Stan went right to the heart of the matter. "But I can't get a guide's license! The polis—"
"Will not bother you," Tan's mother said firmly. "You simply linger around Topkapi, perhaps, or the Grand Bazaar. When you see some Americans who are not with a tour group you merely offer information to them in a friendly way. Tell them you are an American student here—that is almost true, isn't it? And if any polis should ask you any questions, speak to them only in English, tell them you are looking for your parents who have your papers. Fair-haired, with those blue eyes, you will not be doubted."
"He doesn't have any American clothes, though," Naslan put in.
Her mother pursed her lips for a moment, then smiled. "That can be dealt with. You and I will make him some, Naslan. It is time you learned more about sewing anyway."
The endless resources of the Lost & found at Naslan's hotel provided the raw material, the Kusmeroglu women made it all lit. Stan became a model American college student on tour: flared slacks that looked like designer pants, but weren't, spring-soled running shoes, a Dallas Dodgers baseball cap and a T-shirt that said, "Gateway or Bust," on the front, and on the back, "I busted." The crowds of tourists were as milkable as imagined. No, more so. The Americans on whom he concentrated all seemed to have more money than they knew what to do with. Like the elderly couple from Riverdale, New York, so confused by the hyperinflated Turkish currency that they pressed a billion New Lira banknote on Stan as a tip for helping them find clean toilets when a million or two would have been generous. And then, when he pointed out the error, insisted that he keep the billion as a reward for his honesty. So in his first week Stan brought back more than Tan earned at his job and almost as much as Naslan. He tried to give it all to Mrs. Kusmeroglu, but she would take only half. "Save for the future, Stanley," she instructed him kindly. "A little capital is a good thing for a young man to have."
And her daughter added, "After all, some day soon you may want to get married."
Of course, Stan had no such plans, although Naslan certainly was pretty enough in the perky pillbox hat and miniskirt that was her uniform in the patisserie. She smelled good, too. That was by courtesy of the nearly empty leftover bits of perfume and cosmetics the women guests of the hotel discarded in the ladies' room, which it was part of her duties to keep spotless. It had its effect on Stan. Sometimes, when she sat close to him as the family watched TV together in the evenings, he hoped no one was noticing the embarrassing swelling in his groin. He was, after all, male, and seventeen.
But he was also thoroughly taken up by his new status as an earner of significant income. He memorized whole pages from the guidebooks, and supplemented them by lurking about to listen in on the professional guides as they lectured to their tour groups. The best places for that were in sights like the Grand Mosque or Hagia Sofia. There all the little clusters of a dozen or a score tourists were crowded together, with their six or eight competing guides all talking at once, in half a dozen languages. The guide gossip was usually more interesting than anything in the books, and always a lot more scurrilous.
Eavesdropping on them carried a risk, though. In the narrow alleyway outside the great kitchens that had once served Topkapi Palace he saw a couple of the licensed guides looking at him in a way he didn't like as they waited for their tour groups to trickle out of the displays. When both of them began talking on their carry phones, still looking at him, he quickly left the scene.
Actually, he was less afraid of the guides, or of the polis, than he was of Mr. Ozden finding him. What the old man could do if that happened Stan didn't know. In a pinch, he supposed he could actually pay off the overdue rent out of the wads of lira that were accumulating under his side of the mattress he shared with Tan. But who knew what law he had broken by his furtive departure? Mr. Ozden would, all right, and so Stan stayed far away from his old tenement.
It wasn't all work for Stan. If he got home in time he helped Mrs. Kusmeroglu with the dinner—she affected to be amazed by his cooking skills, which were actually pretty rudimentary. Then usually they would all watch the family's old thousand-channel TV together. Mrs. Kusmeroglu liked the weighty talk shows, pundits discussing the meaning of such bizarre events as that inexplicable Wrath of God that visited them from time to time, or what to do about the Cyprus question. Mr. Kusmeroglu preferred music—not the kind the boys played, though. Both Tan and Stan voted for programs about space or sports. But then it seldom came to a vote, because what Naslan liked was American sitcoms—on the English-language channels, so she could practice her English—happy groups of wealthy, handsome people enjoying life in Las Vegas or Malibu or the Tappan Sea, and Naslan talked faster than anyone else. It didn't matter. They shared things as a real family. And that was in some ways the best part of all for Stan, who had only the sketchiest memories of what living in a family was like.
Although the Kusmeroglus were all unfailingly kind to Stan, their tolerance did not extend to allowing the boys to get out the drums and trumpet in the house. So once or twice Stan and Tan lugged their instruments to the school gym, where the nighttime guard was a cousin and nobody cared how much noise you made when school was out.
It wasn't the same, of course. When they were twelve-year-olds in school, they had had a plan. With the Kurdish boy on the bass fiddle and the plain little girl from the form below theirs on keyboard, they were going to be a group. The four of them argued for days, and finally picked out a winner of a name: "Stan, Tan and the Gang." The plan was to start small, with birthday parties and maybe weddings. Go on to the clubs as soon as they were old enough. Get a recording contract. Make it big.... But then the Kurdish boy got expelled because his father was found to be contributing money to the underground Kurdistani movement, and the little girl's mother didn't want her spending so much time with boys anyway.
It wasn't too much of a blow. By then Stan and Tan had a larger dream to work on. Space. The endless frontier. Where the sky was no limit to a young man's ambitions.
If they could only somehow get their hands on enough money to do it, they were determined to go to Gateway, or maybe to one of the planetary outposts. Tan liked Mars, where the colonists were making an almost Earthlike habitat under their plastic domes. Stan preferred the idea of roaming the ancient Heechee catacombs on Venus, where—who knew?— there might still be some old artifacts to discover that might make them almost as rich as a Gateway prospector.
The insuperable problem was the money to get to any of those places. Still, maybe you didn't need money, because there were other chances. The famed old explorer Robinette Broadhead, for instance, was rich beyond avarice with his Gateway earnings, and he was always funding space missions. Like the one that even now was gradually climbing its years-long way toward the Oort cloud, where some fabulous Heechee object was known to exist but no one had found a way to get to it other than on a slow, human rocket ship. Broadhead had paid the way for volunteers to make that dreary quest. He might pay for others, when Tan and Stan were old enough. If by then everything hadn't already been explored.
Of course, those were childish dreams. Stan no longer hoped they could actually become real. But he still dreamed them.
Meanwhile there was his work as a guide and his life with the Kusmeroglu family, and those weren't bad, either. In his first month he had accumulated more money than he had ever seen before. He made the mistake of letting Naslan catch him counting it, and she immediately said, "Why, you're loaded, Stanley! Don't you think it's about time you spent some of it?"