The sight of money partly pacified them, and their anger cooled. Soon they were in a fit state of mind to talk baksheesh, that touchstone of the Turkish character.
I produced ten more banknotes, each of one Turkish pound. Again using pidgin-Turkish, with many an expressive gesture, I offered them to the guards, on condition that when we reached the police station they would say that although White had escaped I made no attempt to do so.
The matter needed several minutes of explanation before misunderstandings were cleared up, so that we withdrew into a side street. The two guards needed little persuasion to make them accept. Thereupon the third man (the soldier who helped to hold me at the bottom of the embankment) demanded a share. To satisfy him I was forced to produce a further sum of five Turkish pounds. He saluted and left us.
The two guards carried on an animated talk for some time longer, and, as far as I could understand, discussed what tale to the police would show them in the best light. They decided, apparently, not to admit having seen White escape and let him give them the slip, but to claim that he vanished when we were all knocked down by the collision.
I remembered that the food supplies in my pockets might be incriminating evidence. I had, also, a dangerous slip of paper, on which Wilkowsky had drawn a plan of the Galata beerhouse in which I was to meet Titoff's Russian friend. This I disposed of by tearing it into shreds behind my back, and dropping the fragments, a few at a time, as in a paper chase.
The packets of food were rather more difficult to lose. There was a tin of Oxo cubes, which I flung surreptitiously on to a dust-heap. Some sticks of bivouac chocolate I left on a convenient windowsill. The worst problem was a small bag containing a mixture of cocoa and grape-nuts, taken from one of White's parcels from home. I could scarcely throw this away unobserved; and the police station was already in sight.
A woman stood in the doorway, and gazed at us. As we brushed past her on the narrow pavement, I took the bag from my pocket, dumped it into her hand, and moved on without a word or a sign. When, from a few yards ahead, I looked back, she had opened the bag and was staring in wide-eyed surprise at the cocoa—then quite unobtainable in Constantinople—which had fallen as from heaven.
The guards told a rambling tale to the police officer, who took notes of their description of White and sent out three gendarmes to search the streets for him. Afterward I was taken into an inner room and searched. Nothing was found to brand me as a suspect. The pockets were quite empty; and my larger banknotes—one of a hundred Turkish pounds, one of fifty, and one of twenty-five—were undiscovered, being sewn into suspenders and braces.
Finally, as a result of the twelve Turkish pounds' worth of good character given me by the guards, I continued the journey to the military dentist in Stamboul, after a guard had telephoned the news of White's disappearance to Psamatia.
Desperate after my failure in face of White's success, I made an unwise bolt for freedom across the ruins of a recent fire. Before the guards had recovered from their surprise, I reached a half-demolished wall at the far end of an open space. I shinned over the wall, and found myself in a blind alley. Straight ahead was a house; and another building cut off the exit to the right. To the left was a bare wall, too high to be climbed. I turned round, walked back to meet the now furious guards, and handed them another pound note apiece. They gasped; but a sense of humour dissolved their rage into laughter.