Istanbul (10 page)

‘These stupid bastards in Whitehall are costing us the war,’ Nick said.

There was a long silence. Abrams disapproved of strong language. ‘I want to talk to you about Maier,’ he said, finally.

‘Maier?’

‘And this other woman you’ve been seeing.’

This took Nick off balance. His mind was still on the Iron Gates. ‘Woman?’

‘If you’re going to repeat everything I say, Davis, I’m going to lose my temper. You know who I’m talking about. Her name’s Daniela Simonici, correct?’

‘Nothing improper has occurred.’

‘I’m really not concerned about that. But she’s the consort of some very high-ranking German officers and your conduct might be called into question in Whitehall if not in heaven.’

Whitehall be damned, Nick thought. ‘Are you asking me not to see her anymore?’

‘Of course not. Quite the opposite.’

‘Sir?’

‘Siegfried Maier is a colonel in the Abwehr,’ Abrams said.

The Abwehr was the Wehrmacht’s counter espionage service. Unlike the Gestapo, they were unconcerned with ideology – it was an intelligence service, the same as Nick’s own SIS.

‘Moreover,’ Abrams went on, ‘there are certain aspects of his background that make him of particular interest to us. If she is his mistress, as seems apparent, she may become a very valuable commodity.’

‘What aspects?’

‘I can’t tell you that. But men like Maier could have a significant impact on the future of western Europe.’

‘I don’t think I follow you.’

‘You don’t have to follow this, Davis. Just do what as I ask. Find out if she’s willing to work with us.’

‘I’ll do my best.’

‘Be discreet, but don’t let her get away.’

Don’t let her get away. Right.

Nick got up to leave. He hesitated at the door. ‘What you said about Maier, the future of Western Europe? Really?’

Abrams pulled his in-tray towards him. More visa applications. He didn’t look up. ‘Need to know, Davis, need to know. Good morning.’

Ben-Arazi looked around the office at the drab filing cabinets, the grey metal desk, the dusty portrait of King George on the wall. ‘Very impressive,’ he said.

‘I had to take down the Vermeers and the Rubens. They clashed with my Ming vases.’

Not even a smile.

‘Tea?’

Ben-Arazi shook his head. ‘Let’s get down to business.’

Rain wept down the grime on the window.

Nick was dreading this. The bastard had been right all along. Ben-Arazi had tried to tell him this would happen.

‘Well?’ he repeated.

Nick shook his head.

The expression on Ben-Arazi’s face betrayed contempt but not surprise. ‘May I ask why?’

‘We cannot be complicit in violating the sovereignty of a friendly government.’

‘Romania? Friendly? They are as friendly to the British Government as a Bedouin. Three days of hospitality and then they cut your throat.’ He stared at the ceiling in despair. ‘You people are unbelievable. Why did you waste my time with this?’

‘This was not my decision. The question of visas to Palestine for Jewish refugees is a difficult one.’

‘The shame of it is that you are not only wasting my time, you are wasting lives as well. But they’re Jewish lives, so why should you care?’ He leaned in. ‘Personally, I don’t give a damn about the Iron Gates. I care about the eight hundred Jews I want to save. What’s going to happen to all these people after you British run away?’

Nick had no answer for him.

‘I despise you,’ he said. He got up and walked out.

Nick threw his pen at the wall. For God’s sake.

The Romanian oil reserves were now in Hitler’s pocket. It seemed to him that Clive Allen was not the only traitor; someone in Whitehall was sabotaging their efforts as well. Someone in England
wanted
the Germans to have that oil.

That was why Bendix had died. Nick would have died too, if he had got in the way.

And why was this Colonel Maier so damned important? He sat there for a long time, staring into space. Then he stood up and swept everything off his desk and onto the floor. He picked up his chair and hurled it across the room at the wall.

The door opened and his new secretary tentatively put her head into the room. ‘Is everything all right?’ she asked.

‘Fine,’ Nick said, and went out.

CHAPTER 20

The young woman wept uncontrollably; the man in the army greatcoat held her as if he was drowning. Nick never found out who they were, where they were from, if they were ever reunited; he liked to think that they were. When he wrote their story in his mind, the soldier came home whole and safe and she was there waiting for him.

Their parting was replayed up and down the station that night. The platform was crowded, people shouting and pushing, porters shouldering their way through the crowds with trolleys of luggage. Refugees slept among their meagre bundles of their possessions, the bits of furniture and rolls of carpet or cooked cornmeal porridge over tiny spirit stoves.

Nick and Jennifer stared at each other across the chasm that lay between them. ‘Give Jamie and Rich my love,’ he said.

‘Of course.’ A brittle laugh. ‘You will be careful, Nick. If anything should happen to you, I don’t know what I’d do.’

This declaration surprised him. He had always thought that Jennifer would be perfectly fine without him. She held him. He felt her crying and patted her shoulder. ‘It’s okay, darling,’ he said. A long time since he had called her that.

‘Take care.’

‘I’ll be all right. No bombs falling here.’

‘Not yet.’

The train would take her as far as Constanza on the Black Sea. A Turkish destroyer was waiting there to take British refugees to Istanbul where a Royal Navy convoy would escort them on the dangerous crossing back to England.

Jennifer touched his face tenderly with a gloved hand. He couldn’t quite meet her eyes. She hugged him quickly around the neck, and then she was gone. He watched her disappear through the crowd.

