Crook's Tour

Synopsis:Retired London bank manager Henry Pulling, attending the cremation of his mother, was surprised to encounter his aunt Augusta, whom he hadn't seen in over half a century. When she took him back to her flat to share some sherry, they were greeted by Wordsworth, his aunt's very large black "valet," who, it soon became obvious, took care of more than the housekeeping. On leaving the flat, Henry discovered that he had left behind a package containing the urn holding his mother's ashes. When Wordsworth returned it to him, Pulling noted it had been tampered with. The next day, Henry discovered why; the police called on him and he learned that over half the urn's contents had been replaced by pot. Later, his aunt informed him that Wordsworth had disappeared and she was enlisting Henry to accompany her to Istanbul, first stop Paris. She did not reveal her reasons for going, but he was led to believe they involved a certain Mr. Visconti, who seemed to have figured prominently in his aunt's past. On the way to Paris, Aunt Augusta exhibited an amazing knowledge of sex practices in every corner of the globe and an uncommon concern over getting through customs, arranging for Henry to take her red suitcase through customs for her. When someone whom Aunt Augusta called her banker showed up at their Paris hotel rooms, she had Henry fetch her red case and then leave the room--but not before he noticed that the bag was crammed with ten-pound notes. Henry, pondering the situation as he strolled along the Boulevard des Capucines, was taken aback to come upon Wordsworth. It was a most unsatisfactory meeting, with accusations being hurled. Henry was glad to get away and more than astonished to have Wordsworth pop up again at the Gare de Lyon, just as he was boarding the Orient Express to join his aunt and continue their mysterious journey. To Henry's relief, Wordsworth did not accompany them. As the train pulled out, Pulling discovered that his aunt had a new friend--a very young lady with the improbable name of Tooley, who was also on her way to Istanbul. It was while they were passing from Swilzerland into Italy that Tooley told Henry what amounted to a short life story--a father in the CIA, a boyfriend she hoped was waiting for her in Istanbul, a feeling that she was pregnant and the fact that the strange-smelling, strange-looking cigarettes she was sharing with him were pot and had been sold to her in Paris by a fellow who could have been none other than Wordsworth. On arriving in Milan, Aunt Augusta was met by one Mario, a white-haired chap who called her Mother and proved to be Mr. Visconti's son; he gave her a parcel in a plain brown wrapper just before the train pulled out. Reminiscing about her life in Rome and Milan with Mr. Visconti, Henry's aunt made it perfectly clear (although Henry had an extraordinarily difficult time getting the message) that she had once been a parttime prostitute. When Henry remonstrated with her about her "sordid" past, Aunt Augusta took the offensive and denigrated him for leading a mean, purposeless life. Pulling left his aunt's compartment in a daze.

I felt glad that I had not lost my temper, but nonetheless, I was shocked and needed a little time for reflection, so I climbed down onto the platform and began to look around me for food. It was the last chance before Belgrade next morning. I bought six ham rolls off a trolley and a bottle of chianti and some sweet cakes--it was not so good a meal as a restaurant would have provided, I thought sadly, and what a dreary station it was. Travel could be a great waste of time. This was the hour of the early evening when the sun had lost its heat and the shadows fell across my small lawn, the hour when I would take my yellow watering can and fill it from the garden tap....

Tooley's voice said, "Would you mind getting me some more Coke?"

"There's nowhere on the train to keep it cold."

"I don't mind warm Coke."

Oh, the absurdity of it all, I could have cried aloud, for now the man with the trolley wouldn't take a pound note and I had to give him two of the dollars that I was carrying in my pocketbook against emergencies, and he refused any change, though I knew the exact rate and told him the lire required.

We sat and talked as Tooley drank her warm Coke. At Venice, the train waited nearly an hour, and dark was falling when we pulled out. I saw nothing at all--we might have been leaving Clapham for Victoria.

It was nearly 9:30 in the evening when we arrived at Sezana. A surly passport man looked at us as though we were imperialist spies. Old women heavily laden with small parcels came down the unplatformed track making for the third-class. They emerged from everywhere, like a migration, even from between the goods trucks that stood uncoupled all along the line, looking as though they would never be linked together. No one else joined the train; no one got off. There were no lights, no waiting room in sight; it was cold and the heating had not been turned on. On the road beyond--if there was a road--no cars passed. No railway hotel offered a welcome.

"I'm cold,." Tooley said. "I'm going to bed." She offered to leave me a cigarette, but I refused. I didn't want to be compromised on this cold frontier. Another uniformed man looked in and regarded my new suitcase on the rack with hatred.

At moments during the night, I woke--in Ljubljana, in Zagreb--but there was nothing to be seen except the lines of stationary rolling stock that looked abandoned, as though nothing was left anywhere to put in the trucks, no one had the energy anymore to roll them and it was only our train that steamed on, impelled by a foolish driver who hadn't realized that the world had stopped and there was nowhere for us to go.

At Belgrade, Tooley and I had breakfast in the station hotel--dry bread and jam and bad coffee--and we bought a bottle of sweet white wine for lunch, but they had no sandwiches. I let my aunt sleep on; it was not a meal worth waking her to share.

