Not Less Than Gods (15 page)

“Did they identify themselves?”

“The one who did most of the talking left his calling card,” said Hobson. “He’d hoped to get an audience with the Russian Ambassador. He read it out for the Russian chap. Reverend Amasa Breedlove, of the Norvell Bible College of Nashville, Tennessee. I think the other fellow’s name was Jackson.”

“Extraordinary,” said Ludbridge. “And absurd. Had a rather exaggerated sense of his own importance, evidently. Anything else of note?”

“Not that I heard,” said Hobson.

“You don’t suppose these would be the filibusters we were asked to watch for?” said Bell-Fairfax. Ludbridge scowled, tugging at his beard.

“Unlikely, I should think; this chap sounds more of a religious busybody. Still . . . never hurts to pass these trifles on to London. Never know what may come of it. If nothing else, we’ve learned that our bolt receiver works a treat! Well done, Hobson. As for our other business: Pengrove, you’ll take a stroll with Bell-Fairfax tomorrow.”

“Must I wear the hat-camera?”

“I’m afraid so.” Ludbridge reached inside his coat and drew out the folded papers. Opening them, he smoothed them out on his knee and studied what had been written there.

“No, no!” Pengrove cried, waving his arms at the boatman. “I need the camera too!” The boatman, who had resumed his seat, glared up at the
mound of photographic paraphernalia still piled on the paving stones and shook his head. Bell-Fairfax leaned forward and said something to him in Turkish, at which he expostulated, leaning forward on his oar. At last Bell-Fairfax reached into his pocket and paid out a few more coins, and rose on the thwart to haul the rest of Pengrove’s equipment into the caique himself. Muttering, the boatman backed and steered them around, and took them across to Stamboul.

“He said you had so much gear with you, it constituted another passenger,” Bell-Fairfax explained.

“Horrid man,” said Pengrove. “Horrid place. I don’t mind telling you, this is not at all what I expected of the glorious East. Not a bit like the Arabian Nights, what?”

“You’ve only seen the docks, so far,” said Bell-Fairfax. “What if you were a foreigner, and had heard a great deal about the power and majesty of Great Britain, and then went there and all you saw was Lime-house? Stamboul is quite picturesque.”

“I suppose,” said Pengrove, looking across the leaping sea at the dome of Hagia Sophia. “Did you really mean it, about that brothel?”

“Yes.”

“Plump beauties with veils and beads and things?”

“Yes.”

“Is it expensive?”

“No. Quite reasonable.”

“Really.” Pengrove set his monocle more firmly in place. “I could quite fancy a visit, you know. Do you suppose we might go there first?”

“We have a job to do, Pengrove.” Bell-Fairfax looked at him askance. “Can you see yourself making a report to Ludbridge? ‘Well, the first thing we did was slip off for an hour’s pleasant fornication’?”

“Oh, I suppose not.”

“And, in any case, you’ll want to purchase some French letters first.”

“Why the devil would I want a French letter?”

Bell-Fairfax stared at Pengrove. “A prophylactic sheath,” he enunciated carefully. Pengrove blushed scarlet and his monocle fell out.

For several hours that morning, the inhabitants of Stamboul were treated to the sight of a pair of Englishmen lugging photographic equipment here and there about the city. The smaller of the two seemed intent on photographing his outlandishly tall friend against a variety of backgrounds: crumbling old medieval fortifications, modern artillery barracks no less crumbling, decrepit mosques, the immense warship
Mahmudiye
lying at anchor with her rigging in disarray and her hull grown with seaweed.

After each shot the taller gentleman would hurry to put up a tiny portable tent, into which his friend would vanish for several minutes. Any curious onlookers venturing close were driven back by the dreadful chemical reek. Any who remained might see the smaller man stagger forth at last, waving a paper negative image on which his tall friend had been transformed into a black-skinned ghoul with silver eyes, the sight of which caused small children and less educated adults to flee screaming.

