Siro by David Ignatius (short books to read txt) 📕

So Taylor, directionless, explored the back alleys of Beylerbey, Cengelkoy and Vanikoy. He found his bearings eventually in Anadoluhisari, up the Bosporus, at a familiar restaurant, where they stopped for lunch and shared a bottle of wine. Anna began to relax. She told Taylor more details about the odious Ali Ascari. She told him about the vicissitudes of NOC-dom in London; by the last glass of wine, she was telling him how, little more than a year before, she had decided to join the world’s most exclusive men’s club. Taylor smiled and drank.

Taylor’s plan was to go to Polonezkoy, a bucolic little village about twenty miles east of the Bosporus distinguished chiefly by the fact that its residents all had blue eyes and blond hair. They were Poles, descended from Polish soldiers who had fought on the Ottoman side during the Crimean War, received land from a grateful sultan, and settled there with their wives and children (hence the name Polonezkoy). They had behaved like good Polish peasants—building tidy farms and copulating industriously with each other—with the result that the land was very green and the population was very inbred.

For generations, the yeomen of Polonezkoy had supplemented their farm income by providing food and short-term lodging (very short-term, by the hour) to wealthy Istanbuli gentlemen and their mistresses, who needed someplace out of the way—preferably run by heathen Christians—to conduct their illicit liaisons. It was a charming, Old World version of a hot-sheet motel, and a place where Taylor had more than once brought his own women friends.

The landscape changed radically a few miles inland. The suburban clutter of the Bosporus gave way to the rugged hill country of Anatolia—dry, dusty and nearly empty of people. Europe lapped over the edge of Asia, at the eastern shore of the Bosporus, but went no farther than a mile or two. Taylor broke his rule and stopped just east of Beykoz to ask directions. “Polonezkoy?” he asked a gaunt Turkish gentleman. The man thought he meant Poland and pointed northwest, toward Warsaw. Eventually they found someone who pointed them in the right direction, and the car bumped along the one-lane dirt road while Taylor fiddled with the radio knob.

“You’re not married,” said Anna, looking at Taylor’s left hand as he swung the steering wheel toward her.

“Not anymore,” said Taylor. “She left me, six months ago.”

“Why? If you don’t mind my asking.”

“We were incompatible.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means we didn’t fit together anymore. My wife wanted me to get serious, take a job back at headquarters, have children, be a normal guy. But she gave up.”

“Why?”

“Because she finally realized I was a hopeless case. My wife was an improver. A fixer-upper. She never got the point.”

“Which was what?”

“The point was that I wasn’t going to change. I liked the way I was. It was wasted effort.”

Anna nodded. She didn’t know whether to sympathize with Taylor or his ex-wife. Taylor went back to fiddling with the radio knob.

“I’m trying to find police radio,” he said. The static floated in and out, but amid the blur you could hear the voice of a Turkish announcer intoning the police slogans of the day. “Remember that the police are here to protect human rights,” said the announcer. There was a vigorous police march, followed by the admonition: “You should be the kind of policeman that people will call ‘friend.’ ”

“I love this station,” said Taylor. “They should have police radio back home.”

The radio announcer began intoning a summary of the day’s terrorism incidents. His voice had the flat tone of a sportscaster reading the soccer scores. “In Izmir, one shooting; in Trabzon, two shootings and one bombing; in Ankara, four shootings.”

“What’s happening to this country anyway?” said Anna as the police announcer rumbled on. “It’s a mess.”

“The usual,” said Taylor. “There’s no political center anymore. Just extremes. So the whole country is going to the mattresses.”

“In Konya,” continued the police-radio announcer, “one shooting and one bombing. In Istanbul, six shootings and two bombings.” Taylor turned police radio off.

“What are we doing about it?” asked Anna.

“Who? The boys and girls from RTACTION?”

Anna nodded. RTACTION was one of the CIA’s cryptonyms for itself.

“You gotta be kidding,” said Taylor. “We’re not in the game.”

The Chevrolet rumbled on. Every few miles they passed a cluster of cement-block houses, each with a muddy terrace and a collection of chickens, sheep and a lame cow or two. Dark-eyed children were everywhere in these settlements, more numerous than the farm animals. Each house had the standard adult complement—a heavy woman in a headscarf and a thin man in a worn coat—that seemed universal in the Turkish countryside. Anna looked at the women, lumpy and misshapen. That was one of the immutable cruelties of the Third World class system: It made poor women fat and rich women thin.

“Who was that cooing in Turkish in the background when I called you last night?” asked Anna.

“None of your business.”

“Touchy, touchy.”

“Her name is Tina. She’s a blackjack dealer at the Etap Marmara. Actually, her name is Tuna, but she got tired of people making rude jokes, so she changed it.”

“Is she in the business?”

“No. I told you, she’s a blackjack dealer.”

“What’s the attraction?”

Taylor looked at her and smiled.

“Raw sex,” he said.

Anna blinked.

“She’s very pretty,” he continued, “in a cheap sort of way. And as she tells all the blackjack players, she has the fastest hands in Turkey.”

“Give me a break,” said Anna. “That’s not what I meant. I meant, isn’t it hard to relax with someone who doesn’t know what you really do?”

“Nope,” said Taylor. Anna stared out the window at some pigs. “I’ve learned a lot from Tina, actually,” he continued. “About Turkish women.”

“Such as?”

“You really want to know? She’s rather graphic.”

“I think I can take it.”

“Well, she told me quite a lot about what it’s like to be a single girl in Turkey.”

“Go on.”

“Okay. For starters, Turkish men are virgin-crazy. They have to marry a virgin or they go nuts.