The Underground Cities Contract, page 7
“In a few minutes, or perhaps a little longer, someone will come to pick up what’s left of the money in the kitchen closet. When that’s done, you take all the papers we’ve worked on and burn them. Then go home. Go straight home.”
Taking the battered cashmere hat from my coat pocket, I put it on and blew her a kiss. When I closed the door, Peri was still staring at me. I was nearly to the landing of the downward steps when the door to Melissa Buckley’s bedroom opened. She beckoned with a scarlet-tipped forefinger.
“The fun and games are over, Melissa,” I said impatiently, and was striding past when she grabbed my coat sleeve and whirled me around.
“They’re over all right, lover, if you don’t step in here a minute.”
The slender American divorcée with the trained abdomen was shook up. When she removed her gripping hand from my coat sleeve, it was trembling.
I stepped out of the hallway into her bedroom and closed the door behind me. “All right,” I said.
“I heard it,” she said, face tight with tension, so that you could see what she would look like in another ten years. “You’re busting that Cihan bastard out of the can ahead of time, aren’t you? Moved your timetable up. Well, I got news for you, good buddy. Promise to bring Timothy out with him and get us both free of this country, or I’ll bust you out, to the local fuzz.”
I didn’t answer her too fast, because I know exactly what screaming international headlines are built on.
“Doesn’t make sense, Melissa,” I said gently. “Everything’s planned to take one man out. And from a different section of the prison than the one Tim is in. We can’t switch at the last minute; we haven’t planned for it. Besides, I learned only an hour ago that the Turkish army has flushed the underground group holding our three hostages. They’re on the run, might get caught, and that would mean no prison break at all.”
Melissa turned and took a long belt from a bottle of Johnny Walker Scotch on her bedside table. It was nearly empty; she was fighting to keep control of herself. In a slurred voice, she told me that the Turkish Supreme Court had that morning refused to review Timothy’s eight-year sentence. He would have to serve every minute of it.
“Hard time, Sir Spook,” she said, wheeling back on me. “Real hard for a fourteen-year-old boy …” She drew the locks of blond hair off her forehead; it was beaded with sweat. “So I wrote a letter about everything you and Miss True-Heart have been planning and left it with a musician friend. One you don’t know, one who doesn’t work the club where I work. If I don’t stop him, in three hours he is going to deliver this letter to the head of the Turkish secret police for Istanbul. I got his name and address from Mr. Karga.”
She sagged onto the edge of the bed, sat there staring at me. And I thought, my God, how many of these people have I seen who think they have a leverage point and no idea of what is involved.
“All right, Melissa,” I agreed, sitting beside her and patting her clenched hands. “We’ll bring Tim out, too. But you’ve got to keep Karga out of it, and you’ve got to talk to Mike Costain about getting yourself out of Turkey before the jailbreak. Is your passport in order; have you got cholera and smallpox stamps in your passport?”
“Yes.” Her thin hands were relaxing.
“Okay. I can’t tell you where we’re taking the American technicians, but it will be out of the country. Tim will go with them. I’m going to meet Mike Costain now. Within an hour, he’ll be here to tell you what to do. The most important thing is to recover that letter from your musician friend. Otherwise, if he slips, or you do, nobody gets out. Okay?” She nodded her head, and I kissed her on the cheek and went out into the hall again. Hurried down the stairs fearing to hear heavier footsteps from the small lobby below. Or the whine of the small German-made elevator, ascending. Neither sound came, and I stepped out of the lobby into sleeting rain. Went leaning forward, with head bowed, up Mesrutiyet Caddesi.
Past the small, deserted park overlooking the Golden Horn, down the hill. Incredibly, at one corner, stumbling over a shoeshine emporium, Istanbul-style. Outside, in the bitter weather, the shine box framed by a miniature brass-and-bronze turreted castle, highly polished. Past Fischer’s Restaurant, its entrance looking smug and warm behind little fans of international flags in the window. Finally, past the palatial gates and buildings of what must be the grandest consulate in the world. Britain, in Istanbul.
