Siro Page 8

  “What is it?” asked Taylor.

  “Madame Mazloumian!”

  Taylor turned and saw a small, white-haired old spinster entering the room from a back door.

  “She has come for the money,” said the pimp, who looked genuinely distressed. The girl in yellow, also vexed, disappeared behind a curtain. The ice queen remained on her stool.

  “We better go,” said Taylor. “This looks serious.”

  “Who the hell was that?” asked George when they were outside again.

  “An Armenian lady named Mrs. Mazloumian. She owns most of these places. Supposedly she’s the biggest taxpayer in Istanbul.”

  “An Armenian?”

  “They’re sort of the designated hitters in this league. They’re Christians, so they can do all the naughty things that are forbidden to good Moslems, like run whorehouses for good Moslems.”

  “Hey, Al,” cut in George. “All this shopping is building up an appetite. I want to get laid.”

  “Fear not, my boy, Ms. Right awaits.”

  They continued down the street. Taylor looked in one window, glanced at the haggard women on display, and pushed George farther on, toward a large crowd—the largest yet—gathered in front of a picture window.

  “What do we have here?” asked Taylor, elbowing toward the front.

  What they had was an absolutely stunning brunette, naked from the waist up, with the most ample breasts Taylor could remember seeing outside a men’s magazine. They were at once very large and very firm, and the areolae around the nipples were a rosy red, almost as if they had been rouged. She had long black hair that glistened like a horse’s mane, and when she saw the two Americans approaching, she tilted her head back and shook her hair wildly and wantonly.

  “My God!” said George. “What a piece of ass.”

  “Let’s go inquire, shall we?” said Taylor, opening the iron door of the shop with George on his heels. Several of the Turks burst into applause—for the girl and her prospective patrons.

  Taylor got right to the point. “How much is she?” he asked the resident pimp. George was still staring in wonder at the woman’s breasts.

  “Let us not talk of money, my brother,” answered the pimp, sensing that he had here a customer who might pay three or four times the normal price.

  Taylor pressed him. “How much, please, my friend?”

  “Twenty thousand Turkish liras.”

  “She is beautiful, but for that I could marry her.”

  “Fifteen thousand Turkish liras,” said the pimp.

  “Al,” said George, still studying the woman. “Come here. I wanna show you something.”

  “Hold on,” said Taylor. “Let me finish bargaining.” He turned again to the pimp. “Five thousand Turkish liras,” he said.

  “Ten thousand liras,” said the pimp.

  Taylor shook his hand.

  “Hal-lo, big boy,” said the Turkish lovely to George. It seemed she spoke a few words of English.

  “Al!” implored George. “Come here.”

  Taylor walked toward his friend, marveling again at the woman’s bosom.

  “You like my tits?” said the brunette in throaty-voiced English.

  “Definitely,” said Taylor.

  “You want fuckee-suckee?” she said huskily.

  “My friend does.”

  “Hey, Al, for chrissake, I mean it. I got to show you something.”

  As Taylor approached, George whispered urgently in his ear. “Look at her throat.”

  “Fuckee-suckee?” repeated the woman. “We go upstairs!” The pimp, too, was encouraging George to head up the stairs to one of the tiny rooms.

  “My God, you’re right,” said Taylor. “She has an Adam’s apple!”

  “That’s not all,” whispered George. “Look at her wrists. They’re as thick as yours.”

  “I don’t believe it!” said Taylor. He was shaking his head.

  The Turkish whore blushed and turned away. She realized that the Americans had discovered her secret.

  “Upstairs,” said the pimp more urgently.

  “I don’t fucking believe it!” said Taylor, still shaking his head.

  “Five thousand Turkish liras,” said the pimp.

  “Go fuck yourself,” said George.

  The embarrassed “woman” disappeared behind the stairs. She returned with a towel draped around her. The crowd of men outside, still eager for the tit show, began hooting and booing, which attracted more people from nearby.

  “Aptal yabanci!” shouted one Turk to George; it was a vulgar Turkish expression that meant: You stupid foreigner.

