Tomy and the Planet of Lies (13 page)

Then I informed Marc that that afternoon, while he had presumably been racing down the ski slopes, the examining magistrate had called and innocently asked how I was. Then he had gone on to tell me that they had found something, which let me off the hook and confirmed our statements.

“Oh, yes? And what was this sensational find?”

“A bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label whisky.” “Since when can whisky bottles talk?”

I asked Mario to bring us over a bottle. “See the way I hold the bottle?”

“Yes, quite normal.”

“Normal means that I grip it with my fingers. The hand is at the end of the arm and points away from the body. Now when I hold the bottle out and you take it…”

He gripped the bottle and I kept hold from my side. “Yeah, and?”

“Your fingerprints are now next to mine. Fingertip to fingertip but a mirror image. That's what the magistrate explained.”

“But what does that prove?”

“Listen. The forensic scientists examined a bottle from the bar in my house. They discovered two sets of prints—mirror images. The same prints! Always mine! Sometimes they overlapped, and that at the same time. The same person— me!—must have held the bottle at the same time from both sides. You see? If I was holding the bottle out from my body, I couldn't also be the person accepting it. It's just not possible.”

Marc scratched his chin.

The pianist was now playing Nat King Cole's
Unforgettable
.

“How do they know that both sets of prints were made at the same time?”

“Search me. But apparently they can prove it. So it must have been two different people simultaneously holding the bottle from opposite sides. My own fingerprints—the proof for Tomy's existence! Things are looking up.”

“Crazy,” muttered Marc and turned round to ask the pianist to play Errol Garner's
Misty
for him. I love piano bars, especially those with talented pianists and had seduced Marc over to my way of thinking—even though the type of music he normally listened to was quite different. The evening atmosphere in the
Suvretta's
bar was dignified. The music brought back memories and was always at a decent level so that guests didn't need to bellow at each other to make themselves heard.

“How would you have told my parents about my death?”

I did a quick double take at this abrupt change of the subject, but didn't hesitate with my answer: “It would never have got to that. I would have been dead too. But my wife would have had a really hard time with the problem. Thank heavens it never came to that!”

“Tomy should have jumped into Ercan and wrung the truth out of him.” Marc said sullenly.

“He didn't want to at the time. And later it was too late.”

“It's all so crazy,” Marc raised his glass again. “If I hadn't been there myself, I wouldn't believe a single word of your mad story!” He grinned, “Do you remember how Elisabeth reacted to meeting Tomy?”

“How could I ever forget?”

 

After a one and half hour hard march, we finally got back to our hotel. Dripping with sweat and exhausted. Chantal was dozing on a deckchair on the hotel patio. At the sound of our footsteps, she woke with a start, regarded us for a moment, and covered her face with a trashy magazine that lay on a footstool next to her. Marc furiously tore the magazine from her face:

“Who was it?” he screamed at her. “Eh? What?
What?
”

Of course, she already knew. The first “eh” betrayed her. I wanted to know where Ercan was. She told me that he had already left, but was she was expecting him back soon to pick her up.

“Pick you up?” inquired Tomy dangerously. “Before we got back from the mountain? So he wasn't expecting us to come back, then?”

Chantal stood up. She had already regained her composure. What had happened, she wanted to know, and why had we arrived on foot? Had we had an accident and should she call for help? Her lying insincerity stank to high heaven. But that kind of thinking didn't help us any. My highest priority was to get back to the car, so I asked where we could rent a car. Chantal spoke to the hotel manager, a wiry man with the obligatory Turkish mustache. Yalcin, he was called, or something similar. After ten minutes' discussion, he was still haggling about money. I paid. I also bought two of the rolls of film that he always had in stock for the tourists. I needed them so I could photograph the wrecked Range Rover.

About a half an hour later, we were again standing in front of our wrecked car. It looked even worse than I remembered. Yalcin wandered around the vehicle a few times and pronounced that it wasn't as bad as it looked. The motor was still intact, the tires too, as well as the entire steering mechanism. The rest could be fixed at any decent repair shop.

