Istanbul (36 page)

‘But Donaldson found out?’

‘Still don’t know how. He was spying on me. Can you imagine, Davis. Nerve of the fellow.’

‘So the Abwehr assassinated him. And you knew about it?’

‘Of course.’

‘I could have died that day, too.’

‘Tried to get you to come to lunch with me, remember? Did my best to get you out of the way.’

Nick could hardly credit this, except that it made perfect sense now.

‘This goes all the way back to Bucharest, doesn’t it? It was you who betrayed Bendix. You fingered Clive Allen for it.’

‘Without the oil, Hitler might not have attacked Russia. We wanted him to have the oil. We thought they’d destroy each other. In the end it broke Hitler, but not Stalin. Too many of those Russian bastards to kill.’

‘Jordon had a family. He had daughters.’

‘Then he should have found a different line of work. You don’t volunteer to go behind enemy lines unless you have a death wish.’

Abrams threw another bottle in the lake.

‘And Constantin? Bendix? Me?’

‘Question of priorities, I’m afraid.’

It was getting towards twilight. The sky was stained a dusty violet, the first stars appeared in a deepening sky. Nick started to walk away.

‘Where are you going, Davis?’

‘You make me sick.’

‘You’re breaking my heart, dear.’

Nick spat on the ground. Abrams just laughed.

CHAPTER 86

In other circumstances he should have been wary of venturing into the ruins of Bucharest after sunset. Six blocks from the hotel the city was a world of darkness and monstrous shadow, lit only by the blue flames of spirit stoves, refugees huddled in the wreckage of ruined apartment blocks.

Soon he was lost. He swore heavily under his breath. Christ. Even with the heavy revolver in his jacket pocket he was nervous. There were scavengers and deserters all over the city.

He turned a corner and bumped into another man. He reeled back, ready for an attack. But the man ignored him and walked on.

He was about to walk on, too, but some instinct made him turn around and follow him. He saw him for just a moment, silhouetted in the moonlight; a face flat and hard as a shovel, hair shaved short to his skull. He had seen him that afternoon, in Demischenko’s office.

The man turned into an apartment block at the end of the street and went inside. This was
her
apartment.

He took out the revolver. He had practiced on a shooting range but he had never fired in anger or in darkness or in a confined space. He heard the Russian’s footsteps echo on the stairwell. He ran after him.

He tripped on some rubbish in the dark and fell headlong. His shinbone cracked on the concrete. He swore at the pain.

The Russian was kicking in the door. He shouted a warning, to distract him, and ran blindly up the stairs.

The door to the apartment lay on the floor, ripped off its hinges.

A single candle burned on a table in the middle of the room. He called Daniela’s name but there was no answer.

The train pulled out of the station, arc lights revealing a few homeless souls crouched around spirit stoves. An unshaven man in a balaclava, sitting beside the tracks, stared up at them and the look on his face made her shudder. She was relieved to be finally leaving this terrible city behind. She did not know Bucharest any more.

Simon took her hand and squeezed it, reassuring her. Hard not to love a man who was kind. He had his cap drawn down over his eyes, and she couldn’t see his face, but she put her head on his shoulder, felt the rough wool of his jacket against her cheek. He still was just bones underneath.

She promised herself that soon there would be a new life and she would be happy again. She hoped it was true.

There were few places to hide and he had only a few seconds to decide. He could not wait there in the doorway. He ran into the kitchen.

Empty.

‘Daniela!’

He heard a noise behind him, coming from the bedroom. He turned, saw the Russian silhouetted in the candlelight. Even as the pistol came up, he felt very calm. There was a sense of blissful peace. It was over.

The pistol shot sounded like cannon fire in that confined space. He fired his own weapon at the same time. He did not feel the bullet. He did not even know he was hit. He concentrated on his aim, as if he was back on the practice range, and squeezed off two more shots before he went down. There was no pain.

CHAPTER 87

The heat was relentless. Daniela and Simon sat in a tea house above the docks staring at the crowds moving about the quay, the dispossessed and the desperate, all looking for another home and another chance.

A passenger ship had just docked in the Horn and passengers spilled into Tophane Square from the customs and shipping offices: turbaned dark-skinned men loaded down with chickens and hessian sacks, well-to-do Turks with porters scurrying behind them with their portmanteaux.

They had with them the tickets they had bought with the money Nick had given them, and the passports he had promised. All their possessions were in the two cardboard suitcases at their feet. They had left the flat and just walked out, caught the first train to Constanza and a boat to Istanbul.

She took a deep breath. She had been waiting for the right time. Would there ever be one? ‘There’s something I have to tell you.’

