“Who keeps looking at me?”
“We cannot see him now. The gentleman is sitting at the bar.”
“No doubt he’s looking at you.” There seemed nothing else to say.
But she was evidently serious. “It is in you that he is interested, Monsieur. It is the one with the handkerchief in his hand.”
They had reached a point on the floor from which he could see the bar. The man was sitting on a stool with a glass of vermouth in front of him.
He was a short, thin man with a stupid face: very bony with large nostrils, prominent cheekbones, and full lips pressed together as if he had sore gums or were trying to keep his temper. He was intensely pale and his small, deep-set eyes and thinning, curly hair seemed in consequence darker than they were. The hair was plastered in streaks across his skull. He wore a crumpled brown suit with lumpy padded shoulders, a soft shirt with an almost invisible collar, and a new grey tie. As Graham watched him he wiped his upper lip with the handkerchief as if the heat of the place were making him sweat.
“He doesn’t seem to be looking at me now,” Graham said. “Anyway, I don’t know him, I’m afraid.”
“I did not think so, Monsieur.” She pressed his arm to her side with her elbow. “But I wished to be sure. I do not know him either, but I know the type. You are a stranger here, Monsieur, and you perhaps have money in your pocket. Istanbul is not like Stockholm. When such types look at you more than once, it is advisable to be careful. You are strong, but a knife in the back is the same for a strong man as for a small one.”
Her solemnity was ludicrous. He laughed; but he looked again at the man by the bar. He was sipping at his vermouth; an inoffensive creature. The girl was probably trying, rather clumsily, to demonstrate that her own intentions were good.
He said: “I don’t think that I need worry.”