Istanbul Passage (6 page)

“Tommy? Who’d trust him with a secret? Just hand him a drink.”

“You worked with him. Who knows, maybe you—”

“Worked. I put him in touch with some people in Ankara. That’s it. What’s this all about?”

“War’s over. What does it matter now? I’d just like to know. Was I right?”

“Ask him. How the hell would I know?”

“Of course, that’s what you’d have to say, isn’t it?”

Leon looked at him, then forced a laugh. “I guess it is. If I didn’t have a foreign wife. German, for Christ’s sake. I’m the last person they’d ask.” The Anna cover, still useful. “And I’ll bet they didn’t ask Tommy, either. With his big mouth. What you’re talking about—I thought all that was over at OWI. And I hear they packed up. So maybe we’ll never know.”

“OWI,” Ed said, nodding, not letting it go. “And the college. Remember early ’forty-two, all of a sudden Robert College gets a whole new group of teachers? You’d meet them at parties, they’d never talk about their classes.”

Leon smiled. “Maybe they came for the view.” A hilltop looking down at Bebek and the Bosphorus. Cocktail parties on the terrace in the evening light. Not what the founding missionaries had had in mind. “Come on, Ed. You see those guys doing parachute drops? Four-eyes? With Tommy? I never saw him open a book. I’ll bet he doesn’t even know where the college is.”

Ed smiled, a cat licking cream. “He’s giving a party there.”

“A party?”

“He didn’t ask you?”

Leon shrugged. “I told you, we’re not that close. What kind of party?”

“Just some drinks. Say good-bye to his friends there.” He looked over. “Those guys he doesn’t know.”

“Well, Tommy. Any excuse. When’s this?”

“Tonight. Why don’t you come? The more the merrier. That’s what he said to me. Wants to fill the place.”

With witnesses. Distancing himself.

“I can’t tonight.”

“Hot date?”

“I’m going to see my wife.”

“Sorry,” Ed said, genuinely embarrassed. “Well, try to drop in late. You’re right there. She’s in Bebek, right?”

Leon nodded. Near the college. But not as far up the coast road as the boat landing. Tommy making a diversion. If anyone followed him, they’d never go farther than Bebek, waiting for him to come down the hill. Hosting a party, not meeting boats.

“I’ll see what I can do,” he said, signaling for the bill. “You find out who’s who first so I don’t say anything I shouldn’t.”

“You think I’m kidding.”

“I think the place is getting to you. Here, let me get that.”

“Tell me one thing then.”

“What’s that?” Leon said, dropping some lira notes on the bill.

“Remember that secretary of von Papen’s? Switched sides?”

“The one asked for asylum. Sure.”

“I was at the consulate that day. And where do they send him? To Tommy. Now why would they do that?”

A flustered attaché, an instinctive reaction, forgetting the rules.

“I don’t know, Ed.”

“Think about it,” Ed said, taking another sip of the wine and leaning back, settling in. Leon imagined another hour of this, Ed probing, a meaningless cat-and-mouse game. To learn what, exactly?

“I have to run,” Leon said, glancing at his watch. “End-of-the-month figures.” He got up. “Watch yourself tonight. With the professors. Loose lips.”

“Very funny. But I’ll bet you I’m right.”

“I’ll try to make it later,” Leon said, a lie they both accepted.

He left by the side exit to the fish market, the narrow street slippery with melted ice and old frying grease, then turned through the covered vegetable stalls and out to Mesrutiyet, a long street of apartment buildings looking west to the Golden Horn. What did Ed want, anyway? Imagining Tommy lurking in alleys, missing the real sleight of hand. Follow me to a party while my freelancer does the work up the road.

The street curved, hugging the steep hill, opening up to the water view below. Once there would have been hundreds of sails. A dip in the road, past the Pera Palas and then up, threading through the narrow streets to the Tünel station. Marina’s building was just behind, a gray apartment block grimy with neglect. Some of the windows looked toward the square where commuters poured off the funicular, but Marina’s faced down to the Şişhane shipyards, the flat waters of the Horn beyond.