  “Has siktir!” cried another, which meant, more or less: Fuck off.

  “Shit!” said Taylor. “We better split before this gets nasty.” He and George pushed their way out the door just as the crowd was pushing toward them, and they barely managed to squeeze through. Their departure seemed to further inflame the Turkish onlookers. A man in his twenties grabbed George’s arm; another pushed sharply against Taylor’s back. Taylor took George by the elbow and literally yanked him away from the crowd. They were walking quickly up the small hill toward the gate when a group of Turkish gendarmes, aroused by the commotion, trotted down the hill past them. Taylor nodded deferentially, but the policemen, in their haste, barely noticed him.

  When they were safely outside, George turned to Taylor and put his arm around him.

  “My pal!” he said. “That’s the last time I ever let you take me to a whorehouse.”

  “Calm down, Georgie,” said Taylor. “It’s all part of your introduction to the mystic East.”

  “I wonder if she had her dick cut off.”

  “You’ll never know. Unless you’re prepared to spend five thousand Turkish liras.”

  “Give me a break!” said George.

  They walked back toward Galata Tower, where Taylor roused the consulate driver, who had fallen asleep.

  “Come on,” Taylor said to George. “I’ll buy you a drink. The night is young.”

  “I want some action! I mean it!”

  “I know, I know,” said Taylor, shaking his head. He was embarrassed by his incompetence as a procurer. He made a mental list of the possibilities, weighing each one against the risk that it would produce another disaster. “I’ve got it,” he said eventually. He mumbled a few words to the driver from the consulate motor pool and got in the car.

  “What’s next?” asked George. “A sheep ranch?”

  “A place called Omar’s,” said Taylor. “An old girlfriend of mine works there. Great gal. Her name is Sonia. She’ll like you.”

  9

  Omar’s had the ambience of a roadside coffeehouse in Tashkent or Tbilisi. It smelled of tobacco and Turkish coffee and the sweet licorice scent of anise; and, of course, for its worldly customers, Moslem or otherwise, of beer and whiskey. It was located near the university, just above Kumkapi, in a district frequented by immigrants—Tatars, Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Azeris and a half dozen other Central Asian nationalities.

  The bar was on the top floor of a cheap hotel that catered to Eastern travelers, and it featured a spectacular view of the harbor and its varied patterns of illumination: the bright lights of the Istanbul business district across the Golden Horn; the distant twinkling lights of the Asian shore across the Bosporus; the riding lights of the Russian freighters in the Sea of Marmara, waiting their turn to navigate the narrow strait to the Black Sea; and framing this scene, the moonlit spires of the five mosques that dominated the old city.

  The owner, Omar Gaspraly, was a Tatar himself, from the Crimea, and he had made the place a gathering point for émigré intellectuals from the Caucasus and Central Asia. On a good night, you could hear people cursing in a half dozen different languages. They came to eat and drink, to read poetry in their native languages, to proclaim the inalienable rights of nations that no longer existed: most of all, they came to denounce the modern-day overlords of that part of the world—the Russians. In Istanbul, among intellectua
l Uzbeks and Azeris, the rule was: “Everybody meets at Omar’s.”

  “Al-an,” boomed a loud and heavily accented voice when Taylor entered the place. Gaspraly embraced him and kissed him on both cheeks. He was a large man, with crinkly gray hair and perpetual laugh lines creased on his face. Taylor kissed him back. Behind the affable Tatar stood a slender Circassian woman in her early thirties in a low-cut, sequined dress. She had the sad look of a cabaret singer who has sung “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” too many times. Except in her case it was probably “I Left My Heart in Sevastopol.”

  “Sonia,” said Omar, pulling her out of the shadows. “Look who is here!” Taylor kissed her on both cheeks. It was a former lover’s kiss, at once tender and distant.

  “I want you to meet someone,” said Taylor, walking her toward George. “This is my friend. His name is Henry, and he doesn’t know anyone in Istanbul.”

  “Hello, Henry,” said Sonia.

