by Joan Fleming
‘When the jet got to Hong Kong they would realize I was missing …’
She thrust her face so close that Jenny backed hurriedly, but she followed, gripping Jenny’s hands. ‘Missing … you had your ticket! Do realize, my child, that though you may be their most urgent concern whilst you are airborne, once you have walked down these steps out of the plane they do not care in the very least what happens to you. You will be simply a passenger who missed the plane, and that will be that. It’s no good, you are a nobody, wanted by no one, and even if your family love you and are mourning for you in their hearts, there is nothing they will do about it because you have chosen your own path.’
‘There’s Nuri bey!’ Jenny cried.
‘Nuri bey! Nuri bey! That dreamer of dreams. You ran from his house and he will sit sadly musing.’
Something like panic was rising in Jenny’s aching head. ‘Oh, no! You’re wrong,’ she almost shrieked. Miasma had to be wrong somewhere, she could not be allowed always to be right. ‘You’re wrong. I gave him the case; he’s got it in his house and if I don’t turn up for it he’ll know something has happened to me. He’ll go to our consul and report that I am missing.’
Madame’s hand flew to her mouth, of which she traced the outline thoughtfully with her ringed forefinger. ‘I see, then you were lying to me all the time, as I knew you were, when you said you threw the case into the Golden Horn. Five thousand dollars into the Golden Horn. I knew it was not so!’
‘So you see,’ Jenny gabbled, ‘you can’t keep me prisoner, or dope me, or kill me … or anything. Nuri bey will do something.’
‘Nuri bey will do nothing, he is not one who does. It is I who do. I have done all my life and I will do again. Relax, my little one, come and look at my pretty birds …’
To give herself time to think, as she later told Nuri bey, Jenny obediently lined herself up beside Madame, a young guest courteously giving her attention to her hostess in spite of her shocking headache.
They stood by cage after cage whilst the particular beauties of the inhabitants were pointed out to her: Hartz mountain rollers, silent love-birds, misty mauve budgerigars, smart little black and yellow creatures which Madame’s friends had sent from Hong Kong, a nightingale.
‘You see, my dear, there are almost no birds in our city; pigeons and sparrows, and an occasional nightingale out here on the Bosphorus, that is all; we treasure our caged birds very greatly …’
It was a crazy room alive with eternal twittering, rendered fantastic by the strange reflected light from the everlasting flowing water outside playing on the faded murals.
I can’t think … I can’t think, was all that Jenny could formulate in her mind. Her absolute isolation, which had been so clearly underlined by Madame’s words, was frightening, by far the most frightening aspect of the situation in which she found herself. Apart from all the immediate worries, what terms was she now supposed to be on with Tony and how would they feel towards each other when they met? Tony the boyfriend was now Tony the crook, Tony the con-man, Tony the seducer, Tony who had let her down more completely, surely, than any man had ever let any girl down. Jenny now understood that corny old phrase, ‘Her heart was sore’; quite literally the place in her chest about where her heart must be, was sore, and when she thought of the way Tony had behaved she received a physical pain which made her wince.
*
Noticing her lack of interest, Madame told her to sit down, she was in need of food. She would go at once and send Hadji out for yoghourt; Jenny sank limply on to the love seat, watching Madame as she hobbled off vigorously. The kitchen had the same den-of-thieves aspect that marks Turkish kitchens. Hadji was dejectedly washing up some yoghourt dishes which had to be taken to the shop in exchange for freshly-filled ones.
‘Listen,’ she hissed. ‘She is clearly unnerved; she has confessed to leaving the valise with Nuri bey and you must try again and retrieve it somehow …’ She held up her hand in protest at the flow of words which came from him. ‘I cannot hold her here long; she is a young girl of energy and some brains; as soon as she is satisfied that her lover is not here, she will go, she will return to Nuri bey and if she does so before you have found the case, there will be no hope for either of us. No hope, do you understand? We might even be hanged side by side, you and I, Hadji, like the vagabond we saw this morning.’
