The Priests of Hiroshima
an excerpt

October 25, 2007 - Istanbul, Turkey
It was an unusually warm day in Istanbul - or was it global warming? and Calvado, used to the cooler air of Florence, was looking for a café that sold iced tea, iced coffee, or anything cold. She was thinking maybe she would look for a gelato shop instead when she saw it. There, down a narrow alley lined with ancient stores it flickered almost as if it had its own light.
Someone had stacked dozens of wooden crates of oranges at the mouth of the alley; piled so high they reached the second story windows and Calvado had to wonder who manhandle the crates at the top. Half a dozen crates blocked the road and two cars - one trying to exit the alley and one trying to enter the alley - were honking their horns at the inanimate crates but, past the exiting car, past two children pushing bicycles, and past an old woman all dressed in black, Calvado saw it.
She turned off the main road she was on and headed toward it. To find such an object was a miracle but to find it in Istanbul, where Mac had never traveled, was more than a miracle, it was an act of God.
A small Turkish man with huge biceps and a barrel chest emerged from a café with a small expresso cup in his leathery hand. He yelled at the cars and immediately the driver of the car trying to get into the alley jumped out, threw his cigarette on the cobbled street and started shouting back. The other driver opened his car door and half-stood on the street and half stayed in his car and shouted at the small man. Soon they were all shouting, pointing, and gesturing at each other in what Calvado assumed were obscene gestures. As she walked in front of the the small man, his face softened, he looked at her and smiled.
“Welcome to Istanbul,” he said in an English heavy with German pronunciation. He glanced down at her breasts and body but was looking at her face quicker than most men Calvado met.
“Thank you,” Calvado smiled back. “You have quite a traffic jam here.”
“Ach,” the man coughed and pointed his espresso at the cars. “It is their problem, not mine. I am only responsible for the oranges in the crates, not Constantinople’s transportation problems.”
Calvado smiled; she liked the man’s attitude - even using the name of the city that was changed 554 years earlier; long before the man’s great-great grandfather was even a child. This, Calvado thought as she picked her way around an orange crate, is Istanbul where the past is alive and the present is just a thin veneer over a 3000-year history.
She looked up and saw it, still shining in the small shop which she could tell now was a used bookstore: the object was surrounded by dozens of old books. As she got closer she realized this was no ordinary used bookstore - the books were not quickly written best-sellers by former lawyers or spooky dwellers of New England but real books. Books with leather covers, hand-tooled titles with gold-leaf, and raised spinal cords. She looked at the book that drew her attention from across the three dozen orange crates, from across a busy Istanbul road, and from this small, dilapidated store. She gazed at it as if in a trance for a few minutes; she swirled through the past in New York when she ran the streets with Mac, when she narrowly escaped with her life - again with and because of Mac, and then she remembered finding his body stretched out on the slab in the morgue during her anatomy class. She shook herself out of her memories and looked a the book. She put her hand on the bookstores window and wept. Then she pushed open the door and entered.
“Hello?”