Topkapi (26 page)

The passage was about twenty feet long and ended in a blank wall with a coiled fire hose inside a glass-fronted box fastened to it. The spiral stairway to the roof was of iron and had the name of a German company on it. The same company had supplied the fire hose. Miller walked to the bottom of the staircase and looked up at it appreciatively. “A very clever girl,” he said.

Fischer shrugged. “For someone who interpreted air photos for the Luftwaffe it was not difficult,” he said. “A blind man could have seen this on the enlarged photo she had. It was I who had to find the way to it, and I who had to get a key and make all the other arrangements.”

Miller chuckled. “It was she who had the idea, Hans, and Karl who worked out the arrangements. We are only the technicians. They are the artists.”

He seemed to be enjoying himself thoroughly, and looked more wolfish than ever. I felt like being sick.

Fischer sat on the stairs. Miller took off his coat and shirt and unwound the tackle from about his skinny waist. There didn’t seem any point in being uncomfortable as well as frightened, so I unbuttoned, too, and got rid of the sling and anchor rope. He attached them to the tackle. Then, he took a black velvet bag from his pocket. It was about the size of a man’s sock and had a drawstring at the top and a spring clip. He attached the clip to one of the hooks on the sling.

“Now,” he said, “we are ready.” He looked at his watch. “In an hour or so Giulio and Enrico will be on their way.”

“Who are they?” I asked.

“Friends who will bring the boat for us,” said Miller.

“A boat? How can a boat reach us?”

“It doesn’t,” said Fischer. “We reach the boat. You know the yards along the shore by the old city wall, where the boats land the firewood?”

I did. Istanbul is a wood-burning city in winter. The firewood yards stretch for nearly a mile along the coast road southeast of Seraglio Point, where the water is deep enough for coasters to come close inshore. But we were two miles from there.

“Do we fly?”

“The Volkswagen will call for us.” He grinned at Miller.

“Hadn’t you better tell me more than that?”

“That is not our part of the operation,” Miller said. “Our part is this. When we leave the Treasury we go quietly back over the kitchens until we come to the wall of the Courtyard of the Janissaries above the place where the cars park during the day. The wall is only twenty feet high and there are trees there to screen us when we lower ourselves to the ground with the tackle. Then ...”

“Then,” Fischer broke in, “we take a little walk to where the Volkswagen will be waiting.”

I answered Miller. “Is Mr. Fischer to lower himself to the ground with one hand?”

“He will seat himself in the sling. Only one hand is needed to hold on to the buckles.”

“Even in the outer courtyard we are still inside the walls.”

“There will be a way through them.” He dismissed the subject with an impatient wave of his hand and looked about him for a place to sit down. There was only the iron staircase. He examined the steps of it. “Everything here is very dirty,” he complained. “That these people do not all die of disease is incredible. Immunity, perhaps. There was a city here even before Constantine’s. Two thousand years or more of plague are in this place - cholera, bubonic,
la vérole
, dysentery.”

“Not any more, Leo,” said Fischer; “they have even cleaned the drains.”

“It is all waiting in the dust,” Miller insisted gloomily.

He arranged the nylon rope so as to make a seat on the stairs before he sat down. His exuberance had gone. He had remembered about germs and bacteria.

I sat on the bottom step wishing that I had an irrational anxiety like his to occupy my mind, instead of the real and immediate fears that occupied my lungs, my heart, and my stomach.

At five o’clock, bells were sounded in the courtyards and there were one or two distant shouts. The guards were herding everyone out and closing up for the night.

I started to light a cigarette, but Miller stopped me. “Not until it is dark,” he said. “The sun might happen to illuminate the smoke before it dispersed above the roof. It is better also that we talk no more. It will became very quiet outside and we do not know how the acoustics of a place like this may work. No unnecessary risks.”

That was what Tufan had said. I wondered what he was doing. He must, I thought, already know that he had lost everyone and everything, except Miss Lipp and the Lincoln. The Peugeot would have radioed in. The question was whether the surveillance people had remembered the Volkswagen van or not. If they had, there would be a faint possibility of Tufan’s being able to trace it using the police; but it seemed very faint. I wondered how many thousand Volkswagen vans there were in the Istanbul area. Of course, if they had happened to notice the registration number - if this, if that. Fischer began to snore and Miller tapped his leg until he stopped.

