Topkapi (6 page)

“It wasn’t important,” I said. I turned away to hang up my suit.

“Will you be long away?” She sounded as if she had accepted the accident.

“Two or three days. I shall come back suddenly by air and surprise you with a lover.”

I thought that would amuse her, but she did not even smile. I got into bed beside her and she put the light out. After a few moments she said: “Why does a man like Mr. Harper want to go to a house?”

“Probably because he is impotent anywhere else.”

She was silent for a time. Then she put up a hand and touched my face.

“What really happened, papa?”

I considered telling her; but that would have meant admitting openly that I had lied about the accident, so I did not answer. After a while, she turned away from me and went to sleep.

She was still asleep, or pretending to be, when I left in the morning.

Harper kept me waiting ten minutes; just long enough for me to remember that I had forgotten to disconnect the battery on my car. It did not hold its charge very well anyway, and the electric clock would have run it down by the time I returned. I was wondering if I would have time to telephone Nicki and tell her to ask the concierge to disconnect the battery, when Harper came down.

“All set?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“We’ll get a cab.”

He told the driver to go to Stele Street out in the Piraeus.

As soon as we were on the way, he opened the briefcase and took out a large envelope. It had not been there the night before; of that I am certain. He gave it to me.

“There’s everything you’ll need there,” he said; “
carnet de tourisme
for the car, insurance Green Card, a thousand Greek drachma, a hundred Turkish lira, and fifty American dollars for emergencies. The
carnet
has been countersigned authorizing you to take it through customs, but you’d better check everything out yourself.”

I did so. The
carnet
showed that the car was registered in Zurich, and that the owner, or at any rate the person in legal charge of it, was a Fräulein Elizabeth Lipp. Her address was Hotel Excelsior, Laufen, Zurich.

“Is Miss Lipp your friend?” I asked.

“That’s right.”

“Are we going to meet her now?”

“No, but maybe you’ll meet her in Istanbul. If the customs should ask, tell them she doesn’t like eight-hundred-and-fifty-mile drives, and preferred to go to Istanbul by boat.”

“Is she a tourist?”

“What else? She’s the daughter of a business associate of mine. I’m just doing him a favour. And by the way, if she wants you to drive her around in Turkey you’ll be able to pick up some extra dough. Maybe she’ll want you to drive the car back here later. I don’t know yet what her future plans are.”

“I see.” For someone who had told me that I wasn’t to ask questions, he was being curiously outgoing. “Where do I deliver the car in Istanbul?”

“You don’t. You go to the Park Hotel. There’ll be a room reservation for you there. Just check in on Thursday and wait for instructions.”

“Very well. When do I get that letter I signed?”

“When you’re paid off at the end of the job.” Stele Street was down at the docks. By an odd coincidence there happened to be a ship of the Denizyollari Line berthed right opposite; and it was taking on a car through one of the side entry ports. I could not help glancing at Harper to see if he had noticed; but if he had he gave no sign of the fact. I made no comment. If he were simply ignorant, I was not going to enlighten him. If he still really thought that I was foolish enough to believe his version of Fräulein Lipp’s travel needs and arrangements, so much the better. I could look after myself. Or so I thought.

There was a garage halfway along the street, with an old Michelin tire sign above it. He told the cab driver to stop there and wait. We got out and went towards the office. There was a man inside, and when he saw Harper through the window he came out. He was thin and dark and wore a greasy blue suit. I did not hear Harper address him by any name, but they appeared to know one another quite well. Unfortunately, they spoke together in German, which is a language I have never learned.

After a moment or two, the man led the way through a small repair shop and across a scrap yard to a row of lock-up garages. He opened one of them and there was the Lincoln. It was a grey four-door Continental, and looked to me about a year old. The man handed Harper the keys. He got in, started up, and drove it out of the garage into the yard. The car seemed a mile long. Harper got out.

“Okay,” he said, “She’s all gassed up and everything. You can start rolling.”

“Very well.” I put my bag on the back seat. “I would just like to make a phone call first.”

