Chapter 11

What a stupid, untrained “special agent”!

Didn’t he realize the danger he was putting himself in? Yet, there he was, in the center of the planet’s opium trade, sitting in a cheap bar, a stranger in the place, a foreigner, his back to the door, and a bouquet of opium poppies in front of him! Just asking for it! And no way to get out of trouble if anything did happen. No connections. No friends. No money. And he didn’t even speak Turkish! What a child. I could almost feel sorry for him.

Heller sat there for a bit, looking at the flowers. From time to time he rearranged them.

Then he took one of them, a gaudy, orange blossom and idly began to pull off its petals. I wondered if he was nervous. I certainly would have been in such a spot as that!

An opium poppy has a big black ball in the center. Really, that’s the bulk of the flower. He had it stripped. He smelled it. Silly performance: fragrance comes from petals, not the stamen.

Heller put it aside. He took another flower from the glass. He got out a piece of paper. He laid the whole flower on half the sheet and straightened out its petals. Then he folded the paper over, covering it.

Then he took his fist and banged the package!

I really laughed. That isn’t the way you press flowers. You put them in between two sheets of paper and you gently let them flatten and you put it away to dry. You don’t bang it with your fist. He didn’t even know how to press flowers: he should have asked his mother!

He opened the paper and of course the whole thing was a complete mess. The huge center ball had simply squashed! That isn’t the way to handle an opium poppy. You gently scrape the ball and you get the sap and then you boil it and you have morphine!

He must have realized that wasn’t how it was done for he just emptied the squashed mess on the table, folded the paper and put it in his pocket.

He looked up. People had been drifting in: Turks of the area, dressed in their sloppy jackets, tieless white shirts, unpressed pants. Maybe twenty of them had come in, a strange crowd for this time of night. I realized that the word had spread. They just sat down at tables, not ordering anything, not talking, not looking at Heller. They seemed to be waiting.

Then the front door crashed open and into the room swaggered the two top wrestlers of the area!

Now, the Turks love wrestling. It is a national sport. They wrestle in any style. They are big and they are tough and they are good! So that was who Faht Bey had called! The wrestling champs!

The bigger one, a formidable hulk named Musef, swaggered to the middle of the room. The other one, named Torgut, sauntered over to the wall behind Heller’s back. Torgut was carrying a short piece of pipe.

About fifteen more townsmen came in behind the wrestlers, avid expectancy on their faces.

The proprietor yelped in Turkish, “Not in here! Outside, outside!”

“Be quiet, old woman,” said Musef insultingly.

The proprietor, faced with that growl and about three hundred pounds of famed muscle, got very quiet.

Musef walked over to Heller. “You speak Turkish? No?” He shifted to badly accented English, “You speak English? Yes?”

Heller just sat there looking at him.

“My name,” and Musef hit himself on the chest, “is Musef. You know me?”

With a slight incredulity, Heller said, “A yellow-man!” And indeed, now that I thought about it, Musef and Torgut did bear some dim resemblance to the yellow-men of the Confederacy. Not surprising, since the Turks come from Mongolia.

But it was the wrong thing to say. Musef snarled, “You say I yellow?”

There was a ripple through the audience as those who didn’t speak English got those who did to tell them what was being said. And then it had to be clarified for some that “yellow” meant “coward” in English. And believe me, eyebrows really shot up and eyes went round with anticipation. You could almost hear them pant.

Musef pretended to be outraged that Heller was not saying anything further. So he spat, “You want to fight?”

Heller glanced around. Torgut was hefting the iron pipe over by the wall. It was indeed a hostile crowd. Heller looked at Musef. He said, “I never fight…” There was an explosion of laughter in the room. Instantly Musef picked up the glass and threw the water and flowers in Heller’s face.

“I was about to say,” said Heller, “I never fight without a wager!”

There was more laughter. But Musef thought he saw a way to make money. After all, how could he lose with Torgut and an iron pipe back of Heller. “A wager!” guffawed Musef. Then, “All right. We wager! Five hundred lira! You,” he yelled at the crowd, “make sure that it gets paid!”

The crowd screamed with laughter. “We will!” they shouted in English and Turkish. It gave them a perfectly legal excuse to pick the “DEA man’s” pocket when he lost. There is nobody quite as cunning as a Turk unless it is a crowd of Turks!

And before anyone knew what was happening, Musef reached out and grabbed Heller’s collar and yanked him to the center of the floor! It was not hard to do. Heller, here on Earth, weighed only 193 pounds and Musef weighed 300!

Somehow Musef’s hands must have slipped. Heller and Musef were standing there in the middle of the floor, facing each other. The crowd, on its feet and roaring for blood, made a circle.

Musef reached with both arms. Heller weaved sideways. I knew what Musef was trying to do. The standard Turkish action of engaging is for each opponent to seize the other, with both hands, on either side of the neck. What happens after that is anybody’s war.

Musef made a second try. He got his hands on Heller’s shoulders!

Heller got his hands on Musef’s shoulders!

The first seconds of such a contest is a jostle for position.

And then I didn’t understand it. Heller had his two hands on the shoulders of the Turk but Heller’s fingers were hidden by the Turk’s head. I couldn’t see that Heller was doing anything. But neither was the Turk!

Heller’s hands just seemed to be rooted there.

The Turk was trying to throw his arms out to get Heller’s hands loose. You could see the muscles jump with the Turk’s effort. The Turk’s face was contorting in savage hatred. But there was enormous strain there!

The two seemed to rotate a few degrees. Now there was a wall mirror in Heller’s view. And in that mirror, Torgut was plainly visible. Torgut, iron pipe in hand, was parting the crowd, approaching Heller’s back.

I realized then why Heller’s hands weren’t coming loose. Turks usually smear themselves with olive oil before they wrestle but tonight there was nothing there to make Heller’s hands slip on the Turk’s shoulders and neck.

You could almost hear the muscles grind with the effort of the two wrestlers.

Ah, I had it. Musef could see Torgut and Musef was simply holding Heller in position until the partner could bring that iron pipe down on Heller’s blond head!

The crowd was going wild, cheering Musef on.

Torgut was very near now.

Suddenly, using his grip on Musef to support the forward part of his body, Heller went back and horizontal!

His feet hit Torgut in the chest!

The thud of that double blow was loud above the yelling room.

Torgut flew backwards as though propelled from a cannon. He took three members of the crowd with him!

They landed with a crash against the wall!

The impact shattered the mirror on the opposite wall!

Musef tried to take advantage of the weight shift. He drew back a forearm to hit Heller in the face.

I couldn’t see what happened. But Heller’s hands clenched suddenly inward.

Musef screamed like a crushed dog!

Heller hadn’t done anything to cause that. He had just closed his hands in tighter.

The huge Turk buckled like a falling building and landed like rubble on the floor!