by Graham Marks
“Got you, boy!” exclaimed a gruff voice, of the kind that Trey knew for sure belonged to a gun-carrying type.
Everything then seemed to happen all at once.
Trey lost his grip and fell, except the hand holding his arm kept a tight grip and he found himself dangling in mid-air; but, as he felt himself being inexorably pulled back up, a bundle of sheets and pillowcases came tumbling down the chute and enveloped him, and however much of his captor was poking into the shaft. As the two of them struggled to untangle themselves, Trey felt the man lose his grip.
It was a couple of seconds before he fully took in that this sensation of freedom was also what it felt like to plunge, uncontrollably, towards the basement. However far down that was...
As he dropped like a stone, Trey was acutely aware that he could well be just moments away from becoming strawberry Jell-O. Fading into the distance above him he could hear shouting, but the only thing that concerned him now was what was going to happen below. It was as he thought that he probably wouldn’t ever get to see his parents again (and that he’d yet to send his mother a postcard from Constantinople, like he’d promised he’d do at regular intervals and from everywhere they visited) that he landed with a muffled thud which knocked the breath out of him.
Gasping for air, and batting various pieces of dirty washing out of the way, Trey attempted to stand up. This was not as easy as it might have been. The loose mound of laundry, piled in the huge wicker container that had caught him, acted much like quicksand, so that the more he tried to get out, the further down he seemed to go. When he finally surfaced he found himself, the arm of a pair of striped pyjama tops draped over his head, staring at a very confused and startled maid, unused to seeing guests come down the laundry chute.
“How do I get out of here – I mean the hotel, not...” Trey flipped the pyjama arm off his head and pointed down at where he was standing, “...this place?”
The maid frowned, in a way that made it perfectly clear she didn’t speak a word of English.
“Okay...” Trey clambered over the side of what he now saw was basically a massive laundry basket on wheels, jumped to the floor and brushed himself down. He thought for a moment, then mimed going up to a door, opening it, checking no one was there and then tiptoeing through. “Out,” he said, “so no one sees me, right?”
The maid looked none the wiser.
“Okay, how’s about this...” Trey mimed a grand arrival. “Front entrance.” He pointed to himself and shook his head; then he did a “tiny door” and the tiptoe thing and pointed to himself again, nodding and grinning. “ Back entrance! Get that?”
The maid, who really didn’t look that much older than him, shrugged, said something in Turkish and pointed behind Trey.
“Thanks a million!” Trey turned to go, then turned back. “Anybody asks? This never happened, right?”
The maid frowned again.
“Oh, okay...sure,” Trey dug into his pocket and handed her a couple of the coins his father had given him so he had some cash when he was out with Miss Renyard and the Stanhope-Leighs. “Me,” he pointed to himself and shook his head, “never here, okeedokey?”
The maid took the money and Trey left her, a puzzled expression on her face, standing by the laundry basket that had without a shadow of a doubt saved his life. Going in the direction she’d pointed he found himself in an ill-lit corridor that went past a number of rooms full of people ironing, sewing, pressing and folding clothes and sheets like robots. No one looked up, no one noticed him passing by and a couple of minutes later he found himself at the requested small door.
He opened it, expecting to find himself looking at some dingy corridor, only to find that instead the door gave onto a wide boulevard, which a swift glance told him must be at the rear of the hotel. He’d been expecting to find himself somewhere inside the hotel and without thinking, turned to go back the way he’d come but then stopped himself. What was he thinking? This was far better than getting lost trying to find his way through the warren below stairs, on top of which, back there was where the men chasing him were, no doubt right at that moment rushing down to the basement to get him. At least he’d escaped, even if he didn’t have a clue, now he had, what to do next.
As he made his way to the side of the hotel, Trey was suddenly hit by the reality of everything that had just happened. One moment he was coming back from not such a bad day spent with Arthur Stanhope-Leigh (he’d tried calling him Artie, but the boy had looked at him like he was something the dog had done), and the next his whole world had been turned upside down.
He leaned against the wall for a moment and considered what he knew for an actual fact (supposition, hunches and guesses were for the birds, as Deke Preston, PI, had put it in a recent issue of Dime Detective) and he had to admit that it didn’t add up to much at all.
But he did know a few items of 24 carat information. To start with, somebody had been on their tail ever since they’d arrived in Constantinople, and this was nothing to do with his “overactive imagination” as Ahmet had also seen them; then, there was the fact that there had been a set-to in their suite, the end result of which was blood had been spilled and his father was no longer there. And finally, the bald Russian man with the gun he’d seen arguing with his father the day before had come back and ended up chasing him!
Trey chewed his lip nervously; whichever way you looked at it, things couldn’t be much worse. But holding up a wall, moping, was not going to get anyone anywhere, least of all him. Trey squared his shoulders. It went completely against every rule in the book for a private dick to go to the police for assistance, but this wasn’t a detective story, he wasn’t a gumshoe and no matter how steely-eyed and iron-fisted he’d imagined he’d be, when it came to actually being hunted by real gunmen, truth was, he needed all the help he could get.
