Istanbul (23 page)

The city lay breathless and steaming under the August sun. On his way to Max’s Taksim apartment, Nick clung to the shade of buildings like a man evading snipers. The heat had drained the city of its energy. Tempers were short.

Max was drinking more than was good for him. He sat in his shirtsleeves on the balcony drinking
raki
, and for the first time Nick noticed the spiderweb of broken capillaries on his nose and cheeks.

They talked about the war. The tide had turned after the German rout at Stalingrad just after Christmas. In recent weeks Allied troops had landed in Sicily and had captured Palermo.

‘How’s life on your side of the fence, old sport?’

‘I’m okay.’

‘Don’t look it. Look bloody miserable.’

‘Got a lot on my mind.’

‘Cloak and dagger or matters of the heart?’

Nick added water to his
raki
. ‘I can’t talk to you about the cloak and dagger, Max.’

‘Better talk to me about the other, then. Heard from Jennifer?’

Nick nodded. ‘She’s okay.’

‘Forgiven you?’

‘It’s over, Max.’

‘Don’t be too hasty, sport. Just a bit of fun. If you can’t have fun during a war, what can you do?’

‘She’s found herself an air force major.’

‘Well. Good for Jennifer.’ He grinned. It was common knowledge he had been having an affair with a Hungarian nightclub singer called Adrienne Varga for the last six months.

‘I’m trying to keep this whole thing quiet, Max.’

‘Of course. Understand completely.’ He downed his
raki
and poured himself another. ‘How’s your mystery girl? Spying for you now, is she?’

‘I hope you’ve not gossiped about this to anyone else.’

‘Me? Absolutely not. Keep that to myself. Naturally. Don’t want to hurt the war effort.’

Nick said nothing.

‘Hitler’s finished, of course.’

‘Not yet.’

‘Writing’s on the wall in bloody big capital letters. Stalingrad was what did it. Russians did for Napoleon, they’ll do for him.’

‘He’ll keep fighting till the end.’

‘But will his generals?’

Well, that was the question, Nick thought. And if they didn’t fight, what would they do? Perhaps Daniela could find out.

‘How’s your love life?’ Nick said.

‘Thing about women, sport, is not to fall in love with them. That’s the ticket. Word of warning for you there, old son. Fall in love and you just make a fool of yourself, no good for anyone. Max King’s first law of romance.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Advice is free round here. Love them but don’t trust them. History of men and women in one sentence. Well done. Another drink?’

The hill led down to the docks and the fisherman’s quarter, age-blackened stone tenements and rotting wooden houses leaning drunkenly into the street. He stepped over rags and melon rinds, even a severed donkey’s leg. Cats hissed at him and scuttled away.

He found a grim doorway and stepped inside, climbed the stairs to the second-floor landing. He knocked on one of the doors, when there was no answer he hammered on the door a second time.

‘Constantin! It’s me! Open the door!’

When Constantin finally appeared, Nick winced at the smell of liquor on his breath. He pushed past him into the flat. nick’s foot kicked an empty
raki
bottle that lay on the floor, and it rolled away under the table.

A cockroach in the kitchen sink, crawling over unwashed plates. Another half empty bottle of
raki
on the table; there was a pillow and blanket on the divan. Still an hour to sunset and Constantin had drunk himself into a stupor. Abrams had questioned his choice for the mission, but Nick knew that when the time came, the fisherman would be sober as an imam.

Constantin had been fishing on the Black Sea in 1941 when the Germans rounded up all the Jews in his village and machine gunned them in a field. He fled to Turkey in his fishing boat, the
Natalia
,
and
was sheltered by a cousin who lived in Galata.

Two months later Constantin discovered that his wife and sons had survived and were hiding in the woods outside his village, Dobruja. He was preparing to sail back and get them when his best friend from the village found him down at the quay. After they had embraced, his friend told him he had some bad news, the worst news. His family had been captured and sent to a concentration camp in Poland.

Constantin was one of Nick’s first and easiest recruits; all he wanted, all he lived for, was to do something, anything, to help beat the Nazis. Nick gave Constantin some money in a brown envelope and he took it and tossed it carelessly on the table. You could trust men like this because they weren’t doing it for the money.

‘Till Friday, then.’ Nick said.

‘Friday,’ Constantin said and shut the door behind him.

Omar Kalmaz was not much older than Nick himself but his bush of hair had already gone to grey and the sad walrus moustache lent him a mournful look. His cheeks were so lined that Nick sometimes imagined he could see dust settled in the creases. But he could still appear a handsome, even an imposing man, when he was away from the pipe.

But staying away from the pipe was something Omar found increasingly difficult to do. An opium addict was not the best choice for a agent; Nick had inherited him from his predecessor in Istanbul. At first he had proved valuable, he had high level contacts inside the Turkish Defence Ministry and the Emniyet, the Turkish secret police. Abrams suspected the Emniyet had planted him to feed them information they could not pass on through normal diplomatic channels.

His business interests often took him to Bucharest, where he exported carpets, copperware and leather. He met routinely with a Romanian trade official from the Interior Ministry who also happened to be the nephew of Ion Stanciu, the leader of the liberal opposition in Romania and still an influential voice in the government.

