Istanbul (4 page)

‘Are you all right?’ Jennifer said from the doorway.

‘No. I nearly got myself killed.’

Jennifer accepted this news with equanimity. Perhaps another, more terrible, possibility had occurred to her.

‘It’s almost midnight, Nick. Where have you been?’

‘Had a few drinks at the American Bar. Steady the nerves.’

‘You didn’t think of ringing me, letting me know what had happened?’

‘You know what the telephones are like in this damned city.’

‘It’s only three streets away. You could have come home.’ Her voice was rising, anger mixed now with the tailings of worry. ‘What the hell happened?’

‘I was in Strada Lipscani. I saw some Jews being attacked by some greenshirts and I helped one of them get away. That’s all.’He drained his glass. ‘We should make plans to get you out of Bucharest. It’s getting too dangerous here.’

‘What were you thinking? Why would you help a Jew?’

They stared at each other. He went back to the liquor cabinet and poured another whisky. All these years he had spent under cover, keeping the government’s secrets; how long could he keep pretending to be someone he never was?

CHAPTER 7

Daniela was about to leave the hotel when reception called her room and told her that a Monsieur Davis was waiting for her in the lobby. She had not expected to see him again. She dressed quickly and went downstairs to meet him. He was standing by one of the pillars, a distinguished, handsome man in a charcoal suit with clear blue eyes and curly black hair. He smiled at her as she walked towards him. Most men smiled at her like wolves; but this one was different, and she did not know what to make of him.

He had a car waiting outside, a black Humber, and a driver from the legation. He held the door for her, then climbed into the back seat beside her.

‘Did you sleep well?’ he asked her, in English.

She had slept hardly at all, of course, crying and worrying over Simon. Whenever she closed her eyes she saw Levi lying bloody and beaten in the street. But she told him, yes, she had slept well, for she thought to tell him otherwise would have seemed ungrateful.

‘I didn’t sleep at all,’ he said. It sounded like a reproach and it made her wish she had told him the truth.

‘You do not have to do this,’ she said to him. ‘You have already been too kind.’

‘All part of the service,
mademoiselle
.’

He toyed with the wedding ring on his finger, slipping it on and off, on and off, staring distractedly out of the window.

‘Did you get into trouble with your wife?’

He looked at her. ‘No.’

She took his hand and kissed him tenderly on the cheek. ‘Thank you,’ she whispered.

They stopped at the Prefecture and he went inside and was gone for a long time. When he came out he was sombre. He got back into the car and shrugged his shoulders. There was nothing to say. Once, a visit from an official from His Majesty’s Legation with a fistful of
lei
would have carried some weight with a Romanian policeman, but those days were long gone.

Daniela stared out of the window at the cold stone walls of the police headquarters and wondered what was happening to Simon in there.

She felt cold on this hot morning. He put his arm around her, pulled her into his shoulder. She let him hold her, didn’t want to believe she would never see Simon again. She would not let herself even think that.

They turned down Strada Zarafi, where they had fled from the greenshirts the day before. The shop had been looted by the greenshirts, and torn and half-charred books lay scattered across the cobblestones among the shards of glass from the windows, that had all been shattered.

They stopped outside the ancient apartment block where she and Simon lived. The street was deserted. People were afraid to leave their houses this morning.

Nick stepped out of the car behind her. ‘It was just you and Simon lived here?’

She nodded. ‘I have one ... other brother. His name is Amos. He ran away to the country when my father was arrested. I haven’t seen him for weeks.’

‘What about the other man you were with?’

‘Levi was hiding from the work gangs.’

The work gangs; if it was not so appalling, it would have been funny. The government had disallowed all Jews from military service, but in the newspapers they were vilified for refusing to fight for their country. In fact all young Jewish men of fighting age had been inducted as forced labour, digging trenches for the army.

‘One night you’re eating lobster at Capsa’s, the next you’re in a flat with no bathroom eating barley soup. My father owned a bank but now he is sitting in a basement cell in the Prefecture and I don’t have enough money to get him out. Sometimes I think I am dreaming this.’

‘I think I can get those visas for you.’

‘It’s too late now.’

‘Not for you.’

She pushed open the door to the building and he followed her up the stairs. The stairwell was dark and he had to grip tightly to the iron balustrade, feeling his way up.

The door to the apartment lay on the floor, splinters of the door frame still clinging to the hinges. She went inside, stepping over broken furniture, shattered glass crunching under her shoes. The greenshirts had been thorough, taken what they wanted and destroyed everything else.

She fell to her knees and sobbed, her whole body shaking. He knelt down beside her, winced as a shard of broken glass pierced his knee. ‘It’s all right,’ he whispered. She allowed him to hold her for a moment, then shook herself free.

He stood up, feeling helpless.

‘Daniela . . .’

‘Just go.’

‘What will you do?’

‘I’m staying here.’

‘It’s not safe.’

‘I’ve nowhere else to go.’

‘Perhaps I can find you somewhere.’ He helped her to her feet, felt her sag against him, beaten. He led her back down the stairs to the car. He gave his driver an address on the Boulevard Bratianu. He sat in the back with his arm around her, to hell with whoever saw him.

He would not let her languish in that apartment alone. He knew just the man to help them out.

