Topkapi (4 page)

“You don’t like it here, sir?”

“What more is there to see? Do they start stripping later?”

I smiled. It is the only possible response to that sort of boorishness. In any case, I had no objection to speeding up my program for the evening.

“There is another place,” I said.

“Like this?”

“The entertainment, sir, is a little more individual and private.” I picked the words carefully.

“You mean a cat house?”

“I wouldn’t put it quite like that, sir.”

He smirked, “I’ll bet you wouldn’t. How about ‘
maison de rendezvous
’? Does that cover it?”

“Madame Irma’s is very discreet and everything is in the best of taste, sir.”

He shook with amusement. “Know something, Arthur?” he said. “If you shaved a bit closer and had yourself a good haircut, you could hire out as a butler any time.”

From his expression I could not tell whether he was being deliberately insulting or making a clumsy joke. It seemed advisable to assume the latter.

“Is that what Americans call ‘ribbing,’ sir?” I asked politely.

This seemed to amuse him even more. He chuckled fatuously. “Okay, Arthur,” he said at last, “okay. We’ll play it your way. Let’s go to see your Madame Irma.”

I didn’t like the “
your
Madame Irma” way of putting it, but I pretended not to notice.

Irma has a very nice house standing in its own grounds just off the road out to Kephisia. She never has more than six girls at any one time and changes them every few months. Her prices are high, of course, but everything is very well arranged. Clients enter and leave by different doors to avoid embarrassing encounters. The only persons the client sees are Irma herself, Kira, the manageress who takes care of the financial side, and naturally, the lady of his choice.

Harper seemed to be impressed, I say “seemed” because he was very polite to Irma when I introduced them, and complimented her on the decorations. Irma is not unattractive herself and likes presentable-looking clients. As I had expected, there was no nonsense about my joining him at
that
table. As soon as Irma offered him a drink, he glanced at me and made a gesture of dismissal.

“See you later,” he said.

I was sure then that everything was all right. I went in to Kira’s room to collect my commission and tell her how much money he had on him. It was after midnight then. I said that I had had no dinner and would go and get some. She told me that they were not particularly busy that night and that there need be no hurry.

I drove immediately to the Grande-Bretagne, parked the car at the side, walked round to the bar, and went in and ordered a drink. If anyone happened to notice me and remember later, I had a simple explanation for being there.

I finished the drink, gave the waiter a good tip, and walked through across the foyer to the lifts. They are fully automatic; you work them yourself with push buttons. I went up to the third floor.

Harper’s suite was on the inner court, away from the noise of Syntagmaios Square, and the doors to it were out of sight of the landing. The floor servants had gone off duty for the night. It was all quite easy. As usual, I had my pass key hidden inside an old change purse; but, as usual, I did not need it. Quite a number of the sitting-room doors to suites in the older part of the hotel can be opened from outside without a key, unless they have been specially locked, that is; it makes it easier for room-service waiters carrying trays. Often the maid who turns down the beds last thing can’t be bothered to lock up after her. Why should she? The Greeks are a particularly honest people and they trust one another.

His luggage was all in the bedroom. I had already handled it once that day, stowing it in the car at the airport, so I did not have to worry about leaving fingerprints.

I went to his briefcase first. There were a lot of business papers in it - something to do with a Swiss company named Tekelek, who made accounting machines - I did not pay much attention to them. There was also a wallet with money in it - Swiss francs,

American dollars, and West German marks - together with the yellow number slips of over two thousand dollars’ worth of traveller's cheques. The number slips are for record purposes in case the cheques are lost and you want to stop payment on them. I left the money where it was and took the slips. The cheques themselves I found in the side pocket of a suitcase. There were thirty-five of them, each for fifty dollars. His first name was Walter, middle initial K.

