Topkapi (27 page)

“Lower slowly.”

I let the rope slide round my arm and the bouncing began again.

“Keep going, smoothly.”

I went on paying out the rope. There was less bouncing now, just an occasional vibration. Miller was using his feet to steady himself against the wall as he descended. I watched the coil of rope beside me growing smaller and had another terror to fight. The end of the rope was tied round my chest. I couldn’t untie it now without letting go. If there were not enough rope in the coil to reach the shutter below, Fischer would make me move nearer to the edge.

There was about six feet left to go when he raised his hand. “Stop. Hold still.”

I was so relieved that I didn’t notice the pain in my arm from the tightened loop; I just closed my eyes and kept my head down.

There were slight movements on the rope, and, after a moment or two, faint clicking sounds as he went to work on the metal shutters. Minutes went by. My left arm began to go numb. Then, there was another sound from below, a sort of hollow tapping. It only lasted a moment, before Fischer hissed at me. I opened my eyes again.

“Lower a little, very slowly.”

As I obeyed I felt the tension in the rope suddenly slacken. Miller was inside.

“Rest”

I loosened the rope on my arm and massaged it until the pins and needles began. I didn’t try to massage them away. They kept my mind on my arm and away from other things, such as the day the games master had made me dive. When you got into the cadet corps you had to be able to swim, and, once a week, all the boys in each squad who couldn’t do so were marched to the Lewisham Public Baths to take lessons. When you had learned to swim you had to dive. I didn’t mind the swimming part, but when my head went under water I was always afraid of drowning. For a time I didn’t have to, because I kept telling the games master that I had bad ears; but then he said that I would have to get a doctor’s certificate. I tried to write one myself, but I didn’t know the proper words to use and he caught me out. I expected him to send me with a note to
The Bristle
, but instead he made me dive. I say “dive.” What he did was pick me up by one arm and a leg and throw me in the deep end; and he kept on doing it. Every time I managed to get out, even while I was still choking up water, he would throw me in again. One of the attendants at the Baths had to stop him in the end. He was married, so I wrote a letter to his wife telling her how he messed about with certain boys in the changing cubicles and pestered them to feel him. I was careless though, because I used the same handwriting as I had used on the certificate, and he knew for certain it was me. He couldn’t prove it, of course, because he had torn up the certificate. He took me into a lobby and accused me and called me an “unspeakable little cad”; but that was all he did. He was really shaken. When I realized it, I could have kicked myself. If I had known that he actually had been messing about with boys in the cubicles, I could have put the police onto him. As it was, I had simply warned him to be more careful. He had thin, curly brown hair with an officer’s moustache, and walked as if he had springs on the soles of his feet. The term after that he left and went to another school.

Fischer hissed at me and I opened my eyes.

“Take the strain.”

I wrapped the rope round my waist this time so that I could use my weight to push away from the edge if necessary.

“Ready?”

I nodded and held on tight. There was a jerk as Miller got his weight into the sling again. Then Fischer nodded.

“Up.”

I started to pull. The friction of the rope against the coat on the edge of the roof made it terribly hard. The sweat ran into my eyes. Twice I had to stop and knot the rope round my waist so that I could wipe my hands and ease the cramp in my finger; but the coil got larger again and then Fischer began to use his good hand on one of the ropes in the tackle.

“Slow ... slower ... stop.”

Suddenly the tackle ran free and Miller, grinning, was crawling across the roof towards me. He patted my leg.

“
Merci, mon cher collégue
,” he said.

I shut my eyes and nodded. Through the ringing in my ears I could hear him reporting to Fischer as he gathered in the tackle.

“All those we counted on and a few more to garnish the dish. I even fastened the shutters again.”

I felt him untying the rope from my chest. When I opened my eyes he was clipping the velvet bag to his belt. Fischer was fumbling with the knots in the anchor rope. I crawled over and began to help him. All I wanted was to get away, and I knew that they would have to help me.

