Istanbul (15 page)

Donaldson was waiting for him on the platform at Sirkeçi station; Abrams was with him. When he stepped down from the train, he immediately took them to one side and told them what had happened.

‘You’d better get away from here right away,’ Donaldson said. He seemed neither surprised nor much impressed by Nick’s narrow escape. He had a porter fetch his luggage and Nick headed for the exit.

He was in a taxicab headed across the Galata Bridge to Pera when station officials unlocked the freight car and discovered the guard trussed and gagged in his underwear behind a large crate. They undertook an immediate search for the passenger in compartment B but without success.

The archives were loaded onto a truck and removed to the British consulate where the leader of the Bulgarian Peasant Party, until very recently the head of the resistance movement in his country, emerged from the crate hungry, exhausted, but otherwise unharmed. Having survived the journey with nothing more than two oranges to sustain him, he was given a hearty breakfast and congratulated on his escape from certain imprisonment and probable death. A pitiless Abrams debriefed him for five hours before allowing him to fall into an exhausted sleep.

The Turkish police made enquiries to the Consul about an Englishman named Peter Box but these were politely rebuffed. No-one of that name was known to anyone at the consulate.

The matter was buried under a mass of paperwork in an office somewhere in Beyoglu and was never raised again.

CHAPTER 33

The consulate arranged temporary rooms for Nick and the rest of the Bucharest staffers at the Pera Palas Hotel. Nick stood on the balcony, smoking a cigarette to steady his raw nerves. The icy wind took his breath away, but revived him.

Out on the Horn a mist of rain swept across the water, and the fishing boats and ferries disappeared from view. It had snowed the week before and dirty lumps remained like foam, clinging to the roofs of the houses and piled in drifts in the gutters.

He ran a hand across his face; he needed a shave. The night’s events seemed suddenly unreal.

I’ll see you in Istanbul.

She was out there somewhere. He knew he had to see her again.

Istanbul was not one city but three: old Istanbul clung to Seraglio Point, its mosques and harems lending the city its famous silhouettes; on the other side of the Golden Horn were the bars and nightclubs around Taksim Square and the European quarter of Pera; Scutari, in Asia, lay on the far side of the Bosphorus.

The city was Byzantium to the Romans, later Constantinople, where Justinian built the great church of Sancta Sophia, a masterpiece in stone that still dominated the old quarter fifteen hundred years later.

Ottoman conquerors had transformed the city, and the skyline was testimony to the sultans and pashas who had lived there, the great mosques of Süleyman and Rustem and Bayezid soaring above the clutter of houses on the south side of the Horn. The elegant Tower of Justice rose from the cypresses on Seraglio Point where the sultans had once kept their harems.

Coming from Bucharest, a city captive to terror and starvation, it was like being set free from a prison. Turkey had so far succeeded to stay out of the war, despite the best efforts of London and Berlin to drag them into it. But the country’s situation was precarious. Hitler wanted Turkey as a base from which to attack Russia and the Middle East, and the British wanted Turkey to help them dislodge the Germans from the Balkans.

Another even bigger vulture was circling. For over a century the Russians had wanted control of the Dardanelles for unhindered access to the Mediterranean. The war now offered them the chance to get it.

But the Turkish President, Inönü, had so far kept his nerve. The Great War twenty years before had been disastrous for the country, and he was determined that they would not be dragged into another one. The economy was a shambles, and the military was too small and too ill equipped to defend the borders. They had no armour, no air force and no anti-aircraft weapons. Siding with either the Allies or the Germans could only end in catastrophe. Instead Inönü signed friendship pacts with all the big players and tried to appease each of them in turn.

Istanbul’s neutrality made the city a magnet for desperate refugees from Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary, Yugoslavia and Romania. They had swollen the city’s population by a hundred thousand souls, adding an extra burden to a country where many were already suffering from hunger and poverty.

The city also attracted countless spies. By Nick’s count, no less than seventeen foreign intelligence services were operating there when he arrived, transforming the city into a covert battleground of elegant manners and polite diplomatic language.

The British Consulate was in Pera, a vast Victorian edifice off Istiklal Boulevard. It was in the European quarter, which dated from the Middle Ages when Pera was home to Venetian and Genoese traders. Unlike the old city, the skyline was featureless except for the Genoese Tower, which was first built as a fortress, then used as a fire lookout and was now principally employed as a giant neon advertising hoarding.

The dark cobbled streets were home to banks, offices and merchant houses, clanging trams making their way up and down the Istiklal Boulevard, the city’s equivalent of Oxford Street.

Nick got to his office at 9.30, went up via the back stairs, for the grand main entrance was reserved for regular diplomats. He had two offices on the same floor as the code room and the security officer.

As ‘assistant military attaché,’ he was expected to interview men and women of every nationality who called on the Consul on their way through Istanbul, mostly businessmen, diplomats and bureaucrats ousted from their positions by the war. Nick debriefed them all, and often gleaned valuable intelligence; sometimes he was even able to recruit them as agents.

His consular colleagues were told that he was helping relieve the burden on the military attaché, but only Abrams and Donaldson, the Consul, knew his real paymaster.

He went straight up to Donaldson’s office. Abrams was already there, and Nick briefed them a second time on what had happened on the train from Sofia.

‘But why did this woman help you?’ Donaldson asked him.

‘I recruited her in Bucharest, under instruction from Mr Abrams here,’ he said. A subtle inversion of the truth. How diligent he sounded. ‘Her brother was imprisoned and probably murdered by the Iron Guard, and her family lost everything to the fascists. They threw her father in prison.’