The patch of sky at the top of the staircase turned red and then grey and then blue-black. I lit a cigarette and saw Miller’s teeth gleaming yellowly in the light of the match.

“What about flashlights?” I whispered. “We won’t be able to see a thing.”

“There will be a third-quarter moon.”

At about eight there was a murmur of voices from one or other of the courtyards - in there it was impossible to tell which - and a man laughed. Presumably, the night watchmen were taking over. Then there was silence again. A plane going over became an event, something to think about. Was it preparing to land at Yesilköy airport or had it just taken off?

Fischer produced a flask of water with a metal cup on the base, and we each had a drink. Another age went by. Then there was the faint sound of a train pulling out of the Sirkeci station and chugging round the sharp curve at Seraglio Point below. Its whistle sounded shrilly, like a French train, and then it began to gather speed. As the sound died away, a light glared, almost blinding me. Miller had a pen light in his hand and was looking at his watch. He sighed contentedly.

“We can go,” he whispered.

“The light a moment, Leo,” Fischer said.

Miller held the light up for him. With his good hand, Fischer eased a small snub-nosed revolver from his breast pocket, worked the safety catch, and then transferred the thing to a side pocket. He gave me a meaning look as he patted it.

Miller got up, so I stood up, too. He came down the steps with the tackle and looped it around one shoulder like a bandolier. “I will go first,” he said; “Arthur will follow me. Then you, Hans. Is there anything else? Ah yes, there is.”

He went and relieved himself in the corner by the fire hose. When he had finished Fischer did the same tiling.

I was smoking. “Put that out now,” Miller said. He looked at Fischer. “Are you ready?”

Fischer nodded; then, an instant before the light went out, I saw him cross himself. That is something I don’t understand. I mean, he was asking a blessing, or whatever it is, when he was going to commit a sin.

Miller went up the stairs slowly. At the top he paused, looking all around, getting his bearings. Then he bent his head down to mine.

“Karl said that you may have vertigo,” he said softly; “but it is all quite simple. Follow me at three paces. Do not look sideways or back, only ahead. There is one step down from the ironwork. Then there is lead sheet. I will step down, go three paces, and wait a little so that your eyes can adjust themselves.”

I had been so long in the darkness that the intermittent glare of the pen light had been almost painful. Outside on the roof, the moonlight seemed to make everything as bright as day; too bright for my liking; I was certain that someone would see us from the ground and start shooting. Fischer must have had the same feeling. I heard him swear under his breath behind me.

Miller’s teeth gleamed for an instant; then he started to move forward past the three cupolas over the quarters of the White Eunuchs. There was a space of about five feet between the cupolas and the edge of the roof. Staying close to the cupolas and looking only ahead as Miller had instructed me, I had no sensation at all of being on a high place. For a while, my only problem was keeping up with him. Harper had compared him to a fly. To me he looked more like an earwig as he slithered round the last of the three cupolas and scuttled on, leaning, inward over the slight hump in the centre of the roof. He stopped only once. He had crossed the roof of the Audience Chamber, to avoid what looked like three large fanlights over the Gate of Felicity, and was returning to the Eunuchs’ roof when another fanlight appeared and the flat surface narrowed suddenly. The way across was only about two feet wide.

I saw the ground below and started to go down on my knees - I might just have been able to crawl across by myself, I suppose - when he reached back, gripped my forearm, and drew me to him. It was done so quickly that I had no time to get sick and lose my balance. His fingers were like steel clamps.

Then, we were level with the kitchens and I could see the conical bases of their ten squat chimneys stretching away to the right. Miller led the way to the left. The flat space here was over thirty feet wide and I had no trouble. There was a four-foot rise then, which brought us over the big room with the exhibition of miniatures and glass in it. Ahead, I could see the whole of one cupola and, beyond it, the top of another smaller one. The smaller one, I knew, was the one on the roof of the Treasury Museum.

