Topkapi (7 page)

I stood there in the customs shed for about ten minutes, watched by an armed guard on the door who looked as if he would have liked nothing better than an excuse for shooting me. I pretended not to notice him; but his presence did not improve matters. In fact, I was beginning to get an attack of my indigestion.

After a while, the security man came back and beckoned to me. I went with him, along a passage with a small barrack room off it, to a door at the end.

“What now?” I asked in French.

“You must see the Commandant of the post.”

He knocked at the door and ushered me in.

Inside was a small bare office with some hard chairs and a green baize trestle table in the centre. The customs inspector stood beside the table. Seated at it was a man of about my own age with a lined, sallow face. He wore some sort of officer’s uniform. I think he belonged to the military security police. He had the
carnet
and my passport on the table in front of him.

He looked up at me disagreeably. “This is your passport?” He spoke good French.

“Yes, sir. And I can only say that I regret extremely that I did not notice that it was not renewed.”

“You have caused a lot of trouble.”

“I realize that, sir. I must explain, however, that it was only on Monday evening that I was asked to make this journey. I left early yesterday morning. I was in a hurry. I did not think to check my papers.”

He looked down at the passport. “It says here that your occupation is that of journalist. You told the customs inspector that you were a chauffeur.”

So he had an inquiring mind; my heart sank.

“I am acting as a chauffeur, sir. I was, I
am
a journalist, but one must live and things are not always easy in that profession.”

“So now you are a chauffeur, and the passport is incorrect in yet another particular, eh?” It was a very unfair way of putting it, but I thought it as well to let him have his moment.

“One’s fortunes change, sir. In Athens I have my own car, which I drive for hire.”

He peered, frowning, at the
carnet
. “This car here is the property of Elizabeth Lipp. Is she your employer?”

“Temporarily, sir.”

“Where is she?”

“In Istanbul, I believe, sir.”

“You do not know?”

“Her agent engaged me, sir - to drive her car to Istanbul, where she is going as a tourist. She prefers to make the journey to Istanbul by sea.”

There was an unpleasant pause. He looked through the
carnet
again and then up at me abruptly. “What nationality is this woman?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“What age? What sort of woman?”

“I have never seen her, sir. Her agent arranged everything.”

“And she is going from Athens to Istanbul by sea, which takes twenty-four hours, but she sends her car fourteen hundred kilometres and three days by road. If she wants the car in Istanbul, why didn’t she take the car on the boat with her? It is simple enough and costs practically nothing.”

I was only too well aware of it. I shrugged. “I was paid to drive, sir, and well paid. It was not for me to question the lady’s plans.”

He considered me for a moment, then drew a sheet of paper towards him and scribbled a few words. He handed the result to the customs inspector, who read, nodded, and went out quickly.

The Commandant seemed to relax. “You say you know nothing about the woman who owns the car,” he said. “Tell me about her agent. Is it a travel bureau?”

“No, sir, a man, an American, a friend of Fräulein Lipp’s father he said.”

“What’s his name? Where is he?”

I told him everything I knew about Harper, and the nature of my relationship with him. I did not mention the disagreement over the traveller's cheques. That could have been of no interest to him.

He listened in silence, nodding occasionally. By the time I had finished, his manner had changed considerably. His expression had become almost amiable.

“Have you driven this way before?” he asked.

“Several times, sir.”

“With tourists?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Ever without tourists?”

“No, sir. They like to visit Olympus, Salonika, and Alexandropolis on their way to Istanbul.”

“Then did you not think this proposal of Mr. Harper’s strange?”

I permitted myself to smile. “
Monsieur le Commandant
” I said, “I thought it so strange that there could be only two possible reasons for it. The first was that Mr. Harper was so much concerned to impress the daughter of a valuable business associate with his
savoir- faire
that he neglected to ask anyone’s advice before he made his arrangements.”

“And the second?”

“That he knew that uncrated cars carried in Denizyollari ships to Istanbul must be accompanied by the owners as a passenger, and that he did not wish to be present when the car was inspected by customs for fear that something might be discovered in the car that should not be there.”