As he climbed up the steps leading to the road at the front of the hotel, a line from a recent novelette, Time Waits For This Man, came back to him: “A cautious guy gets to live another day”, was what one of the characters had said. Trey stopped and, sticking to the wall like a gecko, he slunk the last few yards up to the corner; he wished he had a small mirror so he could use it to see what was happening without being seen, but he didn’t and so very, very carefully he poked his head out for a swift glance.
The guy who’d written the novelette (Seymour G. Something-or-other) certainly knew his stuff when it came to survival tips. Standing right out in front of the hotel, with his back to him, was the balding man.
Trey’s heart sank. He was trapped! And then a thought occurred to him...maybe it was a bald man, not the bald man. He took another quick look, this time catching the man’s profile. No doubt about it, it was the bald man. For a moment he considered the idea of going back the way he’d come, but the last thing he felt like doing was retracing his steps. A better idea was to get away from the hotel, find somewhere reasonably out of sight where he could maybe wait for a bit to see if his dad came back, before trying his luck with the police; it was a plan, sort of. All he knew was that every instinct he owned was telling him to get away from the Pera Palas!
Which was all well and good, if only he could work out how to do it without being seen.
When his opportunity came he very nearly missed it because he was lost in thought trying to work out what to do. A large gaggle of people – locals, not hotel guests, from the way they were dressed – had appeared from somewhere, talking loudly and with much hand-waving. His brain finally clicking into gear, before they’d all moved past where he was hiding Trey dashed out and just managed to bury himself within the group, who were far too busy yakking to notice him. Keeping in the middle of the crowd, he waited until he thought it was safe and then made a break for it.
There were no shouts, no pistol shots, no pounding feet chasing after him as he ran. He’d made it!
14 DISASTER!
Trey had an extremely rough mental map of bits of the area around the Pera Palas Hotel (basically just
what he’d picked up driving with Ahmet) and, once he was totally and ab-so-lutely sure he wasn’t being chased, he began to do what he hoped was circle back so that he could find somewhere to watch from.
Getting to where he wanted to be took a lot more time than it ought to have done because he’d ended up losing his way, which hadn’t been a barrel of laughs; it was only when he recognized a Post Office his father had had Ahmet stop at the previous day that he realized he was going the wrong way. When he eventually managed to sort himself out with a safe spot to observe the front of the hotel, the bald man was, wouldn’t you know, nowhere to be seen. And to top it all, he’d taken so long to get back that the idea of waiting to see if his father turned up didn’t have a leg to stand on; hanging around any longer would just be a waste of time.
Chewing fingernails was not something Trey ever did, but he thought that now might well be the time he took the habit up...because what, apart from fret, was he going to do? His father could have been and gone for all he knew, and then there was a fact that he’d so far ignored, which was that he had no idea what the other guy chasing him looked like. It could be anyone. Trey’s shoulders slumped, his lips pursed and his brow furrowed. He was stymied. It looked like the only thing he could do now was find a policeman and hope he spoke some English...
“Numbskull! Ignoramus! Dolt and chump!”
Trey shook his head and almost gave himself a personal biff. What had he been thinking? He should get himself straight over to the Stanhope-Leigh household! And it didn’t matter that he wasn’t sure exactly where it was, he had his father’s money clip and he could get a taxi...he’d find the place somehow. Trey’s right hand felt in his jacket pocket for the clip, which wasn’t there, no matter how many times he felt for it, or turned the pocket out. It was gone.
With a terrible sinking feeling in his stomach Trey patted his jacket, his trousers and his jacket one last time, then stopped himself, took a deep breath and had to admit that the money clip was absolutely, one hundred and ten per cent definitely not there. Anywhere. At all.
“How...?” he muttered to himself. “I mean how?”
In his mind’s eye, Trey reran where he’d been and what he’d done since he’d first stuffed the clip in his jacket, back in the suite. Could it have fallen out as he ran down the corridor? Maybe, because, as there was a man with a gun right behind him, he probably wouldn’t have noticed. Had it come out as he’d plummeted down the laundry chute? More than possible, and the thought that it might have, and could at this very moment be getting laundered made him kick the wall he was standing next to. So, what was he going to do now? No money meant no taxi, and no way of getting over to the Stanhope-Leighs, wherever they were.
Okay, back to the original plan...where would be the best place to go to find a policeman?
It was as he stood, trying to remember whether he’d actually seen a policeman since he’d arrived in Constantinople, that Trey remembered something that had happened. When he’d gotten himself lost in the maze of narrow streets he’d encountered a group of kids who looked around his age, and he’d tried to get some directions from them. They’d seemed friendly enough, crowding round him and appearing to try and understand what he was saying, but they hadn’t spoken any English and ended up kind of making fun of him. It could have happened then...one of them might have picked his pocket! If he was right, what a gull he’d been!
