countersigned authorizing you to take it through customs, but you’d better check everything out yourself.”
I did so. The carnet showed that the car was registered in Zurich, and that the owner, or at any rate the person in legal charge of it, was a Fraulein Elizabeth Lipp. Her address was Hotel Excelsior, Laufen, Zurich.
“Is Miss Lipp your friend?” I asked.
“That’s right.”
“Are we going to meet her now?”
“No, but maybe you’ll meet her in Istanbul. If the customs should ask, tell them she doesn’t like eight- hundred-and-fifty-mile drives, and preferred to go to Istanbul by boat.”
“Is she a tourist?”
“What else? She’s the daughter of a business associate of mine. I’m just doing him a favor. And by the way, if she wants you to drive her around in Turkey you’ll be able to pick up some extra dough. Maybe she’ll want you to drive the car back here later. I don’t know yet what her future plans are.”
“I see.” For someone who had told me that I wasn’t to ask questions, he was being curiously outgoing. “Where do I deliver the car in Istanbul?”
“You don’t. You go to the Park Hotel. There’ll be a room reservation for you there. Just check in on Thursday and wait for instructions.”
“Very well. When do I get that letter I signed?”
“When you’re paid off at the end of the job.”
Stele Street was down at the docks. By an odd coincidence there happened to be a ship of the Denizyollari Line berthed right opposite; and it was taking on a car through one of the side entry ports. I could not help glancing at Harper to see if he had noticed; but if he had he gave no sign of the fact. I made no comment. If he were simply ignorant, I was not going to enlighten him. If he still really thought that I was foolish enough to believe his version of Fraulein Lipp’s travel needs and arrangements, so much the better. I could look after myself. Or so I thought.
There was a garage halfway along the street, with an old Michelin tire sign above it. He told the cab driver to stop there and wait. We got out and went towards the office. There was a man inside, and when he saw Harper through the window he came out. He was thin and dark and wore a greasy blue suit. I did not hear Harper address him by any name, but they appeared to know one another quite well. Unfortunately, they spoke together in German, which is a language I have never learned.
After a moment or two, the man led the way through a small repair shop and across a scrap yard to a row of lock-up garages. He opened one of them and there was the Lincoln. It was a gray four-door Continental, and looked to me about a year old. The man handed Harper the keys. He got in, started up, and drove it out of the garage into the yard. The car seemed a mile long. Harper got out.
“Okay,” he said. “She’s all gassed up and everything. You can start rolling.”
“Very well.” I put my bag on the back seat. “I would just like to make a phone call first.”
He was instantly wary. “Who to?”
“The concierge at my apartment. I want to let him know that I may be away longer than I said, and ask him to disconnect the battery on my car.”
He hesitated, then nodded. “Okay. You can do it from the office.” He said something to the man in the blue suit and we all went back inside.
Nicki answered the telephone and I told her about the battery. When she started to complain that I had not wakened her to say good-by, I hung up. I had spoken in Greek, but Harper had been listening.
“That was a woman’s voice,” he said.
“The concierge’s wife. Is there anything wrong?”
He said something to the man in the blue suit of which I understood one word, Adressat. I guessed that he had wanted to know if I had given the address of the garage. The man shook his head.
Harper looked at me. “No, nothing wrong. But just remember you’re working for me now.”
“Will I see you in Istanbul or back here?”
“You’ll find out. Now get going.”
I spent a minute or two making sure that I knew where all the controls were, while Harper and the other man stood watching. Then I drove off and headed back towards Athens and the Thebes-Larissa-Salonika road.
After about half a mile I noticed that the taxi we had used on the drive out there was behind me. I was driving slowly, getting used to the feel of the car, and the taxi would normally have passed me; but it stayed behind. Harper was seeing me on my way.
About five miles beyond Athens I saw the taxi pull off the road and start to turn around. I was on my own. I drove on for another forty minutes or so, until I reached the first of the cotton fields, then turned off down a side road and stopped in the shade of some acacias.
I spent a good half hour searching that car. First I looked in the obvious places: in the back of the spare- wheel compartment, under the seat cushions, up behind the dashboard. Then I took off all the hub caps. It’s surprising how big the cavities are behind some of them, especially on American cars. I knew of a man who had regularly smuggled nearly two kilos of heroin a time that way. These had nothing in them, however. So I tried the tank, poking about with a long twig to see if any sort of a compartment had been built into or onto it; that has been done, too. Again I drew a blank. I would have liked to crawl underneath to see if any new welding had been done, but there was not enough clearance. I decided to put the car into a garage greasing bay in Salonika and examine the underside from below. Meanwhile, there was an air-conditioner in the car, so I unscrewed the cover and had a look inside that. Another blank.
The trouble was that I did not have the slightest idea what I was looking for-jewelry, drugs, gold, or currency. I just felt that there must be something. After a bit, I gave up searching and sat and smoked a cigarette while I tried to work out what would be worth smuggling into Turkey from Greece. I could not think of anything. I got the carnet out and checked the car’s route. It had come from Switzerland, via Italy and the Brindisi ferry, to Patras. The counterfoils showed that Fraulein Lipp had been with the car herself then. She, at least, did know about ferrying cars by sea. However, that only made the whole thing more mysterious.
And then I remembered something. Harper had spoken of the possibility of a return journey, of my being wanted to drive the car back from Istanbul to Athens. Supposing that was the real point of the whole thing. I drive from Greece into Turkey. Everything is perfectly open and aboveboard. Both Greek and Turkish customs would see and remember car and chauffeur. Some days later, the same car and chauffeur return. “How was Istanbul, friend? Is your stomach still with you? Anything to declare? No fat-tailed sheep hidden in the back? Pass, friend, pass.” And then the car goes back to the garage in the Piraeus, for the man in the blue suit to recover the packages of heroin concealed along the inner recesses of the chassis members, under the wheel arches of the body, and inside the cowling beside the automatic transmission. Unless, that is, there is a Macedonian son of a bitch on the Greek side who’s out to win himself a medal. In that event, what you get is the strange case of the respectable Swiss lady’s disreputable chauffeur who gets caught smuggling heroin; and Yours Truly is up the creek.
All I could do was play it by ear.
I got the Lincoln back on the road again and drove on. I reached Salonika soon after six that evening. Just to be on the safe side, I pulled into a big garage and gave the boy a couple of drachmas to put the car up on the hydraulic lift. I said I was looking for a rattle. There were no signs of new welding. I was not surprised. By then I had pretty well made up my mind that it would be the return journey that mattered.
I found a small comfortable hotel, treated myself to a good dinner and a bottle of wine at Harper’s expense, and went to bed early. I made an early start the following morning, too. It is an eight-hour run from Salonika across Thrace to the Turkish frontier near Edirne (Adrianople, as it used to be called), and if you arrive late, you sometimes find that the road-traffic customs post has closed for the night.
I arrived at about four-thirty and went through the Greek control without difficulty. At Karaagac, on the Turkish side, I had to wait while they cleared some farm trucks ahead of me. After about twenty minutes, however, I was able to drive up to the barrier. When I went into the customs post with the carnet and my other papers, the place was practically empty.
Naturally, I was more concerned about the car than with myself, so I simply left my passport and currency declaration with the security man, and went straight over to the customs desk to hand in the carnet .
Everything seemed to be going all right. A customs inspector went out to the car with me, looked in my bag, and merely glanced in the car. He was bored and looking forward to his supper.