As a senior minister, Stanciu received regular missives from the Romanian Ambassador in Vichy France, including reports on troop movements and armaments factories there. For the last year Stanciu had been passing copies of these to Nick through Omar, who brought them back to Istanbul in the false bottom of his briefcase. These reports found their way, along with Daniela’s, to Air Marshall Harris and British Bomber Command.

Today, over a glass of apple tea, Omar passed him a brown manila envelope from Stanciu, and Nick exchanged it for another, containing a considerable amount of money in pounds sterling. Usually their business would be concluded. But today Omar had his servant bring more tea and waited till he had gone, shutting the heavy door behind him.

‘I have a message for you,’ Omar said. ‘Stanciu Bey asked me to pass this on to you, and to you only.’

‘Go on.’

‘He wishes to start a dialogue about the possibility of a truce.’

Well. The writing was indeed on the wall, as Max had said. Hard to believe that just two summers before, the Nazis had seemed irresistible.

‘There is something else. Stanciu Bey is unhappy. He says you are supporting the communists, this fellow Dumitrache.’

‘It’s one of the few resistance movements inside the country. Their politics doesn’t matter to us for now.’

‘He says the communists want to take over the country.’

‘They are eager to help us defeat the Germans. That’s our first priority.’

‘I think he is willing to work with you, but these Bolsheviks make him nervous. If he is to work with you he needs assurances that you will stop supporting these communists.’

‘When do you return to Bucharest?’

‘Within the month.’

‘I’ll talk to my superiors about this.’

‘Go with God,
effendim
.’

‘And you also, Omar Bey.’

As he returned to the consulate, Nick closed his eyes and tried to shut out the din of hawkers and taxis on the Galata Bridge. Hard to imagine a world after the war, but as Abrams said, even Hitler was a passing phase. The one thing that this business taught you was that all allegiance and loyalty was temporary. Abrams was right. It was Stalin they should be worrying about now.

CHAPTER 53

A hawk wheeled and dipped on the wind like a scrap of paper, watching the tiny specks below play out the dramas of their short lives. Through the shadow of a golden eye it saw Nick turn down an alleyway and go into a coffee house.

As it circled, it saw a woman in the jade-green silk scarf follow him down the
soguk
. The golden eyes blinked again and then with a delicate tip of its wings it soared away, its eye attuned to other lives, other small dramas of the great city.

The wailing Turkish music on the radio irritated Nick today more than it ever had. He stood up as she entered and held her chair for her. He helped her light her cigarette.

A waiter brought two small cups of Turkish coffee, the colour and consistency of steaming mud.

‘What’s wrong?’ she asked him finally.

He did not answer.

‘I know there’s something. It’s on your face.’

He took a breath. ‘I saw you yesterday. Outside the spice market.’ When she did not respond, he said: ‘You were with a man.’

‘What were you doing there?’ she said, as if he was the one who should explain.

‘I was on my way to work.’

‘You don’t usually go that way.’

‘You don’t usually walk arm in arm with other men. Do you?’

She stared at him, eyes ablaze. ‘How dare you?’ she whispered. ‘Don’t you still have a wife and children? Have I made any promises to you that make you think you own me?’

‘Just tell me who he is.’

A long silence. Then: ‘His name’s Grigoriev.’

‘Who is he?’

‘He works for the NKVD. For the Russians.’

Nick felt the blood drain out of his face.

‘Don’t look at me like that. You don’t know what it’s like for me, Nick. You don’t live in my world.’

‘Did you sleep with him?’

‘No, I didn’t sleep with him.’

‘What were you doing?’

‘Siggi asked me to be nice to him.’

‘Like you were nice to me?’

He thought she was going to slap him.

‘Did you sleep with him?’ he asked her again.

She leaned forward, her voice no more than a whisper. ‘I’ve never lied to you. Everything I’ve said to you is true. Everything.’

What to make of this? There were so many women inside Daniela Simonici. It was why she was the perfect spy; she could be so many people and make them all real.

‘If you don’t believe me, there’s nothing I can do.’

He shrugged his shoulders, genuinely bewildered. She stubbed out the cigarette and left the café without saying another word.

When she turned the corner, she stopped and leaned against the wall. The grief welled up from some place deep in her soul. She started to shake. He would never understand her, no-one would ever understand her. She was alone and she always would be.

He came out of the cafe and found her. He put his arms around her, but she twisted away. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

A tram went past, the cobblestones vibrating as it battled up the hill. A mist of rain spiralled from an indifferent sky. He stared at the crumbling faience on the wall of a nearby mosque, the ancient script a cipher, like a code that held the answers if only he knew how to read it.

A room full of mirrors. Each time he turned, there was a different reflection.

CHAPTER 54

The coast was a thin dark line, sensed rather than seen. The sea like steel. Constantin cut the engines and let the tide bring the
Natalia
into shore. Nick heard the rattle of the anchor, felt the pull of the tide as the
Natalia
swung around on the swell.

‘There,’ Constantin said. A torch flashed on and off three times on the beach. It was the signal.

They loaded the radio and the explosives into the rubber boat they had towed from Istanbul. Constantin’s two deckhands clambered down into the boat, Jordon followed, then Deakin the radio operator, then Nick.