The Light of Day (15 page)

'One more thing,' he said: 'I do not wish you to take foolish risks, but I do wish you to feel confidence in yourself if you are obliged to take necessary ones. Some men have more confidence in themselves if they are armed.'

I couldn't help glancing at the polished pistol-holster on his
belt. He
smiled thinly. This pistol is part of an officer's uniform. You may borrow it if you wish. You could put it in your bag with the radio.'

I shook my head. 'No, thank you, it wouldn't make me feel better. Worse, more likely, I'd be wondering how to explain it away if anyone happened to see it.’

‘You are probably wise. Very
well,
that is all.’

Of course, I hadn't the slightest intention of taking any sort of risk if I could help it. All I intended to do was to go through the motions of co-operating so as to keep
Tufan
happy, and somehow get my letter back from Harper before Tufan's people pulled him in. Of course, I was quite certain that he was going to be pulled in. He
had
to
be.

Tufan
stayed behind, telephoning. As I went back along the corridors with the lieutenant, I saw him glancing at me, wondering if it were better to make polite conversation with someone who seemed on such good terms with the powerful Major
Tufan,
or to say nothing and keep his nose clean. In the end, all he said was a courteous good-night.

The Peugeot was still outside. The driver glanced at the radio I was carrying. I wondered if he knew about the modification, but he made no comment on it. We drove back to the hotel in silence. I thanked him and he nodded amiably, patting the wheel of his car. 'Better on fee narrow roads,' he said.

The terrace was closed. I went to fee bar for a drink. I had to get the taste of fee
Dolmabahçe
out of my mouth.

'Conspiracy,'
Tufan
had said. Well, that much I was prepared to concede. The whole Harper-Lipp-Fischer set-up was obviously a cover for something; but all this cloak and dagger stuff about
coups
d'état
and assassination plots I really couldn't swallow. Even sitting in fee palace wife a painting about a Sultan being deposed staring down from fee wall, it had bothered me. Sitting in a hotel bar with a glass of brandy—well, frankly I didn't believe a bloody word of it. The point was that
Î
knew fee people concerned—or, anyway, I had met them—and
Tufan
didn't know and hadn't met any of them. 'Political context', for Heaven's sake!
 
Suddenly, Major
Tufan
appeared in my mind's eye not as a man in charge of a firing squad, but as a military old maid always looking for secret agents and assassins under her bed—a typical counter-espionage man in
f
act

For a moment or two I almost enjoyed myself. Then I remembered the doors of the car and the arms and the respirators and the grenades, and went back to zero.

If it hadn't been for those things, I thought, I could have made two good guesses about the Harper set-up, and one of them would certainly have been right. My first guess would have been narcotics. Turkey is an opium-producing country. If you had the necessary technical personnel— Fischer, the 'manufacturer', Lipp, the 'student’—all you would need would be a quiet, secluded place like the
Kösk
Sardunya in which to set up a small processing plant to make heroin, and an organizer—Harper, of course—to handle distribution and sales.

My second guess would have been some
de
luxe
variation of the old badger game. It begins in the romantic villa on the Bosphorus graced by the beautiful, blue-blooded Princess Lipp, whose family once owned vast estates in Rumania, her faithful servitor Andreas (Fischer), and a multi-millionaire sucker enslaved by the lady's beauty. Then, just as the millionaire is preparing to dip his wick, in comes the mad, bad, dangerous husband Prince (Harper) Lipp, who threatens to spread the whole story (with pictures, no doubt) over the front pages of every newspaper from Istanbul to Los Angeles,
unless . . .
The millionaire can't wait to pay up and get out. Curtain.

On the whole, though, I would have made narcotics the first choice. Not that I didn’t see Harper as a con man, or in the role of blackmailer (I knew all too well that he could play that), but the cost and extent of the preparatory work suggested that big profits were expected. Unless the supply of gullible millionaires had suddenly increased in the Istanbul area, it seemed more likely that the expectation was based on the promise of a successful narcotics operation.

