Istanbul (5 page)

If I had died tonight, he thought, would I be satisfied with how I have lived my life? Was any of it worth anything? Are there regrets?

Yes, there are regrets. I would like, before I die, to know what it is like to really love somebody.

He thought about Abrams, quintessentially correct and remote. THta will be me in a few years, if I survive this war. Is that what I want to look like in ten years?

He thought about Daniela, how she had kissed him in the
trasura
,
felt a stab of guilt for thinking of another woman while his wife lay sleeping beside him.

At last he saw a leeching of light through the curtains. Almost dawn.

There had never been a new day when life had seemed so precious, when there had been less time to waste. He hated his life, his secrets, and his detachment from his own longings; once he had calculated the course of his life to the fraction of a degree, but he realized now that he no longer knew his true north.

CHAPTER 10

Everyone in Bucharest was a spy; and if they weren’t spies, they were diplomats and military attachés who wanted everyone to think they were. There were British and French oil engineers on their way out of the country, and German and Italian oil men on their way in; there were mink-wrapped Austrian blondes in the pay of the Gestapo hoping to seduce information from the Romanians, and Romanian girls on the arm of German Legation staff for the same reason.

The Germans had set up a propaganda office downtown, the German Bureau. For months there had been a map of France in the window showing the pincer arrows of the Wehrmacht advance, its claws converging on Paris. They had now replaced it with a map of the British Isles, its major cities ringed with flame.

I should be in England, Nick thought. In London they’ll be crowding into tube stations and bomb shelters, while the Luftwaffe turns the city to rubble.

These bastards are dropping bombs on my sons.

So long since he had seen the boys; in normal times they would have come out to join them for the summer holidays, but that was not possible now. There were soldiers fighting in Burma and the Malay peninsula who had not seen their families for perhaps as long, but at least they knew what they were doing and why. He was stuck here waging a phony war it seemed no-one in Whitehall wanted him to fight.

He hurried across the square to the Athenee Palace. The hotel was as much a landmark of the city as the King’s palace; it had been styled after the Maurice and Ritz hotels of Paris, though the original caryatides and turrets had been removed. The façade had faded to a dirty yellow over the years and the shutters painted a bright blue, with unerring tastelessness.

The statue of Carol I, astride a bronze horse, gestured heroically towards his descendant’s palace on the other side of the square.

He ran the gauntlet of the beggars camped outside the hotel, most of them professionals, blinded or maimed by their parents in infancy. Opaque eyeballs and stumps were thrust into his face in the manner of street hawkers trying to tempt him with homemade pies.

‘
Mi-e foame, foame, foame . . .
’

But the heat had even dissipated their energies and they did not pursue him with their usual enthusiasm. He pushed gratefully through the revolving door into the cool of the foyer.

It was gloomy inside even on the brightest summer day and the three rows of paired yellow marble pillars gave the hotel the appearance of a cathedral. The rust-coloured marble walls and the Bordeaux-red carpets added to the wintry atmosphere. The only light came from the electric chandeliers.

Everyone who worked in the hotel also worked for Moruzov’s secret police; the valets, the porters, the woman in the white apron in the lavatory, even the pink-cheeked pageboys with their little monkey caps strapped around their chins. You went there in the evening and by next morning someone in the palace across the square would know who you dined with and where, what you ate, when you got back to the hotel and who you slept with.

Nick knew who worked for whom, that was his job: the bearded tobacco merchant in the corner reading a Greek newspaper was paid by the Germans; the pretty dark-eyed woman sitting at the bar drinking vermouth worked for the French. The sharp-eyed fat man in the white suit with the grey goatee worked for everyone, but he was sleeping with a German asset – a nice young boy from Stuttgart – so he was no longer considered reliable even as a double agent.

Max King was waiting for him in the American Bar. Max was the Reuters man in Bucharest, the epitome of English pipe-sucking masculinity in grey flannel trousers and a tweed jacket with leather patches at the elbow. The journalists spent every day in the bar. Their work came to them; it was a clearing house for rumours and secrets.

Their acquaintance had started professionally, for Max’s sources were better than his own. Nick never knew where Max got his information but he always seemed to know what was going to happen inside the palace twenty-four hours before anyone at the legation. Over time he had become Nick’s best friend and confidant.

When he saw him, Max took out the pipe and grinned. ‘Nick! My favourite spy!’

‘For God’s sake, Max.’

Max ordered another round of gin and tonics. ‘Hell are you, old boy? Been telling Clive here about your little adventure the other night.’

Nick looked over at Clive Allen. He was not at all like Max; he didn’t say much and he had never seen him laugh. I should take you outside right now and get the truth out of you about Ploesti, Nick thought.

‘Better if you tell the story,’ Max said.

‘Not much to tell. I was in Strada Lipscani. The greenshirts attacked some Jews right there in the street. They beat one poor bastard to death right in front of me. I helped one of them get away, that’s all. Hardly heroic.’

Max shook his head. ‘Goodbye to old Bucharest, I’m afraid. Things are going to get very unpleasant here after Carol goes.’

Everyone but the King himself knew he would have to go. It wasn’t just that he was corrupt; he once even spread rumours on the stock market to destabilise the national currency and then made huge profits trading against it. When the truth came out most Romanians just shrugged their shoulders. They were not even that shocked.

It was the loss of territory and with it, national pride, that had finally turned the people against him. The Russians had just annexed two of the northern provinces and the King had done nothing to try and stop them. Ironically, it was one of his few intelligent decisions, because a war with Russia would only have cost more land and more humiliation.

