Little Lost Lambs From the Colliery

by Harold Lamb

  The major opened the door for us po­litely. Rudebar started to climb out. And I saw what I hadn’t seen in the darkness of the car—that he held a drawn knife at his hip.

  I just stared at that flicker of steel. As Rudebar jammed it toward the officer’s belt. The major didn’t look ami­able any more. He stepped away quickly, and when Rudebar stabbed again, he jerked out his sabre, and chopped at the bazaar trader’s wrist. Then slammed him over the eyes with the flat of the sword.

  Rudebar grunted, and collapsed like a dummy into the dirt. Yussuf bolted past him, like a rabbit, into the dark. Willis swore softly in some language that wasn’t English. He scrambled past me, treading on my feet, to open the door on the far side. He ran two or three steps, then stopped abruptly.

  The major was talking to him, hold­ing a revolver raised in his right hand. Somehow, I found that I was out of the car, and I heard my voice arguing with the Turks. “Look here,” it cried, “what d’you think you’re doing?”

  They didn’t answer. I remember how Willis looked up and down the street as he went back to his seat, slowly, into the car. Osman was lifting Rudebar, lugging him into the taxi like a sack of wheat. The driver was picking up the knife, looking at it curiously, then hand­ing it to the major.

  “Willis,” I called, “I’ll phone our con­sul.”

  He didn’t pay any more attention to me than the others. Only Osman had something to say.

  “Eh, effendi,” the old rascal grinned, “this is the one. I waited, and, ilhamdillah—he came.” He pointed to the silent Willis. “Now,” he explained, “we go, my son and I. Allah be praised, the calamity now has come to an end.”

  No one seemed to be excited. I couldn’t think of anything to say, in Turkish. In fact I couldn’t think of any­thing at all as the taxi drove off, leaving me standing in my gateway. They all vanished like actors.

  THE first thing I did was to go to look at the four Korans. Somehow I wasn’t surprised to find that they had disap­peared. The door of the cabinet had been forced, and one of the French win­dows in that room stood open. Noth­ing except the Korans had been taken, and my house servants swore they had heard and seen—nothing. They looked at me as if I were slightly mad when I complained about thieves and assassins.

  The whole thing seemed as screwy as a bit of the Thousand and One Nights. It didn’t make sense. But I couldn’t get that miniature Koran out of my head.

  The next day I inquired at the Brit­ish and American consulates. They knew of no arrest, and had never heard of Willis. They insisted that no one an­swering to his description had come to Istanbul this last week.

  And when I went to look for Osman at his post on the bridge I couldn’t find him.

  So I searched for Bailey, who knows the answers to riddles, and found him at the Club. “I've just been eyewitness,” I said, “to a chapter of the Arabian Nights, and I want you to tell me what happened.” And I told him the whole yarn over our after-luncheon brandies. He whistled when I described the four Korans.

  “Mean to say you don’t know what they were?” he demanded.

  When I’d finished he looked at his watch. It was nearly six, just about the time that Yussuf had shown up at my house with the books. Bailey said he thought he could show me the Korans. “The Museum’s closed of course, now, but I know Ibrahim Bey, the curator, and he’ll let us in. But don’t say any­thing to him.”

  Bailey took me to a place I’d never visited. The Ev Kaf Museum. There, in a glass case, in a row of rare Korans, I found the four that I’d had in my house. They looked as if they’d never been out of the place. And I stared at the open pages of the miniature Koran I'd set my heart on.

  “That belonged,” Bailey observed, “to Sultan Ahmed, at one time. It’s real enough, you see. And I asked Ibrahim Bey if his night watchman hadn’t dis­appeared. He has, this morning. But his real name isn’t Yussuf.”

  We were walking back through the twilight, just when the gray minaret towers of the giant mosques begin to merge into the haze, and the last glow leaves the water.

  “Why,” Bailey asked suddenly, “do you think this fellow Willis, as he called himself, was an American?”

  “Why, he spoke like a New Yorker, and—and his clothes—”

  “Did you see his passport or his let­ter of credit?”