The only place to buy a Herald-Tribune in that part of town was around the corner, in Galatsaray. At the newsstand next to the post office, across the street from the impressive French high school. I pawed through the papers covered with plastic covers and bought the latest Herald-Trib they had, two days old. When I turned away, someone touched my arm and I faced Mike Costain. His black-Irish eyebrows were damp under a trilby-kind of hat, and I followed him across the street and past the fence guarding the French high school.
He turned up a narrow alley, past boardings in front of new construction, and we stood side by side at the far end of the alley in the private-enterprise toilet stalls. After he had pissed and left, I lingered for a few seconds. I wanted to be sure I was through, because I have a very nervous sphincter.
I make no great case for royalty, thinking most of their remnants are pretentious yo-yo’s, but something in the autobiography of the Duke of Windsor impressed me very much. He stated that most of his public appearances while monarch had not been very meaningful, but that they all went with the job. That he would advise all now or future kings never to pass up a toilet. Fairs, openings of bridges and new buildings, et cetera, would always be there, but on the way, a smart king would use every toilet that was offered.
Mike Costain was waiting for me halfway down the boarded tunnel leading to the frantic bustle on Istiklal. I asked him for a light, and he flipped flame under my small, wretched Turkish cigar. And murmured that I was in trouble.
“Oh?”
“Yes. Hour ago, the Turkish government received information that a ranking contract agent from the United States was in Istanbul. For the purpose of taking Yana Cihan, the convicted terrorist, out of Sagmalcilar Prison. That the attempt to free him would be made within the next few days.”
The little cigar wouldn’t draw, not without an oral hernia. I dropped it, and with the toe of my boot, pulverized the poor tobacco.
“Kind of tears it, doesn’t it?” I asked.
“Yes. They claim to have pictures and dossiers on you, your entire record. Going back to your war service in the Marine Corps.”
“Who’s complaining?”
“The Soviet Union. You were seen entering our embassy in Ankara, by somebody who knew you. They backtracked it from there. The Turkish secret police called me, and I denied it, but they know about the apartment, of course. There’s a tanker plane at the airport waiting for you to come aboard. It’s headed for Spain.”
“Oh, shit …” I rubbed my chin. I hadn’t been kidding when I told Peri that the flanks were collapsing and the middle in danger. Mike Costain didn’t know, or hadn’t told me, about the near ambush of the group holding our hostages. I made a mental note to check that out later. Melissa Buckley, the fake belly dancer, was only a hair away from turning me in. And the Russians, officially, already had.
Men kept trudging back and forth, past us, along the wood-covered tunnel to the toilet.
“We don’t have much time,” said Costain impatiently. “The tanker plane has been held since early afternoon. We’ve got another passport and papers waiting for you at the airport. You’re carried as a crew member, only way to get you out this fast.”
I nodded, said “excuse me,” and walked back up the boarded lane again. Had another good piss and delighted the cretin behind the small table at the door by leaving fifty kurush instead of half that. Then walked back down to stand beside Costain again.
“If you’ve got a home,” I said, “go to it. Forget about me. I’ll still take the man out of Sagmalcilar. Let the rebels know that the meet is a day early. I can pull the trigger on it tomorrow.”
Costain bristled. “You’ll wind up in that same prison,” he said. “The thing’s fallen apart. Every cop in Turkey, and the military, too, are already looking for you. They’ve got pictures and prints on you.”
“Hush. I knew there were too many people in it, so in Ankara I made the timing more adjustable.…” I told him about Melissa, her threat, and the letter to the Turkish police. He was to go back to the apartment, jollytime her, and take her to meet the musician of unknown address who had the incriminating letter. When that was recovered, Mrs. Buckley was to be held in close confinement, under guard, for at least forty-eight hours.
He was to recover what was left of the money in the apartment closet.