Hadji had said what he had said: there was a lot more to say but he was not going to say it. He dropped the shallow earthenware dishes into a gaudy plastic shopping bag and put on his cap.
‘Make some tea, Hadji, quickly. Into her draught of tea I shall put …’
‘Yok … yok … yok!’ Hadji made it clear that there was to be no more messing about with Kismet—or dope.
Madame fumbled in her handbag; huge and capacious, it contained, it would seem, everything that anyone could possibly want under any sort of circumstance. This time she brought out a small bottle of pink tablets. ‘I shall use only two of the tablets that Dr MacPherson prescribed to me for sleeplessness,’ she said smoothly. ‘Two of them will send her to sleep for the rest of the day, and the night as well. When she wakes tomorrow morning, you will have retrieved the case from Nuri bey, and she will be allowed to leave here and return to Nuri bey or go to the devil. We shall be safe. When we return tonight I shall ring Nuri bey to say I have kept her here because you found her wandering out of his house late at night and she begged us to protect her. I shall explain that the young thing is a little out of her mind, hysterical. You see, Hadji, I am reasonable. You thought I had brought her here to punish her, didn’t you? You are wrong. My heart is full of benevolence; I wish only, as you do, to carry out the Will of Allah. But, as we both know, Allah helps those who help themselves. It is not the Will of Allah that you and I should hang side by side on the football ground before the Sultan Ahmed Camii, and I am carrying out his wish that we should help ourselves to the best of my ability. Make the tea quickly …’
CHAPTER 9
The first half-hour after sunrise is a silent battle for supremacy between the newly arisen sun and the fog which lies lightly along the Bosphorus and the Golden Horn. The sun always wins and comes up brazen and warm and the fog slinks reluctantly away defeated. It was just about this time that Nuri bey stirred in the chair in which he had sat, unsleeping, the whole night. During that time he had received psychic admonition: it was now his intention to do what he should have done before, to go to the police, but first he cleaned his house, tidied his kitchen a little, ate his midday meal, changed his suit.
Then he locked his front door after him, as usual, boarded a tram and went to see his friend, a brass hat in the police force, whom he found finishing his midday meal in his favourite restaurant.
‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘what is the position now with regard to smuggling?’
It was very bad indeed. More smuggling was going on at the present time than ever before and smuggling by air was at present the most profitable form of carrying contraband goods. So many people flew over so many thousand miles so frequently that small amounts could be carried which, in a short time, could accumulate into vast quantities. A constant stream of gold, diamonds and the raw material of narcotics passed through the sky over their heads daily. The price of gold in India had been raised so high, being now almost twice its value in the open market, that the smuggling of gold into India was extremely profitable and worth any amount of careful organization. Airline stewards had been found wearing waistcoats with special pockets for carrying gold and had been discovered with as much as fourteen pounds of gold on them at one time. In the first quarter of the previous year it was estimated that over a million and a half pounds sterling of gold had been smuggled into India.
As for diamonds, oil kings in the Persian gulf had sent fortunes in the form of diamonds to safety in banks in the United States. On the North Atlantic run one air steward had been caught with five thousand pounds’ worth of stones on him on one occasion. ‘It is a great temptation, my friend, to
these ill-paid young men. They arrive in New York with their small packet, hand their commission to someone from whom they receive in exchange an envelope of dollars! I have no doubt their conscience is clear because if they do not do it, someone else will!’
Nuri bey tapped his mouth with pointed finger and thumb.
‘And what about narcotics?’
‘Drug traffic. Ah, my friend, there you have something which many of these young smugglers will not handle. They are conscientious objectors. They will carry all the gold and diamonds in the world but they will not touch opium. They know, some of them have seen for themselves, the harm which opium does to many young people like themselves.’
‘But there is a very considerable drug traffic, I gather.’
