The light of day

11

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.

The van must have gone about three miles when it slowed down, made a wide U turn, and stopped.

Harper opened the door from the outside.

Miller was nearest the door and he got out first. I followed, with Fischer behind me. The other men just moved enough to make way for us. Then Harper shut the door again and the van was driven off.

“This way,” Harper said.

We were opposite one of the big woodyards by an unloading pier and some beached caiques. He led the way along the pier. I was beginning to see well enough again now to recognize Giulio standing up in the Bulut’ s outboard dinghy. We climbed down into it. I heard Giulio asking who I was and being told that he would find out later. Then the motor started, and we shot away from the pier.

The Bulut was anchored a quarter of a mile away, and a man on deck, Enrico presumably, was at the small gangway waiting to help us on board. I followed the others to the saloon.

By the time I reached the bottom of the narrow companionway that led down to it, Harper was already untying the drawstring of Miller’s velvet bag, while the others crowded round to look. I saw the glitter of dozens of green and red stones and I heard Giulio draw in his breath. The stones didn’t look all that large to me; but, of course, I am no judge of such things.

Harper was grinning his head off. “Nothing but the best, Leo,” he said. “You’re a great man.”

“How much?” said Fischer.

“Better than a million and a half,” Harper replied. “Let’s be on our way as soon as we can, Giulio.”

“Pronto.”

Giulio brushed past me and went up the companionway. There were sandwiches and drinks set out at the other end of the table. While they drooled over the stones, I poured myself a large whisky.

Harper looked across at me. “Aren’t you interested in the loot, Arthur?”

I had a sudden desire to hit him. I shrugged indifferently. “I’m not interested in counting chickens,” I said. “I’ll settle for two thousand dollars, cash on the barrel.”

They all stared at me in silence for a moment. The deck began to vibrate as the boat’s diesels started up.

Harper glanced at Miller. “I take it Arthur behaved himself this evening.”

“He was a damned nuisance,” Fischer said spitefully.

Harper ignored him. “Well, Leo?”

“He was afraid,” Miller answered; “but what he did was enough. Under the circumstances I think he did well.”

Harper looked at me again. “Why the cracks, Arthur? What’s the problem?”

“How do you imagine you’re going to get away with it?”

“Oh, I see.” He relaxed again, all smiles. “So our Arthur’s worried that the bloodhounds are going to start snapping at his butt, is he? Well, forget it. They won’t. All they know so far is that a bunch of armed men in a Volkswagen van roughed up one of their guard posts. So the first thing they’ll do is set up blocks on all the roads leading out of the city and look for the van. They’ll find it, abandoned, over in Galata. Then they’ll start the usual routine-Who’s the owner? Where is he? What did he look like?-and get no place. By then, though, they’ll have done some thinking, too, and some big brain will be starting to wonder why it had to be that particular post and why nobody got killed-why a lot of things. He may even think of checking out the Treasury Museum and so come up with the right answer. When he does, they’ll double up on the road blocks and throw out the dragnet. Only we won’t be inside it. We’ll be going ashore at a little place sixty miles from here and two hours’ easy driving from Edirne and the frontier.” He patted my arm. “And where we go ashore, Arthur, Miss Lipp will be waiting to pick us up.”

“With the Lincoln?”

“What else? We wouldn’t want to walk, would we, or leave without our bags?”

I had to laugh. I couldn’t help it. And it didn’t matter, because Harper thought that it was the beauty of his plan that I found so amusing, and not the bloody great hole in it. I thought of the customs inspector’s face when the Lincoln drove up for clearance-if Tufan allowed it to get that far-and when he saw me again. I laughed so much that Fischer began to laugh, too. It was the best moment I had had in days. I ate some sandwiches and had another drink. There was garlic sausage in the sandwiches, but I didn’t even have a twinge of indigestion. I thought my worries were over.

The place we were to go ashore was a port called Serefli, a few miles south of Corlu. Harper said that it would take five hours to get there. I cleaned off the filth I had collected from the Seraglio roof as best I could and went to sleep in the saloon. The others used the cabins. Giulio and Enrico ran the boat between them. I found out later that they had sent the boat’s regular crew ashore at Pendik for an evening on the town, and then slipped out of the harbor after dark. The patrol boat that was supposed to be keeping an eye on the Bulut missed it completely.