‘Why?’

‘She’s Jewish.’

‘And she’s Maier’s mistress?’ Donaldson said.

‘Yes.’

‘He knows she’s Jewish?’

‘I don’t think he shares the Aryan view of racial purity. Besides, Daniela Simonici is a very beautiful woman.’

‘And she’s helping us because she hates the fascists?’

‘There is a certain friendship between us. I helped her out of tight situations a couple of times in Bucharest.’

‘Really,’ Donaldson said.

Abrams rested his teacup in its saucer and said: ‘We should actively pursue her as a potential agent. The information she supplied to us in Bucharest ultimately proved quite valuable.’

‘Do you think this is possible, Davis?’ Donaldson asked.

Nick stared out of the window, at the sweep of roofs and wooden houses crowding to the Horn. ‘Yes. It’s possible.’

‘Can you contact her?’

‘I don’t know where she is.’

‘Perhaps she’ll contact you,’ Abrams said.

‘I hope so.’

There was a beat. Donaldson looked pained. ‘Well, keep us informed,’ he said.

Nick’s first task was to re-establish the network he had built in Bucharest. His most effective sources had not been the Daniela Simonicis of the world, but ordinary railway workers. He already had two sleeping car attendants from the Orient-Simplon Express on his payroll, as well as a brakeman and a conductor who travelled regularly from Sofia and Bucharest. While Turkey remained neutral, its trains still travelled freely to all the occupied capitals in the Balkans and railway employees were able to smuggle money and documents across borders. They didn’t need bulky radios because they returned frequently to Istanbul and could make their reports in person.

The brakeman had proved especially valuable. He had a sharp eye and a keen memory. He had submitted regular reports on German troop movements and potential bombing targets inside Romania and Bulgaria.

Their main objective was to try and anticipate Hitler’s next move in the Balkans. Would he move against Russia or against Turkey? He could not strike at both. Would he invade Greece or Yugoslavia? Nick pored through endless reports, trying to see patterns, but it was like piecing together pieces of a jigsaw that consisted almost entirely of sky.

The editorial in Istanbul’s leading daily newspaper,
Cumhurriyet
, had no doubts:
For Germany a long drawn out war means defeat. Hitler’s real target is the British Empire so he will not come towards Turkey.

President Inönü certainlyhoped so. Their own intelligence assessment calculated that a committed German offensive would take Istanbul within forty-eight hours. Already many
instanbolu
were flooding out of the city; you couldn’t get a seat on a train or a boat to anywhere these days without a substantial bribe.

Abrams’s own forecast was gloomy. ‘Month at the outside,’ he said. ‘I’d keep your suitcases packed. We’ll be moving on again soon.’

An air raid siren wailed across the city, interrupting his thoughts. Another drill.

The telephone rang. ‘Davis.’

‘It’s me,’ a voice said.

‘Daniela?’

‘We need to meet.’

‘Is everything okay?’

‘I can’t talk now. Askatliyan’s. Two o’clock.’ And she hung up.

Askatliyan’s Hotel was at the lower end of Istiklal, a grand Victorian hotel of faded glories. Waiters in once-white jackets shuffled among the handful of diners in a vast and dimly lit dining room of scrolled pillars and peeling gilt. Nick pushed through the heavy mahogany doors into the bar. He sat two vodka vermouths on the marble counter and waited.

She was fifteen minutes late. When she did arrive, he didn’t recognise her. She wore no make-up and she kept her sunglasses on. A jade-green silk scarf covered her hair.

She sat down. ‘So. You got away from the Bulgarian police,’ she said.

‘Where’s Maier?’

‘He is off doing business somewhere.’ She looked at him over the top of her sunglasses, an unnecessary and extravagant accessory. It was dark in the bar even at this hour of the day, yellow sunlight filtering through gaps in the faded silk curtains. ‘You made quite a stir at the border. The police were running up and down the corridors banging on all the doors. The rumour went round that someone had jumped from the train.’

‘What did Maier say about that?’

‘Siggi didn’t say anything. I never know what he’s thinking.’

‘He didn’t suspect you had anything to do with it?’

‘Why would he think that?’ She looked genuinely shocked. ‘I wasn’t sure until we got to Istanbul that you were all right. You’re very clever.’

‘Thank you.’

She sipped her vodka-vermouth. ‘Is your wife here in Istanbul?’

‘No. She went back to England.’

She put a small pale hand on his. There was an aching silence between them.

‘So, you’re still Maier’s mistress?’ he said.

‘He treats me well enough.’

‘Don’t you hate these people? They put your father in prison and took your house and your businesses.’

‘Hating Maier doesn’t change what happened. Anyway, it was Siggi who helped get my father released. He’s been kind to me.’

‘Will he be as kind if he finds out you’ve been here?’

‘He told me to come.’

It took Nick a few moments to understand what she meant by this. Then it hit him: ‘He wants you to seduce me and spy for him.’

She nodded. ‘But he doesn’t know I saw you in your compartment on the train.’

‘Why are you telling me this?’

‘You know he’s not a businessman? Not really.’

‘He’s a colonel in the Abwehr. Were you as frank with him about our arrangement?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Why not?’

‘You asked me if I hated the fascists. Hating Maier doesn’t get the Germans out of my country. But helping you, that is something I can do for all the ones who died, isn’t it?’

‘Why does he want you to spy on me?’

‘He thinks you work for the British secret service.’