Читать книгу Deadline Istanbul (The Elizabeth Darcy Series) - Peggy Hanson - Страница 9

CHAPTER 5

A nail will come out but its hole remains.

Turkish proverb

Bayram Çengel sat at Peter Franklin’s desk in the Washington Tribune office on the hill stretching up from the Golden Horn, that dagger-shaped inlet of water that once separated the Ottoman government from the foreign envoys on Pera Hill. His knees went weak when he thought of Peter’s sudden death. Peter was big. Not big like Atatürk, of course, no one could be that big, but someone respected by all. A role model for any aspiring journalist. Peter Franklin, the Washington Correspondent. The man who knew everything. How could he have died?

Bayram felt lucky to have gotten this job at the tender age of twenty-two. He’d done a course in journalism at a private university on the Asian side. But it was only a two year course. Everything he knew about news, real news, had come from Peter.

The Turkish newspaper Bayram had worked for was often well-written but it, like others of its kind, expressed a certain political view. Objectivity did not come into it, though investigation did, at times. Peter had combined the two. Pure luck that Peter chose Bayram from other applicants. Or was it? Peter may have seen how eager the young man was to pull himself out of the poverty he’d grown up in. Peter understood.

It was almost sacriligious to be sitting in Peter’s chair. Certainly, it was sad.

Earlier today he’d met the new person at the airport. Elizabeth Darcy. He’d seen her byline on Trib articles.

She had a nice smile, at least.

As a traditional Turk, Bayram doubted that a woman could take the place of a man, especially a man like Peter Franklin.

Perhaps he would give her a chance. Really, he had no choice. He’d stocked the little office refrigerator with a whole case of Kendi bottled water, allegedly taken from one of the plentiful artesian wells in the Anatolian mountains. All Westerners and all Turks who could afford it drank bottled water, never from the tap. Bayram was proud to be in the bottled water class.