I'd barely made it through a rough day in paradise. I had paperwork up to my eyeballs, and the ambassador was being a real bear toward the Country Team. He was being crushed in a vice between Washington, the Greeks, and the Turks over the latest failure of the Cypriot settlement talks to move just when the Greeks and Turks were both teasing us with the possibilityâthe false possibility, as usualâof inching ahead in the decades-long struggle. And the ambassador didn't like being put through the crusherâso he was deflecting his pain onto the members of his Country Team.
Despite the real work we each had, he had peppered us all day with petty little memos designed to irritate us all as much as his superiors and the Greeks and Turks were irritating him. This was hardly the moment I wanted to think about what brand of sedan my office could next buy.
I hadn't planned out the evening I ultimately had, but I couldn't face going to what was waiting for me at home. Lena was off in the States on one of her periodic shopping tripsâwhich I didn't begrudge her, because it was her dad who was paying for those and so much else we both enjoyed in life. I never slept alone, though, when I could avoid it, and so Marios, the actor I'd been working with in my cultural attachĂŠ capacity at the Theatro Ena, the Greek Cypriot national experimental theater housed inside one of the old gates to the ancient city fortress of Nicosia, had moved in temporarily the day Lena left.
But Marios was high strungâand quite opinionated himself on what the Americans should be doing in the current peace talks. After having had the ambassador chew on my butt all day, I was in no mood to go home and have Marios chew on my dick.
So, I avoided going home. I took up the paperwork I should have done today, putting the classified material in the vault adjacent to my office and the unclassified work in my briefcase in the hopes that it would solve its own problems overnight, and walked out to my BMW convertible, part of the reverse dowry Lena's father had given me to marry his flighty daughter and give her instant cachet in the diplomatic community. Neither Lena nor her father cared that I was bisexual; they both were more interested in how I looked in a tuxedo beside her in the newspaper society section snapshotsâand, of course, my access to diplomat status and world travel at government expense. And the arrangement was quite agreeable for both Lena and her father. She was happy with my cocksman skills with herâand her father had enjoyed taking me himself more than once since before we'd married.
I decided I'd eat dinner out and only go home later, when I was less on edge from the day and when Marios had drunk enough Cypriot brandy to be maudlin and I could use his cock for relief of my tension without being lashed by his sharp tongue as well.
But I didn't really want to go to a Greek tavern, either. They wouldn't be in full swing until 10:00 pm, and I'd been on TV today, in the background, as the ambassador was being subjected to a trying press conference. I found that on those days, when I then appeared in public, I was swamped by Greeks who bent my ear mercilessly about what the Americans should be doing for them and not doing for the Turksâthinking that I had something to do with the formulation of the policy since they saw me on TV. If I went to a taverna and dined virtually alone, I'd be a helpless target.
And so, I nosed the BMW toward the Ledra Palace checkpoint, the only border crossing in the city, which was divided by a UN-monitored green line no-man's zone. I'd catch a quick meal on the Turkish side and then slip back across the border and go home to face Marios. Marios was between plays at Theatro Ena, and I was ambivalent about that. When he wasn't working, he drank hard and could be a mean drunk; but when he was working, he worked hard and came away from the theater wrung out and not always capable of fucking the way I liked it. I tried to slip into the in-between when he was mean enough to fuck rough, which is what I liked from him, but sober enough to actually deliver it.
I had intended to drive on to Kyrenia, on the northern Mediterranean coast, as dinner by the harbor was always soothing, but the BMW was more practicalâor thought it wasâand parked, as if having a mind of its own, not more than a hundred yards beyond the Turkish checkpoint at the Ledra Palace crossing.
Mehmet's was one of Lena's favorite restaurantsâand I enjoyed it too. That's where we went for our doner kebab, that national Turkish dish of shaved roasted lamb covered with yogurt and a marinara sauce and served atop freshly baked pita bread. I'd found out about Mehmet's from the son of the owner, who naturally enough was named Mehmet. The son, Jelal, was on the Turkish national tennis team, and I had played him in singles a couple of times in the diplomatic club leagueâand we were pretty even on wins and losses, which thrilled me because he was a good five years my junior and looked like he got a hell of a lot more exercise than I did.
The restaurant was directly on the Ininci Selem Caddesi, the road leading from the Turkish checkpoint around the western side of the fortress walls of Nicosiaâcalled Lefkosa in the Turkish zone. As close to the road as the restaurant was, it still opened to the outside with large plate-glass windows, a rarity in an area where most restaurants were either inside ancient rock-walled caverns or in the open air. The glass expanse gave the restaurant's waiters notice that I was approaching.
Jelal waved me to a table as I entered and arrived there the same moment I did with a heaping plate of doner kebab. I didn't have to look at a menu; I never had to look at the menu at Mehmet's. If I was eating there, I was eating the doner kebab.
"And is madam meeting you here?" Jelal asked me as he set the plate down even before I had settled in my seat.
"No, just me this evening, Jelal," I answered. "Is that convenient for you?" The smile he gave me sent chills up my back and let me know that it, indeed, was convenient. We both knew what it meant when I dined here alone.
The proprietor, Mehmet, came from behind the cooking counter and took up a position beside the cash register and stared at me intently.
I brushed Jelal's crotch with the back of my hand as he walked by my chair, on the side where Mehmet couldn't see what I'd done, and I had my second chill. I could feel that he was hard.
Mehmet and his son weren't fully Turkish, which was not all that uncommon for Turkish Cypriots. Mehmet's family had roots in London, where they ran another Turkish restaurant, and each was the son of a Turkish Cypriot father and a British mother. In both, it made for an exotic mix, the British origin softening somewhat the rougher look and manners that were purely Turkish. Turkish men are often gorgeous in youth and ogres as they ageâin both aspect and disposition. Mehmet wasn't an ogre, though, which held promise that Jelal wouldn't be either. Both were muscular men of tall stature, straight of spine and well-proportioned. Both had dark curly hair, but whereas Mehmet was hairy all over, Jelal was not. Both were olive skinned and handsome of face, though, and of dark, brooding, sultry looks that, in Jelal's case, were offset arrestingly by milky blue eyes. With Jelal, it was always the eyes that attention went toâat least at first. The rest of him was very nice to look at too.