Posner’s wife, a slim woman whose smile seemed no more likely to slip than that of the Mona Lisa, bent close to her husband’s ear and whispered. He swore under his breath, glared at the cigarette, and ground it out in the clean ashtray with which a waiter had just replaced the overflowing one.
Mrs. Posner smiled at Kelly.
“I know,” said Kelly with a nod of false condolence to the naval officer. “It’s terrible to work for people as ruthless and clumsy as high military officers, ready to force the most ridiculous orders down the chain of command.”
Commander Posner sat up sharply, blinking as if he thought he had misheard the statement.
As perhaps he had, because the noise in the big room was even greater than was to be expected by Western standards. A significant sample of the American official community was at the party, and, Kelly noticed, a high proportion of the Turkish nationals was not in fact ethnic Turks. Men – almost all the women in the room were the wives of Americans – of the Levantine, Kurdish, East European, and even Jewish communities in Istanbul predominated here. They were the folk who, rightly or wrongly, felt they might need outside protection in or from what was basically an Osmanli – Ottoman Turkish – nation state.
The US was unlikely to supply that help, should it ever come down to cases; but when you’re nervous, a bad chance is better than no chance at all. Tom Kelly knew the feeling right enough.
There was a rattle of cymbals from the far doorway. A man in evening dress on the low podium in the center of the hall cried, his voice echoing through the ill-balanced sound system, “I give you Gisela!” in both English and Turkish.
Turkish music began at the far end of the hall. A man as tall as Doug Blakeley came in, carrying a large, chrome-glittering ghetto blaster, and stood by the doorway.
With a clash of finger cymbals, Gisela Romer appeared there. She was of a height with her assistant, though part of that was the pumps she wore.
Nothing in the file, photograph included, had prepared Kelly for the fact that the woman came as close to his ideal of beauty as anyone he had ever met in his life. Her shoulder-length hair was not the ash blond he had expected, but rather a richer color like that of polished brass or amber that has paled during long exposure to sunlight. Her choker, bra, and briefs were of those materials, brass and amber, and the gauze ‘skirt’ depending from the briefs at her flanks and midline was silk dyed a yellow of low saturation.
The dancer moved down the hall toward the podium with a lithe grace and as much speed as comported with the need to make an entrance. Her arms reached above her head and twined at the wrists momentarily. Then, clashing the finger cymbals, she advanced, spinning with alternate hip jerks – each carrying her the length of a long leg closer to her goal. The man with the tape deck trailed her, accompanied by a shorter man playing what looked like a small acoustic guitar.
“I’ve never understood the attraction of Oriental dancing,” said Mrs. Posner distantly, using the technical term not from concern for anyone’s feelings but rather from a distaste for the word belly.
“Muscle control,” Kelly said. He watched intently as the blond mounted the podium and went into a formal routine, rotating slowly around the semicircle of the audience. “I’ve never seen a dancer with muscle control that good. Well, once before.”
Gisela’s hips shimmied and threw the gauze draperies outward, drawing the eyes of most in the room. Kelly watched instead what the actual belly muscles were doing and was flabbergasted. The blond woman was taut-bodied and no more fleshy than the veteran himself was, so the horizontal folds which ascended one after another from briefs to rib cage were not accented into crevices by folds of subcutaneous fat. They were impressive nonetheless, and the precision with which they marched upward like the static arcs of a Jacob’s ladder was nothing short of remarkable when combined with the flashier portions of the routine.