  I thought of Osman and his “Ameri­can” and I didn’t answer.

  “What do you suppose,” I hazarded, “they did with Willis—Osman and his son, the major?”

  “That’s something,” Bailey said, “you’ll never know. Their slogan is still an eye for an eye. My guess is that he’s still running, away from Istanbul.” He thought for a moment. “They’re clever, those fellows in the bazaar.”

  “I don’t see,” I objected, “what the bazaar had to do with it.”

  “No? Didn't you buy two Korans there, not long ago. That marked you for them. Smart, the way they tried you out the first night to see if you’d recog­nize a Museum piece. You didn’t.” He glanced down at a beggar asleep with his head in a basket under the remnant of a Roman Caesar’s tower. “I used to think I knew all their tricks. Now I know that I don’t. If it hadn’t been for Osman,” Bailey said, “you’d be owing the Bible House some forty-six hun­dred dollars today. And he couldn’t have known anything of their game of selling the Museum Korans by night.”

  He laughed. "I'd like to see Osman—a really honest man in the great bazaar.”

  I LOOKED over toward the street of the Book Sellers. Some lights winked out in the stalls, and I thought I recog­nized a familiar figure among the sharafs, who were closing up their stands.

  “You can if you want to,” I said. “Diogenes.”

  The sharafs began to tap on the glass, when they recognized us as Americans. I looked into the searching eyes and thought I’d never get to understand these men.

  Osman didn’t tap on the glass. He rose from behind his old stand, smiling and touching his heart and forehead. “Eh, Osman,” I asked, “how is it?”

  “Well, effendi,” he said, “praise Al­lah.”

  Then I noticed something different about his stand. The inside of the glass was decorated with English five-pound notes.

  “Twenty of ’em,” Bailey murmured. “All the cash your Willis had.”

  The Devil's Current

  OF COURSE I heard there had been a robbery in the Seraglio. There’s one every six months or so. But I didn’t know how big it was.

  You know the Seraglio’s the old palace of the Sultans, out at the point of Constantinople. It has everything from a wardrobe to a museum of arms stowed away in it. I was working there, classi­fying the early Turkish and Uigur manu­scripts with Ahmed Bey, in the library that looks like a kiosk. The Turks told me only that a few things were missing, and, God willing, would be found again. They have a great way of telling you nothing about their own affairs.

  But Ahmed Bey looked worried when he heard that I was going to leave my work for a few days’ vacation along the Dardanelles.

  “Be sure to come back,” he said, and he didn’t laugh.

  Two days later I’d forgotten about Ahmed Bey and the thieves. I was foot­loose and fancy-free, nursing an old car along the strait that divides Europe from Asia. And then I ran into Anya.

  I’ve often wondered how it would have turned out if Anya hadn’t wanted that swimming pool. She wanted so many things—odd things that most people never bothered about.

  Anya had gray eyes that slanted up, and a mass of coppery hair that she sel­dom troubled to fix. She was that care­less. Nothing seemed to make her cross. And often I heard her singing to herself.

  That first time I saw her I was climb­ing up the shore across from Nagara Point with its lighthouse and the Turkish quarantine station for incoming vessels. I was climbing up to look at a tumbledown white villa overgrown with cy­presses. And I almost fell over her, where she was sitting in the shadow watching a couple of Armenians digging.

  I apologized, and she laughed.
As if it were quite natural for a middle-aged American orientalist to climb through the cypresses and bump into her.

  “I thought,” I explained lamely, “that these fellows were digging in a ruin here.”

  Anya studied the faded whitewash on the stone villa critically. “It really is quite a ruin,” she decided, “but my men are making me a swimming pool.”

  “A what?” I asked her incredulously.

  “A pool for me to swim in. You see,” she added gravely—she spoke English well, but not with our American slur— “I am what you call a wild goose. Oh, very much a goose. I have not even a home or a country of my own.”

  Actually, that was true. Anya was Russian-born—the south of Russia, where the sun is warm and the water blue. But she remembered nothing more of it than that, because she had been eight years old when an aunt fled with her out of Odessa in that black year of 1917. She had gone to a French school, and she had studied music in Vienna, drifting through the postwar kaleido­scope while there had been money.

