Having entered the beerhouse (named Zum Neuen Welt), I was to pass down the main room until, on the right-hand side of it, I reached the piano. I must seat myself at the table next to the piano, order a glass of beer, put a cigarette behind my left ear, and look around without showing too much anxiety.
Somewhere near me I should find a man whose left ear, also, was adorned with a cigarette; or, if not already there he would arrive very shortly. He would occupy the table beyond mine—that is to say, the next but one to the piano. On no account must I speak to him in the beerhouse, although to make his identity doubly clear he might ask for a light, speaking in German. He would remain until I had paid my reckoning, then pay his own, leave the Bierhaus Zum Neuen Welt, and walk toward Pera.
I was to follow him not too closely, always taking care to be separated by a distance of at least twenty yards, so that nobody might observe how my movements depended on his. Arrived on the fringe of Pera he would unlock a door, leave it open, and disappear; whereupon all that remained for me was to follow him into this retreat, where I should find Captain White already installed.
It was four-twenty-seven when I entered the Bierhaus Zum Neuen Welt, a close-atmosphered café in the Rue de Galata. The customers inside it were few, but some of them caught my attention at once, for they included a group of German soldiers and a Turkish officer of gendarmerie, who was talking to a civilian. The table next to the piano was vacant, as were those surrounding it. I sat down, casually placed a cigarette behind my left ear, and ordered a glass of beer.
As I sipped the beer I looked around the room for the man of mystery. Nobody paid the least attention to me. Plenty of cigarettes were held in the hand or the mouth, but none in the cleft of the left ear.
Still with a faint hope that the Russian who was to hide me might return, I ordered a second then a third glass of beer, and made a study of every man present, in case one of them might be he. But nothing had happened, and nothing continued to happen. The officer of gendarmerie kept his back toward me, while the German soldiers grew boisterous over repeated relays of beer, and over mandolin strummings by a red-faced Unteroffizier. The proprietress, a German woman of an especial corpulence, dragged her fleshy body from table to table, and finally arrived before mine.
"You seem hot," she said in German. "You must have been walking too fast."
"No, I have merely been out in this atrocious sun."
"German?" she asked—at which I was delighted, for it proved that my accent, acquired many years before as a student in Munich, was not yet too rusty to pass muster.
"No, madam, Russian," I replied, hoping hard that she could speak no Russian.