It was getting light when voices in the saloon woke me. Harper and Miller were drinking coffee, and Fischer was trying to make his dirty bandages look more presentable by brushing them. He seemed to be having some sort of discussion with Harper. As it was in German, I couldn’t understand. Then Harper looked at me and saw that I was awake.

“Arthur can use a screwdriver,” he said, “if you just show him what to do.”

“Which door?” Fischer asked.

“Does it matter? How about the right rear?”

“We were talking about a safe place for the loot,” Harper said to me. “Inside one of the car doors seems a good place for the customs people to forget about.”

“Arthur would not know about such things,” Miller said waggishly.

They had a good laugh over that gem of wit, while I tried to look mystified. Luckily, Enrico came in just then and said that we would be entering port in ten minutes.

I had some of the coffee and a stale sandwich. Harper went up to the wheelhouse. Half an hour later, the sun was up and we were moored alongside a stone jetty.

Fishermen are early risers and the harbor was already busy. Cuttlefish boats were unloading the night’s catch at the quayside. Caiques with single-cylinder engines were chugging out to sea. A port official came aboard to collect dues. After a while, Harper came down and said that he was going ashore to make sure that Miss Lipp was there. He left the velvet bag with Fischer.

He returned fifteen minutes later and reported that the Lincoln was parked in a side street beside a cafe-restaurant on the main square. Miss Lipp was in the restaurant eating breakfast. The side street was a quiet one. Fischer and I could get busy on the door. We would be allowed half an hour to complete the job.

Fischer borrowed a screwdriver from Enrico and we went ashore. Nobody seemed to take any notice of us, probably because we looked so scruffy. I couldn’t see the Opel or the Peugeot anywhere about, but that didn’t worry me. I knew that one or other of them would be on tap. We found the car without difficulty and I started on the door. It was an ordinary screwdriver I had to work with, but the earlier removals of the panel had eased the screws and I didn’t do any more damage to the leather. It took me ten minutes to take the panel off, five seconds for Fischer to wedge the velvet bag in clear of the window mechanism, and fifteen minutes for me to replace the panel. Then Fischer and I got into the back seat. Two minutes later, Miss Lipp came out of the restaurant and got behind the wheel. If she had slept the previous night it could only have been at the inn in Corlu; but she looked as fresh as she always did.

“Good morning, Hans. Good morning, Arthur. The others are just coming across the square now,” she said.

They arrived a moment after. Harper got in the front seat with her. Miller sat on my left. She said “good morning” to Miller, and drove off the moment she heard the door close.

From Serefli to Corlu, where we would join the main Istanbul-Edirne road, there are twelve miles of narrow secondary road. The first mile or so is winding, and I waited until we got to a straighter part before I risked a look back.

The Peugeot was there, and I caught a glimpse of another car behind it. The Opel was on the job as well.

Harper had started telling Miss Lipp about the night’s work and the size of the haul. Miller was putting in his word, too. There was a lot of mutual congratulation. It was like being in the winning team’s bus. I wasn’t needed in the conversation, and didn’t have to listen to it either. I could think.

There were several possible explanations for the two cars being there. Miss Lipp had probably driven straight to Corlu from the garage, after dropping us the previous afternoon. By the time she had left the Istanbul area, Tufan must have been told that the men were no longer in the car, and realized that his only hope of re-establishing contact lay in keeping track of the Lincoln. The Opel could have been sent to make sure that there were no further mistakes. Or it may have been to compensate for lack of radio communication outside the Istanbul area. The two cars could talk to one another; if an urgent report became necessary, one car could stop and reach Istanbul by telephone while the other continued the surveillance. Then a third possibility occurred to me. Tufan must have been told about the attack on the guard post. As soon as he heard the details-smoke, tear gas, concussion grenades, six men in respirators-he would know that the attack and the Lincoln were related. If he also knew that the Bulut had left Pendik and that the Lincoln had stopped at Corlu, he might have decided that reinforcements were necessary in that area.

