Little Lost Lambs at the Post

by Harold Lamb

  Mary without her hat was waiting at the office door. There Cadet Karabak explained nervously that he would have to interpret for his father, who spoke no English. In the bare office, papers were neatly stacked on work tables, and fragments of pottery and marble on the shelves all had labels tied to them, as if the owner were preparing to leave.

  Dr. Osman Karabak had the sallow face and stooped shoulders of a man who works over books. He had the nervous tensity of the Oriental scholar confronted by an intruding man of action.

  "He says his house is your house," interpreted Piri gravely. "He means, be at home here, sir.”

  As soon as a servant brought in the customary coffee cups, the archaeologist produced the chart of the great cistern, his hands unrolling it restlessly. A man, the admiral thought under strain. The plan itself was beautifully sketched in red ink, with black dotted lines showing the buildings over it. The American put his finger on the red line of a conduit running beneath the city to hills outside, with air vents marked in several places upon it.

  "What's this?" he demanded.

  That was the underground aqueduct, Karabak explained, bringing water to the Thousand and One Pillars. It had been kept secret by the Byzantines, against possible attack on the city by enemies. He had explored it to its source. And the admiral made a mental note that Karabak must be familiar with the subterranean waterways. No believer in beating about the bush, he asked bluntly why the man had sent his children to beg the aid of American naval personnel to solve a robbery.

  At this, Piri stiffened. His father exclaimed nervously. He had not known of the action of his mannerless children. Their minds had been filled with American inventions by cartoons of a strange Superman, and motion pictures of extraordinary animals; they called everything new "nylon,” and they gave him no peace of mind. For his children’s actions. Doctor Karabak apologized.

  "We're not supermen,” the admiral grumbled, "and while we may have some lie-detecting machines, we haven't any crime detectors. What was stolen—coins?"

  Bleakly, Doctor Karabak smiled. A few gold solidi or bezants had been taken from the vault. But they were trifles beside the two lost treasures of the Saray Musée—the gold-crowned helmet of a Byzantine emperor, set with matched emeralds, and the tiara of an empress, with lappets of precious stones. They were unique, priceless.

  "Could stuff like that ever be marketed?”

  Anger flashed in the Turk’s tired eyes. In these lawless days, he insisted, such masterpieces were hoarded by unseen buyers. Who had bought up the Nazi treasures missing from the salt mines? Men like Mansur Bey, exclaimed Doctor Karabak, converted their paper money into art treasures. "I made two mistakes," he said more quietly, "because I was afraid of thieves. I did not trust even a bank vault, and I hid the two finest possessions of the museum myself, thinking no one would see me. But someone did. Then, when I found them gone, I made no report because I hoped to discover some trace myself, making this." Rolling up the chart unsteadily, he gave it to the admiral. "Keep it until tomorrow. My things will never be found now. Tomorrow when I make my report I shall resign.”

  When he walked out under the sycamores of the old palace courtyard, Admiral Cater thought how the solitary director of a museum like this might get to hate the rich collectors of art like Mansur Bey. He might have collector’s mania himself and try to steal what he craved the most before getting out. You had to think of personalities in a case like this.

  "What do you think, Terry?” he muttered.

  "I think this is one place we could have used a lie detector. Who but the Karabak family worked around that cistern for days? Why couldn’t Karabak have dug the wall down himself?”

  "Personality, Terry. He has the wrong personality. The Karabak family group did not tip off the police, but somebody did. Uh-huh.”

  Uneasily Terry glanced at his superior, who sometimes had wacky ideas about strategy ashore. "Look here!” he said savagely. "The doc had the dope one thing. Whoever’s got them, the crown jewels are gone for good. J. Edgar Hoover couldn’t dig them up now. Now’s your chance to bow out. As you said yourself, we’re not equipped with a crime detector."

  Thoughtfully the admiral glanced ahead and astern. At his waiting car, interested citizens huddled around his driver, obviously taking in scuttlebutt. By now the strange doings of the American senior officer would be known in the streets. Behind him, under the great arch, the two Karabak children watched him, forlorn but hopeful. As if he were a superman forsaking them.