In the fields, horses moved slowly along, dragging harrows. We were back in the preindustrial age. Tooley and I were both depressed, yet it wasn't the lowest point of our journey; that came as evening fell in Sofia and we tried to buy something to eat, but no one would take any money but Bulgarian except at an exorbitant rate; and even when I agreed to that, there were only tepid sausages on sale made of (continued on page 162)crook's tour(continued from page 143) some coarse unrecognizable meat and chocolate cake made of a chocolate substitute and pink fizzy wine. I hadn't seen my aunt all day except once, when she looked in on us and refused Tooley's last bar of chocolate and said sadly and unexpectedly, "I loved chocolate once. I am growing old." Eventually, I went down the corridor to find her.

I found her with a Baedeker opened and a map of Istanbul spread over her knee. She looked like a general planning a campaign.

"I'm sorry about yesterday afternoon, Aunt Augusta," I said. "I really didn't mean to say anything against Mr. Visconti. After all, I don't know the circumstances. Tell me more about him."

"He was a quite impossible man," my aunt said, "but I loved him and what he did with my money was the least of his faults. For example, he was what they call a collaborator. During the German occupation, he acted as advisor to the German authorities on questions of art, and he had to get out of Italy very quickly after the death of Mussolini. Göring had been making a big collection of pictures, but even he couldn't easily steal pictures from places like the Uffizi, where the collection was properly registered; but Mr. Visconti knew a lot about the unregistered--all sorts of treasures hidden away in palazzos almost as crumbling as your uncle Jo's. Of course, his part got to be known and there'd be quite a panic in a country place when Mr. Visconti appeared, taking lunch in the local taverna. The trouble was he wouldn't play even a crooked game straight or the Germans might have helped him escape. He began to take money from this marchesa and that not to tip off the Germans--this gave him liquid cash or sometimes a picture he fancied for himself, but it didn't make him friends and the Germans soon suspected what was going on. Poor old devil," she added, "he hadn't a friend he could trust. Mario was still at school with the Jesuits and I had gone back to England when the War began."

"What happened to him in the end?"

"I thought for a long time he'd been liquidated by the partisans. Mr. Visconti, as I told you, was not a man for fighting with knives or fists. A man who fights never survives long, and Mr. Visconti was great at survival. Why, the old sod," she said with tender delight, "he survives to this moment. He must be eighty-four, if he's a day. He wrote to Mario and Mario wrote to me, and that's why you and I have taken the train to Istanbul. I couldn't explain all that in London, it was too complicated, and anyway, I hardly knew you. Thank goodness for the gold brick, that's all I can say."

"The gold brick?"

"Never mind. That's quite another thing."

"You told me about a gold brick at London Airport, Aunt Augusta; surely . . . ?"

"Of course not. It's not that one. That was quite a little one. Don't interrupt. I'm telling you now about poor Mr. Visconti. It seems he's fallen on very lean times."

"Where is he? In Istanbul?"

"It's better you shouldn't know, for there are people still after him. Oh, dear, he certainly escaped the hard way. Mr. Visconti was a good Catholic, but he was very, very anti-clerical; and yet, in the end, it was the priesthood that saved him. He went to a clerical store in Rome, when the Allies were coming close, and he paid a fortune to be fitted out like a monsignor, even to the purple socks. He said that a friend of his had lost all his clothes in a bombing raid and they pretended to believe him. Then he went with a suitcase to the lavatory in the Excelsior Hotel, where we had given all those cocktail parties for the cardinals, and changed. He kept away from the reception desk, but he was unwise enough to look in at the bar--the barman, he knew, was very old and short--sighted. Well, you know, in those days, a lot of girls used to come to the bar to pick up German officers. One of these girls--I suppose it was the approach of the Allied troops that did it--was having a crise de conscience. She wouldn't go to her friend's bedroom, she regretted her lost purity, she would never sin again. The officer plied her with more and more cocktails, but with every drink, she became more religious. Then she spied Mr. Visconti, who was having a quick whiskey in a shady corner. 'Father,' she cried to him, 'hear my confession.' You can imagine the tension in the bar, the noise outside as the evacuation got under way, the crying children, people drinking up what there was in the bar, the Allied planes overhead. . . ."

"How did you hear the story, Aunt Augusta?"

"Mr. Visconti told Mario the essentials when he got to Milan, and I can imagine the rest. Especially, I can picture poor Mr. Visconti in his purple socks. 'My child,' he said, 'this is no fit place for a confession.'

" 'Never mind the place. What does the place matter? We are all about to die and I am in mortal sin. Please, please, Monsignor.' She had noticed his socks by this time. What worried Mr. Visconti most was the attention she was provoking.

" 'My child,' he told her, 'in this state of emergency, a simple act of contrition is enough.' But oh, no, she wasn't going to be fobbed off with something cheap like that--'Bargain sale, owing to closing down of premises.' She went and knelt at his knees. 'Your Grace,' she exclaimed.

She was used to giving officers a superior rank--it nearly always pleased a captain to be called a major.

" 'I am not a bishop,' Mr. Visconti said. "I am only a humble monsignor.' Mario questioned his father closely about this episode, and I have really invented nothing. If anyone has invented a detail, it is Mario. You have to remember that he writes verse plays.