At some point the Englishmen produced a bottle, and thereafter their behavior became somewhat disorderly, at last drawing the attention of a hostile policeman. Suspicious, he took to following the Englishmen about, fuming as they posed in a disrespectful manner before the Sublime Porte itself. When they made their wobbly way to the ostentatiously grand mansion of a local official, and seemed intent on photographing it from every possible angle, the policeman decided the pair of idiot infidels had gone too far. He descended on them in wrath, threw their camera down on its tripod, stamped on it twice for good measure, confiscated their half-empty bottle, and told them in no uncertain terms to depart. With a few dismayed cries of “Oh! I say!” they slunk away.

“And now my camera’s broken,” said Pengrove mournfully, holding up the brass lens tube, which had parted company with the broken box.
Bell-Fairfax had found them a quiet café in the Greek Quarter, to which they had retreated.

“We can repair it tonight,” said Bell-Fairfax. “It doesn’t matter, does it? Be thankful he didn’t snatch off your hat and dance on that as well.”

“Why that particular palace?”

“Ludbridge wanted it photographed,” said Bell-Fairfax. “Entrances and exits and all. We’ll need to go back, once that fellow’s temper has cooled.”

“Perfectly splendid palace, I must say,” Pengrove said indistinctly, through a mouthful of baklava. “Everyone here seems to dwell in either marble halls or filthy little huts. No middle classes, eh? And the state of those barracks! Never heard of chamber pots, clearly.”

“They aren’t mentioned in the Arabian Nights, I believe,” said Bell-Fairfax, lounging back in his chair.

“Ha-ha. And look at that sentry over there, look at him! You’d think his rifle was a broom, the way he’s leaning on it. My word, wouldn’t one of our sergeants-at-arms give him a tongue-lashing!”

“Or one of our boatswains,” said Bell-Fairfax.

“No way to run an empire,” said Pengrove, shaking his head. “I don’t envy their sultan. Well, shall we go out and buy a melon, and loiter about eating it and throwing the rinds everywhere, as we shoot Ludbridge’s palace? No point pretending to be publicly intoxicated anymore, but that ought to make us look suitably like a pair of ill-bred fools.”

“Excellent thought,” said Bell-Fairfax. He paid their score and together they packed the camera equipment, closing up the ruined camera in its traveling-case; then they ventured out and found a fruit vendor’s stall on the far edge of the bazaar.

“Oh, my word,” said Bell-Fairfax, as they approached. Pengrove followed his gaze and saw a Greek girl seated within the stall, holding her veil in place with a negligent hand, looking out boredly on the passing scene. She wore apple-green satin, trimmed with jonquil-yellow embroidery. Sloe-eyed, pale as perfect ivory, and the veil was far too thin to conceal the Byzantine beauty of her features.

“She’s a picture,” affirmed Pengrove.

“Indeed she is,” said Bell-Fairfax. He approached her and said something in Greek, with a curious soft intonation Pengrove had never heard him use before. It was suave, it was caressing, it acted on the nervous system like notes played on a violin. The girl looked up sharply; Pengrove saw her dark eyes widen, as Bell-Fairfax gazed down into them. She stammered some kind of reply, with a rosy color coming into her face. Bell-Fairfax said something further, in the same dulcet tones. She looked desperately hopeful, glanced once over her shoulder, and then spoke in a low urgent voice.

Bell-Fairfax smiled broadly. By way of reply he reached into his inner coat pocket and withdrew a sort of flat wallet. He opened it and displayed its contents, which were not pound notes. She inspected them briefly, nodded, and rose and took his hand.

“Mind the stall a moment, Pengrove, will you? There’s a good chap,” said Bell-Fairfax, dropping the camera bundle and allowing himself to be led into the depths of the booth.

“But—but!” Pengrove looked around frantically, unable to believe what was happening. For some ten minutes he stood there petrified, expecting that at any moment some enraged phanariote would come storming across the bazaar asking after his daughter, or wife, or sister. Instead, the languid flow of the marketplace continued all around, in the sweltering heat. Flies buzzed. Donkeys plodded. Doves crooned sleepily. Elderly kitchen slaves bargained for onions with vegetable-stall keepers, both in such listless voices they might have been chatting in a Turkish bath.