CHAPTER 8

Ploesti was just thirty-seven miles north of Bucharest on the Danube plains. Europe’s premier oil reserve was a sad, grey industrial town where oil sometimes seeped out of the ground and stuck to the shoes. Nick saw the lights of the gantries long before they reached the outskirts.

A brown leather suitcase lay beside him on the back seat. He rested one hand on it and stared at the back of his driver’s head, fascinated by the fleshy folds of skin that fell in scallops over the collar of his shirt. Extraordinary. He had no neck.

His name was Ionescu, Ilie Ionescu, one of the drivers from the car pool at the Legation. Nick suspected he had talents other than driving, and that was why he had been assigned to him for his errand to Ploesti. A gorilla with car keys.

He stared out of the window at the darkness. If he and Abrams could pull this off, it would be one of the greatest coups in the history of the intelligence service. It might not stop the bombs that were falling on England, but it would force that lunatic in Berlin to call off any planned invasion.

Ionescu stopped at an army roadblock. The guards pocketed the banknotes folded inside Nick’s diplomatic passport and waved them through.

They said the common language in Romania was French, but it wasn’t; it was money. It was why the plan just might work. If a few thousand
lei
could get him into Ploesti, a few million might get a squadron of engineers into the oilfields. But they had to do it now, before it was too late.

Bendix lived alone in a two-storey house near the Gara de Sud. As they drove up, Nick felt a prickle of apprehension. The house was in complete darkness. Bendix should have been waiting for them. Ionescu stopped the car, turned off the engine and waited.

The street was deserted. The clicking of the cooling car engine was the only sound.

‘Stay here,’ he said to Ionescu. He picked up the suitcase and got out of the car. He knocked at the door. No answer. He looked through window. No lightson anywhere.

He went back to the car. Ionescu looked nervous. ‘It’s dangerous just sitting here, Monsieur Nick,’ he said in Romanian.

‘There’s a torch in the glove box,’ Nick said.

Ionescu handed it to him.

‘Give me five minutes.’ He went around the side of the house. He tried the back door. It was open. Another bad sign.

There was a Webley revolver in his jacket pocket. He took it out. Its weight and size was reassuring. ‘Bendix?’

He flicked the torch on. Nothing. The mains power was cut. He swung the torch beam around the room; the kitchen table lay on its side and there was broken cups and plates on the floor. And here he was, standing in the dark, holding twenty thousand pounds sterling, a king’s ransom.

He felt his heart hammering against his ribs.

‘Bendix?’

He removed the safety from the revolver and moved across the kitchen. He swung the torch through an adjoining doorway into the living room; an upholstered sofa, two low bookcases under the window, a lamp standard. Bendix lived simply; or rather, he had, for the lamp now lay across his prone body.

He knelt down and felt for a pulse. He was still warm. There was a pool of black blood congealed like jelly around Bendix’s head. He tracked pieces of scalp over the Bokhara rug.

He heard a noise from the kitchen. In one movement he stood up, turned around and switched off the torch. Voices called to each other in German in the darkness, and he was blinded by two torches shining directly into his face. Instinctively, he threw himself to his right.

The gunshots were so loud and so close it made his ears ring. He thought he was dead.

CHAPTER 9

‘You all right, Monsieur Nick?’ Ionescu said.

‘I’m all right.’ Nick got to his feet. He switched the torch back on, The two Germans lay face down on the rug next to Bendix, both shot once in the back. ‘You saved my life.’

‘Now too much better we leave.’

‘Yes.’ They should be back in Bucharest when the bodies were discovered by Moruzov’s secret police. “I hope you can drive as well as you can shoot.’

They drove wildly through the night. Nick’s mind was in chaos. They had been betrayed. Someone had informed the Abwehr, their plan had died at the source, someone must have leaked it from inside the Legation.

Someone he must know had nearly had him killed.

He undressed in the dark and slipped into bed. Jennifer murmured in her sleep and rolled away. ‘You’re cold.’

He had nearly died tonight and she would never know. He had been comfortable inside his secrets for so long. Tonight he just felt alone and afraid.

An hour earlier Abrams had met him at the door of his apartment on Bratianu in his dressing gown and slippers. Even woken from sleep in the middle of the night he looked unruffled. His hair parting was still precise, undisturbed by his pillow. ‘Davis? What happened?’

‘Problem, sir. Have to talk to you.’

‘You’d better come in.’

They had sat in armchairs in his living room, drunk tea; perfect English gentlemen, except one of them had blood on his shirt. Abrams listened to Nick’s account of what had happened in cool silence.

‘You’re very lucky to be alive,’ Abrams said when he had finished. ‘The two men Ionescu shot were probably Wehrmacht special forces.’

‘They knew I was coming.’

‘So it would appear.’

‘Who else knew about this?’

‘About Bendix? Clive Allen recruited him originally.’

Allen was the Bucharest correspondent for the
London Times
. He had been working for SIS for six years and his job at the
Times
– which was absolutely legitimate – provided perfect cover for his activities.

‘Anyone else?’

He shook his head. ‘Just you and I.’

‘So it was Clive. Why?’

‘You never ask why, Davis. No-one ever understands these things. There’s a hundred reasons.’ He looked up at the ormolu clock on the sideboard. ‘It’s late, you should go home and try to get some sleep. We’ll talk about this again in the morning.’

And so now he lay in his own bed, exhausted but a long way from sleep, his mind churning over the night’s events. His eyes felt gritty and sore.