by Eric Ambler
“You will sleep here,” he said. “The chef has the next bed. You will eat your meals with him in the kitchen.”
“Where is the toilet?”
“There is a pissoir across the yard in the stables.”
“And the bathroom?”
He waved his hand towards the sink. He was watching my face and enjoying himself just a bit too obviously. I guessed that this had been his own wonderful idea of a punishment for the crime of calling him a servant, and that Harper probably did not know of it. In any case, I had to protest. Without some privacy, especially at night, I could neither use the radio nor write reports.
I had put my bag down on the floor to rest my arm. Now I picked it up and started to walk back the way we had come.
“Where are you going?”
“To tell Mr. Harper that I’m not sleeping here.”
“Why not? If it is good enough for the chef it is good enough for you, a driver.”
“It will not be good enough for Miss Lipp if I smell because I am unable to take a bath.”
“What did you expect-the royal apartment?”
“I can still find a hotel room in Sariyer. Or you can get another driver.”
I felt fairly safe in saying that. If he were to call my bluff I could always back down; but I thought it more likely that I had already called his. The very fact that he was arguing with me suggested weakness.
He glared at me for a moment, then walked to the stairs.
“Put the car away,” he said. “It will be decided later what is to be done with you.”
I followed him down the stairs. At the foot of them, he turned off left into the house. I went out to the yard, left my bag in the garage, and walked back to the car. When I had put it away, I went into the house and set about finding the kitchen. It wasn’t difficult. The passage which I had glimpsed from the back entrance ran along the whole length of the house, with a servants’ stairway leading to the bedroom floor, and, on the right, a series of doors which presumably gave the servants access to the various reception rooms in front. There was a smell of garlic-laden cooking. I followed the smell.
The kitchen was a big stone-floored room on the left of the passage. It had an old charcoal range along the rear wall with three battered flues over it, and a heavy pinewood table with benches in the middle. The table was cluttered with cooking debris and bottles, and scarred from years of use as a chopping block. Empty butcher’s hooks hung from the beams. There was a barrel on a trestle, and beside it a sinister-looking zinc icebox. A doorway to one side gave on to what appeared to be a scullery. A short man in a dirty blue denim smock stood by the range stirring an iron pot. This was Geven, the cook. As I came in he looked up and stared.
He was a dark, moon-faced, middle-aged man with an upturned nose and large nostrils. The mouth was wide and full with a lower lip that quivered much of the time as if he were on the verge of tears. The thick, narrow chest merged into a high paunch. He had a three-day growth of beard, which was hardly surprising in view of the fact that he had nowhere to shave.
I remembered that he was a Cypriot and spoke to him in English. “Good evening. I am the chauffeur, Simpson. Mr. Geven?”
“Geven, yes.” He stopped stirring and we shook hands. His hands were filthy and it occurred to me that Mr. Miller was probably going to need his Entero Vioform. “A drink, eh?” he said.
“Thanks.”
He pulled a glass out of a bowl of dirty water by the sink, shook it once, and poured some konyak from an already opened bottle on the table. He also refilled his own half-empty glass, which was conveniently to hand.
“Here’s cheers!” he said, and swallowed thirstily. A sentence of Tufan’s came into my mind-“He gets drunk and attacks people.” I had not thought to ask what sort of people he usually attacked, the person with whom he was drinking or some casual bystander.
“Are you British?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“How you know I speak English?”
An awkward question. “I didn’t know, but I don’t speak Turkish.”
He nodded, apparently satisfied. “You worked for these people before?”
“A little. I drove the car from Athens. Normally, I work there with my own car.”
“Driving tourists?”
“Yes.”
“Are these people tourists?” His tone was heavily ironical.
“I don’t know. They say so.”
“Ah!” He winked knowingly and went back to his stirring again. “Are you by the week?”
“Paid you mean? Yes.”
“You had some money from them?”
“For the trip from Athens.”
“Who paid? The Fischer man?”
“The Harper man. You don’t think they really are tourists?”
He made a face and rocked his head from side to side as if the question were too silly to need an answer.
“What are they, then?”
He shrugged. “Spies, Russia spies. Everyone know-Hamul and his wife, the fishermen down below, everyone. You want something to eat?”
“That smells good.”
“It is good. It is for us. Hamul’s wife cooks for him in their room before they come to wait table in the dining room. Then, I cook for the spies. Maybe, if I feel like it, I give them what is left after we eat, but the best is for us. Get two dishes, from the shelf there.”
It was a chicken and vegetable soup and was the first thing I had eaten with any pleasure for days. Of course, I knew that I would have trouble with the garlic later; but, with my stomach knotted up by nerves the way it was, I would have had trouble with anything. Geven did not eat much. He went on drinking brandy; but he smiled approvingly when I took a second helping of the soup.
“Always I like the British,” he said. “Even when you are backing the Greeks in Cyprus against us, I like the British. It is good you are here. A man does not like drinking alone. We can take a bottle upstairs with us every night.” He smiled wetly at the prospect.