“I see.” He smiled slightly. “But
you
had no such fear.”

We were getting cosier by the minute. “
Monsieur le Commandant
” I said, “I may be a trifle careless about having my passport renewed, but I am not a fool. The moment I left Athens yesterday, I stopped and searched the car thoroughly, underneath as well as on top, the wheels, everywhere.”

There was a knock on the door and the customs inspector came back. He put a sheet of paper down in front of the Commandant. The Commandant read it and his face suddenly tightened. He looked up again at me.

“You say you searched everywhere in the car?”

“Yes, sir. Everywhere.”

“Did you search inside the doors”

“Well, no, sir. They are sealed. I would have damaged ...”

He said something quickly in Turkish. Suddenly the security man locked an arm round my neck and ran his free hand over my pockets. Then he shoved me down violently onto a chair.

I stared at the Commandant dumbly.

“Inside the doors there are” - he referred to the paper in his hand - ”twelve tear-gas grenades, twelve concussion grenades, twelve smoke grenades, six gas respirators, six Parabellum pistols, and one hundred and twenty rounds of nine-millimetre pistol ammunition.” He put the paper down and stood up. “You are under arrest.”

THE POST HAD no facilities for housing prisoners, and I was put in the lavatory under guard while the Commandant reported my arrest to headquarters and awaited orders. The lavatory was only a few yards from his office, and during the next twenty minutes the telephone there rang four times. I could hear the rumble of his voice when he answered. The tone of it became more respectful with each call.

I was uncertain whether I should allow myself to be encouraged by this or not. Police behaviour is always difficult to anticipate, even when you know a country well. Sometimes High Authority is more responsive to a reasonable explanation of the misunderstanding, and more disposed to accept a dignified expression of regret for inconvenience caused, than some self-important or sadistic minor official who is out to make the most of the occasion. On the other hand, the Higher Authority has more power to abuse, and, if it comes to the simple matter of a bribe, bigger ideas about his nuisance value.

I must admit, though, that what I was mainly concerned about at that point was the kind of physical treatment I would receive. Of course, every police authority, high or low, considers its behaviour “correct” on all occasions; but in my experience (although I have only really been arrested ten or twelve times in my whole life) the word “correct” can mean almost anything from hot meals brought in from a nearby restaurant and plenty of cigarettes, to tight-handcuffing in the cell and a knee in the groin if you dare to complain. My previous encounters with the Turkish police had been uncomfortable only in the sense that they had been inconvenient and humiliating; but then, the matters in dispute had been of a more or less technical nature. I had to face the fact that “being in possession of arms, explosives, and other offensive weapons, attempting to smuggle them into the Turkish Republic, carrying concealed firearms and illegal entry without valid identification papers”, were rather more serious charges. My complete and absolute innocence of them would take time to establish, and a lot of quite unpleasant things could happen in the interim.

The possibility that my innocence might
not
be established was something that, realist though I am, I was not just then prepared to contemplate.

After the fourth telephone call, the Commandant came out of his office, gave some orders to the security man who had been waiting in the passage, and then came into the lavatory.

“You are being sent at once to the garrison jail in Edirne,” he said.

“And the car I was driving, sir?”

He hesitated. “I have no orders about that yet. No doubt it will be wanted as evidence.”

Direct communication with Higher Authority seemed to have sapped a little of his earlier self-confidence. I decided to have one more shot at bluffing my way out. “I must remind you, sir,” I said loudly, “that I have already protested formally to you against my detention here. I repeat that protest. The car and its contents are within your legal jurisdiction. I am not. I was refused entry because my papers were not in order. Therefore, legally, I was not in Turkey and should have been at once returned to the Greek side of the border. In Greece, I have a
permis de séjour
which is in order. I think that when your superiors learn these facts, you will find that you have a lot to answer for.”

It was quite well said. Unfortunately, it seemed to amuse him.

