Very fortunately for White the woman was a Greek, and as such well disposed to the British. She hid him in a cupboard for an hour, and persuaded her husband, when he arrived home at midday, to provide a disguise.
White bought a fez and an overcoat, and blackened his moustache. The Greek was shorter and slighter than he, so that it was impossible to wear the overcoat without removing his own jacket and waistcoat. These he left in the house. The results, however, justified his loss, for when he went into the streets, during the afternoon, he was a perfect study of a broken-down Levantine.
He reached Galata too late for the beerhouse rendezvous, and was obliged, therefore, to spend the evening and night as best he could. As he wandered along the Rue de Galata a policeman stopped him and, according to the Near East habit, showed a cigarette without saying a word and signed that he wanted a light. This White supplied from the cigarette he was smoking. The gendarme passed on, without deigning to thank the wretched looking man in a faded fez and torn coat.
A café and two cinemas filled his evening. Afterward, unable to hire a room at any hotel or lodging-house, because he had no vecika, he spent the night huddled behind a cemetery tombstone.
Next day he met Titoff's Russian friend in the German beerhouse, according to plan; and so to the hiding-place.
This hiding-place of ours was a disused workshop belonging to the Russian, who claimed to be a carpenter. Its only furniture was a crude bench and a long table. The floor lay inches deep in shavings through which the rats rustled all night and most of the day. There was one small window; but this we were told to keep covered by its iron shutter, in case somebody should look in from the street. A tiny yard led from the corner opposite the door to the bottom of a shaft, down which the dwellers on the upper floors of the building threw their rubbish.
In themselves these conditions were fairly bad; for apart from the lack of furniture, the atmosphere was always dusty and unpleasantly musty, and unless we opened the window the workshop remained in perpetual twilight. But the worst drawback of all was that only a flimsy partition separated us from the living room of a Turkish officer. His bedroom was above our wooden ceiling. Everything he did we could hear quite plainly, whether he coughed, spoke, whistled, removed his boots, or snored.
The Turkish officer, we realized, must likewise hear every movement of ours; so that whenever either he or his orderly or anybody else was in his rooms we maintained, perforce, a death-like stillness. We scarcely dared to whisper, or to tip-toe across the workshop on bootless feet. In the daytime, the striking of a match had to be masked by scraping the shavings, so as to make a noise like a rat. After daylight smoking was impossible, because the glimmer would have shown through the many cracks in the partition.
We slept side by side on the wooden table, with rolled-up coats as pillows. White once woke up in the middle of the night and was horrified to hear me talking in my sleep. Fortunately, the Turk above was not awake, and so missed the performance. Afterward we never slept at the same time, but kept watch in turn, in case one of us should snore or otherwise attract attention. Four of the nights were broken into by machine-gun fire from a near-by roof, during British air-raids.
On my arrival White had told me that we must be particularly careful in the mornings, just after the Turkish officer left the house. The noises from the living room then suggested that somebody, probably the Turk's wife, was tidying it. This happened on three successive mornings. What worried us in particular was a scrunching and scraping behind the partition, which suggested that the wife suspected our presence and tried to look at us through the cracks.