Free Gorgeous East by null Page A

a little extra for the fresh mint that they carried around in fragrant leather bags. There were maybe a dozen left now, maybe twenty, in the entire city of ten million. Running into a tea peddler in Istanbul was like catching a cab in Manhattan not driven by a Pakistani or a Somali—what were the odds?
    “ Hayir, mersi ,” Smith said—no, thanks, a kind of knee-jerk American tourist reflex to peddlers of any kind.
    “ Çay? ” the tea seller persisted gently, holding out a cup. He was a small man, hunched from carrying his tin-lined tank of tea around for thousands of miles over these steep and windblown streets. His face, dominated by a scraggly gray mustache, was deeply lined but kindly; he might be sixty or perhaps eighty, hard to tell with Turks.
    “ Hayir! ” Smith said again, but he realized suddenly that he was very thirsty, that he was dying of thirst, that nothing had passed his lips, not food or water, since before noon. “Well, O.K. Tamam —” He went fumbling in his pocket for change.
    The tea peddler reached for his spigot, then caught sight of the tears still wet on Smith’s cheeks. He touched his own creased visage and put a concerned hand on Smith’s arm.
    “No, I’m fine,” Smith began, “just a piece of dirt in my eye . . .” He tried to say more, but found himself giving way to emotion again; it was no use. “Shit!” he said in a choked voice. “This is really fucking stupid!” And he tried to grin, but couldn’t and bowed his head and found himself heaving with sobs.
    The tea peddler clucked sympathetically, still patting Smith’s arm. Then, something, a flash of sunlight off the stainless-steel cables above made the old man glance up, and he caught sight of Jessica in the aquarium window, engrossed in her magazine, her golden hair throwing off light. The thick terry-cloth robe had fallen away from her legs and a wide swath of creamy flesh shone there like the marble thigh of a goddess.
    “ Eh-eh! ” the tea peddler let out an exclamation. “ Genk ksiz, cok pahali. Sini cekmek! ” He looked from Jessica’s exposed thigh to the tears on Smith’s face and back again. Now he understood. Here was a scene from a storybook: the golden-haired princess in the tower; the lovelorn palace thief weeping from a broken heart in the alley below—though in the old Turkish stories it wasn’t a golden-haired princess at all, but a dark-eyed page boy with lips like rose petals and soft, fawn-colored skin.
    The tea peddler clucked again and filled a tin cup with tea and handed it to Smith, who drank deeply, not bothering to wipe the rim, slightly green and worn thin by the passage of many lips. The stuff was sweet and strong and cool, despite sloshing around the tank on the man’s back all day, and soothed Smith’s dry throat. When he tried to pay for it a moment later, the tea peddler shook his head. He wouldn’t accept a single coin.
    “Come on,” Smith said. “Here, take it—”
    The tea peddler only smiled sadly and began a speech in Turkish in a low earnest voice—advice for the lovelorn, Smith guessed—though he couldn’t understand a word.
    “ Türkçe bilimiyorum, ” he interrupted, a phrase from the guidebook—I don’t speak Turkish.
    The tea peddler nodded, thinking. At last he held up a finger and plucked at Smith’s sleeve and did a little pantomime that meant come with me, come with me, and descended a few steps toward Istiklal Caddesi.
    Smith hesitated, then let himself be drawn down the slope and into the crowds along the busy sidewalk. The tea peddler kept hold of his arm as they came up the steep grade to Karakoy, talking all the while, a soothing monologue. Maybe Smith was being taken somewhere dangerous where he might be robbed, held for ransom, murdered, his body dropped in pieces into the Bosphorus. No. The tea peddler seemed like a straightforward kind of guy and Smith trusted his instincts. Anyway, he had lost something crucial over the last year of