“What do you want?” Delight asked, not looking for a fight.
“What do I want? I was in the ladies’ room, minding my own business, and I wake up tied to a sofa in your apartment, with a dead man in the next room!”
“Dead man? Who is dead?” The words brought fear to Delight’s face.
“You tell me,” Ives replied. “Go look, but be careful of the spiders.”
That seemed to trigger something in Delight. “Prattos! What did that fool do?” She hurried to unlock the apartment door, then gasped when she saw the body and the bloody dagger.
“Who was he?” Ives asked.
“He was a merchant. He was delivering spiders and gold dust.”
“Did he have a key to this apartment?”
“No, of course not. He was bringing these things for my wedding.”
“Wedding?”
Delight smiled. “I’m to be married day after tomorrow, to Wesley Fazzis.” For a moment they were no longer enemies, just women talking.
“But why did you kidnap me?”
“To retrieve the calligraphy Bruno was selling to that German. It belongs to me. I want it at my wedding.”
“If it’s yours, what was Bruno Tranle doing with it?”
Delight took a deep breath. “Bruno is my father.”
“Your father!”
“He just phoned me and warned me not to injure you. We had no intention of doing harm.”
The man who’d been with Ives when she recovered consciousness appeared at the top of the stairs. “What’s happening here?” he asked, seeing them in the apartment doorway.
Delight smiled. “This is Wesley, my husband-to-be.”
Ives grimaced. “We’ve met. I was tied to a sofa at the time.”
“I am sorry about that,” he told her. “I tried not to make the ropes too tight, but perhaps that is how you got free.”
“It helped,” she admitted. “Now where is Stanton?”
“Your partner? He has the calligraphy. We are meeting him in the courtyard of the Blue Mosque.”
“If you harm me, he will kill you both,” Ives told them, somehow doubting it was true.
“I will bring two of the Gypsies with weapons. He will surrender the calligraphy without a struggle. But you’d better come along too, just in case.”
“You’ll stay in the car,” Delight told her. “I’ll be you until we get the calligraphy.”
“How do you intend to do that?”
“These veils can hide a great deal.”
When the veil fell away, revealing Delight’s frosty face, Stanton cried out in frustration. “Ives!” he shouted.
Surprisingly, a reply came back through the darkness. “Over here, Stanton!”
He saw the black sedan parked on the street and ran toward it. Ives was already out the rear door, hampered only by a handcuff holding her wrist to the car’s interior. “Thank God you’re safe!”
“Did I see you just blow those two Gypsies away?”
“A sawed-off shotgun full of birdshot. I bought it from that street vendor, Ersu. It put them out of action but they shouldn’t have any lasting injuries.”
Ives told him about finding the murdered man and the spiders. Delight had followed him to the car while Wesley dealt with the wounded Gypsies. “I must have that calligraphy for my wedding,” she insisted.
“Are the spiders for your wedding, too?” Stanton asked.
“Of course! It is an American custom, no?”
“I don’t think so. What about the man who brought them? Who killed him?”
“Prattos? I have no idea. I don’t even know how he gained entry to my apartment. Wesley locked the door when he left your friend here.”
Ives interrupted then, telling Stanton, “Tranle, the man who’s paying us, is her father.”
Stanton sighed and shook his head. “Unlock her handcuffs, Delight. It’s time we all sat down and figured this out.”
They returned to the Bosphorus Cafe and her upstairs apartment. Wesley Fazzis joined them soon thereafter. “Did you have to shoot them?” he grumbled to Stanton.
“They had guns and I expected they’d use them. You should be thankful I didn’t use buckshot or they might be dead.”
“All right,” he said, sitting down. “What’s there to talk about?”
“We were hired to transport a valuable example of sixteenth-century calligraphy to a buyer in Germany. Your bride claims it should be hers.”
“Her father is a bastard,” Fazzis told them. “He promised that to her on her wedding day. Now he is selling it just before her wedding because he doesn’t approve of me. What’s he ever done for her?”
“He recommended that we see her dance,” Ives said.
“I don’t even want that painting to keep,” Delight informed them. “I just want it for my wedding day.”
Stanton thought about it. “Why do you need spiders?”
It was Delight who answered. “Our wedding is to duplicate a Turkish wedding from a hundred years ago, with traditional costumes and a chariot for the bride’s arrival. It will be at Wesley’s country estate, where there are many trees. I read in a book that in your pre-Civil War South plantation slaves would be sent out to distribute large spiders on the trees. The webs they wove would then be covered with gold dust for weddings.”
Ives looked doubtful. “I never heard of such a thing.”
“I suppose it might be true,” Stanton allowed.
“That’s what the spiders are for. We will take them out to Wesley’s place in the morning and hope they are in a spinning mood.”
“Let’s first visit your father and hope he is in a forgiving mood.”
Bruno Tranle was anything but forgiving. He sat behind his desk glaring at Stanton and Ives. “I expected you to be in Germany by this time, delivering the calligraphy to Meinz.”
“You promised it for my wedding,” Delight reminded him.
“That was before you became a belly dancer, my dear.”
Ives spoke up then. “That can’t upset you too much. You recommended Turkish Delight to Stanton and me.”
“I can appreciate her art without identifying her as my daughter.”
“Can’t we have a compromise here?” Stanton suggested. “You allow her to display the calligraphy at her wedding ceremony tomorrow and we’ll fly it to Germany the next day.”
“What if someone tries to steal or damage it during the wedding?” he asked.
“Ives and I will guarantee its safety,” Stanton promised, avoiding his partner’s icy stare as he spoke.
Bruno Tranle glanced at his daughter. “Is that agreeable with you, Sophie?”
“Sophie?” Ives repeated.
The dancer snorted. “Did you think I was born with the name Turkish Delight?” Then, to her father, she nodded. “It is agreeable with me. I only want the painting for my wedding day.”
Fazzis, who’d remained silent in the corner until now, stepped forward to shake his future father-in-law’s hand. “You have my promise that Sophie will have a good life.”
“Let us hope so.”
Once they were alone, Ives berated her partner. “We’re guaranteeing the safety of that thing worth nearly a million dollars?”
“Otherwise he never would have agreed. It won’t be difficult. Prattos was killed because someone saw him arrive with that canvas bag and thought it contained the calligraphy. Another attempt will probably be made tomorrow, the last chance before it flies off to Germany. We’ll catch the killer in the act and save the painting.”
“How will we know who it is?”
“I already know,” Stanton told her. “All we have to do is keep our thief from getting it.”
The wedding day was bright with sunshine without being uncomfortably warm. That afternoon, arriving at the Fazzis estate with its palatial house on the Bosphorus, they seemed to enter another dimension of time. There were Arabs in turbans and Turks in traditional red fezzes that hadn’t been worn since the government outlawed them after the First World War. Everything was as it might have been a hundred years earlier, and among the trees they could see the spider webs with their golden dust.