Topkapi (20 page)

Harper nodded to her. “Let’s get back to the villa, Arthur,” he said.

None of them uttered a word on the drive back. I sensed a feeling of tension between them, and wondered who was waiting to report to whom. As they got out of the car, Harper picked the cardboard box up off the floor and turned to me.

“That’s it for today, Arthur.”

“What time tomorrow, sir?”

“I’ll let you know.”

“The car is very dusty, sir, and there is no proper hose here. I would like to get it washed at a garage.”

“You do that.” He could not have cared less what I did.

I drove into Sariyer and found a garage where they would wash the car. I left it there and went to a café. I had a drink before I telephoned Tufan.

The written report of the morning had been supplemented by reports from the surveillance squad and he had more to tell me than I had to tell him. Giulio’s other name was Corzo, and his Swiss passport gave his occupation as “industrial designer.” His age was forty-five and his place of birth Lugano. The cabin cruiser had been chartered a week earlier, for one month, through a yacht broker in Antalya. The crew of three were local men of good reputation. As for Miss Lipp and Miller, they had lunched in the Hilton grill room, then hired a car. They had spent forty-five minutes sightseeing and returned to the Hilton, where Miss Lipp had visited the hairdresser. She had had a shampoo and set. Miller had passed the time reading French newspapers on the terrace.

“Then it must have been the meeting with Giulio they wanted to hear about,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

I told him of the feeling I had had on the way back that they had been impatient for a chance to talk privately.

“Then why are you not at the villa? Go back there immediately.”

“If they wish to have private talk there is nothing I can do to overhear it. Their part of the house on the ground floor is separate. I have not even seen those rooms.

“Are there no windows?”

“Giving on to their private terrace, yes. I could have no excuse for being even near it, let alone on it.”

“Then do without an excuse.”

“You told me to take no risks.”

“No
unnecessary
risks. An important discussion justifies risk.”

“I don’t
know
that it is important. I just had a feeling. I don’t know that it’s a discussion either. Harper may just have wanted to pass on a piece of private information he had received from Giulio to the others. The whole thing could have been over in a minute.”

“The meeting at Pendik was obviously important. We must know why. So far all you have learned is gossip from a fool of a cook. What do these people with arms and ammunition hidden in their car and false passports discuss when they are alone? What do they say? It is for you to find out.”

“I can tell you one thing they say - ’Let the dogs be fed and clothed.’ I overheard it first last night. It seemed to be some sort of private joke.”

He was silent for a moment and I waited for another angry outburst. None came. Instead he said thoughtfully: “That is quite an interesting joke.”

“What does it mean?”

“When one of the old Sultans was preparing to receive a certain class of persons, he would always keep them waiting a long time, perhaps a whole day. Then, when he thought that they had been sufficiently humbled, he would give that order - ’Let the dogs be fed and clothed.’ After that, they would be admitted to the chamber of the Grand Vizier, given food, and robed in caftans.”

“What class of persons?”

“The ambassadors of foreign powers.” He paused. Obviously, he was still thinking about it. Then he dismissed me curtly. “You have your orders. Report as arranged.”

I went and got the car. The man at the garage who had the key to the petrol pump had gone home, and there was only the old man who had washed the car waiting for me. I wasn’t too pleased about that, as it meant that I would have to fill the tank in the morning. Opportunities for making telephone reports to Tufan did not seem particularly desirable at that moment.

When I got back to the villa it was almost dark and the lights were on in the terrace rooms. I put the car away and went to the kitchen.

Geven was in a jovial mood. Fischer had moved him to a bedroom near mine and told him to share my bathroom. Whether this was due to spite on Fischer’s part or a shortage of bathrooms, I couldn’t tell. Geven, through some obscure reasoning process of his own, had decided that the whole thing had been my idea. In a way, I suppose, he was right; but there was nothing to be done about it. I took a tumbler of brandy from him and beamed like an idiot as if I had earned every drop. He had cooked a spaghetti Bolognese for the kitchen. The spies were having canned soup and a shish kebab made with mutton which, he proudly assured me, was as tough as new leather. The spaghetti was really good. I had a double helping of it. As soon as the Hamuls arrived, I got away, giving as an excuse that I had work to do on the car. I went out to the yard.

