The Underground Cities Contract, page 12
Personal vendettas are stupid and create unnecessary danger. But if Mr. Cihan was on a jihad, I had a small holy war going too. After I had yanked him out from under an execution date, he had crossed me several ways. Ambushed me at the helicopter pickup spot and killed Robertson, the pilot, sealed the three of us who remained into the underground city, and caused the death of Cornell.
My point was simple. I meant to teach Mr. Cihan, personally, that he wasn’t a pimple on a rough man’s ass. Wiping the rain off the face of my watch, I watched the sweep hand move, then pulled the pin from the grenade. Lofted it, stiff-armed, over the broken parapet of the Citadel. And after it had boomed, came up crouching and waved my small, tattered army forward.
Chapter 32
A Turkish bathhouse is called a hamam. The best and most luxurious one in Istanbul is the Galatsaray Hamami: it is spacious; golden dimness filters down into the main chamber from the mosquelike roof. Here Kumandan Atmaca, head of the Istanbul division of the secret police, was taking his naked and corpulent ease. Until not so long ago, most Turkish bathhouses were also whorehouses, with small boys on tap for pederasts, but since modern Turkey is no longer a barbaric state, these additional amenities have been suspended. They make the tourists nervous.
Atmaca was a giant going to fat, a former rugby star, and the huge paunch being slammed, kneaded, and walked on by the sweating masseur was only a normal Turkish dividend for a well-connected government official. It was midnight, which is slightly after dinner in Istanbul, and the Kumandan was belching off waves of his kebab and the raki, which had washed it down.
Content and surfeited, he lay like a beached whale on the edge of the thirty-foot marble table around which the masseurs worked, his indulgences being sweated and pounded out of him. Eyes half-closed, his big manicured hands were back under his head. He was far from his aides and weapons.
One of the Turkish cretins who infested the outer chambers of the hamam, begging for tips from anyone who entered, came obsequiously into the large hot chamber and touched the glistening elbow of the great man.
“Bu ne?” growled Atmaca. He did not open his eyes, or turn his head, and sweat dripped off his hooked nose into the fierce mustaches.
“An ecnebi effendi to see you, sir.”
The Kumandan nodded, and the masseur went on working doggedly, at his massive right leg. When I walked in, the secret-police chief turned his head slowly and looked me over. He had been expecting an informer or a pimp. There was only me. Atmaca kicked the masseur away and sat up.
His reflexes were good, and so was his memory. He stared at my dark suit, the dark turtleneck sweater, and the weathered English raincoat slung over my shoulder. It was not a good spot to be caught in, for him. His government had a warrant out for my arrest, on nine counts, but he had no pistol to pull, no one to order into action.
“Don’t overdo,” I advised him, because his fat predator’s face was becoming suffused with blood. “Fatal heart attacks are nature’s way of telling us to slow down.… Remember Yana Cihan, the convicted terrorist I took out of your Sagmalcilar Prison? Fellow who murdered the Israeli consul-general, the one you were going to hang?”
Atmaca nodded, looking around. Since Cihan was the most wanted man in Turkey, he remembered him clearly. The fatigued masseur, the other patrons, and their masseurs, had deserted the central hot table en masse. Were huddling in the shadowed wall cubicles, sloshing water over themselves with haste. Nobody knew what I had under the shouldered coat.
“Okay, Commander Fatso,” I continued, half-turned to watch the two swinging doors to the outer chambers. No one attempted to enter the hot chamber, but there were bobbing, jostling heads in the oval windows at the tops of the doors. “Cihan double-crossed me, so I have just put him back in Sagmalcilar Prison. Into the same cell, even. Chained him back to the wall. But you’d better get on the matter right away. The front gate doesn’t know he’s back inside.”
I counted in my head while this information penetrated the Kumandan’s broad, sweating face. A look of pure horror ridged his heavy eyebrows as the implication of it hit him.
Disgrace enough to have had the terrorist leader taken from the prison. But to have him recaptured by the same foreigner who had blasted him out, and returned to the same cell without his knowledge or that of the prison authorities …
If these things were true, Kumandan Atmaca knew he was a dead man, politically. He swung his tree-trunk legs to the marble floor and started to rush me. I retreated a few steps, holding both hands in the air.
“Gently, gently, Kumandan! Don’t insist on making other people hear us talk. Not to worry. There will be a press release tomorrow, both international and domestic, stating very clearly how you recaptured Yana Cihan. Yesterday, in a bloody battle at the Citadel beside Lake Van. The release is already written and distributed.”