“I can see my whole life from here,” she said once, smoking by the window, her body wrapped again in her kimono. “That’s my childhood.” She nodded toward the streets squeezed behind the docks. “Then, if you
lean out this way—well, maybe it’s better, you can’t see that house. But the same hill. A few streets, what a difference. Another life.”

“And now what,” Leon said idly.

“Now here. I like it here. I like looking down on it.”

He checked his watch. A little early, driven away by Ed’s prying, but Marina wouldn’t mind. Thursdays were his. “You couldn’t wait?” she’d say, teasing, opening the robe to her breasts, waiting for him to take them in his hands, lean down.

He had just left the square when he saw the man coming out of the building. Stopping for a minute to adjust to the sunlight, then straightening his hat. A western suit, not the workers’ overalls or
jellabas
you usually saw in the building. Leon turned, almost a pivot, and stepped toward the station newsstand, looking at a newspaper, waiting for a presence behind him, then turning again. The man was heading to the Istiklal tram. High cheekbones, thin nose, dark but not necessarily a Turk, anybody. Who went to her building in the middle of the afternoon. Now walking past the tram into the crowd. He felt suddenly warm. Of course she saw others, he’d always known that. But not on his day. That was the point. Not to be somebody waiting in line, like a sailor in a Galata house. The illusion of something more, the whole day paid for. Unless the man had been somewhere else, visiting one of the other flats. Except he hadn’t. Sometimes you knew, just by instinct.

“You’re early,” she said, opening the door, the air golden, blinds half shut against the light.

“I know. I just missed your friend.”

She hesitated for a second. “What friend?” she said, not sure, trying to find a tone.

“I saw him coming out.”

“Oh, and I’m the only one who lives here,” she said quickly.

“Who was he?”

“No one. What a little boy you are. Pretending to be jealous.” She
tugged a little at his belt. “Close the door. Did you see the pail? On the landing? Another leak.”

“You should complain.”

“Oh, to the
kapici.
In a building like this.”

“To the owner. Was that him?”

She moved closer to him. “Look at me. My eyes. So you know it’s true. I haven’t been with anyone today. You know you can smell that, when there’s somebody. On the skin. Do you smell anyone?”

“Just perfume.”

“That’s right. The one you like.” She stared at him again. “I haven’t been with anyone today. All right?” She put her hand on his crotch, rubbing him. “I always save today for you. You know that.” Stroking him, the lie like another hand on him, so that he was hard instantly, excited by both, unable to separate them.

He took a
dolmus
taxi to Bebek this time, making conversation with the other passengers so that he’d be remembered, a foreigner who spoke some Turkish. Anna had already been fed and changed for bed, a soft nightgown she seemed not to notice. “I’ll just sit with her until she falls asleep,” he told the nurse, holding up the magazine he’d brought to read. An open-ended visit, no need to check back. Fifteen minutes later he was through the garden entrance, back on the road where Mihai was waiting.

“Anybody around?”

“Busy night. Egyptians are giving a party,” Mihai said, looking out the windshield toward the old khedive’s summer palace.

“Anybody else?”

“Hard to see. No moon.”

Outside the village the night was black, only a few yellow windows visible through the cypresses and umbrella pines. On the Bosphorus a passing freighter’s lights reflected on the water, then were swallowed up again by the dark.

“Let’s see if we have company,” Leon said, turning to look out back as Mihai started the car.

But no one else pulled into the line of cars, moving quickly tonight, winter traffic, not the usual jam.

“We’ll be early,” Leon said.

“It’s not exact, the time. Like a train.”

“No rain tonight anyway. I checked the reports. It’s clear all up along the coast.”

He looked again at the black water. Where Jason had once sailed the
Argo
.

“Did you see Anna? Tell her about the boat?”

Leon nodded. “If she heard.”

“They say hearing is the last sense to go. When you have a stroke.”

