Istanbul (29 page)

‘You should not leave it too long.’

Maier smiled but the strain told in his eyes.

‘What about your mistress?’

‘What about her?’

‘Will you require a visa for her also?’

‘I’m afraid that will not be possible. Frau Maier may not appreciate it.’ He leaned towards him. Nick smelled tobacco and expensive eau de cologne. ‘You don’t seem such a bad fellow, my Englisher friend. There have been times, of course, when I would have liked to have cut your throat, but there it is. But overall I have come to like you. She’s yours.’

He didn’t like Maier thinking that she was his to pass along. But that would have to wait for another time. ‘As soon as you’re ready, call me on the telephone at the consulate. Or at home. Here is my number.’ He pushed a slip of paper across the table.

Maier pocketed it, finished his coffee. ‘Now I must be off to buy more cinnamon.’

‘Good luck with it. I believe it’s a seller’s market these days.’

Maier hesitated. ‘She is a remarkable woman. But you know that.’

‘Yes, I do,’ Nick said.

‘You’ll never have her, you know.’ And with that he walked away.

‘God put your dick on the outside and your heart on the inside and He did it for a reason, old boy. Only one way to get attached to women, sport, and that’s through the carnal organs. The heart’s for keeping, it stays on the inside and it’s not meant to get attached to anything. All right?’

They were in a bar near Taksim. Max’s mistress, Adrienne Varga, was singing a sad Hungarian ballad on the tiny stage, accompanied by a Turkish
baglama
player.

There was a patina of sweat on Max’s high forehead, and it gleamed in the reflection of the stage lights. ‘Take me and Varga. Nice girl. Acrobat, if you understand my meaning. Easy on the eye. Secret is not to get too attached. Just a woman. Half the world are women. Got to remember that, sport.’

Varga was indeed beautiful, Slavic blonde, snake-hipped, and with a torchy voice that had every man in the bar devouring her with his eyes.

‘I shouldn’t have told you. I knew you wouldn’t understand.’

‘Understand perfectly. Intent on fucking up your life over a woman. Been done before. Wish you all the best with it.’

‘I love her, Max.’

‘Men don’t fall in love, sport, they get hard-ons.’

‘You’re a cynic.’

‘Of course I am, I’m a journalist.’

Varga finished her ballad and moved on to another slow and plaintive love song to tumultuous applause from a group of Turkish men sitting at her feet below the stage.

‘I want to marry her,’ Nick said.

‘Why ruin a good thing? Don’t understand you, old man. Ever met a happily married man?’ His voice rose to a theatrical whisper. ‘Between you and me, Varga wants to get married.’

‘You don’t?’

‘Don’t believe in it. Once is enough. Told her no.’

Max finished his whisky and ordered another. Drinking too much. Getting beyond help. Nick looked at Varga and wondered if any woman could reform him.

He doubted it.

CHAPTER 68

They stood side by side on the Galata Bridge, staring into the cold black waters, buffeted by the wind. Not many fishermen out here today, the wind raising whitecaps on the Horn and the little ferries bucking like horses on the churning waves.

‘When this war finishes, you must go back to your family.’

‘I told you, Daniela, it’s over.’

‘Then you’ll find someone else.’

‘I want you.’

‘I’m not good for you. You have to find some woman who can make you happy.’

‘I have found her. You’re the one I want.’

‘There’ll be other women.’ There can be no worse torment, he thought, than the woman you love wishing you happiness with someone else, pushing you into someone else’s arms. He supposed she truly did wish him to be happy.

He didn’t want that. He wanted her to feel as jealous and possessive of him as he did of her.

She reached for his hand. ‘I wish it could be you and I.’

‘It could be, if that’s what you wanted.’ His frustration made him do something he never thought he’d do; he betrayed a military secret to her. ‘He’s bringing his wife and son to Istanbul. Did you know that? He’s coming over to our side, Daniela. Where will that leave you?’

There was a look of indescribable sadness on her face. He realised she already knew.

‘I can look after you,’ he said.

‘If it’s meant to be, it will happen for us.’

‘It’s people who decide whether something is meant to be.’

‘You can’t fight fate, Nick.’

He did not understand her fatalism. Did she really think she had no control over her own life? He wanted to shake her. ‘I love you,’ he said. ‘Why do you keep pushing me away?’

‘I’ve given you everything I can and you still want more. I can’t do this anymore. I can’t keep hurting you this way.’

‘What are you going to do?’

She gave him a tired smile. ‘I’ll survive. I always do.’

Their affair had lasted through three years of separation and danger and doubt; but now she was finally free, she wanted to walk away from him.

He watched her walk away from him across the bridge, towards Beyoglu. The world was grey and cold. The boom of a freighter’s siren echoed mournfully across the water.

Wooden houses swayed over the street. He caught a glimpse of the Marmara Sea over their roofs, caiques beetling among the anchored warships. A muezzin called the faithful to noon prayer, his voice joined by another and then another, their chants echoing over the city in discordant holy song.

Something made Nick look up. He saw a woman’s face appear for a moment, peering down from a half-shuttered window, through the jalousie. They understood jealousy, these sons of Mohammed.

He stopped at the end of the street and looked back to satisfy himself that he had not been followed. All he saw was the woman behind the window still watching him, another soul like himself, trapped in a fretted cage.

Omar’s house dated from the Ottoman Empire of the seventeenth century. It had been grand once, but now it was long past its faded glory, the wooden casements and loggias grey with age, paint peeling in strips from the front door like charred skin.