The only certainty, I decided sourly, was that Tufan would not be the “big brain” who would think of checking the Treasury Museum. He would still be off on his political wild-goose chase. Well, he would have some surprises coming.

At that moment Miss Lipp said sharply: “Karl!”

Miller had been in the middle of saying something and he broke off abruptly.

“What is it?” Harper said.

“That brown car behind us. It was behind me yesterday when I drove out from Istanbul. I thought then that I’d noticed it before, earlier in the day. In fact, I was so sure that when I stopped at Corlu I waited to get a look at it. When it didn’t show up I figured it had turned off somewhere and thought no more about it.”

“Don’t look around, anyone,” Harper said. He swiveled the driving mirror so that he could look behind. After a moment, he said: “Try slowing down.”

She did so. I knew what would happen. The Peugeot would keep its distance. After about a minute, Harper twisted the mirror back into position. “Do you think you could lose it?” he said.

“Not on these roads.”

“Okay. Just keep going. Doesn’t look like a police car. I wonder…”

“Franz!” Fischer said suddenly.

“All set for a little hijacking operation, you mean?”

“Why not?”

“He could have done that better last night when he had us in the van,” said Miller.

“I’m not so sure,” said Harper. “He might have figured that it would be safer to wait until we were all outside the city.”

“But Franz didn’t know this end of the plan,” Miss Lipp objected.

“If he put a tail on you,” Fischer said, “he could have guessed.”

“Well we’ll soon find out,” Harper said grimly. “There are only two of them in that car. If it’s Franz we’re dealing with, that probably means that he’s set up an ambush somewhere ahead with his other two mugs. That makes five. We only have three guns, so we’d better take care of this lot first. We’ll pick a spot with some trees and then pull off the road. Okay?”

“May I look round at this car?” I asked.

“Why?”

“To see if I recognize it.”

I knew that I had to do something. If they started shooting at Turkish security agents, Turkish security agents were going to start shooting back-and they weren’t going to stop to ask questions or worry about who got hit.

“Okay,” he said; “but make it casual.”

I looked back.

“Well?” he asked.

“I don’t recognize the brown one,” I said; “but there’s another one behind it, a gray Opel.”

“That’s right,” Miss Lipp said; “it’s been there some time. But so what? The road’s too narrow for passing.”

“I’m almost sure it was outside that garage yesterday afternoon.” I tried to sound like a really worried man. It wasn’t very difficult.

“There are many gray Opels,” Miller said.

“But not with such a very long radio aerial. That is why I noticed it.”

Harper had swiveled the mirror again and was peering into it. “You’d better look, too, Leo,” he said grimly. “See the antenna?”

Miller looked and swore. “It could be a coincidence,” he said.

“Could be. Do you want to take a chance on it?”

“No,” said Fischer.

“I agree,” said Miller; “but what do we do about them?”

Harper thought for a moment. Then he asked: “How much farther to Corlu?”

“About three kilometers,” Miss Lipp answered.

“Then he must have it set up somewhere between Corlu and Edirne.”

“So?”

“So, instead of turning left at Corlu and going to Edirne, we change our plans and turn right.”

“But that would take us back to Istanbul,” Miller objected.

“Not all the way,” Harper said; “only as far as the airport and the first plane out.”

“Leaving the car behind?” asked Miss Lipp.

“Don’t worry, sweetie. We’ll all be able to buy fleets of Lincolns when we cash in this pile of chips.”

Suddenly they were all smiles again.

I tried to think. It was barely seven-thirty and the run from Corlu to the Istanbul Airport at Yesilkoy would take little more than an hour. It was Wednesday, which meant that the Treasury Museum would normally stay closed until the following day. Unless the big brain had already started working, or unless Tufan had decided to stop uncovering nonexistent terrorist plots and let the police know what was going on, there was every chance that, within a couple of hours, Harper and the rest would be out of the country. In that case, if anyone were going to stop them it would have to be me. The question was: Did I want to stop them? Why didn’t I just go along with them and collect my two thousand dollars?

I was still tired and confused or I would have remembered that there could be only one answer to that-my passport was not valid and an airline would not carry me. But instead of the answer, another stupid question came into my mind; and, stupidly, I asked it.

