The Grab: A Classic Crime Novel. Gordon Landsborough

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      Holy jeez, the thoughts I had in my mind were enough to set me jumping quicker than a bug on a hot griddle. I couldn’t stand what I was thinking. I had to be a sap and try and do something about it.

      I shouted: “The hell, I won’t stand for seein’ girls treated thataway in any country. Not without standing on my hindlegs and mouthing a gripe agen it.”

      I let my eyes drop to Benny’s. I reckon I must have looked madder than mad, right then, and he was scared stiff of me.

      He said, quickly: “I got nothing to do with it, brother.” Always brother with Benny. He believed in democracy in some aspects. His quick, big dark eyes fluttered and looked away and then came back and then looked quickly away again. Benny was giving an impression of a man wholly out of ease with himself.

      So I snarled something, and I kicked my way out through that revolving door, leaving Benny back of his desk under the yellow electric lights. I had an impression that he was reaching for the telephone as I stomped away.

      I went to the police station round the corner before I could cool off. I was in such a mood I was determined to make a song about the handling of that girl. I didn’t care what she had done—if she had done anything.

      Istanbul police are picked men. They all look like six-footers, and they’re physically first-class. But their uniform is something inspired by a Nazi storm trooper’s get-up, and we’ve been taught to dislike it in the Western World. So I wasn’t on my best behaviour inside that police station. I was rude and arrogant, loud-mouthed and truculent.

      I was scared.

      Don’t tell me most people aren’t scared when they get inside the police stations of these countries around the Mediterranean. When you go in, you have a feeling that maybe you aren’t ever going to come out again. You feel anything can be done to you, and no one will be any the wiser.

      Maybe we have read too much....

      The main receiving room—or whatever it’s called in these countries—wasn’t sinister. It was small, not well-lighted, imposingly solid in its furniture, and comfortable looking.

      Two big cops without helmets rose from a bench as I went in. Their eyes were upon me. They were tough babies, so I looked tough at them. A sergeant came in, buttoning his tunic. I don’t know whether he was a sergeant, because I don’t know Turkish police ranks, but I kept calling him that to myself and—well, take him as a sergeant and quit the sidetracking.

      He spoke English, though not too confidently.

      I gave him the story. “I saw a girl taken from my hotel. She was in pyjamas. There was a cop standing by, watching the apes bring her out. He went off in the car with them, so it was police work.”

      I took a deep breath. I always do when I tell a lie.

      “I want to know what you’re going to do to her. I want to see her. She’s a friend of mine.”

      That was sticking my neck out. It could bring a whole lot of trouble on me. But I was all worked up, I guess—sight of that partly dressed girl...had got me moving inside.

      That sergeant just stared at me. He struggled with a foreign language and then said, blankly: “No police have removed any girl from your hotel tonight.”

      All right, what do you do under such circumstances? I did it, brother, I did a lot of desk-thumping, a lot of shouting, a lot of talk about seeing my ambassador. I even called them a lot of so-and-so’s and generally behaved as an angry man, a bit scared of his surroundings, behaves.

      But it did no good. That sergeant was impassively polite. He took all I had to give him and he just stared solemnly at me and repeated his statement: “No police have taken any girl from your hotel tonight.”

      Those other babies just stood around and said nothing and did nothing, and I think that scared me more than if they had behaved as truculently as I had. It gave me a feeling of utter helplessness. I felt that they must be sure of themselves to be able to watch my tantrums and listen to my yapping offensiveness, and be so stolidly silent all the while. It didn’t occur to me until afterwards that probably neither of them understood English, anyway.

      Well, I got out of that police station after about five minutes. I knew I wasn’t getting anywhere. I knew I could thump that desk until it was a ruin on the floor, and that sergeant wouldn’t change his tune. I went out and I felt glad when I got outside into yet another of those narrow, cobbled, Turkish alleys which abound in Istanbul. There was the moon beautifully white and clear, riding in an absolutely cloudless sky. And the soft, warm, night air of summer along the Bosporus was a joy to breathe after the claustrophobic atmosphere within that old police station.

      I’m telling you all this, and I’m telling you what a so-and-so I am inside for all the big mouth I carry most times in my job. I felt the most relieved man on earth when I walked out on those cops.

      I was also the most surprised man.

      Somehow I hadn’t thought it could be so easy, that I could go into a Turkish police station and shoot off my mouth and then swagger out, as I did. I suppose I’d been certain that there’d be a hellova rumpus, with a lot of shouted orders and heel clickings and the beginnings of an international situation. I felt for certain they’d try to slap me in the cooler and only release me when the American Embassy came down to protect an undeserving national.

      Yet nothing like that happened. They just let me walk out.

      I went along that busy main street of Pera, back to my hotel. That street is always busy. No one ever goes to bed before two o’clock in Istanbul. I moved along the crowded sidewalk, and this time I had no eye for the cuties who promenade by the hour along that fashionable shopping thoroughfare. And that shows the kind of emotion gripping me right then.

      Usually I can think of nothing better than to amble slowly along that Istanbul sidewalk and gawk at the fashionable females who make this city such a Paradise for the traveller.

      You see them of every Mediterranean nationality, from the dark-skinned Arabic types to the fair-haired Greeks who form such a large part of this population. And, brother, let me tell you those babies are sure good to look at. They seem to mature early and they have a softness and a roundness that somehow you don’t seem to see back in the States or in more Northern countries. There’s a kind of exotic touch about these females, something of the old Arabian Nights’ magic, I suppose. They wear dainty, flimsy, highly-coloured dresses, and I’m telling you that any climate kind enough to keep women out of shapeless coats is a climate which suits Joe P. Heggy. There’s a flamboyance about these Istanbul girls—a vividness—which somehow wouldn’t go down in any other city in the world except perhaps Cairo.

      But this night they could jiggle themselves past me and I never admired the goods, never even saw them.

      I was still seeing that terrified white face in that alley. I was feeling the helplessness, the hopelessness, which had gripped that pyjama-clad girl, being dragged away by those shapeless, moon-faced apes.

      I couldn’t get my thoughts beyond that incident.

      I went back into my hotel. Benny was behind his desk, and if he was reading that paper he’d got darned good eyesight. He didn’t notice he’d got it upside down, and that shows the condition he was in at that moment.

      I hesitated, СКАЧАТЬ