“Is it so?” asked Atmaca hoarsely. When I handed him the Xeroxed flimsy, he read it quickly. Head down, like a stunned bull. When he looked up, I was backing out of the heated central chamber. Because I was obviously a foreigner, by the cut of my clothes, the begging cretins followed me to the outside door, hands thrust forward, crying “Tip! Tip!” although they had done me no service at all. One importunate oaf insisted I must pay for having a bath, and I chopped him enough to put him down on his knees.
Ducking into the waiting cab, I gave the driver a Karakoy address, and after getting out, lost myself in the crowd around the ferry slips. Then, after I had doubled around several blocks and was sure that nobody was on me, I caught a ferry to Uskudar, on the Asia side.
Chapter 33
After I had trudged up the worn brick walk on the other side of the Bosporus Strait, it took twenty minutes to find a cab. The one I finally located had a finely developed financial mind. Natural, since it was one-twenty in the morning. Finally he drove me half a mile past empty, echoing sheds and warehouses along the dock, and we found the lighted bulk of a big American freighter, Elizabeth Dismukes.
As the cab slowed I threw several Turkish lira at the driver and broke out of the back seat before he had stopped rolling. Tugs were already nudging the big freighter, and the gangplank was rattling up. I sprinted, but could not make it; the bosun’s party already had the metal stairs halfway up. I shouted at the bridge deck, and after a few seconds, a rail spotlight was turned on and fixed me in its glare.
“Passenger for New Orleans,” I shouted, because I could not remember the name of my latest passport. The light snapped off, a winch whined, and I grabbed one of the greasy loading nets which had been discarded by the stevedores, after they had completed loading the ship. When the line came down near me, I hooked three corners of the net over the shining, work-worn hook, and stepped inside it.
The rail spot flared on again, and I was hauled aboard. Or, more appropriately, snatched up and dumped on the main deck, with the greasy net collapsing around me. The ship’s whistle blasted peremptorily, deafeningly, and the tugs began to pull the big freighter away from the dock. When we were in the stream, they turned her, listened for more transceiver instructions from the pilot on the bridge, and their great hooks dropped, releasing the Elizabeth’s hawsers.
I scrambled up to the boat deck, snatching at the metal ladder. Jetliners are for idiots who want to get somewhere so fast that they can’t think properly for a week after they get there. Cruise ships, with their phony protocol and carefully arranged games of off hand screwing and costume parties, are really Outward Bound. They carry nobody but those who are waiting for death and wish to be beguiled until it happens. If you see anybody young or interesting on a cruise ship, he or she is just part of the floating Las Vegas funerary deal.
Chapter 34
As I walked down the starboard side of the boat deck, Captain Stahl was dropping down the ladder from the deck above. He nodded and said without heat, “You nearly got your worthless ass left behind this time, Joe. I can’t ask tugs to wait.”
“Thank you, Captain,” I said. “I’m in B cabin?”
“Right. You’re carried on the manifest as super cargo, but I never had one eat as high on the hog as you.”
“Yes, sir. Customs and immigration all iced?”
“Through the line’s agency ashore. Nice to have you aboard again.” Nodding, he ducked into the companionway on that side of the ship’s inner boat deck which was his private domain. Office and quarters, official lockup room midships, where he had to seal all liquor when in port.
I went to cabin B, beyond the lockup room. My baggage was there, and on the small desk, a note from Charlie Smith-Haughton, the number two in the shipping agency which handled the Dismukes Line in Istanbul. It said that he had sent aboard a case of dark Bacardi rum; that I was to drink it in good health and company, on the way to New Orleans.…
I smiled at that, pleased, because I had ridden the line many times. An agent in Havana used to do it, too, before Castro. I sat on the bed and tried to think how many times I had gone down the Mississippi out of New Orleans, on black errands. Seventeen, as near as I could remember.
Opening the Dopp kit, I went into the bathroom to shave. Then showered, brushed my teeth, and went out into the hallway in my best Savile-tailored dark suit and a black sport shirt. When I knocked on the door of cabin A, it was opened immediately, and a radiant Peri Cicek started climbing me like a ladder.
She was wearing a miniskirt and seemed bursting out of her clothes. Her mother appeared behind her, smiling, still with the wrought-iron hairdo. Our talk was incoherent for several seconds; then I told them that I had ordered several bottles of champagne cooled.
We had one bottle in their cabin and took the other two, in the bucket, out to the deck. There, in lowslung chairs, we watched the land barriers slide by. After the Marmara pilot had been taken on board, Captain Stahl joined us and kept the ladies laughing while I sat staring across the dark water.
