Chapter 15

For some reason an old restaurant car with a kind of faded elegance was attached to the express after the Turkish frontier, when it was already too late to be of much use. My aunt rose that day early, and the two of us sat down to excellent coffee, toast and jam: Aunt Augusta insisted on our drinking in addition a light red wine, though I am not accustomed to wine so early in the morning. Outside the window an ocean of long undulating grass stretched to a pale green horizon. There was the talkative cheerfulness of journey’s end in the air, and the car filled with passengers whom we had never seen before: a Vietnamese in blue dungarees spoke to a rumpled girl in shorts, and two young Americans, the man with hair as long as the girl’s, joined them, holding hands. They refused a second cup of coffee after carefully counting their money.

“Where’s Tooley?” my aunt asked.

“She wasn’t feeling well last night. I’m worried about her, Aunt Augusta. Her young man’s hitch-hiking to Istanbul. He may not have arrived. He may even have gone on without her.”

“Where to?”

“She’s not sure. Katmandu or Vientiane.”

“Istanbul is a rather unpredictable place,” Aunt Augusta said. “I’m not even sure what I expect to find there myself.”

“What do you think you’ll find?”

“I have a little business to do with an old friend, General Abdul. I was expecting a telegram at the Saint James and Albany, but none came. I can only hope that there’s a message waiting for us at the Pera Palace.”

“Who is the General?”

“I knew him in the days of poor Mr. Visconti,” my aunt said. “He was very useful to us in the negotiations with Saudi Arabia. He was Turkish Ambassador then in Tunis. What parties we had in those days at the Excelsior. A little different from the Crown and Anchor and a drink with poor Wordsworth.”

The scenery changed as we approached Istanbul. The grassy sea was left behind and the express slowed down to the speed of a little local commuters’ train. When I leant from the window I could see over a wall into the yard of a cottage; I was in talking distance of a red-skirted girl who looked up at us as we crawled by; a man mounted a bicycle and for a while kept pace with us. Birds on a red tiled roof looked down their long beaks and spoke together like village gossips.

I said, “I’m awfully afraid that Tooley’s going to have a baby.”

“She ought to take precautions, Henry, but in any case it’s far too early for you to worry.”

“Good heavens, Aunt Augusta, I didn’t mean that… how can you possibly think…?”

“It’s a natural conclusion,” my aunt said, “you have been much together. And the girl has a certain puppy charm.”

“I’m too old for that sort of thing.”

“You are a young man in your fifties,” Aunt Augusta replied.

The door of the restaurant car clanged, and there was Tooley, but a Tooley transformed. Perhaps it was only that she had put on less shadow, but her eyes seemed to be sparkling as I had never known them do before. “Hi,” she called down the length of the car. The four young people turned and looked at her and called back “Hi,” as though they had been long acquainted. “Hi,” she greeted them in return, and I felt a small ache of jealousy, irrational as the irritations of early morning.

“Good morning, good morning,” she said to the two of us; she seemed to be speaking a different language to the old. “Oh, Mr. Pulling, it’s happened.”

“What’s happened?”

“The curse. I’ve got the curse. I was right, you see. The jolting of the train, I mean – it did do it. I’ve got a terrible belly-ache, but I feel fabulous. I can’t wait to tell Julian. Oh, I hope he’s at the Gulhane, when I get there.”

“You going to the Gulhane?” the American boy called across.

“Yes, are you?”

“Sure. We can all go together.”

“That’s fabulous.”

“Come and have a coffee if you’ve got the money.”

“You don’t mind, do you?” Tooley said to my aunt. “They’re going to the Gulhane too.”

“Of course, we don’t mind, Tooley.”

“You’ve been so kind, Mr. Pulling,” she said. “I don’t know what I’d have done without you. I mean it was a bit like the dark night of the soul.”

I realized then that I preferred her to call me Smudge.

“Go gently on the cigarettes, Tooley”, I advised her.

“Oh,” she said, “I don’t need to economize now. They’ll be easy to get, I mean at the Gulhane. You can get anything at the Gulhane. Even acid. I’ll be seeing you both again before we go, won’t I?”

