The Venetian Judgment by David Stone

Author:David Stone
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781101032084
Publisher: Jove
Published: 2009-04-15T10:00:00+00:00

ISTANBUL

ÇENGELKÖY, THE ASIAN SIDE OF THE BOSPHORUS

Dawn was a faint rose-colored tint on the black night in the hills behind them as the gypsy cab turned near the Bosphorus Bridge. They cleared a line of trees, and across the water the city of Istanbul opened up before them, a panoramic sweep of shimmering light from the northern suburbs all the way down the shoreline to the jutting headland of Sultanhamet, the skyline pierced in numerous places by the needle-tipped minarets of hundreds of mosques. There was no way Istanbul could ever be mistaken for a Christian city.

Kipling aside, this was the city where East and West really did meet, a city that had been the crossroads of the world ever since the place was called Byzantium. As they made the long sweeping curve north through rolling parkland, the far shore, beyond the spotlit hulk of the Ortaköy Mosque at the water’s edge, was a wall of lights that filled up the low rolling hills of the city all the way to the crest, where a black starless night sliced them off abruptly. In the extreme south, they could just make out the illuminated domes of the Topkapi Palace and the four slender minarets of Hagia Sophia.

It was the coldest part of a January night, and a veil of coal smoke and sea mist lay over Istanbul, giving it a pale aura and an ethereal beauty that, as ethereal beauty often does, vanishes in the cold light of morning. The air smelled of car fumes, coal fires, cooking oil, and under that the wet-stone-and-seaweed reek of the Bosphorus.

Their cab, a rusted-out hulk that might once have been a Benz, was being driven by a fatally bored young man in a woolen watch cap and a Korn T-shirt who had listened to deafening techno-house on an iPod and chain-smoked little black cigars all the way from the tiny airfield at Sandirma. He was a terrible driver, jerking and jinking and horn-blasting his way through the mad swirl of jitneys and trucks and motorcycles that filled up the lunatic maze of Istanbul’s streets even at this unholy hour.

Levka, up front with the driver, had his boots braced against the dashboard and had long since given up trying to engage the kid in small talk. Now he was staring out the passenger window at the storefronts and milling crowds hurtling past while nursing a paper cup of black tea. Mandy and Dalton were sitting close together in the rear, aware of the heat of their bodies, staring stoically out the side windows and breathing through their mouths.

They had left the Blackhawk at Sandirma, rotors folded, wheeled into a hangar and covered with the tarp, for a rack rent of a thousand American dollars a night, paid in cash a week in advance to a shriveled little gnome in grease-stained mechanic’s overalls and an oil-soaked kaffiyeh, who had scowled at them out of a face so wizened and wrinkled it looked like a dried apricot, until the dollars got counted out on top of his toolbox.

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