I returned the smile. It was not the moment, I felt, to tell him that I hoped not to be sharing the servants’ quarters with him.
And then Fischer had to come in.
He looked at the brandy bottle disapprovingly, and then at me. “I will show you your room,” he said.
Geven held up an unsteadily protesting hand. “ Effendi, let him finish his dinner. I will show him where to sleep.”
It was Fischer’s opportunity. “Ah no, chef,” he said; “he thinks himself too good to sleep with you.” He nodded to me. “Come.”
Geven’s lower lip quivered so violently that I was sure he was about to burst into tears; but his hand also went to the bottle as if he were about to throw it at me. It was possible, I thought, that he might be going to do both things.
I whispered hurriedly: “Harper’s orders, nothing to do with me,” and got out out of the room as quickly as I could.
Fischer was already at the staircase in the passage.
“You will use these stairs,” he said; “not those in the front of the house.”
The room to which he now showed me was at the side of the house on the bedroom floor. He pointed to the door of it.
“There is the room,” he said, and then pointed to another door along the corridor; “and there is a bathroom. The car will be wanted in the morning at eleven.” With that he left, turning off the lights in the corridor as he went.
When he had gone, I turned the lights on again. The corridor had cream lincrusta dadoes with flowered wallpaper above. I had a look at the bathroom. It was a most peculiar shape and had obviously been installed, as an afterthought, in a disused storage closet. There was no window. The plumbing fixtures were German, circa 1905. Only the cold-water taps worked.
The bedroom wasn’t too bad. It had a pair of french windows, a brass bedstead, a chest of drawers, and a big wardrobe. There was also a deal table with an ancient hand-operated sewing machine on it. At the time when women guests in big houses always bro
ught their lady’s maids with them to stay, the room had probably been given to one of the visiting maids.
There was a mattress on the bed, but no sheets or blankets. I knew it would be unwise to complain again. Before I got my bag from the garage, I went back up to the servants’ quarters and took the blankets from the cubicle which Fischer had allocated to me. Then I returned to the room. The car radio transmission wasn’t due until eleven; I had time to kill. I began by searching the room.
I always like looking inside other people’s drawers and cupboards. You can find strange things. I remember once, when I was at Coram’s, my aunt had pleurisy and the District Nurse said that I would have to be boarded out for a month. Some people with an old house off the Lewisham High Road took me in. The house had thick laurel bushes all round it and big chestnut trees that made it very dark. I hated going past the laurel bushes at night, because at that time I believed (in the way a boy does) that a madman with a German bayonet was always lying in wait ready to pounce on me from behind and murder me. But inside the house it was all right. There was a smell of Lifebuoy soap and furniture polish. The people had had a son who had been killed on the Somme, and they gave me his room. I found all sorts of things in the cupboard. There was a stamp collection, for instance. I had never collected stamps, but a lot of chaps at school did and I took one or two of the stamps and sold them. After all, he was dead, so he didn’t need them. The thing I liked most though was his collection of minerals. It was in a flat wooden case divided up into squares with a different piece of mineral in each one and labels saying what they were-graphite, galena, mica, quartz, iron pyrites, chalcocite, flourite, wolfram, and so on. There were exactly sixty-four squares and exactly sixty-four pieces of mineral, so at first I couldn’t see how to keep any of them for myself because the empty square would have shown that something was missing. I did take one or two of them to school to show the chemistry master and try to get in his good books; but he only got suspicious and asked me where I had found them. I had to tell him that an uncle had lent them to me before he would let me have them back. After that, I just kept them in the box and looked at them; until I went back to my aunt’s that is, when I took the iron pyrites because it looked as if it had gold in it. I left a small piece of coal in the square instead. I don’t think they ever noticed. I kept that piece of iron pyrites for years. “Fool’s gold” some people call it.
All I found in the room at Sardunya was an old Russian calendar made of cardboard in the shape of an icon. There was a dark-brown picture of Christ on it. I don’t read Russian, so I couldn’t make out the date. It wasn’t worth taking.
I had the windows wide open. It was so quiet up there that I could hear the diesels of a ship chugging upstream against the Black Sea current towards the boom across the narrows above Sariyer. Until about eight-thirty there was a faint murmur of voices from the terrace in front. Then they went in to dinner. Some time after nine, I became restless. After all, nobody had told me to stay in my room. I decided to go for a stroll.
Just to be on the safe side, in case anyone took it into his head to go through my things, I hid the radio on top of the wardrobe. Then I went down, out through the rear door, and skirted the front courtyard to the drive.
It was so dark there under the trees that I couldn’t really see where I was going, and after I had gone a hundred yards or so I turned back. Miss Lipp, Harper, Miller, and Fischer were coming out onto the terrace again when I reached the courtyard, and Hamul was lighting candles on the tables.
Along the side of the courtyard it was quite dark, and the weeds made it easy to move quietly over the gravel. At the entrance to the stable yard I stopped by the wall to see if I could hear anything they said.
