The Sultan of Byzantium (11 page)

I scrutinized the phone number digit by digit like I was looking for an alibi. When I lifted my head to thank Jesus, he was giving the address of the golf course to the rotund man behind me and there was no sign of the twenty-dollar bill. I went back to my room to call Kinsey Milhone’s office. Unlike in detective novels and movies, my luck was no good – I dialed the number seven times and got no answer. I left a polite message and focused my attention on the latest TV adventure of the easy-going Simpsons. I was on the cusp of boredom when Madame Milhone called. She had a self-confident and sultry voice; I noticed that I was buttoning up my shirt. I summarized my request with the sentence, ‘I’m looking for my Aunt Emma Hackett,’ and a big laugh crackled back over the phone.

‘I’m sorry, young man,’ she replied, and I felt a bit more comfortable. ‘But solving this case will make my reputation as the speediest detective in the history of detective novels and put me in the Guinness Book of World Records. Emma Hackett was my classmate from grade school through high school. We lost touch when she moved to San Francisco thirty years ago, but I know she’s running a nursing school there. I’ll get her phone number and address from a mutual friend. Meanwhile I should express my sorrow over Paul’s death. He was a genius for some of us, and for others he was nuts.

‘Look, let’s meet at 7:30 in the Edgewater lobby. If you’re really Emma’s nephew, I’ll tell you her whereabouts. In return, I’ll expect a perfect meal at the hotel restaurant.’

Before saying hello to Kinsey Milhone, I observed her from a distance. As if her worn-out blue jeans and faded rose-colored T-shirt weren’t enough, she made no attempt to hide the gray in her hair. She had a pert turned-up nose and cheerful eyes. She walked like a retired model despite her aging looks. She looked a little over fifty but didn’t seem to care about that. This plain but attractive woman had fallen into the luxurious lobby like a ball of light. I moved toward the female detective, whistling as she waited, trying to visualize her in her younger days.

As soon as she saw me she raised her right hand and said, ‘No need to show your passport – you’re a Hackett.’ We proceeded to the restaurant, which was more like a palace. Kinsey persuaded the waiter to ask the chef for a salad not on the menu, and ordered Chilean sea bass to go with it. She left the wine selection to me. She observed me like a psychologist with a sense of humor, working up, I supposed, the outline of her report.

‘Your grandfather was a neurotic war hero. He took special pleasure in his retirement, but he treated his family like prisoners of war.’ Perhaps this sentence was formulated beforehand. ‘Your grandmother Mara was Serbian I think, an immigrant and a quiet but sagacious woman. We were the diffident witnesses of her endless struggle to protect her children from the caprices of her fascist husband.

‘Your father was regularly the most successful student at school, but a little odd. He never came to parties and he liked to flirt with immigrant working girls older than himself. During summer vacations he would go and visit Mayan and Aztec ruins or else bury himself in the public library. He acted like he was superior to his own age group. He constantly tried to create the impression in his circle that he was an enigmatic character. I would have bet money that Paul would become a bloodless academic.

‘Emma, on the other hand, was a good-hearted and lively friend, mature and intelligent. Since she never complained, we called her ‘Saint.’ She did well in high school – her brother helped her – and got a scholarship to San Francisco State. In her third year there her mother went nuts and ran off to Florida with a Korean mechanic twelve years younger than herself. Her father had a partial stroke and she quit school to look after that bad-tempered man. He died two years later and they sold the house to pay off a bank loan. There was some money left, and with that your aunt finished school, took up another academic career, and married a widowed academic when she was pushing forty. At that time I’d just divorced my second husband. I told you on the phone that your aunt heads a department in a San Francisco nursing school. Before we leave, I’ll give you some phone numbers and addresses that I got from a friend still in touch with her.

‘Emma kept up with her old friends in Santa Teresa for a while. Whenever I saw her I thought she was trying hard to act like a businesswoman to avoid revealing her inner world. But I never understood why she wanted to hide her brother’s death. Off and on I go to San Francisco on business, but usually I’m just grateful to get back here in one piece, let alone have time to visit old friends.

‘Young man, instead of a long-winded conclusion let me just tell you one thing: You’re lucky to have an aunt like her. You won’t be sorry you met her.’

