Istanbul (9 page)

People wandered about, dazed. A man shouted at him, crazy with grief or fear; an old woman crouched in the middle of the street, cradling a jar of pickles.

He climbed up the mess of bricks and iron and started scrabbling at the shattered concrete with his bare hands. Soon his fingers were torn and bleeding.

‘Nick.’ He turned around, saw her standing with Max beside the battered grey Humber. Her face was chalky with plaster dust.

‘I’m all right, Nick, I’m all right.’

‘Jen,’ he said.

He clambered down from the rubble. She threw herself at him. ‘Nick,’ she whispered and sobbed on his shoulder.

‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘It’s all right.’

‘I fell asleep in the armchair, waiting for you to come home,’ she said. ‘If I hadn’t fallen asleep . . .’

He held her, wondering what he would have done if she had died this morning. Got on with things, he supposed. He wished he loved her more than that. A man should love his wife more; for just one shameful moment, had thought that he was free.

CHAPTER 18

Nick peered through the curtains, down at the square. The city was blacked out and shrouded in fog. Armed men were running across the snow-hushed cobbles towards the palace. Gunfire echoed over the rooftops.

It was frigid in the room. They sat in their overcoats, huddled around the guttering candles. The power was out again, the heating too. Jennifer’s breath formed little clouds in the air. Event the Athenee Palace was not immune from war and earthquakes.

‘We have to get you out of here, Jen.’

She said nothing.

‘It’s too dangerous now. We don’t want our boys left without a mother.’

‘They’re safe where they are now.’ Like thousands of other schoolchildren, the boys had been evacuated to the west coast, were staying with Jennifer’s mother in Weston-super-Mare.

‘You can’t stay here now.’

‘I’m scared that if I leave I won’t ever see you again.’

‘All the other wives have left. It’s getting more dangerous here every day. There could be another coup.’ She was silent. ‘Do you hear that, Jen? It’s gunfire.’

She shivered and blew on her hands to try to warm them.

‘I’d feel better if I knew you were there with them.’

She gave him a look he could not decipher. She had always been a rather remote mother. Even when they were babies, she had preferred to hand them over to their nannies. In that respect, he imagined being a diplomat’s wife had suited her well, because the boys had both, by necessity, been sent to boarding schools in England at a young age. He wondered if she regretted that lost time now; he knew he did.

‘Do you still love me, Nick?’ she whispered.

He came to stand behind her, put his hands on her shoulders. ‘I won’t let anything happen to you,’ he said.

He went downstairs to the bar. Even in the candlelit dark, the scheming was still going on. An official from the Romanian Ministry of Defence was trying to sell transcripts of wiretaps from Antonescu’s office. They might have been genuine; Nick passed on them. The man wanted too much money and, anyway, what did it matter now?

He met Max in the American Bar. They had the place to themselves. The Nazis disappeared into their rooms at ten o’clock and most of the German military mission had moved to the Ambassador Hotel and only came back to the Athenee Palace when they wanted to sleep with a girl.

By midnight the corridors and stairs were lit only by a few sparse violet bulbs. As he crossed the foyer, headed back to his room, he had the eerie feeling he was being watched. A grim-faced Gestapo man sat by the stairs pretending to read newspapers.

He heard laughter in the foyer behind him, a German bringing his girlfriend back for the night. In the cavernous gloom of the foyer, he saw a mane of long dark hair and he knew it was
her
. He felt as if he had been stabbed in the heart.

For some insane reason he stopped and waited on the stairs, let them catch up. When he saw him Maier grinned wolfishly. ‘My Englisher friend!’ he shouted.

Daniela looked radiant. For almost a week he had worried over her, wondered if she might be languishing in some hospital, or lying among the piles of blackened corpses now being buried in unmarked graves all around the city.

She would not meet his eyes.

‘Still awake, Herr Davis?’

‘Stayed up for a nightcap.’

‘You don’t conquer Europe with a hangover,’ Maier said laughing. ‘Goodnight!’

Nick let them pass him on the stairs, smelled her perfume, was transfixed by the perfect sway of her hips. She turned once and their eyes met. In the violet dark he thought he saw a movement of her lips and he wondered what it was she might have wanted to say to him.

Later, in his own bed, he tried not to imagine Maier’s possession of her, but he conjured every detail of their joining in his imagination anyway.

What was he doing? He had no claim to her.

He had to get out of this damned place.

He and Jennifer lay like the entombed kings and queens in Westminster Abbey, on their backs, side by side, silent and cold.

Finally he swung his legs out of bed and put on his silk dressing gown – one of the few possessions they had rescued from their apartment – and went down to the lobby, feeling his way in the violet gloom of the lamps.

It was cold, like a catacomb. Shadows moved about the entrance, German sentries on patrol. The Gestapo man dozed in his chair under the stairs. The reception clerk slept with his head on the desk.

He paced for the sake of pacing, trying to walk off his agitation, as if this razor edge of confusion could somehow be blunted with movement.

‘You look like a tiger trapped in a cage,’ a voice said.

He knew her voice, though he could not see her, a silhouette in a chair set against one of the pillars.

For a moment he was too surprised to speak. ‘What are you doing down here?’

‘The same as you. I couldn’t sleep.’

‘Maier will wonder where you are.’

‘He’s snoring like a bulldog. Why don’t you sit down for a while?’

He found a hard-backed chair. What a strange life, he thought, the two of us sitting here while my wife and her lover sleep alone upstairs.

