The crowd screamed with laughter. “We will!” they shouted in English and Turkish. It gave them a perfectly legal excuse to pick the “DEA man’s” pocket when he lost. There is nobody quite as cunning as a Turk unless it is a crowd of Turks!
And before anyone knew what was happening, Musef reached out and grabbed Heller’s collar and yanked him to the center of the floor! It was not hard to do. Heller, here on Earth, weighed only 193 pounds and Musef weighed 300!
Somehow Musef’s hands must have slipped. Heller and Musef were standing there in the middle of the floor, facing each other. The crowd, on its feet and roaring for blood, made a circle.
Musef reached with both arms. Heller weaved sideways. I knew what Musef was trying to do. The standard Turkish action of engaging is for each opponent to seize the other, with both hands, on either side of the neck. What happens after that is anybody’s war.
Musef made a second try. He got his hands on Heller’s shoulders!
Heller got his hands on Musef’s shoulders!
The first seconds of such a contest is a jostle for position.
And then I didn’t understand it. Heller had his two hands on the shoulders of the Turk but Heller’s fingers were hidden by the Turk’s head. I couldn’t see that Heller was doing anything. But neither was the Turk!
Heller’s hands just seemed to be rooted there.
The Turk was trying to throw his arms out to get Heller’s hands loose. You could see the muscles jump with the Turk’s effort. The Turk’s face was contorting in savage hatred. But there was enormous strain there!
The two seemed to rotate a few degrees. Now there was a wall mirror in Heller’s view. And in that mirror, Torgut was plainly visible. Torgut, iron pipe in hand, was parting the crowd, approaching Heller’s back.
I realized then why Heller’s hands weren’t coming loose. Turks usually smear themselves with olive oil before they wrestle but tonight there was nothing there to make Heller’s hands slip on the Turk’s shoulders and neck.
You could almost hear the muscles grind with the effort of the two wrestlers.
Ah, I had it. Musef could see Torgut and Musef was simply holding Heller in position until the partner could bring that iron pipe down on Heller’s blond head!
The crowd was going wild, cheering Musef on.
Torgut was very near now.
Suddenly, using his grip on Musef to support the forward part of his body, Heller went back and horizontal!
His feet hit Torgut in the chest!
The thud of that double blow was loud above the yelling room.
Torgut flew backwards as though propelled from a cannon. He took three members of the crowd with him!
They landed with a crash against the wall!
The impact shattered the mirror on the opposite wall!
Musef tried to take advantage of the weight shift. He drew back a forearm to hit Heller in the face.
I couldn’t see what happened. But Heller’s hands clenched suddenly inward.
Musef screamed like a crushed dog!
Heller hadn’t done anything to cause that. He had just closed his hands in tighter.
The huge Turk buckled like a falling building and landed like rubble on the floor!
The crowd was silent.
They were incredulous.
They became hostile!
Heller stood there in the middle of the floor. Torgut was a half-dead mess against the far wall, blood trickling down his shoulders. Three town Turks were getting themselves untangled from chairs near him. Musef was collapsed and moaning at Heller’s feet.
With his two hands, Heller straightened up his own collar. “And now,” he said, in a conversational voice, “who pays me the five hundred lira?”
Now, money is a very important subject to the impoverished Turk. If Heller had had any sense, he would have simply walked out. But he doesn’t have any training in this sort of thing. I would have been running already.
The townsmen jabbered together. Then one said in English, “It wasn’t a fair bet. You, a foreigner, took advantage of these two poor boys!”
“Yes,” said an old Turk. “You exploited them!”
“No, no, no,” said the proprietor, getting brave. “You owe me for all this damage. You started the fight!”
Heller looked them over. “You mean you are not going to see that an honest wager is paid?”
The crowd sensed its numbers. It started to edge forward hostilely toward Heller. One tough-looking fellow was nearest Heller.
“Are you going to see that the bargain is kept?” said Heller to the nearest man.
The crowd was closer. Somebody had Torgut’s iron pipe.
“Ah, well,” said Heller. And before anyone could block him he grabbed Musef off the floor and with a wide sweeping movement threw him at the proprietor!
Musef landed against the counter. Glasses and bottles and kegs soared into the air. The counter fell over on the proprietor!
Every man in that room had ducked!
As the noise died down, Heller said, “Honor seems to be something you have never heard of.” He shook his head sadly. “And I did want to try some of your beer.”
Heller walked out.
The crowd had recovered a bit. They surged to the door after him and there they began to throw bottles and yell derisively and do catcalls.
Heller just kept on walking.
I saw that he was limping.
I really hugged myself. He had been utterly routed!
His crude scheme to get some money had failed.
Ah, indeed, the roles had reversed. He was the dog and I the hero here.
I went to bed singing — while Heller limped the miles back to base, broke, outcast and alone.
PART THIRTEEN
Chapter 1
The next morning, I felt pretty cheery, I can tell you. I got up early and put on an orange silk shirt and black pants and a cobra-skin belt, with shoes to match.
I had melon and cacik — cucumber salad with yogurt, garlic and olive oil dressing — and I washed it down with very sweet coffee. Delicious. When I criticized it to the cook, he looked so woebegone, I really had to laugh. The whole staff looked woebegone, having been up all night trying to find something they had not done. The joke was on them. I really laughed.
Then I got busy with a big sheet of paper. I am a long way from a draftsman but I sure knew what I wanted. It was up to somebody else to try to make it out.
The school owned another piece of property a little bit closer to town. It had been planned to build a staff recreational hall there but I had other ideas.
I was designing a hospital. It would be one story, with a basement. It would have numerous wards and operating rooms. It would also have a parking lot. It would be surrounded by a wire fence made to look like a hedge. And in the basement it would have numerous private rooms nobody would suspect were there. It would have an Earth-type security system. Every room would be bugged.
I was going to register it as the “World United Charities Mercy and Benevolent Hospital.” I was going to make my fortune with it. They really train you in the Apparatus. “When you mean total evil,” one of my professors in Apparatus school used to say, “always put up a facade of total good.” It is an inviolable maxim of any competent government.
Finally, I finished it, hoping I could make the plan out myself — I had scratched out and changed quite a bit.
Then I had to write a bunch of orders: one to our Voltar resident engineer to dig some tunnels to it; another to our Istanbul attorney firm to get it registered real fast; another to the World Health Operation for the attorneys to forward which said it was a magnificent donation to the world of health and please could we use their name, too; and another to the Rockecenter Foundation for a grant “for the poor children of Turkey” — they always hand out money if their executives can get a slice back and if Rockecenter can get his name up in lights as a great humanitarian (hah! that would be the day!).