Istanbul (11 page)

‘What are you going to do?’

‘There’s nothing we can do,’ Nick said.

‘You should get out. The greenshirts are crazy.’

The windscreen wipers laboured against another heavy shower of rain.

‘I’ll be in touch when I can,’ Dumitrache said. ‘But it’s becoming more and more difficult. He tapped the driver’s seat and Ionescu stopped the car. Dumitrache jumped out. ‘Good luck,
mon ami
,’ he whispered, then he slammed the door and ran off into the dark.

The smell of him lingered in the car, a pungent brew of damp wool and body odour. Despite the rain and cold, Nick wound down the window. He heard the sound of gunfire somewhere in the city, death out there stalking the dark.

The Legation should leave, he thought. They were no longer trying to defeat or even frustrate the Germans; if anything, the enemy was all that stood between them and the greenshirts. If the Germans joined with the Romanian fascists, then the life of every British and American national in Bucharest was forfeit.

It was up to Hoarse now. If he hesitated too long, they were all dead.

CHAPTER 22

Winter took Bucharest by the throat. Snow piled in drifts all over the city, except for the boulevards, where the streetcars clearing it away with wooden blades. To the north, beyond the white cupolas of the Cretulescu church, the mountains appeared freshly washed, the glaciers veined and blue.

Snow boots and rubber galoshes left pools of melted ice in the cloakrooms of hotels and in the waiting room at the legation. Ordinary Romanians wore hats of black and grey astrakhan; the refugees and gypsies made do with old newspapers.

A new sound impressed itself on the consciousness when he stepped out of the hotel: the jangle of sleigh bells.

German troops continued to pour into the country. The square outside the hotel looked like a field camp, row upon row of dull grey military lorries parked there. It was clear the Germans were staging for a campaign. Whether they wanted it or not, the Romanians were going to war with Russia.

Nick thrust his fists deeper into the pockets of his coat. Daniela looked up and down the street before joining him in the doorway, as if they were two lovers on a secret tryst. Two German soldiers in heavy greatcoats went past, boxes of chocolates under their arms, bought for a few coins in the
chocolaterie
on the Chaussée. They were laughing at some joke.

The city was living on the edge. Every night squads of greenshirts in leather coats and high fur caps roared off on their motorcycles to raid Jewish houses. Guardist thugs from the countryside patrolled the streets in gangs, doing as they pleased.

Antonescu had fired the Director and Prefect of Police, both Guardists, and issued a decree effectively removing all the commissars from their lucrative posts. Overnight he had taken away the nationalists’ power and the nationalists’ money. The Germans had done nothing to block him.

‘I wrote down everything I remember,’ she said. ‘Names of Germans sympathetic to the Guard, SS men who have been supplying the greenshirts with weapons.’She produced an envelope from under her coat and he transferred it quickly to his back pocket.

‘What does Maier think will happen?’

‘I heard him tell one of his Wehrmacht friends that von Killinger promised Sima he will support him against Antonescu. It was a lie. They want to see the Guard destroyed. All they care about is the oil, and the greenshirts are too crazy, even for the Nazis.’

‘You believe him?’

‘The Germans aren’t squeamish. It’s just politics for them.’

‘Von Killinger has set them up?’

‘Of course.’

Nick sighed. For God’s sake. They said intelligence gathering was like a blind man searching in a dark room for a black cat that wasn’t there. Did he believe Dumitrache, an intimate of Horia Sima, or the mistress of his own counterpart in the Abwehr?

Were they both wrong? Or was one of them – or both of them – deliberately feeding him lies? All he could do was report on what was said and heard and let someone else make that decision. He just wished so many lives, including his own, didn’t depend on the outcome.

Could he trust her?

Her face was turned towards him. Suddenly he was kissing her. Her face was cold, her mouth was warm. She responded immediately, her whole body pressed against him. Then she pulled away and was gone.

Afterwards he stood there a long time, overwhelmed. For the first time in his life he felt truly alive.

Abrams stared at the reports scattered across his desk; lies, rumours, half-truths, contradictions. What to make of it?

‘What do you think, sir?’

‘I don’t know, Davis. It makes sense that von Killinger is playing a double game.’ He rubbed his forehead. ‘Do we ignore the highest placed agent we have inside the Iron Guard in favour of some young woman we barely know?’

‘You asked me to recruit her, sir.’

Abrams sighed. ‘I know what I did, Davis.’

‘I think we should believe Miss Simonici. The Germans would never let Sima have Bucharest.’

‘You trust her then?’

‘More than that. It makes sense.’

Abrams nodded. ‘I hope to God you’re right. Or this time next week we’ll all be dead.’

CHAPTER 23

Now, a week later, Nick stood at the Legation window and watched as black smoke spiralled into the sky from the Jewish Quarter.

A burst of machine gun fire echoed across the city, rattling the windows. ‘It’s finally started,’ Nick said.

He left the office and went down to the basement where everyone had crowded into the signals room. The receiver was tuned to the government radio station, and one of the interpreters gave a running commentary to the handful of staffers who still remained; the station had been taken over by the Iron Guard and there were repeated calls for legionaries to report to headquarters for duty.

There was a thick fug of smoke in the room. Everyone was chain-smoking.

‘What do you think Jerry will do?’ someone said.

Nick looked at Abrams and shrugged. He supposed they would all find out soon enough.

