Chapter 12
I was in the central bus station, on my way to Cappadocia, before dawn. Hundreds of small bus companies cried their destinations: Trabizond, Batman, Antalya, Aphion, Van. People bustled in all directions: old ladies lugging enormous shopping bags, soldiers in uniform strutting, schoolboys running, back-packing tourists all hairy legs and arms, elegant young women being nonchalant, young men being casual. A man dressed for solemn business sat on a narrow bench beside his briefcase and chewed a simit dropping sesame seeds down his shirtfront. An old man spilled a cardboard box full of apples. A stout woman in traditional dress clasped a box of day-old chicks. I was sorry you were not with me, Millicent, to share the great flurry of life at 6.30. in the morning in a bus station in Ankara. You would enjoy it, Millicent. There are pigeons running and strutting all over the place, but I'd keep them away from you.
Seats are allocated in the bus when you buy your ticket. I found my bus and my seat and settled down to make notes on my discoveries. The bus filled up. The driver sat in. A young woman in jeans and jumper took the seat beside me. Some moments later the door of the bus was filled by a middle-aged woman with a determined jaw, not at all softened by the headscarf that framed it. She began to argue with the driver. All heads turned to look at me. The girl beside me blushed and spoke defensively to the woman. I got the drift of the argument. Mamma had specified that daughter was not to sit next to a man for such a long journey and they had put her, not only next to a man, but next to a foreigner. I tried to change places immediately – a manoeuvre not easily executed in a bus full of people, apples, chicks, rucksacks, uniforms and simit crumbs. A cheerful-looking woman across the aisle nodded and rose to swap with me. Mamma relaxed and turned to the driver for a parting shot. Daughter smiled at me ruefully and batted her eyelids. I settled down in my new seat without glancing at my neighbour. Gradually a set of whiffling moustaches registered on my peripheral vision and I looked sideways at Pierre.
'Why are you following me around, Denis?'
'I might ask the same question.'
Exceedingly annoyed, I looked around for an empty seat.
'Have you made provisions for the journey, Denis? Five hours on the bus.'
'I shall dine in Göreme.'
'If you have no provisions, you should stay where you are. Gül made sandwiches for me.'
'I had breakfast.'As I said it, I realised that tea and a stale croissant at five o'clock does not hamper a seven o'clock appetite.
'As soon as we are out on the motorway, the attendant will serve coffee. We'll share the sandwiches.'
Gül had filled fresh white rolls with tomato, white cheese, olives and herbs.
'Your fiancée, Liliane; is she a good cook, Pierre?'
'Liliane? Mais non! She has the soul of a pastrycook. A good cook is inspired – a soupçon of this, a pinch of that, lashings of the other. Never will my rognons de veau taste exactly the same twice. Each dish is a thing of the moment and of what is to hand; chance supervised by an artist. So you see a good cook is not orthodox, not settled in his ways ever. A pastrycook is merely a chemist – x ounces of this, y ounces of that. This is exactly how to make Gâteau St. Honoré. Liliane is a pastrycook, though she never cooks pastry. She has no temperament. We will suit each other marvellously .... Have you a purpose in travelling to Cappadocia, Denis, or are you, like myself, taking a short break from Ankara?'
'I thought you were going to perfect your frenchified tripe and garlic soup today?'
'A creative block – the proportions of black pepper to cayenne. I decided to give my subconscious time to assert itself. But you, Denis, should you not be in the office?'
'I promised my fiancée that I would visit Cappadocia; we may honeymoon there.'
'Avoid it in July and August. Heat and tourists.'
I hope you don't mind, Millicent, that I mentioned this plan to Pierre before consulting with you. I wished to deflect his attention from the real purpose of my visit.
'Both of us are tourists, so. Join me on a tour, Denis?'
Pierre must have guessed that I was seeking M. d'Aubine. If I travelled with him, he would lead me on a grand tour of Cappadocia and wait, until I had to depart, before he made contact with the villain.
'No thanks, Pierre. Nothing organised for me. I intend to drift and absorb the atmosphere.'
'As you will,' he said amiably. 'Here, read this guidebook to Cappadocia. Be careful not to fall from one of the "fairy chimneys". There was a fatality recently. An over-adventurous tourist. I shouldn't like to have anything happen to you.'
For the next half-hour I studied the guide: Byzantine art, underground cities, St. Paul's letters. My eyes flickered now and then to Pierre's clasped hands, broad and stubby-fingered, wondering if they had killed.
We passed Tuz Gölü, the salt lake. Salt, like snow gleaming in the sun, stretched everywhere. The bus rattled down a narrow elevated causeway barely wide enough for it, miraculously passing approaching traffic without slowing.
