Young Turk (9 page)

Bilâl’s relatives had to be saved. They were, to all intents and purposes, our kindred too. Bilâl, who had met them when he and his parents had visited Salonica in the summer of 1939, just before the war, had praised them to us so highly that we had adopted them unreservedly as family. Viktorya and Süzan, adorable little girls threatened by every peril under the sun, were the little sisters we all wished we had. (Naim’s older sister Gül had died two years earlier.) David was our age and, on the evidence of photographs, looked like Bilâl’s twin; therefore he was our twin. In Fortuna’s case, the prevailing moral view that prostitution was a fate worse than death plunged us into gruesome fantasies. Thus, though we secretly felt aroused by the thought of a woman who gave herself to any man, we could not let her face perdition in a thousand and one horrific ways. We had our reservations about Salvador – he had been a veritable tyrant all his life – but we decided that abandoning him would be heinous.

Given our eventual course of action, it might be assumed that we deliberated on the matter for days. We didn’t. Our decision was instant and unanimous. Such considerations as to how we would solve any problems that arose could be dealt with, we decided, in due course. We were young; and according to Plato, who had captured our imagination in those days, we were wiser than our elders. We could make the world a better place. Eradicate wars. Establish universal justice and human rights. Stop the sacrifice of millions at the altar of monomaniacs.

Bilâl presented an ‘if only’ scenario that had become his mother’s lament. If only we could procure five Turkish passports and deliver them to Fortuna ...

He had investigated the possibilities.

As anybody who went around Istanbul with eyes and ears open knew, the black-market trade in passports was a thriving business. Those of neutral countries, like Sweden and Switzerland, or from regions outside the theatres of war, like Latin America, were worth a fortune. There were some exceptions: Turkey was neutral, yet because it was feared that Germany, seeking to destroy Soviet oilfields and refineries east of the Black Sea, would invade the country, Turkish passports were not much in demand. Basically, the market value of a passport was governed by the vagaries of war. On occasion, even passports from war-battered countries could prove a gold-mine – British passports, for instance, though they had the same modest status as Turkish ones, would fetch a fortune from Jewish refugees seeking to settle in Palestine.

In the main, Bilâl instructed us, the black market in passports was dominated by the Levantines, that tiny minority of Europeans who, enamoured of the Orient, had settled in the Ottoman empire and intermarried with its many peoples. Immensely proud of their mixed ethnicity, the Levantines had evolved, in eastern Mediterranean eyes, into ‘lovable rogues’. In the new Turkey, they had perfected the highly specialized
métier
of
iş bitirici,
‘job-accomplisher’. It was said that once they accepted a commission, only death would prevent them from completing it to the client’s satisfaction.

Here, Bilâl declared, luck favoured us. Naim had a perfect entrée into this community. His classmate, Tomaso (Turkish name, Turgut), was the son of ‘Neptune’, owner of the famous restaurant in the Golden Horn, which served the best fish in the world. Neptune was a scion of the Adriatiko, an elite strain of Levantines who were the descendants of Venetian sailors taken prisoner in the sea battles of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, then used as galley-slaves in Ottoman men-of-war and, eventually, set free and allowed to settle in the empire. Neptune had a horde of ‘cousins’ who, in pursuit of their smuggling activities, covered Turkey’s four seas with a fleet of trawlers; not surprisingly, they had ended up dominating the fishing trade – which explained the excellence of his restaurant.

So, if we could get hold of five British passports, Bilâl concluded, we could approach the Adriatiko and arrange a barter for Turkish ones. The latter, he reminded us, were worth about the same but had the advantage of being bona fide for the German occupation forces because Turkey was not only a neighbouring country but also neutral. They offered the only chance of escape for Ester’s family.

And this is where I came in. I was a member of the British diplomatic community. Perfectly placed to lay my hands on new passports. Fate had brought me to Istanbul for that very purpose.

We wove an ingenious plan.

During the rest of the holidays I would be especially friendly with the Johnsons, particularly Mr Johnson, who was His Majesty’s Consul. And I would find out, by asking the sort of casual questions that might occur to any curious youngster, how the consulate issued passports and where it stored them. Then, on my father’s next trip to Istanbul, I would visit him at the consulate on some pretext and, while everybody went on with their work, slip into whichever storeroom contained the passports and pinch the five we needed. If the passports were kept under lock and key, the boys would provide me with a passe-partout. Obtaining such an item from a locksmith would be easy; having worked the markets with their fathers, they knew countless tradesmen.

Once we had the passports, Naim would prevail on Tomaso to introduce us to the Adriatiko for the exchange with Turkish ones.

The next phase, slipping into Greece, should be equally simple, we convinced ourselves. We could engineer a good excuse to leave town for a few days. Our district boy scout troop had a progressive programme of fitness and culture that included excursions to famous archaeological sites. Since our parents approved of these activities – to date we had explored several digs in Anatolia – we would ‘invent’ such a jaunt to, say, the Royal Hittite Archives in Boğazköy.