In my experience, most people are extraordinarily careless about the way they look after traveller’s cheques. Just because their counter-signature is required before a cheque can be cashed, they assume that only they can negotiate it. Yet anyone with eyes in his head can copy the original signature. No particular skill is required; haste, heat, a different pen, a counter of an awkward height, writing standing up instead of sitting - a dozen things can account for small variations in the second signature. It is not going to be examined by a handwriting expert, not at the time that it is cashed anyway; and usually it is only at banks that the cashier asks to see a passport.

Another thing: if you have ordinary money in your pocket, you usually know, at least approximately, how much you have. Every time you pay for something, you receive a reminder; you can see and feel what you have. Not so with traveller's cheques. What you see, if and when you look, is a blue folder with cheques inside. How often do you count the cheques to make sure that they are all there? Supposing someone were to remove the
bottom
cheque in a folder. When would you find out that it had gone? A hundred to one it would not be until you had used up all the cheques which had been on top of it. Therefore, you would not know exactly
when
it had been taken; and, if you had been doing any travailing, you probably would not even know
where
. If you did not know when or where, how could you possibly guess
who
? In any case you would be too late to stop its being cashed.

People who leave traveller's cheques about
deserve
to lose them.

I took just six cheques, the bottom ones from the folder. That made three hundred dollars, and left him fifteen hundred or so. It is a mistake, I always think, to be greedy; but unfortunately I hesitated. For a moment I wondered if he would miss them all that much sooner if I took two more.

So I was standing there like a fool, with the cheques right in my hands, when Harper walked into the room.

I WAS IN the bedroom and he came through from the sitting room. All the same he must have opened the outer door very quietly indeed, or I would certainly have heard the latch. I think he expected to find me there. In that case, the whole thing was just a cunningly planned trap.

I was standing at the foot of one of the beds, so I couldn’t move away from him. For a moment he just stood there grinning at me, as if he were enjoying himself.

“Well now, Arthur,” he said, “you ought to have waited for me, oughtn’t you?”

“I was going back.” It was a stupid thing to say, I suppose; but almost anything I had said would have sounded stupid at that point.

And then, suddenly, he hit me across the face with the back of his hand.

It was like being kicked. My glasses fell off and I lurched back against the bed. As I raised my arms to protect myself he hit me again with the other hand. When I started to fall to my knees, he dragged me up and kept on hitting me. He was like a savage.

I fell down again and this time he let me be. My ears were singing, my head felt like bursting, and I could not see properly. My nose began to bleed. I got my handkerchief out to stop the blood from getting all over my clothes, and felt about among the cheques lying on the carpet for my glasses. I found them eventually. They were bent a bit but not broken. When I put them on, I saw the soles of his shoes about a yard from my face.

He was sitting in the armchair, leaning back, watching me.

“Get up,” he said, “and watch that blood. Keep it off the rug.”

As I got to my feet, he stood up quickly himself. I thought he was going to start hitting me again. Instead, he caught hold of one lapel of my jacket.

“Do you have a gun?”

I shook my head.

He slapped my pockets, to make sure, I suppose, then shoved me away.

“There are some tissues in the bathroom,” he said. “Go clean your face. But leave the door open.”

I did as I was told. There was a window in the bathroom; but even if it had been possible to escape that way without breaking my neck, I don’t suppose I would have tried it. He would have heard me. Besides, where could I have escaped to? All he would have had to do was call down to the night concierge, and the police would have been there in five minutes. The fact that he had not called down already was at least something. Perhaps, as a foreigner, he did not want to get involved as a witness in a court case. After all, he had not actually lost anything; and if I were to eat enough humble pie, perhaps even cry a bit, he might decide to forget the whole thing; especially after the brutal way in which he had attacked me. That was my reasoning. I should have known better. You cannot expect common decency from a man like Harper.

When I came out of the bathroom, I saw that he had picked up the cheque folder and was putting it back in the suitcase. The cheques I had torn out, however, were lying on the bed. He gathered them up and motioned me towards the sitting room.

“In there.”

As I went in, he moved past me to the door and bolted it.