  “Hi,” said George. He was wide-eyed, dumbfounded. Perhaps it was the contrast with the vulgar women they had encountered earlier in the evening, but George looked as if he had fallen instantly in love. “Come sit with us,” said George. It sounded almost like a marriage proposal.

  “One more time I must sing,” she said. “Then I come sit.”

  Omar led them to a quiet booth in the corner of the room, almost hidden from the other tables. The room was so smoky that you couldn’t see, at first, that it overlooked the magnificent panorama of Istanbul. The bar, enveloped in cigarette smoke and surrounded by the city lights, seemed to float over Istanbul like a cloud.

  “Wod-ka?” said Omar, and wod-ka it was, a full bottle, and three glasses. “I come back,” he said.

  “How do you know this guy so well?” asked George.

  “He did some work for us after the war. We got a few of his buddies killed. Somehow, he still likes us.” Taylor emptied his glass of vodka and poured another for himself and for George.

  “We fuck up a lot, don’t we?” said George.

  “Of course we do,” said Taylor. “That is our mission. To provide a benchmark of incompetence against which other intelligence services can be measured.” They pondered that truth together in silence for a few moments, the cool, sharp taste of the vodka on their lips.

  “We’re going to solve your problem for you, Al.”

  “Which problem?”

  “Leaving people hanging. Getting them killed.”

  “Oh yeah? How?”

  “With rats.”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “No,” said George, learning toward Taylor and talking in a whisper. “Back at TSD we have a new project to implant transmitters in the bodies of rats. Then we train the little critters to follow very precise routes, sometimes several miles long. If they make a wrong turn, we zap them by remote control, until they get it right.”

  “So?”

  “So when the rats get to where they’ve been trained to go, we send out a signal that kills them dead—poof!—and activates the microphone and transmitter. The dead rat becomes a listening post. The idea is to release these little guys at a precise point in the Moscow sewer system and have them make their way to the Kremlin, into the walls of the actual building where the actual fucking Politburo meets! And our dead rat will be just on the other side of the wall, broadcasting away. Incredible, no? Like having a miniature agent.”

  “With fur and big teeth.”

  “Seriously, Al, this is what you guys need. Nobody’s going to get bent out of shape about losing a few rats.”

  “So how are the little fellows doing?”

  “Still a few problems, actually. The rats tend to get lost, despite all the training. Stage fright maybe. And sometimes they don’t die when they’re supposed to. They hate carrying the hardware, so they try to get rid of it by scratching it, or gnawing at it, which can get kind of messy. But the idea is quite promising, don’t you think?”

  “Quite,” said Taylor. “Maybe one of them could do my job.” He poured himself another drink. The band was beginning another set. Taylor scanned the room with a look of pure pleasure on his face. This was the point of it all: to have a drink with a friend in an exotic bar while the band played Crimean love songs.

  “Why do you like bars and whorehouses so much?” asked George. “They don’t seem like your kind of thing, exactly.”

  Taylor thought a moment. It was a good question.

  “Because I’m a neggo,” he said.

  “What the hell is a neggo?”

  “That’s a long story. I’ll tell you sometime. Let’s listen to the music.”

  It was, in fact, the truest thing that Taylor could have said about himself. At the New England prep school he had briefly attended in the late 1950s, they divided the world into possos and neggos. The possos believed in things. They got to class on time, they studied diligently to make the honor roll, they wore their letter sweaters right side out. At the seminar tables, they sat without embarrassment in the “suck seats” closest to the teacher. They didn’t get drunk, they didn’t get laid; but then, they weren’t sure they wanted to. They were fine young men; they looked at life without irony.

  The neggos, in contrast, professed to believe in nothing. They spent their time in the dormitory butt room, smoking cigarettes under a sign that read: “Recreant in Pacem.” They read Zen poetry and listened to Miles Davis records and could recite long passages of “Howl” by heart. When they studied hard, they pretended not to. They were in search of experience and “authenticity.” What they feared, above all, was the nothingness of ordinary life. They were, in their way, professional malcontents. When a teacher encountered a student who had lately developed that telltale James Dean look in his eye, he might implore him: “Mr. Jones, you’re not going to become a neggo, are you?”