Kinsey professed to love the Napa Valley wine we drank, so I had two bottles gift-wrapped for her and we walked to her car, a twenty-year-old Volkswagen. I felt certain that her previous car was a thirty-year-old version of the same. She pinched my cheek and gave me her card with Emma Hackett Green’s address scribbled on the back of it. I don’t know why I didn’t watch her car rattle out of the parking lot. I felt a strange emptiness after she left. But when I turned to the inviting ocean breeze I felt relieved, as if I’d solved a thorny equation: Santa Teresa was a giant stage set erected for Kinsey Milhone’s scenes.

Back in the lobby a Maxi girl in a miniskirt approached me with a telegraphic sentence: ‘The restroom on this floor is out of order; may I use the one in your room?’

‘If you have a friend with the same problem I can help her out too,’ I said.

Later, after sending the pricey prostitutes away, I pressed my nose against the ocean in my windowpane and shut my eyes to intensify the pleasures of midnight. It struck me what was missing in this 3-D postcard. The aroma of citrus fruit?

*

San Francisco! At first sight I declared it my favorite town in the USA. (I gradually dropped the habit of collecting a harem of cities. Now there’s one city on earth that makes my heart leap, and it’s not Istanbul.)

The minute I walked into my ninth-floor suite at the Four Seasons I cheered up. I wondered when I would have had enough of this marathon hopping from one luxury hotel to the next. The greenery that came closer as I moved closer to the window was called the Yerba Buena Gardens. When I was a student I would go to the park and occupy the bench nearest the entrance as if I were standing guard. I loved to watch the toddlers beam with happiness as their small hesitant steps led them to the grass. Despite my anxiety – ’Does this indicate an incapacity to become a father?’ – I never tired of this amusement. If one of the kids began crying I was hurt to the quick.

I asked room service for a salad, sandwich and grapefruit juice. My order was brought in with Fellini-like flamboyance. They must have been rewarding me for choosing the worst menu in the hotel’s history.

‘3333 B Geary Boulevard, Florence Nightingale School of Nursing.’ There was a quizzical note in my voice as I read the address; the taxi driver comforted me. ‘Could be worse,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen 8300 Geary.’

In order not to start a useless conversation I didn’t ask why a city of 800,000 should have such a long non-boulevard. The hospital looked like a dead whale. The nursing school was an annex and belonged to a nonprofit foundation. In front of the main hospital gate stood a bust of the founding elderly lady; in front of the nursing school that looked like a fitness center stood one of Florence Nightingale. I wanted to believe that sculptures embody the personal marrow of the people they honor. I couldn’t walk by the symbolic nurse without my shoulders straightening and my feet falling unconsciously into step.

There were two bulletin boards in the hallway. On the first was the nursing profession’s oath; on the second a notice politely requested donations and drew attention to the resulting tax deductions. The information desk was manned by a black guard who was born to play Othello. I knew I would not be scolded if I approached him with the deference ordinarily reserved for a judge. Since it was still summer vacation, my aunt was not at school. It happened that the security guard’s father had served in Turkey in the 1960s at a radar station that was then an American base. He gave me Emma Hackett Green’s address and phone number without hesitation when I disclosed her Turkish connection. I had a fifty-dollar bill in my right hand just in case. We were both astonished to see that I put it down on the left end of the counter. He pushed the bill away with the back of his hand and I threw myself out of the place apologizing profusely.

My taxi driver was listening to classical music and I paid no attention to his boasting. When I told him ‘City Lights Bookstore’, he informed me that it belonged to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the last poet of the Beat Generation, who had just entered his eighty-ninth year. He enunciated his words one by one slowly, as if he had a half-retarded passenger in the car. We started off and I asked him to turn down the radio. ‘If you like, I can recite one of the master’s poems for you,’ I said, and without waiting for an answer began declaiming
‘Two Scavengers In the Garbage Truck, Two Beautiful People in a Mercedes.’

The fifty-five-year-old bookstore had a certain charm. The only prose work among the dozen books I carried to the cash register was a biography of Hadrian. I couldn’t bring myself to correct the talkative check-out girl who thought I was a literary scholar.

