Naturally I could produce no vecika. But I had the next best thing. That same morning I had discussed with Vladimir Wilkowsky the possibility of being stopped in the street by a policeman. His advice was that if it happened I must claim to be a German officer. I remembered being photographed in civilian clothes when at Gumuch Souyou Hospital; and before leaving Psamatia I gave myself a useful identity by signing one of the copies with a German name.
After searching an inside pocket, I now handed to the gendarme a photograph which went to prove that I was "Fritz Richter, Oberleutnant in der Fliegertruppen." Speaking [in fluent German, interspersed with a few words of broken Turkish], I protested violently that I was a German officer in mufti, and that he would get himself into trouble for having presumed to stop a German officer. And never was I more frightened than when uttering that bombast.
Half convinced and half browbeaten, the gendarme took the photograph, looked at it dubiously, and consulted a Greek from among the curious crowd that circled us. This man, it appeared, claimed to know German. I understood little of the conversation, but as far as I could gather the policeman asked if I really were a German officer; and the stallkeeper, reading the signature laboriously, informed him that it proclaimed me to be a Supreme Lieutenant of the Flying Soldiers.
"Pek ee, effendi," said the gendarme to me. He returned the photograph, salaamed, and apologized. He then went away. So did I.
I returned cautiously, through a combination of side streets, to the bridge-head, and I was much relieved to find that Mahmoud had disappeared. From the quay I chartered a rowing-boat, ordering the Turkish kaiktche to row me up the Bosphorus.
"Are you Russian, effendim?" he asked.
"No, German," I replied, surlily. At that his conversational advances ended.
The train of thought started by the word Russian led me to decide that I had better spend the night aboard the Russian tramp steamer on which White and I were to travel as stowaways. Vladimir Wilkowsky, in fact, had told me to make for it if I failed to reach the hiding-place on shore, and to ask for M. Titoff, the chief engineer. Its name, I knew, was the Batoum, and most of its officers were in the conspiracy to help us, in return for substantial consideration. I knew that the ship was moored in the Bosphorus, but of its appearance or exact position I had been told nothing.
"Russky dampfschiff Batoum," I ordered the kaiktche, using the polyglot mixture which he was most likely to understand. But his voluble jabbering and his expressive shrug showed that he, also, was ignorant of where it lay.
"Bosphor!" I commanded, pointing higher up the Bosphorus and thinking that I would find the name Batoum painted on one of the five or six ships that I could see in the distance, moored in midstream.