  Taylor was very much a neggo. So much so that he was ejected from school in the middle of his senior year. “Fired,” in neggo lingo. The formal accusation was that he had been gambling on a bridge game in the butt room, but many people did that without getting fired. In Taylor’s case, it was an accumulation of things: He had pissed out the dormitory window one afternoon during parents’ weekend; he had refused to take a standardized personality-inventory test. He had, in a hundred large and small ways, signaled a dislike for the school and its traditions. And the school finally reciprocated.

  Taylor returned home in apparent disgrace and finished out his senior year at the local high school in his hometown in Connecticut. His grades were excellent, his test scores were brilliant, but because of the black mark of his expulsion, he was not admitted to Harvard or Yale, and went instead to the University of Chicago. Taylor’s father was mortified. In his mind, the University of Chicago was for Jews. But Taylor liked it well enough. Chicago was a neggo’s paradise. Taylor found new ways to get out of his skin and into other people’s. He would hang out at the blues clubs on the South Side, listening to Elmore James and smoking pot. Or he would drive east along the shores of Lake Michigan toward the glowing nightscape of Indiana Harbor and Gary, and play pool with steelworkers getting off their shifts. To Taylor, it was all gloriously romantic—except for school, which was a joke. As an act of nihilism and defiance, he majored in Near Eastern languages. Surely that would keep him out of law school, he reasoned. And it did. But it didn’t keep him out of the CIA.

  Taylor would never have joined the CIA if it hadn’t been the 1960s, and if he hadn’t been even more contrary than people imagined. There was the pressure of the draft, of course, and Vietnam, which seemed to Taylor, even then, like an especially dumb idea. But it was more complicated than that. In the wave of generalized national negativism that followed the Kennedy assassination, the people Taylor had spent his adolescence trying to escape were now embracing his worldview. Disillusionment was setting in among the bright young men. The possos didn’t want to be spies anymore. They wanted to join the Peace Corps, go on freedom marches, hang out in jazz clubs. Even Yale men were having second thoughts. It
was too much for Taylor to bear. The possos were invading the butt room. So Taylor decided to go the other way. The rebel became a counter-rebel. And the Central Intelligence Agency, already losing its annual influx of the right men from the right schools, was only too glad to have him. It was, in a way, a neggo’s paradise. As Taylor quickly discovered, you didn’t have to believe anything at all.

  George might have coaxed a little bit of this out of Taylor, a hint of the sensualist’s quest for experience that had made him, as his colleagues said, a “natural recruiter.” But just then they heard the booming voice of Omar, who was approaching their table.

  “I can join you, Al-an?” said the proprietor. “Not stay long. Just say hi.”

  “Of course,” said Taylor, pouring him a glass of vodka.

  “Some coincidence!” said Omar.

  “What’s that?”

  “Another American man is here tonight at my bar.”

  “Oh yeah?” said Taylor. “Where?”

  Omar pointed to a table across the room where a blond-haired man in his late twenties was talking with two older dark-haired men.

  “I thought maybe some friend of yours, huh?” said Omar. “He come here two, three times last few weeks. He talk to Azeri men. Tatar men. Tonight I think he talk to Uzbek men. He remind me of you, maybe.”

  Taylor gazed at the man across the room with a mixture of curiosity and concern.

  “I don’t believe I know the gentleman.”

  “Too bad,” said Omar, draining his glass. “Maybe Omar is wrong.”

  “Omar is never wrong,” said Taylor.

  They talked for a few minutes, about the wonders of the old country and the perfidies of Stalin, which pretty much exhausted Omar’s range of interest. To hear him talk, you might think that old Joe Dzhugashvili was still running the Soviet Union. Eventually, a waiter arrived to solicit Omar’s help—a quarrel had broken out in the kitchen between a Kurdish busboy and a Sudanese dishwasher—and Omar excused himself. As he walked off, Taylor’s eyes turned back toward the American whom Omar had pointed out across the way.