“She didn’t have a stroke.”

Mihai said nothing. It had been his boat, the one he and Anna had organized, also out of Constancia, as it happened. Overcrowded and listing, stuck in Istanbul for repairs, then waiting for sailing permits, two hundred people taking turns on deck. They’d run tenders out with food and water, medicine that Anna had somehow rounded up out of nonexistent supplies. Black market drugs. And still no permits, then panic, everyone seeing a repeat of the
Struma
, the ship sent back, then torpedoed in the Black Sea, everyone down with it. One survivor, they’d heard.

So the decision was made, a desperate run through the Marmara, a moonless night like this one that made them hope they could slip through. Mihai’s decision. No, both; Anna’s too. Worth the risk.
What could the Turks do? Tow them back to Istanbul, where they were anyway, rotting? Better to make a run for it.

Later it was said the engines would never have made it, not at that speed, that weight. They were bound to overheat. But no one really knew how the fire had started. Some sort of explosion, probably, flames suddenly leaping up into the night. The ship had been just off Yedikule, close enough for the fire to be seen, but even so the rescue boats were late. The
Bratianu
had begun to break up by then, people screaming in the water, going under, later washing up, the shore littered with them, like driftwood. Anna had managed to save a few, swimmers strong enough to stay afloat, grab onto paddles, but the children were gone. It must have been then, watching the debris and corpses float toward her in the ship’s lights that something had broken in her too, another overheated engine.

“There’s the chance of another one,” Mihai said. “A boat. The British are watching Brindisi now, so we’re trying to get one here.”

“Should I know this?”

“Why not? We have no secrets from each other. Except the ones you don’t tell me.”

Leon looked over at him. “I don’t know who he is.”

“So you said. Well, a surprise for both of us.
Eine kleine Überraschung
.”

“You’re so sure he’s German.”

“Who else comes out this way? The Americans. First they put them on trial. Now they take them home. A change of heart, very useful.”

“You can’t put everyone on trial.”

“Why not? They wanted all of us dead. No exceptions.”

“Anna’s German.”

“A Jew. It’s different.”

“That’s what they wanted everyone to think.”

“In that they succeeded. Now we know who we are.”

“Where are you getting the ship?” Leon said, changing the subject.

“Trabzon. Of course a wreck. But if it can make it this far, why not Palestine?”

“A freighter?”

“Maybe for your tobacco. From Trabzon. Tobacco and hazelnuts.”

Leon pointed out the windshield. “Pull up here.”

“I don’t see anyone.”

“They’ll see us.”

They parked in the drop-off area by the quay. A few boats bobbed against their mooring posts, launches you could hire, their owners probably keeping warm in the café on the other side of the road. No one else around.

Mihai put on a knitted sailor’s hat, pulling it over his ears. “Let’s hope they’re not late. It’s freezing.”

They walked over to the edge of the pavement, looking out at the black water. Any minute now, unless the boat had had to dodge a patrol around Garipçe.

“The money’s already arranged?” Mihai said. “You don’t want to hang around bargaining.”

Leon tapped his breast pocket. “On delivery.” He looked over at Mihai, clamping his ears for warmth. Two men standing in the cold, outlined by the café lights behind them. Up to what? They’d have to move soon.

“Hear that?” A boat being put in gear, the noise moving toward them, their shadowy figures spotted from the water.

“Right,” Mihai said, “one, two, three. Let’s go. You pay, I’ll get Johnny in the car.”

The fishing boat, still without lights, now swung toward the quay, throwing out a rope.

“John?” Leon said, feeling foolish, as if it were a password.

The passenger nodded. Thin, smaller than Leon had expected,
about Mihai’s height. A heavy woolen jacket. He shoved a step box against the gunwale.

Mihai pulled him up out of the boat, gripping his hand. “Come on. Car’s over there. Get in the back,” Mihai said in a rush, then stopped, his eyes on the passenger’s face, reading it.

Below them the fisherman started talking in Turkish, Leon answering before he got louder.