Istanbul (14 page)

‘Embassy business. You?’

‘Tourism. Sofia is a very beautiful city.’

Nick hadn’t thought so, but said he did.

‘Still, it’s best not to get too fond of a place, I find. You were fond of Bucharest as well, I remember.’

Nick did not rise to the bait. ‘You’re going to Istanbul?’

‘For a short time.’

‘More tourism? The war has been good to you. So many vacations.’

A smile. ‘Business this time, I’m afraid.’

‘You’re staying long?’

‘I have no firm plans. Perhaps we will see each other from time to time.’

Daniela appeared bored by the exchange. He was acutely aware of her, and wished he could be alone with her, to talk with her, if just for a few minutes. She carefully avoided his eyes.

The bisque arrived and Maier got to his feet. ‘But we are disturbing your dinner. We should leave you to dine in peace.’

He stood up. ‘Herr Maier. Miss Simonici.’

‘
Bon appetit
,’ she said, and they were her only words.

Maier escorted her to a table at the other end of the dining car. She took a seat facing away from him. He watched them talking, heard her torchy laugh, and it took him back to the dimly lit foyer of the Athenee Palace Hotel. So, she was still Maier’s mistress. She had told him that night in the lobby that she was a good actress, and he wondered if she was acting now.

Was she as happy as she sounded? Impossible to tell.

Jealousy is a bad dinner companion. He pushed his soup away untouched and decided to go back to his compartment. Once, he had been contentedly numb; now he only felt an acute sense that somewhere in his life he had missed something very important. It was as if he had lived only half a life so far.

Daniela tried to concentrate on what Maier was saying but in her mind she followed Nick down the corridor to his compartment. Maier was talking politics to her, so fascinated with his own cleverness that he did not seem to notice how distracted she was. He was intoxicated by his country’s eminence in the world, and by extension, of course, his own.

He was explaining to her the merits of the Kavaklidere, the burgundy he had ordered for their dinner. All she could think about was the tall Englishman in the tussore suit, with the sad blue eyes and comma of dark hair falling across his forehead.

CHAPTER 30

The attendant turned down the bed. When he had gone, Nick undressed and turned out the light. He lay there in the dark, watching freezing rain weep down the windows. He wondered what Jennifer was doing and thought about his sons, growing up in England without him.

Most of all he thought about Daniela, sleeping just a few compartments away.

He didn’t remember falling asleep, lulled by the melancholy screech of the steam whistle, the clatter of the rails, the creak of the wooden panelling. He was disturbed in the early hours by a soft tapping on the door. He was immediately awake. He got out of bed and put on his dressing gown. ‘Who is it?’

No answer.

He took the revolver from the pocket of his coat hanging on the back of the door. He held it out of sight and inched open the door.

He could not see her face but he recognised her perfume.

‘Daniela?’

He checked the corridor. It was empty except for the attendant dozing in his chair.

Suddenly she was pressed against him, kissing him. He realised he was still holding the revolver in his right hand and that the safety was off. Christ. He slipped the gun under the mattress.

It was dark in the compartment and he couldn’t see her face. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I needed to see you alone.’

‘What about Maier?’

‘I told him I couldn’t sleep. He thinks I’m in the salon.’

‘What if he comes looking for you?’

A crooked and unexpected smile. ‘He won’t find me,’ she said. ‘I’m not there.’

He pulled her down beside him on the bed. ‘I never thought I’d see you again.’

‘When Siggi left Bucharest, he decided to take me with him. I suppose if you remember to bring everything with you, you don’t have to buy them again in the next city. Things like a hairbrush, winter suits, mistress.’

‘Is that what you are?’

‘I came to warn you,’ she whispered.

‘Warn me?’

‘I heard Maier talking to a German colonel at the station. They saw you getting on the train. They think you’re a spy. The colonel told Siggi that the Bulgarian police are going to take you off the train at the border and arrest you.’

He almost said:
They wouldn’t dare.
But who knew what anyone would dare in the Balkans? Europe had gone mad; once, an Englishman could count on his country’s power and reputation for safe passage in the world, but not anymore. If they took him before they reached the border, he would simply disappear; apologies would be made, investigations would be launched and meanwhile he would be in some safe house in the Bulgarian woods being tortured by experts for the names of all his intelligence contacts inside Romania and the Near East.

He felt a cold grease of fear erupt on his skin.

He switched on the lamp beside the bed. Almost two in the morning. They would be at the border in less than an hour.

‘Why are you telling me this?’

‘Why do you think?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. Was it because he had saved her life, or was there another reason?

‘I have to go now,’ she said.

She took his hand and placed it on her heart and held it there for just a moment, then stood up.

‘Can you help me?’ he said.

‘What do you want me to do?’

‘The attendant at the end of the corridor. I need you to get him out of the way.’

‘Leave it to me.’ One last lingering kiss. ‘I’ll see you in Istanbul,’ she said, and with that elusive promise, she was gone.

He left the door ajar, watched as she woke the attendant and whispered something to him. He never discovered what fool’s errand she invented for him, but a beautiful woman soliciting help for any damned fool thing will always get what she needs. The attendant, still groggy with sleep, followed her out of the carriage and through the adjoining door.