Then he was to call and release the tanker plane to wherever it was going, without me. I would not see or contact him again, but he had to neutralize Melissa immediately.
Costain was still protesting when I walked past him and out the end of the passage. Into the sleeting rain lashing at bending figures along Istiklal.
Chapter 21
For the next two hours, I walked around Istanbul, killing time. The assignment had come unraveled on me, and unless I could establish a new operating base and move up the timing for the prison break, my effectiveness in Turkey was ended. I could not go near any of the agency contacts without being picked up, and the only person who could possibly help was Peri Cicek, the little university graduate.
I had her address; she lived on the Asiatic side of Istanbul, near Camlica Hill in Uskudar. But I knew she had to finish cleaning out the papers in the apartment I had left so abruptly, and would probably go shopping before returning to her home. The ferry trip took fifteen or twenty minutes, and I had no idea how far she lived from the dock on the Uskudar side.
So I ducked into bufes, coffee houses, and pastry shops one after another. To keep out of the cold rain. Had a fruit drink or coffee, stretched it as long as I could, and walked on to another. Nobody noticed me, with my sodden cashmere hat and turned-up raincoat collar. They were too busy talking, gesticulating, and being emphatic. The Turks are lively, argumentative people and frame every point with their hands.
After dark, I rode the ferry across to Uskudar. Then it took me another hour to locate Peri’s flat. The way to it led through a mounting maze of narrow, twisting streets without signs on them. The rain had stopped temporarily but was still dripping on me from the overhanging roofs and balconies of ancient wooden houses. And when I questioned shopkeepers or housewives, they were uniformly polite and kept pointing upward.
The entrance to her flat was a narrow hallway beside a large mechanic’s garage, which was still open and busy. And her private doorway was at the far end of a dark hall on the third floor, which to an American meant fourth. There was no bell, and when I knocked, nothing happened. I knocked again.
There were quick steps inside the apartment, the door was thrown open, and the little Turkish girl stood facing me. Wearing an old housecoat and plastic curlers in her hair. She stared at me, her hands flew up to her cheeks, and she turned and bolted back into the apartment.
There was remote conversation in a far room, and slower footsteps came toward me. A matronly Turkish lady with jet hair streaked by silver came to smile at me and motion me inside. I introduced myself, and she said that she was Madame Cicek, Peri’s mother, and that I was not to mind the girl’s precipitous flight. She had not known I was coming and had been embarrassed by the hair curlers.
I apologized for the intrusion, and she smiled again and brought me a tiny cup of scalding coffee. The furniture in the sitting room was massive, baroque, and battered, but had once been expensive. Bibelots of polished brass, alabaster, and ivory were everywhere, and a cut-glass chandelier, too big for the room. The family pictures on the walls were prisoned in fading gilt, and below them, Madame Cicek and I sat stiffly and talked politely of nothing at all.
When Peri came in, with her hair in order and wearing a simple black linen frock, her mother excused herself. The girl sat down across from me in the chair her mother had vacated, but on the leading edge of it, and again I noticed that she had uncommon good legs.
“Hate me, don’t you?” I asked.
“Indeed I do.” The careful hairdo went imperiled as she tossed her head. “You have no manners, to come here without warning.”
I sighed and stared at my wet boots. “Miss Fairy Flower, I apologize for that. But circumstances … Do you have anything stronger to drink than this crankcase oil?” I motioned at my coffee cup.
She flourished out, short skirt swirling around her pantyhose, and came back with a carafe of water, two glasses, and a bottle of J & B Scotch with only a few drinks left in it. Explaining that she and her mother did not drink much, a fact I had already surmised from her disaster with the cognac in the agency apartment, but that she had recently had a party for some of her university friends.
I blessed her university friends and had a belt of the remaining Scotch. Adding, after I had chased it with water, that she had nice legs, and that I would like to see her in a bikini. She flushed and tried to pull her short skirt down.
“Peri,” I went on, “I’m trying to promote a busted flush, and need a hideyhole in the worst way.”