But she didn’t. She had become one of the young now, and I could only wave to her back as she went ahead of us through the customs. The two Americans still walked hand in hand, and the Vietnamese boy carried Tooley’s sack and had his arm round her shoulder to protect her from the crowd which was squeezing to get through the barrier into the customs hall. My responsibility was over, but she stayed on in my memory like a small persistent pain which worries even in its insignificance; doesn’t a sickness as serious as cancer start in just such a way?

I wondered whether Julian was waiting for her. Would they go on to Katmandu? Would she always remember to take her pill? When I shaved again more closely at the Pera Palace I found I had missed in the obscurity of my coach a small dab of lipstick upon the cheek. Perhaps that was why my aunt had jumped to so wrong a conclusion. I wiped it off and found myself wondering at once where she was now. I scowled at my own face in the glass, but I was really scowling at her mother in Bonn and her father somewhere in the CIA, and Julian afraid of castration, and at all those who ought to have been looking after her and yet felt no responsibility at all.

Aunt Augusta and I had lunch in a restaurant called Abdullah’s and then she took me around the tourist sights – the Blue Mosque and Santa Sophia – but I could tell all the time that she was worried. There had been no message waiting for her at the hotel.

“Can’t you telephone to the general?” I asked her.

“Even at the Tunis Embassy,” she said, “he never trusted his own line.”

We stood dutifully in the centre of Santa Sophia – the shape, which had been beautiful once perhaps, was obscured by ugly Arabic signs painted in pale khaki, so that it looked like the huge drab waiting-hall of a railway station out of peak traffic hours. A few people stood about looking for the times of trains, and there was a man who carried a suitcase.

“I’d forgotten how hideous it was,” my aunt said. “Let’s go home.”

Home was an odd word to use for the Pera Palace, which had the appearance of an Eastern pavilion built for a world fair. My aunt ordered two rakis in the bar, which was all fretwork and mirrors – there was still no message from General Abdul, and for the first time I saw my aunt nonplussed.

“When did you last hear from him?” I asked.

“I told you I heard from him in London, the day after those policemen came. And I had a message from him in Milan through Mario. Everything was in order, he said. If there had been any change Mario would have known.”

“It’s nearly dinner-time.”

“I don’t want any food. I’m sorry, Henry. I feel a little upset. Perhaps it is the result of the train’s vibration. I shall go to bed and wait for the telephone. I cannot believe that he will let me down. Mr. Visconti had a great belief in General Abdul, and there were very few people whom he trusted.”

I had dinner by myself in the hotel in a vast restaurant which reminded me of Santa Sophia – not a very good dinner. I had drunk several rakis, to which I was unaccustomed, and perhaps the absence of my aunt made me a little light-headed. I was not ready for bed, and I wished I had Tooley with me as a companion. I went outside the hotel and found a taxi-driver there who spoke a little English. He told me he was Greek but that he knew Istanbul as well as if it were his own city. “Safe,” he kept on saying, “safe with me,” waving his hand as though to indicate that there were wolves lurking by the walls and alleys. I told him to show me the city. He drove down narrow street after narrow street with no vista anywhere and very little light, and then drew up at a dark and forbidding door with a bearded night watchman asleep on the step. “Safe house,” he said, “safe, clean. Very safe,” and I was reminded uncomfortably of something I would have gladly forgotten, the house with the sofas behind the Messaggero.

“No, no,” I said, “drive on. I didn’t mean that.” I tried to explain. “Take me,” I said, “somewhere quiet. Somewhere you would go yourself. With your friends. For a drink. With your friends.”

We drove several miles along the Sea of Marmara and came to a stop outside a plain uninteresting building marked WEST BERLIN HOTEL. Nothing could have belonged less to the Istanbul of my imagination. It was three square stories high and might well have been built among the ruins of Berlin by a local contractor at low cost. The driver led the way into a hall which occupied the whole ground space of the hotel. A young woman stood by a small piano and sang what I supposed were sentimental songs to an audience of middle-aged men in their shirt-sleeves sitting at big tables drinking beer. Most of them, like my own driver, had big grey moustaches, and they applauded heavily and dutifully when the song was over. Glasses of beer were placed in front of us, and the driver and I drank to each other. It was good beer, I noticed, and when I poured it on top of all the raki and the wine I had already drunk, my spirits rose. In the young girl I saw a resemblance to Tooley, and in the heavy men around me I imagined – “Do you know General Abdul?” I asked the driver. He hushed me quickly. I looked around again and realized that there was not a single woman in the big hall except the young singer, and at this moment the piano stopped, and with a glance at the clock, which marked midnight, the girl seized her handbag and went out through a door at the back. Then, after the glasses had been refilled, the pianist struck up a more virile tune, and all the middle-aged men rose and put their arms around each other’s shoulders and began to dance, forming circles which they enlarged, broke and formed again.

