So that’s how it was. It made me nervous. “What was the message?” I asked fearfully.
“Well, it’s about Nurse Bildirjin, the young Turkish girl at the hospital. He said not for you to worry even for one second. He said to tell you he has everything fixed up.”
Ters gave his evil laugh.
I concentrated on the message. Madison was pushing a sandwich at me. I followed it with a second Coke.
My wits began to work. Evidently Prahd had done an abortion on Nurse Bildirjin after all. Maybe her father had never even found out.
I felt optimistic, even reassured. Maybe this was going to turn out all right after all.
I fell asleep.
It was well after dawn before I awoke. They had evidently made more stops for they had more Cokes. Drinking one, I saw that we were rolling into Afyon.
They drove down some back streets and then into a broader road.
“Hey,” I said, “you’re not taking me to the villa. Where are you going?”
Ters, who was driving, gave his evil laugh.
He braked suddenly in front of a mosque.
He honked his horn.
Instantly the car was surrounded by a mob!
With horrified eyes I saw Nurse Bildirjin. She was very swollen with child.
HER FATHER! He was elbowing forward. HE WAS CARRYING A SHOTGUN!
With screams surging in my throat, I scrambled around trying to locate my machine gun. IT WAS GONE!
There was Prahd, his straw-colored hair standing up at all angles. He opened the car door and I cringed back. He got in. He looked at me with his bright green eyes.
“You tricked me!” I cried. “You lured me to my death!”
He closed the car door to shut out the mutter of the threatening crowd. “You are unduly alarmed,” he said. “I have been trying to contact you for months. Thank Gods you came back in time. It would have been a terrible scandal if the baby had been born first.”
“Born FIRST? Born before what?”
“I made a bargain for you. It is all arranged. The first part of the bargain was to start my pay. Is that agreed?”
Oh, (bleep) him, I couldn’t officially start his pay. He was officially dead by my action on Voltar. But he had me on the spot. “All right,” I said. Later I could delay it but right now this was an emergency.
“Next,” he said, “is letting me take some time off from altering the identity of criminals and permit me to begin a campaign to cure prevalent diseases in Turkey and that you will finance it.”
Who cared about this riffraff? And I could welsh on this. “All right,” I said.
“The third part of the bargain I made,” he continued, “concerned all these wives you violated. Many of them got pregnant, you know. The penalty is being stoned to death.”
I flinched. I looked out the car window fearfully. Yes, some of those women were in the crowd! They had stones in their hands!
“I studied the Qur’an,” said Prahd. “All their law comes from it, you know. And there’s a thing called kaffarah. Instead of suffering the legal punishment, one can escape it by private atonement. So I arranged that you would create a fund to feed the poor of each one of their villages for the next century. That will make the resulting children sort of holy and cared for.”
The next century! Gods! Well, I could get out of that some way. Demand that it was only for the one-eyed poor or something. “All right,” I said. “But what about Nurse Bildirjin and her father?”
“Oh, that was the easiest one of all,” said Prahd. “All you have to do is marry her.”
I knew I was going to faint again. But this was no time for fainting. I could recall too vividly her bony knees when he’d operated on my head! Madly I scrambled through my wits to find some way to overcome this threatened catastrophe. I had it!
“What if I was already married?” I cried.
“Well, I’ve been studying the Qur’an. The faithful are allowed four wives. And the same number of concubines.” He smiled brightly. “So it doesn’t matter what else you’ve been up to.”
The whole world seemed to tilt before my eyes and then came straight. It hit me like a thunderbolt. Adora Pinch Bey and Candy Licorice Bey couldn’t get a Moslem for bigamy. I was safe from them! Oh, my, would I be careful to say my daily prayers.
Still, life would be hells around that vixen Bildirjin. But I nodded.
I reached for the door handle. Then I saw the tattered state I was in. A pair of grimy jogging shorts, a sea-wrinkled suit jacket, bare and bleeding feet. I grasped at a reprieve. “I’ll have to go home and get dressed first.”
“No, no,” said Prahd. “A Moslem marriage is not all that formal. It’s even unusual to do them in a mosque but Nurse Bildirjin wanted it extra legal. Your clothes don’t matter. Everything is waiting.”
He opened the door and pushed me out. The silent crowd glowered at me. They were waiting for a signal from Prahd. He told them it was all agreed to. I heard some stones being dropped and people frowned. Nurse Bildirjin’s father uncocked his gun.
I limped into the mosque on bloody feet, a martyr to my duty as an Apparatus officer.