" 'Father,' the girl implored, taking the hint, 'help me.'

" 'The secrecy of the confessional,' Mr. Visconti pleaded back--they were now, you see, pleading to each other, and she pawed Mr. Visconti's knee, while he pawed the top of her head in an ecclesiastical way. Perhaps it was the pawings that made the German officer interrupt with impatience.

" 'For God's sake,' he said, 'if she wants to confess, Monsignor, let her. Here's the key to my room, just down the passage, past the lavatory.'

"So off went Mr. Visconti with the hysterical girl--he remembered just in time to put down his whiskey. He had no choice, though he hadn't been to confession himself for thirty years and he had never learned the priest's part. Luckily, there was an air conditioner in the room breathing heavily, and that obscured his whispers, and the girl was too much concerned with her role to pay much attention to his. She began right away; Mr. Visconti had hardly time to sit on the bed, pushing aside a steel helmet and a bottle of schnapps, before she was getting down to details. He had wanted the whole thing finished as quickly as possible, but he told Mario that he couldn't help becoming a little interested, now she had got started, and wanting to know a bit more. After all, he was a novice--though not in the ecclesiastical sense.

" 'How many times, my child?' That was a phrase he remembered very well from his adolescence.

" 'How can you ask that, Father? I've been at it all the time ever since the occupation. After all, they were our allies, Father.'

" 'Yes, yes, my child.' I can just see him enjoying the chance he had of learning a thing or two, even though his life was in danger. Mr. Visconti was a very lecherous man. He said, 'Always the same thing, my child?'

"She regarded him with astonishment. 'Of course not, Father. Who on earth do you think I am?'

"He looked at her kneeling in front of him and I am sure he longed to pinch her. Mr.Visconti was always a great pincher. 'Anything unnatural, my child?'

" 'What do you mean, unnatural, Father?'

"Mr. Visconti explained.

" 'Surely that's not unnatural, Father?' (continued on page 224)

crooks tour(continued from page 162)

"Then they had quite a discussion about what was natural and what wasn't, with Mr. Visconti almost forgetting his danger in the excitement, until someone knocked on the door and Mr. Visconti, vaguely sketching a cross in a lopsided way, muttered what sounded through the noise of the air conditioner like an absolution. The German officer came in in the middle of it and said, 'Hurry up, Monsignor. I've got a more important customer for you.'

"It was the general's wife, who had come down to the bar for a last dry martini before escaping north and heard what was going on. She drained her martini in one gulp and commanded the officer to arrange her confession. So there was Mr. Visconti, caught again. There was an awful row now in the Via Veneto, as the tanks drove out of Rome. The generals wife had positively to shout at Mr. Visconti. She had a rather masculine voice and Mr. Visconti said it was like being on the parade ground. He nearly clicked his heels together in his purple socks when she bellowed at him, 'Adultery. Three times.'

" 'Are you married, my daughter?'

" 'Of course, I'm married. What on earth do you suppose? I'm Frau General'--I've forgotten what ugly Teutonic name she had.

" 'Does your husband know of this?'

" 'Of course he doesn't know. He's not a priest.'

" 'Then you have been guilty of lies, too?'

" 'Yes, yes, naturally, I suppose so, you must hurry, Father. Our car's being loaded. We are leaving for Florence in a few minutes.'

" 'Haven't you anything else to tell me?'

" 'Nothing of importance.'

" 'You haven't missed Mass?'

" 'Oh, occasionally, Father. This is wartime.'

" 'Meat on Fridays?'

" 'You forget. It is permitted now, Father. Those are Allied planes overhead. We have to leave immediately.'

" 'God cannot be hurried, my child. Have you indulged in impure thoughts?'

" 'Father, put down yes to anything you like, but give me absolution. I have to be off.'

" 'I cannot feel that you've properly examined your conscience.'

" 'Unless you give me absolution at once, I shall have you arrested. For sabotage.'

"Mr. Visconti said, 'It would be better if you gave me a seat in your car. We could finish your confession tonight.'

" 'There isn't room in the car, Father. The driver, my husband, myself, my dog--there simply isn't space for another passenger.'

" 'A dog takes up no room. It can sit on your knee.'

" 'This is an Irish wolfhound, Father.'

" 'Then you must leave it behind.' Mr. Visconti said firmly; and at that moment, a car backfired and the Frau General took it for an explosion.

" 'I need Wolf for my protection, Father. War is very dangerous for women.'

" 'You will be under the protection of our Holy Mother Church,' Mr. Visconti said, 'as well as your husband's.'

" 'I cannot leave Wolf behind. He is all I have in the world to love.'

" 'I would have assumed that with three adulteries--and a husband--'

" 'They mean nothing to me.'

" 'Then I suggest,' Mr. Visconti said, 'that we leave the general behind.' And so it came about. The general was dressing down the hall porter because of a mislaid spectacle case when the Frau General seated herself beside the driver and Mr. Visconti sat beside Wolf in the back. 'Drive off,' the general's wife said.

