‘What’s a hamam?’ Elizabeth asked.
JC pointed at the plaques.
‘It’s in your language right here.’
And in fact it was, a plaque, recently written with tourists in mind: ‘Real Turkish Bath. 300 years old.’
‘We are in the baths of Cagaloglu, ordered built by Mehmet the First in the eighteenth century,’ JC explained.
They stopped at the entrance.
‘In these baths the sections for men and women are separated. The entrance for women is on another street,’ JC said. ‘My assistant will stay here with you, and the captain and I will go in. Is that all right with you?’
The married couple agreed in part because there was nothing they could do. Of course Elizabeth wanted to go in, but she had to respect the cultural tradition different from her own. She couldn’t help thinking that JC did this so that she would find out what was going on secondhand through her husband. In any case, someone would have to tell her everything.
The cripple approached JC and whispered something in his ear.
‘I imagined so,’ the old man said in response. ‘Are you ready, Captain?’
Raul said nothing, but yes was understood.
The two men walked to the entrance, where JC let Raul go forward. The Portuguese sighed and continued walking into the unknown.
In the camekan they found the dressing rooms, small cubicles where several men changed their clothes, conversed, read newspapers, sipped tea. They were all Westerners, no Turks.
Raul stopped, expecting directions.
‘Keep going,’ JC ordered.
They passed the next antechamber, the sogukluk, without stopping and stayed in the hararet. The steam was dense, and the heat immediately made them sweat.
‘This isn’t good for you,’ Raul warned, with sweat running down his face. ‘Nor for me,’ he muttered.
‘I imagine so,’ JC commented. ‘If it’s not good for me, imagine for him.’
Who? Raul thought.
Though the hararet was usually the most crowded part of the bath, there were few men that day. They made one out, stretched out on a table, being massaged expertly, but he didn’t seem the least interested in secret conversation.
‘That’s enough for me,’ JC grumbled with his clothes soaked and breath panting. It was too much. ‘Sebastiani,’ he shouted.
He needed to wait only five seconds before the latter entered, an old man with a huge head of white hair dressed in a black suit, sitting in a wheelchair, pushed by a young cleric, his aide.
‘JC.’
‘Sebastiani,’ he greeted him, suffocating, sweating, and tired. ‘What are we doing here?’
As incredible as it seemed, Sebastiani didn’t seem affected by the temperature or the steam; his assistant, a young man about twenty years old, was dripping water from his face, stumbling as he walked, his vision clouded, and feeling as if he might faint at any moment.
‘Ah, I’m getting used to it.’
‘What?’
‘To hell,’ the other answered without thinking about it. ‘Isn’t that where we’re all going? That’s what I think.’ He smiled sarcastically.
‘I can’t stand being here longer,’ JC said, holding on to Raul. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
The group passed into the sogukluk. JC and Raul needed a few minutes to recuperate. Sebastiani waited serenely without wiping the light sweat away that had broken out on his face. He won’t have a problem surviving hell. The assistant thanked God that they had left the steam room, where they’d entered completely clothed, and sat down on the first bench he found, completely exhausted.
‘Without question one should never go beyond the camekan in a Turkish bath. There’s something to eat and drink there, and the steam doesn’t kill you,’ JC declared.
‘In hell you’re not going to have to eat and drink,’ Sebastiani explained.
‘Do you know someone who’s been there and returned to tell about it?’ JC asked.
‘Don’t question my beliefs,’ Sebastiani returned. ‘I don’t impose my faith on anyone, but I don’t allow it to be insulted, either.’
JC respected his friend’s warning. You have to divide in order to conquer sometimes.
‘This is Captain Raul Brandao Monteiro. Portuguese military.’ JC made the introductions. ‘This is Sebastiano Corrado, cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church.’
Raul inclined his head courteously. He had never met a cardinal.
‘Cardinal without right of election. I’m ninety-four years old, you know. I’m a second-class cardinal. And you, Raul, a soldier without an army?’
‘In fact, yes. I’m in the reserve.’ He smiled.
‘You see? Our situations are similar,’ he observed.
‘In the conclave of 1978, I was still a bishop. In the one of 2005, I was too old.’
‘It’s because you didn’t need to vote,’ JC declared.
‘That’s what I tell myself. There is room for only one pope at a time. But I congratulate myself that the Pole lasted so many years, although it was bad for me.’
‘How are things in Fatima?’ JC wanted to know.
‘As always. It’s strange to see people much younger than me, and all with atrophied minds.’
‘Look to your faith,’ JC admonished. ‘Don’t offend that of others.’ He couldn’t resist a gibe.
‘Don’t confuse faith with psychopathology,’ he answered with a guttural laugh no one else took up.
‘What do you have for me?’ JC pressured him.
The man opened his hand, palm upward. It was a silent message to his assistant, who placed a yellow envelope in it. Sebastiani gave it to JC.
‘Is this it?’
‘It is. Be careful.’ It was the first time his unpleasant face showed any suspicion. ‘The other one must be totally confused right now. He’s discovered there’s nothing there.’
‘Stupendous.’
‘What’s going to happen now?’
JC took the envelope and looked seriously at everyone around.
‘I’ve thrown out a lot of misinformation to make things very hard for everyone else,’ he said joyously. ‘Now the time has come for the famous JC to appear.’
62
James Phelps hung on to the weak thread of life with all his strength, or, at least, that’s how it seemed. He was shaken by intermittent jolts from the rusty van that rushed him to the veterans’ hospital a few blocks from the barbershop.
They’d left through one of the closed doors in the passageway that opened onto another narrow hallway, with a door to an underground parking garage at the end. The escape route in case an operation went wrong.
Rafael and Ivanovsky did the carrying with Sarah comforting Phelps. They put him in the middle seat of a 1980s Daihatsu with room for nine. Vladimir drove the ‘smoke bomb,’ as they lovingly called it for the excessive fumes that escaped through the exhaust pipe.
‘Hang on,’ Rafael encouraged Phelps with his hands on his head.
Ivanovsky took the passenger seat to show Vladimir the way. A Russian mania for knowing more than others or thinking they did. Sarah was in the middle seat next to the sliding door. Phelps’s feet were on her lap.
‘Everything will be all right,’ she told him.
