The Venetian Judgment (25 page)

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Authors: David Stone

BOOK: The Venetian Judgment
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“Not to my face.”
“I get wind of any of that, time I’m through with them they’ll look worse than I do. Now, go. Go, and then come back.”
ISTANBUL
ÇENGELKÖY, THE ASIAN SIDE OF THE BOSPHORUS
Dawn was a faint rose-colored tint on the black night in the hills behind them as the gypsy cab turned near the Bosphorus Bridge. They cleared a line of trees, and across the water the city of Istanbul opened up before them, a panoramic sweep of shimmering light from the northern suburbs all the way down the shoreline to the jutting headland of Sultanhamet, the skyline pierced in numerous places by the needle-tipped minarets of hundreds of mosques. There was no way Istanbul could ever be mistaken for a Christian city.
Kipling aside, this was the city where East and West really did meet, a city that had been the crossroads of the world ever since the place was called Byzantium. As they made the long sweeping curve north through rolling parkland, the far shore, beyond the spotlit hulk of the Ortaköy Mosque at the water’s edge, was a wall of lights that filled up the low rolling hills of the city all the way to the crest, where a black starless night sliced them off abruptly. In the extreme south, they could just make out the illuminated domes of the Topkapi Palace and the four slender minarets of Hagia Sophia.
It was the coldest part of a January night, and a veil of coal smoke and sea mist lay over Istanbul, giving it a pale aura and an ethereal beauty that, as ethereal beauty often does, vanishes in the cold light of morning. The air smelled of car fumes, coal fires, cooking oil, and under that the wet-stone-and-seaweed reek of the Bosphorus.
Their cab, a rusted-out hulk that might once have been a Benz, was being driven by a fatally bored young man in a woolen watch cap and a Korn T-shirt who had listened to deafening techno-house on an iPod and chain-smoked little black cigars all the way from the tiny airfield at Sandirma. He was a terrible driver, jerking and jinking and horn-blasting his way through the mad swirl of jitneys and trucks and motorcycles that filled up the lunatic maze of Istanbul’s streets even at this unholy hour.
Levka, up front with the driver, had his boots braced against the dashboard and had long since given up trying to engage the kid in small talk. Now he was staring out the passenger window at the storefronts and milling crowds hurtling past while nursing a paper cup of black tea. Mandy and Dalton were sitting close together in the rear, aware of the heat of their bodies, staring stoically out the side windows and breathing through their mouths.
They had left the Blackhawk at Sandirma, rotors folded, wheeled into a hangar and covered with the tarp, for a rack rent of a thousand American dollars a night, paid in cash a week in advance to a shriveled little gnome in grease-stained mechanic’s overalls and an oil-soaked kaffiyeh, who had scowled at them out of a face so wizened and wrinkled it looked like a dried apricot, until the dollars got counted out on top of his toolbox.
Then his face had opened up like a lotus, as he displayed a set of snaggled teeth that were a standing indictment of Turkish dentistry, and solemnly swore by the Sema of Sufi that not even the imps of Shaitan would sniff a whiff of its presence. Then he dragged out a truly appalling
nargileh,
fired the bowl up with something that looked like compacted mouse dung, and insisted on passing the water pipe around three times to settle their business. But, thanks to Levka’s contagious criminality, it
had
been settled, and, to Mandy’s lasting amazement, Dalton’s wild ride had not ended in a Turkish prison but in the backseat of this Benz with Istanbul spreading its infectious charms out before her like a
houri
shedding veils. Dalton, hip to hip with her, felt her shiver slightly and folded her hand in his.
“Are you okay?” he asked in a low, warm whisper, the heat of his body and the scent of him—dry grass and tobacco smoke and spices—filling her up and sending a flood tide of post-traumatic lust through her body.
“I’m fine,” she said, leaning softly into him. “I’m tired. I need to be taken to bed. What is this place we’re going to again, the Sumatra . . . whatever?”
