Topkapi (12 page)

“One moment, sir. There is something.” I had had an idea.

“What is it?”

“There is something that you could do, sir. If, before I speak to Harper, I could have a license as an official guide with tomorrow’s date on it - it might help.”

“How?”

“It would show that in the expectation of driving Miss Lipp on her tour, I had gone to the trouble and expense of obtaining the license. It would look as if I had taken him seriously. If he or she really wanted a driver for the car it might make a difference.”

He did not answer me immediately. Then he said: “Good, very good.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“You see, Simpson, when you apply your intelligence to carrying out orders instead of seeing only the difficulties, you become effective.” It was just like
The Bristle
in one of his good moods. “You remember, of course,” he went on, “that, as a foreigner, you could not hold a guide’s license. Do you think Harper might know that?”

“I’m almost sure he doesn’t. If he does, I can say that I bribed someone to get it. He would believe me.”

“I would believe you myself, Simpson.” He chuckled fatuously, enchanted by his own joke. “Very well, you shall have it by noon, delivered to the hotel.”

“You will need a photograph of me for it.”

“We have one. Don’t tell me you have forgotten so soon. And a word of caution. You know only a few words of Turkish. Don’t attract attention to yourself so that you are asked to show the license. It might cause trouble with museum guards. You understand?”

He hung up. I paid the proprietor for the call and left.

Outside, the man in the chauffeur’s cap was waiting up the street. He walked ahead of me back to the hotel. I suppose he knew why I had been to the cafe.

There was a guide to Istanbul on sale at the concierge’s desk. I bought one with the idea of brushing up on my knowledge of the Places of Interest and how to get to them. On my way down to my room I had to laugh to myself. “Never volunteer for anything,” my father had said. Well, I hadn’t exactly volunteered for what I was doing now, but it seemed to me that I was suddenly getting bloody conscientious about it.

I spent most of the following morning in bed. Just before noon I got dressed and went up to the foyer to see if Tufan had remembered about the guide’s license. He had; it was in a sealed Ministry of Tourism envelope in my mailbox.

For a few minutes I felt quite good about that. It showed, I thought, that Tufan kept his promises and that I could rely on him to back me. Then I realized that there was another way of looking at it. I had asked for a license and I had promptly received one; Tufan expected results and wasn’t giving me the smallest excuse for not getting them.

I had made up my mind not to have any drinks that day so as to keep a clear head for Harper; but now I changed my mind. You can’t have a clear head when there’s a sword hanging over it. I was careful though and only had three or four
rakis
. I felt much better for them, and after lunch I went down to my room to take a nap.

I must have needed it badly, for I was still asleep when the phone rang at five. I almost fell off the bed in my haste to pick it up, and the start that it gave me made my head ache.

“Arthur?” It was Harper’s voice.

“Yes.”

“You know who this is?”

“Yes.”

“Car okay?”

“Yes.”

“Then what have you been stalling for?”

“I haven’t been stalling.”

“Fischer says you refused to deliver the car.”

“You told me to wait for
your
instructions, so I waited. You didn’t tell me to hand the car over to a perfect stranger without any proof of his authority ...”

“All right, all right, skip it! Where is the car?”

“In a garage near here.”

“Do you know where Sariyer is?”

“Yes.”

“Get the car right away and hit the Sariyer road. When you get to Yeniköy look at your mileage reading, then drive on towards Sariyer for exactly four more miles. On your right you’ll come to a small pier with some boats tied up alongside it. On the left of the road opposite the pier you’ll see a driveway entrance belonging to a villa. The name of the villa is Sardunya. Have you got that?”

“Yes.”

“You should be here in about forty minutes. Right?”

“I will leave now.”

Sariyer is a small fishing port at the other end of the Bosphorus where it widens out to the Black Sea, and the road to it from Istanbul runs along the European shore. I wondered if I should try to contact Tufan before I left and report the address I had been given, then decided against it. Almost certainly, he had had Harper followed from the airport, and in any case I would be followed to the villa. There would be no point in reporting.