“Am I included in this?”

Harper turned right round in his seat to face me, and gave me the cold, unpleasant smile I liked least.

“Included, Arthur? Why? Did you have something else in mind-like making a quick deal with Franz, for instance, or even the police?”

“Of course not. I just wanted to be certain.”

“Well, that makes five of us who want to be certain. Don’t you worry, Arthur. Until we’re on that plane with the loot all safe and sound, you’re not even going to the can by yourself. That’s how much you’re included.”

Fischer and Miller thought that hilariously amusing. Miss Lipp, I noticed, was keeping her attention divided between the road ahead and the cars behind.

We came to Corlu and turned right onto the main Istanbul road. Harper began to organize the change of plan.

“The first thing is to get the stuff out of the door. Hans, you’d better change places with Arthur. He can get busy now.”

“He can’t,” Fischer said. “There are seven screws on the rear door. With the door shut he cannot get at them. The door has to be open.”

“All the way open?”

“Nearly.”

Harper looked at the heavy doors. They were hinged at the rear, and would swing open against the wind. We were doing over sixty. It was obviously out of the question to take the panel off while we were on the move. He nodded. “All right. Here’s what we’ll do. As soon as we get to the airport, Elizabeth and Leo will take all the passports and get busy buying tickets and filling out passport cards and customs forms for all of us. Right?”

They nodded.

“Then I follow them inside just to check on the flight number and boarding time so that we all know what the score is. As soon as I have that, I return to the car and Arthur drives us to the parking lot. There, we open the door and get the stuff. When it’s out, Hans gets porters and we unload the baggage. We leave the car on the park. Any questions?”

“You could unload the baggage first,” said Miller; “while the car is in front.”

“Maybe. If we have plenty of time. If we don’t have too much, I’d sooner make sure of the loot first.”

“We must have some baggage for the customs,” Miss Lipp put in. “People without baggage get a personal search.”

“All right. We’ll unload just the stuff from inside the car and leave the rest until later.”

There was a murmur of agreement. Miller asked: “If there are two flights available within a short time, which do we take?”

“If one of them flies over a lot of Turkish territory-say, to Aleppo or Beirut-we take the other. Otherwise, we take the first.”

They went on discussing which city they would prefer as a destination. I was wondering what would happen if I told them about my passport. From Harper, I decided, there would be only one reaction; if they could not take me with them, yet dared not leave me because I knew too much, I would have to be eliminated from the picture altogether. There would be a corpse on the floor of the car they left behind them. On the other hand, if I waited until the passport was challenged at the airport, there wasn’t much they could do. I could yell my head off, demand to see a security official and tell him to contact Tufan. True, the three men had guns; but even if they managed to shoot their way out of the place, I would stand a better chance of coming out of it alive.

“Any more problems?” Harper asked. “No? Okay, then, let’s have the passports.”

I nearly threw up, but managed to cough instead.

Fischer asked me to get his out of his inside pocket for him. Miller passed his over and Harper flipped through the pages. I gave him Fischer’s.

Miss Lipp said: “My bag is on the floor, if you want to put them in it now.”

“Okay. Where’s yours, Arthur?” Has any boy not handed in his homework?

I handed the wretched thing to him and waited.

He lingered over my vital statistics. “Know something, Arthur? I’d have said you were a good three years older. Too much ouzo and not enough exercise, that’s your trouble.” And then, of course, his tone changed. “Wait a minute! This is over two months out of date!”

“Out of date? But it can’t be!” I know I handed in my work with the rest, sir.

“Look at it!” He leaned over and jammed it under my nose.

“But I had no trouble coming in. You see, there’s the visa!”

“What difference does that make, you stupid slob? It’s out of date!” He glowered at me and then, unexpectedly, turned to Miss Lipp. “What do you think?”

She kept her eyes on the road as she answered. “When you leave here the immigration people are mostly interested in seeing that the exit cards are properly filled in. He’ll get by there. It’s the airline-counter check that matters. They are responsible at the port of disembarkation if papers are not in order. We’ll have to write in a renewal.”

“Without a consular stamp?”