"The driver hesitated, but he was more afraid of the wife than the husband. The general came out into the street and shouted to them as they drove off--a tank had stopped to give precedence to the staff car. Nobody paid any attention to the generals shouts except Wolf. He clambered all over Mr. Visconti, thrusting his evil-smelling parts against Mr. Visconti's face, knocking off Mr. Visconti's clerical hat, barking furiously to get out. The Frau General may have loved Wolf, but it was the general whom Wolf loved. Probably the general concerned himself with its food and its exercise. Blindly, Mr. Visconti fumbled for the handle of the window. Before the window was properly open, Wolf jumped right into the path of the following tank. It flattened him. Mr. Visconti, looking back, thought that he resembled one of those biscuits they make for children in the shape of animals.

"So Mr. Visconti was rid of both dog and general and was able to ride in reasonable comfort to Florence. Mental comfort was another matter and the general's wife was hysterical with grief. Mr. Visconti, as I have told you, was not a religious man, and the consolations he offered, I can well imagine, were insufficient and unconvincing. Perhaps he spoke of punishment for the Frau General's sins--for Mr. Visconti had a sadistic streak--and of the purgatory that we suffer on earth. Poor Mr. Visconti, he must have had a hard time of it all the way to Florence."

"What happened to the general?"

"He was captured by the Allies, I believe, but I'm not sure whether or not he was hanged at Nuremberg."

"Mr. Visconti must have a great deal on his conscience."

"Mr. Visconti hasn't got a conscience," my aunt said with pleasure.

• • •

For some reason, an old restaurant car with a kind of faded elegance was attached to the Express after the Turkish frontier, when it was already too late to be of much use. My aunt rose early that day and the two of us sat down to excellent coffee, toast and jam: Aunt Augusta insisted on our drinking in addition a light red wine, though I am not accustomed to wine so early in the morning. Outside the window, an ocean of long undulating grass stretched to a pale-green horizon. There was the talkative cheerfulness of journey's end in the air and the car filled with passengers whom we had never seen before: A Vietnamese in blue dungarees spoke to a rumpled girl in shorts, and two young Americans, the man with hair as long as the girl's, joined them, holding hands. They refused a second cup of coffee after carefully counting their money.

"Where's Tooley?" my aunt asked.

"She wasn't feeling well last night. I'm worried about her, Aunt Augusta. Her young man's hitchhiking to Istanbul. He may not have arrived. He may even have gone on without her."

"Where to?"

"She's not sure. Katmandu or Vientiane."

"Istanbul is a rather unpredictable place," Aunt Augusta said. "I'm not even sure what I expect to find there myself."

"What do you think you'll find?"

"I have a little business to do with an old friend, General Abdul. I was expecting a telegram at the St. James and Albany, but none came. I can only hope that there's a message waiting for us at the Pera Palace."

"Who is the general?"

"I knew him in the days of poor Mr. Visconti," my aunt said. "He was very useful to us in the negotiations with Saudi Arabia. He was Turkish ambassador then in Tunis. What parties we had in those days at the Excelsior. A little different from the Crown and Anchor and a drink with poor Wordsworth."

The scenery changed as we approached Istanbul. The grassy sea was left behind and the Express slowed down to the speed of a little local commuters' train. When I leaned from the window, I could see over a wall into the yard of a cottage; I was in talking distance of a red-skirted girl, who looked up at us as we crawled by; a man mounted a bicycle and for a while kept pace with us. Birds on a red tiled roof looked down their long beaks and spoke together like village gossips.

I said, "I'm awfully afraid that Tooley's going to have a baby."

"She ought to take precautions, Henry, but in any case, it's far too early for you to worry."

"Good heavens, Aunt Augusta, I didn't mean that . . . how can you possibly think . . . ?"

"It's a natural conclusion," my aunt said. "You have been much together. And the girl has a certain puppy charm."

"I'm too old for that sort of thing."

"You are a young man in your fifties," Aunt Augusta replied.

The door of the restaurant car clanged and there was Tooley, but a Tooley transformed. Perhaps it was only that she had put on less shadow, but her eyes seemed to be sparkling as I had never known them to before. "Hi," she called down the length of the car. The four young people turned and looked at her and called back, "Hi," as though they had been long acquainted. "Hi," she greeted them in return, and I felt a small ache of jealousy, irrational as the irritations of early morning.

"Good morning, good morning," she said to the two of us; she seemed to be speaking a different language to the old. "Oh, Mr. Pulling, it's happened."

"What's happened?"

"The curse. I've got the curse. I was right, you see. The jolting of the train, I mean--it did do it. I've got a terrible bellyache, but I feel fabulous. I can't wait to tell Julian. Oh, I hope he's at the Gulhane, when I get there."

"You going to the Gulhane?" the American boy called across.

"Yes, are you?"

"Sure. We can all go together."

"That's fabulous."

"Come and have a coffee, if you've got the money."

"You don't mind, do you?" Tooley said to my aunt. "They're going to the Gülhane, too."

"Of course we don't mind, Tooley."

"You've been so kind, Mr. Pulling," she said. "I don't know what I'd have done without you. I mean, it was a bit like the dark night of the soul."

I realized then that I preferred her to call me Smudge.

"Go gently on the cigarettes, Tooley," I advised her.