‘The biggest and most profitable of the lot, my friend. Opium grown here, in Burma, Persia and India is converted into heroin and sold on the illicit market in Hong Kong. One ounce, Nuri my friend, one single ounce reaching the United States, diluted with lactose, can produce five thousand shots for which an addict will pay at the rate of three dollars a shot. Furthermore, the conversion to heroin of a small amount of raw opium can take place in an ordinary outhouse, no need for large factories, it can be done secretly and all trace of the operation removed easily.’
The policeman then observed sadly that in time somebody could always be found who would do anything for money. But recently, he added more cheerfully, air security personnel both in the United States and England, had been greatly increased and, given time, he felt sure, this crime of carrying disaster to the young people of both countries would be overcome.
‘And what about the young man Grand, who shot and killed the security officer at the airport only the night before last?’ Nuri bey asked.
The police officer said that he understood he was a young man with a bad record; Scotland Yard were flying out two detectives to make further investigations but in the opinion of the Istanbul police, between themselves, this young man had friends in the city who were at present hiding him.
‘And what will happen when he is found?’
‘He will be extradited, of course. No longer any concern of ours.’
‘And the people who have kept him hidden?’
‘Ah, my friend. We shall deal with them ourselves, and very severely indeed.’
Something in Nuri bey cringed and curled up painfully.
His friend fixed him with a piercing look. ‘Come, Nuri, my friend, if you know something, get it out. In the name of humanity, get it out, man. When I was in the States I was shown a group of drug addicts waiting outside a druggist’s for their daily supply. It was something I can never forget. Anyone who aids and abets in the continuation of the taking of drugs by young people is a criminal, make no mistake, and he deserves the worst punishment that can be handed out to him.’
Nuri bey then admitted that, in fact, he knew nothing but he had grave suspicions.
In that case, his friend returned promptly, he owed it to humanity to make known his suspicions; if they proved to be groundless no harm would follow—if not, justice would be done.
‘I must be a little more certain,’ Nuri bey said. ‘My suspicions are so fantastic that I must have a little more time to make quite sure that I am not wrong. Otherwise I could cause great harm and suffering.’
His friend told him, in Turkish words, the equivalent of: well, step on it, old man, we don’t want to look fools in the eyes of these foreigners; if we can have the accomplices lined up by the time the English detectives arrive, it will be very fine.
Nuri bey hurried away bewildered, like a long pair of scissors, and took refuge under the enormous plane tree that grows in the shade of the mosque of Bayazit II on the third hill near the covered bazaar and the bookshops he loved.
It is known as the ‘mosque of the pigeons’, pigeons having a sacred significance, and in the courtyard and amongst the tables of the open-air café hundreds of fat pigeons stagger around amongst the starving kittens, their eyes glazed with over-feeding. Under the black and white arches of the cloisters, between the pillars of jasper and porphyry, sits an old scribe with a prehistoric Underwood typewriter, waiting for custom.
Nuri bey placed himself carefully upon a rickety chair and ordered a narghile pipe into which he fitted his own ivory mouthpiece and settled into a long contemplative smoke. To watch the bubbles slowly travelling up through the faintly colouring water is known to be one of the most profoundly tranquil experiences available to man. It should have engendered wisdom and peace, but unfortunately he could only think shallow thoughts from the top of his head and all the time, through his mind, ran a jingle from the Oxford Book of Verse which had been haunting him for many hours and preventing him from more profound thoughts; a sickeningly sentimental verse which went:
Jenny kiss’d me when we met
Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time, you thief who love to get
Sweets into your list, put that in!
Say I’m weary, say I’m sad,
Say that health and wealth have missed me,
Say I’m growing old, but add,
Jenny kiss’d me.
Nuri bey was entirely nauseated with himself but he had caught the verse as he might catch an attack of influenza, and that was that.