I went to the garage, paid the bill, and got the car. The early-evening traffic was heavy and it took me twenty minutes to get out of the city. It was a quarter to six when I reached Yeniköy. The same Peugeot which had followed me down from Edirne was following me again. I slowed for a moment to check the mileage and then pushed on.

The villas on the Bosphorus vary from small waterfront holiday places, with window boxes and little boathouses, to things like palaces. Quite a lot of them
were
palaces once; and before the capital was moved from Istanbul to Ankara the diplomatic corps used to have summer embassy buildings out along the Bosphorus, where there are cool Black Sea breezes even when the city is sweltering. The Kösk Sardunya looked as if it had started out in some such way.

The entrance to the drive was flanked by huge stone pillars with wrought-iron gates. The drive itself was several hundred yards long and wound up the hillside through an avenue of big trees which also served to screen the place from the road below. Finally, it left the trees and swept into the gravel courtyard in front of the villa.

It was one of those white stucco wedding-cake buildings of the kind you see in the older parts of Nice and Monte Carlo. Some French or Italian architect must have been imported around the turn of the century to do the job. It had everything - a terrace with pillars and balustrades, balconies, marble steps up to the front portico, a fountain in the courtyard, statuary, a wonderful view out over the Bosphorus - and it was huge. It was also run down. The stucco was peeling in places and some of the cornice moldings had crumbled or broken away. The fountain basin had no water in it. The courtyard was fringed with weeds.

As I drove in, I saw Fischer get up from a chair on the terrace and go through a french window into the house. So I just pulled up at the foot of the marble steps and waited. After a moment or two, Harper appeared under the portico and I got out of the car. He came down the steps.

“What took you so long?”

“They had to make out a bill at the garage, and then there was the evening traffic.”

“Well ...” He broke off as he noticed me looking past him and over his shoulder.

A woman was coming down the steps.

He smiled slightly. “Ah yes. I was forgetting. You haven’t met your employer. Honey, this is Arthur Simpson. Arthur, this is Miss Lipp.”

SOME MEN CAN make a good guess at a woman’s age just by looking at her face and figure. I never can. I think that this may be because, in spite of Mum, I fundamentally respect women. Yes, it must be that. If she is very attractive, but obviously not a young girl, I always think of twenty-eight. If she has let herself go a bit, but is obviously not elderly, I think of forty-five. For some reason I never think of any ages in between those - or outside them, for that matter - except my own, that is.

Miss Lipp made me think of twenty-eight. In fact she was thirty-six; but I only found that out later. She looked twenty-eight to me. She was tall with short brownish-blond hair, and the kind of figure that you have to notice, no matter what dress covers it. She also had the sort of eyes, insolent, sleepy, and amused, and the full good-humoured mouth which tell you that she knows you can’t help watching the way her body moves, and that she doesn’t give a damn whether you do so or not; watching is not going to get you anywhere anyway. She wasn’t wearing a dress that first time; just white slacks and sandals, and a loose white shirt. Her complexion was golden brown and the only make-up she was wearing was lipstick. Obviously, she had just bathed and changed.

She nodded to me. “Hullo. No trouble with the car?” She had the same combination of accents as Harper.

“No, madam.”

“That’s good.” She did not seem surprised.

Fischer was coming down the steps behind her. Harper glanced at him.

“Okay, Hans, you’d better run Arthur into Sariyer.” To me he said: “You can take the ferryboat back to town. Are the
carnet
and Green Card in the glove compartment?”

“Of course not. They are in the hotel safe.”

“I told you to put them in the glove compartment,” said Fischer angrily.

I kept my eyes on Harper. “
You
didn’t tell me,” I said; “and you didn’t tell me to take orders from your servant.”

Fischer swore angrily in German, and Miss Lipp burst out laughing.

“But isn’t he a servant?” I asked blandly; “he behaved like one, though not a very good one, perhaps.”

Harper raised a repressive hand. “Okay, Arthur, you can cut that out. Mr. Fischer is a guest here and he only meant to be helpful. I’ll arrange to have the documents picked up from you tomorrow before you leave. You’ll get paid off when you hand them over.”