“The Sumahan. You’ll like it. It’s a five-star hotel in Çengel village, right on the waterline, with a view across the strait. You can see all of Istanbul from your balcony. Trust me, it’s up to your standards. I wouldn’t put an English noble into a ratbag, would I?”
She moved in closer, nuzzled into his neck, inhaled deeply, breathing him in, his heat, his scent. She moved his right arm closer to her left breast and held it there.
“And what are your
plans,
dear boy, when we get there?”
She got the answer she expected, but not before he kissed her in a not entirely brotherly way on the side of her mouth, his dry lips open slightly.
Progress,
she thought.
“You are going to get some rest. Levka and I are going straight to the Ataköy Marina. It’s on the European side, down on the Marmara coast, a couple of miles from Atatürk Field. About fifteen miles by car. I want to get there before full light.”
“And what am I doing?”
“Sleep. Have a bath, get some breakfast. Then I need you to find a waterfront rental with a boathouse. A big one. Big enough for a fifty-foot cruiser. Close to the hotel. Ask the concierge. Tell them you want to rent a villa, a furnished one, but it
has
to have a boathouse. One that’s available today. It’s a tourist area, lots of waterfront homes all along the shore. It’s a very wealthy area. And it’s not the high season. We can pay top dollar, which never fails. Somebody will have something.”
They had turned off Yaliboyu and were cruising along Kuleli now, through a neighborhood of large private waterfront homes, gated, heavy with palms, fig trees, and frangipani vines, the soft, warm light of money spilling from leaded-glass windows and intricately carved Moorish screens and vine-draped Juliet balconies. The street ran in a long, curving glide through tree-lined avenues, past an open park, a brand-new luxury development now coming up on their right, huge white-stone mansions in the Italian style, built along a cresting hillside, with red-tiled roofs and swimming pools, and now coming up on their left, the waterfront side, a long Frank Lloyd Wright façade in stone and steel and glass that ran for several hundred feet along the edge of the Bosphorus. A large glass-and-steel sign had been set into a limestone wall—SUMAHAN—their Turko-Goth driver rolling up to the glass doors and slamming on the brakes, still deep into his techno-house.
They were promptly besieged by uniformed attendants. In a moment, Mandy and all their baggage had been swept into the hotel, leaving Dalton and Levka alone with the driver, who seemed to feel that his part in their little excursion had come to an end and that it was time for a hard-earned and life-altering gratuity.
Levka leaned into him, plucking the earpod free with a sticky pop, said a few soft words in pidgin Turkish, close enough to the kid for him to feel the large pistol in Levka’s belt. The kid sat up straight, stared back at Levka, and nodded several times, his brown eyes open so wide Levka could see a ring of white around each iris.
Levka patted his cheek, not gently, stuffed a fat wad of Turkish lira into the neck of the kid’s T-shirt, and in a Turkish trice they were back on the road again, this time heading south, with the lights of the suspension bridge on their right floating like a chain of fireflies in the hazy air, Istanbul glimmering on the far side of the strait. The driver had dumped the iPod and was now driving with great care, his thin body rigid.
Dalton, from the back, leaned forward, tapped Levka.
“What did you say to him?”
Levka beamed at Dalton.
“I motivate him, boss.”
“Really? How?”
“I explain him situation. I tell him you are big man in Swedish Mafia. If he don’t take iPod out of ear and drive like human, you will cut his balls off, cook them in lingonberry sauce, and eat them.”
“Lingonberry sauce?”
“You know, like Swedish meatballs?”
Dalton nodded, sat back, thought it over.
“The
Swedish
Mafia?”
Levka shrugged, looked back at Dalton over his shoulder.
“Look at you, boss. Long blond hair. Ice eyes. Look like killer Viking. What I gonna say? You dago don from Sicily?”