"Oh," she said, "I don't need to economize now. They'll be easy to get, I mean at the Gülhane. You can get anything at the Gülhane. Even acid. I'll be seeing you both again before we go, won't I?"

But she didn't. She had become one of the young now, and I could only wave to her back as she went ahead of us through the customs. The two Americans still walked hand in hand and the Vietnamese boy carried Tooley's sack and had his arm round her shoulders to protect her from the crowd that was squeezing to get through the barrier into the customs hall. My responsibility was over, but she stayed on in my memory, like a small persistent pain that worries even in its insignificance; doesn't a sickness as serious as cancer start in just such a way?

I wondered whether Julian was waiting for her. Would they go on to Katmandu? Would she always remember to take her pill? When I shaved again more closely at the Pera Palace, I found I had missed in the obscurity of my coach a small dab of lipstick upon the cheek. Perhaps that was why my aunt had jumped to so wrong a conclusion. I wiped it off and found myself wondering at once where Tooley was now. I scowled at my own face in the glass, but I was really scowling at her mother in Bonn and her father somewhere in the CIA, and at Julian afraid of castration, and at all those who ought to have been looking after her and yet felt no responsibility at all.

Aunt Augusta and I had lunch in a restaurant called Abdullah's and then she took me around the tourist sights--the Blue Mosque and Santa Sophia--but I could tell all the time that she was worried. There had been no message waiting for her at the hotel.

"Can't you telephone to the general?" I asked her.

"Even at the Tunis embassy," she said, "he never trusted his own line."

We stood dutifully in the center of Santa Sophia--the shape, which had been beautiful once, perhaps, was obscured by ugly Arabic signs painted in pale khaki, so that it looked like the huge drab waiting hall of a railway station out of peak traffic hours. A few people stood about, as if looking for the times of trains, and there was a man who carried a suitcase.

"I'd forgotten how hideous it was," my aunt said. "Let's go home."

Home was an odd word to use for the Pera Palace, which had the appearance of an Eastern pavilion built for a world's fair. My aunt ordered two rakis in the bar, which was all fretwork and mirrors--there was still no message from General Abdul, and for the first time, I saw my aunt nonplused.

"When did you last hear from him?" I asked.

"I told you I heard from him in London, the day after those policemen came. And I had a message from him in Milan through Mario. Everything was in order, he said. If there had been any change, Mario would have known."

"It's nearly dinnertime."

"I don't want any food. I'm sorry, Henry. I feel a little upset. Perhaps it is the result of the train's vibration. I shall go to bed and wait for the telephone. I cannot believe that he will let me down. Mr. Visconti had a great belief in General Abdul, and there were very few people whom he trusted."

I had dinner by myself in the hotel in a vast restaurant that reminded me of Santa Sophia--not a very good dinner. I had drunk several rakis, to which I was unaccustomed, and perhaps the absence of my aunt made me a little light-headed. I was not ready for bed, and I wished I had Tooley with me as a companion. I went outside the hotel and found a taxi driver there who spoke a little English. He told me he was Greek but that he knew Istanbul as well as if it were his own city. "Safe," he kept on saying, "safe with me," waving his hand as though to indicate that there were wolves lurking by the walls and alleys. I told him to show me the city. He drove down narrow street after narrow street with no vista anywhere and very little light, and then drew up at a dark and forbidding door with a bearded night watchman asleep on the step. "Safe house," he said, "safe, clean. Very safe," and I was reminded uncomfortably of something I would have gladly forgotten, the house with the sofas behind the Messaggero.

"No, no," I said, "drive on. I didn't mean that." I tried to explain. "Take me," I said, "somewhere quiet. Somewhere you would go yourself. With your friends. For a drink. With your friends."

We drove several miles along the Sea of Marmara and came to a stop outside a plain, uninteresting building marked West Berlin Hotel. Nothing could have belonged less to the Istanbul of my imagination. It was three square stories high and might well have been built among the ruins of Berlin by a local contractor at low cost. The driver led the way into a hall that occupied the whole ground space of the hotel. A young woman stood by a small piano and sang what I supposed were sentimental songs to an audience of middle-aged men in their shirt sleeves sitting at big tables, drinking beer. Most of them, like my own driver, had big gray mustaches, and they applauded heavily and dutifully when the song was over. Glasses of beer were placed in front of us and the driver and I drank to each other. It was good beer, I noticed, and when I poured it on top of all the raki and the wine I had already drunk, my spirits rose. In the young girl, I saw a resemblance to Tooley, and the men reminded me of another name--"Do you know General Abdul?" I asked the driver. He hushed me quickly. I looked around again and realized that there was not another woman in the big hall except the young singer, and at this moment the piano stopped and, with a glance at the clock, which marked midnight, the girl seized her handbag and went out through a door at the back. Then, after the glasses had been refilled, the pianist struck up a more virile tune and all the middle-aged men rose and put their arms around each other's shoulders and began to dance, forming circles that they enlarged, broke and formed again.