Fischer with his injured hand needed help to get back onto the upper roof level. Then, Miller somehow managed to heave me up high enough for me to claw my way over the ledge. I crawled then on my hands and knees to the shelter of the big cupola. By the time Miller reached me, I was able to stand up.

We started back, as we had started out, with Miller in the lead. This time, however, there was no turn to make. We left the White Eunuchs’ quarters on our right and went on over the kitchen roofs to the wall by the Gate of Salvation. There was one awkward place - for me, that is - by the old water tower, but I somehow got past it on my hands and knees; then we were on the wall overlooking the Courtyard of the Janissaries.

There was a row of tall plane trees close to the wall, and Miller used an overhanging branch as an anchor for the tackle. He lowered Fischer first, in the sling, and then me; but he wouldn’t use the sling himself, because that would have meant leaving the tackle in the tree. It was not the tackle itself he cared about, he said; he didn’t want to leave any traces behind of how the job had been done. He got off the wall by looping the anchor rope over the branch and sliding down it. Doubled like that, it wasn’t quite long enough to reach the ground, so he dropped the last six feet, pulling one end of the rope with him. He landed as lightly as a cat and began gathering in the rope. After all he had done, he wasn’t even out of breath.

Fischer took over the lead now, and headed for the outer wall on a line parallel with the road the tourist car used during the day. Miller walked behind me. After a minute or two, we could see the lights of the guard room beside the huge Bab-i-Hümayun Gate and Fischer slowed down. We had been walking in the shadow of a row of trees, but now they came to an end. Fifty yards across the road to the right was the bulk of St. Irene; ahead the road forked, the right prong going to the gate, the left prong narrowing and curving inward down the hill towards the sea.

Fischer stopped, staring at the gate.

It was no more than fifty yards away and I could see the sentry. He had his carbine slung over his shoulder and was picking his nose.

Fischer put his mouth to my ear. “What time is it?”

“Five to ten.”

“We have time to wait.”

“Wait for what?”

“We have to go left down the hill. The guard changes in five minutes. It will be safer then.”

“Where are we going to?”

“The railroad - where it bridges the wall.”

A section of the railway ran along the shoreline just inside the big wall for about three quarters of a mile; but I knew that there were guard posts at both ends of it. I said so.

He grinned. “Guard posts, yes. But no gates.”

Miller hissed a warning.

An oblong of light glowed as the door of the guard room opened. For an instant two men were outlined in the doorway. Then, as the business of changing sentries began, Fischer touched my arm.

“Now.”

He moved forward out of the shadow of the trees and cut across a patch of rough grass to the road. It descended sharply and narrowed to little more than a track. Within thirty seconds the top of the slope hid us from the sentries. Fischer glanced back to see that we were with him, and then walked on at a more leisurely pace.

Ahead was a strip of sea and beyond it the lights of Selimiye and Haydarpasar on the Asian side. Other lights moved across the water - a ferry and small fishing boats. In the daylight, tourists with movie cameras waste hundreds of feet of film on the view. I suppose it’s very beautiful. Personally, I never want to see it again - in any sort of light.

After a couple of minutes’ walking we came to another track, which led off to the right towards the outer wall. Fischer crossed it and went straight on down over a stretch of wasteland. There were piles of rubble from archaeological diggings, and part was terraced as if it had at some time been cultivated as a vineyard. At the bottom was the railway embankment.

There was a wooden fence running alongside it, and Miller and I waited while Fischer found the damaged section which he had chosen on an earlier reconnaissance as the best way through. It was about thirty yards to the right. We clambered over some broken boards to the side of the embankment and walked along the drainage ditch. Five minutes later it was possible to see the big wall again. We walked on another hundred feet, and there the embankment ended. If we were to go any farther we had to climb up and walk along the track over the bridge.

“Fischer stopped and turned. “What is the time?”

“Ten-fifteen,” said Miller. “Where is the guard post exactly?”

“On the other side of the bridge, a hundred metres from here.” He turned to me. “Now listen. A train will be coming soon. When it starts to cross the bridge we go to the top of the embankment. As soon as the last wagon has passed us, we start to follow along the tracks at walking speed. When we have gone about twenty metres we will hear a loud explosion ahead. Then we start to run, but not too fast. Have you ever smelled tear gas?”