They charged, they retreated, they stamped the ground in unison. No one spoke to his neighbour, there was no drunken jollity, I was like an outsider at some religious ceremony of which he couldn’t interpret the symbols. Even my driver left me to put his arm round another man’s shoulder, and I drank more beer to drown my sense of being excluded. I was drunk, I knew that, for drunken tears stood in my eyes, and I wanted to throw my beer glass on the floor and join the dancing. But I was excluded, as I had always been excluded. Tooley had joined her young friends and Miss Keene had departed to cousins in Kofiefontein, leaving her tatting on a chair under the Van de Velde. I would always be protected, as I had been when a cashier, by a hygienic plastic screen. Even the breath of the dancers didn’t reach me as they circled my table. My aunt was probably talking about things which mattered to her with General Abdul. She had greeted her adopted son in Milan more freely than she had ever greeted me. She had said good-bye to Wordsworth in Paris with blown kisses and tears in her eyes. She had a world of her own to which I would never be admitted, and I would have done better, I told myself, if I had stayed with my dahlias and the ashes of my mother who was not – if my aunt were to be believed – my real one. So I sat in the West Berlin Hotel shedding beery tears of self-pity and envying the men who danced with their arms round strangers’ shoulders. “Take me away,” I said to the driver when he returned, “finish your beer but take me away.”

“You are not pleased?” he asked as we drove uphill towards the Pera Palace.

“I’m tired, that’s all. I want to go to bed.”

Two police cars blocked our way outside the Pera Palace. An elderly man who carried a walking stick crooked over his left arm was reaching with a stiff right leg towards the ground as we drew up. My driver told me in a tone of awe, “That is Colonel Hakim.” The colonel wore a very English suit of grey flannel with chalk stripes, and he had a small grey moustache. He looked like any veteran member of the Army and Navy alighting at his club.

“Very important man,” my driver told me. “Very fair to Greeks.”

I went past the colonel into the hotel. The receptionist was standing in the entrance presumably to welcome him; I was of so little importance that he wouldn’t shift to let me by. I had to walk round him and he didn’t answer my good night. A lift took me up to the fifth floor. When I saw a light under my aunt’s door, I tapped and went in. She was sitting upright in bed wearing a bed-jacket and she was reading a paperback with a lurid cover. “I’ve been seeing Istanbul,” I told her.

“So have I.” The curtains were drawn back and the lights of the city lay below us. She put her book down. The jacket showed a naked young woman lying in bed with a knife in her back, regarded by a man with a cruel face in a red fez. The title was Turkish Delight. “I have been absorbing local atmosphere,” she said.

“Is the man in the fez the murderer?”

“No, he’s the policeman. A very unpleasant type called Colonel Hakim.”

“How very odd because…”

“The murder takes place in this very Pera Palace, but there are a good many details wrong, as you might expect from a novelist. The girl is loved by a British secret agent, a tough sentimental man called Amis, and they have dinner together on her last night at Abdullah’s – you remember we had lunch there ourselves. They have a love scene too in Santa Sophia, and there is an attempt on Amis’s life at the Blue Mosque. We might almost have been doing a literary pilgrimage.”

“Hardly literary,” I said.

“Oh, you’re your father’s son. He tried to make me read Walter Scott, especially Rob Roy, but I much prefer this. It moves a great deal quicker and there are fewer descriptions.”

“Did Amis murder her?”

“Of course not, but he is suspected by Colonel Hakim, who has very cruel methods of interrogation,” my aunt said with relish.

The telephone rang. I answered it.

“Perhaps it’s General Abdul at last,” she said, “though it seems a little late for him to ring.”

“This is the reception speaking. Is Miss Bertram there?”