The terrace ran along the front and right side of the house; I had noticed a door in the wall beside the garage. There was an orchard of fig trees beyond and I thought it possible that the side terrace might be accessible from there.

The door had no lock, only a latch, but the old hinges were rusty and I used the dip stick from the car to run some oil into them before I attempted to open it. It swung inward silently and I shut it behind me. I waited then, not only so that my eyes would get used to the dark but because the spies had not yet gone into dinner. I could hear their voices faintly. I knew that Tufan would have wanted me to go closer and hear what they were saying; but I didn’t. The ground was uneven and I would have to feel my way towards the terrace balustrade. I preferred to do that while they were well away from the terrace and trying to get their teeth into Geven’s shish kebab.

After fifteen or twenty minutes, dinner was served and I edged forward slowly to the terrace. As soon as I reached it and was able to see through the balustrade, I realized that it would be impossible for me to get close enough to the windows of the room they had been using to hear anything. There was too much light coming from them. I suppose one of these daredevil agents you hear about would have concealed himself in the shadows; but that looked too risky for me. Getting to the shadows would have been easy enough; but if Harper and Co. decided to sit outside, as they had done the night before, there would have been no way of getting back without being seen.

I walked on through the orchard until I came to the outer edge of the front courtyard. This was the side which overlooked the Bosphorus and there were no trees to obstruct the view. A low stone balustrade ran along the edge with a statue on a plinth at each end. The first of these statues was over thirty feet from the corner of the terrace, but it was the nearest I could get and still remain in cover. The top of the plinth was chest-high. Using the balustrade as a stepping-stone, it wasn’t difficult to climb up. The statue, a larger than life-size Vestal virgin with bird-droppings all over her, seemed quite steady, and I was able to hold on to her draperies. From the plinth I could see over the terrace balustrading and through the windows of the corner drawing room. It was not much, but it was something. If they did decide to come out onto the terrace, I might even catch a word or two of what they said.

After about twenty minutes, they came back into the room. The bits of it that I could see contained an old leather-topped library table, part of a faded green settee, part of a wall mirror, a low round table, and one or two gilt chairs. The only person I could actually see at first was Miller, who took a corner of the settee; but he was talking nineteen to the dozen and waving his hands about, so he obviously wasn’t alone. Then Mrs. Hamul came in with a coffee tray, which she put on the round table, and I saw bits of the others as they helped themselves. Somebody gave Miller a glass of brandy, which he drank as if he needed it; he could have been trying to wash away the taste of his dinner. After a bit, he stopped talking and appeared to be listening, his head moving slightly as he shifted his attention from one speaker to another. Then, there was a flash of white in the mirror and his head turned. For a moment, I saw Miss Lipp. She had changed into a green dress, though; the white belonged to a large sheet of paper. Almost immediately it disappeared from view. Miller’s head lifted as he began to listen to someone who was standing up. A minute or so went by, and then the paper reappeared, as if put aside, on the library table. I could see now that it was a map. At that distance and at that angle it was impossible to tell what it was a map of, but it looked to me like a roughly triangular island. I was still staring at it when Harper moved in and folded it into four.

After that, nothing seemed to happen until, suddenly, Harper and Miss Lipp came out onto the terrace from a window much farther away and walked down the marble steps. There was nothing purposeful about their movements - they were obviously just going for a stroll - but I thought it as well to get out of the way. If they were going to admire the view from the balustrade, I would be in an awkward spot.

I got down from the plinth and moved back into the shelter of the fig trees. Sure enough, they made their way round to the balustrade. When they turned to go back I was only twenty-five feet away from them. I heard a snatch of conversation.

“... if I took over?” That was Miss Lipp.