'Salt,' said Pierre. 'The hero and the villain of the kitchen. A cook with a conscience will curtail its use. A cook who is proud of his art will not. So it is with all the good things: cream and butter and eggs, marbled beef, charcuterie. Ah Denis, how it grieved me never to put a good pâté maison on the table. Madame minded her husband's waist at the expense of his stomach and my art. Have you not noticed? None of my dishes went to table salted à point. Always too little. Madame was exigent. And now, Denis, my friend, all this salt going to waste. It is enough to make a cook shed tears.'
I distracted him by pointing out the salt works and the lorries seeming to float, like boats above the horizon. The bus reached the outskirts of Cappadocia, a landscape stranger than anything I have seen in dreams. There were pillars and needles and stacks of rock excavated as dwellings. The cliffs were pitted with caves, decorated at their mouths with lines of washing. There were shallow modern buildings straight up against the rock, which was excavated to provide depth for the rooms. The place is a honeycomb, Millicent. It is too perforated for my fancy.
The bus stopped in front of the tourist office in Göreme. I loitered in the office until I saw Pierre depart on a tour of the rupestrine churches of Ürgüp. I was sure that he would get off the bus as soon as it was out of sight and head off to meet M. d'Aubine. However I had the satisfaction of making him buy a ticket.
The hotel that M. d'Aubine recommended, when I spoke of bringing you to Cappadocia, Millicent, is a small family inn in the centre of the street in Göreme. The lobby was a comfortable place with rugs and cushions and I could see out the back to a courtyard, with a few tables under a roof of vines. The man of the house was at the desk.
'Is M. d'Aubine in the hotel at present?'
'You are a friend of M. d'Aubine?'
I hesitated.
'We must give you a discount. Since M. d'Aubine came here our wine industry is improving. Now there is more money in grapes than in potatoes. He is very strict. No black-market. Every lira of tax is paid, and yet there is profit.''
'Where can I find him?'
'You wish to go to his house? I bring you in hotel minibus. Put your suitcase here, behind the desk. We look after registration when you get back.'
He left me for a few minutes. I suspect that he went to telephone d'Aubine. I would have preferred to arrive unannounced.
'How far is it to M. d'Aubine's house?' I asked as we got into the minibus.
'We go on tour: Güvencilik, Kaymakli.'
'Not a tour; not today please. I want to go to M. d'Aubine's house as quickly as possible.'
'Yes. We go.'
A half-hour later, near a signpost for the underground city of Kaymakli, we left the main road and bumped along a track. The running commentary of the driver and the fantastic scenery had made it difficult for me to collect my thoughts. We pulled up at a large shed with a typical, flat-roofed, Anatolian, red cavity-brick house alongside. It was two stories high and the roof was in the process of be
ing raised another story.
My driver shouted at the builders, who shouted back at him. It seemed to me that he said he had brought the enspektör with him and that the builder said something rude. My understanding of the local dialect may have been at fault. He turned to me politely and said that M. d'Aubine was in the cave and if I did not mind getting a bit dusty, he would ask one of the workmen to show me the way. I was given a pair of overalls and put them on gratefully, only to find that they were so dusty they would do more damage to my clothes than a web-encrusted wine cellar would. The builders stopped to watch. My driver waved cheerfully and drove away. Entry to the cave was through a trapdoor and down a long flight of shallow steps in one of the sheds.
'You are using an old underground passage for the storing the wine?' I observed as we descended.
'Part of an old underground city. In Derínkuyu you pay to see only three levels. Here we can go down levels and levels. It is perfect for the wine.'
'Is it used by all the Cappadocian wine- makers?'
'Yes,' said my guide, but in the tone of voice that means pleasant assent to whatever you wish.
'Here they had stables for the animals – mangers, storage bins, vats for grapes, thousands of years old. You can see the hole there where the juice flows down to the next level.
'His powerful torch pointed the way. It was a cool dry place, no trace of mustiness in the air.
'You had to do some reconstruction work to make the place suitable,' I observed. 'Did M. d'Aubine have trouble getting permission?
'The old entrance is collapsed. The steps brought us down two levels. Now we go up to first level to our cave.'
The way was narrower. He waved me courteously ahead sending the beam of the torch before me. I moved quickly, glad to be moving upwards. Then the light was guillotined with a heavy thump. Absolute silence and darkness followed.
