Istanbul (12 page)

He walked away.

Nick went back to Max. A few solicitous spectators had crowded around. Nick pushed them aside. ‘I need your help, Max.’

‘What?’

‘You’ve got to help me find her.’

‘Who?’

‘You know who I’m talking about.’

‘You go out there, you’ll get yourself killed.’

‘Better than sitting around here letting the Germans laugh at us.’

‘Not sure I agree with you there.’

‘Just need your car, Max.’

‘My car?’

‘You don’t expect me to walk?’

He laughed at that. The colour was coming back to his cheeks. ‘Hell with it. Let me have a cigarette and I’ll come with you.’

CHAPTER 26

The Germans at the machine gun post stared in astonishment as they ran past them. Nick could feel the ruts in the snow through the thin soles of his shoes. The bitter wind slapped his face. If he had run naked across the square he could not have felt more vulnerable, or more alone.

Small arms fire echoed over the rooftops.

Max slipped on the ice and went down. Nick hauled him to his feet and they ran side by side along the Strada Episcopiei before throwing themselves in the doorway of the nearest salon. Once, it sold the latest Paris fashion, but the windows and doors were boarded up now. There would be no winter collection this year.

They were both breathing hard. The dirty white wedding cake of the Athenee Palace already seemed hopelessly remote.

Max couldn’t get his breath. Hardly surprising; his morning exercise consisted of propping up the American Bar with a brandy and a cigarette.

Cars and buses were abandoned all along the boulevard. The city smelled of burning and black smoke hung over the rooftops like a pall. Nick saw a corpse sprawled across the driver’s seat of a taxi, blood congealed in thick clots on the upholstery.

The streets were empty. He and Max were the only ones out on the street in this city full of snipers and madmen.

Max’s apartment was just two blocks from the hotel and the Humber was parked outside in the street. There were burnt-out cars behind it and in front of it but for some inexplicable reason it had been spared.

They crawled inside the car and Max fumbled with the keys but his hands were shaking so badly he couldn’t find the ignition. Nick snatched them away from him.

‘Get out of the way, Max.’

‘I can do it, sport.’

‘No, you can’t.’

Max crawled across the seat and cowered in the floor-well on the passenger side. Nick tried the ignition. The engine was too cold to start. He hoped the water in the radiator hadn’t frozen.

There was a starter handle. He got out of the car and bent down in front of the bonnet, his back an inviting target for every sniper in Bucharest. The engine coughed and coughed again, and then the handle kicked back and almost smashed his wrist. ‘Start you bastard!’

It stuttered into life.

The windscreen was caked with ice. He scraped it off with his gloves and then crawled behind the wheel. ‘Going to get us killed, old boy,’ Max said.

Nick drove at walking pace through the deserted streets, crouched down over the wheel, waiting for a bullet to shatter the windscreen at any moment. Max crouched on the floor, his head on the passenger seat. ‘Don’t know how I let you talk me into this.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Fucking should be, sport.’

They drove almost five blocks. The walls of the buildings were pocked with bullet holes. Bodies had frozen in bizarre attitudes of death.

They reached the outskirts of the Jewish Quarter. Nick stopped the car. ‘We’ll go on foot from here.’

He got out, and crouched down beside the front wheel. Max crawled across the driver’s seat and slid out beside him. ‘We’re going to die, old sport. You know that?’

They heard a crack of rifle fire from the next street. Too close. If the Guards came round the corner right now they were finished. ‘Let’s get going,’ Nick said.

They heard screams, very close. Instinctively, they dropped on their bellies in the wet snow.

‘Christ,’ Max said, ‘think I’ve pissed myself.’

‘Wait here,’ Nick said.

He crawled to the corner. There were perhaps half a dozen greenshirts in the next street and they had found a Jew to play with. The man looked like a student, a Hassid with a shaved head and long curls around his ears. His long black coat was stained with all manner of filth from his hiding place.

One of the greenshirts aimed his rifle at the man’s feet, and fired. The bullet sparked off the cobblestones and his terrified prisoner screamed and danced. One of the others had a can of petrol and threw the contents over him. Realising what was about to happen, he tried to run, but one of his tormentors knocked him down with the butt of his rifle.

The man with the petrol can threw a lighted match and his victim erupted into a writhing ball of flame.

Nick crawled back to where Max lay face down in the slush of wet snow. He hauled him into a nearby doorway by his collar. ‘Don’t move, just keep quiet!’

The screaming went on and on. The stink of roasted meat was sickening. Not all the greenshirts stayed to watch the fun. Three of them passed within a few feet of where Nick and Max lay, headed west towards the square. A few minutes later the others hurried after them.

Nick imagined what would happen to Daniela if these bastards found her. He would not even let himself think he might be too late.

When the greenshirts were out of sight, they started to run. Nick spared a glance for the blackened corpse lying in the middle of the cross street but he had mercifully stopped screaming and now lay quite still, like a bundle of charred rags.

The Jewish Quarter was deserted. Frozen bodies lay in the street like litter. Daniela’s building had been looted and burned, blistered wood smouldered among the blackened shell of the walls.

Nick heard sniper fire in the next street. He pressed his back against a wall. It was still warm.

‘We’re too late,’ Max said.

They huddled side by side against the wall, watching their breath form into white vapour. ‘You did your best. Let’s get out of here.’

‘Not yet.’