Daniela was wearing a fox fur coat that Maier had no doubt bought for her. She shivered inside it. ‘I saw you earlier, here in the lobby. I don’t think you saw me. Was that your wife?’

‘Yes.’

‘She’s very beautiful. Do you love her?’

‘That’s a good question and one I don’t think I can answer right now.’

‘Is that why you’re so unhappy?’

‘Does it show?’

‘Yes, it does.’

A long silence. ‘Why Maier?’ he asked her, finally.

‘He helped get my father away from the Iron Guard, persuaded them to release him.’

‘Is he all right?’

‘He’s very sick.’

I shouldn’t wonder, he thought. A miracle that he survived six months in a Romanian prison. He knew how they treated Jews in there, especially the wealthy ones.

‘Siggi’s kind to me.’

Maier: Siggi. ‘Well, that’s important.’

‘And I can pretend to like him. I’m a good actress. I always have been.’

‘Does he think he can help you get your brother out of prison?’

‘There are some things even Siggi cannot arrange.’

‘That’s a comforting thought.’

Their eyes locked.

‘Aren’t you afraid?’ she said, after a while.

‘Of the Iron Guard? Of course.’

‘Isn’t it strange? The greenshirts would kill you Britishers too, if they could. Only these Germans stand between you and a massacre.’

‘Yes, I’ve thought about that, and well, in the circumstances – Heil Hitler.’

Her laughter fell into the silence like breaking glass. The Gestapo man woke up and glared at them, as if they were whisperers in a public library.

‘How long since you have been home?’ she asked.

‘Eighteen months now. A long time. Wars tend to disrupt your life.’

‘What is England like?’

‘We drink a lot of tea.’ He wondered how you explained a country to someone who had never been there. ‘The people are colder somehow. There’s no passion in them. We have a saying: “keeping a stiff upper lip”. It means that no matter what you’re feeling, you don’t let it show.’

‘Is that what you’re like?’

‘I suppose. For most of my life.’

‘And now?’

‘And now?’ He took a deep breath. ‘I want to sit up all night here talking to you, I want to hold you all night and never let you go. But I have a wife and I have two sons and I cannot abandon them, and I feel sick to my stomach when I realise what a sham it has all been for so long. There. That’s not exactly stiff upper lip, and it’s not exactly Latin passion, but it’s the best I can do right now.’

She took his hand in both of hers, held it like an injured bird. Then she pulled him towards her and kissed him softly on the lips. For the first time he allowed himself to believe.

‘I wish that . . .’ she began, but she never finished and he never did discover what it was that she wished.

‘
Liebling
,’ a voice said from the stairs. ‘There you are, I was worried about you. What are you doing down here?’

Daniela snatched her hand away. ‘Siggi! You’re awake. Sorry. I couldn’t sleep.’

Maier strode across the lobby, stopped when he saw Nick. ‘My Englisher friend! What are you doing here?’

‘Insomnia. It’s contagious.’

‘Come back to bed,
liebling.’

She sighed and stood up, obeying. ‘Goodnight,’ she murmured and followed Maier up the stairs. Nick thought he saw her look back once with longing, but how could he possibly have discerned such an expression in the darkness?

He must have been mistaken.

CHAPTER 19

At the end of World War One, MI6 took over responsibility for issuing visas to foreign nationals overseas. Someone in the Foreign Office thought it was a good idea to use the passport control system as a cover for the ministry’s intelligence gathering activities. The PCO’s were only loosely connected to the diplomatic corps but did not enjoy full diplomatic status; if necessary, the local ambassador could deny all responsibility for their activities.

But the PCO cover was thin disguise. Any hostile government could quickly discover the identity of the MI6 station head by applying for a British visa.

The cover role also turned out to be an onerous duty. One of the functions of the Chief Passport Control Officer was to issue visas to Jews wishing to emigrate to Palestine. In Bucharest the trickle of applications had now become a flood and Abrams was overrun with desperate Romanian Jews seeking visas to escape the pogroms.

This morning Abrams was unusually fractious. His budget did not extend to employing more local officials, and although few of the applications on his desk would be successful, they were still required to be processed. He spent ten minutes complaining to Nick on the futile nature of his cover before he finally subsided.

‘But this particular problem is not the reason I wished to see you,’ he said. ‘It’s about this proposition you made to the Haganah agent.’

‘You’ve heard from Whitehall?’ Nick said, eagerly.

Abrams shook his head.

‘No? They said no? But why?’

‘We do what we’re told, Davis. There are wiser and cooler heads in Whitehall.’

‘Wiser?’

‘While Romania remains neutral, the British Government is unwilling to violate the sovereignty of a friendly government.’

‘Really? We’ve been doing it to France and Spain for centuries.’

‘That’s a very cynical point of view, Davis. Let me also remind you that I am responsible for the issuing of visas to foreign nationals, and the question of Jewish immigration into Palestine is a particularly difficult one right now.’

‘What do I tell Ben-Arazi?’

‘You tell him the truth, if it suits you.’

Nick could barely contain himself. But it wasn’t Abrams’s fault, this was a Foreign Office decision. Germany was dropping thousands of bombs on their cities every night and Whitehall was still worried about upsetting the Romanians.

We have no money and no resources and so we just sit here watching the Germans do as they please, and men like Maier laugh at us.

He had come to hate this job. At least if he had a gun in his hand he would feel like he was doing something.