Since I have lived to write this, you will know that I was not walled up there for all eternity, Millicent. I did not know, at the time, that that was not to be my fate, so I suffered considerably. My last glimpse ahead had shown that I was in a small chamber with a passage at the far end of it. As the shadow began to fall, I whipped around and saw a large circular stone, set in a groove, roll across the passage behind me. The guidebooks explain that the good citizens of Cappadocia used withdraw underground with their cattle, provisions and wine, roll across the great stones and sit tight until Roman legion or Seljuk band passed on.
I had not been quick enough to catch the implications of what my betrayer had said about the upper passage. I was now on the invader's side of the blocking stone, but the invader's entry was there no longer.
I felt that it was silly to die down in a hole while the beautiful world was just overhead – sky, hills, green things. For a while I was overcome with love for them. Then I wanted desperately to get out. I didn't care about the Countess or her cousin or Walter. It was meagre comfort to decide that M. d'Aubine admitted guilt by attacking me. I felt my way back to the great stone. My side of it was a smooth circle, its edges set within their circular stone frame. Impossible to shift.
I thought of the letter I had left for the Inspector, telling him that I was going to seek M. d'Aubine in Cappadocia. M. d'Aubine was probably securing an alibi elsewhere. I groaned when I thought of the hotel in Göreme. If only I had insisted on registering before being driven to M. d'Aubine's house. Whether it was his house or not, I couldn't tell. How long before the Inspector found me? I had left no trail. Cappadocia had swallowed me from the moment I left the tourist office.
I'm not sure how long I spent there in the dark. I knew that the passage continued at least some little distance but I also knew that there might be deep shafts, for ventilation or as part of the defences, at any point. I crawled away from the door inch by inch, testing the floor to the right and left of me as I went and raising my head regularly to check that the ceiling was not getting lower. My right hand descended on something wet and squishy and sank through it. The smell of rotten oranges was so unexpected that I almost fainted. My left hand found a rectangular corner. I gripped a doormat, a frayed gritty doormat. I found a firm stone horizontal, a wooden perpendicular. I ran my hand up along it, standing up as I did so. A doorway. There was an open door in the frame! My hand, reaching of its own accord to the place where there would be an electric switch, made contact with a real one. The light showed that I was in a small room with a rotating stand of postcards. The views were of Cappadocia. A few of them showed vines and an underground cellar full of barrels. There was a desk with admission tickets and souvenirs, a refrigerated display of soft drinks, an ice cream fridge.
How long could I live on coke and ice cream, if they decided not to open to the public again? I had no idea. If the stone rolled back, it would probably admit an executioner. I slept and wakened several times, read all the pamphlets on the stand and ate a lot of ice cream.
The great stone groaned. I advanced to meet my fate as I felt one should. I had alternated, during my incarceration, between the idea of making a desperate fight or a stoic and dignified exit from this life. I had decided to make a last stand. This depended, however, on my being by the stone and ready to club whomever entered with a Coke bottle. The stone rolled back while I was trying to decide between a choc ice and an ice lolly. Only dignified exit was left to me. I threw down my lolly and advanced. M. d'Aubine came through the portal followed by the innkeeper and two others. He came towards me, arms outstretched.
'My dear Denis, what a most terrible mistake! I hope you have not caught a chill. I am so sorry.'
'Hypocrite. Do you think me sufficiently intimidated to go away and forget murder? I am not to be turned aside by threats. I have taken precautions. Kill me and you destroy yourself.'
'My dear fellow, you are mixed up. I felt exactly the same after Colette's death. I wanted to hit out at someone, anyone, and I picked on poor dear Walter. Now you are just hitting out at me because you are blaming me for this ridiculous mistake. Truly I am not to blame. Come, Denis. Let us return to the world.'
I didn't believe a word he said but I felt it politic to allow myself to be floated to the surface on a raft of apologies.'You didn't bump your head, did you? Come along now, a bath, a shave, some real food. Too much ice cream is bad for one. You really shouldn't indulge...'
I was put into a car which was driven with exaggerated caution, 'for fear of rattling your brains, my dear boy', to a house, perhaps a mile away from the cave. I was wrapped in blankets. A hot water bottle was put under my feet and a glass of raku into my hand. Then Mr. d'Aubine's three associates went to lurk in an ajoining room while M. d'Aubine began to explain everything away.
'How can I apologise sufficiently? You were the wrong man, come at the wrong moment. There is a wine war going on here. My friends, my associates, have been too successful to be popular. They are kind enough to say that I have been instrumental. What is more, we pay taxes. I insisted, always that everything must be above board. The grape growers of Kayseri have not, in general, been so successful but, because of us, they have been assessed for tax at the same level. They blame us for everything, even suspecting our growers of wishing to buy them out. Now they have resorted to sabotage. Their spies discovered certain minor irregularities in our system - nothing is perfect- and we are to be inspected.
