The look on the woman’s face had been one of wariness masked by fatigue. Gisela tossed her heavy hair in its blond net and, with a smile as real and wicked as Kelly’s own as he watched her, went into a belly roll that speeded to the point that the movement but not the individual folds were visible.
“Ha!” she shouted after what seemed to have been a minute of frantic motion. She stamped her right foot and shifted back into a gentle hip sway as if a control had been thrown to a lower speed.
Gisela’s pelvis was prominent above the line of her spangled briefs. Kelly reached toward the point of her left hip with the currency and question. Rather than thrusting her flank toward him, Gisela bent and jerked her shoulders back so that the tassles on her left bra-cup flicked out against the bills.
“There,” she directed in a Platt-Deutsch accent, “for the thought. And I can do other things your wife never thought of, too.”
Her breast was warm; but then, so were Kelly’s fingers and everything else in the big room.
There was a louder cheer than expected from local tables, because very few of the Americans had gotten into the spirit of the affair as Kelly seemed to have done. Gisela strode and swayed liquidly to the podium to finish her act there. Kelly had fanned the note briefly to show the dancer it was there, but as she moved away from him he noticed that her fingers brushed the three pieces of paper into a thin sheaf so that the query was not visible amid the currency.
They were both actors, going through motions choreographed by others; neither able to admit to the other what their real purposes and intentions were, or what they knew of the other party’s. It was human society in microcosm, Kelly supposed.
Within moments of the time Gisela sprang from the room with a series of leggy bounds and double-handed kisses toward the guests to either side of her path, chairs and a speaker’s stand were set up on the podium by members of the hotel staff.
“We really ought to stay for the speeches,” Posner said apologetically in response to a whisper from his wife.
“They’ll be in Turkish,” Mrs. Posner replied, and in a tone that suggested she had been asked to go mud-wrestling.
Kelly looked at her, amazed. She seemed to think that after-dinner speeches at an affair like this were likely to be more boring in a language you didn’t understand than they would be in one that you did.
A waiter approached, so soon after the dancer had left that Kelly assumed he was changing the defense attache’s ashtray once again. Instead, the waiter offered a folded note to Kelly himself with a smirk. It was the paper he had slipped between the thousand lire bills, and beneath his own Later? was written in a loose, jerky hand, Why don’t we talk about it at the door to the parking lot?
Well, that was fast. Kelly rose, setting his chair back with one hand while he balanced the weight of his torso over the table with the other. “Mrs. Posner,” he said as he leaned toward the couple, “Commander, I appreciate your company, but I think I’ve found my own ride home.” Or somewhere.
Mrs. Posner nodded distantly. Her husband, frowning, said, “Mr. Bradsheer – take care.”
“Thank you, Commander.” Kelly shook the naval officer’s hand, then walked toward the exit.
The cooler, less smoky air of the hallway as he went to the elevators did not seem at first to clear Kelly’s sinuses. Rather, motion and oxygen brought with them a pounding headache as smoke-constricted capillaries tried to adjust to the new demands.
The parking lot north of the big hotel was actually off the basement rather than on a level with the front entrance to the ground-floor lobby. A hotel here, where almost all the guests would arrive in and use taxis instead of their own cars, had less need for parking than a similar 450-room unit in Washington, but that meant there would probably be a great deal of congestion tonight. Kelly shrugged as he got off the elevator, loosening his coat and his muscles, trying to be prepared for anything at all.