Nick ran across the street, leaping over broken armchairs and torn books. He slipped on a trampled prayer shawl lying in a pool of congealed blood. The fire had collapsed the roof and it lay in a blackened rubble around the stairwell. A brass menora lay under a piece of twisted tin.

He was about to turn away when he heard a noise. It sounded like someone coughing. A cement staircase led down to a basement beneath the skeleton of the stairwell.

‘Is there anyone there?’ he shouted.

He climbed over the tangle of beams and tin. Dried blood was smeared on the concrete, where it had mixed with the melting ice.

He heard the coughing again and he kicked open the basement door. There was someone in there, in the dark. ‘Hello?’ he called and then in French: ‘
N’avez pas peur. Je suis Anglais. Je veux vous aider
.

‘Don’t be afraid. I am English. I want to help you.’

‘... Nick?’

Someone struck a match and lit a candle. Daniela was crouched in the corner, beside her father. He appeared to be unconscious.

‘Daniela?’

The old man coughed again, and a pink froth bubbled on his lips.

‘He’s dying,’ she said.

He knelt down and put his arms around her. She was wearing her fox fur, high French fashion encrusted with filth, but at least doing the job that nature intended, keeping a body warm and alive through winter nights.

She pushed herself away from him, angrily wiping away her tears with the back of her hand. ‘When the greenshirts came, we hid down here. ‘I carried him. Like he carried me when I was a child.’

He’s going to die anyway, Nick thought. The old man’s breath smelled like the grave.

‘We have to get you out of here.’ He helped her to her feet.

‘What about papa?’ she said.

An exercise in futility. But they couldn’t just leave him here. He scooped the old man up in his arms. It was like picking up a bundle of dried twigs.

‘What are you doing here?’ she asked him.

‘I came looking for you.’

‘Why?’

Why. A good question. He didn’t have an answer for her, any more than he had the answer for Max. ‘You’re my most beautiful spy.’ He carried the old man up the stairs, Daniela following him. He picked his way through the rubble to where Max still crouched behind a burnt-out van.

‘Fuck is that, old son? Moses? He’s dead, for Christ’s sake, put him down.’

‘He’s still alive.’

‘Could have fooled me.’ Max looked at Daniela and shook his head in astonishment. ‘Don’t believe it. He said he’d find you. This bastard’s mad.’

Daniela was too exhausted to answer.

‘Must get your story for the paper,’ Max said and his mad laughter echoed along the street, over the bones of the burned and newly dead.

They ran towards the boulevard, saw the Humber on the other side of the intersection. Max led the way, but when he reached the end of the
strada
, he swore and ducked back behind the wall.

There was a government tank, painted sky blue, parked not a hundred yards away. ‘Now what do we do?’ Max said.

‘We can’t sit here and wait for it to leave. If a Legion patrol comes along, we’re dead.’

Nick heard a metallic whirring as the tank turret started to turn. The barrel of the cannon searched the surrounding apartment blocks for targets. ‘Now,’ he said and pushed Max and Daniela ahead of him. He hefted the old man in his arms again and started after them.

From the corner of his eye he saw the tank’s gun swivel around towards him. Time slowed down. It was as if there were sandbags on his feet.

Daniela and Max had reached the corner. They shouted at him to hurry. What do they think I’m doing?

He staggered, turned, saw the machine gun in the tank turret pointing straight at him. But the gunners did not open fire; and he wondered why. Perhaps the mechanism in the gun jammed; or perhaps there was some other, arcane reason. In his experience men killed arbitrarily in any war. Perhaps they just didn’t feel like wasting ammunition on him.

He reached the other side of the street and was shocked to find himself still alive.

CHAPTER 27

Nick didn’t know where the boy came from; but then there were no battle lines to cross, the chaos in the city was absolute. It threw up in the flotsam this child in a green Iron Guard shirt, holding a rifle. He was no more than fourteen years old.

But it was not the rifle in his left hand that shocked him, it was the look of sheer joy on the kid’s face, joy at finding something to kill.

He let out a whoop and brought the weapon to his shoulder. Nick heard the crack of the rifle, or perhaps the echo of it, a moment after he felt the sting of brick fragments on his face as a bullet hit the wall inches from his head.

Max and Daniela were ten paces ahead of him; the boy had not even seen them. There was nothing Nick could do, he still had the old man in his arms and there was nowhere to run. He saw Max and Daniela turn around, saw their expressions of horror over the boy’s shoulder.

The boy loped towards him, working the bolt action on the rifle. He was limping; an old injury by the look of it, or perhaps a defect from birth. He fired again, but he was too excited to aim properly, and the bullet ricocheted off the cobblestones.

The boy aimed the gun again, at Nick’s chest, then lowered it even further. Let’s have some fun first, his eyes were saying, I’ll make you lame like me. Fourteen years old. What could have happened to someone so young to fill him with such hate?

He is the same age as my youngest son, Nick thought.

Max and Daniela screamed at him to run, and the boy heard their shouts and turned around. He hesitated. Who to kill first?

Nick saw his chance.

He let the old man slide to the ground and launched himself at the boy, who brought up the rifle just as Nick hit him with the full weight of his body. He heard the rifle bark again before it clattered onto the ground. Then the boy slammed backwards and his skull hit the frozen cobblestones with a sickening crack. He convulsed underneath him and his eyes turned upwards into his head.

Nick stood up slowly, his legs shaking. A wave of nausea and revulsion sweeping over him.

‘Is he dead?’ Max said.

He nodded.

‘Jesus.’