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

as she went. By the time she reached Taylor, he was hard again. He unzipped her sundress and lifted the straps off her shoulders. She wasn’t wearing a bra, and her breasts fell free against him.

“I want you,” she whispered.

Taylor slid his hands beneath the elastic of her pants and slowly pulled them down over her thighs, his tongue tracing the path down to her heels. Anna was trembling now. As Taylor passed his gaze slowly up the entire length of her body, she said softly, “Now.”

Taylor stripped quickly and pushed up her skirt.

“Gently,” she said. “It’s been so long.”

She needn’t have worried. She was so aroused that when he lifted her up and held her astride him, he slid into her easily the first few inches. She was breathing so hard now that Taylor thought she might faint if she stayed on her feet, so he laid her down on the blanket and slowly entered her all the way. With the ground firm underneath her, Anna moved in rhythm with him, enfolding him, trembling and crying out when he went too far; then gradually tightening around him like a membrane that was about to burst, so that he could barely slide in and out; and finally pulling him with her over the edge.

24

“Go away!” said Munzer Ahmedov when Taylor approached him on the street corner in Brooklyn the next Friday. The noon prayer service had just concluded a block away at a two-story brick building marked “Uzbek-Kazakh Fraternal Association, Inc.,” and Munzer was walking to his car, threading his way among the Orthodox Jewish men in long black coats who filled the streets. Taylor had been sitting in a coffee shop across the street from the mosque for nearly an hour waiting for Munzer to emerge. He recognized him instantly from the old ID photo Stone had provided: He was a short, round-faced man in his late fifties, with the high cheekbones and narrow eyes that marked him as a son of Central Asia. It was a face halfway between Turkey and China, one that hid its secrets like a hooded trader along the Silk Road.

Taylor handed Munzer his card. “My name is Goode,” he said. “I’m in the rug business.” As Taylor spoke, the D train rumbled by on the elevated tracks overhead, on its way to Coney Island.

“Go away!” said Munzer again. “I not interested in any rugs.” He spoke from deep in the throat, with a guttural accent that was at once Russian and Uzbek, just as Stone had described.

“I’d like to talk to you,” said Taylor.

“This America. Nobody got to talk to nobody. Goodbye.” Munzer opened his car door.

“I have a letter for you,” said Taylor as the Uzbek man was closing the door. “From Sheikh Hassan.”

Munzer rolled down the car window. “Sheikh who?”

“Sheikh Hassan.”

“Turkish Sheikh Hassan from Rahway, New Jersey? That one you mean?”

Taylor nodded. He handed Munzer the two-sentence letter of introduction, passing it through the open window. Munzer read it and handed it back, looking very apologetic.

“Ah! I am sorry, my friend,” he said, getting out of his car and shaking Taylor’s hand. “I did not know you was friend of Sheikh Hassan from Rahway, New Jersey. So now, what I can do for you?”

“I’d like to talk to you,” repeated Taylor.

“About rugs?”

“No.”

“What about then, Mr.…” He looked at the card. “Goode.”

“Is there someplace quiet around here where we could talk?”

“Yeah, sure. Turkish restaurant. Very nice.”

“Where is it?”

“On Ocean Parkway. Just before Avenue J. You know where that is?”

“I’ll find it,” said Taylor. “What time?”

“Now, why not?”

Taylor walked back to the white Karpetland van. As he passed the façade of the Uzbek-Kazakh Fraternal Association, it struck him that it looked like one of those old-fashioned bowling alleys where they set up the pins by hand. The brick building was sandwiched between a furniture store called Rubinstein & Cohen and a storefront with a hand-lettered sign in the window that read: “Eretz Realty.” It was certainly an unlikely neighborhood for a mosque.

Taylor found the Turkish restaurant on Ocean Parkway, next to a car lot with a big sign that proclaimed: “Masada Used Cars, Inc.” The restaurant’s decor was spare and simple: a white linoleum floor; a glass case just inside the door displaying the day’s collection of kebabs and appetizers; on the walls, posters of Izmir, Konya and other Turkish haunts. Indeed, the café looked virtually identical to one you might find in Izmir itself. Munzer was sitting at a table all the way in the back, smoking a nargileh. He waved to Taylor and motioned for him to sit down.

“You like to smoke hubbly-bubbly, my friend?”

“Sure,” Taylor answered. In situations like this, he was always willing to do whatever the object of his attention suggested. Eat lamb’s testicles in Mogadishu. Chew qat in Aden. Drink a bottle of arak in Erzurum. Whatever it took. Taylor pulled the mouthpiece of the pipe to his lips and breathed in deeply. The crackling in the bowl and the sweet aroma suggested that someone had put a few crumbs of hashish in with the tobacco. He took another long drag and put the mouthpiece aside.

“Good,” said Taylor. “Where’s it from? Afghanistan?”

Munzer just smiled. “So what you like to eat?” he asked.

“It’s your restaurant. You pick.”

Munzer called over the waiter and rattled off a string of dishes. As he did so, Taylor tried to think about how to make his pitch. He didn’t want to be impolite and talk business before eating. But then, he hadn’t come all this way to eat kebabs. So he said nothing for a while.

The trick in recruiting anybody to do anything, Taylor had learned long ago, was to go a step at a time. The first priority was to get your target to cross some sort of threshold. It almost didn’t matter what it was at the start of a relationship, so long as you got him to cross a line. If