It seemed to me so obviously the right answer that I began to think again about the grenades and pistols. Supposing they did fit into the narcotics picture after all, but in a subsidiary sort of way. Supposing they had no direct relationship to Harper, but had been carried for someone
outside
the villa group—someone Turkish with political intentions of the kind in which Tufan was interested, narcotics picture had to include a supplier of illicit raw opium. Almost certainly that supplier would be Turkish. Why shouldn't the price for his illicit opium have included a small shipment of illicit arms? No reason at all. Or the delivery of the arms might merely have been one of those little gestures of goodwill with which business men sometimes like to sweeten their contractual relationships. 'I'm bringing a car in anyway. Why not let me take care of that other little matter for you? Just give me a letter to your man in Athens.'

There was only one thing that I could see that was not quite right about it—the time factor. The villa had been taken on a short lease. The car had been imported on a tourist
carnet. I
didn't know long it took to set up a laboratory and process enough heroin to make a killing in
aie
dope market; but, on the face of it, two months seemed a bit short. I decided in the end that, for safety, they might well want to avoid remaining for too long in any one place and intended to keep the laboratory on the move.

I think I knew, secretly, that it wasn’t a highly convincing explanation; but, at that moment,
it
was the best that I could think of, and until a better one occurred to me I was prepared to be uncritical, I liked my arms-for-opium theory. At least it held out a promise of release. When
Tufan
realized that, as far as the arms were concerned, Harper was only an intermediary, his interest must shift from the villa group to someone somewhere else. My usefulness would be at an end. Harper would accept my resignation with a shrug, return my letter and pay me off. Tufan's delighted Director would help me over my papers. A few hours later I would be back in Athens, safe and sound.

I remembered that I hadn't yet written to
Nicki.
Before I went to bed, I bought a postcard from the concierge and
 
wrote a few
lines.
'Still on Lincoln job. Money good. Should last a few more days. Home mid-week latest. Be good. Love,
 
Papa
'

I didn't put the villa address, because that would have
j
made her curious. I didn't want to have to answer a lot of questions when I got back. Even when I've had a good time, I don't like having to talk about it. Good or bad, what's over's done with. Anyway, there was no point really in giving an address. I knew she wouldn't write back to me.

The following morning I went out early, bought a dozen packets of cigarettes and then looked for a shop which sold tools. If I were to make sure that the stuff had been removed from the car doors I would have to look inside at least one of them. The only trouble was that the screws which fastened the leather panels had Phillips heads. If I tried to use an ordinary screwdriver on them, there would be a risk of making marks or possibly scratching the leather.

I could not find a tool shop, so, in the end, I went to the garage off Taxim Square, where they knew me, and persuaded the mechanic there to sell me a Phillips. Then I went back to the hotel, paid my bill and took a taxi to the ferry pier. There was no sign of the Peugeot following.

A ferry-boat came in almost immediately and I knew that I was going to be early at Sariyer. In fact, I was twenty minutes early, so I was all the more surprised to see the Lincoln coming along the road as the boat edged into the pier.

Miss Lipp was driving.

CHAPTER SIX

As I came off the pier, she got out of the car. She was wearing a light yellow cotton dress that did even less to obscure the shape of her body than the slacks and-shirt I had seen her in the day before. She had the keys of the car in her hand, and, as I came up, she handed them to me with a friendly smile.

'Good morning, Arthur.’

'Good morning, madam. It's good of you to meet me.'

'I want to do some sight-seeing. Why don't you put your bag in the trunk for now, then we won't have to stop off at the villa?'

"Whatever you say, madam.' I put my bag down and went to hold the rear door open for her, but she was already walking round to the front passenger seat, so I had to scuttle round to get to that door ahead of her.

When she was installed, I hurriedly put my bag in the luggage compartment and got into the driving seat. I was sweating slightly, not only because it was a warm day, but also because I was flustered. I had expected Fischer to meet me with the car; I had expected to go straight to the villa, to be told where I would sleep, to be given a moment to orient myself, a chance to think and time to plan. Instead, I was on my own with Miss Lipp, sitting where she had been sitting until a few moments ago, and smelling the scent she used. My hand shook a little as I put the ignition key in, and I felt I had to say
something to cover my nerves.

'Isn't Mr Harper joining you, madam?"