PART FIFTY-NINE
Chapter 5
A Moslem marriage is pretty businesslike. They don’t consider women have any souls so the religious angle is almost absent.
Nurse Bildirjin was dressed in a white silk cloak and hood. The costume helped to hide her swollen belly but it was pretty obvious nonetheless. Her black eyes were looking at me with complete indifference.
A Turkish religious master was present, a khoja. He was just there to see that nobody messed up his mosque.
Nurse Bildirjin’s father had two copies of a contract. This was an exchange of a promise to be faithful and all that.
Somebody was pushing a pen into my hand. I lifted it to sign. Then I saw the sum on it! The mahri, or dowry to the wife, was specified.
“A HUNDRED MILLION LIRA!” I screamed. That was a million US bucks!
“Of course, you’ll want your child to have the best of care,” said Prahd. “And a nice villa for Nurse Bildirjin to vacation in. You’re founding a family, remember.”
“As a matter-of-fact,” said Nurse Bildirjin’s father, shifting his shotgun to the other arm, “I have the bank orders right here. You have to pay the dowry at the ceremony, you know.”
I hesitated.
The crowd ran out to get the rocks they had dropped.
I signed the contract and the orders on the Piastre National Bank of Istanbul. Gods, what would Mudur Zengin think and do now?
I was aware of Ters and Ahmed at my side. They were signing the marriage contract as witnesses!
“Now, that was easy, wasn’t it?” said Prahd. “That’s all there is to it.”
He might think it was nothing. I felt like I had just been wrapped around and around with heavy chains.
“Now put your bride in your car,” said Prahd.
I didn’t want to touch her. I was afraid she would bite. I walked out of the mosque. As I glanced back, I saw that she was following me. The khoja was shooing the crowd out. They came to gather around the car again.
My feet were killing me. I felt a fever burning through me. But I carried on. I got into the car.
Madison was sitting there writing in a notebook. Big as she was with child, there wouldn’t be room for Nurse Bildirjin if the bunk remained raised. I clicked the latches to lower it.
Half the rear seat cushion was out of position. I took hold of it to adjust it.
My fingers touched something.
Fevered as I was, I went cold as ice.
Under that cushion, exactly where I had put it months ago, was THE BOMB!
I lifted the cushion.
There it lay.
The latch which should have clicked over at the end of the time limit had not moved to connect and fire it!
Something had blocked it from thrusting home. It must be being held suspended by a piece of dirt or lint!
> I had been bouncing over rotten roads all night sitting on a defective bomb that could go off any minute!
A thin scream surged into my throat.
I picked it up.
I could not toss it out the window. It had enough explosive to blow this car to bits.
I slowly backed out of the car holding it, not knowing if the last thing I would see in this universe would be its lethal flash.
“A BOMB!” cried Prahd. “Run for your lives! He’s going to blow us all up!”
There was the wind of sudden passage as the crowd fled. The thunder of feet died away.
I kept backing. Oh, Gods, I better not stumble. The time delay was all run out. There was just that little lever left to fall in place. It could not be reversed.
I did not know what to do with it. The standard action would be to throw it into a bunker and run.
I didn’t have a bunker.
Yes, I did!
The mosque door was open. Its walls were thick.
I backed toward the door.
Carefully I turned.
I measured the width of the door.
I threw with all my might!
The bomb flew into the door.
I turned to sprint away.
My lacerated feet betrayed me. I only ran ten paces before I fell.
WHOOOM!
The walls of the mosque flew outward like a suddenly inflated balloon!
The minaret toppled sideways and fell.
Rubble started to patter down as clouds of smoke rose into the sky.
I had been skidded by concussion another twenty feet.
Finally, a voice. Prahd’s. He was picking me up. “I don’t know why you have to do these things,” he said. “It’s good nobody was in there. They could have been killed. I thought when I gave you new equipment you would get too interested in other things to have time to blow things up. But I see I was wrong.”
People were coming back, staring at the ruin and glaring at me. Then I noticed something very odd. The khoja was smiling broadly. It alarmed me.
“What’s he so happy about?” I said. “I just blew up his mosque!”
Prahd was getting me over to the car which Ahmed seemed to have moved some distance away before the blast. “You see,” said Prahd, “they know you here. When I arranged this and said who the husband would be, he wouldn’t let you enter the holy place. He said the roof would fall in. But I persuaded him that if it did, you would build him a new mosque. And sure enough, the roof fell in. He’s happy because he has been wanting to build a much more ornate one for years.”
The world was spinning. What did a mosque cost?
