Bozbeyli laughed and chopped the air with his hand.
“Well,” he said, “we must give him all the help we can! He fights the terrorists in our country!”
Dagmar responded with her wordless smile.
Bozbeyli turned to view his colleagues.
“My colleagues and I-we did not want this terrible responsibility,” he said. “But the nation was in danger-it was necessary to step forward and act to prevent a catastrophe.”
Dursun and the admiral looked a little bored by this. Perhaps they had heard this speech too many times.
“Every time the military has intervened in our nation,” Bozbeyli went on, “we have stepped down once the country’s security was assured.” He tapped a finger on his knee. “I assure you, we all wish for the day on which constitutional government may be restored.”
Dagmar nodded and smiled.
“Then we have something in common,” she said.
She knew immediately that this was the wrong thing to say. Bozbeyli’s face hardened, and he stood.
“This way, miss,” he said, and marched out without waiting for her. His colleagues followed.
And that was it, as far as hospitality was concerned. Dagmar and her party followed the junta into another room where a long table had been laid with a buffet. Others were there, men and women, to meet the guests, but Bozbeyli’s attitude was very clear, and no one approached.
Dagmar and her party stood at one end of the long table and Bozbeyli and a score of others at the far end. They talked to one another in low voices and every so often turned to look at Dagmar’s group as if sizing them up for their coffins.
Even the waiters didn’t approach. Dagmar helped herself to a glass of tea from a buffet.
“And here I thought it was going so well,” she said.
“Fuck him,” said Tuna darkly. Dagmar glanced at the other party, to make sure no one had heard.
No one was looking at them at the moment.
The grim standoff ended after twenty minutes, when a man in a tailcoat approached and told Dagmar that her car was ready. The group was reunited with its cell phones and returned to the Mercedes and its silent driver.
“Screw it,” Richard said. “It’s been a long day, and I’m hungry.”
Dagmar decided that Richard had the right idea. She turned to Ismet.
“Can you see if the driver will let us off someplace other than the hotel?” she said. “Let’s see if we can’t find someplace good to eat.”
A few minutes later, standing outside a bustling restaurant in Kizilay, Dagmar hit Lincoln’s speed dial.
“Hi, Dagmar,” he said. His voice was languid, and Dagmar imagined him stretched out on a divan, tingling with the aftereffects of his massage.
“I pissed off Bozbeyli,” Dagmar said.
There was a moment’s silence. Lincoln’s voice, when it returned, was less languid than before.
“You’d better tell me about it.”
Dagmar described the conversation as well as she could remember it.
“He said he was longing for democracy,” she concluded. “All I did was agree with him.”
“Where are you now?”
Dagmar glanced up at the restaurant sign. “Restaurant Harman,” she said. “Turkish-International cuisine, whatever that is.”
There was a moment of thoughtful silence.
“Call me before you come back to the hotel,” Lincoln said. “And I’ll check to see if there’s anyone hanging around outside.”
“And if there is?”
“You’ll check into another hotel for the night.”
“What about our things? All my work’s on my laptop. And I can’t wander around for the next few days in heels and a Donna Karan frock.”
“If necessary,” Lincoln said, “I’ll get your things myself.”
“How?”
Amusement entered his voice. “I’ll bribe the hotel staff,” he said.
Dagmar had to admit that this made perfect sense.
“Don’t let this spoil your dinner,” Lincoln said. “In all likelihood it means nothing.”
“I told you at the beginning,” Dagmar said, “that I have a bad personal history with military governments.”
“Noted,” said Lincoln. “Have a nice dinner anyway.”
The staff at the Harman seemed a little surprised at so well dressed a party so early in the evening but behaved with an impeccable, bustling courtesy that only mildly concealed their all-encompassing avarice.
In France, Dagmar reflected, you’d be made to feel second-class for dining so early, but the Turks didn’t care about such things. If you wanted drinks at nine in the morning, or dinner at four thirty, or breakfast at midnight, they’d do their best to accommodate you. They had an ancient tradition of hospitality to which they adhered with easy grace. Besides, good service was their way to a better paycheck, and they seemed to have no notions about either the proper time to eat supper or the proper time to earn money.
President Bozbeyli, she reflected, was the only rude Turk she’d ever met.
Dinner lasted a couple hours, and featured raky and Efes, olives and anchovies, spiced meatballs and grilled fish, and a form of kofte that, according to Ismet, translated as “ladies’ thighs.” When the group left the restaurant the sun was just on the horizon and the first cool touch of evening was on the air. They walked along Ataturk Boulevard while the muezzins sang the call to evening prayer-a sound that sent a primeval shiver down Dagmar’s spine.
The people in the streets ignored the call. Kizilay was busy and modern and filled with young people just beginning their evening. None of the women wore headscarves. It was like any European city.
Dagmar called Lincoln, and he said he’d take a look at the hotel lobby and the street in front, to see if some kind of unpleasantness waited.
Buses and trucks rolled past. Dagmar recoiled from the scent of diesel.
Ismet glanced around. “Want to see something different?” he said. “Have you been up to the castle?”
“There won’t be soldiers?” she asked.
Ismet shrugged. “No more than anywhere else.”
He hailed a taxi. With the three men crammed in the back and Dagmar riding shotgun, they sped north to Ulus and turned where a big equestrian monument of Ataturk stood foursquare on its plinth. Illuminated by spotlights, birds circled over the head of the great man but dared not alight.
To the east rose the walled mass of the city’s old citadel on its steep hill. A spotlit Turkish flag waved above the ramparts. Cell phone towers and the masts of broadcasters speared the evening sky.
The overloaded cab chugged slowly uphill, past a pair of silent museums, along the ancient Byzantine wall, and then through the gates of the citadel. Crowding the road were mansions dating from the Middle Ages, all built with ground floors of stone and wooden upper storeys that jutted out over the street and turned the road into a dark canyon. Some salesmen stood smoking in the doors of souvenir shops, alert to the possibility of oncoming profit-but most of the homes were family residences in varying states of repair, and Dagmar realized that there was an entire self-contained town standing within the citadel walls, a town of children with footballs, men playing backgammon in front of their doors, and old women in headscarves carrying plastic laundry baskets up steep, narrow streets. A town where cooking smells floated on the air and where television’s blue light shone through upper windows.
It was an older presence that she sensed here and much poorer than fashionable Kizilay. Even the little girls wore headscarves, something Dagmar hadn’t seen anywhere else. The present was compounded here with the timeless, present-day Ankara with Hittite Ankuwash and Roman Ancyra, with Byzantine Ankyra and Ottoman Angora, all blended together in the deep blue Anatolian twilight.
The taxi groaned up a steep road and halted in a cloud of biodiesel that tainted the air with the scent of stale olive oil. Ahead was a gate in another wall.
“I’ll tell the cab to wait,” Ismet said.