CHAPTER 24

The Athenee Palace Hotel remained one of the safest places in that blighted city. The Germans had set up a cordon around the hotel to protect their own and there was a machine gun post on the porch. The streets were dangerous now and Nick had been unable to leave the hotel to go to the legation for two days. He had no idea what was happening to the rest of the British staffers. A strange war, with their safety and survival secured by their enemy.

He found O’Leary, from the
Chicago Herald Tribune
, in the bar. He and Max were the only two journalists still in the city.

‘Where’s Max?’ Nick said.

‘Haven’t seen him since this started. Don’t worry, he’ll be all right. He knows his way around.’

Nick didn’t feel quite as confident. Max lived in an apartment on Bratianu, two blocks from the hotel. There had been some heavy fighting around there the previous afternoon.

So far the Wehrmacht had sat on their hands and done nothing, just as Daniela’s reports had said they would.

Out in the lobby, Wehrmacht officers strode about in their polished boots, laughing and shouting to each other as if it was all a great game. And to them it probably was; they could crush either side any time they wanted. They were like school prefects watching two small boys fight in the schoolyard for their own amusement.

The crackle of gunfire from the street added to the apocalyptic gloom. If it was the end of the world, there was a fitting cast of characters scattered about the lobby; princesses-for-hire and armaments bosses, Gestapo agents and erring husbands.

A tank cannon fired close by and the windows rattled. Several women screamed. ‘Christ,’ Nick said aloud. Even the bellhops and the waiters stopped what they were doing and waited, holding their breath.

‘People say Antonescu’s dead,’ O’Leary said.

‘If they’re still fighting, then he’s still alive.’

There were stories of Guardists rounding up all the Jews. Where was Daniela? Perhaps she was with Maier.

Strange, but he hoped so.

A neighbour ran in to warn her what was happening. Gunfire had crackled around the city all morning, but for the last hour it had been eerily quiet. ‘The greenshirts are coming!’ the neighbour shrieked at her and then Daniela heard her running down the stairs.

Daniela went to the window. It was true. The greenshirts were dragging whole families into the street and herding them into trucks. The street was blockaded at both ends. There was no way out.

She went into the bedroom where her father was sleeping. ‘Oh papa,’ she murmured. The sheets smelled of sweat and rotting. She put her arms under him and lifted him easily off the bed, for he was just skin and bones now. He moaned. ‘It’s all right, papa, everything will be all right.’

She heard a woman screaming down in the street, and then the brute voices of the greenshirts. She stood in the middle of the apartment with her dying father in her arms while the heavy boots of the soldiers echoed on the cobblestones. She did not know what to do.

CHAPTER 25

A crowd had gathered in the lobby around the front doors. Nick wondered what could have drawn such an audience. A man in a brown overcoat ran towards the hotel across the empty square. He slipped once on the ice and his hat fell off but in his panic he got straight up and kept running and made no effort to retrieve it.

From the other side of the square a Guardist legionary shouted at him and raised his rifle.

‘Who is it?’ a Brazilian diplomat asked.

‘It’s Max King,’ Nick said. ‘He’s a journalist with Reuters.’

‘He’s crazy,’ the diplomat said.

They all heard the crack as the legionary fired his rifle. Max kept running. The two German soldiers at the machine gun emplacement outside the doors decided the bullet had come too close to them and they fired a burst from the machine gun over the legionary’s head. The sniper ducked and ran for cover.

Max leaped over a drift of dirty brown snow and threw himself on the hotel porch. The guests cheered.

The German soldiers cheered too, laughing at his escape in the way they might enjoy seeing a bedraggled cat escape a pack of dogs. They patted him on the back and hauled him to his feet, propelling him through the doors where several of the other guests helped Nick drag him inside.

Max was not of a mind to join the general air of celebration. He was wheezing like an asthmatic and now his legs had carried him to sanctuary they would no longer support him. The onlookers parted to let him through and Nick dumped him unceremoniously onto a cherry-red sofa where he was immediately surrounded by the bored and the inquisitive.

‘Are you all right?’

It took a while for him to get his breath back. ‘Those people are animals,’ he gasped.

Until this moment Max had forever been the laconic Englishman; now he was shaking with fright and his face was a pasty shade of grey.

Someone ran to fetch him a reviving shot of
tsuica
.

‘What happened?’

‘Tank started shelling the apartment. Figured it was time to move.’

Nick helped him get the
tsuica
down.

He looked up and saw Maier walk into the American Bar with two Wehrmacht officers. He called out to him. Maier turned around, surprised.

‘My Englisher friend! I am glad to see you safe and sound. What can I do for you?’

‘Having a good war?’

‘This is not a war. That’s just a dogfight out there.’

‘How many dogs can drive a tank?’

Maier looked uneasy. ‘What’s wrong, Herr Davis?’

‘Where’s your girlfriend?’

‘Miss Simonici? I have no idea. Is this any business of yours?’

‘Your friends in the green shirts may have her right now. Doesn’t that worry you?’

‘This is not my concern.’

Nick took a step closer. ‘You know she’s Jewish?’

‘Keep your voice down!’

‘You have to help her!’

‘I do not have to do anything.’ Maier glanced over his shoulder at the two Wehrmacht officers, who were watching the exchange with interest. ‘Now I must say good morning to you, Herr Davis. Please do not approach me this way again!’