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By Root 411 0

the distinctive engine note of a motor scooter in a cross street. She looked up and saw a girl on a yellow Vespa drone past. Ace realized that the muscles in her shoulders were bunched and tense, elbows held in tight to her ribs, ready to tight. She forced herself to relax. It was a lovely evening now that the motor traffic had thinned. Smiling people walked past, couples kissed, arms and legs bare under pastel shorts in the warm Mediterranean air. In a dark restaurant silver clinked and a waiter wrestled a bottle open. Ace heard the pop as the cork came free. She smiled. Then she heard the buzzing of another motor scooter and looked up in time to see Massoud swoop around a corner. He stopped then glanced up. Ace was looking directly at him. Massoud did a U-turn and went back the way he’d come. Ace stood for a moment, then hurried down a side street. Now the streets seemed to be narrowing in on her in the heat. She couldn’t read the words on the shopfronts or street signs, their meaning locked away in alien lettering. An old horse tethered at a stone trough had a white film over one of its eyes. A thick cloud of flies lifted from its mane every time it stirred. Ace was still clutching the warm newspaper‐wrapped bundle in her hand. It felt like a small living thing. The food she’d eaten was shifting greasily in Ace’s stomach. At the first litter bin she passed she threw the rest of the kebab away, the newspaper greased to transparency, the war pictures lost to sight.

* * *

The desk clerk at the Novotel gave Ace the same look she’d received when she checked in that morning. It was not a look of approval. The clerk was a woman dressed in an immaculate man’s evening suit, white shirt and black tie. On her lapel was a small crescent badge, the symbol of the new Turkish nationalism. Tourists were welcome in the new Turkey but at the Novotel they were looking for the right kind of tourist. Ace wore torn khaki culottes, a Rohan tee‐shirt knotted to form a bra, and plastic sandals. She was dirty and sunburned and her hair, tied in a bun, was greasy from a week’s travel in buses along the Turkish backroads. The clerk made her wait while she double‐checked Ace’s Visa rating on the front‐desk computer. The credit card was in the name of Ms J Smith, but the validating thumb print and the recorded passport photo on the Visa database were Ace’s. The clerk moved her light pen around and punched keys, trying to get the computer to ring some bells, but she couldn’t find anything wrong. Finally she clucked and looked up and reluctantly handed Ace a rectangle of plastic embossed with the hotel’s crest and a machine‐readable barcode.

Ace slid the plastic key through the reading unit beside her door and went into her room. The air conditioning made a soft noise in the darkness. ‘Lights,’ said Ace, and panels of recessed halogen bulbs came on silently in the ceiling. The thick hotel carpet of the corridor had given way to even thicker carpet inside the room. She kicked her sandals off and felt the soft fibre on her sore toes. She walked to the closet opposite the bed. Her airline bag was still there, untouched. In the bathroom the fat chrome taps gleamed in the bright white curvature of an immense bathtub. Ace could see her reflection in the taps. At one touch hot water would pour into the tub. Ace turned to the sink and gathered up her toothpaste and toothbrush, sweeping them into the airline bag.

Looking at the clean smooth sheets of the bed Ace felt the weight of exhaustion settle on her. For a week she’d been travelling this alien coast, riding in old dolmuses thick with Turkish tobacco, ringing with Western music. She’d followed the winding backroads across mountains, her ears popping with the sudden pressure changes. For a week she had hustled, organized, made preparations. She’d met arms dealers, boat builders and black‐market software hustlers. Dealing with a foreign language and the eyes of men on her all the time. Now she was in a quiet room sealed away from the world, looking down at this soft wide bed. She’d be asleep as soon