  "Why haven't we a crime detector? That's the gimmick we need." The calculating light of battle came into his eyes. "McGowan, find the chief of police, whoever the guy is, and present my compliments, and so on."

  "Is that wise, sir?’’ demanded his side crisply.

  "Hell, no. But it may work. Request his permission to make an operational-readiness test of one naval-type crime detector on the water of the Thousand and One Pillars after sunset, say at nineteen hundred hours.”

  When Terry McGowan departed reluctantly, the admiral beckoned to the watching children. Piri came down at the double, with Mary not far behind. At sight of her, the elderly officer hesitated. Then he informed her what he had ordered Terry to do, and added, "This detector isn’t the new reactograph type used by the FBI; it's one I'm putting together. You understand that, Mary? Well, if you want to help your father, go back to your freshman class at the college and explain all that to the other girls.”

  Sensing by his face rather than his words that the American officer meant to help them, Mary hurried off.

  Left alone with Piri, the admiral said, "Son, I think you've been telling me the truth. Now one thing more. Isn't the boatman lsmet your grandfather, who helped make this chart?"

  "Yes, sir,” answered the cadet readily. "But he is old-fashioned. He likes better fishing from his boat than sitting in an office like my father. Ismet sent my father to school in Vienna, but he says my father did not learn from the books how to stand up to his enemies."

  "I see.”

  To Piri's surprise, the admiral took him to the sedan car with the small American flag, and drove off, without waiting for the other officer, across the bridge and along the shore to Bebek, where Ismet sat in the blue sandal eating his afternoon bread and sour cheese. It seemed to Piri that the admiral had changed in his personality because he ordered Piri to buy bread and cheese for the two of them and went to sit in the boat, paying no attention to the passing crowd.

  Then taking out a bright gold coin, the admiral told Piri to ask his grandfather if it had been stolen from the treasure vault, and Ismet said it had, but it was a small thing that did not count in a great matter. The admiral said, yes, he understood that, and he was sorry now that he had not gone with Ismet to look at the Thousand and One Pillars. Ismet said he was sorry, too, they had not gone together to look for the other boat there.

  When the admiral asked what other boat, Ismet suggested they row out a way to be in the sun, and away from the crowd. After a while he leaned on his oars and said the other boat must be the one the thieves used to row to the vault. They had a boat down there, because they could not carry one down the entrance stairs and out again, for all Istanbul to see, and besides. Ismet had seen it

  With one thing and another, with rowing and talking about boats, the time passed until sunset. The admiral looked at his wrist watch and said it was time for them all to go to look at The Thousand and One Pillars. Yet he had a fancy, and the fancy was to take the sandal of Ismet with them, roped on the sedan with a pole in place of the oars. So the driver and Ismet and Piri did this, and then they all got into the car. People stared when they drove through the crowded street at evening, with the wet boat riding on the car.

  On the way up, past the great Aya Sofia Mosque, the admiral had another fancy. Looking again at his watch, he said—and Piri remembered every word—"Son, there isn't any machine able to detect crime as well as human nature. So I'm going to depend on you to carry out this mission for me. When we reac
h the entrance, you hurry down ahead of us. Launch the small boat from the landing of the Thousand and One Pillars, and cross to the far side. Watch and listen there, to detect what you can, but do not make a sound. Do you understand?"

  Piri understood, but he was excited by his mission.

  When the sedan stopped at the fountain, the boy slipped away easily in the darkness. People crowded around the entrance like a wedding festival, with police officers parked in a car, and even college girls with their families trying to catch sight of the admiral. Sight of the boat on the sedan drew a ripple of applause.

  "The police are detailed to protect you,” reported Terry grimly, "and the reporter from Vatan wants a flash photo of you and the crime detector.”

  But the admiral was busy with the driver's flashlight and the chart, and ordering the boat lifted down. What with the bystanders pushing past the police guards, and the fuss he made getting the boat carried down the steep steps, it took a long time to reach the landing and launch the boat through the gallery of eager spectators. At that moment the reporter touched off his flash and got his picture.

