guide’s license. Tufan had warned me against attracting attention to myself as a guide in case I was challenged and had to show it. He had said that, because I was a foreigner, that would cause trouble with museum guards. Well, trouble with museum guards was the one kind of trouble I needed at that moment; and the more the better.
Fischer and I began to walk towards the gate. Miller was within a few yards of it, and I saw a guide approach him. Miller walked straight on in without a glance at the man.
“That’s the way,” Fischer said, and began to walk a little faster.
The hooks began to thump against my legs. “Not so fast,” I said; “if these hooks swing too much they’ll show.”
He slowed down again immediately.
“You needn’t worry about the guides,” I said. “I’ve got my license. I’ll be your guide.”
As we got near the Gate, I began to give him the set speech, all about the weekly executions, the block, the fountain, the Executioner who was also the Chief Gardener.
The guide who had approached Miller was watching us, so I raised my voice slightly to make sure that he heard me and knew what I was up to. What I hoped was that he would follow us and complain about me to the guard at the gate. Instead, he lost interest and turned away.
It was disappointing, but I had another plan worked out by then.
Just inside the gatehouse there is the counter where you pay to go in. When I got to it, I handed the man three separate lira and said: “Two tickets, please.” At the same time I showed him my guide’s license.
From his point of view I had done three wrong things. I had shown a guide’s license, and yet, by asking for two tickets, revealed that I didn’t know that guides were admitted free; I had given him three lira, which a real guide would have known was enough to buy six tickets; and I had spoken to him in English.
He was a haggard man with a small black mustache and a disagreeable expression. I waited for trouble. It never came. He did absolutely nothing but glance at the license, push across one ticket, take one of the lira, and give me sixty kurush change. It was maddening. I picked the change up very slowly, hoping he would start to think, but he was gazing into space, bored to death.
“Let’s go,” Fischer said.
Out of the corner of my eye I could see Harper approaching the gate. There was nothing for it but to go on. Usually there are one or two guides touting for customers inside the Second Courtyard. In fact, it had been there that I had been challenged three years previously. That episode had ended up in my being jailed for the night. I could only count on the same thing happening again.
Of course, the same thing did not happen again. Because it was the last hour of the museum day, all the courtyard guides were either out with parties of suckers completing tours of the palace or cooling their fat arses in the nearest cafe.
I did my best. As we walked on along the right side of the Second Courtyard, I gave Fischer the set speech on the Seraglio kitchens-all about the Sung, Yuna, and Ming porcelains-but nobody as much as looked at us. Miller had already reached the Gate of Felicity and was standing there gawking at it like a tourist. When he heard our footsteps behind him, he walked through into the Third Courtyard.
I hesitated. Once we were through the gate, the Audience Chamber and the Library of Ahmed the Third would screen us from the buildings across the courtyard that were open to the public. Unless a guard came out of the manuscript library, and there was no reason why one should, there would be nothing to stop us from getting to the door to which Miller had the key.
“Why are you stopping?” Fischer asked.
“He said that we were to stop here.”
“Only if there were guides watching.”
There were footsteps on the paving stones behind us. I turned my head. It was Harper.
“Keep going, Arthur,” he said; “just keep going.” His voice was quite low, but it had an edge to it.
He was only about six paces away now, and I knew suddenly from the look on his face that I dare not let him reach me.
So I went on with Fischer through the Gate of Felicity. I suppose that obedience to Harper had become almost as instinctive with me as breathing.
As he had said, the walk was exactly sixty paces. Nobody stopped us. Nobody noticed us. Miller already had the door open when Fischer and I got there. All I remember about the outside of the door was that it had wood moldings on it arranged in an octagon pattern. Then, with Fischer behind me, I was standing in a narrow stone passage with a vaulted ceiling and Miller was relocking the door.
The passage was about twenty feet long and ended in a blank wall with a coiled fire hose inside a glass- fronted box fastened to it. The spiral stairway to the roof was of iron and had the name of a German company on it. The same company had supplied the fire hose. Miller walked to the bottom of the staircase and looked up at it appreciatively. “A very clever girl,” he said.
Fischer shrugged. “For someone who interpreted air photos for the Luftwaffe it was not difficult,” he said. “A blind man could have seen this on the enlarged photo she had. It was I who had to find the way to it, and I who had to get a key and make all the other arrangements.”
Miller chuckled. “It was she who had the idea, Hans, and Karl who worked out the arrangements. We are only the technicians. They are the artists.”
He seemed to be enjoying himself thoroughly, and looked more wolfish than ever. I felt like being sick.
Fischer sat on the stairs. Miller took off his coat and shirt and unwound the tackle from about his skinny waist. There didn’t seem any point in being uncomfortable as well as frightened, so I unbuttoned, too, and got rid of the sling and anchor rope. He attached them to the tackle. Then, he took a black velvet bag from his pocket. It was about the size of a man’s sock and had a drawstring at the top and a spring clip. He attached the clip to one of the hooks on the sling.
“Now,” he said, “we are ready.” He looked at his watch. “In an hour or so Giulio and Enrico will be on their way.”
“Who are they?” I asked.
“Friends who will bring the boat for us,” said Miller.
“A boat? How can a boat reach us?”
“It doesn’t,” said Fischer. “We reach the boat. You know the yards along the shore by the old city wall, where the boats land the firewood?”
I did. Istanbul is a wood-burning city in winter. The firewood yards stretch for nearly a mile along the coast road southeast of Seraglio Point, where the water is deep enough for coasters to come close inshore. But we were two miles from there.
“Do we fly?”
“The Volkswagen will call for us.” He grinned at Miller.
“Hadn’t you better tell me more than that?”
“That is not our part of the operation,” Miller said. “Our part is this. When we leave the Treasury we go quietly back over the kitchens until we come to the wall of the Courtyard of the Janissaries above the place where the cars park during the day. The wall is only twenty feet high and there are trees there to screen us when we lower ourselves to the ground with the tackle. Then…”
“Then,” Fischer broke in, “we take a little walk to where the Volkswagen will be waiting.”
I answered Miller. “Is Mr. Fischer to lower himself to the ground with one hand?”
“He will seat himself in the sling. Only one hand is needed to hold on to the buckles.”
“Even in the outer courtyard we are still inside the walls.”
“There will be a way through them.” He dismissed the subject with an impatient wave of his hand and looked about him for a place to sit down. There was only the iron staircase. He examined the steps of it. “Everything here is very dirty,” he complained. “That these people do not all die of disease is incredible. Immunity, perhaps. There was a city here even before Constantine’s. Two thousand years or more of plague are in this place-cholera, bubonic, la verole, dysentery.”
“Not any more, Leo,” said Fischer; “they have even cleaned the drains.”
“It is all waiting in the dust,” Miller insisted gloomily.
He arranged the nylon rope so as to make a seat on the stairs before he sat down. His exuberance had gone. He had remembered about germs and bacteria.