My stomach heaved. “But I understood, sir, that I was to act as Miss Lipp’s driver while she is in Turkey.”

“That’s okay, Arthur. I’ll hire someone locally.”

“I can drive the car,” said Fischer impatiently.

Harper and Miss Lipp both turned on him. Harper said something sharply in German and she added in English: “Besides, you don’t know the roads.”

“And I do know the roads, madam.” I was trying hard to make my inner panic come out sounding like respectful indignation. “Only today I went to the trouble and expense of obtaining an official guide’s license so that I could do the job without inconvenience to you. I was a guide in Istanbul before.” I turned to Harper and thrust the license under his nose. “Look, sir!”

He frowned at it and me incredulously. “You mean you really
want
the job?” he demanded. “I thought all you wanted was this.” He took my letter out of his pocket.

“Certainly, I want that, sir.” It was all I could do to stop myself from reaching out for it. “But you are also paying me a hundred dollars for three or four days’ work.” I did my best to produce a grin. “As I told you in Athens, sir, for that money I do not have to be persuaded to work.”

He glanced at her and she answered, with a shrug, in German. I understood the last three words: “... man English speaks.”

His eyes came to me again. “You know, Arthur,” he said thoughtfully, “you’ve changed. You could be off the hook if you wanted, but now you don’t want to be off. Why?”

This was just answerable. I looked at the letter in his hand. “You didn’t send that. I was afraid all the time that you’d sent it anyway, out of spite.”

“Even though it would have cost me three hundred dollars?”

“It wouldn’t have cost you anything. The cheques would have been returned to you eventually.”

“That’s true.” He nodded. “Not bad, Arthur. Now tell me what you meant when you told Mr. Fischer that he’d been careless. What did you think he’d been careless about?”

They were all three waiting for my answer to that. The men’s suspicion of me was in the air and Miss Lipp had smelled it as well. What was more, she didn’t look in the least puzzled by what Harper was saying. Whatever the game was, they were all in it.

I did the best I could. “Why? Because of the way he’d behaved, of course. Because he
had
been careless. Oh, he knew your name all right and he knew enough to get in touch with me, but I knew he couldn’t be acting on your orders.”

“How did you know?”

I pointed to the letter. “Because of that. You’d told me it was your insurance. You’d know I wouldn’t turn the car over to a complete stranger without getting my letter back. He didn’t even mention it.”

Harper looked at Fischer. “You see?”

“I was only trying to save time,” said Fischer angrily. “I have said so. This does not explain why he used that word.”

“No, it doesn’t,” I said. The only way was to bull it through. “But this does. When he started threatening me I offered to go with him to the police and settle the matter. I’ve never seen anyone back down so fast in my life.”

“That’s a lie!” Fischer shouted; but he wasn’t so sure of himself now.

I looked at Harper. “Anyone who pulls that sort of bluff without knowing what to do when it’s called, is careless to my way of thinking. If Mr. Fischer had been a dishonest servant instead of your helpful guest, you’d have said I’d been pretty careless to let him get away with a fourteen-thousand-dollar car. I’d be lucky if that was all you said.”

There was a brief silence, then Harper nodded. “Well, Arthur, I guess Mr. Fischer won’t mind accepting your apology. Let’s say it was a misunderstanding.”

Fischer shrugged.

Just what Harper thought I was making of the situation I cannot imagine. Even if I hadn’t known what was hidden in the car, I would have realized by now that there was something really fishy going on. Miss Lipp, in Turkey for a little ten-day tourist trip with a Lincoln and a villa the size of the Taj Mahal, was sufficiently improbable. The shenanigans over the delivery of the car had been positively grotesque.

However, it was soon apparent that nothing I might think or suspect was going to give Harper any sleepless nights.

“All right, Arthur,” he said, “you’ve gotten yourself a deal. A hundred a week. You still have that fifty dollars I gave you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Will that take care of the bill at the Park?”

“I think so.”

“Right. Here’s the hundred you have coming for the trip down. Go back to town now. In the morning check out of the hotel. Then take a ferryboat back to Sariyer pier so that you get there around eleven. Someone will meet you. We’ll find a room for you here.”