I must have waited there for twenty minutes or more before I heard anything but an indistinct mumble. Then, one of the men laughed loudly-Miller it was-and I heard him saying seven words as if they were the climax of a joke.
“Let the dogs be fed and clothed!” he cackled, and then repeated it. “Let the dogs be fed and clothed!”
The others laughed with him, and then the mumbling began again. I went on in and up to my room.
I made the bed as comfortable as I could with the blankets, and then shaved to save myself the trouble of doing so in the morning.
Just before eleven, I took the radio out of its case, opened the back, and turned the small switch. All I got was a hissing sound. I waited. I did not trouble to use the earphone, because I did not see any reason to then. I had not even shut the windows.
On the stroke of eleven, the set made a harsh clacking noise. A moment later, a voice crackled through the tiny loudspeaker at such a high volume level that I could feel the whole set vibrating in my hands. I tried to turn the thing down, but, with the V.H.F. on, the control seemed to have no effect. All I could do was stuff the set under the blankets. Even there it seemed like a public-address system. I scrambled to the windows and shut them. The loudspeaker began repeating its message.
Attention period report. Attention period report. New arrival is Leopold Axel Miller. Belgian passport gives following data: Age sixty-three, described as importer, place of birth Antwerp. Data now also received concerning Tekelek S.A., a Swiss corporation registered in Berne. Nominal capital fifty thousand Swiss francs. Directors are K. W. Hoffman, R. E. Kohner, G. D. Bernadi, and L. A. Mathis, all of whom are believed to have personal numbered and secret accounts at Banque Credit Suisse, Zurich. Business of Tekelek said to be sale of electronic accounting machines manufactured in West Germany. Urgent you report progress. Attention period report…
I fumbled under the blankets, turned the V.H.F. switch off, and replaced the back on the set. Then I tuned in a Turkish station in case anyone had heard the noise and came to investigate.
Nobody did.
“Urgent you report progress.”
I had a cigarette packet with two cigarettes left in it. I lit one, put the other in my pocket, and went to the bathroom for a piece of toilet paper.
When I returned I locked the door and sat down to write my progress report. It was quite short.
Cook, caretaker, and local fishermen all believe suspects to be Russian spies.
I folded the toilet paper, put it inside the cigarette packet, crumpled the packet, and put the result in my pocket ready for disposal in the morning.
I felt I had done my duty for that day.
7
I woke up very early in the morning and with that nasty sick feeling that I used to have when it was a school day and I hadn’t done my homework properly the night before.
I got the cigarette packet out of my pocket and had another look at my toilet-paper report. It really was not good enough. Unless I could think of something else to say, Tufan would think that I was trying to be funny. I went and had an extremely uncomfortable cold bath, collected some more sheets of toilet paper, and started again.
Period report heard. Attempts to check door contents frustrated. Will try again today, I wrote.
I thought about the “today.” Fischer had ordered the car for eleven o’clock. With that instruction to rely upon, it would be perfectly natural for me to go and fill up the car with petrol without asking anyone’s permission; and, as long as I didn’t keep them waiting, I could take my time about it. If, when I got back, they objected to my having taken the car out by myself or wanted to know why I had been so long, I could say that I had been to buy razor blades or something, and be the injured innocent.
It was six forty-five by then and in a few minutes I would have to get ready for the seven o’clock radio contact. Two other things occurred to me that I might add to my report.
Will telephone you from garage after inspection if time and circumstances allow, or will add to this report. During conversation Lipp-Miller yesterday name “Giulio” was mentioned in connection with a boat. No other details.
Then I added the bit about the Russian spies. It didn’t look quite so bald and stupid now.
I hid the report
under the lining paper of one of the drawers, shut the french windows tight, and got the radio ready with the earphone attachment plugged in. Promptly at seven the car began transmitting.
Attention period report. Attention period report. Advice received from Swiss source that no passports have been legally issued to Harper and Lipp. In view Miller contact and Tekelek papers with Harper, possibility must be considered that correct names of Harper and Lipp are Hoffman and Kohner or vice versa. Miller may be Mathis. Imperative you report progress.
As the voice began repeating I switched off. When I had packed the set away, I got the report out and added five words.
Hoffman, Kohner, and Mathis names noted.
At least, I ought to get an “E” for Effort. I put the new report in the cigarette packet, burned the earlier one, and started to get dressed. As I did so, I heard the Lambretta start up and then go whining off down the drive. About twenty minutes later, I heard the sound of it returning. I looked out of the window and saw it disappearing into the stable yard with a bundle of partially wrapped loaves strapped to the rear seat.
Geven was back in the kitchen when I went down. He gave me a sullen look and did not answer when I said “good morning.” He was probably hung over as well as disgusted with me; but he looked such a mess anyway that it was hard to tell.
There was a pot of coffee on the range and I looked from it to him inquiringly. He shrugged, so I got a cup and helped myself. He was slicing the bread by hacking at it with a heavy chopping knife. From the neat way the slices fell I knew that the chopping knife was as sharp as a razor. As I had no desire to lose any fingers, I waited until he had put it aside before taking a piece of bread.
