“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 US 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.
PART TWELVE
Chapter 7
I rode through the sultry night, the air like soft, black velvet on my face. To the right and left of me the sunflowers flashed along in the headlights. And beyond them, nicely obscured from the casual passing tourist, were the vast expanses of Papaver somniferum, the deadly opium poppies, the reason the Apparatus had settled here in the first place.
It is an interesting story as it sheds some insight on how the Apparatus works, and tonight, when we found ourselves held up by a procession of badly tail-lit carts, I went over it.
Long ago, an Apparatus cultural and technical survey crew, made up of a subofficer and three Apparatus peoplographers, had been interrupted by the outbreak of what they call, on Earth, World War I. They had missed their pickup ship, were unable to get to the rendezvous and thereafter had dodged across this border and that, taking advantage of the turmoils of war. They had gotten into Russia when it was writhing with revolution and had fallen south through the Caucasus and, from Armenia, had crossed the border into Turkey.
They had hidden out on the slopes of Buyuk Agri, a 16,946-foot peak known otherwise as Mount Ararat. They put their call-in signal there in the hopes that its steady radio beep and the prominence of the mountain would eventually bring an Apparatus search ship.
But the war came to an end and still no rescue ship, so, pretty chilled with altitude and privation, they slogged their way westward, vowing amongst them not to stop until they found warmer weather. It must have been a bitter trip as the high plateau of eastern Turkey is no garden spot. But they made it, assisted by the fact that Turkey, which had been in the war on the wrong side, was in the chaos of defeat and victor dismemberment.
They came at length to Afyon. It was warmer. And before them they saw the remarkable tall black rock and fortress, Afyonkarahisar. They put their call-in signal up in the ruins and made shift to survive, hiding in the war-ripped countryside. They could actually speak Turkish by this time and the land abounded with deserters.
Nineteen hundred twenty, Earth date, came. A huge Greek expeditionary force was approaching Afyon to grab a big slice of Turkey. The Turkish general, Ismet Pasha, not only checked the Greek Army but actually defeated the invaders twice and in the very shadow of Afyonkarahisar.
Caught up in all this, the Apparatus subofficer and the three peoplographers chose sides, took uniforms and weapons from the dead and actually fought in the second battle as Turkish soldiers.
The following month somebody in the Apparatus, probably looking for an excuse for a vacation, noticed they had a cultural and technical survey team missing. It was not a very important survey—it was the twenty-ninth Blito-P3 had had in the last several thousand years. The Timetable did not call for an invasion of that planet for another hundred and eighty years or more but this Apparatus officer got permission and a scoutship and was probably surprised to find the call-in beeping away on the top of Afyonkarahisar. So the Apparatus squad was finally rescued after nearly seven years.
This survey team subofficer, probably himself looking for a sinecure, came back with a wonderful idea.
Old Muhck, Lombar’s predecessor, had listened.
It seemed that during World War I, the rest of the world had begun to adopt a Russian idea called “passports”; it had failed utterly to save the Russian government from revolution and was silly, so, of course, the other governments were avidly taking it up. In the predictable future, and long before the invasion was scheduled, it would be pretty hard to infiltrate Blito-P3.
Old Muhck was fairly competent. He knew very well that the Apparatus would be called upon to furnish preinvasion commotion someday. This consists of people in various countries to run around hysterically in the streets screaming, “The invaders are coming! Run for your lives!”; power plant operators who blow up the works; Army officers who order their troops to flee; and newspaper publishers who come out with headlines, Capitulate to the Invader Demands Before It Is Too Late! That sort of thing. Standard tradecraft.
But there was a clincher on the idea: finance!
Now, every intelligence organization has the primary problem, when working inside enemy lines, of finding money to do so. Voltarian credits are no good and can’t even be exchanged. Intelligence is costly and robbing banks calls attention to oneself. Imported gold and diamonds in such quantities can be traced. Getting hold of enemy money to spend is rough!
