seconds flat.
"Gimme a break! I'm the one who found it!" I yelled.
"You found it by chance. It doesn't belong to you. You're not even from this country. You're..."
"Go ahead and say it: I'm just a girl. An American girl."
"That's not what I was going to say."
"Liar."
Amesh frowned. "If we do end up selling it, then we'll have to be clear about who owns what."
"Fine. If I decide to sell it, I'll pay you a ten percent commission for helping me get it out of here."
"That's crazy!"
"Why?"
"Because I'm taking all the risk! I should pay
you
ten percent!"
I reached over and squeezed his good arm. "Amesh?"
He shook me off, he was so heated. "What?"
"If we get it out of here, we'll both own it equally. And if we decide to sell it, we'll split the money."
He began to cool down. "That's fair."
"But I have one condition. In the end, I get to decide what we do with the carpet."
"No way!"
"For the last time—I found it! Now we've talked enough. Do we have a deal? Yes or no?" I stuck out my hand.
He shook it. "All right. But you have to promise not to do anything with it without first talking to me."
"Agreed." I handed him my cell. "Find a taxi that will come out here, then go wrap up the carpet."
"For someone I just met, you're asking me to trust you an awful lot."
"It works both ways," I told him.
To lure a taxi to the work site, we had to promise to pay a staggering eighty lira. I was being exploited but there was no helping it. We had to keep moving forward.
The carpet took only fifteen minutes to dry in the boiling sun. But a minor miracle occurred when I went to roll it up. The carpet practically shrank. I folded it in two and it lay down perfectly flat. Then, I rolled it up, and it was like handling a deflated air mattress. The more I folded it, the smaller it got. By the time I handed it to Amesh, it was two feet by one foot. Plus it was so light—five pounds max!
Amesh didn't notice the miracle. He just nodded. "Good work."
"Thanks," I mumbled, staring at it with awe.
While Amesh went off to wrap it, my taxi arrived. The guards had it wait outside the gate. Before leaving the job site, I decided to give Amesh a quick call. I was worried about his nerves. Turned out, I was right to be worried. He sounded scared. I warned him to stay cool.
"That's easy for you to say," he complained.
"I'd take the risk if I could," I said, but I wondered if that was true. Swiping something this important in a foreign country was no laughing matter.
"You can," he said. "I can give you the package. Then you can have your taxi pick you up inside the compound and leave with the carpet already hidden inside the taxi's trunk."
"It won't work. My taxi's already here. The guards know I'm leaving. They have no reason to let my cab through the gate." I paused. "Look, if you can't do it, I understand. Hide it in the building you're in and I'll find another way to sneak it out."
"Yeah. Then you'll own it a hundred percent."
"Well, yeah."
Amesh sighed. "Wait for me. If I'm not there in fifteen minutes, then it means I got caught."
He hung up. Getting in the cab, I smiled and waved goodbye to the guards. They waved back. This particular taxi driver did not have his radio on, nor did he complain when I stopped him a mile from the job site. I held up a ten lira note and repeated the Turkish sentence Amesh had taught me: "A friend's coming on a moped." The guy did not complain. He turned off the engine and quickly pocketed the cash.
Amesh did not show for twenty minutes—the longest twenty minutes of my life. When he finally did appear, he acted nonchalant. He let the driver stick his moped and the package in the trunk, and soon we were on our way to Istanbul.
"You're as cool as James Bond," I teased when we were both seated in the back.
"This had better be worth it."
I saw he was serious. "Did the guards give you a hard time?"
"For the first time ever, they wanted to know what was in the box. I told them I didn't know, just