Hawn explained that Anna and he did not smoke.
‘You want to buy American cigarettes?’ the man said. ‘Good price. Fifty Turkish lire, two hundred Lucky Strike.’
Hawn decided this was his cue. He said, ‘What is your name?’
‘They call me Baka.’
‘Well listen, Baka, akadash. We have to go back to the hotel now. But tomorrow we will come back and I will give you some good American cigarettes. You give me raki — I give you cigarettes.’
There was a lot of shaking hands and kissing on the cheeks — though none of them attempted to kiss Anna. They at last got out of the cafe and returned to the car.
‘One thing I will say for all that,’ Hawn said, when they were inside. ‘After the first glass, that raki’s not bad stuff.’
‘Why didn’t you ask about Salak?’ she said: and Hawn nudged her violently, noticing the drivers eyes watching them in the mirror.
‘We walk before we run,’ he muttered, then tried to distract the driver by kissing her with passion.
She straightened up. ‘I don’t know about you, but I could do with a long cold drink.’ Back at the Pera Palace they ordered a bottle of Krug, non-vintage. It was the best the hotel could provide.
As they had come back in, Hawn thought the keen-looking receptionist had eyed them both with more than usual interest. Perhaps it was because, beside the rest of the clientele, they were young and good-looking. Perhaps.
CHAPTER 19
Next day they decided to keep away from Kumkapi. It was one thing for a couple of foreigners to sample the city’s low life on a casual visit; it was another for them to make a habit of it.
Hawn was an idle and indifferent sightseer; but Anna, with her precise academic nature, felt that if she did not always enjoy it, she must at least do it.
They spent the morning making the statutory round of the Blue Mosque, the Sancta Sophia, the Hippodrome and the gloomy vaults of the Roman cisterns, through endless palaces and dungeons and fortresses, all blood-soaked in history, and now peopled by gawping, shuffling tourists and their rapacious guides.
Exhausted, Hawn and Anna lunched away from the main street, Taksim, in a foul expensive restaurant where the only delicacies were the cheese and thick black coffee. In the afternoon they visited two palaces and three more mosques, and in one of the bazaars, after some exhilarating bargaining, he bought Anna a heavy silver bracelet.
The only jarring incident of the day had been the obsequious intrusion of a fellow tourist — a middle-aged Austrian, alone, bespectacled, bald, and armed with a guidebook in which he made notes on the flyleaf in pencil.
He had joined them in the Sancta Sophia, and at first had been quite useful in explaining some of the special architectural features of the church; and as they tramped between the colonnades of the Mosque of Suleymaniye, he padded along beside them like some lost dog from the Great Bazaar. His name was Otto Dietrich, he was an accountant from Vienna, and had recently been widowed.
Hawn’s first instinct was to be suspicious of him: yet the man was such a stupendous bore that Hawn’s only reaction was one of exasperation, tempered with a grudging sense of pity for the man. He realized that such creatures were one of the penalties of tourism, and of sightseeing in particular.
He and Anna made several attempts to rid themselves of him: but Otto Dietrich was no ordinary bore: he was both persistent and skilful. They only managed to shake him off finally at the entrance of the Pera Palace, where Dietrich’s farewell was accompanied by the threat that he would telephone or call round in the next few days. He kissed Anna’s hand and said, with awful sincerity, ‘I have so enjoyed myself today! I have not enjoyed myself so much for a long time. Thank you both so very much!’
That evening, feeling free at last, Hawn went out and bought yesterday’s Herald Tribune. There was no further mention of Mönch’s supposed suicide. The Herr Doktor had disappeared as thoroughly as Norman French.
Next morning, they took the precaution of telling Reception that if anyone called for them, they had gone for a day’s excursion up the Bosporus.
They decided to leave their second visit to Kumkapi until after siesta. Hawn bought a pack of two hundred king-size American cigarettes, and this time the hotel ordered for them a different car, with a different driver — an older man who seemed to speak no English. He also had little feel for the traffic, and they were soon caught up in the same laborious crawl back over the river into the wooden slums of the southwestern area of the city.
When they at last arrived, Hawn told the driver to wait in one of the narrow side streets off the square. The man obeyed impassively. Hawn and Anna got out and walked.
Nothing had changed. The hippies sat like hungry crows at the foot of the mosque and fat green flies moved leisurely among the hanging meat. They came to the cafe. Hawn was relieved to see that their ferocious host of two days ago was not there. They found a table outside, and when the waiter came they ordered two rakis; then Hawn said casually, ‘Baka?’ with a wave towards the inside of the cafe.
The waiter muttered and moved off. When he returned with the two drinks, he was accompanied by a tall man in a surprisingly smart oyster-white suit, who bowed and sat down.
‘You want to talk to Baka?’
Hawn laid the carton of cigarettes on the table. ‘Two days ago I promised to give these to Baka.’ He smiled. ‘Baka is akadash.’
‘Akadash,’ the man