The subofficer had a piece of news. A country on Blito-P3, the United States of America, had passed a piece of legislation called “The Harrison Act” in 1914 and was pushing it into heavy effect by this date of 1920, Earth time. It regulated the traffic of narcotics, namely opium. So, of course, the price of opium was going to go sky-high. And that’s what they raised around Afyon. It was the world center for it!
As “Turkish veterans” on the winning side, they had an “in.” And what an “in”! They were war heroes and revolutionary pals with the incoming regime of Mustafa Kemal Pasha Ataturk!
So old Muhck, operating on the principle that governs all Voltar, really (“There’s lots of time if you take it in time”), authorized the project. The cost was small. He probably had some people he didn’t want around but to whom he owed favors. And the Blito-P3 base was born.
Up to Lombar’s tenure, nobody had thought much about the base. It just ran on as a local, almost unsupervised operation. Then Lombar, assisted by Muhck’s old age and, some say, some judiciously introduced poison, took over the Apparatus. This was in the early 1970s, Earth time.
Lombar, casting about for ways and means to accomplish his own ambitions, had his attention drawn to this obscure base by a report that the United States of America, a country he was now aware existed on Blito-P3, had decided that most of the opium which was slipping past Rockecenter’s control was coming from Turkey. And they undertook to pay huge sums to Turkey to stop growing opium.
Instead of reacting with alarm, Lombar knew exactly what would happen. The payments would fall into the hands of the Turkish politicians and they would not pass them on to the farmers a
nd hardship would occur in the Afyon district.
And Lombar suddenly saw his chance on Voltar. For Voltar had never had any involvement with narcotics: their doctors used gas anesthetics and cellologists could handle most pains. He had reviewed drug history in the politics of Blito-P3 and found that a country named England had once totally undermined a population and overthrown the government of China using opium. From there, he planned his own advancement on Voltar.
He helped subsidize the starving farmers by buying their unwanted surplus. He increased the importance of Section 451 in the Apparatus and apparently after a couple of management failures, had found an Academy officer to take it over—namely me.
The US subsidy was soon canceled. But if the Apparatus had been “in” before, it was the hero of the day now. It was king here in Afyon and Lombar soon would be king on Voltar if he could figure out how to do it. Apparatus Earth base personnel were still the descendants of Turkish war heroes and, like every other Turkish business, they had plaster heads of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the father of modern Turkey, all over the place. Long live the revolution! Long live opium! Long live the Apparatus! And long live His Majesty Lombar, if he could turn the trick on Voltar.
My contemplation ended. Carts or no carts, we had arrived back at the mountain. And there sat my villa!
It had once belonged to some Turkish pasha, a noble of the long-departed regime and probably, before him, to some Byzantine lord and before him some Roman lord and before him some Greek lord and before him who knows: Turkey is the most ruin-strewn place on Blito-P3. Crossroads between Asia and Europe, most of the civilized Earth races you hear about had, at one time or another, colonized Turkey or run an empire from it! It is an archaeologist’s fondest dream: a land absolutely chock-a-block with ruins!
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 (£) to the US 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.
PART TWELVE
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!”
They thought I’d been to America.
One of the small boys, about eight, came crawling over and started tugging at the bottom hem of my raincoat. His name was Yusuf, I recalled. “Please don’t shoot Melahat,” he pleaded. “Please, Sultan Bey! We all pooled our money and we bought you new clothes. And we even stole some extras from tourists. Don’t shoot Melahat. Please, Sultan Bey!”
Oh, it was a great homecoming. The guard subofficer said, “I told them they better put on a gatekeeper. Serves them right.” And then he stepped close and whispered, “Thanks for the tip about that Crown agent.” And the guards drove off laughing.
I pointed the gun at the gardener. “Your grounds are in terrible shape. Get up right now and fix them.” And he scuttled out like a rocket, followed by his two helpers, both boys. I pointed the gun at the cook. “Get me something to eat and then clean up your kitchen, it’s filthy.” And he scuttled out. I pointed the gun at the head cleaning girl, “Get those rooms dusted! Right now!” And she and two small girls who help her left with speed. And then I pointed the gun at Karagoz, “Your accounts are probably in total disorder. Get me a full accounting by dawn!”