“Yes.”

“You will smell it again, but do not worry. It is our tear gas, not theirs. And there will be smoke, too, also ours. The train will have just gone through. The guard post will not know what is happening. They may think the train has blown up. It does not matter. The tear gas and the smoke will make it hard for them to think, or see. If any of them tries too hard he will get a bullet or a plastic grenade to discourage him. In the confusion we run through. And then, as I told you, the Volkswagen will be waiting for us.”

“What about our confusion?” I said. “How do we see where to go with tear gas and smoke?”

Miller nodded. “I asked the same question, my friend. We should have had respirators. But Karl’s argument was good. With so much to conceal, how could we carry respirators, too?”

“I made the experiment,” Fischer said defensively. “I tried to take a respirator in. They stopped me because of the bulge in my pocket. They thought I was trying to smuggle a camera into the Seraglio. They are strict about that, as you know. It was embarrassing.”

“How did you explain it?” Miller asked.

“I said I was a doctor.”

“They believed you?”

“If you say you are a doctor, people will believe anything. We need not worry where to go. We simply follow the rail tracks and leave everything to Karl. We have done our work for this evening. Now we only wait for our train.”

We waited twenty-five minutes.

It was a mixed train, Fischer said, carrying newspapers, mailbags, local freight, and a few passengers to the small towns between Istanbul and Pehlivanköy. It chuffed towards the bridge as noisily and importantly as the Orient Express. There was a slight offshore breeze blowing. The thick black smoke from the engine rolled along our side of the embankment and engulfed us.

“
Los! Vorwärts!
” Fischer shouted, and, coughing and sputtering, Miller and I scrambled after him up the embankment.

For half a minute we stayed there with the train wheels clacking over a joint in the rails about three feet from our noses. Then, the last axle box went by.

“
Los!
” said Fischer again, and we were stumbling along the side of the tracks between the jutting ends of the ties and the parapet of the bridge.

We must have been about seventy yards from the guard post when the concussion grenade went off, and even at that distance the detonation made my ears sing. In front of me Fischer began to trot. Almost immediately he tripped over something and fell. I heard him gasp with pain as his left arm hit a tie; but he was on his feet and moving again before I got to him.

There was shouting ahead now, and I could hear the plunking, sizzling noise of tear-gas and smoke grenades detonating. The train smoke was still billowing around, but a moment later I got the first whiff of chemical smoke. Three yards more and I saw the white bandage on Fischer’s right hand go to his forehead. Then, I was in the tear gas, too, and the first excruciating reaction of the sinuses began to spread into my eyes. I blundered on, choking. As the tears began to blind me, another concussion grenade went off. Then, a shape loomed up out of the smoke and a respirator goggled at me; a hand gripped my arms and steered me to the right. I had a vague, tear-blurred impression of a lighted room and a man in uniform with his hands above his drooping head leaning against a wall. Then, the arm belonging to the hand was supporting me as I stumbled down a long fight of steps.

I was out of the smoke now and I could just see the door of the Volkswagen van. The arm shoved me towards it. I almost fell inside. Fischer was already there, hawking and coughing. More grenades were exploding on the bridge above as Miller scrambled in after me. Then there was a sound of running feet and the men in the respirators piled in. Someone pressed the starter. A moment later the van was on the move. I was crouched on the floor against one of the empty packing cases and somebody was treading on my feet. The stink of tear gas was everywhere. I heard Harper’s voice from the front passenger seat.

“Everything okay, Leo?”

Miller was coughing and chucking at the same time. “The dogs have fed and clothed themselves,” he wheezed.

THERE WERE FIVE men besides Harper in the respirators, but my eyes were still so painful that I didn’t see any of their faces well enough to be able to identify them. One of them was named Franz and he spoke German as well as Turkish. I know, because I heard him use both languages - the German to Fischer. The other four only spoke Turkish, I think. I can’t be certain, because I was only with them a few minutes, and I was coughing most of the time.