“Yes, what is it?”

“I am sorry to disturb her, but Colonel Hakim wishes to see her.”

“At this hour? Quite impossible. Why?”

“He is on the way up now.” He rang off.

“Colonel Hakim is on the way to see you,” I said.

“Colonel Hakim?”

“The real Colonel Hakim. He’s a police officer too.”

“A police officer?” Aunt Augusta said. “Again? I begin to think I am back in the old days. With Mr. Visconti. Henry, will you open my suitcase? The green one. You’ll find a light coat there. Fawn with a fur collar.”

“Yes, Aunt Augusta, I have it here.”

“Under the coat in a cardboard box you will find a candle – a decorated candle.”

“Yes, I see the box.”

“Take out the candle, but be careful because it’s rather heavy. Put it on my bedside table and light it. Candlelight is better for my complexion.”

It was extraordinarily heavy, and I nearly dropped it. It probably had some kind of lead weight at the bottom, I thought, to hold it steady. A big brick of scarlet wax which stood a foot high, it was decorated on all four sides with scrolls and coats of arms. A great deal of artistry had gone into moulding the wax, which would melt away only too quickly. I lit the wick. “Now turn out the light,” my aunt said, adjusting her bed-jacket and puffing up her pillow. There was a knock on the door and Colonel Hakim came in.

He stood in the doorway and bowed. “Miss Bertram?” he asked.

“Yes. You are Colonel Hakim?”

“Yes. I am sorry to call on you so late without warning.” He spoke English with only the faintest intonation.

“I think we have a mutual acquaintance, General Abdul.

May I sit down?”

“Of course. You’ll find that chair by the dressing-table the most comfortable. This is my nephew, Henry Pulling.”

“Good evening, Mr. Pulling. I hope you enjoyed the dancing at the West Berlin Hotel. A convivial spot unknown to most tourists. May I turn on the light, Miss Bertram?”

“I would rather not. I have weak eyes, and I always prefer to read by candlelight.”

“A very beautiful candle.”

“They make them in Venice. The coats of arms belong to their four greatest doges. Don’t ask me their names.

How is General Abdul? I had been hoping to meet him again.”

“I am afraid General Abdul is a very sick man.”

Colonel Hakim hooked his walking stick over the mirror before he sat down. He leant his head forward to my aunt at a slight angle, which gave him an air of deference, but I noticed that the real reason was a small hearing-aid that he carried in his right ear. “He was a great friend of you and Mr. Visconti, was he not?”

“The amount you know”, my aunt said with an endearing smile.

“Oh, it’s my disagreeable business,” the colonel said, “to be a Nosey Harker.”

“Parker.”

“My English is rusty.”

“You had me followed to the West Berlin Hotel?” I asked.

“Oh no, I suggested to the driver that he should take you there,” Colonel Hakim said. “I thought it might interest you and hold your attention longer than it did. The fashionable night clubs here are very banal and international. You might just as well be in Paris or London, except that in those cities you would see a better show. Of course I told the driver to take you somewhere else first. One never knows.”

“Tell me about General Abdul,” my aunt said impatiently. “What is wrong with him?”

Colonel Hakim leant forward a little more in his chair and lowered his voice as though he were confiding a secret. “He was shot,” he said, “while trying to escape.”

“Escape?” my aunt exclaimed. “Escape from whom?”

“From me,” Colonel Hakim said with shy modesty and he fiddled at his hearing-aid. A long silence followed his words. There seemed nothing to say. Even my aunt was at a loss. She sat back against the cushions with her mouth a little open. Colonel Hakim took a tin out of his pocket and opened it. “Excuse me,” he said, “eucalyptus and menthol. I suffer from asthma.” He put a lozenge into his mouth and sucked. There was silence again until my aunt spoke.

“Those lozenges can’t do you much good,” she said.

“I think it is only the suggestion. Asthma is a nervous disease. The lozenges seem to alleviate it, but only perhaps because I believe they alleviate it.” He panted a little when he spoke. “I am always apt to get an attack when I am at the climax of a case.”

“Mr. Visconti suffered from asthma too,” Aunt Augusta said. “He was cured by hypnotism.”

“I would not like to put myself so completely in someone else’s hands.”

