James Munro - The Innocent Bystanders

"Not in Turkey. Turkey's a little difficult for us at the moment."

"Then get him out of Turkey. Surely there are ways?"

Lederer thought for a moment, watching the thick coil of cigar smoke plume into nothingness as the air conditioning got it.

"There's a man called Royce and a girl called Benson. They're after Kaplan too. Craig won't want to meet them. Perhaps we could use that. I'd like to. It would make the whole thing so much neater."

"It would make Loomis mad too."

Lederer smiled. "There's that also, of course. And when Loomis is angry he's at his most vulnerable. Yes. That's the way we'll play it."

One of Lederer's phones rang. He had three on his desk and one on a side table, an old-fashioned piece of ivory, inlaid with gilt, that belonged to Paris in the naughtiest nineties. Most people thought of it as decoration, but it worked, though its number was unlisted. He walked to it now, and picked it up.

"Yes?" he said. The phone squawked briskly, then went dead. He hung up and turned to Mankowitz.

"Craig's recovered remarkably," he said. "Yesterday he clobbered a CIA man."

The journey was a grueling one, and by the end of it the yellow Orion dress had lost its glitter. Beside her, Craig looked as indestructible as ever, in his crumpled suit, the shirt that had stopped being white the day before. Rome was behind them now, and they were on an Al Italia Caravelle, headed for Istanbul. She had a confused memory of meals that were always breakfast, of sound systems that shouted first in Portuguese, or Spanish, or Italian, then in English; of uneasy sleep and only half-awake wakefulness as one plane or another screamed across the Atlantic, Spain, the Mediterranean, Italy, and now the

Middle East. All the way he had been kind to her, considerate for her comfort, easing the strain of travel that seemed to touch him not at all, so that in the end she had slept against him, her head resting on the hard muscle of his shoulder, and he had sat unmoving, hour after hour. Once she had awakened, and found him looking down at her. There had, she thought, been a kind of pity in his face, but it had disappeared at once, the blank mask taking its place as he settled her down again, put his arm across her shoulders, the most impersonal arm she had ever felt. It was there now as the plane strung islands like jewels below them: Limnos, Imroz, Samothraki, before the long ride down to Gallipoli, Marmara, Istanbul. He shook out one of his rare cigarettes and lit it left handed.

"Are we nearly there?" she asked.

"Soon," said Craig.

"Boy, could I use a shower," she said. The arm quivered, she looked up and saw that he was laughing. "What did I say?" she asked.

"Miss Loman, Miss Loman, how American you are."

"Well of course I'm American," she said, "and anyway, I wish you'd stop calling me Miss Loman."

"Never spoil a professional relationship for the sake of a little politeness," said Craig.

She looked up at him, but his face as usual told her nothing. He concentrated on the pleasure the cigarette gave him.

"Professional relationship?"

"We're colleagues," he said. "We may not want to be, but we are."

The no smokingsign came on then, and it was time to fasten seat belts.

The customs, she thought, were disappointed in them. They carried so little luggage, but currency control cheered up appreciably when they saw the dollars he carried. They walked through the bright impersonality of the arrival lounge, and already she felt bewilderment, even resentment. The Middle East resembled the Middle West far too much. He guided her out to a clouded sunlight that added to her resentment—they had better weather in Chicago—and took her to a long line of taxi cabs. This too was Middle Western, but twenty years too late. An unending line of museum pieces: Fords, Chewies, Oldsmobiles, even a salmon-pink Cadillac that reminded her of the pictures Marcus had in his album; the kind of cars they made when Detroit started rolling again, just after the war, before she was a year old, battered now, their paint peeling, the shark's grin of chromium turned yellow, or nonexistent, but as American, she thought bitterly, as Mom's apple pie. Only the drivers were different, but there the difference was so marked it almost compensated for the rest. Miriam had never seen taxi drivers before who promised so much in so many different languages.

Craig let his glance move across them, taking his time. To her they all seemed alike, swarthy, noisy, not very clean, but Craig found one at least who was different, and walked toward him, a tubby and excitable man with an ancient Packard that smelled of nothing more terrible than coarse soap, recently used. Craig spoke to him in a language she didn't recognize, but which she presumed to be Turkish, and the taxi driver grinned and answered him in a speech that lasted until they drove away from the cab rank and were on the highway to the city. From time to time Craig butted in for a word or two, and once they both exploded with laughter, then the driver gave up at last and concentrated on passing everything else on the road. As he did so, he twiddled with the radio, and station after station wailed out the music of the Middle East. For some reason this annoyed the driver, who twiddled even harder, but the radio was obstinate.

"So you speak Turkish too?" she said.

"No," said Craig. "That was Greek. There are thousands of Greeks in Istanbul."

"You've—worked in Greece?" she asked.

"During the war," he said. "My war. You weren't even born then."

"You're still fighting," she said, and yawned. She couldn't help it. "Where are you taking me?" "This fellow knows a place," he said, and she remembered the laughter, and willed herself not to blush. "It 'squiet and it's clean, and the food's good," he said. "I'll wake you when we get there."

But in fact she woke long before, as they drove into the racket of the new suburbs, and the even worse racket of the old city: old cars, even older buses, horse-drawn carts, mules, and people, once even a small, bunchy herd of sheep that threaded their way through streets that grew narrower and narrower, past tall, shuttered houses, with now and again a glimpse of the dome and minaret of a mosque, until at last they turned a corner, and in front of them was the Golden Horn, blue and gleaming, the ships bobbing on it like birds. She looked and cried out, "My God, it's marvelous."

"You should have brought your camera," said Craig. The driver abandoned his war with the radio and turned to grin at her, then flung out a hand as if offering the blue water, the purple-hazed hills beyond, white houses embedded in them like pearls. He spoke again, and again Craig laughed.

"He says it was a Greek city first," he said. "And in many ways it still is."

He settled back as the car just scraped through a narrow cobbled street, turned a corner, and stopped at last in a tiny square, one side of which was a long building of wood that seemed to have emerged at the whim of generations of owners. Parts of it seemed wholly isolated from others. There were three roofs and four entrances, and everywhere tiny, shuttered windows. It was painted a fading green, but the white of its balconies still dazzled. There was a charm about the place that shefound hard to define. It certainly didn't lie in its design or proportions—only there was a Tightnessabout it; it belonged there, opposite the tiny Orthodox church and alongside the great warehouse that looked like a Sultan's palace. Their driver picked up the canvas bag and led them through an entrance, past a sign that said, in Turkish and Latin script, Hotel Akropolis.

They were in a cool room then, low, dim, marble-tiled, with a battered desk and a fat woman behind it who could only have been the driver's sister. Craig signed the register, and handed over his passport. Nobody asked for Miriam's and the fact annoyed her even as it consoled. Then an aged crone appeared, and led them through a maze of corridors, and flung open a door with a flourish. Inside was a huge room with an enormous canopied bed, more marble flooring, and a vast wooden fan like the paddle of a steamer that stirred the sluggish air when the crone pressed the switch. Off the bedroom was a bathroom with a copper bath built on the same scale as the bed, and a huge copper shower suspended above it. The crone looked at it in wonder that people should waste so much time in being clean, then went back to the bedroom again, prodded the mattress, and grinned. Here at least was luxury that made sense, and she said so to Craig. It cost him a quarter to get rid of her.