‘Let’s not do this now,’ he said. It was his mantra.

‘I have to tell you about the Englishman.’

‘It doesn’t matter. That’s all in the past.’

‘It does matter. I loved him, Simon. I still love him.’

He was silent.

‘We were lovers for three years.’ She waited to see what he would do. She hoped he would hit her. She deserved it.

The look on his face broke her heart. ‘I told you, it doesn’t matter.’

He stared down at the Horn, one fingertip absently tracing the scar on his jaw. She thought of him as he used to be, when there was flesh on his bones, a good-looking boy who could have had any woman he wanted. Why did he choose her? One day soon he would be attractive again, she supposed. What then?

She took a deep breath. ‘I’m not coming with you,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘I said I’m not coming with you.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I can’t.’

He laughed, then frowned, not knowing what to say to her. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘I just can’t do it.’

‘You don’t want to go to England? Where do you want to go?’

‘I don’t want to go with you.’

‘You’re not serious.’

‘You never asked what happened to me during all those years you were in prison. Don’t you care?’

‘I told you, I don’t want to know. That was our agreement.’

‘I lived with a German Abwehr colonel as his mistress and I did anything he asked of me in order to keep you alive, Simon. I slept with him and I spied for him. And I fell in love with the Englishman. I slept with him and I fell in love with him.’

The look of naked pain on his face cut her like a knife. ‘Are you asking me to forgive you? Because I have. We don’t have to talk about it anymore. It’s all in the past now.’

‘It’s not in the past. I’m in love with him still.’

He winced. ‘You’re my wife. You can’t abandon me now, not after everything I’ve been through.’

‘Simon, I’m sorry.’

‘You have to forget about this. We’ll go to England and you’ll forget about what happened in Istanbul and we can get on with our lives.’

‘I love him,’ she insisted.

There are moments in every life around which the future turns; she knew this was the moment she could take her freedom back, if she was strong enough, if she had courage enough. But inside she was still the stupid girl who got herself pregnant and who no-one could love. Anyway, she deserved to be punished for taking Nick from his wife and family.

She heard herself say: ‘Please let me go.’ If he saw her desperation, how much she needed her freedom again, he would relent.

‘I can’t live without you,’ he said. ‘I didn’t survive three years in that Nazi prison just to have you leave me.’

‘You wouldn’t have survived three days without me!’

‘You can’t do this to me. Not now.’

She felt her resolve slipping away.

‘How can you do this, after I married you when no-one else would? Have you forgotten that?’

He started to cry.

‘Don’t,’ she said and held his head against her breast and stroked his hair. ‘It’s going to be all right.’

‘Look, we’ve both been through a lot,’ he said. ‘We’ll talk about this on the way to England. All right?’

She took a breath. ‘All right,’ she said.

CHAPTER 88

Nick Davis first saw Daniela Simonici in the American Bar of the Athenee Palace Hotel in Bucharest in the June of 1940. He couldn’t take his eyes off her. The city was full of beautiful women, penniless countesses and fox-furred demi-mondaines looking to be rescued, and until that moment he had spared them only an appreciative glance, as a man does.

Four years later, in the September of 1944, with the Russians in Bucharest and the Allies in Brussels, he sat on the balcony of the American Hospital in Istanbul in a wicker chair, staring at the slick waters of the Bosphorus, and wondered at his misfortune at being alive. You would think you could trust a professional assassin to find his target, even in the candlelit gloom of a tiny apartment. A collapsed lung, the loss of almost three pints of blood, it might have killed other men, the doctors had said to him before they transferred him to Instanbul to convalesce. You have a great will to live.

Where had that come from?

A freighter pulled away from the quay and made its way towards Seraglio Point.

Max walked across the lawn towards him. Another ghost, another spectre from the past. He sat down in the empty chair beside him. ‘Is she on board?’ he said.

Nick nodded his head.

‘She’ll be back,’ Max said. ‘Girl like that. She’ll be back.’

But if she never did come back, he wondered what he would do. When you have been in love, as when you have known true madness, you are changed forever by it. It is impossible to come back.

A hawk circled the freighter as it moved through the narrows of the Golden Horn, followed it until it was far out to sea. Then it glided back to the shore, wheeling high above the Bosphorus, and for moment the wounded man sitting alone on the balcony of the hospital was reflected in its golden eye.

Then it moved on, soaring on the currents high above the ancient city. When it returned the next day the man had gone, in search of another city, and another destiny.

Other titles by Colin Falconer

Kindle US
  or 
Kindle UK