He was instantly wary. “Who to?”

“The concierge at my apartment. I want to let him know that I may be away longer than I said, and ask him to disconnect the battery on my car.”

He hesitated, then nodded. “Okay. You can do it from the office.” He said something to the man in the blue suit and we all went back inside.

Nicki answered the telephone and I told her about the battery. When she started to complain that I had not wakened her to say goodbye, I hung up. I had spoken in Greek, but Harper had been listening.

“That was a woman’s voice,” he said.

“The concierge’s wife. Is there something wrong?”

He said something to the man in the blue suit of which I understood one word.
Adressat
. I guessed that he had wanted to know if I had given the address of the garage.

Harper looked at me. “No, nothing wrong. But just remember you’re working for me now.”

“Will I see you in Istanbul or back here?”

“You’ll find out. Now get going.”

I spent a minute or two making sure that I knew where all the controls were, while Harper and the other man stood watching. Then I drove off and headed back towards Athens and the Thebes-Larissa-Salonika road.

After about half a mile I noticed that the taxi we had used on the drive out there was behind me. I was driving slowly, getting used to the feel of the car, and the taxi would normally have passed me; but it stayed behind. Harper was seeing me on my way.

About five miles beyond Athens I saw the taxi pull off the road and start to turn around. I was on my own. I drove on for another forty minutes or so, until I reached the first of the cotton fields, then turned off down a side road and stopped in the shade of some acacias.

I spent a good half hour searching that car. First I looked in the obvious places: in the back of the spare wheel compartment, under the seat cushions, up behind the dashboard. Then I took off all the hub caps. It’s surprising how big the cavities are behind some of them, especially on American cars. I knew of a man who had regularly smuggled nearly two kilos of heroin a time that way. These had nothing in them, however. So I tried the tank, poking about with a long twig to see if any sort of a compartment had been built into or onto it; that has been done, too. Again I drew a blank. I would have liked to crawl underneath to see if any new welding had been done, but there was not enough clearance. I decided to put the car into a garage greasing bay in Salonika and examine the underside from below. Meanwhile, there was an air-conditioner in the car, so I unscrewed the cover and had a look inside that. Another blank.

The trouble was that I did not have the slightest idea what I was looking for - jewellery, drugs, gold, or currency. I just felt that there must be something. After a bit, I gave up searching and sat and smoked a cigarette while I tried to work out what would be worth smuggling into Turkey from Greece. I could not think of anything. I got the
carnet
out and checked the car’s route. It had come from Switzerland, via Italy and the Brindisi ferry, to Patras. The counterfoils showed that Fräulein Lipp had been with the car herself then. She at least
did
know about ferrying cars by sea. However, that only made the whole thing more mysterious.

And then I remembered something. Harper had spoken of the possibility of a
return
journey, of my being wanted to drive the car back from Istanbul to Athens. Supposing
that
was the real point of the whole thing. I drive from Greece into Turkey. Everything is perfectly open and aboveboard. Both Greek and Turkish customs would see and remember car and chauffeur. Some days later, the same car and chauffeur return. “How was Istanbul, friend? Is your stomach still with you? Anything to declare? No fat-tailed sheep hidden in the back? Pass, friend, pass.” And then the car goes back to the garage in the Piraeus, for the man in the blue suit to recover the packages of heroin concealed along the inner recesses of the chassis members, under the wheel arches of the body, and inside the cowling beside the automatic transmission. Unless, that is, there is a Macedonian son of a bitch on the Greek side who’s out to win himself a medal. In that event, what you get is the strange case of the respectable Swiss lady’s disreputable chauffeur who gets caught smuggling heroin; and Yours Truly is up the creek.

All I could do was play it by ear.

I got the Lincoln back on the road again and drove on. I reached Salonika soon after six that evening. Just to be on the safe side, I pulled into a big garage and gave the boy a couple of drachmas to put the car up on the hydraulic lift. I said I was looking for a rattle. There were no signs of new welding. I was not surprised. By then I had pretty well made up my mind that it would be the return journey that mattered.