  As if in echo, a boy’s shout came over the water, "There they are!”

  "Jericho,” muttered the admiral. "Just what I didn’t want.”

  He broke off to listen, with everyone else, to a splintering of wood, and then a faint splash. Sweeping the beam of the flashlight across the water, he glimpsed a maze of pillars beyond which dim figures moved in some kind of boat. Three shots stabbed back the gleam of the torch.

  Three slugs screamed, ricocheting off the marble pillars. Echoes shrilled back from invisible walls. Fascinated and immobilized, the Turkish cops and civilians stared at the admiral.

  He jumped into the sandal, with Terry a pace behind, as Ismet shoved off mightily with his pole from the stern. Terry had to flicker the light on, and straight-arm menacing pillars as they drove wildly across the water in the direction of the shots.

  By the far wall they bumped into the cistern boat, stove-in and sinking. The other craft seemed to have vanished. Suddenly Terry flashed his light into the water, and plunged his arm down, to haul Piri up and into their swaying boat.

  The boy was bleeding at the head, half-conscious, but breathing. Before they could examine him, Ismet heaved on the pole, pointing ahead. There the beam of the torch showed the mouth of a fathom-wide tunnel arching over the ewater.

  "Hey!" objected Terry as Ismet maneuvered them into it deftly.

  "That’s right," commented the admiral, adding that it must be the Byzantine aqueduct and Ismet knew what he was doing. "Where's the other craft?”

  Kneeling to save his skull, Terry switched off his light promptly, hearing tie subdued scraping and splashing of another boat ahead of him in the shallow conduit. "Dead ahead,” he growled, and swore silently.

  Staring into a void, he felt sweat run down his body. By any calculation, a burst of shots loosed down the aqueduct would register hits on him. He wanted out, badly.

  They rounded a curve in the conduit. and dim light showed ahead from above. As they neared it, Terry saw that it came from a round manhole, beneath which an empty rowboat swayed.

  When they bumped the other craft, Ismet dropped his pole and surged past Terry to catch at the rungs of an iron ladder and climb fast up the manhole. He really knew the way. Following Ismet's slippered feet up the stonewalled shaft, past a bucket and chain, Terry shoved his head out the top. He recognized familiar surroundings. Slowly he climbied out of the wellhead in the courtyard of the shop of Messrs. as Ashraef and Lut within the Great Bazaar, which should have been closed at that hour.

  Messrs. Ashraef and Mansur Bey stood by the stooge in the lighted door, eying Terry with no pleasure. Before anything else could happen, Ismet yelped like a hound on the scent and hurled himself at the hand in which Ashraef gripped a revolver. Jumping after him, Terry resorted to a tactic of football days and kicked the weapon out of the tangle of bodies. lt slid across the pavement toward the wellhead, from which Admiral Cater, emerging, pounced on it. Sniffing at it, he broke out the cylinder.

  "What is this?” demanded Mansur Bey. He was no longer jovial. "By Jove, we almost shot your men. Admiral Cater, for robbers!"

  The admiral squinted at the cylinder of the revolver and flicked it back into place. "One of you fired three of these cartridges just now,” he said carefully, "when you were down in your skiff on the cistern, watching to see what we were going to do about solving a crime. Who was the bad marksman?"

  Slowly Ashraef shook his head. "No.” He nodded at the lighted and somewhat disordered shop. "We were here, making inventory of all items.”

  Then Piri’s wet head came out of the well. The boy got an arm over and wiped the blood from his eyes. "Sir, I do not know who fired any shots,” he said, pointing at Mansur Bey, "because that gentleman hit me on my head with his pole."

  And Terry, remembering the green-jade dragon, said, "All right, if you three ginks were making an inventory, let's see all the items in the safe."

  It was midnight before Admiral Mickey Cater stretched out at ease on his terrace under the Judas trees, waiting for his brandy, laced with water. In the darkness he still saw the glow of light from the jewels of a Byzantine crown and tiara of such fantastic beauty that men might have been driven to murder to possess them.

