“Who was that?” someone asked.
Kelly glanced around him. Mrs. Posner waited, an eyebrow raised in interrogation, for the veteran’s answer.
“Bev,” said her husband with a grimace.
“A go-go dancer in Sydney,” Kelly said, turning again toward Gisela as he spoke, “tucked six Ping-Pong balls up her snatch with the mouth of a beer bottle. While she danced” – from the corner of his eye he noted that Mrs. Posner’s hand had lifted to cover her gaping mouth – “she spit ’em out into the audience again. I mean, she could really aim, and some of ’em landed in the third rank of tables.”
The woman made a choking sound but did not say anything further. Kelly thought there was the least hint of a smile on Commander Posner’s face.
The music thinned to a background of sharply-tapped drums, which Gisela counterpointed with her finger cymbals as she went into a long series of hip rolls, shifting position again with each thrust to make the whole audience part of the performance. Her face was not bored nor disfigured by slit-eyed, open-mouthed mimings of lust. Rather, she was alive and aware both of her audience and the fact that she was very damned good at what she was doing.
Gisela ran a full set on the podium before she began to work the room. Her stunning hair remained surprisingly still as her body, hidden from most angles in the narrow aisleways, shimmied and jerked.
Belly dancing was a form of gymnastics and, like other gymnastic routines, an acquired taste. The detailed muscle work, which distinguished this performance from that in a Sirkeci nightclub, was subtler than similar skill demonstrated on the parallel bars. As a result, the attention of most Westerners lapsed – even that of the men, who could see more flesh in cocktail bars in whatever city they called home.
But Christ! thought Tom Kelly, not flesh like that – unless they were dating gymnasts. And the Turkish citizens were noisily delighted, their enthusiasm making up for any lack of spirit among the foreigners present. Men at each table held up bills as the dancer swung close. In general Gisela smiled and shot a pelvis toward them, holding the pose long enough for them to tuck the money under the strap of her briefs.
The two music men accompanied her on her rounds, providing music – by Turkish definitions, rhythm by any – and a level not so much of protection as of presence, to keep matters from getting out of hand. Neither man was as young as Kelly, and the bigger one, for all that he looked fit, was closer to sixty than fifty. At intervals, as Gisela shifted her attention from table to table, the smaller fellow with the guitar plucked sweaty lire from the dancer’s waistband and stuffed them into the side pockets of his jacket. Even granting that most of the bills would be hundreds – something over a US dollar – Gisela was making a respectable haul.
And there were exceptions. One table held a quartet of fat, balding men with features similar enough to make them brothers. They had been drinking raki, Turkey’s water-clear national liquor that clouded over ice. Its licorice flavor disguised its ability to lift the scalp of an incautious drinker. Though these four were not inexperienced, the volume of their intake tonight had loosened them considerably.
“Ho!” cried the nearest one as Gisela did a shoulder shimmy before him. He raised a bill over his head and flapped it. Kelly could not see what it was, but somebody at a nearby table hooted and clapped.
The blond woman responded with a belly roll that progressed to an amazing shimmy, a rattle of finger cymbals that overrode the drum taps from the boom box, and finally a forward thrust of her chest that brought her breasts within an inch of the man’s face. A bangle, either a large topaz or tawny paste, joined the two bra cups. It was beneath that that the man thrust his bill. There was a cheer and general applause from the surrounding tables.
The brother to whom Gisela now directed herself already had a bank note ready, but instead of waving it he shouted, “Wait!” in Kurdish to the hip-swaying woman and fumbled again in his wallet. The two others at the table who had not yet joined the performance were doing the same, bumping empty glasses in their haste to get out more money.