She thought for a moment. “There’s a Swiss airmail stamp in my purse, I think. We could use that. Ten to one they won’t look at it closely if there is writing across it. Anyway, I’ll keep them talking.”

“What about where we land?” asked Miller. “Supposing they catch it there?”

“That’s his worry,” Harper said.

“Not if they send him back here.”

“They wouldn’t trouble to do that. It’s not that serious. The airport police would hold him until the airline could get the Egyptian consul to come out and fix the renewal.”

“He has been nothing but a nuisance from the beginning.” This was Fischer, of course.

“He was useful enough last night,” remarked Miss Lipp. “By the way, that renewal had better be in his handwriting. Would it be in Arabic?”

“French and Arabic, both.” Harper stuck the stamp on the renewal space. “Okay, Arthur. Here you are. Write across the center of the stamp. ‘Bon jusqu’au,’ let’s see-make it April ten of next year. Then do it in Arabic. You can, I suppose?”

I did as I was told-as ever-and handed the passport back to him.

I didn’t know where I stood now. If the plane went to Athens I might be able to get away with it; I still had my Greek permis de sejour to fall back on. But if I went to Vienna, or Frankfurt, or Rome, or (hideous thought) Cairo, then I’d be completely up the creek. I would have to wait until I knew whether they were going to Athens or not, before I decided whether I would go along or try to stay. If I wanted to stay, though, it would be more difficult now. With Harper and Fischer keeping their eyes on me, and no official to single me out because of my invalid passport, yelling for help wouldn’t do much good. A quick clip on the jaw from Harper and some fast talking-“So sorry. Our friend tripped and hit his head on a suitcase. He’ll be all right in a moment. We’ll take care of him”-would be the end of that. I would have to rely upon the surveillance cars. The only trouble was that before they regained direct contact with Tufan, we would be at the airport. I would have to give the men in the cars time to draw the right conclusions and issue the necessary orders.

I could only think of one way of causing a delay. When I had finished putting back the door panel, I had slipped the screwdriver into my pocket. There wasn’t another one in the car, I knew.

While we were going through Mimarsinan, fifteen minutes or so away from the airport, I managed to ease the screwdriver from my pocket and let it slide back on the seat until I was sitting on it. A minute or two later, I pretended to stretch my legs and stuffed it deep down behind the seat cushion and below the back of the seat. If I wanted to go, I could “find” it; if I wanted to delay, I could look for it in vain on the floor. That way, I thought, I would at least have some sort of control over the situation.

And then Miss Lipp began to worry again about the Peugeot and the Opel.

“They’re still tailing us,” she said. “I don’t get it. Franz must have guessed where we’re heading for by now. What does he think he’s going to do?”

“Supposing it isn’t Franz?” Miller said suddenly.

“If it isn’t Franz, who is it?” Fischer demanded irritably. “They can’t be police or they would have stopped us. Could it be Giulio?”

“That is an imbecile suggestion,” Miller retorted. “Giulio is of our company. You are not. If you were, you would not say such a stupid thing.”

I have a unique capacity for self-destruction. I said, helpfully: “Perhaps it is Franz. Perhaps he thinks that we are going back to the villa. If we were, we would still be on this road.”

Harper looked back. “When will he know better, Arthur?”

“Not until we turn right for the airport.”

“How far is the turn-off?”

“About six miles.”

“How far then?”

“A mile and a half.”

He looked at Miss Lipp. “Do you think you could lose them so that they wouldn’t see us make the turn?”

“I could try.”

The Lincoln surged forward. Seconds later I saw the red speedometer needle swing past the ninety mark.

Harper looked back. After a minute, he said: “Leaving them cold.”

“We’re going too fast for this road” was all she said. It didn’t seem to be worrying her unduly, though. She passed two cars and a truck going in the same direction as if they were standing still.

I already knew that I had made a bad mistake, and did my best to retrieve it. “There’s a bridge a mile or so ahead,” I warned her. “The road narrows. You’ll have to slow down for that.”

She didn’t answer. I was beginning to sweat. If the surveillance cars lost us, that was really the end as far as I was concerned.

She beat a convoy of army trucks to the bridge by fifty yards. On the other side, the road wound a little and she had to slow down to seventy; but when I looked back there wasn’t a car in sight. As she braked hard and turned right onto the airport road, Harper chuckled.