“Of course Mr. Visconti had a hold on the hypnotist.”

“Yes, that makes a difference,” Colonel Hakim said with approval. “And where is Mr. Visconti now?”

“I’ve no idea.”

“Nor had General Abdul. We only want the information for the Interpol files. The affair is more than thirty years old. I just ask you in passing. I have no personal interest. It is not the real subject of my interrogation.”

“Am I being interrogated, Colonel?”

“Yes. In a way. I hope an agreeable way. We have found a letter from you to General Abdul which speaks about an investment he had recommended. You wrote to him that you found it essential to make the investment while in Europe and anonymously, and this presented certain difficulties.”

“Surely you are not working for the Bank of England, Colonel?”

“I am not so fortunate, but General Abdul was planning a little trouble here; he was very short of funds. Certain friends with whom he had speculated in the old days came back to his mind. So he got in touch with you (perhaps he hoped through you to contact Visconti again), with a German called Weissmann of whom you probably haven’t heard, and with a man called Harvey Crowder, who is a meat packer in Chicago. The CIA have had him under observation for a long while and they reported to us. Of course I mention these names only because all the men are under arrest and have talked.”

“If you really have to know,” my aunt said, “for the sake of your files, General Abdul recommended me to buy Deutsche Texaco Convertible Bonds – out of the question in England because of the dollar premium, and away from England, for an English resident, quite illegal. So I had to remain anonymous.”

“Yes,” Colonel Hakim said, “that is not bad at all as a cover story.” He began to pant again and took another lozenge. “I only mentioned those names to show you that General Abdul is now a little senile. One doesn’t finance an operation in Turkey with foreign money of that kind. A wise woman like yourself must have realized that if his operation had any chance of success, he could have found local support. He would not have had to offer a Chicago meat packer twenty-five per-cent interest and a share of the profits.”

“Mr. Visconti would certainly have seen through that,” my aunt said.

“But now you are a lady living alone. You haven’t the benefit of Visconti’s advice. You might be tempted a little by the quick profits…”

“Why? I have no children to leave them to, Colonel.”

“Or perhaps by the sense of adventure.”

“At my age!” My aunt beamed with pleasure.

There was a knock on the door and a policeman entered. He spoke to the colonel and the colonel translated for our benefit. “Nothing,” he said, “has been found in Mr. Pulling’s baggage, but if you wouldn’t mind… My man is very careful, he will wear clean gloves, and I assure you he will leave not the smallest wrinkle… Would you mind if I put on the electric light while he works?”

“I would mind a great deal”, my aunt said. “I left my dark glasses on the train. Unless you wish to give me a splitting headache…”

“Of course not, Miss Bertram. He will do without. You will forgive us if the search takes a little longer.”

The policeman first went through my aunt’s handbag and handed certain papers to Colonel Hakim. “Forty pounds in travellers’ cheques,” he noted.

“I have cashed ten,” my aunt said.

“I see from your air ticket you plan to leave tomorrow – I mean today. A very short visit. Why did you come by train, Miss Bertram?”

“I wanted to see my stepson in Milan.”

The colonel gave her a quizzical look. “May one ask? According to your passport you are unmarried.”

“Mr. Visconti’s son.”

“Ah, always that Mr. Visconti.”

The policeman was busy now with my aunt’s suitcase. He looked in the cardboard box which had contained the candle, shook it and smelt it.

“That is the box for my candle,” my aunt said. “As I told you, I think, they make these candles in Venice. One candle does for a whole journey – I believe it is guaranteed for twenty-four hours continuously. Perhaps forty-eight.”

“You are burning a real work of art,” the colonel said.

“Henry, hold the candle for the policeman to see better.”

Again I was astonished by the weight of the candle when I lifted it.

“Don’t bother, Mr. Pulling, he has finished.”

I was glad to put it down again.

“Well,” Colonel Hakim said with a smile, “we have found nothing compromising in your luggage.” The policeman was repacking the case. “Now just as a formality we must go through the room. And the bed, Miss Bertram, if you will consent to sit in a chair.”