  I suppose it was in her Russian blood, the restlessness that wouldn’t take root anywhere. She had just enough in her purse, she admitted, to last for these months for which she had rented the white villa. After that—the wild geese always found some place to rest, didn’t they? “Perhaps I will make some man a good mistress,” she laughed.

  Now I hadn’t heard of any European woman within sixty miles of that spot on the Dardanelles. For one thing, it's a military zone, and you need an iride to enter it. Yet here was a young woman as modern as upper Fifth Avenue, in tranquil possession of a run-down Turk­ish villa in a neglected garden. And alone, as it turned out.

  Anya had judged me with one quick glance. What she thought I didn’t know. I never did know.

  "BUT she explained, as if afraid I were going to question her, that the Turk­ish police had not wanted her to swim down in the strait, among the fishermen and patrol boats. (The Turks have never acquired our Anglo-Saxon love for exer­cise, and they do their bathing within walls.)

  “It’s dangerous,” I warned her.

  “Why?”

  “The current is worse than it looks. The people here call it the Shaitan akintisi. The Devil’s current. And it really is not safe when the wind is from the north.”

  “Safe!” The word seemed to amuse Anya. She glanced down at the dark water, tideless and yet moving swiftly. It always looks dark, against the bare yellow mounds of the Asia shore. And for some reason the sky is usually cloudy over it.

  “I would like the sun,” she said quietly, “to be always shining. And I would like to be invisible in a hole in the ground, with the sun shining there.”

  The next day I came back to the villa among the cypresses, on the slim pre­tense that the Armenian diggers might turn up some coins or bits of pottery.

  Anya’s smile made me feel like a schoolboy or an aged schoolteacher. “In­deed,” she said, “we have found some­thing.”

  And so they had. Down at the bot­tom of the hole, about five feet down, some smooth black stones showed. When I saw them I climbed down, and the Armenians leaned on their shovels read­ily enough to watch while I brushed the loose dirt off the stones. They were dark with age, and no trace of mortar showed between them. That meant they had been fitted together before cement was generally used. And that was a long time ago.

  “Isn’t it a paving of some kind?” Anya asked. “It would be nice for the floor of my pool.”

  “We’ll see.” I felt a thrill of curiosity. “Those stones were laid in place more than a thousand years ago.”

  Then I noticed the Albanian. He stood respectfully enough over by the house—a heavy man with a gray mustache, wearing an old-fashioned tarboosh. Just then he was watching the shovels uncov­ering those stones.

  “Does he belong here?” I asked.

  “Oglu?” Anya nodded. “He thinks he does.”

  The Albanian, she said, had appeared four days ago with a letter in English recommending him as a reliable gate­keeper. As Anya spoke no Turkish and Oglu spoke nothing else, their conversa­tion had been limited. She’d tried to make him understand that she could not pay another servant—she already had a woman from the village to cook for her. Oglu had considered himself hired as gatekeeper, and had refused to leave.

  “Even if I haven’t a gate, and don’t pay him a piaster, he won’t go away.”

  This was nothing surprising. Turkish servants, like the Chinese, hire and fire themselves. And I imagined that Anya was not the kind to drive anyone away from her door.

  “He’s left his own home—” she nod­ded at the Asia shore—“over there.”

  “You feed him, don’t you?”

  “I have to, now. He sleeps on a rug in the hall.” She laughed. “At least he’s scared the ghosts away.”

  The ghosts, she explained, had visited the house a week ago. She hadn’t seen them, but she had heard them moving about the cellar late that night, when she had been reading herself to sleep. Rous­ing the servant woman, she had gone down to investigate with a lighted can­dle.

  AS SOON as she’d set foot on the cellar stair, she heard a door close below her. “It sounded like an old metal gate,” she explained. And she had found noth­ing at all in the cellar—no trace of a door. Only dried onions and firewood and baskets piled all over the place. “So they must have been ghosts, if they van­ished.” She looked reflectively at the solid walls of the villa, where she was training vines to grow. She’d rented the place for a year, paying the rent in full to someone in Nagara Kalessi across the strait.

