Steve Katz - The Compleat Memoirrhoids - 137.n

The captain of the Turkish ship that did Brindisi to Istanbul asked me to deliver a bottle of whiskey to his cousin, a hotel owner. He said the cousin would rent me a nice room at a good price. I was old enough to know better than to do something illegal in Istanbul, but it was my first time to that exotic crossroads, and it seemed wimpy to enter without a touch of intrigue. The ship arrived in the evening, and I grabbed a taxi to this small, grungy hotel on the narrow street indicated on the scrap from the Captain’s notepad. The words on the hotel sign had been obliterated, except for its one star. The owner was a greasy, scowling man in a torn undershirt and pajama pants, a two-day beard, his lips stained from something he chewed. He grabbed the whiskey without thanking me. I asked about a room, though I would have quit this sleazy haunt had it been earlier in the day. He pointed at the worn leather chair and couch in what served as the hotel lobby. “Sit, wait,” he growled, and disappeared with the bottle through a swinging door behind the counter.

I expected the film noir to begin. Sydney Greenstreet could have slid through the door. Humphrey Bogart might have come down the stairs and tossed his key into a cubbyhole behind the counter. It was all dark brown veneer. A dim light-bulb hung over the front desk. The wallpaper, a flophouse beige pattern of leaves, was blistered and peeling. As soon as I sat down the real film noir started to roll. A blonde guy came in as if looking for me. He sat down on the couch, and immediately started to talk. I couldn’t figure out what he was doing there. He wasn’t staying at the hotel. Why was he interested in me? He was maybe thirty, spoke English fluently, with a South African or New Zealand accent, though he could have been a Frenchman. And he was clean, a starched white short-sleeved shirt, chino shorts newly pressed, clean sandals on his spotless feet. He looked like a tourist on a midday stroll. Anyone who wears shades at night must be up to something. He took them off to talk to me. How did I get there? Why this hotel? I explained it was the recommendation of the ship’s captain, but didn’t mention the whiskey. I think he knew about it. I turned the conversation around and asked him what he was doing there.

“Je fait le traffique.” He winked at me, and sat back waiting for my response. “Le traffique,” he repeated.

I grinned stupidly. Not until he left did I figure out that he wanted me to think he was dealing drugs. I had just arrived, was a little out of it. He left as soon as the owner reappeared. The owner gave me a key to a room incredibly cheap, suggested I grab what I need, then lock my backpack in the storeroom, which I did. He pointed me up the stairs. The room smelled like tobacco and men’s fluids. The grim green walls were so water-stained that someone might find a fleet of Buddhas or images of the Virgin Mary. There were two beds, coarse discolored sheets covered with thin grey blankets. I dove right into sleep, thinking I’d start my own Istanbul pleasures on the next day. It didn’t occur to me until much later, when my naiveté turned to paranoia, that the guy who questioned me could have been from Interpol, and they were checking me out because I’d delivered the whiskey. They wanted to see if I was up to anything else. All kinds of rumors had circulated while I was crossing on the boat. Swedish hippies had sold their girlfriends to white slavers. There were blood donor clinics, where kids who thought they were selling a pint of blood ended up anaesthetized, all their blood drained, their organs up for auction.

I woke with the first light, stretched, threw my arm across the bed, and hit a guy who had crawled between the covers with me during the night. There were two guys cozy in the other bed too. That’s why it was so cheap. They didn’t rent rooms, they rented spaces in the beds.

I grabbed my pack from the tired old woman who had taken over behind the desk in the morning, and headed for the Haja Sofia neighborhood where I secured a room with two beds. I negotiated a price for all four positions for a couple of weeks. Some ex-pats, looking for a ride to Katmandu, recommended Yener’s Restaurant nearby which they said was cheap and welcomed foreigners. It was a nondescript place on a hill, open to the Bosporus, frequented by a scruffy crowd of European hippies, before they’d taken on the designation of eurotrash. Yener himself was addicted to Romilar, a codeine based cough medicine. As he cooked, and served the food, you saw him tipping back bottles of the sticky stuff. A couple of cops were always there. They kept tabs on the crowd. They sold drugs and occasionally busted one of their clients, just to look on the up and up. It was a double bind. You could get busted also for buying your drugs on the street, instead of from the police. I stopped going to Yener’s not because I didn’t like the company or the food, but because once he realized I wasn’t a junky he tripled my bill. Maybe he had some kind of deal with the cops to draw only traveling druggies to his restaurant.

After that I hung out at pudding shops on the avenue. The smell of rosewater was reassuring. I was happy scribbling away in a notebook, at a table on a shaded patio. I looked up occasionally at the minarets and domes of the Haja Sofia and the Blue Mosque hovering across the way as if about to bubble into the sky. This is nice, I thought. A young girl sat down at the table with me. She wanted to look older, but couldn’t have been more than fourteen. She told me her name was Brigitte. She spoke French quite well, and her English with a French accent. She almost immediately revealed to me that she was British, had run away from her bloody nasty father and sick mother. Perhaps she needed to confess to someone anonymous, otherwise I don’t know why she was confiding in me. She told me she was denying her British identity, and taking on a French one. I never learned her English name. She could have been lying to me; nonetheless, I felt very protective of her. I was indulging myself in travel, was doing so leaving my wife and three kids at home. I was spending some of the advance on my first novel on myself. I was ready to take her on as a penance.

A young, muscular Turkish man sat down with us and laid a wad of money in front of me. It was Turkish Lira and American dollars all bundled together. “How much the girl?” he asked me, looking very serious. I looked from the money to his face. He didn’t crack a smile. “How much?”

I thought he must have been kidding. “I just met her,” I said. “I don’t know what she’s worth yet.” It was a terrible joke.

“How much the girl?” He wasn’t kidding.

Brigitte tried to act blasé but I could feel her fear. She didn’t know either of us.

I lifted both hands in a gesture that I hoped he’d understand as “no deal”. I don’t know what my move meant to him. His look got more serious and sullen. He brought his elbow down on the table and flexed his hand, thrusting his chin towards the girl. He intended to arm wrestle me for her. I touched her back and took her hand and signaled her to get up. The man looked desperate and grim.

“I’ll walk you back to your hotel.”

She stood up without saying anything. I paid the bill, and we started for her hotel. At a certain point, when we turned a corner, I caught a glimpse of the guy. He was following us. I didn’t like it. We stopped. I whirled around to confront the scumbag. I made myself as big as I could, as you are supposed to in the Rockies if you have to confront a mountain lion. I was wearing cowboy boots. My belt had a big, studded buckle. After a few moments the guy retreated. We waited until we were sure he was gone. I left her as she entered the dark lobby of her greasy hotel. We had agreed to meet the next day, but I never saw her again.