‘Me?’ His black eyes widened like saucers. ‘What do you take me for? I’m a simple guide in Istanbul. I never get involved in the affairs of my clients. Why should I? There’s no gain in it for me. In any case, how would I know the number of the room allocated to you?’
He convinced me with his final comment but I was unwilling to concede my suspicion to him. ‘I don’t think that’s a problem,’ I went on easily. ‘Money can make all kinds of things happen. Anyone can bribe a desk clerk to reserve a certain room for a client. And it would be easy to make certain that an assailant was waiting there beforehand.’
‘I don’t do things like that, Mr. Scott,’ he bleated adamantly. ‘I like to sleep at night with a clear conscience.’ His white teeth flashed showing the gold filling and he left me to go back to the hotel lounge.
I shortly discovered which maid had cleaned the room I had just vacated and handed her a handsome tip. She was confused by my gesture but she would never know how grateful I was that she had left that aerosol can of mosquito repellent in the room. Had she not done so, I might have been in very serious trouble… or extremely dead!
When everyone had left, I closed the door and crept into the bathroom after looking in the wardrobe and under the bed. Paranoia was becoming rampant but I had no need to fear for I was completely alone. I telephoned the hotel restaurant, ordering some sandwiches, fruit and coffee to be sent to my new room. Time was speeding along and I wanted to visit the Mahdi as soon as possible. Ten minutes later there was a knock on the door and I admitted a waiter wheeling a trolley with my sandwiches, fruit and coffee. He picked up a knife and I froze like a block of ice. Surely it wasn’t another man with a contract to kill me! He stared at me with a menacing look in his eyes.
‘If you wish,’ he said meekly, ‘I will peel the fruit for you.’
I breathed a sigh of relief, took the knife from his hand, pressed a few lira into his pocket, and ushered him out of the room. I had had enough of knives and waiters for one day!
I ate lunch reading the notes I had written in a book in my study at home. The Mahdi, which meant the divinely guided one in Arabic, was the term for a messianic deliverer able to fill the Earth with justice and equity. He would restore true religion and herald a short golden age lasting between seven and nine years. Thereafter the world would end. One could almost say the same about Hitler. He claimed to be a kind of Mahdi although the Reich he predicted was supposed to last for a thousand years. However it ended within a very short time. He became President and Director of Germany in 1932 but his plans did not really come to fruition until 1936. By mid-1945 his world had ended. Yet the Islam religion was in contradiction with regard to a divine deliverer. The sacred scriptures of Islam, the Quran, failed to mention anything about a Mahdi, nor did the Hadith, the sayings attributed to the Prophet Mohammed. It was the Shias who introduced the idea while the Sunnis continued to question such beliefs. The Shias saw the Mahdi as a restorer of political power and the religious purity of Islam. The doctrine appears to have gained ground during the confusion and insecurity of the religious and political upheavals of earlier times. The leaders of a revolt on non-Arab Muslims in Iraq in the seventh century used the doctrine in respect of Mohammed’s son-in-law. It was claimed that his body remained alive in the tomb in a state of occulation and would reappear to vanquish his enemies. The body was supposed to rise and return to the world carrying a black banner. Every time a crisis arose in history, The Mahdi tended to receive new emphasis. After the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212, when Islam lost most of Spain, Muslims circulated prophesies ascribed to Mohammed foretelling a re-conquest of Spain by the Mahdi. Over the centuries, the title was claimed by a number of social revolutionaries in the Islamic world. During Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt, someone claiming to be the Mahdi appeared for a while in Lower Egypt North Africa has seen many self-styled Mahdis including the found of the Fatimid dynasty, which encompassed the Almohad movement in Morocco. There was also the Mahdi of Sudan who besieged General Gordon in 1881 and overthrew Egyptian power in the Sudan. In essence, the Mahdi is a complete myth devised by human-beings for their own use. It ws similar to the analogy of the large vicious-looking dog whose owner told a stranger that the animal was harmless. ‘I know that and you know that,’ replied the stranger, ‘but does the dog know it?’ The situation with the Mahdi was no different. He was the divinely guided one , to administer justice and restore religion. I knew that, everyone else knew that, but did the Mahdi know it? History had often proved otherwise!
After lunch, I pocketed my second passport to become Mushtaq Hussein and went to the hotel lounge to find Turgut.
‘I want to go to this address,’ I told him, showing him the information that Schmuel Musaphia had given me at the Dorchester Hotel.
‘Ah,’ he responded hesitantly. ‘That’s one of the things I’ve been asked to arrange. That address is incorrect. I have a new one for you.’
‘A new one?’
‘Yes… they’ve probably done it for security reasons… in case someone steals the information from you on the way here. Had they stolen it, they would have the wrong address.’ He led me out of the hotel lounge to the car park and we got back into the vehicle. ‘We have to travel to the old section of Istanbul. The walled city.’ He started the engine and drove off. ‘We leave this modern part, cross the Golden Horn on the Galata Bridge, and enter that part of the city which is still fairly free of bulldozers, although it won’t be long before the developers get their way. The address I have is in the Stamboul section… a place where time seems to have stood still for centuries.
It was only a short distance away from our destination when he stopped the vehicle just a few hundred yards past the Column of Arcadius. He pointed ahead with the index finger of his right hand. ‘If you go down that street, you’ll find it’s the third house on the right. I daren’t drive you to the door. There are thousand of watching eyes around here.’
I got out of the car and walked down the street with an uneasy feeling in my bones. This was yet another horrendous venture into the unknown, only this time I was carrying a false passport, using a false name, and assuming an identity in relation to a religion of which I knew so little. I reached the third house on the right. It wasn’t as miserable as Menel’s house in Jaffa but it came very close. There was a small knocker on the door which I use forcefully to be shortly welcomed by a man in Western clothes.
‘I’ve come to interview Mustapha Ozal,’ I announced bravely. ‘I’m Mushtaq Hussein from Britain.’
He bade me enter with a sweep of his hand but as soon as I had crossed the threshold he placed a hand on my shoulder preventing me from going further. Before I could speak, he ran his hands over my body and down my legs checking that I was carrying no weapons.
‘Sorry about that,’ he said insincerely in a clipped English accent. ‘It’s just a formality. We all have a multitude of tasks to perform in these troubled times. One of them is security. One can never be too careful. Please come with me.’ I followed him down a short passage which had a number of doors. He opened one of them and ushered me inside. ‘You’ll be called shortly,’ he said, closing the door behind him, leaving me alone in the room.
I sat down on a modern chair and look around. There were three comfortable chairs and a round table made of mahogany. On a coffee-table lay a miscellany of Turkish newspapers and magazines. A few pictures adorned the walls but some were surrealistic and beyond my comprehension. In the far corner, on a small desk sat a computer and monitor. I had imagined that the man and the place was going to be mystical and strange. I was wrong! After five minutes had passed, just as my nerves were becoming frayed as a result of my deception, the door opened and a man of medium height, dressed in a dark blue suit, entered the room.