Naturally I could produce no _vecika_. But I had the next best thing. That same morning I had discussed with Vladimir Wilkowsky the possibility of being stopped in the street by a policeman. His advice was that if it happened I must claim to be a German officer. I remembered being photographed in civilian clothes when at Gumuch Souyou Hospital; and before leaving Psamatia I gave myself a useful identity by signing one of the copies with a German name. After searching an inside pocket, I now handed to the gendarme a photograph which went to prove that I was "_Fritz Richter, Oberleutnant in der Fliegertruppen_." Speaking [in fluent German, interspersed with a few words of broken Turkish], I protested violently that I was a German officer in mufti, and that he would get himself into trouble for having presumed to stop a German officer. And never was I more frightened than when uttering that bombast. Half convinced and half browbeaten, the gendarme took the photograph, looked at it dubiously, and consulted a Greek from among the curious crowd that circled us. This man, it appeared, claimed to know German. I understood little of the conversation, but as far as I could gather the policeman asked if I really were a German officer; and the stallkeeper, reading the signature laboriously, informed him that it proclaimed me to be a Supreme Lieutenant of the Flying Soldiers. "_Pek ee, effendi_," said the gendarme to me. He returned the photograph, salaamed, and apologized. He then went away. So did I. I returned cautiously, through a combination of side streets, to the bridge-head, and I was much relieved to find that Mahmoud had disappeared. From the quay I chartered a rowing-boat, ordering the Turkish _kaiktche_ to row me up the Bosphorus. "Are you Russian, _effendim_?" he asked. "No, German," I replied, surlily. At that his conversational advances ended. The train of thought started by the word Russian led me to decide that I had better spend the night aboard the Russian tramp steamer on which White and I were to travel as stowaways. Vladimir Wilkowsky, in fact, had told me to make for it if I failed to reach the hiding-place on shore, and to ask for M. Titoff, the chief engineer. Its name, I knew, was the _Batoum_, and most of its officers were in the conspiracy to help us, in return for substantial consideration. I knew that the ship was moored in the Bosphorus, but of its appearance or exact position I had been told nothing. "_Russky dampfschiff Batoum_," I ordered the _kaiktche_, using the polyglot mixture which he was most likely to understand. But his voluble jabbering and his expressive shrug showed that he, also, was ignorant of where it lay. "_Bosphor!_" I commanded, pointing higher up the Bosphorus and thinking that I would find the name _Batoum_ painted on one of the five or six ships that I could see in the distance, moored in midstream.