The Apparatus subofficer who founded the place had also rebuilt this villa and lived here a long time. Its maintenance was a standard piece of allocation budgets. Lombar Hisst had once even had the daffy idea of coming down here, a thing which he would never do — it’s fatal for an Apparatus chief to turn his back on Voltar — and so had increased the allocation.
It was built straight in against the mountain. It had big gateposts and walls that hid six acres of grounds and its low, Roman style house.
It was all dark. I hadn’t phoned ahead. I wanted to surprise them.
The “taxi driver” put my luggage down by the dark gate. He was a veteran Apparatus personnel, a child rapist, if I remembered.
The dim light, reflected from the dash of the old Citroen, showed me that he had his hand out.
Ordinarily, I would have been offended. But tonight, in the velvet dark, gleeful with the joy of arriving back, I reached into my pocket. The Turkish lira inflates at about a hundred percent per year. When last I handled any it was about 90 Turkish lira (£T) to the U.S. dollar. But the dollar inflates too, so I guessed it must be about one hundred and fifty to one by now. Besides, it’s what we call “monkey-money”: you’re lucky if anyone will take it outside of Turkey. And my new order gave me an unlimited supply.
I pulled out two bills, thinking they were one’s and handed them over.
He took them to his dashlight to inspect them. I flinched! I had given him two one-thousand Turkish lira notes! Maybe thirteen dollars American!
“Geez,” said the driver in American slang — he talks English and Turkish just like everybody else around here — “Geez, Officer Gris, who do yer want bumped off?”
We both went into screams of laughter. The Mafia is around so much that American gangster slang is a great joke. It made me feel right at home.
In fact, I pulled out two more one-thousand lira sheets of monkey-money. I hitched up my trench coat collar. In American, I said out of the corner of my mouth, “Listen, pal, there’s a broad, a dame, a skirt, see. She’ll be getting off the morning plane from the big town. You keep your peepers peeled at the airport, put the snatch on her, take her to the local sawbones and get her checked for the itch in the privates department and if she gets by the doc, take her for a ride out here. If she don’t, just take her for a ride!”
“Boss,” he said, cocking his thumb like he had a .45, “you got yerself a deal!”
We screamed with laughter again. Then I gave him the two additional bills and he drove off happy as a clam.
Oh, it was good to be home. This was my kind of living.
I turned to the house to yell for somebody to come out and get my baggage.
Chapter 8
I had just opened my mouth when I closed it. A far better idea had occurred to me. In the country, they go to bed the moment they can’t see: they were all asleep. There should be about thirteen staff, counting the three young boys; actually they were two Turkish families and they had been with the place since the subofficer had originally rebuilt it, maybe since the Hittites had built it for all I knew. They had far more loyalty to us than to their own government and they wouldn’t have said anything even if they noticed something odd and they were too stupid to do that — just riffraff.
They lived in the old slave quarters to the right of the gate, a building hidden by trees and a hedge. The old gatekeeper, pushing ninety — which is quite old on Earth — had died and nobody had hired a new one as they couldn’t decide whose relative should have the job.
The alleged ghazi or man-in-charge was a tough, old peasant we called Karagoz after a funny Turkish stage character. But the real boss was a widow named Melahat: the name means “beauty” but she was anything else but that, being dumpy and gimlet-eyed; she kept the rest of them hopping.
My plan was to first find something wrong. I took a hand-light out of my bag — one I had stolen from the ship. On secretly silent feet, slipping like a ghost across the cobble-paved courtyard, I faded into the trees, not even letting my trench coat whisper.
Suppressing the beam of the light with two fingers across it, I looked at the grass: it was cut. I looked at the shrubs: they were pruned. I looked at the fountains and pools: they were cleaned out and running.
Disappointed, but not giving up hope, I slid into the main house. Roman dwellings are built around a court open to the sky. The fountain in the center was keeping the place cool. The marble floor was clean with no dust. The side rooms were spotless. Of course, they were kind of bare: I had not had much in the way of funds when I had been here last; the bare Romanness of the house had been Turkified by large numbers of colorful large rugs and draperies and I had sold these to passing tourists one by one — I don’t much care for flummery anyway. The staff had tried to replace them here and there with grass mats, but even these were neat and clean. No, I couldn’t find anything wrong with the main house. (Bleep)! It spoiled the joke I was about to play.
My own room was at the back, chunked into the mountain for good reasons. I was about to pick its locks and enter when I suddenly remembered what Faht Bey had said about the whore stealing my clothes! That was it!
On silent feet — I had forgotten to change my insulator boots — I crept up to the old slave quarters. I knew it was composed of two large rooms, both opening off the center front door.
I took the Colt .45 out of my pocket and silently pulled back the slide, easing a shell under the firing pin.
I turned my hand-light up to full flare.
I drew my foot back.
Then, all in one motion, I kicked the door open, pounded the glare of the light into the room and fired the gun in the air!
Ah, you should have seen the commotion!
Thirteen bodies went straight up and came down trying to burrow under beds, blanket and floor!
“Jandarma!” I bellowed. It is Turkish for “police.” And then, just to add to the confusion, in English I yelled, “Freeze, you (bleepards) or I’ll rub you out!”
Well, let me tell you, that was one confused staff! They couldn’t see who it was against the glare of the light. They were screaming in pure terror. All kinds of Turkish words came spattering out like “innocent” and “haven’t done anything!”
And to add the sugar to the coffee, an Apparatus guard contingent, alerted by the shot, came racing up the road from the archaeological workmen’s barracks, engines roaring!
Pandemonium!
Bedlam!
Within a minute the guard contingent — they go by the name of security forces and are there to “protect any valuables dug up” — came rushing into the grounds and converged on my light.
The subofficer’s own torch hit me. He hauled up. He said, “It’s Sultan Bey!”
The gardener’s small boy at once began to throw up.
The staff stopped screaming.
I started laughing.
Somebody turned on some lights. Old Karagoz pulled his head out from under a blanket. He said, “It’s Sultan Bey all right!”
The guards started laughing at Karagoz.
A couple of the staff started laughing.
But Melahat wasn’t laughing. She was kneeling on the floor. In Turkish, she was wailing at the wall, “I knew when he came back from America and found out that whore had stolen his clothes he’d be furious. I knew it. I knew it!”