Elaine nodded; and Kelly, his task of misinforming his case officer complete, focused on finding a place to eat.
A few doors down a sidestreet shone the internal lighting of a red and blue Pepsi-Cola sign with, lettered below, the name Doner California. “There we go,” Kelly said, pointing with his offside arm to direct Elaine.
“Authentic Turkish, right,” the woman said in mock scorn as she obeyed. “Do they have a quartet lip-synching the Beach Boys?”
“I’ll eat every surfboard on the walls,” Kelly promised as he pushed open the glass-paneled door and handed her within. “Watch the little step.”
The floor of the diner was of ceramic tiles with a coarse brown glaze. There were half a dozen white-enameled tables, several of them occupied by men or groups of men dressed much as Kelly was. The sides and top of the counter were covered with green tile, similar to that of the floor in everything but color; but there was a decorative band just below the countertop, tiles mixing the brown and green glazes in an eight-pointed rosette against a white background.
Elaine was the only woman in the restaurant.
Though the evening was beginning to chill fog from air saturated by the Bosphorus, warmth puffed aggressively from the diner, heated as it was by a vertical gas grill behind the counter. A large piece of meat rotated on a spit before the mesh-fronted grill that glowed orange and blue as it hissed.
All eyes turned to the newcomers – particularly to Elaine – as they entered. The owner, behind the counter in an apron, made a guess at what variety of Europeans they were, and called, “Willkommen!”
“God be with you,” Kelly responded, in Turkish rather than German.
Elaine slid onto a stool at the counter instead of a hoop-backed chair at one of the empty tables. “If we’re going to do this,” she replied to the veteran’s quizzical glance, “we may as well do it right. And you were right about the surfboards.”
A ten-year-old boy with the owner’s features and the skull-cap haircut universal among prepubescent Turkish males set out two glasses of water with a big smile.
“You hungry?” Kelly asked.
Elaine set her palm across the top of Kelly’s glass and held his eyes. “The water’s almost certainly okay,” she said. “Worst case is you’ll do anything we need you for before you’re disabled by amoebiasis. Your choice.” She slid the glass toward him and removed her hand.
Kelly hesitated. “Look,” he said, “I’ve drunk – ”
“And if you were in the field,” Elaine interrupted calmly, “you might have to now. Your choice.”
“Two Pepsis,” Kelly said, smiling back at the boy. “And two dinners with double helpings of doner kebab, please,” he added to the father.
“Turkish for shish kebab?” Elaine asked as the boy opened small bottles with the familiar logo.
“Shish kebab is Turkish,” said Kelly, “and you can get it anywhere in the world. Doner’s pretty localized by contrast, so I’m making you a better person by offering you a new experience. Not necessarily better than the familiar, but different.”
The woman’s body tensed into her ‘neutral’ status while she attempted to follow the ramifications of what Kelly had just said. Her legs crossed instinctively, then uncrossed and anchored themselves firmly to the footrail of the stool when she realized what she was doing.
Kelly, grinning broadly, turned to watch the owner slice doner while his son readied the plates with cooked carrots, cooked greens, and ladlesful of rice.
The meat rotating before the gas flame was not the roast or boned leg of mutton it at first appeared. It was in fact a large loaf of ground mutton, recompressed into a slab in the ovine equivalent of hamburger, homogenous and broiling evenly on the vertical spit.
As the Americans watched, the man behind the counter swung out the spit and the integral driptray onto which juices spluttered with a sound that would have started Kelly’s saliva flowing even if he had not gone most of a day without food. With a knife the length of his forearm, the Turk sliced away a strip of mutton so thin that it was translucent as it fell onto his cooking fork. The man pretended that he was not aware of the foreigners watching him, but his boy chortled with glee at the excellence of the job.