There was a marble-topped commode against the side wall. On the commode was a tray with an ice bucket, a bottle of brandy, and some glasses. He picked up a glass, then looked at me.

“Sit down right there,” he said.

The chair he motioned to was by a writing table under the window. I obeyed orders; there did not seem to be anything else to do. My nose was still bleeding, and I had a headache.

He slopped some brandy into the glass and put it on the table beside me. For a moment or two I felt encouraged. If you are going to have a man arrested you don’t sit him down first and give him a drink. Perhaps it was just going to be a man-to-man chat in which I told him a hard-luck story and said how sorry I was, while he got dewy-eyed over his own magnanimity and decided to give me another chance.

That
one did not last long.

He poured himself a drink and then glanced across at me as he put ice in the glass.

“First time you’ve been caught at it, Arthur?”

I blew my nose a little to keep the blood running before I answered. “It’s the first time I’ve even been tempted, sir. I don’t know what came over me. Perhaps it was the brandy I had with you. I’m not really used to it.”

He turned and stared at me. All at once his face was neither old-young nor young-old. It was white and pinched and his mouth worked in an odd way. I have seen faces go like that before and I braced myself. There was a metal lamp on the writing table beside me. I wondered if I could possibly hit him with it before he got to me.

But he did not move. His eyes flickered towards the bedroom and then back to me.

“You’d better get something straight, Arthur,” he said slowly. “That was just a little roughing up you had in there. If I really start giving you a going over, you’ll leave here on a stretcher. Nobody’s going to mind about that except you. I came back and caught you stealing. You tried to strong arm your way out of it and I had to defend myself. That’s how it’ll be. So cut out the bull, and the lies. Right?”

“I’m sorry, sir.”

“Empty your pockets. On this table here.”

I did as I was told.

He looked at everything, my driving license, my
permis de séjour
, and he touched everything. Finally, of course, he found the pass key in the change purse. I had sawn off the shank of it and cut a slot in the end so that I could use a small coin to turn it, but it was still over two inches long, and heavy. The weight gave it away. He looked at it curiously.

“You make this?”

“Not the key part. I just cut it down.” There seemed no point in trying to lie about that.

He nodded. “That’s better. Okay, well start over. We know you’re a two-bit ponce and we know you heist traveller's cheques from hotel rooms when you get the chance. Do you write the counter-signature yourself?”

“Yes.”

“So that’s forgery. Now, I’m asking again. Have you ever been caught before?”

“No, sir.”

“Sure?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have any sort of police record?”

“Here in Athens?”

“Well start with Athens.”

I hesitated. “Well, not exactly a police record. Do you mean traffic offences?”

“You know what I mean. Quit stalling.”

I sneezed, quite unintentionally, and my nose began bleeding again. He sighed impatiently and threw me a bunch of paper napkins from the drink tray.

“I had you pretty well figured out at the airport,” he went on; “but I didn’t think you’d be quite so stupid. Why did you have to tell that Kira dame that you’d had no dinner?”

I shrugged helplessly. “So that I could come here.”

“Why didn’t you tell her you’d gone to gas up the car? I just might have bought that one.”

“It didn’t seem important. Why should you suspect me?”

He laughed. “Oh brother! I know what that car you have sells for here, and I know that gasoline costs sixty cents a gallon. At the rates you charge you couldn’t break even. Okay, you get your payoffs - the restaurant, the clip joint, the cat house - but they can’t amount to much, so there must be something else. Kira doesn’t know what it is, but she knows there’s something because you’ve cashed quite a few traveller's cheques through her.”

“She told you that?” This really upset me; the least one can expect from a brothel keeper is discretion.

“Why shouldn’t she tell me? You didn’t tell her they were stolen, did you?” He drank his brandy down. “I don’t happen to like paying for sex, but I wanted to find out a bit more about you. I did. When they realized that I wasn’t going to leave without paying, they were both real friendly. Called me a cab and everything. Now, supposing
you
start talking.”