He’s gotten through. Victoria’s eyes alight with fear, the blue and red bulbs above her head setting off a kaleidoscope of concern. She uses the gin and tonic to busy herself.
Knox thinks his dark rum and tonic has never tasted quite so perfect. He appreciates meeting a challenge head-on, facing a powerful threat. His life with Tommy can’t supply this. He feels on edge, one foot on either side of a self-imposed line.
He would welcome being free of chess sets and tribal reproductions in exchange for gray-market Kandinskys and Bernards. The commissions on such sales would fast-track Tommy’s safety net and grant Knox an independence he hasn’t felt in five years. He cautions himself to not allow his hunger to get ahead of thoughtful precaution.
“She did not look well,” Victoria says from an intended position of authority.
“She’s not. And if I find out you had anything to do with it, you’ll think she looked good.” It’s the booze speaking, but the thing is, he likes it. This is a John Knox he enjoys playing, is comfortable playing. Alcohol could be his downfall.
Victoria tries to contain her surprise.
“You are extorting me,” he says. “Don’t think I don’t know it. For all your beauty and charm, I’m reminded that poisonous snakes are often the most alluring.”
“You think my bite so venomous?”
For two nights, this woman has slept beside him in the same bed. They have lived like a married couple, sharing a bathroom. He has fantasized about her bite. It has been one of the oddest forty-eight hours Knox has spent with any woman, especially one as beguiling as Victoria. Also like an old married couple, they have not touched, have not shared so much as a glimpse of nudity.
But now there is an offer on the table.
Knox brushes it away along with the corpses of brown bugs that have orbited the hot bulbs for the last time. They silently float to the sidewalk, snowflakes of wasted lives.
He takes her in her new room, starting by pinning her to the wall, her long legs wrapped around him and hooked at the ankles. They laugh as he fights to tear loose her thong and it stretches to an absurd size. It’s around her knees as he drops his jeans and together they direct him to the treasure. Then her eyes roll back and she says something in a language he can’t translate but understands. When her eyes come back to him, they say, You’re kidding me, and a smile seen only on women creeps across her lips. She laughs, groans and coughs, and drops her hand to join in her deliverance. It’s frantic and awkward, hard core and hard driving. Her eyes are open again and far away.
Knox feeds off that, thrills to it, loves the feel of her bottom in his hands and the spasms of muscles flexing and rippling as she exhales in a rush and shiver that connects to him and sends him over the top. He turns her and lowers her to the bed, her insides contracting and sparking, her throat cries guttural, her chin thrown back.
Later, she is leaning against him, and he against the headboard, both of them half undressed, her underwear now around a single ankle. They are dozing, not saying much. Occasionally she giggles and then holds his arms tightly around her.
He doesn’t tell her that it rarely feels like this. Doesn’t share that it’s hard to share. There’s usually some reserve held in the tank for the sake of self-preservation and self-respect. But she demanded all of him and she got it and he can’t say that there are no more tricks or secrets held back within him.
He wants to say that it happens so rarely he can count the times on one hand. That it has as much, if not more, to do with the mystery about her, the situation they are in, the hold she has over him, as it does the intangibles of physical perfection and connection. To her credit, she doesn’t press for another throw. Perhaps she’s as surprised as he. How incredible if that were the case, if a man and woman could not only scale and reach their own peaks, but summit the same mountain.
Also to her credit, she hasn’t spoken. They are basking in an afterglow so intense that a single word would spoil it.
Another thirty minutes. He kisses her on the top of her head, and leaves her slumbering but not quite completely out, on the pillow. Pulls up his jeans, covers her and moves toward the door.
As the latch is about to click shut, he hears a faint “thank you.” In English.
The call from Akram comes as Knox is walking down the hall back to his room and Grace. He checks the time. Jesus.
“Yeah?” Knox says, answering.
“Where Itfaiye Caddesi crosses the aqueduct. How long?”
“Ten minutes.”
“Fifteen.” The call ends.
It takes Knox five minutes. A single streetlamp pours yellow light onto brown stones sixteen hundred years old, piled sixty feet high in double-stacked arches. The bottom arch leads through to a tree-lined pedestrian way.
The Turks are not superstitious or afraid of the dark, but Muslims are devout and wary of displeasing Allah. New Yorkers, certainly a man from Detroit, would think twice about loitering along the aqueduct’s nearly thousand meters of randomly darkened arches at this time of night. The Itfaiye intersection, while busy with street vendors by day, lacks the lighted and noisy cafés and bars that abound near its Atatürk Boulevard crossing. Itfaiye Caddesi looks more like a pedestrian tunnel. Knox peers inside cautiously. The aqueduct is ten meters wide at its base. He sees no one.
While he appreciates the activity, even in the midst of it Knox can’t stop his mind from grinding. He’s not an analyst but an operative. He’s here because he was a truck driver in another life and he saved Sarge’s life. He’s been put in a position of doubting everyone and everything. His only touchstone is Grace, and she’s been through a psychological wringer from which it’s not easy to immediately recover. The setting feels like the Berlin Wall in a Cold War film; he’s a spy who doesn’t know which side he’s on. He took precautions to make sure he wasn’t followed from the hotel, but his efforts feel in vain as he itches under the invasive sense that he’s being watched. His skin crawls. He’s sweating despite the cool night air. He convinces himself he can smell the Bosphorus — a muddy, turgid tang swirling up in faint gusts along the aqueduct’s ancient route.
A figure of a man in silhouette appears beneath a cone of streetlamp light on the south side of the Valens Aqueduct. A dramatic image, it triggers a series of defensive reactions. Knox establishes two modes of egress, though neither provides much cover. In fact, the rendezvous exposes both men unnecessarily. It’s a poor choice.
The constant hum of city noise is shrouded by a whine in Knox’s ears. It’s the sound of increased blood pressure and hyperawareness.
Knox practices the Native American art of rolling his feet as he walks, eliminating all sound of his advance. Keeping his legs slightly spread and his arms from contacting his torso as they swing, he moves silently through the darkened arch, pausing at the far side and allowing his peripheral vision to account for anomalies, any possible threats lurking to either side. Seeing none, he continues toward what appears to be a black cardboard cutout of a man.
As Knox nears, the man moves closer to the streetlamp’s post and sits on a metal bench that faces the promenade. The posture puts him in profile. It’s Akram. He wears wire-rim glasses tonight, moving him away from a well-dressed tough toward academic.
Knox doesn’t like the choice of the bench, which exposes his back. He retreats to the ancient wall and leans against it. A minute passes. Two. Akram stands and walks slowly toward Knox. He joins Knox, the two of them looking down the long promenade, before a word passes between them.