For entering Greece, we had two options. We could either waft into eastern Thrace by crossing the Meriç river, which ran along the Turkish-Greek frontier, or sail directly, in a hired boat, to a deserted cove.

We discounted the first as dangerous. To do that we would have to evade two armies, the German and the Bulgarian occupation forces. Moreover, despite Germany’s assurances that it would not invade Turkey, the Turkish government, remembering that similar pledges had been given to the Soviets, remained alert. Consequently, the border was assiduously patrolled by a third military outfit, the Turkish army.

Naim felt sure that his friend Tomaso could be as helpful on this matter as with the passports by enabling us to hire a boat from one of his father’s ‘cousins’ for the short hop over to Greece.

The journey to Salonica – by bus, we surmised – would be uneventful thanks to Bilâl’s impeccable Greek. Once there, we would intercept Viktorya and Süzan as they went to sell flowers and would be taken to the rest of the family.

We would have a fair amount of money; we all had some savings. Moreover, because of the war, the exchange rate between the Greek drachma and the Turkish lira greatly favoured the latter. However, to be on the safe side, the best-off among us – me – would sell his bicycle and tell his parents that it had been stolen.

The journey back, we believed, would be just as easy. We would sneak back into our boat at night and reach Turkey before dawn.

Bilâl’s relatives, now equipped with Turkish passports, would execute the formalities for exit visas and travel to Istanbul either by rail – directly or via Sofia – or by steamer, if services were still operational.

The first phase went perfectly smoothly.

It took me only a few days to become Mr Johnson’s favourite youngster. I did so, rather cunningly, by undertaking to give daily maths lessons to his oldest son, Ernest – not the brightest of boys – who had to retake an exam in September. The fact that snooty Dorothy, after an initial bout of cold-shouldering, began to take an interest in me and contrived invitations to some of their family outings also helped. So did my mother’s condition: reduced, in the space of a year, from a jolly, athletic woman to a listless, tumbledown person by the death of her younger brother in action with the Royal Navy, she had ceased engaging with the world. The Johnsons, dear people, were determined to compensate for her neglect of me by lavishing treats on me.

One such treat was a standing invitation to the consulate which, Mr Johnson must have assumed, would impress me with His Majesty’s Government’s delicate work and thus further justify my pride in being British. Indeed, I found the activities there – comprising, in the main, preparatory work for my father’s committee – fascinating. And I discovered, to my surprise, that the passport office was seldom manned; it had never occurred to us that, in the midst of war, there would not be many travellers. As for the passports, they were stacked in neat piles, together with the consulate’s stationery, in a large metal locker behind the front desk. The locker had a key, but it was always left hanging from the handle for the benefit of those who needed stationery.

I decided to take my chance straightaway and arranged another visit to the consulate, this time with Ernest and Dorothy, after having taken them to the cinema. At a convenient moment, pretending to go to the lavatory, I slipped away, stole into the passport office, filched the five passports and stuffed them in my satchel. I had brought my satchel to borrow books from the consulate library and, as might be expected of a bookworm, had made a habit of taking it with me everywhere, even to the toilet. To make sure that the numbers would not be consecutive, I picked each passport from a different pile. That was an inspired move, worthy of a seasoned agent. I am proud of it even today.

Naim, too, had an easy time.

His friend Tomaso, envious of the adventure we had planned, went to work diligently. Arranging an exchange of passports, he told us, should be child’s play. But when it came to getting in and out of Greece, he dissuaded us from approaching the old-timers. Since Germany’s invasion of the Balkans, these veterans had abandoned their legendary braggadocio. They had even stopped smuggling. These swastika-Huns, they told everybody, were not like the Germans who had fought in the Great War; they were rabid dogs, just like their Führer.

However, the new generation, the
delikanlι
– those with ‘crazy blood’, to use that graphic Turkish expression – were itching to prove their mettle; they were particularly keen to match wits with the ‘master race’. And none more so than Marko, Tomaso’s mother’s kid brother, not yet twenty-five, but already extolled as a Sinbad.

The exchange of passports did turn out to be child’s play. Tomaso, pretending that he had undertaken a job – his first – for a Greek friend, sought advice from his father on how to arrange the exchange. Neptune, proud of the boy’s initiative, supervised the transaction himself. In the true tradition of the fixer, he asked no questions. But he made sure to turn a profit of seventy-five liras.

Tomaso then introduced us to Marko.

Even today, Marko is imprinted on my mind as the manliest man I’ve ever met: a blend of film star, athlete and Olympian god with the thick, perfectly groomed regulation moustache of a Casanova; serene as if he had perfected the art of being a loner, yet a man always living at the peak of his spirits. We fell under his spell immediately. Even Naim, who at first perceived him as puzzlingly ingenuous, ended up mesmerized by his irrepressible confidence. But then, Marko had every reason to be confident. Since embarking on his career, he had undertaken all sorts of perilous assignments and had accomplished every one with panache, an unprecedented achievement in a very precarious profession. Moreover, he had so souped up his boat, the
Yasemin
, that he could outrun any patrol craft in the Aegean.