Istanbul Noir - Mustafa Ziyalan [54]
The dense heat slaps my head like a wet blanket soaked in urine. I disembark just in time to be serenaded by the haunting sickness of the midday call to prayer. My irritation returns twofold as I’m jostled by a gaggle of terminally old women scurrying like lizards, overloaded with wicker baskets full of rotting fruit. I scamper aimlessly ahead of them, no clue where I am, where I’m going, or what the hell I was thinking when I decided to just drop in for a few hours of exploration. In order to truly understand this freakish divide which both straddles and separates the East from the West, Asia from Europe, would take the most astute detective decades of investigation. Ripe with intrigue, filthy with an undercurrent of sexy repression, her sinister underbelly shrouded in aromatic blossoms whose fragrance can never fully disguise its festering malignancy. Istanbul is a beautiful bitch languishing on a hotbed of winding passageways steeped in sleazy mystery where crusty cousins with dirty fingernails wheel and deal anything that yields a price tag. The art of bartering, bad-gering, and hustling, if not invented in Constantinople, was long ago refined here and is now practiced by nearly all of its estimated fifteen million sweating bodies. If I hadn’t already, I was about to lose my fucking mind.
A petulant gang of six-year-old boys had been following me for blocks, barking with insistence that I purchase a pack of their ratty Kleenex. Their skinny arms and legs encouraged visions of tiny morsels of grilled meat slathered in chili sauce and served on a stainless steel skewer sharp enough to puncture tires. With blood pressure skyrocketing, blood sugar plummeting, I needed to eat before adding cannibalism to my lengthy resume of hate crimes.
I ventured up a dusty side street in search of libations. A scattering of mismatched tables offered miraculous refuge at a deserted café. Empty save for a litter of dirty tiger kittens frolicking after a cloud of iridescent horse flies at the feet of two outstanding specimens of hyper-sexed American stupidity. The twin towheads sporting sun-kissed cheeks, broad shoulders, and aviator shades intensified my hunger. Now it was more than food I craved. I slid into a grimy seat at the next table.
I summoned the waiter, placed my order, and sitting within earshot of their inane conversation felt my blood pressure hike itself up another notch even before the lamb chops arrived. I started getting itchy. My pinkie began to twitch. My eyelids burned. Spoiled shits with Mommy’s money pillaging through Eurasia stoned on hash and horny as hell flipping through incriminating photos on expensive cell phones while relaying a running commentary of their recent female conquests: “Anal in Varna,” “Organ Grinding in Odessa,” “69 Plus One in Sarajevo.” Sounded like a laundry list of bad alt-porno, further evidence of which I was sure could be found on the palm-fitting camcorder coyly snuggled against the blonder of the two’s semi-erection.
“Shit, she’s a gaper,” the bulging one sidelined, inching closer to the phone.
“I’ll give you that one, holmes, but Dirty Sanchez be damned! Two can ride for the price of one!”
“That’s right, cowboy!”
The bosom buddies knocked knuckles.
Although I didn’t feel a moral obligation to avenge my sex-starved sisters in absentia for the randy reminiscing of these gloating globe-trotting Lotharios, I couldn’t resist the