“For that extra ounce of get-up-and-go,” he announced facetiously, “there is nothing, but nothing, like a Lincoln Continental.”

There’s nothing like feeling a complete bloody half-wit either. When we drew up outside the airport building, my legs were quivering like Geven’s lower lip.

Miller was out of the car and into the building almost before the car had stopped. Miss Lipp and Harper followed while Fischer and I handed the bags inside the car, mine included, to a porter.

I couldn’t help looking back along the airport approach road and Fischer noticed. He smiled at my lily-livered anxiety.

“Don’t be afraid. They are on their way to Sariyer by now.”

“Yes.” I knew that at least one of them would be; but I also knew that the men in the cars were not incompetent. When they failed to pick up the Lincoln again, the second car would turn back and try the airport road. How long would it take them to get the idea, though? Five minutes? Ten?

Harper came out of the building and hurried to the car.

“There’s an Air France jet to Rome,” he said. “Seats available. Boarding in twenty minutes. Let’s get moving.”

I drove to the car park, a chain-fenced area just off the loop of road in front of the building and beyond the taxi rank. There were only a few cars already there and, on Harper’s instructions, I backed into an empty space between two of them.

“Where is the screwdriver?” Fischer asked.

“On the floor.” I was still backing the car and could see that he was already searching for it.

“It must have rolled under one of the seats,” Harper said impatiently. “Okay, Arthur, that’ll do. Let’s get the doors open so we can see.”

I pulled up, got out, and immediately began trying to peer under the seats. With a Lincoln there is not much to see. The seats are snug against the floor.

“Oh, for God’s sake!” Harper said angrily. Suddenly he grabbed at my jacket. “You must have put it in your pocket.” He started slapping them to find out.

“I put it on the floor.”

“Well, it isn’t there now,” Fischer said.

Harper glanced at his watch. “It must have been pulled out with the baggage.”

“Shall I go back and look?”

“No, get one out of the tool kit.”

“There isn’t one there,” Fischer said. “I noticed that before.”

“Okay, see if it’s on the ground back there.” As Fischer hurried off, Harper looked at the next car to us, a Renault, and tried the front doors. They were locked, of course. Then he tried the front luggage compartment. To my horror, it opened. The next moment he had a tool roll in his hand and was taking a screwdriver from it.

He grinned. “If the owner comes back, we’ll buy it off him as a souvenir,” he said, and quickly went to work on the door panel of the Lincoln.

I was utterly desperate or I could never have done what I did; but as I stood there gaping at him I became aware of the sound of the engine running. I hadn’t finished backing the car into line with the others when he had made me stop. Then I had simply forgotten to switch off.

The door to the driver’s seat was open and so were both back doors. He was crouched over the panel of the right-hand one on the opposite side of the car from me.

I glanced at the car-park entrance to make sure that Fischer wasn’t coming back; and then I moved. I went to the door by the driver’s seat, leaned across it as if I were going to switch off the engine, and looked across the back of the seat.

Harper was bending down to undo one of the screws by the hinge.

I slid into the driver’s seat gently so as not to rock the car, and eased the transmission lever from “Park” to “Drive.” The car gave a slight jerk. At the same moment I stamped on the accelerator.

I heard a thump as the door sent him flying, then I spun the wheel and was heading for the car-park entrance.

About twenty feet from it, I jammed on the brakes and the two rear doors swung shut with a slam. Through the rear window I could see Harper scrambling to his feet. As I closed the door beside me I accelerated again and went through onto the road. A moment later I was halfway round the loop. Another car ahead slowed me for a moment. In the driving mirror I saw Harper running towards the taxi rank. I leaned on the horn ring and the car in front swerved. Then I was out of the loop and on the approach road.

I had gone about a mile when the Opel passed me going in the opposite direction. I waved frantically, but kept on going. I didn’t care whether they thought I’d gone mad or not. All I wanted was to get away from Harper.

I went on driving fast towards Istanbul until I saw in the mirror that the Opel was behind me. Only then did I stop.

It wasn’t my fault that they took all that time to catch up with me.