Chapter 35
By no accident, my plane stopped in Washington for twenty minutes. I walked out through the pleated tunnel and was joined by a tall, bulky man of middle age, wearing rumpled clothes of impeccable English cut. Neal Pearsall, director of the action division of the agency.
“How did the Buckley kid get killed?” he asked.
“Oh …” I found some empty seat space in the lounge and sat down. He settled beside me, but more slowly. “… the little bastard recognized me, even in the jailer’s uniform. When the action started, he jumped into the line of fire. Trying to protect me.”
Pearsall nodded, thumbing a little round cloisonné box out of his fancy weskit. Opening it gingerly, he took a pinch of the brown powder, sniffed it into his nostrils, and sneezed like the escape-valve blowing on a boiler. Several people looked around in astonishment.
“Trying to stop smoking,” he explained, mopping at his face with a snowy handkerchief. “Toughest frigging thing I ever attempted, in war or peace. And this goddamned juju dust probably gives you nose cancer.”
“Not to worry,” I said soothingly, “with your nose area that will take years and years.…”
His eyes were watering as he stuffed away the handkerchief. “Joe, you haven’t said anything funny in years. Just vicious.… The Buckley kid’s mother got flown back, on us, first class, and we pieced her off with five thousand dollars. But I got a feeling we ain’t heard the last of that lady. She’ll be back for more.”
“She helped me at first. Then threatened to turn me in if I didn’t liberate Timothy, too, while we were taking Cihan out. Incidentally, I’ve got some questions about that Costain, the Istanbul station-chief.”
“Not now, Joe,” answered Pearsall. “Can’t you see I’m having a nicotine-withdrawal fit? Thank Christ I ain’t quit drinking; all that can give you is wet-brain.” He heaved up and bulled his way through the crowd to a door which read ADMIRAL’S CLUB. It was a private lounge for favored passengers on an airline. Not the one I was riding. Neal was admitted with a flourish, and I tracked him to the bar.
He ordered two doubles, Beam’s sour-mash, with plain water chasers, and I asked when he had quit the other black-label sour-mash. The more famous one. He said since they had quit printing an age on that label and turned it into yak piss. We downed the two doubles.
“You did fine,” said Pearsall. “I know it was rough as a cob.”
I said I was sorry about Cornell’s death, but that he had insisted on it.
“You’re all right?”
I shrugged, staring out the huge glass windows at the big jets being towed in and out. “Who’s all right, pappy?”
“We persevere, Joe. We try to keep up,” he answered. We sat in silence, in the hubbub of the bar, for a few seconds. With the mounting whine of jets slamming off the field and the steady and impersonal announcements streaming from the hidden speakers. Pearsall sipped at his drink, looking like an over-the-weight bloodhound with a bespoke tailor.
Turning his big shot-glass, still half full, on the top of the bar, he said that he had short-circuited everybody to get me the papers on the Turkish girl and her mother.
“Glad to clear it, of course …” He was hesitant, as he always was when approaching anything which touched my private life, “But we’re not going to catch any flak, are we?”
I laughed. “Neal, they’re my house guests. I’d be dead right now if the girl hadn’t used her head. Right on target, about twenty times. Mostly intuition, because I hadn’t told her much. Peri wants to take a doctorate in psychology here in the States, and I have posted a twenty-thousand-dollar bond, which is surety she will do just that. As for morality, her mother is stronger than I am.”
“Okay, trooper.” He fixed me with the bloodhound eyes again. “Except that down through the years we’ve known each other, you’ve helped a great many people. All deserving, and all with beautifully curved asses.”
“So?” I gave my right hand the Italian obscenity shake. “When I come around promoting some hard-butted boy, you start worrying.”
He grinned and began laughing silently.
“Joseph, I sometimes tell you what to do, but never what not to do. Why did you put that Turkish terrorist leader back in prison?”
“He hurt my feelings,” I said. “Knows better now.”
We threaded our way through the crowd in the Admiral’s Club and walked back to the lounge. The impersonal voice, amplified, stated that my flight was loading for immediate departure, so I finished the drink I had carried away from the bar. Handed the empty glass to Neal Pearsall, and departed.
About the Author
Philip Atlee (1915–1991) was the creator of the long-running Joe Gall Mysteries, which is comprised of twenty-two novels published in the 1960s and 70s. Born in Fort Worth, Texas, Atlee wrote several novels and screenplays—including Thunder Road starring Robert Mitchum, and Big Jim McLain starring John Wayne—before producing the series for which he is known. An avid flyer, he was a member of the Flying Tigers before World War II and joined the Marines after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
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