'When you arrived at the inn and enquired for me, it was thought that you were one of the foreign experts, come to find some little rule that we had contravened. You can have no idea how complex the rules are. It seemed to the hotelier and his friends that they should detain you until I had been informed. Unfortunately I was away. I came the moment I heard.'
'Where is Pierre?'
'Pierre? In Ankara.'
'He is in Cappadocia, in league with you.'
'If you say so, dear fellow. You have suffered a shock to the system, you know. Do not cogitate excessively for the present. Why do you think Pierre is here?'
'Because I sat beside him on the bus comi
ng here.'
'Did he say why he was coming?'
'Tourism.'
'That explains it. He felt the need to get away from it all. That is why he has not contacted me.'
'Do you deny, M. d'Aubine that you were on Abdul Pasha Caddesi, behind the residence, spying on the Countess on Tuesday evening at a time when you implied that you were reading a paper at the wine seminar?'
'So that is what is distressing you! Why didn't you ask me to explain long ago? It must have slipped my mind when I was talking to you. The guest of honour was late for the afternoon session. Everything was to be delayed an hour and that pushed my slot back until after dinner. I had time to kill. I took a stroll along Abdul Pasha. Pierre had told me that Colette was in the habit of sneaking in that way on Tuesday afternoons. I decided to have a look. It would not have suited us to swap Ambassador Brown for the Italian when Colette decided on a change of husbands. She came in Barbellini's car but there was no suggestion of romance. It was the last time I saw Colette. She must have been happy. She was singing as she crossed the road.'
'What did Barbellini do?'
'He smoked a cigarette and then drove away.'
'What did you do?'
'I had no desire to attract his attention by materialising from behind a pine tree. I waited until he had left and then I walked down the road and took a taxi back to Ulus.'
'I don't believe you. You signalled to Pierre that the Countess was on her way down to the laundry to change clothes. He went down there and killed her.'
'Your wits are truly astray, Denis. If I thought you were sane, I would kill you.'
'Gül heard you. You bleated like a goat when the Countess started down the path. There were no goats in the lot that evening. They had been shifted on Sunday.'
'Lie down until the doctor sees you.' He leaned towards me, his little goatee waggling as he spoke. 'I bleated like a goat? Does a goat bleat? Bleated like a goat .... And why would Pierre kill Colette?'
'So that you would inherit Château Fontenoy.'
'If this is the way your subconscious works, Denis, I am glad that your mishap has brought the thoughts to the surface. I have no idea how you concocted such an histoire. Let me think how best to set you straight. In the meantime, have a hot bath, a meal, then bed.'
I looked at the clock. It was after three. I threw off the blankets.
'Bring me to Göreme immediately. The last bus for Ankara leaves at four. I demand to be brought to Göreme.'
'Stay here till Monday.'
'Let me go now or I shall report that I was detained against my will.'
He expressed deep concern about my condition, begged me to go to my doctor as soon as I reached Ankara and bid me farewell with a show of affection calculated to infuriate me. The innkeeper, he said, would be only too pleased to convey me to Göreme as a personal favour to himself. The innkeeper let me out of the car at the bus terminal, collected my bag from his hotel and brought it to me, telling me with a grin that there would be no hotel charge. I had twenty minutes to wait. There was a tiny restaurant at the bus stop. I ordered an omelette and a glass of the local wine. The wine was excellent. In fact it was familiar. I ignored the omelette and sipped my way down the glass. There could be no doubt. It was, I knew it was, the very wine I had drunk in the residence as the Countess's own 'Château Fontenoy' from France. I had another glass and the conviction grew.
'May I buy a bottle of this wine?'
The price was modest. The label had a pen and ink drawing of a Byzantine crucifixion from a local cave-church. I bought several, finished my omelette and boarded the bus feeling better than I had ever expected to feel again. The bus was half-empty. No young lady sat down beside me in order to torment her mother. There was no sign of Pierre.
It occurred to me, as I settled down to sleep all the way to Ankara, that I hadn't covered myself in glory. Perhaps, Millicent, I have been excessively influenced in my expectations by the success rate of fictional detectives. I might have known that M. d'Aubine is not the kind of villain to admit anything, except perhaps in a boastful confession on the eve of execution.
I rang Ayse to tell her to bring the kitten to the office in the morning but she came around with it immediately. Indeed I was happy to see it. The kitten was one of the things I regretted when I thought I was buried alive. Do you think, Millicent, that I was imprisoned by Cappacadocian grape growers who thought I was an inspector, or by M. d'Aubine in an attempt to intimidate me. I am so pleased to be alive that I actually feel grateful to him for not having killed me.