They charged, they retreated, they stamped the floor in unison. No one spoke to his neighbor; there was no drunken jollity; I was like an outsider at some religious ceremony of which he couldn't interpret the symbols. Even my driver left me to put his arm round another man's shoulders, and I drank more beer to drown my sense of being excluded. I was drunk, I knew that, for drunken tears stood in my eyes, and I wanted to throw my beer glass on the floor and join the dancing. But I was excluded, as I had always been excluded. Tooley had joined her young friends. My aunt was probably talking about things that mattered to her with General Abdul. She had greeted her adopted son in Milan more freely than she had ever greeted me. She had said goodbye to Wordsworth in Paris with blown kisses and tears in her eyes. She had a world of her own to which I would never be admitted, and I would have done better, I told myself, if I had stayed with my dahlias. So I sat in the West Berlin Hotel, shedding beery tears of self-pity and envying the men who danced with their arms round strangers' shoulders. "Take me away," I said to the driver when he returned. "Finish your beer, but take me away."

"You are not pleased?" he asked, as we drove uphill toward the Pera Palace.

"I'm tired, that's all. I want to go to bed."

Two police cars blocked our way outside the Pera Palace. An elderly man, who carried a walking stick crooked over his left arm, was reaching with a stiff right leg toward the ground as we drew up. My driver told me in a tone of awe, "That is Colonel Hakim." The colonel wore a very English suit of gray flannel with chalk stripes, and he had a small gray mustache. He looked like any veteran member of the Army and Navy alighting at his club.

"Very important man," my driver told me. "Very fair to Greeks."

I went past the colonel into the hotel. The receptionist was standing in the entrance, presumably to welcome him; I was of so little importance that he wouldn't shift to let me by. I had to walk round him and he didn't answer my good night. A lift took me up to the fifth floor. When I saw a light under my aunt's door, I tapped and went in. She was sitting upright in bed, wearing a bed jacket, and she was reading a paperback with a lurid cover.

"I've been seeing Istanbul," I told her.

"So have I." The curtains were drawn back and the lights of the city lay below us. She put her book down. The jacket showed a naked young woman lying in bed with a knife in her back, regarded by a man with a cruel face in a red fez. The title was Turkish Delight. "I have been absorbing local atmosphere," she said.

"Is the man in the fez the murderer?"

"No, he's the policeman. A very unpleasant type called Colonel Hakim."

"How very odd, because-- --"

"The murder takes place in this very Pera Palace, but there are a good many details wrong, as you might expect from a novelist. The girl is loved by a British secret agent, a tough sentimental man called Amis, and they have dinner together on her last night at Abdullah's--you remember we had lunch there ourselves. They have a love scene, too, in Santa Sophia, and there is an attempt on Amis' life at the Blue Mosque. We might almost have been doing a literary pilgrimage."

"Hardly literary," I said.

"Oh, you're your father's son. He tried to make me read Walter Scott, especially Rob Roy, but I much prefer this. It moves a great deal quicker and there are fewer descriptions."

"Did Amis murder her?"

"Of course not, but he is suspected by Colonel Hakim, who has very cruel methods of interrogation," my aunt said with relish.

The telephone rang. I answered it.

"Perhaps it's General Abdul at last," she said, "though it seems a little late for him to ring."

"This is the reception speaking. Is Miss Bertram there?"

"Yes, what is it?"

"I am sorry to disturb her, but Colonel Hakim wishes to see her."

"At this hour? Quite impossible. Why?"

"He is on the way up now." He rang off.

"Colonel Hakim is on the way to see you," I said.

"Colonel Hakim?"

"The real Colonel Hakim. He's a police officer, too."

"A police officer?" Aunt Augusta said. "Again? I begin to think I am back in the old days. With Mr. Visconti. Henry, will you open my suitcase? The green one. You'll find a light coat there. Fawn, with a fur collar."

"Yes, Aunt Augusta, I have it here."

"Under the coat, in a cardboard box, you will find a candle--a decorated candle."

"Yes, I see the box."

"Take out the candle, but be careful, because it's rather heavy. Put it on my bedside table and light it. Candlelight is better for my complexion."

It was extraordinarily heavy, and I nearly dropped it. It probably had some kind of lead weight at the bottom, I thought, to hold it steady. A big brick of scarlet wax that stood a foot high, it was decorated on all four sides with scrolls and coats of arms. A great deal of artistry had gone into molding the wax that would melt away only top quickly. I lit the wick. "Now, turn out the light," my aunt said, adjusting her bed jacket and puffing up her pillow. There was a knock on the door and Colonel Hakim came in.

He stood near the doorway and bowed. "Miss Bertram?" he asked.

"Yes. You are Colonel Hakim?"

"Yes. I am sorry to call on you so late without warning." He spoke English with only the faintest intonation. "I think we have a mutual acquaintance, General Abdul. May I sit down?"

"Of course. You'll find that chair by the dressing table the most comfortable. This is my nephew, Henry Pulling."

"Good evening, Mr. Pulling. I hope you enjoyed the dancing at the West Berlin Hotel. A convivial spot unknown to most tourists. May I turn on the light, Miss Bertram?"

"I would rather not. I have weak eyes and I always prefer to read by candlelight."

"A very beautiful candle."

"They make them in Venice. The coats of arms belong to their four greatest doges. Don't ask me their names. How is General Abdul? I had been hoping to meet him again."