She climbed aboard the train, a slim woman in a tan raincoat, her silhouette blurred and indistinct. He waved as the train pulled away, lost among the clouds of steam, saw her briefly lean from the compartment window and wave. He watched her until she was out of sight, a memory to store away in his mind, like a photograph hidden in a drawer, to be taken out with private regret at some future time when they were no longer husband and wife.

The apartment was cluttered and very small. Daniela peered out from behind the door. Without make-up she appeared younger, and fragile.

‘Nick.’

‘Hello, Daniela.’

‘How did you find me?’

‘I had you followed,’ he said and she thought he was joking.

‘Come in.’ She went to make coffee in a pot on the stove in the tiny kitchen. She was nervous.

‘What are you doing here?’

‘I needed to see you.’

He saw the look on her face. She thought he was there for sex. Well, there was nothing to stop him asking, if that was what he really wanted. ‘Do you live here alone?’

She didn’t answer.

‘You should get out while you still can.’

There was chicken soup bubbling on the stove. She poured some of the broth into a bowl and covered it with a cloth. He heard someone cough in the bedroom and followed her out of the kitchen and down the dark and narrow passageway.

An old man lay on the bed. The room smelled vile, of sweat and human waste.

‘My father,’ she said. ‘See what they’ve done to him? He was a strong and handsome man when they arrested him.’

Daniela propped him up in the bed and started to feed him the soup. It leaked down the old man’s chin, following a crease in the stubbled jaw. She dabbed at it with a napkin. A side of his temptress Nick had never seen.

‘So why are you here?’ she asked him.

‘It’s a delicate matter.’

‘You want to sleep with me?’

‘It’s about Maier.’

‘You want to sleep with Maier?’

‘Not my type.’

‘Too short?’

‘Too blond.’

She smiled for just a moment. The old man coughed, he could hear the breath whistling in his chest.

‘I would like to pay you for certain information.’

‘You want me to spy for you? After Siggi helped me get my father out of the Prefecture?’

‘Did he?’

‘In a way. But it cost me a lot of money. He said it was for the chief of police.’

‘Well, that was probably true.’

‘Are you a spy?’

‘Do I look like a spy?’

The old man clamped his jaw and refused to eat anymore of the soup. She said something to him in Yiddish but he shook his head. She sighed and put down the spoon.

‘What sort of information do you want?’ she said.

‘You just have to keep your ears open. My government needs to know what men like Maier are thinking, what they’re saying about the war.’

‘He’s just a businessman.’

He smiled at that, and so did she.

‘You’ll do it?’

She tucked the old man up into the bed, kissed him gently on the forehead and put the cloth over the bowl. She stood up. ‘I can’t make you a promise like this.’

He followed her out of the room. She put the bowl on the kitchen bench and turned, her hands resting behind her on the stove, a challenge in her eyes. ‘Do you want to stay?’

‘I can’t.’ Is this what I want? he thought, an easy, convenient affair now that my wife’s gone? It just seemed too shabby. ‘Think about what I said. The money’s good.’

He left.

Daniela watched him from the window as he walked back up the cobbled street. She was pleased he had not accepted her invitation, it made him different from other men. How many times did he have to prove himself to her? She had never had quite this feeling with a man before and just for once in her life she wanted to take what she wanted, have the moment and the man to herself.

She heard her father coughing in the other room and went in to him. He was dying of the lung rot. He had still been a fine man when he went in; he had come out a ravaged skeleton.

He never showed her much affection when she was a child; then when she put on her first pair of silk stockings he called her a slut. Now, too late, he needed her. She could have taken the visa that Nick had offered her and gone to Palestine and escaped from this hell. But if her father never loved her, at least now she could prove that she loved him, and even if he never opened his eyes and said the words to her, she hoped he would know that in the end she had been a good daughter.

CHAPTER 21

Cold inside the car. Ionescu turned up the heater, the fan drowning out the rumble of the engine. They turned down a cobbled street near the old Hanul Manoc Inn and drove at walking pace. A man emerged from a nearby doorway and jumped into the back.

Jan Dumitrache came from one of the aristocratic families of Bucharest and had been educated at the Sorbonne in Paris. His appearance belied this; greasy hair trailed over his collar and he had a long, unkempt beard. But he was a confidant of Horia Sima himself and was therefore one of Nick’s most important agents, the station’s highest placed contact inside the Iron Guard. Nick suspected – or rather, assumed – that he also worked for the Russian military intelligence, the GRU.

‘How are you, Jan?’ Nick said.

‘Sima wants a showdown,’ he said. ‘There was a meeting at the palace last night. In the Council Room. Antonescu beat his fist on the table and Sima shouted back at him that he was finished, that he would see him hanging from the palace gates.’

If there was a confrontation between Antonescu and the Guardists, and if the Germans supported the Guard, Horia Sima would take power, and there would be wholesale massacres. It would be anarchy. Even the British diplomatic staff might be in danger.

‘Do you know what the Germans are going to do?’ Nick said.

‘Sima is convinced they’ll support him. He’s had assurances from von Killinger, the new minister.’

‘Assurances from Hitler?’

‘Von Killinger says from Hitler. Sima believes him.’

‘It’s not in Hitler’s interests to support the Iron Guard.’

‘Sima says he’s had a meeting with von Killinger at the German Legation and the Germans want Antonescu out.’

Nick shook his head. It was hard to imagine that it served the German interest to have Bucharest in the hands of the nationalists.