He sat for a long time. At a nearby table an old man and youth played two games of backgammon. The sellers of pigeon food rattled the maize about in their brown paper bags, hoping to attract custom. A kitten sat hopeless on the steps of the mosque, blinking its eyes, wishing it liked maize; pigeons walked round it and past it and almost over it but it never raised a paw; no one in Istanbul would harm a pigeon, least of all a kitten. The long arms of the Underwood typewriter were now flaying out wildly as the scribe typed furiously to the dictation of the old woman who bent over him.
It seemed that no amount of hubble-bubbling was going to help Nuri bey to reach a decision to his almost insoluble problem. Through the archway, opposite the garden where the Sultan Bayazit lies buried, is the bookshop to which Nuri bey now knew he was going, drawn there by an irresistible impulse. As he slipped his own mouthpiece into his pocket he looked up and saw that the old woman who had been dictating to the scribe was now coming down the steps of the mosque towards him and she was Miasma. He had to have a second look before deciding that it was definitely she because he had never known her to be out unchaperoned. As she walked past the table she looked directly at him; there was nothing to be done but to rise and greet her.
This he did, kissing her hand as usual and saying how astonished he was to see her here alone, and employing the services of the scribe!
‘I was writing to Valance’s sister in France.’
‘But I was going to do that for you.’
‘I am not sure about your French, Nuri bey. The scribe has a French colleague who will translate my letter for him. Valance had a sister Martine to whom she was much devoted; I have written at length to tell her of Valance’s beautiful funeral. She will be distracted with sorrow, poor woman!’
The intuition for which Nuri bey had been waiting all day suddenly struck with a force which nearly knocked him off his feet. In all the years he had known her it occurred to Nuri bey for the first time that Miasma could neither read nor write. And this was why he was asked to visit her every week to read the news of the world to her and would account, also, for the endless time she spent on the telephone. She had probably used the services of the scribe many a time. It made explicable, suddenly, quite a number of things about her which he had never understood.
Miasma peered up into his face across which shadows of his thoughts were racing like cloud shadows across a bare fell. ‘We have been close for many years, you and I, my lion. And now, when I am in grave trouble, you seem to have become my enemy,’ she said plaintively. ‘I cannot understand. There is no more loyalty towards me.’
‘No, Madame,’ Nuri bey answered stiffly, ‘I cannot claim that we have been friends. Acquaintances only.
One must know something about one’s friends. I now understand that I have, all these years, known nothing about you. You have been to me as a closed book. I do not admire a book for its binding nor can I feel affection for a book I have not opened.’ Thinking how much he preferred books to people, his glance slipped over the top of her head towards the archway in the wall beneath the plane tree, through which he hoped to go to his favourite second-hand bookshop at the earliest possible moment.
‘After all I have done for you,’ he heard her saying, ‘the arrangements I have made in your favour when I am gone!’
His face hardened, he did not now believe in those benefits at which she had hinted many, many times.
‘Where do you think my money comes from? From Allah? Where do you think I get the money to pay for those two parasites Valance and Hadji? They have squeezed me dry, those two, sucked all the juice from me until I am as a used lemon.’ She then flatly stated and repeated, the amount of money that she had paid monthly to her two servants, and Nuri bey, listening in spite of not wanting to do so, was staggered to hear that each of them received in one week what he had to live on in a month in the way of rents from some half-dozen houses he owned.
‘And in addition to all that they are kept by me. Each time Valance came back from her home in France, she demanded a rise in pay, each time, my friend. And, knowing how I had missed her when she was away, living as I was obliged to, in that hotel in Beirut and hating every moment of it, she could be sure that I would have to agree to her outrageous demands. Pay me more … or I shall leave, that was her attitude. And she carried Hadji with her, each time I raised her salary it was necessary for me to give Hadji more as well. Valance has a good sum of money salted away in France, let me tell you, and believe me,’ she raised her finger and her voice became shrill, ‘that sister of hers, to whom I have just sent a long letter, will demand Valance’s salary to the end of this month, even though the poor woman is dead! Oh, the French are mean … mean … they would pick up the pigeons’ corn, grain by grain, to make bread for themselves!’