That was the most cheerful thought I had heard all day! I took off my cap and got out of my bearskin coat. I put the viewer on the examination couch and sat down in a chair. I might as well make myself comfortable. I was going to make very sure this lepertige got out of Turkey.
I reached up to fondle my "rank locket" as one will. My hand met empty air!
I looked.
GONE!
I must have dropped it!
A sick feeling coursed through me. I had intended just to borrow Utanc's emerald locket to give myself the necessary air of authority when I couldn't find mine. I had intended, before this day was out, to sneak it back into her wardrobe jewel drawer. Oh, my Gods, her rage at me would make the villa utterly uninhabitable!
Wait. Where had I felt it last? I couldn't recall.
I raced out into the hall. I almost collided head-on with Prahd. "Have you found a locket?" I screamed at him.
He said, "Sssh, sssh!" He pushed me back into his office. "Don't yell so. And you've taken off your fur coat. You can't run around in public in a Voltar uniform! Here." He grabbed a white doctor's coat out of a drawer and shoved it at me.
I steadied myself down long enough to put it on. The skirt and sleeves were much too long. "The locket
I was wearing to show my rank," I said. "It's gone. Please help me look for it."
"I'm sorry," he said. "I have an operation scheduled. Just remember the places you have been and go look."
That was wise advice. I went to the operating room we had used last night. A cleaning team was in there. No, they hadn't seen a green locket.
I went to where I had stood looking through the oneway window. No, no locket on the floor.
Bright idea: I called the taxi driver on the phone. I held on while he went and looked in his cab. No, no locket.
Pleadingly, I told him to drive out to the airport and look around the floor and call back. He said he would.
I paced. Oh, Gods, Utanc would scream and rage and throw things in absolute hurricanes for days, weeks, months! It was the biggest stone in that drawer. It must be worth fifty thousand dollars at least!
That called to mind the state of my finances. Very soon those credit-card vultures would be back. I hadn't any notion how much I still owed from my trip to the U. S., but it would not be less than another half a million. No possible chance existed of getting it from the hospital or Faht Bey. As it stood now, maybe they would be satisfied just by selling off the villa and the staff. But if I bought another locket for replacement and ran up even more bills than I had, maybe they would sell me, too!
No, buying another locket was out of the question! The very thought of more bills turned my blood cold.
An hour went by. The taxi driver called back. No, there was no locket on the floor of the airport and nobody had turned one in and I now owed him another fifteen dollars! It made me feel pretty angry. Not only had he probably tipped the scales in favor of mayhem from the collectors by buying me that new wardrobe on my credit cards, he now couldn't even do a simple thing like finding a locket! But I didn't rage at him. He was the only excuse for a friend I had. I simply hung up.
Dispiritedly, I wandered back to the interview room I had been using, went in and closed the door.
The Countess had transferred at Istanbul and was on her way to Brussels for the next plane change.
Apparently, in the transit lounge, she had made some acquisitions. They have a pretty complete snack and magazine stand there and she had invested heavily. She had a lot of periodicals on her lap. She was selecting one. She had a French one called Oo La La, La Femme.
The elation I should be feeling at the realization that she was out of Turkey and that every second was taking her further away did not come.
Maybe it was the magazine which made me feel suppressed. It was a fashion magazine. I knew that she didn't read French but those huge color plates of clothes didn't need words. What they were saying to her, I did not know. But what they said to me was "Expensive!" I was a man of experience now where women's clothes were concerned!
Gradually, however, I began to cheer up. Those gorgeous color plates of weirdly posing models draped in impossibly bizarre garments were going to cost Heller a roaring fortune! A Parisienne designer doesn't look at his client's figure: he looks only at her checkbook. As he expects both to be very fat, I wondered why the models in such fashion plates were always as thin as chicken bones. Strange world, women's fashions. The French were featuring, I could make out, Le Look Garbage.
Somebody had explained all this to me once-a man on a plane. He had said the fashion designers were all homos and they hated women because they saw in them competition. So they covertly dressed them as bizarrely as possible to keep men off of them. He was probably right. Looking at these pictures made me hate homos all the more! To dress women strangely was one thing but to dress them so expensively was unforgivable!
The Countess Krak eventually threw it aside. She picked up a huge American edition of a periodical called Vague. More fashion plates. They were, strangely enough, quite different from the French. It was not that they were less bizarre, it was not that the models had any more meat on them, it was not that the (bleeping) homos had been any less industrious in trying to make women look awful and thus get the men into their own beds: they were just entirely different. The American gays were pushing The Marionette Look. The magazine was even full of little side sketches showing marionettes with their legs all tangled up and crossed and bending the wrong way and the strings strangling them.
"Dearie, I see you're studying fashions." A new voice. Krak looked sideways at her seat companion. The speaker was a blowzy blonde of about forty, with peroxided hair. "I can see it's about time!" She smiled. "I'm Mamie Boomp, heading back to the Big Apple and bright lights. Who're you?"
That's what I like about American travellers. Very direct. No beating around the bush.
"I'm supposed to be Joy Krackle," said the Countess Krak. "How do you do?"
"Well, I'm doing quite all right, thank you, after a star tour of the hot spots of the Middle East. I'm a famous singer. The Arabs loaded me with loot and I'm on my way back to God's Country to spend it. Jesus Christ, I don't think I'll get in another bed for a year! But, honey, you look like you got caught in a camel crash."
"Really?"
"Yeah, them clothes," said Mamie Boomp with a contemptuous wave at Krak's cloak. "Where'd you get such rags?"
"I was held captive for three years in a fortress," said the Countess Krak. "They stole all my clothes."
"No (bleep)?" said Mamie. "Jesus Christ, them (bleeped) Arabs will do anything. Much as a girl's life is worth to leave the U. S. of A. these days. I can see you need some coaching if you let them get away with that! You got to keep your wits about you. Same thing almost happened to me in Morocco. But I told the king, I said, 'Listen, Buster, if you don't come across with a few diamonds, I'll not just amputate your (bleeps), I'll cut off your American aid.' He can't exist without American aid so he just filled my pockets up with the old glitter and let me go. Look, here's one of them yet!"
She showed Krak a huge diamond ring, nestling amongst many others on her puffy hand. "Diamonds are a girl's best friend," she added.
"Are emeralds and rubies also very valuable on this planet?" said the Countess.
"You said it, baby. Mind if I help you with that fashion mag and show you what really puts the beasts in heat?"