"I am afraid General Abdul is a very sick man." Colonel Hakim hooked his walking stick over the mirror before he sat down. He leaned his head forward to my aunt at a slight angle, which gave him an air of deference, but I noticed that the real reason was a small hearing aid that he carried in his right ear. "He was a great friend of you and Mr. Visconti, was he not?"

"The amount you know," my aunt said with an endearing smile.

"Oh, it's my disagreeable business," the colonel said, "to be a Nosy Harker."

"Parker."

"My English is rusty."

"You had me followed to the West Berlin Hotel?" I asked.

"Oh, no, I suggested to the driver that he should take you there," Colonel Hakim said. "I thought it might interest you and hold your attention longer than it did. The fashionable night clubs here are very banal and international. You might just as well be in Paris or London, except that in those cities, you would see a better show. Of course, I told the driver to take you somewhere else first. One never knows."

"Tell me about General Abdul," my aunt said impatiently. "What is wrong with him?"

Colonel Hakim leaned forward a little more in his chair and lowered his voice as though he were confiding a secret. "He was shot," he said, "while trying to escape."

"Escape?" my aunt exclaimed. "Escape from whom?"

"From me," Colonel Hakim said with shy modesty and he fiddled at his hearing aid. A long silence followed his words. There seemed nothing to say. Even my aunt was at a loss. She sat back against the pillow with her mouth a little open. Colonel Hakim took a tin out of his pocket and opened it. "Excuse me," he said, "eucalyptus and menthol. I suffer from asthma." He put a lozenge into his mouth and sucked. There was silence again until my aunt spoke.

"Those lozenges can't do you much good," she said.

"I think it is only the suggestion. Asthma is a nervous disease. The lozenges seem to alleviate it, but only, perhaps, because I believe they alleviate it." He panted a little when he spoke. "I am always apt to get an attack when I am at the climax of a case."

"Mr. Visconti suffered from asthma, too," Aunt Augusta said. "He was cured by hypnotism."

"I would not like to put myself so completely in someone else's hands."

"Of course, Mr. Visconti had a hold on the hypnotist."

"Yes, that makes a difference," Colonel Hakim said with approval. "And where is Mr. Visconti now?"

"I've no idea."

"Nor had General Abdul. We only want the information for the Interpol files. The affair is more than thirty years old. I just ask you in passing. I have no personal interest. It is not the real subject of my interrogation."

"Am I being interrogated, Colonel?"

"Yes. In a way. I hope an agreeable way. We have found a letter from you to General Abdul that speaks about an investment he had recommended. You wrote to him that you found it essential to make the investment while in Europe and anonymously, and this presented certain difficulties."

"Surely, you are not working for the Bank of England, Colonel?"

"I am not so fortunate, but General Abdul was planning a little trouble here; he was very short of funds. Certain friends with whom he had speculated in the old clays came back to his mind. So he got in touch with you--perhaps he hoped through you to contact Visconti again--with a German called Weissmann, of whom you probably haven't heard, and with a man called Harvey Crowder, who is a meat packer in Chicago. The CIA have had him under observation for a long while and they reported to us. Of course, I mention these names only because all the men are under arrest and have talked."

"If you really have to know," my aunt said, "for the sake of your files, General Abdul recommended me to buy Deutsche Texaco convertible bonds--out of the question in England because of the dollar premium, and away from England, for an English resident, quite illegal. So I had to remain anonymous."

"Yes," Colonel Hakim said, "that is not bad at all as a cover story." He began to pant again and took another lozenge. "I mentioned those names only to show you that General Abdul is now a little senile. One doesn't finance an operation in Turkey with foreign money of that kind. A wise woman like yourself must have realized that if his operation had any chance of success, he could have found local support. He would not have had to offer a Chicago meat packer twenty-five percent interest and a share of the profits."

"Mr. Visconti would certainly have seen through that," my aunt said.

"But now you are a lady living alone. You haven't the benefit of Visconti's advice. You might be templed a little by the quick profits. . . ."

"Why? I have no children to leave them to, Colonel."

"Or, perhaps, by the sense of adventure."

"At my age!" My aunt beamed with pleasure.

There was a knock on the door and a policeman entered. He spoke to the colonel and the colonel translated for our benefit. "Nothing," he said, "has been found in Mr. Pulling's baggage, but if you wouldn't mind. . . . My man is very careful, he will wear clean gloves and, I assure you, he will leave not the smallest wrinkle. . . . Would you mind if I put on the electric light while he works?"

"I would mind a great deal," my aunt said. "I left my dark glasses on the train. Unless you wish to give me a splitting headache--"

"Of course not, Miss Bertram. He will do without. You will forgive us if the search takes a little longer. '

The policeman first went through my aunt's handbag and handed certain papers to Colonel Hakim. "Forty pounds in traveler's checks," he noted.

"I have cashed ten," my aunt said.

"I see from your air ticket you plan to leave tomorrow--I mean today. A very short visit. Why did you come by train, Miss Bertram?"

"I wanted to see my stepson in Milan."

The colonel gave her a quizzical look. "May one ask? According to your passport, you are unmarried."

"Mr. Visconti's son."