She was staring; nothing found on the Rosetta Stone helped her decipher that. I tried again.
“With the Turkish police after me, I cannot go to any big hotel. I cannot contact Mike Costain, the agency head here. Unless I can find somewhere to hide and work from, to move the action up, the whole deal is over. I need a small hotel room, taken by somebody else, a place in a pension, with a private entrance, something like that.…”
Peri stared at me steadily. “Everybody is nervous around you. Mr. Costain, Mrs. Buckley. Even Mr. Karga, the lawyer, who had never seen you before. Why do you need to come to me, a part-time clerk and translator, for help? A not-very-pretty girl whom you kissed because you thought it would help her morale?”
I poured another drink, which left only one. This girl was dangerous enough, truthful enough, to uproot romance branch and bloom.…
“I come to you because there is nobody else in Istanbul I can trust.”
She nodded and walked into the back of the apartment again. I stared at the ormolu ornaments around me, the faded grandeur, and wondered how regal had been the previous estate of the Ciceks, before the remnant of the family took refuge three dingy floors above a garage.
Peri returned, catching me in the act of pouring the last drink of her college-reunion Scotch, and said that I was to be a guest in their home. She would help in any way she could.
“Not what I meant, and you know it,” I said doggedly. “I only need somebody who is not obviously my size, blond and American, to get an anonymous room. You know that the Turkish police are looking for me; my presence here would endanger—”
“Hush. We could get you such a room, but who would act as your courier? Some badmash who would sell you to the police for a few kurush?”
Peri tossed me a heavy wool housecoat and instructed me to put it on after stripping myself. I caught the coat and asked about her father.
“Dead, nearly three years now. Do you think we would be living in this pigsty if he were alive?”
In another twenty minutes, I was installed in the bedroom away from the street, obviously hurriedly evacuated by Peri, and my wet clothes and boots were being cleaned by the Cicek women. Somewhere out of sight, hot water was being sloshed; they were busy giving each other instructions and advice, and once Peri came into the bedroom to ask about my prepressed slacks. I said to just iron them down the crease, and if that didn’t work, no matter.
In another hour, Peri had gone. To make several telephone calls and to meet someone at the Uskudar Ferry slip. I sat in a chair, staring out through a smudged window pane at grimy slate roofs and wishing I had some more Scotch. Instead, Madame Cicek, in a cotton dress with the sleeves rolled up, brought me some more scalding coffee in a tiny cup.
I had just finished having a bath in an undersized tub, shampooing my hair and forcing the soap out with the hand shower, when Peri returned. She had a bulky parcel brought by the courier on the ferry. It was a thick, top-secret Turkish intelligence manual containing pictures and dossiers on the leading underground conspirators. The members of the Turkish People’s Liberation Army.
She sat beside me on the couch, rain still glistening on her hair, as we went through it. Matching the names and pictures of the men I had bribed. All but one checked out, and I suspected that he was too minor to be included in the intelligence manual. I was handing it back to Peri, because it was numbered and had to be returned to the office from which it had been pilfered, when I noticed a face on the second page.
A bold face, only one of three, in a line under a larger head-shot.
“That one!” I said. “Who is he? That’s the tall cat who talked to me in the subway car, when the line was blocked off to passengers. The one who gave me the yikmak identification word.”
Peri leaned over, and her glance followed my pointing finger. She turned to face me, horrified.
“But that is Kumandan Atmaca, head of the secret police in Istanbul.”
That was a jolt. “Just the same, he’s the one who cleared out the little subway and chatted me up. Couldn’t be a member of the underground movement, too?”
“Never! He’s notorious for torturing and maiming students who are only suspected of being involved.”
I whistled. No wonder Commander Atmaca could stop traffic on the little subway train … I seemed to be finding losers everywhere I turned. I have always thought that things are easier to manage when you are rich and smart, but I have always known that it is far better to be lucky. Mine seemed to have run out.