But the Bucaresti finally lost faith with Carol the Cad.

The people were now looking to the nationalists for salvation, and to men like Horia Sima, the leader of the Iron Guard. In desperation, the King had tried to placate the mob by declaring an amnesty for the Guard and had made Sima the Minister of Culture and the Arts. The appointment had not been an outstanding success. From his new post Sima had directed the arrest, torture and execution of hundreds of Jews.

‘Turned it into an art form,’ was Max’s grim joke.

It had done nothing to silence the voices raised against the King. There were demonstrations in the square every day, most of them organised by Sima himself.

Clive finished his drink, made a polite farewell and left.

‘Everything all right, old boy?’ Max said after he had gone.

‘Yes. Of course.’

‘Did he upset you?’

‘No. Why?’

‘Just the way you were looking at him, old son. Poor old Clive. Whatever he’s done, don’t be too hard. Drinks more than is good for him,’ Max added, ordering another round. It was eleven o’clock in the morning.

‘How’s Daniela?’

‘Don’t worry about her. Trust Max. She’s fine.’ For the last week Max had been sheltering Daniela at his apartment on Bratianu. When Nick had appeared at his door that morning with a beautiful waif with tear-stained cheeks, he had asked no questions.

But he had made assumptions.

‘Be discreet, Nick. You’re a married man.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Nick said, startled to hear his secret desires so baldly stated.

‘Women like Jennifer don’t miss a thing.’

‘Then you should hire her for Reuters.’

‘Love to, but she doesn’t drink enough.’ He raised his glass. ‘Good health,’ he said, with his usual flair for inverted prophesy.

CHAPTER 11

They sat in the garden of a restaurant called Cina’s in wicker armchairs. The evening sun was dappled through the leaves of the lime trees that shaded the courtyard. The strings of coloured lights that hung in the trees gave the garden a fairytale appearance.

It would have been peaceful if not for the shouts coming from the square outside. Another demonstration against the King.

White-jacketed waiters scurried from table to table while patrons grabbed at their coat tails, demanding service.

‘Are you going to be gloomy again tonight?’ Jennifer said. ‘I do so hope you’re going to be better company tonight, you haven’t been yourself for weeks.’

They had met in the summer of 1924, at a ball in the Savoy Hotel in the Strand. She was beautiful, well travelled, educated at Roedean. Her father was a diplomat and Nick’s ambition to join the service had met with her wholehearted approval.

He had needed a wife, it was required for diplomatic advancement along with an Oxbridge classics degree. Jennifer was of an age that she was looking for a suitable husband and he supposed, looking back on it, that what had happened between them was inevitable.

They made love for the first time a month before their wedding, in a beachfront hotel in Brighton. It was not all he had hoped, but he told himself it would get better.

Jennifer fell pregnant quickly with Jamie; two years later Richard was born. Life seemed straightforward then. He was consumed with work, and if anyone had asked him then, he would have told them that a successful career and a stable home was all a man needed for contentment.

When they had married, it had been for better or worse. He was twenty-three years old and had no idea what such words meant. He never imagined that the Nick Davis he knew would one day become such a different man.

Early in his career his ambitions within the diplomatic service had been diverted to the more arcane pursuit of intelligence gathering. Soon there were postings to Lisbon and Madrid with the Passport Control Office, which was where his secret life began. His whole life was secrets now; secrets in the office, secrets at home.

‘Are you happy, Jen?’

‘Whatever do you mean?’

‘With me. With us.’

‘Of course I am,’ she said and he saw a flicker of apprehension in her eyes.

A gypsy troupe in white blouses and velvet breeches started playing sad Oriental melodies in the Chinese kiosk in the centre of the garden.

‘Is this enough for you?’

‘Enough?’

‘Don’t you wish there was . . . some passion in our lives? That we spent more time together? That I talked to you more?’

‘I don’t think I follow you, Nick. What is it you want to talk about?’

It occurred to him that she was happy with their marriage, that for all her complaints over the years, she actually wanted very little of him. Without her acquiescence, it would be quite impossible to end it. He knew he couldn’t be the one to walk away. He didn’t have enough reasons, there was no infidelity, no blistering arguments. And what about the boys?

‘I don’t think I’ve ever felt so unhappy,’ he said.

‘There’s a war on, as you’re so fond of telling people, Nick. No one’s happy.’

He took a deep breath and tried again. ‘I’m unhappy ... about things with you and me.’

‘What are you saying?’

‘I’m saying . . . I’m saying have you ever thought that we would be happier apart?’

There was a sudden welling of tears in her eyes. ‘No, Nick. No, I’ve never thought that.’

They lapsed into silence.

‘Jennifer, I ...’

‘Good Lord, what’s that noise?’ she said.

He heard it too, over the sound of the gypsy violins, the tramp of marching feet. They were chanting in unison in the square: ‘
Abdica . . . abdica . . .
’

Nick happened to know that the King’s Prime Minister, General Antonescu, was in the palace at that moment, trying to persuade the King to abdicate in the best interests of Romania. Some additional pressure was being applied.

‘What’s going on, Nick?’

‘The usual nonsense,’ he said. He didn’t want to try to explain it to her, wanted to forget about work for a while. Or perhaps dissembling had become a habit with him.

A shot rang out, then another. Diners jumped up from their tables, spilling glasses and plates. Some ran to the low hedge to get a better view of what was happening. The more timorous ran inside.