I found a small comfortable hotel, treated myself to a good dinner and a bottle of wine at Harper’s expense, and went to bed early. I made an early start the following morning, too. It is an eight-hour run from Salonika across Thrace to the Turkish frontier near Edirne (Adrianople, as it used to be called), and if you arrive late, you sometimes find that the road-traffic customs post has closed for the night.

I arrived at about four-thirty and went through the Greek control without difficulty. At Karaagac, on the Turkish side, I had to wait while they cleared some farm trucks ahead of me. After about twenty minutes, however, I was able to drive up to the barrier. When I went into the customs post with the
carnet
and my other papers, the place was practically empty.

Naturally, I was more concerned about the car than with myself, so I simply left my passport and currency declaration with the security man, and went straight over to the customs desk to hand in the
carnet
.

Everything seemed to be going all right. A customs inspector went out to the car with me, looked in my bag, and merely glanced in the car. He was bored and looking forward to his supper.

“
Tourisme
?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“We went back inside and he proceeded to stamp and validate the
carnet
for the car’s entry, and tear out his part of the counterfoil. He was just folding the
carnet
and handing it back when I felt a sharp tap on my shoulder.

It was the security man. He had my passport in his hand. I went to take it, but he shook his head and began waving it under my nose and saying something in Turkish.

I speak Egyptian Arabic and there are many Arabic words in Turkish; but the Turks pronounce them in a funny way and use a lot of Persian and old Turkish words mixed up with them. I shrugged helplessly. Then he said it in French and I understood.

My passport was three months out of date.

I knew at once how it had happened. Earlier in the year I had had some differences with the Egyptian consular people (or “United Arab Republic,” as they preferred to call themselves) and had allowed the whole question of my passport to slide. In fact, I had made up my mind to tell the Egyptians what they could do with their passport, and approach the British with a view to reclaiming my United Kingdom citizenship, to which, I want to make it clear, I am perfectly entitled. The thing was that, being so busy, I had just not bothered to fill in all the necessary forms. My Greek
permis de séjour
was in order, and that was all I normally needed in the way of papers. Frankly, I find all this paper regimentation we have to go through nowadays extremely boring. Naturally, with all the anxiety I had had over Harper, I had not thought to look at the date on my passport. If I had known that it was out of date, obviously I would have taken more trouble with the security man, kept him in conversation while he was doing the stamping or something like that. I have never had any bother like that before.

As it was, the whole thing became utterly disastrous; certainly through no fault of mine. The security man refused to stamp the passport. He said that I had to drive back to Salonika and have the passport renewed by the Egyptian vice-consul there before I could be admitted.

That would have been impossible as it happened; but I did not even have to try to explain why. The customs inspector chimed in at that point, waving the
carnet
and shouting that the car
had
been admitted and was now legally in Turkey. As I had
not
been admitted and was not, therefore, legally in Turkey, how was I,
legally
, to take the car out again? What did it matter if the passport was out of date? It was only a matter of three months. Why did he not just stamp the passport, admit me, and forget about it?

At least that was what I think he said. They had lapsed into Turkish now and were bawling at one another as if I did not exist. If I could have got the security man alone, I would have tried to bribe him; but with the other one there it was too dangerous. Finally, they both went off to see some superior officer and left me standing there, without
carnet
or passport, but with, I admit it frankly, a bad case of the jitters. Really, my only hope at that point was that they would do what the customs inspector wanted and overlook the date on the passport.

With any luck, that might have happened. I say “with any luck,” although things would still have been awkward even if they had let me through. I would have had somehow to buy an Egyptian consular stamp in Istanbul and forge the renewal in the passport - not easy. Or I would have had to have gone to the British Consulate-General, reported a lost British passport, and tried to winkle a temporary travel document out of them before they had had time to check up - not easy either. But at least those would have been the sort of difficulties a man in my anomalous position would understand and could cope with. The difficulties that, in fact, I did have to face were quite outside anything I had ever before experienced.