Istanbul (13 page)

‘Let’s get off the street,’ Nick said.

He turned to pick up the old man. The wrinkled face stared back at him with that curious half-lidded expression of the recently dead. The boy’s bullet had taken him through the heart. He supposed it was a mercy, even if that was not what the young killer had intended.

CHAPTER 28

The crack of small arms fire and the dull boom of tank cannon had been replaced by the sound of church bells tolling for the dead.

Antonescu had won. He had only stayed his hand to save even greater destruction to a city that already lay in ruins after the earthquake. Daniela’s intelligence had been correct; the Iron Guard believed the Germans would help them and when they discovered the lie, it was too late. A few thousand green-shirted fanatics with rifles were no match for Romanian tanks and artillery.

But in those three days of chaos the legionaries indulged their frustrations in an orgy of violence against the Jews. What they did was unspeakable. Thousands suffered deaths terrible beyond imagining. If not for her own instincts and fortitude – and Nick’s recklessness – their fate would have been Daniela’s also.

‘Hell made you do it?’ Max said later, when they were sitting in the American Bar. Returned to the womb, as Max called it. He was drunk; had hardly been sober for two days. He was propped at the end of the bar, cigarette burning to ash in one hand, a vermouth in the other. There were smears of grey cigarette ash on his jacket sleeves, and his eyes were red from too much alcohol and too little sleep.

‘I don’t know,’ Nick said.

‘Rescued her twice. Cash in your chips at the door. Good for six months rogering and no questions asked. Day or night. If you ask me.’

‘Thanks, Max. I’m sure it’s good advice.’

‘Love’s a form of madness, you know. Well, Plato said it, not me. Didn’t want to intimidate you with my knowledge of the classics.’

Nick finished his drink and left.

There was no power for the electric chandeliers and the lobby was grim and cold. Outside it looked like hell, frozen over; stained and rutted snow, hunched soldiers in greatcoats rounding up prisoners, survivors stumbling dazed through a city bereft of mercy.

Daniela sat alone by one of the yellow marble pillars, slumped in a chair like a coat carelessly tossed aside by its owner.

He did not think she had seen him, for she did not look up. But then she said: ‘Have you seen what they did?’

‘I’ve been no further than the legation.’

The legation; another pitiful scene. He had reached his office by the back stairs, for the front door was besieged by a few hundred Jews who had survived the Guardist excesses and were now clamouring for visas to escape this terrible city.

‘You heard what happened at the abattoir?’ she said.

He nodded. Everyone in the city was talking about it. The Guardists had dragged six hundred Jewish men and women to the slaughterhouse where they put them through exactly the same process as the hogs; then they hung up the cleaned and gutted carcasses on steel hooks with signs that said: ‘Kosher Meat’.

Even their fate was kinder than that meted out to those Jews arrested on the day of the revolt and taken to the cellars below the Prefecture. Wives and daughters were raped in front of husbands and fathers; those that were spared this treatment were forced to watch as their men were put to death in such terrible ways that, when Antonescu’s men reclaimed the police headquarters three days later, some of the women had literally gone insane with grief and terror.

They were still finding more bodies in the Baneasa Woods.

‘How can people do this to each other?’ she asked him.

It was a question philosophers had been debating for centuries and he certainly had no answer for her, for anyone. Killing another human being can be an act of fear or necessity, but cutting off their ears and noses first had always struck Nick as perverse. But then he was an incurable romantic.

‘I think sometimes it’s the cocktail parties and polite conversations at dinner that are the aberration,’ he said.

She shook her head, as if trying to clear her mind of the day’s nightmare visions. ‘I wanted to thank you again, for what you did. My guardian angel.’

Some angel. He had saved her from the Jewish Quarter and brought her back to the Athenee Palace and allowed Maier to reclaim her. Perhaps it was an act of nobility performed to assuage his sense of guilt over the queue of Jews at the door of the legation or perhaps he gave her up because he didn’t want to fall any further in love with her or was it because Maier could offer her the kind of protection that he could not in the coming weeks and months.

But he still regretted it.

‘You don’t have to stay with Maier,’ he said.

‘What else should I do?’

‘I can still get you that visa. Get you out of Bucharest.’

‘I can’t,’ she said.

‘Why not?’

She did not answer.

‘What are you going to do?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You have somewhere to go?’

‘Oh, I think I’ll survive.’ And the way she said it stoked the smouldering embers of his jealousy. ‘There are times I wish you hadn’t been there that day the greenshirts came. There are times I wish I could have died with Levi.’

‘You don’t mean that.’

He saw Maier walk through the revolving door. She stood up and leaned over him, kissed him tenderly on the cheek. ‘I’ll never forget you,’ she said.

‘Why won’t you leave?’ he repeated.

She smiled and shook her head. He never did understand until much later, and by then it was too late.

Antonescu insisted that the British leave at night. The hotel porters brought down Nick’s luggage and loaded it into an embassy car; there wasn’t much to pack, most of his and Jennifer’s possessions lay under the rubble of their apartment.

As he came down the stairs, everyone in the lobby stopped talking and stared. Some of the Germans smirked at him, several even raised their glasses in mock salute; others, like Maier, had the dignity to turn away. His former associates, the little community of spies and aristocratic conmen and prostitutes fought with other emotions; some regret, some anger.