And then, cutting like a black arrow through the dreamy Arabian Nights scene, marched a phalanx of Westerners in sober black clothing. They were led by a dignified-looking elder who wore a clerical collar and a shovel hat. They walked with purpose, looking around them severely at the indolence they beheld.

Pengrove stared at them, struck by the contrast between the men and their surroundings. A fragment of muttered conversation drifted to him:
“. . . don’t think twice about slaves here, and white slaves to boot . . .” They were American voices.

When had he heard mention of Americans in Constantinople, recently? Memory of the voices Hobson had picked up came back to him. Instinctively Pengrove’s hand rose to his lapel and he captured the Americans’ likenesses with the hat-camera. Then they had passed him, sprinting quickly up a flight of stairs to an upper terrace.

Pengrove was still staring after them when the Greek girl emerged from the booth, followed by Bell-Fairfax. Looking smug, he kissed her hand and then tipped his hat to her. With a radiant smile she replied effusively, showering him with compliments of some kind, and ended by seizing up a pair of melons and pressing them upon him, with many expressive, not to say suggestive, gestures. He accepted them and turned to Pengrove with a smirk. “Shall we go?”

Pengrove waited until they were a decent distance away before rounding on him. “What did you think you were playing at?” he demanded.

“I should have thought that was obvious,” said Bell-Fairfax, drawing out his penknife and pausing by a wall to cut a melon into quarters.

“And what about, ‘No, Pengrove, we have a job to do’? What about considering what Ludbridge would say? What about bloody
French letters
?”

“I happen to keep a ready supply of them with me at all times,” said Bell-Fairfax.

“And . . . and . . . you’ve just been a beastly cad and seduced some virgin, instead of a brothel girl!”

“She wasn’t a virgin,” said Bell-Fairfax, putting a slice of melon into Pengrove’s waving hand. “And I didn’t seduce her. I merely asked, in the politest possible fashion, whether she would be available and she answered with enthusiasm. We had a brief pleasant encounter, entirely unobserved by anyone, and have parted on the best of terms.”

“You practically mesmerized her! I saw it!”

“No such thing.”

“But . . . but you’re in the East, for God’s sake, and there might be . . . consequences,” said Pengrove, subsiding enough to take a bite of melon.

“Not with a French letter,” said Bell-Fairfax calmly. “And, as I believe I mentioned, I do have some sort of natural immunity to these things.”

“I never met such a brazen chap in all my life,” Pengrove grumbled.

“Nonsense. If you like, I’ll show you the brothel after we’ve finished the job.”

They strolled back to the district in which the mansion stood, and found that the irate policeman had departed the scene. They wandered all along the outer garden wall, placidly eating melon as they noted the large dog that came rushing to the gate, barking furiously. They made their way around to the side of the house that faced the sea, and stood there awhile by a long low private pier, tossing pebbles and bits of melon-rind into the Bosporus. Now and again they glanced over their shoulders to note the women watching them from behind the second-story latticework.

They picked their way back to the road and observed as the master of the house returned, a strangely grubby little bureaucrat for such a magnificent residence. They raised their hats as his coach rattled past, and watched with interest as he clambered out onto the back of a servant, swearing at his major domo for not meeting him with a cup of sherbet.

Ambling on, they observed the ancient plane tree that overhung the garden wall of the mansion next door. Bell-Fairfax, looking about first to make certain they were unobserved, made an experimental leap and caught the lowest branch of the tree. Pulling himself up through the boughs, he at once drew the attention of the large dog of that particular garden, who promptly set up such a commotion that Bell-Fairfax scrambled back down into the street and ran, speedily catching up with Pengrove, who was already running.

“Do you suppose we’ve been publicly stupid enough?” inquired Pengrove, when they were able to pause for breath.

“Perfectly idiotic,” said Bell-Fairfax.

“Seen a way into that house?”

“Yes. Did you photograph him?”

“I did. Might we perhaps go to the brothel now?”