"Ah, always that Mr. Visconti."

The policeman was busy now with my aunt's suitcase. He looked in the cardboard box that had contained the candle, shook it and smelled it.

"That is the box for my candle," my aunt said. "As I told you, I think, they make these candles in Venice. One candle does for a whole journey--I believe it is guaranteed for twenty-four hours continuously. Perhaps forty-eight."

"You are burning a real work of art," the colonel said.

"Henry, hold the candle for the policeman to see better."

Again, I was astonished by the weight of the candle when I lifted it.

"Don't bother, Mr. Pulling, he has finished."

I was glad to put it down again.

"Well," Colonel Hakim said with a smile, "we have found nothing compromising in your luggage." The policeman was repacking the case. "Now, just as a formality, we must go through the room. And the bed. Miss Bertram, if you will consent to sit in a chair."

He took part in this search himself, limping from one piece of furniture to another, sometimes feeling with his stick, under the bed and at the back of a drawer. "And now Mr. Pulling's pockets," he said. I emptied them rather angrily onto the dressing table. He looked carefully through my notebook and drew out a cutting from the Daily Telegraph. He read it aloud with a puzzled frown: " 'Those that took my fancy were the ruby-red Maître Roger, light-red, white-tipped Cheerio, deep-crimson Arabian Night and Black Flash, and scarlet Bacchus. . . .'

"Please explain, Mr. Pulling."

"It is self-explanatory," I said stiffly.

"Then you must forgive my ignorance."

"The report of a dahlia show. In Chelsea. I am very interested in dahlias."

"Flowers?"

"Of course they are flowers."

"The names sounded so oddly like those of horses. I was puzzled by the deep crimson." He put the cutting down and limped to my aunt's side. "I will say good night now, Miss Bertram. You have made my duty tonight a most agreeable one. You cannot think how bored I get with exhibitions of injured innocence. I will send a police car to take you to your plane tomorrow."

"Please don't bother. We can lake a taxi."

"We should be sorry to see you miss your plane."

"I think, perhaps, I ought to stop over one more day and see poor General Abdul."

"I am afraid he is not allowed visitors. What is this book you are reading? What a very ugly fellow with a red fez. Has he stabbed the girl?"

"No. He is the policeman. He is called Colonel Hakim," my aunt said with a look of satisfaction.

After the door had closed, I turned with some anger on my aunt. "Aunt Augusta," I said, "what did all that mean?"

"Some little political trouble, I would imagine. Politics in Turkey are taken more seriously than they are at home. It was only quite recently that they executed a prime minister. We dream of it, but they act. I hadn't realized, I admit, what General Abdul was up to. Foolish of him at his age. He must be eighty if a day, but I believe in Turkey there are more centenarians than in any other European country. Yet I doubt whether poor Abdul is likely to make his century."

"Do you realize that they're deporting us? I think we should call the British embassy."

"You exaggerate, dear. They are just lending us a police car."

"And if we refuse to take it?"

"I have no intention of refusing. We were already booked on the plane. After making my investment here, I had no intention of lingering around. I didn't expect quick profits, and twenty-five percent always involves a risk."

"What investment, Aunt Augusta? Forty pounds in traveler's checks?"

"Oh, no, dear. I bought quite a large gold ingot in Paris. You remember the man from the bank. . . ."

"So that was what they were looking for. Where on earth had you hidden it, Aunt Augusta?"

I looked at the candle, and I remembered its weight.

"Yes, dear," my aunt said, "how clever of you to guess. Colonel Hakim didn't. You can blow it out now." I lifted it up again--it must have weighed nearly 20 pounds.

"What do you propose to do with this now?"

"I shall have to take it back to England with me. It may be of use another time. It was most fortunate, when you come to think of it, that they shot poor General Abdul before I gave him the candle and not after. I wonder if he is really still alive. They would be likely to glide over any grisly detail like that with a woman. I shall have a Mass said for him in any case, because a man of that age is unlikely to survive a bullet long. The shock alone, even if it were not in a vital part--"

I interrupted her speculations. "You're not going to take that ingot back into England?" Ingot--England. I was irritated by the absurd jangle that sounded like a comic song. "Have you no respect at all for the law?"

"It depends, dear, to which law you refer. Like the Ten Commandments. I can't take very seriously the one about the ox and the ass."

"The English customs are not so easily fooled as the Turkish police."

"A used candle is remarkably convincing. I've tried it before."

"Not if they lift it up."

"But they won't, dear. Perhaps if the wick and the wax were intact, they might think they could charge me purchase tax. Or some suspicious officer might drink it a phony candle containing drugs. But a used candle. Oh, no, I think the danger is very small. And there's always my age to protect me."

"I refuse to go back into England with that ingot." The jangle irritated me again.

"But you have no choice, dear. The colonel will certainly see us onto the plane and there is no stop before London. The great advantage of being deported is that we shall not have to pass the Turkish customs again."

"Why on earth did you do it, Aunt Augusta? Such a risk. . . ."

"Mr. Visconti is in need of money."

"He stole yours."

"That was a long time ago. It will all be finished by now."

This is the third and concluding part of "Crook's Tour," a selection from a new novel by Graham Greene.