  “And the next day,” she went on, “the police came.” Two officers with polished sabers had looked through the house si­lently and politely. They had spent some time inspecting the stones of the garden before going away.

  “And then?” I asked.

  She glanced at me curiously. “The day after that my diggers quit. At least they did not come back to work. So I hired these two Armenians.”

  “Then the others were Turks?”

  “Yes—why?”

  Things happen around Constantinople that you don’t expect. After a while, you take them for granted. Anya seemed more amused than bothered by these manifestations of the Turkish character.

  “I’ve lived here three years,” I said, “without beginning to know why things happen. And you—”

  “Four weeks.”

  “Well, your Turkish diggers might have been afraid of the police, or per­haps they turned up some ancient bones. The police might have been looking for a radio station—this is a military zone, and an ideal situation for a spy. Your ghost might have been a prowler who hid himself until you'd gone away.”

  “Good!” Anya clapped her hands. (Actually, every one of my guesses turned out to be wrong.) "And what about Oglu?”

  “Are you sure he eats your food and not his own?”

  “Indeed, I am certain.”

  “Then he won’t hurt you.”

  Anya rewarded me with tea, served in long Russian glasses, and we sat in the garden watching the sunset down the strait. She lay there in the wind, her unruly hair whipping across her eyes, and she said she loved it all. “Because I'm a way-worn wanderer, and this is home.”

  And I felt jealous of Oglu, who took away the glasses ceremoniously. He be­longed here, where I did not. When I left, I noticed him peering down into the excavation, in the dim afternoon light.

  “Eh, Oglu,” I said, “you eat the food of this house, and of the hanim your mistress.”

  "True, chelabi.” He stood up, folding his hands.

  “Then it will be upon your head that no harm comes to the hanim.”

  His dark eyes searched my face, and he seemed troubled. For a moment he wrestled inwardly. Then: “What does the hanim try to make at this place?”

  “A hole, Oglu. We will put water in the hole, and make a pool, for the gar­den.”

  Carefully, he considered this. “Chelabi, it will not be good. Do not make the pool.”

  When I aske
d him why not, his face changed, and he observed thoughtfully that God is great. So I had that to chew over when I drove back to my quarters at Gallipoli village. It was pretty clear that Oglu knew more about the house than we did, and that he was bothered. For two days I took tea with Anya—she didn’t seem to mind. Oglu had nothing more to say, and the diggers un­covered the whole surface of the stones.

  And I discovered that they curved, like the top of a shallow dome beauti­fully made. A pickax, bounced against the stones, rang loud. Obviously it was the roof of something.

  The day after that I noticed an aux­iliary schooner anchored off the shore. And I found Mikhail at the villa. Mik­hail Galin. Looking like a blond Greek god, in white duck pants.

  “Eheu!” He raised a lazy eyebrow at me. “You must be the professor!”

  He seemed perfectly at home there, sunning himself in the garden, even be­fore Anya came out and introduced us.

  I’d read about him and his adventures in the newspapers. Who hasn't?

  “Call me Mike.” His eyes swept over me curiously, and sought Anya. “The trouble I’ve had,” he laughed, “running this woman to earth. Had to enlist the Turkish police—stout fellows. Told them she was my runaway wife, in the sight of God. They were darned sympa­thetic.”

  “And is she?" I asked.

  He grinned.

  “No,” said Anya.

  “The lady,” Galin explained, “wants persuading. I’ve offered her a boat and a man, and the freedom of the seas. Still, she wants persuading. I anchored on the wrong shore, Professor. Tell me, isn’t this the place—Sestos and Abydos they called it—where Leander used to swim the strait to Hero’s arms?”

  “This is the traditional place,” I as­sented. “At least, Lord Byron swam the strait here.”

  “Another famous lover,” Galin said. I felt like a poor third in their com­pany. But when I made an excuse to leave, Anya asked Galin to put me up on his boat that night. And he invited me, cheerfully enough.