He saw her through the crowd, with her dark mane of hair and golden eyes, surrounded by grey German uniforms outside the American Bar. She pointedly looked away.

It was a short drive to the Gara de Nord through black and deserted streets, past bullet-scarred walls. He joined the rest of his colleagues from the legation on the platform.

As the train left the station, snow drifted from a starless sky.

The whole world was going to hell and all Nick could think of was that he would never see Daniela Simonici again.

BOOK TWO

CHAPTER 29

Orient-Simplon Express, Sofia–Istanbul, February 1941

When Nick arrived in Istanbul, he was immediately seconded to the British Consulate with the same cover he had in Bucharest. He was briefed by the military attaché, Donaldson; he was told the British Government now considered that it was only a matter of time before Bulgaria joined the Axis and they would have to evacuate the consulate in Sofia as well. The consulate’s archives, Donaldson said, had been placed in a large packing case and he was to escort them back to Istanbul. He was given a ticket for the next train to Sofia and told to report to the envoy there.

The German tourists who been sightseeing in Romania were now catching ferries across the Danube for yet another vacation. When they opened their suitcases for the Bulgarian customs officials, their holiday items included Wehrmacht uniforms and small arms.

The Bulgarians smiled and waved them through.

In the lobby of his hotel in Sofia, Nick constantly heard cries of ‘Heil Hitler’ as the Nazis saluted each other. All pretence of neutrality had disappeared. Hitler had taken another mistress in the Balkans without having to marry her.

Meanwhile, columns of railroad cars rumbled into the rail sidings carrying armaments for the Bulgarian army, while rolling stock headed in the other direction laden with butter, vegetable oil and sugar.

It was one of the richest farming countries in the Balkans and most people couldn’t get enough to eat. He bet they were doing just fine in Frankfurt and Heidelberg though.

It was a cold, dismal evening, a mist of rain drifted across the station lights. He was huddled in his overcoat, overseeing the loading of the crates from the consulate. A droplet of freezing rain worked its way down the back of his neck under his collar. He shuddered, haunted by the spectre of defeat, for his country, for himself.

The Consul shook his hand. ‘I’ll see you in Istanbul.’

A brown-uniformed conductor hurried along the platform. ‘
En voiture, messieurs et ’dames, en voiture!
’

‘Good luck, Davis,’ the Consul said as Nick climbed aboard the train.

‘Thank you, sir,’ he said and went to find his compartment.

The corridors were crowded. He showed his ticket to the
wagon-lit
conductor and went to his compartment. He swung his case onto the luggage rack and hung his coat on the back of the door, where it leaked rainwater onto the floor.

The guard blew his whistle and the train lurched out of the station. He was relieved to be getting out of Sofia. It reminded him too much of Bucharest in the last days; Germans everywhere, singing too loud and talking too loud, in every restaurant, every bar. They owned the bloody world now.

He tried to read a three-week-old copy of the
Times
he had brought with him from Istanbul but he could not concentrate, kept reading the same paragraph over and over. He tossed it aside and stared at the rain-smeared window.

He heard the attendant ringing the bell in the corridor. ‘
Premier service, ’dames et messieurs, le diner est servi, premier diner!
’

He wasn’t hungry but it would be something to busy his mind with. He stood up and made his way down the corridor.

There was a salon car with two separate drawing rooms and the dining car was on the other side of it. It was his first time on the Orient-Simplon Express and he was impressed; it was lavish. The salon and dining cars had mahogany and teak panelling inlaid with rosewood, and there were original watercolours by Delacroix and Seymour. The chairs were covered with red embossed leather and the settings were suitably expensive, solid silver cutlery and Sèvres porcelain dinnerware. The glasses were Baccarat crystal.

A white-jacketed waiter took his order in French; bisque, a pilaf of quails and a ’37 burgundy. Why not? he thought. I’m not paying.

He stared at his fellow diners. He was eating with the enemy. These days most of the passengers were Nazi party bosses travelling between Berlin and the Balkans on diplomatic missions to puppet states like Bulgaria and Romania. The head of the Abwehr, Admiral Canaris, and von Papen, Germany’s Ambassador to Turkey, were also frequent passengers.

The fat Austrian with the ginger goatee had to be a banker; the three Germans talking and laughing at the next table were undoubtedly Abwehr; the Turk with the red carnation in his buttonhole and the fat gold ring on his pinkie looked too prosperous to be honest. He imagined him in his godown in the spice bazaar, trading opium, cardamom and government secrets over endless cups of thick black coffee and bitter Turkish cigarettes.

And then she walked in. He could not have been more shocked if the waiter had hurled a glass of ice cold water in his face.

She was with Maier. He was in uniform, she wasn’t: a black sheer dress, scarlet-lacquered fingernails and lips moist with fresh lipstick. He felt sick with desire.

Then Maier spotted him. He beamed as if he had seen an old friend. ‘
Liebling
, look, it is the Englisher! What an unexpected pleasure!’

He stood up. ‘It certainly is unexpected, Herr Maier.’

‘You remember Miss Simonici, of course.’

He gave a slight bow of the head in her direction. ‘Of course.’

Her face was blank. He tried to read the expression in her eyes.

‘Would you care to join me?’

‘Just for a moment,’ Maier said, and they sat down. ‘So, Herr Davis, what have you been doing in Sofia?’