Nick opened the side gate and made his way through the sparse garden. He rapped on the door and waited. He was about to knock again when he heard a key turn in the lock and the door edged open.

He smelled smell and something else, something sweet and sickly. Omar’s wife peered at him from the gloom, her head wrapped in a heavy scarf. Her black eyes were shadowed with dread. A foreigner coming into the house could only bring her husband bad luck.

Nick slipped off his shoes and went in. Once the house had been full of heavy mahogany furniture, and there had been layers of Bokhara carpets on the floors. Now it was almost bare, just a few
kilims
hanging from the walls; the rest had been sold off to pay for Omar’s addiction.

The woman led him to a bedroom at the back of the house.

Omar lay on a carpet in a corner, on his left side. The room was dark, and thick with sweet-smelling smoke. Nick sat cross-legged on the floor beside Omar and waited.

Omar took a ball of sticky black opium on the end of a needle and tamped it into the bowl of his pipe. He lit it with a taper and inhaled the thick smoke. Nick was not sure that he knew he was there.

Just when Nick thought he was lost to his dreams, Omar beckoned him closer.

‘
Effendim
,’ he murmured. ‘A long time since I have seen you.’

‘
Günaydin
, Omar Bey. May your day be bright.’

‘How goes it with you?’

‘I am well, Omar, God be praised.’

‘I have heard you have problems with a woman,’ Omar said.

‘People like to gossip.’

‘I understand,
effendim
. The only men who do not have problems with women are dead.’ He grinned and inhaled more of the sweet smoke. ‘Stanciu Bey wants to arrange a meeting, here in Istanbul. He is sending his own envoy, from the Ministry. It is his son-in-law, an army officer, the son of one of Stanciu’s closest friends. His name is . . . it is . . .’

Omar had drifted away again, into the soothing arms of the opium. Nick waited but he was soon deeply asleep.

Nick left. Once outside, he thought he was going to be sick. The smoke nauseated him and he clung to the wall for support.

He walked down to the Galata Bridge, where just that morning Daniela had walked away from him for the last time. He had intended to catch a taxicab from there to the consulate but instead he went down the steps to the pontoon under the bridge. The timbers swayed beneath his feet as a trolley bus thundered overhead.

Small clouds of gulls hovered and shrieked around the stern of a fishing boat in the harbour. The Turks thought they were the ghosts of those who had died in its black waters, the discarded harem girls and the strangled courtiers. So many lost souls in the world, he thought; he sometimes thought he might be one of them.

Am I so different from Omar? he wondered. They said that once you were a slave to opium, the only way out was from the Galata Bridge. He stared into the water and imagined he saw his own face staring back at him.

He turned away, saw a
hamal
labouring up the gangway of a ferry moored at the docks, bowed under massive sacks of rice. As the load was lifted from his back by two of the deckhands, Nick saw the look of sheer relief on his face. He thought he knew how he felt.

CHAPTER 69

The Park was a drab stucco hotel set back from the broad avenue of the Ayas Pasha Boulevard, across the road from the German Consulate, with its huge red and black Nazi flag. There was a circular driveway, forever crowded with German and French limousines, and at its centre were a few forlorn flowerbeds.

It was the city’s unofficial fascist headquarters. Germans, Hungarians, Austrians, even Arabs and Japanese congregated in its bars and restaurants. Nick had a watching brief for every Nazi and fascist sympathiser who went in and out of Istanbul and they all appeared at the Park sooner or later. But tonight he had business of his own to attend to.

He rode the elevator to the fifth floor and checked that the corridor was empty. He went to suite 505 and knocked on the door. A gorilla in a badly fitted suit threw open the door and ushered him inside. He was about to pat Nick down but Stanciu waved him away.

The two men shook hands and Stanciu led Nick to the window and two red upholstered leather armchairs. He offered him
raki
. The gorilla brought the drinks.

Stanciu was dressed in the manner of a cavalry officer, with a cravat and dark suit, and had the air of dissipation and education affected by Romanians of breeding. His family had been involved in Romanian politics for seventy years, the voice of reason among a coterie of racketeers, industrialists and police chiefs. Even now he had Antonescu’s ear.

‘So, at last we meet. I trust I have been of some assistance to you.’

‘My government deeply appreciates all you have done.’

He bowed his head in acknowledgment. ‘I have no love for the Germans, Monsieur Davis. Only matters of political expediency have constrained me.’

‘How are things in Bucharest?’

‘Not good. You know our boys were fighting in Stalingrad? We had one hundred and fifty thousand casualties. Now Romania no longer has an army.’

‘It’s a lot of men to lose.’

‘It was a policy decision by the German High Command. They wanted to destroy our army in case we ever decided to fight them.’

‘It worked.’

‘One hundred and fifty thousand men, and still we do not have our lost provinces returned to us. But then, you warned us about Monsieur Hitler.’

‘There was nothing you or I could have done to prevent what happened.’

‘I am glad you see it that way. But it doesn’t help my son. He was an officer in the artillery. He lost both his legs at Kiev.’

Stanciu finished his
raki
.

‘Why did you want to see me?’ Nick asked.

‘There are some of us in Romania who have always been sympathetic to the Allied cause, you understand that?’

‘I think so.’

‘We believe it is important that discussions between your government and ours continue. You cannot allow the Russians to march into Bucharest. It is not in your interests and it is certainly not in ours.’