The Light of the Day - Eric Ambler [44]
“One more thing,” he said, “I do not wish you to take foolish risks, but I do wish you to feel confidence in yourself if you are obliged to take necessary ones. Some men have more confidence in themselves if they are armed.”
I couldn’t help glancing at the polished pistol holster on his belt. He smiled thinly. “This pistol is part of an officer’s uniform. You may borrow it if you wish. You could put it in your bag with the radio.”
I shook my head. “No, thank you. It wouldn’t make me feel better. Worse, more likely. I’d be wondering how to explain it away if anyone happened to see it.”
“You are probably wise. Very well, that is all.”
Of course, I hadn’t the slightest intention of taking any sort of risk if I could help it. All I intended to do was to go through the motions of co-operating so as to keep Tufan happy, and somehow get my letter back from Harper before Tufan’s people pulled him in. Of course, I was quite certain that he was going to be pulled in. He had to be!
Tufan stayed behind telephoning. As I went back along the corridors with the lieutenant, I saw him glancing at me, wondering if it were better to make polite conversation with someone who seemed on such good terms with the powerful Major Tufan, or to say nothing and keep his nose clean. In the end, all he said was a courteous good night.
The Peugeot was still outside. The driver glanced at the radio I was carrying. I wondered if he knew about the modification, but he made no comment on it. We drove back to the hotel in silence. I thanked him and he nodded amiably, patting the wheel of his car. “Better on the narrow roads,” he said.
The terrace was closed. I went to the bar for a drink. I had to get the taste of the Dolmabahçe out of my mouth.
“Conspiracy,” Tufan had said. Well, that much I was prepared to concede. The whole Harper-Lipp-Fischer setup was obviously a cover for something; but all this cloak-and-dagger stuff about coups d’etat and assassination plots I really couldn’t swallow. Even sitting in the palace with a painting about a Sultan being deposed staring down from the wall, it had bothered me. Sitting in a hotel bar with a glass of brandy—well, frankly I didn’t believe a bloody word of it. The point was that I knew the people concerned—or, anyway, I had met them—and Tufan didn’t know and hadn’t met any of them. “Political context,” for heaven’s sake! Suddenly Major Tufan appeared in my mind’s eye not as a man in charge of a firing squad, but as a military old maid always looking for secret agents and assassins under her bed—a typical counter-espionage man in fact.
For a moment or two I almost enjoyed myself. Then I remembered the doors of the car and the arms and the respirators and the grenades, and went back to zero.
If it hadn’t been for those things, I thought, I could have made two good guesses about the Harper setup, and one of them would certainly have been right. My first guess would have been narcotics. Turkey is an opium-producing country. If you had the necessary technical personnel—Fischer, the “manufacturer,” Lipp, the “student”—all you would need would be a quiet, secluded place like the Kösk Sardunya in which to set up a small processing plant to make heroin, and an organizer—Harper, of course—to handle distribution and sales.
My second guess would have been some de luxe variation of the old badger game. It begins in the romantic villa on the Bosphorus graced by the beautiful, blue-blooded Princess Lipp, whose family once owned vast estates in Rumania, her faithful servitor Andreas (Fischer), and a multimillionaire sucker enslaved by the lady’s beauty. Then, just as the millionaire is preparing to dip his wick, in comes the mad, bad, dangerous husband Prince (Harper) Lipp, who threatens to spread the whole story (with pictures, no doubt) over the front pages of every newspaper from Istanbul to Los Angeles, unless … The millionaire