There was nothing he could do about it now, no point in trying to retrace his steps in the vain hope that he might run into those kids again. That was a pretty stupid idea, because what on earth was he going to do if he found them – take the gang on single-handed? Ask nicely for his money back? Well, you never knew, they might take pity on him. But it was beginning to get late – Trey checked his watch, which showed the time was around 7.30 – and while it wasn’t getting dark yet he reckoned it wouldn’t be that long before dusk and he did not want to be wandering the streets of Constantinople, alone, at night. Not if he could help it.
Setting off, Trey kept an eye out for a cop, and viewed every kid he saw with the deepest suspicion. It wasn’t long before he saw that he himself was getting some pretty odd looks as he trudged the streets, and he had to admit that that was probably because he was lost again and was somewhere he really did not fit in at all.
And then, while he was standing on a corner, attempting to work out which of the five available directions he should take, and wondering if he’d actually been down any of the roads before, he saw the boy.
He was a little way down the road off to his left, looking his way, head cocked to one side; he was wearing grey trousers that were too big for him, cinched at the waist by a old brown leather belt, with a similarly large collarless white shirt half tucked in. He was wearing sandals instead of shoes.
But it was the shock of wiry black hair that Trey remembered. That and the more than slightly arrogant set of his face. He had been with the kids, one of whom he’d now convinced himself must have lifted his dad’s money clip. He’d been hanging back, observing rather than joining in. Or maybe controlling, from a distance, what was going on? Then Trey noticed there was a girl standing behind the boy, and a couple of other kids further down the street. The gang was all here.
He had, he knew, just two choices: deal with this face to face, or walk away. And there really was no choice, because, like his gramps said, you can turn your back on a problem, but turn around again and it won’t have gone away. Trey stuck his hands in his pockets and started walking.
Feeling like he should be wearing pearl-handled six-guns, leather boots with Spanish spurs and a red kerchief tied round his neck like Tom Mix, Trey came to a halt a few feet in front of the boy, who hadn’t moved an inch since they’d first spotted each other. Trey raised an eyebrow and shrugged.
“Speak English?” he asked.
“Little.”
“That’s good.”
“Why you here?”
“I think one of your friends...” Trey nodded, looking over the boy’s shoulder at the other kids, who had now moved in closer, “...I think they took something off of me. A money clip.”
“My friends?” The boy looked around, feigning surprise that there was anyone with him. “This people?”
“Yeah. This people.”
“Was mistake.”
“Mistake?” Trey did a double take. “How the heck can you pick a guy’s pocket by mistake?”
The boy brushed the question aside with a wave of his hand. “You should come me. To my father house.”
For a moment Trey didn’t know whether to laugh or land one on the boy’s nose; but, discretion being the better part of valour, he decided to save the fisticuffs for when they were really necessary. “And just why should I go to your father’s house, huh? Tell me that, why don’t you!”
“You need help.”
“You think I need help?” Trey could feel all his frustrations coming to the boil, and, even though he knew he was outnumbered, he couldn’t just stand there and take any more insults. He leaped forward, launching a terrific haymaker of a punch, which never landed. Trey was in mid-swing when everything stopped and he found himself held in an iron grip, his feet not touching the ground. There had been someone behind him...
The dark-haired boy, whose name was Evren, turned down yet another narrow side street, but this time he stopped almost immediately at the first door he came to. Opening it, he gestured for Trey to go in first, which he did.
There was no point in him doing anything else. Firstly, it was pitch black and he had not a single clue where he was, so making a break for it would be completely pointless. And second, even though Trey had attempted to pulp Evren’s face, the boy hadn’t laid a finger on him – which would have been easy enough, considering a kid about twice his size had been pinning his arms back – and he had waited until Trey had calmed down enough to talk to again.
And what he’d told Trey had made it clear he’d be stupider than a field of turnips if he didn’t go with
him. Somehow, he hadn’t yet found out how, Evren knew his name, that they’d been followed, and that his father was no longer at the hotel!
Trey walked down a short, unlit passage with a couple of doors off it, at the end of which he could see a flight of stairs leading up to the next floor. Behind him he heard Evren talking to someone in Turkish; he glanced round to see that the girl, whom he now knew was called Neyla, had come in with them. He’d also found out that Neyla, who looked like butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, was the one who’d lifted the clip off him...“by mistake”.
“Where to now?” he asked.
“Upstair.”
“Who’s there?”
“My father, he need you to talk to.”
“Does he know where my dad is?”
Evren shrugged. “Have to ask. He hasn’t tell me.”
“Okay, let’s ask.” Trey licked his lips; he was thirsty, hungry, tired and not a little scared, but there really was no turning back. He cracked his knuckles and marched up the stairs.
From a small half landing at the top of the second flight, he saw soft lamplight, heard louder voices and caught the delicious smells spilling out of a curtained doorway. It was so inviting that his fear of the unknown melted away as he felt himself being drawn up the last few stairs as if being pulled by a magnet. At the last minute, Evren gently pushed past him and went into the room first, holding the ancient brocade curtain back.
“I have him, Baba,” he said, and beckoned Trey forward with a nod of his head.