“He was Leo’s idea,” he answered. “Let Leo take care of him. After tomorrow, he doesn’t matter too much anyway. Even Arthur could do the rest of that job.”

She laughed. “The indignant sheep? With his breath you wouldn’t even need the grenades, I guess. You’d get a mass surrender.”

He laughed.

She said: “When does Giulio’s man arrive?”

“Sometime today. I didn’t wait. Giulio knows ...”

I heard no more.

As soon as they were well clear, I went back through the orchard to the yard, and then up to my room. I locked the door. Geven would be free of the kitchen at any moment, and I did not want to be bothered with him.

I had to think about what they had said and it was hard to do so, because all I could think about was her laugh and the words she had used about me. I felt sick. There was another time when it had been like that, too. Jones iv and I had gone up to Hilly Fields to meet a couple of girls we knew. One of them was named Muriel, the other was Madge. Madge didn’t turn up because, so Muriel said, she had a cold. So there were just the three of us. Muriel was really Jones’ girl, so I was more or less out of it. I tried to pick up another girl, but that was more difficult when you were alone and I didn’t have any luck. After a while, I gave up and went back to where I had left the other two necking on a seat under the trees. I thought I’d come up quietly and give them a surprise. That is how I overheard it. She was saying that she had to get home early, for some reason or other, and he was asking her about Saturday night.

“With Arthur, too?” she said.

“I suppose so.”

“Well, Madge won’t come.”

“She’ll be over her cold by then.”

“She hasn’t got a cold. She just didn’t want to come. She says Arthur’s a little twerp and gives her the creeps.”

I went away and they didn’t know that I’d heard. Then I was sick behind the bushes. I hated that girl Madge so much that it was like a pain.

Geven came up and I heard him go into the bathroom. A little while afterwards he came out and knocked on my door. I had taken the precaution of switching off the light so that it wouldn’t show under my door and he would think that I was asleep. He knocked again. After a few moments I heard him muttering to himself. Then he went away.

I nearly changed my mind and called him in. I could have done with a drink just then, and someone to talk to. But then I thought of how dirty he was and how the stink of his body would stay in the room - the “perfume of the great unwashed,” as my father would have said. Besides, I couldn’t be sure of getting rid of him when I wanted to, and I had the eleven o’clock radio call to take.

It came at last.

Attention period report. Attention period report. Passenger for yacht Bulut arrived Pendik seventeen hundred hours today. Name Enrico, other names unknown so far. Description: short, stocky, black hair, brown eyes, age about thirty-five. Casual observation of subject and hand luggage suggests workman rather than guest of charterer Corzo. Are you able to identify this man? Important that written notes of all conversations, with particular care as to political content, should be made. Essential you report progress. Repeat. Essential.

The outside of the body can be washed of sweat and grease; but inside there are processes which produce other substances. Some of these smell. How do you wash away the smells of the inside of the body?

THE MORNING CALL was a repetition of that of the previous night, and made no more sense at 7 a.m. than it had at 11. I got up and went to the bathroom. Luckily, I had had the sense to remove my towel to my bedroom; but Geven had left a filthy mess. There was grey scum in the bath and shaving soap in the basin. Patience was necessary in order to flush the toilet successfully, and he had given up too soon.

Shaved, he looked more bleary-eyed than he had with the three-day growth, but his mood was one of jovial aggression. Fischer’s complaints about the shish kebab, it seemed, had been loud and insolent. But the reprisal had already been planned - the spies’ dinner that night would be boiled mutton in yoghurt
à la Turque.
Fischer would learn to his cost who was master in the kitchen; and if he didn’t like the knowledge, well then, the spies could go on eating pig swill or find themselves another chef.

I had breakfast, got the car out, and drove to the garage for petrol.

Tufan answered promptly. I made my report about the overheard conversation first, editing only slightly. “If I took over. He was Leo’s idea, let Leo take care of him. After tomorrow he doesn’t matter too much anyway. Grenades ... mass surrender.”