"He had some business to attend to.' She was lighting a cigarette. 'And by the way, Arthur," she went on, 'don't call me madam. If you have to call me something, the name's Lipp. Now, tell me what you have on the tour menu.'

'Is this your first time in Turkey, Miss Lipp?

'First in a lo
ng time. All I remember from before is mosques. I don't think I want to see any more mosques.'

'But you would like to begin with Istanbul?'

'Oh yes.'

'Did you see the Seraglio?'

'Is that the old palace where the Sultans' harem used to be?'

That's it.' I smiled inwardly. When I had been a guide in Istanbul before, it had been the same. Every woman tourist was always interested in the harem. Miss Lipp, I thought to myself, was no different.

'All right,' she said, 'let's go to see the Seraglio.'

I was regaining my composure now. 'If I may make a suggestion.'

'Go ahead.'

‘The Seraglio is organized as a museum now. If we go straight there we shall arrive before it opens. I suggest that I drive you first to the famous Pierre
Loti café,
which is high up on a hill outside the city. There you could have a light lunch in pleasant surroundings and I could take you to the Seraglio afterwards.'

‘What time would we get there?'

'We can be there soon after one o'clock.'

'Okay, but I don't want to be later.'

That struck me as rather odd, but I paid no attention. You do get the occasional tourist who wants to do everything by the dock. She just had not impressed me as being of that type.

I started up and drove back along the coast road. I looked for the Peugeot, but it wasn't there that day. Instead, there was a grey Opel with three men in it. When we got to the old castle at Rumelihisari, I stopped and told her about the blockade of Constantinople by Sultan
Mehmet Fatih
in 1453, and how he had stretched a great chain boom across the Bosphorus there to cut off the city. I didn't tell her that it was possible to go up to the main keep of the castle because I didn't want to exhaust myself climbing up all those paths and stairs; but she didn't seem very interested anyway, so, in the end, I cut the patter short and pushed on. After a while, it became pretty obvious that she wasn't really much interested in anything in the way of ordinary sight-seeing. At least, that was how it seemed at the time. I don't think she was bored, but when I pointed places out to her she only nodded. She asked no questions.

It was different at the
café.
She made me sit with her at a table outside under a tree and order
raki
for us both; then she began asking questions by the dozen, not about Pierre
Loti,
the Turkophile Frenchman, but about the Seraglio.

I did my best to explain. To most people, the word 'palace’ means a single very big building planned to house a monarch. Of course, there are usually a few smaller buildings around it, but the big building is the Palace. Although the word 'seraglio' really means 'palace', it isn't at all like one. It is an oval-shaped walled area over two miles in circumference, standing on top of the hill above Seraglio Point at the entrance to the Bosphorus; and it is a city within a city. Originally, or at least from the time of Suleiman the Magnificent until the mid-nineteenth century, the whole central government, ministers and high civil servants, as well as the Sultan of the time, lived and worked in it There were household troops and a cadet school as well as the Sultan's harem inside the walls. The population was generally over five thousand, and there was always new building going on. One reason for this was a custom of the Ottomans. When a new Sultan came to the throne, he naturally inherited all the wealth and property accumulated by his father, but he could not take the personalized property for his own personal use without losing face. Consequently, all the old regalia had to be stored away and new pieces made, a new summer palace had to be built and, of course, new private apartments inside the Seraglio, and a new mosque. As I say, this went on well into the nineteenth century. So the Seraglio today is a vast rabbit-warren of reception rooms, private apartments, pavilions, mosques, libraries, gateways, armouries, barracks and so on, interspersed by a few open courtyards and gardens. There are no big buildings in the 'palace' sense. The two biggest single structures happen to be the kitchens and the stables. Although the guide-books try to explain all this, most tourists
don’t
seem
to understand it They think 'seraglio' means
'harem'
anyway and all they are interested in apart from that is the 'Golden Road', the passage that the chosen girls went along to get from the harem to the Sultan's bed. The harem area isn't open to the public as a matter of fact, but I always used to take the tourists I had through the Mustafa Pasha pavilion at the back and tell them that that was part of the harem. They never knew the difference, and it was something they could tell their friends.