Nick dressed and put the revolver in his pocket. He cut the sash to the blind with a pocketknife and slipped it into his other pocket. Then he threw open the window. The icy wind was like a slap in the face. He slipped on his overcoat and checked for his passport in his pocket.

With luck, the Bulgarian police would think he had fled through the window. He gave one last look around the room. Satisfied with his preparations, he slipped out into the empty corridor.

As he opened the connecting door to the dining car, the clatter of the wheels was deafening. He took a deep breath in front of the glass door in the vestibule, prayed there was no-one up and awake at this hour.

Empty.

He hurried past the kitchen. He heard two of the cooks arguing while they prepared breakfast. The next door connected the dining car to the freight wagon.

He took out his revolver, but left the safety on.

The guard was asleep. He was snoring and there was a rather endearing trickle of saliva leaking from the corner of his mouth onto the sleeve of his uniform.

If he had been Robert Coleman or Errol Flynn, he would have knocked the guard over the head with the butt of the gun and the man would have conveniently fallen unconscious to the floor. In real life Nick’s experience had been that if you didn’t hit the man hard enough, he either yelled or got very angry, and if you hit him too hard, you broke his skull and killed him.

He would not risk doing such a thing to some poor Frenchman doing an honest if rather boring job, a man with perhaps a wife and a family at home. Most of these railroad employees didn’t like the Nazis any more than he did, and some of them were even on the SIS payroll.

The man woke up when he heard Nick remove the safety from the revolver right next to his ear.

Nick told him in French what he wanted him to do. The man was shaking so violently he could barely stand up. Nick felt sorry for him.

He stripped off his clothes and stood there in his underwear. He was not an appetising sight. Nick made him unlock the freight car and pushed him inside. He tied his hands behind his back with the sash cord that he had cut from the blinds in his compartment and stuffed a gag in his mouth, using a strip of red cloth cut from a signal flag.

When it was done, he took off his own clothes. The guard’s eyes went wide. He thinks I’m going to get Bulgarian with him, Nick thought, with disgust. Even an Old Etonian would have chosen a more tempting prospect.

Nick put on the guard’s uniform. It was too small in the leg and too large around the middle and he had to cinch the belt to the last notch to keep his trousers up. He left the guard crouched on the floor next to the crate containing the consulate archives. When he got back to the guard’s compartment, he felt the train start to slow. They were almost at the border.

CHAPTER 31

He sat down at the guard’s desk next to the dining car. He heard shouts on the platform. He felt a slick of sweat on his palm and he wiped it onto the trousers of the uniform. He held the revolver out of sight under the desk.

They weren’t going to take him alive, whatever happened. Death was easier to contemplate than torture. He wondered what Jennifer would say if he didn’t come back. He thought about his two boys and hoped that one day they would be proud of him.

Concentrate Nick, keep your head clear.

Outside, grey sheets of rain fell on some deserted Balkan backwater, and ugly men in drab uniforms sheltered scowling from the weather; but he was desired and in danger and the world had never been as luminous. He hated this damned war and he didn’t want it ever to end.

Nick heard footfall in the dining car. They were coming.

There were three of them, in dirty brown uniforms with frayed sleeves and sweat-rimmed collars. They all had bad moustaches, peasants trying to look like generals. One of them said something to him in Bulgarian and he replied, as the real guard would have done, in French.

He knew from Daniela that they were looking for a passenger named Peter Box, the false identity he had been using;
non monsieur
, he answered, respectfully, no gentleman of that name or any other has been through here.

One of the policemen shoved past his colleagues and headed for the freight car but Nick jumped to his feet and stood in his way. The policeman puffed out his chest, his black eyes just inches from Nick’s face. His breath was foul.

Nick wondered what he would do.

CHAPTER 32

They both stood there, nose to nose. Finally, to Nick’s relief, the other man backed down. He turned and walked out of the van, waving the others after him. Nick slumped down into the guard’s chair.

At last, the train lurched out of the siding. They stopped again on the Turkish side of the border but no-one came into the freight car and finally they were waved through.

He was safe.

He put his own clothes back on and went back down the corridor. When he appeared from the salon, the attendant stared at him in astonishment. Nick smiled and wished him a good morning.

It was frigid inside his compartment. The window was still open. He closed it and looked around. The Bulgarian police had upended everything from his suitcase onto the floor. This was frustration over efficiency. He scooped up his clothes and shoved them back into his valise.

The bed was soaked with rain. It didn’t really matter because he knew he couldn’t sleep, not now.

He sat down and stared out of the window. The night was black and he saw in the glass the reflection of a gaunt Englishman cradling a Webley revolver in his lap. He listened to the rhythm of the iron wheels on the tracks, remembered Daniela’s kiss, remembered that she had just saved his life and remembered, too, her parting promise:
I’ll see you in Istanbul
.

His reflection began to fade as light leeched into the sky. He found himself staring instead at a cold Istanbul dawn, at the dirty yellow ruins of Byzantium looming from the black cypresses.

For a moment the lighthouse illuminated the dreary hovels that lay still in shadow near the railway line. They lumbered past Süleyman’s grand harem and the Topkapi palace, past the niches in the walls where the heads of the sultan’s enemies had once fed the crows.

Istanbul could appear a filthy ruin or a grand testament to history, depending on one’s mood. This morning it inspired him to hope, a dangerous emotion indeed.