from the wreckage, just as Vatran began firing. He felt the warm breath of a bullet pass a fraction of a millimeter from his left cheek and pushed himself up and vaulted over the zinc-topped counter to scramble on his hands and knees along the rubber matting just behind the bar. A third shot splashed into the bottles set in even rows on the barback and shattered the huge gilt mirror brought from France in 1911, then another, closer, and Smith felt himself sprayed with liquor—rum, he thought from the smell—and splinters of glass. The alarmed shouting of men and the screeching of women now came from the lobby. Smith reached the far end of the bar, there was no place farther to go, nothing but wall ahead. Oh, God, he found himself praying—probably for the first time since his sister’s death back in Iowa—Please, God, help me! Melt this wall! But the wall didn’t melt and his feeble prayer came out as no more than a spiritual squeak, a transparent bubble that dissolved in terrestrial air before reaching heaven.

Another shot hissed just over his left shoulder and drilled into the oak paneling, and a sharp splinter, like a tiny arrow, gouged his cheek. Now Smith twisted around desperately to see Vatran standing behind the bar not three feet away, gun at his side, muzzle smoking. If there was something else Smith could do to save his own life, he couldn’t think what it might be. As the Turk raised the gun for the last time, Smith closed his eyes.

2.

I
nspektor Biryak of the Istanbul Metropolitan Police sat at his desk in his large pleasant office in the Galatasaray district on Mesrutiyet Caddesi beneath an unusual framed photograph of Atatürk: Instead of the usual head-and-shoulders stern-faced, uniformed, bemedalled Father of the Turkish Nation, this one showed a vacationing Atatürk, beer in hand, in shirt-sleeves and sunglasses on a patio at somebody’s villa overlooking the Adriatic, white sailboats luffing pleasantly in the background.

“I tell my superiors Atatürk did not drink this beer.” Inspektor Biryak chuckled. “That it was not his beer at all, that he was just holding it for the photographer. Atatürk, you understand, is more than a human being to us in Turkey, he is like a perfect saint. But to you, I tell the complete truth. According to my great-grandmother, who was a German—this is her drinks party you see in the photo—the man who was not yet Atatürk, who was still only plain Mustafa Kemal, drank down this beer with gusto and also drank two or three more and then fell asleep with his mouth open in a comfortable garden chair in the sun. Like many ordinary Turks”—he chuckled— “our Great Turk could not hold his liquor. Like perhaps”—he took a cigarette from a silver case and lit up—“this unfortunate Kasim Vatran.”

“I don’t know about that,” Smith said. Somehow he couldn’t keep his teeth from chattering, though it wasn’t cold in the room.

“There was”—Inspektor Biryak consulted his notes—“a bottle of whisky on the table, yes?”

“That’s right,” Smith said. “But the man wasn’t drunk during . . .” His voice trailed off. He could still hear the sound of the gunshots ringing in his ears and the screaming as he scrambled along beneath the bar.

“Excuse my rudeness”—Inspektor Biryak held out the cigarette case—“would you like one?” He was a large, broad-shouldered man, the bottom half of his face occupied with the shaggy mustache usually associated with Turkish policemen.

Smith didn’t smoke, but took a cigarette just to have something to do with his hands. The inspektor offered a match. Smith managed to light up on the third try, the inspektor shaking out the two previous matches in the moment before they singed his glossy, manicured fingernails.

“Third try unlucky,” Inspektor Biryak said, frowning, and he tugged his right ear with his left hand as Smith had seen Vatran do in the bar at the Stamboul Palace. Trembling, Smith fumbled the cigarette to the floor after just a few puffs. It rolled beneath the inspektor’s desk, where the man crushed it with the heel of his boot.

“You are indeed rather nervous, Mr. Smith,” he commented dryly.

“Y-yes,” Smith stuttered. “I am nervous. The bastard almost killed me.”

“Of course, I understand.” Inspektor Biryak nodded. “Now please describe the unfortunate incident to me exactly as it happened. I’ve read the police report, but such statements can be misleading.” He smiled, showing large, square, cigarette-stained teeth.

Smith took a deep breath and tried to reconstruct the sequence of events out of the painful blur of sound and image in his head—what Vatran said, what he said in response, etc. He managed to keep his voice steady until the end, when he choked with emotion and dropped his face to his hands.

“Take a moment to compose yourself.” The inspektor clucked sympathetically. “Being shot at can be an exhilarating experience as long as one is not hit, of course. Try to look at it that way.”