“So you are a lawyer, as well as a journalist, a chauffeur, and an arms smuggler.”

“I am simply warning you.”

His smile faded. “Then let me give you a word of warning, too. In Edirne you will not be dealing with the ordinary police authorities. It is considered that there may be political aspects to your case and it has been placed under the jurisdiction of the Second Section, the
Ikinci Büro.
”

“Political aspects? What political aspects?” I tried, not very successfully, to sound angry instead of alarmed.

“That is not for me to say. I merely warn you. The Director, Second Section, is General Haki. It will be his men who will interrogate you. You will certainly end by co-operating with them. You would be well advised to begin by doing so. Their patience, I hear, is quite limited. That is all.”

He went. A moment or two later the security man came in.

I was driven to the garrison jail in a covered jeep with my right wrist handcuffed to a grab rail, and an escort of two soldiers. The jail was an old stone building on the outskirts of the town. It had a walled courtyard, and there were expanded metal screens as well as bars over the windows.

One of the soldiers, an N.C.O., reported to the guard on the inner gate, and after a few moments two men in a different sort of uniform came out through a smaller side door. One of them had a paper which he handed to the N.C.O. I gathered that it was a receipt for me. The N.C.O. immediately unlocked the handcuffs and waved me out of the jeep. The new escort-in-charge prodded me towards the side door.

“
Girmek, girmek!
” he said sharply.

All jails seem to smell of disinfectants, urine, sweat, and leather. This was no exception. I went up some wooden stairs to a steel gate, which was opened by a man with a long chain of keys from the inside. Beyond it and to the right was a sort of reception room with a man at a desk and two cubicles at the back. The guard shoved me up to the desk and rapped out an order. I said in French that I didn’t understand. The man at the desk said: “Vide les poches.”

I did as I was told. They had taken all my papers and keys from me at the frontier post. All I had left in my pockets was my money, my watch, a packet of cigarettes, and matches. The desk man gave me back the watch and the cigarettes, and put the money and the matches into an envelope. A man in a grubby white coat now arrived and went into one of the cubicles. He was carrying a thin yellow file folder. After a moment or two he called out an order and I was sent in to him.

The cubicle contained a small table and a chair and a covered bucket. In one corner there was a washbasin, and on the wall a white metal cabinet. The white-coated man was at the table preparing an inking plate of the kind used for fingerprinting. He glanced up at me and said in French: “Take your clothes off.”

People who run jails are all the same. When I was naked, he searched the inside of the clothes and the shoes. Next he looked in my mouth and ears with a flashlight. Then he took a rubber glove and a jar of petroleum jelly from the wall cabinet and searched my rectum. I have always deeply resented that indignity. Finally he took my fingerprints. He was very businesslike about it all; he even gave me a piece of toilet paper to wipe the ink off my hands before he told me to dress and go into the next cubicle. In there, was a camera, set up with photofloods and a fixed focus bar. When I had been photographed, I was taken along some corridors to a green wooden door with the word ISTIFHAM lettered on it in white paint.
Istifham
is a Turkish word I know; it means “interrogation”.

There was only one small screened and barred window in the room; the sun was beginning to set and it was already quite dark in there. As I went in, one of the guards followed me and switched on the light. His friend shut and locked the door from the outside. The guard who was to stay with me sat down on a bench against the wall and yawned noisily.

The room was about eighteen feet square. Off one corner there was a washroom with no door on it. Apart from the bench, the furniture consisted of a solid looking table bolted to the floor and half a dozen chairs. On the wall was a telephone and a framed lithograph of Kemal Atatürk. The floor was covered with worn brown linoleum.

I got out my cigarettes and offered one to the guard. He shook his head and looked contemptuous, as if I had offered him an inadequate bribe. I shrugged and, putting the cigarette in my own mouth, made signs that I wanted a light. He shook his head again. I put the cigarette away and sat down at the table. I had to assume that at any moment now a representative of the Second Section would arrive and start questioning me. What I needed, very badly, was something to tell him.