Miller began to move more slowly and carefully as he skirted the big cupola. Every now and again he stopped. Then I saw him lower himself over a ledge. When his feet found whatever there was below, only his head and shoulders were showing.

I was following round the big cupola, and had started to move away from it towards the ledge, when Miller turned and beckoned to me. He had moved a yard or two towards the outer edge of the roof, so I changed direction towards him. That is how it was that when I came to the ledge I saw too much.

There was the vaulted roof of the Treasury, and the cupola with a flat space about four feet wide all around the base of it. That is where Miller was standing. But beyond him there was nothing, just a great black emptiness, and then, horribly far away below, the faint white hairline of a road in the moonlight.

I felt myself starting to lose my balance and fall, so I knelt down quickly and clung to the lead surface of the roof. Then I began retching. I couldn’t help it; I’ve never been able to help it. From what I’ve heard from people who got seasick, that must be the same sort of feeling; only my feeling about heights is worse.

I had nothing in my stomach to throw up, but that didn’t make any difference. My stomach went on trying to throw up.

Fischer began kicking me and hissing at me to be silent. Miller reached up and dragged me by the ankles down over the ledge, then made me sit with my back, against the side of the cupola. He shoved my head hard between my knees. I heard a scuffling noise as he helped Fischer down off the ledge, then their whispering.

“Will he be all right?”

“He will have to be.”

“The fat fool.” Fischer kicked me as I started to retch again.

Miller stopped him. “That will do no good. You will have to help. As long as he gets no nearer the edge it may be possible.”

I opened my eyes just enough to see Miller’s feet. He was laying out the anchor rope round the cupola and presently he pulled one end of it down between my back and the part I was leaning against. A moment or two later, he crouched down in front of me and began knotting the rope. When that was done, he slipped on the upper block of the lifting tackle. Then he brought his head close to mine.

“Can you hear me, Arthur?”

“Yes.”

“If you didn’t have to move, you’d feel safe here, wouldn’t you?”

“I don’t know.”

“You
are
safe now, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Then listen. You can handle the tackle from here. Open your eyes and look up at me.”

I managed to do so. He had taken his coat off and looked skinnier than ever. “Hans will be at the edge,” he went on, “and with his good hand will hold my coat in place there. In that way the ropes will run smoothly over it and not be cut. You understand?”

“Yes.”

“And you will not have to go near the edge - only let out rope and pull in when you are told.”

“I don’t know. Supposing I let it slip.”

“Well, that would be bad, because then you would have only Hans to deal with, and he would certainly make sure that you slipped, too.”

The teeth, as he smiled, were like rows of gravestones. Suddenly he picked up a coil of rope from the lead beside him and put it in my hands.

“Get ready to take the strain,” he said, “and remember that it stretches. I don’t mind how slowly I go down or how quickly I come up. Hans will give you the signals to lower, stop, and raise.” He pointed to a ridge in the lead. “Brace your feet against this. So.”

The day Mum died, the Imam came and intoned verses from the Koran.
Now taste the torment of the fire you called a lie.

Miller slipped the end of the rope around my chest and knotted it firmly. Then he hauled in the slack. “Are you ready, Arthur?”

I nodded.

“Then look at Hans.”

I let my eyes go to Fischer’s legs and then his body. He was lying on his right side with his shoulder on

Miller’s coat and his right hand on the tackle ready to guide it. I dared not look any nearer the edge. I knew I would pass out if I did.

I saw Miller put a pair of gloves on, step into the sling, then crouch down and move out of sight.

“Now,” Fischer whispered.

The strain didn’t come suddenly; the stretch in the nylon had to be taken up first. My hands were slippery with sweat and I had looped the rope round the sleeve of my left arm to give me more purchase. When the full strain came, the loop tightened like a tourniquet. Then the pressure fluctuated and I could feel Miller bouncing in the sling as the tackle settled down.

“Steady.” Fischer held his right hand palm downwards over the tackle.

The movement in the block by the anchor rope beside me ceased.