“And how is this wreck supposed to get to a repair shop?” I inquired.

Yalcin offered to call a friend of his in Adiyaman who ran a repair yard and had a truck that would be able to transport the car. It wouldn't be any problem getting this high up the mountain with a small truck.

“It has to be today!” I insisted. “And I need a rental car. I don't want to sit around here getting old!”

The truck was there within three hours, but not the rental car. Instead, Ercan turned up. He seemed to have everything under control; he had already heard everything about our “accident.”

From whom?

It couldn't have been Chantal; she was with us the whole time and had even driven up here with us to act as an interpreter.

“Accident?” Marc roared, disbelieving. He held his fist under Ercan's nose: “Do you call cut brake hoses and severed brake cables an accident?”

Ercan shouted back just as loudly. If he was lying—of which we were all certain—he must have been a damned good actor. He knew nothing about any sabotage, he claimed, and certainly wouldn't have had anything to do with it. He asked me if I thought he had ever lied to me before. I shrugged my shoulders, I couldn't really know if things he had said at earlier meetings were true or not.

“But haven't I always been there to help you out?” he insisted, and this really put the pressure on me. He really had helped me an awful lot during my previous visits to Turkey. After the heated atmosphere had cooled down a little, Ercan offered to drive us in his Lada wherever we wanted to go and—he stressed this firmly and decisively.

“I will protect you. Nothing else will happen to you here in my country!”

Marc didn't believe a word. I didn't believe everything, but what choice did we have? We were stuck in a lousy hotel at the foot of the Nemrut Daği in a backwater town called Eski Kahta and there was no other transport for miles around. We had to travel to the place where our car was getting fixed and where there was decent accommodation—to Adiyaman. I asked Ercan if he knew who Tomy was and he answered that Chantal had told him everything but he didn't believe a word of it. “Extraterrestrial? Pah! I'd love to have your imagination, Erich!”

“Then you wouldn't object to Tomy taking you over for a few minutes?”

“Never!” he cried and held up his hands as if to protect himself from Tomy. “He might have supernatural powers, but he's certainly no alien.”

“And what makes you so sure?” asked Tomy calmly. “Because there's no such thing as aliens. Basta! And even if there were such a thing, there's no way that they would be here. I didn't spend all my time in university studying physics to end up believing in that sort of baloney. Have you never heard of light years?”

Tomy said nothing, just stood there, smiling. I was amazed. This was the first time I had heard anything about a physics degree. And what's more, Ercan had always claimed to be sympathetic to my theories and they are almost exclusively to do with aliens. I wondered what kind of devious game he was playing. I took Tomy to one side and quietly asked him if he could forcibly take over Ercan.

“It's not a problem. But not now. I need to wait until he's asleep.”

By the time the truck that was carrying our car piggyback drove past the hotel, we had already cleared out our rooms and loaded everything into Ercan's Lada. As long as he stayed close to us, nothing much could happen. He was hardly likely to put himself into danger. We drove down the gravel road and soon caught up with the truck carrying the Rover. We followed it the whole way to a yard somewhere in the chaos of Adiyaman.

“A perfect location to do us in!” observed Marc, who spent his whole time looking pointedly around for potential assassins.

Tomy shook his head. “I hardly think so. They don't need murdered corpses: they want accident victims.” The surprisingly spacious repair yard actually consisted of several yards muddled up together and dotted here and there with cannibalized wrecks. As soon as the Rover was set back down on the ground on its own four wheels it was surrounded by a group of about ten mechanics dressed in dirty overalls, who immediately began a long discussion in Turkish. The owner proudly presented me with his business card: Gürüp Bocörü, I read, Central Garage Adiyaman, and on the back, “Repairs of all kinds. We sell all brands.” It would be no problem fixing the Rover, in his expert opinion. But he would have to order replacement parts from Ankara. If I wanted the car to look like new, he would need twenty days.

