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* * *
—
Two hours later, they could see the minarets of two grand mosques.
Istanbul! They’d made it!
Paulo had worked out a detailed plan of how to spend his time here. He’d once watched the dervishes perform with their skirts twirling around them. He’d been fascinated and decided that he was going to learn how to dance like that until he finally understood it wasn’t merely a dance but a way of speaking with God. They called themselves Sufis, and everything he’d read about them left him even more excited. He’d had plans to go to Turkey one day to train with the dervishes or the Sufis, but he’d always thought this was something he’d do in the distant future.
But now he was actually here! The towers getting closer, the road filled with an ever-increasing number of cars, traffic jams—more patience, more waiting—however, before the sun rose again, he would be among them.
“Set your watches: we’ll be there in an hour,” the driver said. “We’re going to spend a week here, not because this is some touristic stop, as you’ve probably already guessed, but before we left Amsterdam—”
Amsterdam! It seemed like centuries ago!
“—we received a warning that, earlier in the month, an assassination attempt on the King of Jordan transformed part of our route into a minefield. I tried to get a sense of how things are developing, and it looks as if the situation has calmed down a bit, but we decided before leaving Amsterdam that we wouldn’t risk it.
“We’ll continue our plan a little further on—also because both Rahul and I are tired of the same thing over and over and we need to eat, drink, have a little fun. The city is cheap, in fact, it’s dirt cheap, the Turks are incredible, and the country, despite everything you’ll see on the streets, is not Muslim but secular. All the same, I’d advise our beauties to avoid wearing more provocative clothing and our beloved young men that they not provoke any fights just because someone’s made some sort of joke about their long hair.”
He’d given them fair warning.
“One more thing: back in Belgrade, when I called in to say that everything was all right, I learned that someone called looking to do an interview about what it means to be a hippie. The agency said it was important because it would get word out about its services—and I didn’t have the presence of mind to argue.
“The journalist in question knew where we were going to stop to fill up our tank and our stomachs, and was waiting for me there. He peppered me with questions, but I wasn’t sure how to respond to any of them—all I said was that your bodies and souls are free like the wind. This journalist—he’s from a major French news agency—wanted to know if he could send somebody from his Istanbul bureau to speak directly with one of you, and I told him I didn’t know but that we would all be staying in the same hotel—the cheapest we could manage to find, each room with space for four…”
“I’ll pay extra, but I’m not sharing a room. My daughter and I will take a room for two.”
“Same here,” said Rayan. “Room for two.”
Paulo gave Karla a searching look, and she finally responded.
“Room for two here, too.”
The bus’s other muse liked to show she had the skinny Brazilian under her thumb. They’d spent much less money than they’d imagined up until then—mostly because they lived off sandwiches and slept on the bus more times than not. Days earlier, Paulo had counted his fortune—eight hundred and twenty-one dollars, after endless weeks of traveling. The monotony of recent days had softened Karla’s mood a bit, and their bodies were already coming into more frequent contact—they’d sleep resting their heads on one another’s shoulders, and now and then they held hands. It was an extremely comfortable, caring feeling, though they’d never ventured more than a kiss—no other form of intimacy.
“Anyway, there ought to be a journalist waiting. If any of you don’t want to talk, you’re not required to say anything. I’m only telling you what I was told.”
The traffic began to move faster.
“I forgot to say something very important,” said the driver, after whispering an exchange with Rahul. “It’s easy to find drugs on the street—from hashish to heroin. As easy as in Amsterdam, Paris, Madrid, or Stuttgart, for example. Except that, if they catch you, no one—absolutely no one—will manage to get you out of the slammer in time to leave with us. You’ve been warned. I hope I’ve made myself very, very clear.”
* * *
—
They’d been warned, but Michael had his doubts that anyone would heed this warning, especially because they’d spent almost three weeks without touching any sort of drug. Though he kept careful watch on every one of his passengers without their knowing it, during the three weeks they’d been together, he hadn’t noticed anyone show interest in the things they consumed every day in Amsterdam and other European cities.
Which, once again, gave him doubts: Why was it everyone loved to say drugs were addictive? As a doctor,
someone who, while in Africa, had experimented with several hallucinogenic plants to see if he could use them on his patients, he knew that only those derived from opium caused any dependency.
Ah yes, and cocaine, which rarely made its way to Europe since the United States consumed nearly everything that was produced in the Andes.
Still, governments everywhere spent fortunes on antidrug campaigns while cigarettes and alcohol were sold in every corner bar. Perhaps that explained why everyone loved to say drugs were addictive: political agendas, advertising budgets, that sort of thing.
He knew that the Dutch girl who’d just asked for a room with the Brazilian had doused one of the pages of her book in an LSD solution—she’d mentioned it to others. Everyone knew everything on the bus, an “Invisible Post” was in effect. When the time was right, she would cut a piece, chew it, swallow, and wait for the resulting hallucinations.
But that wasn’t a problem. Lysergic acid, discovered in Switzerland by Albert Hofmann and popularized throughout the world by Timothy Leary, a Harvard professor, had been declared illegal but remained indetectable.