He took part in this search himself, limping from one piece of furniture to another, sometimes feeling with his stick, under the bed, and at the back of a drawer. “And now Mr. Pulling’s pockets,” he said. I emptied them rather angrily on the dressing-table. He looked carefully through my notebook and drew out a cutting from the Daily Telegraph. He read it aloud with a puzzled frown: “Those that took my fancy were the ruby-red Maitre Roger, light-red, white-tipped Cheerio, deep crimson Arabian Night and Black Flash, and scarlet Bacchus…”

“Please explain, Mr. Pulling.”

“It is self-explanatory”, I said stiflfy.

“Then you must forgive my ignorance.”

“The report of a dahlia show. In Chelsea. I am very interested in dahlias.”

“Flowers?”

“Of course they are flowers.”

“The names sounded so oddly like those of horses. I was puzzled by the ‘deep crimson.’” He put the cutting down and limped to my aunt’s side. “I will say good night now, Miss Bertram. You have made my duty tonight a most agreeable one. You cannot think how bored I get with exhibitions of injured innocence. I will send a police car to take you to your plane tomorrow.”

“Please don’t bother. We can take a taxi.”

“We should be sorry to see you miss your plane.”

“I think perhaps I ought to stop over one more day and see poor General Abdul.”

“I am afraid he is not allowed visitors. What is this book you are reading? What a very ugly fellow with a red fez. Has he stabbed the girl?”

“No. He is the policeman. He is called Colonel Hakim,” my aunt said with a look of satisfaction.

After the door had closed I turned with some anger on my aunt. “Aunt Augusta,” I said, “what did all that mean?”

“Some little political trouble, I would imagine. Politics in Turkey are taken more seriously than they are at home. It was only quite recently that they executed a Prime Minister. We dream of it, but they act. I hadn’t realized, I admit, what General Abdul was up to. Foolish of him at his age. He must be eighty if a day, but I believe in Turkey there are more centenarians than in any other European country. Yet I doubt whether poor Abdul is likely to make his century.”

“Do you realize that they’re deporting us? I think we should call the British Embassy.”

“You exaggerate, dear. They are just lending us a police car.”

“And if we refuse to take it?”

“I have no intention of refusing. We were already booked on the plane. After making my investment here, I had no intention of lingering around. I didn’t expect quick profits, and twenty-five per cent always involves a risk.”

“What investment, Aunt Augusta? Forty pounds in travellers’ cheques?”

“Oh no, dear. I bought quite a large gold ingot in Paris. You remember the man from the bank…”

“So that was what they were looking for. Where on earth had you hidden it, Aunt Augusta?”

I looked at the candle, and I remembered its weight.

“Yes, dear,” my aunt said, “how clever of you to guess. Colonel Hakim didn’t. You can blow it out now.” I lifted it up again – it must have weighed nearly twenty pounds.

“What do you propose to do with this now?”

“I shall have to take it back to England with me. It may be of use another time. It was most fortunate, when you come to think of it, that they shot poor General Abdul before I gave him the candle and not after. I wonder if he is really still alive. They would be likely to glide over any grisly detail like that with a woman. I shall have a Mass said for him in any case, because a man of that age is unlikely to survive a bullet long. The shock alone, even if it were not in a vital part…”

I interrupted her speculations. “You’re not going to take that ingot back into England?” Ingot – England. I was irritated by the absurd jangle which sounded like a comic song. “Have you no respect at all for the law?”

“It depends, dear, to which law you refer. Like the Ten Commandments. I can’t take very seriously the one about the ox and the ass.”

“The English customs are not so easily fooled as the Turkish police.”

“A used candle is remarkably convincing. I’ve tried it before.”

“Not if they lift it up.”

“But they won’t, dear. Perhaps if the wick and the wax were intact they might think they could charge me purchase tax. Or some suspicious officer might think it a phony candle containing drugs. But a used candle. Oh no, I think the danger is very small. And there’s always my age to protect me.”

“I refuse to go back into England with that ingot.” The jangle irritated me again.

“But you have no choice, dear. The colonel will certainly see us on to the plane and there is no stop before London. The great advantage of being deported is that we shall not have to pass the Turkish customs again.”

“Why on earth did you do it, Aunt Augusta? Such a risk…”

“Mr. Visconti is in need of money.”

“He stole yours.”

“That was a long time ago. It will all be finished by now.”