“Of course not. I just wanted to be certain.”
“Well, that makes five of us who want to be certain. Don’t you worry, Arthur. Until we’re on that plane with the loot all safe and sound, you’re not even going to the can by yourself. That’s how much you’re included.”
Fischer and Miller thought that hilariously amusing. Miss Lipp, I noticed, was keeping her attention divided between the road ahead and the cars behind.
We came to Corlu and turned right onto the main Istanbul road. Harper began to organize the change of plan.
“The first thing is to get the stuff out of the door. Hans, you’d better change places with Arthur. He can get busy now.”
“He can’t,” Fischer said. “There are seven screws on the rear door. With the door shut he cannot get at them. The door has to be open.”
“All the way open?”
“Nearly.”
Harper looked at the heavy doors. They were hinged at the rear, and would swing open against the wind. We were doing over sixty. It was obviously out of the question to take the panel off while we were on the move. He nodded. “All right. Here’s what we’ll do. As soon as we get to the airport, Elizabeth and Leo will take all the passports and get busy buying tickets and filling out passport cards and customs forms for all of us. Right?”
They nodded.
“Then I follow them inside just to check on the flight number and boarding time so that we all know what the score is. As soon as I have that, I return to the car and Arthur drives us to the parking lot. There, we open the door and get the stuff. When it’s out, Hans gets porters and we unload the baggage. We leave the car on the park. Any questions?”
“You could unload the baggage first,” said Miller; “while the car is in front.”
“Maybe. If we have plenty of time. If we don’t have too much, I’d sooner make sure of the loot first.”
“We must have some baggage for the customs,” Miss Lipp put in. “People without baggage get a personal search.”
“All right. We’ll unload just the stuff from inside the car and leave the rest until later.”
There was a murmur of agreement. Miller asked: “If there are two flights available within a short time, which do we take?”
“If one of them flies over a lot of Turkish territory-say, to Aleppo or Beirut-we take the other. Otherwise, we take the first.”
They went on discussing which city they would prefer as a destination. I was wondering what would happen if I told them about my passport. From Harper, I decided, there would be only one reaction; if they could not take me with them, yet dared not leave me because I knew too much, I would have to be eliminated from the picture altogether. There would be a corpse on the floor of the car they left behind them. On the other hand, if I waited until the passport was challenged at the airport, there wasn’t much they could do. I could yell my head off, demand to see a security official and tell him to contact Tufan. True, the three men had guns; but even if they managed to shoot their way out of the place, I would stand a better chance of coming out of it alive.
“Any more problems?” Harper asked. “No? Okay, then, let’s have the passports.”
I nearly threw up, but managed to cough instead.
Fischer asked me to get his out of his inside pocket for him. Miller passed his over and Harper flipped through the pages. I gave him Fischer’s.
Miss Lipp said: “My bag is on the floor, if you want to put them in it now.”
“Okay. Where’s yours, Arthur?” Has any boy not handed in his homework?
I handed the wretched thing to him and waited.
He lingered over my vital statistics. “Know something, Arthur? I’d have said you were a good three years older. Too much ouzo and not enough exercise, that’s your trouble.” And then, of course, his tone changed. “Wait a minute! This is over two months out of date!”
“Out of date? But it can’t be!” I know I handed in my work with the rest, sir.
“Look at it!” He leaned over and jammed it under my nose.
“But I had no trouble coming in. You see, there’s the visa!”
“What difference does that make, you stupid slob? It’s out of date!” He glowered at me and then, unexpectedly, turned to Miss Lipp. “What do you think?”
She kept her eyes on the road as she answered. “When you leave here the immigration people are mostly interested in seeing that the exit cards are properly filled in. He’ll get by there. It’s the airline-counter check that matters. They are responsible at the port of disembarkation if papers are not in order. We’ll have to write in a renewal.”
“Without a consular stamp?”
She thought for a moment. “There’s a Swiss airmail stamp in my purse, I think. We could use that. Ten to one they won’t look at it closely if there is writing across it. Anyway, I’ll keep them talking.”
“What about where we land?” asked Miller. “Supposing they catch it there?”
“That’s his worry,” Harper said.
“Not if they send him back here.”
“They wouldn’t trouble to do that. It’s not that serious. The airport police would hold him until the airline could get the Egyptian consul to come out and fix the renewal.”
“He has been nothing but a nuisance from the beginning.” This was Fischer, of course.
“He was useful enough last night,” remarked Miss Lipp. “By the way, that renewal had better be in his handwriting. Would it be in Arabic?”
“French and Arabic, both.” Harper stuck the stamp on the renewal space. “Okay, Arthur. Here you are. Write across the center of the stamp. ‘Bon jusqu’au,’ let’s see-make it April ten of next year. Then do it in Arabic. You can, I suppose?”
I did as I was told-as ever-and handed the passport back to him.
I didn’t know where I stood now. If the plane went to Athens I might be able to get away with it; I still had my Greek permis de sejour to fall back on. But if I went to Vienna, or Frankfurt, or Rome, or (hideous thought) Cairo, then I’d be completely up the creek. I would have to wait until I knew whether they were going to Athens or not, before I decided whether I would go along or try to stay. If I wanted to stay, though, it would be more difficult now. With Harper and Fischer keeping their eyes on me, and no official to single me out because of my invalid passport, yelling for help wouldn’t do much good. A quick clip on the jaw from Harper and some fast talking-“So sorry. Our friend tripped and hit his head on a suitcase. He’ll be all right in a moment. We’ll take care of him”-would be the end of that. I would have to rely upon the surveillance cars. The only trouble was that before they regained direct contact with Tufan, we would be at the airport. I would have to give the men in the cars time to draw the right conclusions and issue the necessary orders.
I could only think of one way of causing a delay. When I had finished putting back the door panel, I had slipped the screwdriver into my pocket. There wasn’t another one in the car, I knew.
While we were going through Mimarsinan, fifteen minutes or so away from the airport, I managed to ease the screwdriver from my pocket and let it slide back on the seat until I was sitting on it. A minute or two later, I pretended to stretch my legs and stuffed it deep down behind the seat cushion and below the back of the seat. If I wanted to go, I could “find” it; if I wanted to delay, I could look for it in vain on the floor. That way, I thought, I would at least have some sort of control over the situation.
And then Miss Lipp began to worry again about the Peugeot and the Opel.
“They’re still tailing us,” she said. “I don’t get it. Franz must have guessed where we’re heading for by now. What does he think he’s going to do?”
“Supposing it isn’t Franz?” Miller said suddenly.
“If it isn’t Franz, who is it?” Fischer demanded irritably. “They can’t be police or they would have stopped us. Could it be Giulio?”
“That is an imbecile suggestion,” Miller retorted. “Giulio is of our company. You are not. If you were, you would not say such a stupid thing.”