There wasn’t much to say to that. The rest of the trip passed uneventfully, although the kid seemed to be having some trouble breathing. But he drove wonderfully well, gracefully negotiating the hectic four-lane traffic swarming across the Bosphorus Bridge, dealing gently with the packed causeway that ran along the Galata shoreline, and basically handling the Galata Bridge and the clogged arteries of Sultanhamet just like a limo driver in Vegas. As they rounded the causeway curve below the high hill of Sultanhamet, the minarets of the Sultan Ahmed Mosque silhouetted against the sky, a lemon yellow winter sun crested the low black hills far away to the east, and the first gleam of dawn struck the Sultan’s turret in a shaft of light, just as it said in the
Rubáiyát
.
They reached the Ataköy Marina on Kennedy Caddesi a few minutes later, a former Holiday Inn—and it looked it—a row of stolid chevron-shaped buildings, looking a tad down-at-the-heels, nowhere as severely posh as the Sumahan, more of an airport hotel for business travelers such as you’d find near any huge national hub from Frankfurt to La Guardia.
They passed through the lobby, barely drawing the attention of the half-asleep attendant behind the counter, heading for the long dining room that fronted the marina and the pool deck. At the entrance to the dining hall, Dalton stopped by a newsstand, still shuttered, to look down at a wire-bound stack of papers called
The New Anatolian,
apparently published in English since the headline, in large screaming-scarlet letters, read:
MIDAIR COLLISION OVER BANDIRMIA
TWO CHOPPERS DOWN
MASSIVE SEA SEARCH FOR SURVIVORS
DEBRIS AND BODY PARTS LITTER SHORELINE
Levka and Dalton exchanged a look but said nothing, and went out the waterside doors onto the pool deck, a large, open space looking south across the Sea of Marmara, now a vast plain of sparkling-blue water fluttering with wind-whipped whitecaps that looked like shark’s teeth and the strong, dank graveyard reek of old, deep water. The pool deck was lined with white wooden recliners laid out under fake-palm-frond
palapas
. Beyond the deck, out in the marina harbor, the masts and rigging of luxury sailboats stitched the pale sky down to the rugged shoreline.
The marina itself was huge, sheltered by a man-made seawall that defined a D-shaped harbor about a quarter mile in length, inside which there were seven wooden docks each about four hundred feet long. Even in winter, the marina was reasonably full, holding at least three hundred craft of various sizes, from runabouts to sixty-foot trawlers, although most of the boats had been shrink-wrapped in blue plastic and sealed up for the winter.
Dalton stood there for a moment, running his eyes over the array of pleasure craft, looking for the low sharklike cruiser he had last seen in Venice.
Levka stood a little behind him, facing the hotel, looking for watchers and seeing no one, although any of the shuttered rooms that overlooked the marina could hide a man with a scope.
Dalton made a short muffled sound, and Levka turned around.
“You see it, boss?”
Dalton nodded toward a long, sleek Riva motor yacht, a streamlined fifty-footer with a white cabin and upper deck, lots of brass and mahogany and teak, silver handrails, and a navy blue hull, with a thin line of red paint separating the blue and white a foot below the deck. She was tethered at the far end of the third inner dock, half covered with a plastic tarp that made her look like a swan tangled up in picnic trash.
Levka followed Dalton’s look.
“So, she still here.”
“Yes. They’ll try to move her today. We got here too fast for them.”
“Pretty boat. I not seeing guard at all. What we gonna do?”
Dalton didn’t answer for a while, and then he turned and looked back at the hotel. In the dining room, a few waiters were beginning to pass among the tables, laying out dishes and silverware for the early breakfast crowd.
He looked at Levka—still in his air-crew khakis, unshaven and rather shopworn. And then down at himself, wearing the pants to his navy blue pinstripe, a pair of black wingtips, and a reasonably clean white shirt, no tie. They both looked a little on the scruffy side but presentable enough for a second-rate Turkish hotel in the off-off-season.
“You hungry?”
Levka showed his teeth, not to his advantage.
“Boss, I could eat horse.”
“Let’s settle for bacon and eggs.”
 
 
 
THREE MEN CAME
in midafternoon, a trio of small but solidly built button men with a military cast, ranging in age from twenty to forty, with the oldest man, who was also the shortest, a tough-faced thug with a Kosovo Marine cut and a trim black goatee. Dalton, watching him, thought he carried the unmistakable burden of noncom leadership. The Top Kick look.

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