I got into the car. Nurse Bildirjin pulled her white silk cape sideways away from me. I wondered why. I looked down. My feet!
“I’m bleeding,” I told Prahd. “You’ll have to take me to the hospital.”
“That’s right where we’re going,” said Prahd.
We drove off and came at length to the World United Charities Mercy and Benevolent Hospital. It was amazingly groomed up: it was all landscaped and even now volunteer peasants were at work cutting the grass of their establishment. They saw who it was and stopped work to stare at me as I got out and limped up the steps. They were completely silent. What ingrates! If it hadn’t been for my brilliant idea to alter the identities of criminals these peasants would have no hospital at all! Riffraff!
I went through the lobby, thinking I was going to an operating room. But Prahd was simply taking me to his office.
I sank down in a chair. “I’m in terribly bad shape,” I said. “This horizontal scar on my forehead needs attention, too.”
He looked at it. Then he got out a bottle of antiseptic and swabbed my feet. It really stung! He picked up some rolls of Earth-type bandage, sprinkled some reddish powder on them and wound them around my lacerations. He evidently was not going to do anything extensive. When he had finished that he stood back.
“Hey,” I said, “what about this forehead scar?”
“It makes you look like you have a ferocious scowl,” he said.
“I know,” I said.
“Well, people need some kind of warning. I think we’ll just leave it that way.”
I was about to protest. He could get rid of it without half trying. The door opened. Nurse Bildirjin walked in. I blinked.
She was dressed in her usual hospital uniform, let out a bit to accommodate the swollen belly.
“You just married me,” I said. “Aren’t you going home with me?”
“And break up the beautiful relationship I have with Doktor Muhammed?” she said. “Don’t be silly. We were just making sure the baby had a legal father.”
“And a million bucks,” I grated.
“Of course,” she said, smiling sweetly.
It was really from that moment that I began to suspect that I was being had by the young Doctor Prahd Bittlestiffender.
“I am going home,” I said.
Little did I know that my travail had barely begun!
PART FIFTY-NINE
Chapter 6
The villa was sitting there against the mountain in the spring sun. It was a sort of shock to see it so peaceful and serene. But then, in its history it had witnessed three thousand years of the agonies of men. From Phrygia, through Rome and up to now, more than one pair of bloody feet had walked through its gate.
Madison and I got out. I looked around. I saw that Utanc had a new car: an awesome red Ferrari, a vehicle that represented an awful lot of bucks, at least a hundred thousand.
The staff was peering timidly from around corners, very nervous.
Musef waddled forward. Gods, he was fat on all this good food—he must be three hundred and fifty pounds! Torgut was right beside him, swinging a hefty club. They were both grinning like a couple of apes.
“Welcome home!” they both cried.
At least my bodyguards were glad to see me. They might not be in wrestling shape but they could certainly make the staff step. Torgut had only to point his club and three staff dived to grab Madison’s bag.
Well! This was more like it!
I limped across the yard into the patio. The fountain was plinking away.
Utanc’s door was open.
Her eye was applied to the crack.
The two little boys had evidently been caught in the open. They rushed feverishly to her door. She let them in and then closed it.
“You want anything, you just yell,” said Musef. “It won’t take us any time at all to beat it out of these people. We got lots of practice.”
“Who’s he?” said Torgut, pointing at Madison with his club.
“This fellow won’t be with us long,” I said. “But he’s not to know it. I’m disposing of him later. Don’t let him wander around or get into things and don’t let him reach a phone.”
“We hear and obey,” said Musef, grinning.
“What are they talking about?” said Madison. “I don’t speak this lingo.”
“They’re telling me that the Mafia has been prowling around,” I said in English. “There’s lots of them in this valley. You can hear them howling at night.”
“They didn’t seem very serious about it,” said Madison.
“Oh, that’s because they enjoy killing them. These two men are my bodyguards. They’re the champion wrestlers of this province. I told them to look after your safety and not let you go wandering about getting yourself shot.” I pointed to a guest room. “So why don’t you just go in there and have a bath and get some sleep. The staff will see that you get fed. And don’t be alarmed if we keep the door locked. We don’t want the Mafia to get you.”
“Got it,” said Madison. He went into the room. Two staff carried his grip in. I winked at Musef and he locked the door.
Well, things were going much better. Maybe I could work this out after all. At least I wasn’t going to be stoned to death and I could probably even wriggle out of paying the kaffarah to the violated wives.
I went i
nto my room. I handed the American International machine gun to Musef and told him to clean it and its magazines before it rusted to pieces. I got out of my clothes and gave them to Karagoz and told him to go out and burn them.