When Elaine tapped on the door of 725 a few minutes after he had gotten dressed, Kelly had a twinge of concern that his comment regarding clothing would cause her to change into slacks. Istanbul was as cosmopolitan as London, in one sense, but the underlying culture was Sunni Muslim. Smart visitors to London didn’t slaughter sheep in the street there, and women didn’t go around in pants here without insulting a proportion of the people who saw them. That would be true even if she were a foreigner wearing some $200 Paris equivalent of blue jeans with a couturier’s tag on the fly.
He needn’t have worried. Elaine wore a high-throated black dress with a long-sleeved cotton jacket over it. Hell, she was smarter than he was and at least as well-traveled. Kelly nodded approvingly and joined her in the hall instead of inviting her into the room.
“Want to tell me what comes next?” Elaine asked as they strode toward the elevators, “or is the surprise an important part?”
“Well, you know …” Kelly said, poking the call button. Damn! but she seemed tiny when she stood beside him; the full cheeks were so deceptive. . . . “You can get any kind of food in the world in Istanbul – though if you’re big on pork, you’re limited to places like this one.”
He circled his hand in a gesture that indicated the Sheraton itself and its five-star equivalents on Taksim Square. “But I thought we’d be exotic and eat at a Turkish diner. You can find that too in the tourist hotels, with tables and the waitresses tricked out like they were on loan from the Arabian Nights … but I don’t much feel like that.”
The elevator arrived, empty. “Lead on, faithful guide,” Elaine said as she stepped into the cage. When the door shut she added in a voice barely audible over the whine of the hydraulics, “The dancer is Gisela Romer, a Turkish citizen but part of an expatriate German community that settled here after World War II. There should be an extensive file in Ankara. I’ve put a first priority on it, so something ought to be delivered by courier as soon as it’s printed out here.”
“Nice work,” said Kelly.
“I’m glad you’re giving us a chance to help you, Tom,” Elaine said seriously. “That’s all that we’re here for.”
“I wonder if – ” he started to say, timing the words carefully so that the elevator chugged to a stop at the lobby before he could complete the sentence. Elaine’s face blanked, and she said nothing more until they had dropped off their keys and left the hotel.
Kelly did not see George or any other of her subordinates.
“I think we’ll walk,” he said, with a wave to the doorman and the leading cab of the rank beneath the hotel’s bright facade. As they walked beyond the band of light, Kelly went on in a low voice, “You know, I wonder if you could find me a pistol if I needed one. I don’t mean I do, I mean if.”
“I’d have thought you had sources of your own, Tom,” Elaine said. Her smile asked more than the words themselves did.
“Yeah, needs must,” agreed the veteran with false frustration. “I mean, it wasn’t a turndown. But things’re tight now, real tight, with Ecevit trying to get a grip on things. Somebody could take a real hard fall if, you know, something went wrong and the piece got traced back.”
“What do you want?”
“I don’t want anything,” Kelly insisted, “but you know – if I do, something standard, a forty-five auto, a nine millimeter. And it’ll just be a security blanket, if I turn out not to have enough guts to stay on an even keel without something to wrap my hand around.”
“Doesn’t sound like a problem,” the woman said, nonchalance adding weight to the words. “Doesn’t seem to me either that you need to feel you’re going off the deep end if you choose to carry a personal sidearm under the – present circumstances.”
They were walking -down Independence Boulevard, which was flooded with traffic noise and the sound of music, mostly Turkish, from the open doors of many of the shops. A triple-tier Philips sign over an electronics store threw golden highlights over Elaine’s short hair. Kelly bent closer to her to say, “I used to carry a piece all the time I was in uniform, a snubbie that wasn’t good for a damn thing but to blow my brains out if things got too tough. Just as soon not get into that headset again, you know?”