Even if the bar next door to the bookstore hadn’t been Jack Kerouac’s favorite watering hole, its beautiful name – Vesuvio – would have lured me in. It looked as if the all-embracing gloom of this claustrophobic den had gone unchanged for the last fifty years. When the three senior bohemians at the bar looked at me questioningly, I felt obliged to seek their approval by nodding hello. I regarded with envy the junior poets at the crowded tables behind us, with their beards and granny glasses and grungy girlfriends. After my second martini I called my aunt. Her voice was gentle but tired. We arranged that I would bring her the package from Kinsey Milhone tomorrow at two. I would try my surprise announcement face-to-face.

After four drinks I managed to stand up without swaying. I walked down Columbus Boulevard with numbers and words crashing into each other and washing over my mind. I hoped that walking would sober me up. Coming across a 24-hour striptease club, I greeted it with a stanza from Karacaoğlan:

At dawn I stopped at the beloved’s village

Welcome, my love, she said, come in

Putting her rosebud nipple to my mouth

You’re tired, my love, she said, take this in.

Is every suburb in the world half an hour away from its town?

I feared I would fall asleep the moment I set foot in Alamo, that quiet district of the rich. As I stopped people on the street to ask the whereabouts of Emma’s address, I wondered about the residents of the charming villas. The natural flora framing the deserted streets looked like it would quit the scene when the photo shoot was finished. I queried a paper boy who stammered, ‘The street across from the shopping mall that looks like a sleeping dinosaur.’ I mildly enjoyed Stone Valley Way for its lack of postcard glossiness. Its houses were not engaged in a gaudiness contest. The mailbox hanging from the second-last house said, ‘Emma H. – Albert Green.’ The modest house had a miniature garden and an old Nissan parked in front of the garage.

I whispered an Arabic prayer and rang the doorbell. The door opened instantly and I was facing my aunt for the first time. Emma Hackett Green looked about sixty-five and the shirt hanging out of her jeans failed to conceal a few excess pounds. She was outgoing and instantly charming in a thoroughly natural way. It didn’t surprise me to see her take a startled step back. She covered her mouth and chin with her left hand. (I’m left-handed too.) I stood there hoping she would retrieve her brother’s face from memory and recognize me. I couldn’t bear her trembling, however, and said, ‘Instead of a package I brought greetings from Kinsey Milhone. And a surprise from me. To use the name I never used, I’m Adrian Hackett.’

I imagined that she would shriek and rush to throw her arms around me, but in fact she turned her back and burst out sobbing. Before long she pulled herself together – after all, her life had seen plenty of ups and downs before this. Wiping her face with a tissue, she moaned, ‘I knew it, I knew it,’ and then did throw her arms around my neck. Her living room was airy, but I felt that the furniture there was not begotten with the joy of life. Prints of local birds and butterflies hanging on the wall did not soften the room’s rectitude. On the end table next to the leather armchair in which I sat was a framed picture of my aunt, her husband who appeared about fifteen years older, and an underfed little girl. Al, a retired academic, looked like a scarecrow. I was glad that he’d gone to Sacramento. The shy girl looking distrustfully at the camera was their adopted Tibetan daughter. The picture was taken nine years earlier when she had come to live with them, with Virginia as her new name. My honorary niece was now a high school student and due home from summer camp in Costa Rica.

My green tea came in a giant cup. Clearly my aunt was settling in for a long conversation. I went first. It was the third time in five days I had to supply my autobiography and I was getting tired of it. The more I talked, the more I bored myself. As though under an obligation to seek forgiveness, I listed all the prohibitions my mother had imposed on my father’s memory. My voice was louder than I expected as I declared, ‘I’ve never even seen his photograph, much less a line of his handwriting.’

When my aunt’s turn came, she cast her eyes to the floor, a gesture that foreshadowed a concise and political talk.

‘Probably Kinsey already told you that our family life was short on love.’ Her voice cracked as she said this. ‘My mother met my father in Cincinnati where she was working at a bar. For the need of American citizenship she tricked my father into marriage. You know what I mean. Poor woman, she made a terrible choice of victim. My father was talented but neurotic, hard-working but unlucky. He was wounded in the Korean War essentially because of inaccurate information, you might say. He could never accept that he was forced to retire with what they called a physical disability, while his commander was given a medal. He turned into an angry man and a near-alcoholic. Torturing us was his main pastime and of course my mother was his number-one victim. I think all of St Teresa was surprised that she put up with it for so long before she finally ran away.