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Michelin tyre sign above it. He told the cab-driver to stop there and wait. W« got out and went towards the office. There was a man inside, and when he saw Harper through the window he came out. He was thin and dark and wore a greasy blue suit. I did not hear Harper address him by any name, but they appeared to know one another quite well. Unfortunately, they spoke together in German, which is a language I have never learned.
    After a moment or two, the man led the way through a small repair shop and across a scrap yard to a row of lock-up garages. He opened one of them and there was the Lincoln. It was a grey four-door Continental, and looked to me about a year old. The man handed Harper the keys. He got in, started up and drove it out of the garage into the yard. The car seemed a mile long. Harper got out.
    'Okay,' he said. 'She's all gassed up and everything. You can start rolling.'
    ‘Very well.' I put my bag on the back seat. 'I would just like to make a phone call first.'
    He was instantly wary. "Who to?'
    ‘The concierge at my apartment. I want to let him know that I may be away longer than I said, and ask him to disconnect the battery on my car.'
    He hesitated, then nodded. 'Okay. You can do it from the office.' He said something to the man in the blue suit and we all went back inside.
    Nicki answered the telephone and I told her about the battery. When she started to complain that I had not wakened her to say good-bye, I hung up. I had spoken in Greek, but Harper had been listening.
    ‘That was a woman's voice,' he said,
    ‘The concierge's wife. Is there anything wrong?'
    He said something to the man in the blue suit of which I understood one word, 'adressât'. I guessed that he had wanted to know if I had given the address of the garage. The man shook his. head.
    Harper looked at me. 'No, nothing wrong. But just remember you're working for me now.'
    ‘Will I see you in Istanbul or back here?'
    ‘You'll find out. Now get going.'
    I spent a minute or two making sure that I knew where all the controls were, while Harper and the other man stood watching. Then, I drove off and headed back towards Athens and the Thebes-Larissa-Salonika road.
    After about half a mile I noticed that the taxi we had used on the drive out there was behind me. I was driving slowly, getting used to the feel of the car, and the taxi would normally have passed me; but it stayed behind. Harper was seeing me on my way.
    About five miles beyond Athens I saw the taxi pull off the road and start to turn around. I was on my own. I drove on for another forty minutes or so, until I reached the first of the cotton fields, then turned off down a side road and stopped in ^he shade of some acacias.
    I spent a good half-hour searching that car. First, I looked in the obvious places: in the back of the spare-wheel compartment, under the seat cushions, up behind the dashboard. Then I took off all the hub-caps. It's surprising how big the cavities are behind some of them, especially on American cars. I knew of a man who had regularly smuggled nearly two kilos of heroin a time that way. These had nothing in them, however. So I tried the tank, poking about with a long twig to see if any sort of a compartment had been built into or on to it; that has been done, too. Again I drew a blank. I would have liked to have crawled underneath to see if any new welding had been done, but there was not enough clearance. I decided to put the car into a garage greasing-bay in Salonika and examine the underside from below. Meanwhile, there was an air-conditioner in the car, so I unscrewed the cover and had a look inside that. Another blank.
    The trouble was I did not have the slightest idea what I was looking for—jewellery, drugs, gold or currency. I just felt that there must be something. After a bit, I gave up searching and sat and smoked a cigarette while I tried to work out what would be worth smuggling into Turkey from Greece. I could not think of anything. I got the