Dead Secret by Alan Williams

Author:Alan Williams [Williams, Alan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781913518585
Publisher: Sapere Books
Published: 2020-03-11T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 19

Next day they decided to keep away from Kumkapi. It was one thing for a couple of foreigners to sample the city’s low life on a casual visit; it was another for them to make a habit of it.

Hawn was an idle and indifferent sightseer; but Anna, with her precise academic nature, felt that if she did not always enjoy it, she must at least do it.

They spent the morning making the statutory round of the Blue Mosque, the Sancta Sophia, the Hippodrome and the gloomy vaults of the Roman cisterns, through endless palaces and dungeons and fortresses, all blood-soaked in history, and now peopled by gawping, shuffling tourists and their rapacious guides.

Exhausted, Hawn and Anna lunched away from the main street, Taksim, in a foul expensive restaurant where the only delicacies were the cheese and thick black coffee. In the afternoon they visited two palaces and three more mosques, and in one of the bazaars, after some exhilarating bargaining, he bought Anna a heavy silver bracelet.

The only jarring incident of the day had been the obsequious intrusion of a fellow tourist — a middle-aged Austrian, alone, bespectacled, bald, and armed with a guidebook in which he made notes on the flyleaf in pencil.

He had joined them in the Sancta Sophia, and at first had been quite useful in explaining some of the special architectural features of the church; and as they tramped between the colonnades of the Mosque of Suleymaniye, he padded along beside them like some lost dog from the Great Bazaar. His name was Otto Dietrich, he was an accountant from Vienna, and had recently been widowed.

Hawn’s first instinct was to be suspicious of him: yet the man was such a stupendous bore that Hawn’s only reaction was one of exasperation, tempered with a grudging sense of pity for the man. He realized that such creatures were one of the penalties of tourism, and of sightseeing in particular.

He and Anna made several attempts to rid themselves of him: but Otto Dietrich was no ordinary bore: he was both persistent and skilful. They only managed to shake him off finally at the entrance of the Pera Palace, where Dietrich’s farewell was accompanied by the threat that he would telephone or call round in the next few days. He kissed Anna’s hand and said, with awful sincerity, ‘I have so enjoyed myself today! I have not enjoyed myself so much for a long time. Thank you both so very much!’

That evening, feeling free at last, Hawn went out and bought yesterday’s Herald Tribune. There was no further mention of Mönch’s supposed suicide. The Herr Doktor had disappeared as thoroughly as Norman French.

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