  Across the way from the admiral’s rented villa the great mansion of Mansur Bey was dark, because its owner had been taken by the police to a cell. The wealthy Mr. Ashraef had been unable to produce a Mr. Lut other than his silent partner, Mr. Mansur Bey, whose political power had been unable to withstand the public exposure of a crime, backed by the testimony of the distinguished and impartial American admiral.

  "Terry, I don't know,” murmured the admiral. "I don’t think members of the American Mission should raise any more personal hell in a place like Istanbul.”

  "No, sir," agreed his aide gratefully. "For my money, I think the Karabak family had the logistics of this crime worked out, but they needed evidence and witnesses. Then, when Mary was casing the Ashraef joint, and Ismet was putting the eye on the Mansur Bey house, one of them thought of getting American aid." Resentfully, he remembered how the girl had made as if she really liked him personally. "I’ll put up one of those gold bezants against a nickel ten piasters that we never see the Karabaks again."

  He stopped because the houseboy came up with his tray, and the admiral reached for his glass. Behind the boy appeared the familiar silhouette of Mary Karabak and gaunt Ismet.

  "Please,” she said, when she was noticed, "he wanted me to say how our house will always be your house.”

  Ismet bent and caught the admiral's hand. He pressed it to his forehead, in the old-fashioned way. Bending over the surprised Terry, Mary touched a finger to her lips and to Terry's. Then they both went away.

  Comfortably the admiral sipped his brandy and decided against showing his aide the splendid gold bezant, now secure in his vest pocket.

  Amateur Spy

  I NEVER thought about what we were sending Mike Mailenin into. For one thing, we were in a hurry. For another thing, he seemed so anxious to go. I know now that was because he felt himself to be my friend.

  Then, too, I was excited because a guess on my part, a hundred-to-one chance, had paid off. You see, when the Sergei Razin situation broke, our section of CIA—Central Intelligence—went to work fast to find a trustworthy person who could identify Razin face to face. No such person seemed to exist in the U.S.A. Then I thought of Mikhael Mailenin, my Finnish acquaintance—or rather of something Mike had said.

  It was a stifling August afternoon when I ran Mike to earth in Central Park, sitting in his black suit on a bench, watching the kids sail their toy ships across that round pond. In spite of his forty-eight years, when Mike had a day off from his job—foreman of hard-rock drillers—he liked to watch the kids there or at the zoo and the Metropolitan Museum. Don't ask me why. It meant something to him, besides being for free.

  "Hiyah,
Jim,” he growled, the lines easing in his heavy crag of a face, which meant he was glad to see me. He helped me read Russian newspapers—his Russian being a lot better than his version of American slang—and once I’d been the honored guest at the akvavit party for fellow Finns by which Mike had celebrated getting full American citizenship. He took that seriously, as he took friendship. Otherwise, I guessed that he’d been through hell on ice when his people under Mannerheim fought off the Red Army, until Finland caved in and Mike somehow found his way over to New York. He never talked about that, but once he’d mentioned that Jan Sibelius, who made the music of Finland, would never do anything for the victorious Soviets.

  That remark of his about Sibelius had started me looking for him that day. "Mike,” I said, "did you ever know a man named Sergei Razin?”

  Squinting at a full-rigged schooner bumping our side of the pond, the Finn nodded. "Yess. Long time no see, Jim.”

  I felt like doing a standing high jump. Here was the finger we’d been screening the country for. Instead, because we had to be certain, I asked Mike for details, and he told me carefully how he’d been a graduate student in geology in Leningrad when Sergei Razin, the famous archaeologist, had come across the gray River Neva from the Academy of Sciences to lecture the youngsters.

  It fitted the scrap of a dossier we had on Razin:

  Expert on Central Asia, age about 60, former president of Soviet Academy of Sciences, ceased publishing his work and lost contact with Western scientists after 1938 purge.

  Razin’s name, however, was listed with other prominent Soviet scientists and musicians in the new General Society for the Expansion of Knowledge. And we wanted very much to answer the question: Had the celebrated Sergei Razin died in ’38 with Meyerhold and the others or had he joined the ranks of those now teaching science according to Marx, Lenin and Stalin?