Obviously, the sudden news of my arrival, of which he had had no warning word, had perspired ten pounds off him in the last hour since the ship had called in for permission to land.
He was at the door when I came in. He was mopping his face with a huge silk handkerchief and bowing and trying to open the door wider and quivering all at the same time.
Ah, the joys of being an officer from headquarters! It scares the daylights out of people!
His wife got through the door with a tray bearing both tea and coffee and almost spilled them. Faht Bey was trying to wipe off a seat for me with his handkerchief — which only greased the chair up.
“Officer Gris,” he quavered in a high-pitched voice. “I mean Sultan Bey,” he quickly added, using my Turkish name. “I am delighted to see you. I trust you are well, that you have been well, that you will be well and that everything is all right!” (By the last he really meant, “Am I still base commander or are you carrying orders to have me disposed of?”)
I put his mind at ease at once. I threw down my orders. “I have been appointed Inspector General Overlord of all operations related to Blito-P3 — I mean Earth! At the slightest hint that you are not doing your job, cooperating and obeying me implicitly, I will have you disposed of.”
He sat down so hard in his overstuffed office chair, it almost collapsed. He looked at the orders. He was ordinarily quite swarthy. Now he was gray. He opened his mouth to speak but no words came out.
“We can dispense with formalities,” I said. “Get on your phone. Make three calls into Afyon right away. Your usual contacts, the cafe bartenders. Tell them that you have just received a secret tip that a young man, about six feet two in height, blond hair and passing himself off as a satellite technician, is actually an agent of the United States Drug Enforcement Agency, the DEA, and that he is here prying around and not to talk to him.”
Faht Bey was on that phone like a shot.
The local natives are very friendly with us. They overlook everything. They cooperate one hundred percent. They, and even the commander of the local army barracks, think we are really the Mafia. It puts us in all the way.
Faht Bey finished and looked up like an obedient dog,
“Now,” I said, “call two local toughs, give them the description and tell them to find him and beat him up.”
Faht Bey tried to protest. “But the DEA is always friendly with us! We have every agent they got in Turkey on our payroll! And, Sultan Bey, we don’t want no dead bodies in any alleys in Afyon! The police might hear of it and they’d have to go to work and they wouldn’t like that!”
I could see why they needed an Inspector General Overlord!
But Faht Bey was just quavering right on. “If you want somebody killed, why don’t you just do the usual and take him up to the archaeological dig…”
I had to shout at him. “I didn’t say kill him! I just said to beat him up. He’s got to learn it’s an unfriendly place!”
That was different. “Oh, he ain’t really a DEA man!”
“No, you idiot. He’s a Crown agent! If he learns anything, it could be your head!”
Oh, that really was different! Worse. But he made the call.
When he finished, he nervously drank both the tea and the coffee his wife had set out for me. It was nice to know how thoroughly I could upset him. I gloated. It was so different from Voltar!
“Now, are my old quarters ready?”
This upset him further. I finally got it out of him. “That dancing girl you had there got to playing around with anybody and she gave the (bleep) to four guards and stole some of your clothes and ran off.”
Well, women always were unfaithful. And factually, there aren’t any real dancing girls left in Turkey. They’ve all emigrated elsewhere and what remains are just the bawds in the big city, not real belly dancers. “Get on that phone to our contact in the Istanbul Sirkeci quarter and have him ship one in on the morning plane.”
Faht Bey’s wife came in with some more tea and coffee. Now that important things were cared for, I sat down and drank some of the coffee. It was as thick as syrup to begin with and the heaps of sugar in it made it almost solid.
The base commander was through so I said, “Are Raht and Terb here?”
He bobbed his head. “Raht is. Terb is in New York.”
I produced Lombar’s now-sealed orders to Raht. “Give these to Raht. Have him on the morning plane to the U.S. Give him plenty of expense money as he’s going to Virginia to get something ready.”
“I don’t know if I can get him a seat,” said Faht Bey. “Turkish airlines…”
“You’ll get him a seat,” I said.
He bobbed his head. Yes, he would get him a seat.
“Now,” I said, “speaking of money, here is an order.” I threw it on the desk. It was a pretty good order. I had typed it myself on the tug’s administrative machine. It said:
KNOW ALL:
The Inspector General Overlord must be advanced any and all funds he asks for any time he asks for them without any such (bleeped) fool things as signatures and receipts. It is up to the Inspector General Overlord how he spends them. And that’s that!
Finance Office
COORDINATED INFORMATION APPARATUS, VOLTAR
I had even forged a signature and identoplate stamp nobody could read. It would never go back to Voltar. Voltar doesn’t even know these Blito-P3 funds exist. Clever.
It made him blink a bit. But he took it and put it in his files and then, because I was holding out my hand, went into the back room where he kept his safe.
“Ten thousand Turkish lira and ten thousand dollars United States will do for a start,” I called after him.
He brought them out and laid the wads in my hand and I stuffed them in the pocket of my trench coat.
“Now,” I said, “open that top drawer of your desk and take out the Colt .45 automatic you keep there and hand it over.”
“It’s my own gun!”
“Steal another off some Mafia hit man,” I said. “That’s where you got this one. You wouldn’t want me to violate Space Code Number a-36-544 M Section B, would you? Alien disclosure?”
He did as he was told. He even added two extra loaded clips. I checked the weapon out. I had seen the gun there a year ago when I was snooping in his desk looking for blackmail data. It was a U.S. Army 1911A1.
But a year ago I didn’t have the rank I had now. That he had taken it off the Mafia was pure guess. But sure enough, it had three notches filed into the butt plate.
I wanted to reassure him. No sense in making him too panicky. I cocked and spun the .45 expertly and pulled the trigger. There was no bullet under the firing pin, of course. And the barrel had wound up pointed at his stomach, not his head. The gun just went click. “Bull’s-eye!” I said in English, laughing.
He wasn’t laughing. “Timyjo Faht,” I said, using his Flisten police-blotter name, and speaking in a mixture of Voltarian and English, “you and I are going to get along just fine. So long, of course, as you do everything I tell you, break your (bleep) to see to my creature comforts and keep your nose clean. There’s nothing illegal you can do that I can’t do better. So what I want around here is respect.” He also speaks English. He also deals with the Mafia. So he got my point.
I gave the Colt .45 another twirl and put it in my trench coat pocket just like I’d seen an actor called Humphrey Bogart do in an old Earth film last year.
I went back to my waiting “taxi.” I got in. In American, I said, “Home, James, and step on it!”
For, in truth, I was home. This was my kind of country. Of all the places in the universe I’d been, this was the one place that really appreciated my type. Here, I was their kind of hero. And I loved it.