I didn't have that much time, and to be honest, I wasn't bothered about the dents and scratches. The main thing was that everything worked properly—especially the brakes. The rest could be sprayed over. Mr. Gürüp convinced me that, at the very least, all four wheels needed to be replaced. They had taken too many knocks and were now badly dented and even cracked in a few places. We agreed on a price of 1500 dollars cash up front. Any extra costs—he generously offered—could be paid later by credit card. He got straight on the phone to the British Leyland central office in Ankara, nodding repeatedly during the course of the call and then proudly announced to us that the car would be ready for collection in four days. A driver would be setting off from Ankara the same day with the wheels and other parts.

“What are we going to do for four days,” Marc moaned. “Especially with the company we're keeping.” He indicated Chantal and Ercan with a contemptuous nod of the head. “Why don't we just tell them all to go to hell and rent a car to go to all the archeological sites that you still want to visit?”

Ercan had heard everything. He dragged us into a coffee shop across the road and insisted again and again that he had known nothing about the sabotage.

“And what happened to the two officers?” probed Tomy. Ercan explained that they had had to return to their unit; that was why he and Chantal had driven back before us.

That all sounded plausible enough, and yet it wasn't enough. “Ercan,” I pushed, “since we've known each other, I have always thought of you as my Turkish friend. And it's true that you have helped me out quite a few times. But it's also true that you have always claimed to be an enthusiastic adherent of my theories. But back at the hotel at the foot of the Nemrut Daği you made it clear that you don't believe in extraterrestrials. Not in the slightest! Have you been lying to me all these years?”

To my amazement, he kept his cool and didn't lose his temper or appear embarrassed. He said that he found my archeological discoveries fantastic. He thought it was phenomenal, the way I reevaluated myths and holy books and questioned yesterday's world. And he loved my lively style of writing, he said flatteringly, the Turks loved my literature. But all of my discoveries could be explained much more sensibly, without any need to resort to extraterrestrials.

I had a hunch what was coming next. The idea of earlier civilizations—Atlantis and the like.

“Exactly!” he agreed, relieved. “Atlantis lay here, right on our front doorstep, in the Mediterranean. And all the inexplicable megalithic constructions, the huge walls, and all the technology that doesn't fit into our image of the Stone Age— none of it has anything to do with aliens, but rather Atlantis. The knowledge of the Atlantians was employed here, on Turkish soil, before Atlantis sank into the sea. Our forefathers inherited the oldest culture in the world: Atlantis.”

This was the voice of the nationalist in him speaking. I was aware of these arguments and knew that they weren't enough to explain anything. My thoughts strayed back to the sabotage.

“If this murder attempt had nothing to do with you and you don't know who it was, then who the hell
was
it? And why on earth
us
?” I was speaking calmly, but very deliberately. Marc sat next to me biting his lip. Tomy smiled, as he so often did.

“Just give me one good reason, just one…” demanded Ercan through gritted teeth, “…why I should want to see you dead!”

“Because of Tomy and his abilities. Chantal told you everything—you said it yourself.”

“But that all happened in Iran! What has that got to do with us Turks? And the idea that Tomy is an alien is something I find ridiculous, as you must understand by now.”

I was not completely convinced, but I held my tongue knowing full well that Tomy would be taking over Ercan that same night. Then the truth would definitely come to light. But what about Chantal? I asked her directly.

“That kiss you gave Marc, on the lips, at Nemrut Daği. Was that a farewell?”

“What? No!” Chantal leapt up and began shouting. “I didn't know anything about the stupid sabotage, otherwise I would have warned you. And Marc—I just like him, he's a good- looking guy.”

“So why were so surprised when we turned up at the foot of the mountain? You weren't expecting to ever see us again. Admit it!”

Chantal explained that she had never expected that the Iranians were going to just let us drive off into the sunset, and she had heard several exchanges in Iran that had led her to believe that this was exactly the case. But she had never expected an attack in Turkey.