The Light of the Day - Eric Ambler [25]
“Very well.” He was all business again. “You understand your position, which is that you have no position. We come now to the story you told to the post Commandant before your arrest.”
“Every word I told the Commandant was the truth.”
He opened the file. “On the face of it that seems highly unlikely. Let us see. You stated that you were asked by this American, Harper, to drive a car belonging to a Fräulein Lipp from Athens to Istanbul. You were to be paid one hundred dollars. You agreed. Am I right?”
“Quite right.”
“You agreed, even though the passport in your possession was not in order?”
“I did not realize it was out of date. It has been months since I used it. The whole thing was arranged within a few hours. I scarcely had time to pack a bag. People are using out-of-date passports all the time. Ask anyone at any international airline. They will tell you. That is why they always check passengers’ passports when they weigh their baggage. They do not want difficulties at the other end. I had nobody to check. The Greek control scarcely looked at the passport. I was leaving the country. They were not interested.”
I knew I was on safe ground here, and I spoke with feeling.
He thought for a moment, then nodded. “It is possible, and, of course, you had good reason not to think too much about the date on your passport. The Egyptians were not going to renew it anyway. That explanation is acceptable, I think. We will go on.” He referred again to the file. “You told the Commandant that you suspected this man Harper of being a narcotics smuggler.”
“I did.”
“To the extent of searching the car after you left Athens.”
“Yes.”
“Yet you still agreed to make the journey.”
“I was being paid one hundred dollars.”
“That was the only reason?”
“Yes.”
He shook his head. “It really will not do.”
“I am telling you the truth.”
He took a clip of papers from the file. “Your history does not inspire confidence.”
“Give a dog a bad name.”
“You seem to have earned one. Our dossier on you begins in fifty-seven. You were arrested on various charges and fined on a minor count. The rest were abandoned by the police for lack of evidence.”
“They should never have been brought in the first place.”
He ignored this. “We did, however, ask Interpol if they knew anything about you. It seemed they knew a lot. Apparently you were once in the restaurant business.”
“My mother owned a restaurant in Cairo. Is that an offense?”
“Fraud is an offense. Your mother was part owner of a restaurant. When she died, you sold it to a buyer who believed that you now owned all of it. In fact, there were two other shareholders. The buyer charged you with fraud, but withdrew his complaint when the police allowed you to regularize the transaction.”
“I didn’t know of the existence of these other shareholders. My mother had never told me that she had sold the shares.” This was perfectly true. Mum was entirely responsible for the trouble I got into over that.
“In 1931 you bought a partnership in a small publishing business in Cairo. Outwardly it concerned itself with distributing foreign magazines and periodicals. Its real business was the production of pornography for the Spanish- and English-speaking markets. And that became your real business.”
“That is absolutely untrue.”
“The information was supplied through Interpol in fifty-four by Scotland Yard. It was given in response to an inquiry by the New York police. Scotland Yard must have known about you for a long time.”
I knew it would do no good for me to become angry. “I have edited and sometimes written for a number of magazines of a literary nature over the years,” I said quietly. “Sometimes they may have been a little daring in their approach and have been banned by various censoring authorities. But I would remind you that books like Ulysses and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which were once described by those same authorities as pornographic or obscene, are now accepted as literary works of art and published quite openly.”
He looked at his papers again. “In January fifty-five you were arrested