Istanbul (25 page)

The mosque courtyard was shaded by plane trees. Pigeons flapped into the air as a latecomer ran across the flagstones, then descended again to waddle and fuss around the fountain where the men washed their feet before prayer. A beggar crouched in the cloister selling trays of bird grain to infidel visitors.

She made her way towards him across the baking stones, a jade-green scarf on her head, gold bracelet on her slender wrist. She swept a stray lock of hair from her forehead and hide it beneath the scarf so that it could not arouse the lust of a Moslem in his holy devotions. For a moment he glimpsed her bare arm, and remembered how she liked him to kiss the smooth, pale skin along her wrist and up to the intimate folds of her inner arm.

Come to prayer, God is great. God is great but what game is God playing here? He had brought him this wonderful woman and He had contrived their destinies so that they might be together, and by some miracle He had made her love him. God is great but He had brought her at the wrong time, while the world was at war and he was married to another woman.

They left their shoes under the cloister and stepped inside the mosque. Hundreds of oil lamps hung suspended from the roof, throwing an amber glow on the faience and into the great dome above.

‘I love you,’ she whispered. ‘I know you don’t believe it but the truth is here in my eyes.’

When he looked there, he did not see the truth, only his own confusion.

Allahu akbar.
God is great. Come to prayer.

BOOK FOUR

CHAPTER 58

Istanbul, November 1943

The black telephone rang in his office.

‘It’s Maier,’ a man’s voice said. There was no preamble, no banter prefixed with jokes about ‘my Englisher friend’.

‘Herr Maier. What can I do for you?’

‘We must talk,’ he said.

What can he possibly have to say to me? Nick thought. Is it a trap?

‘Where do you want to meet, Herr Maier?’

The
hamam
, the public steam bath, was a place to go to relax and chat, the last place you would expect to be followed. It was the perfect rendezvous for a clandestine meeting with an enemy intelligence officer.

Maier chose an establishment near the ruins of the Heptstadion. Nick undressed in one of the cubicles, and wrapped a towel around his waist. An attendant led him to the hot room. Hairy, middle-aged men padded naked through the steam, wiping sweat from their faces. It reminded Nick of a classical Italian painter’s vision of hell; blurred figures moving like wraiths through the steam, men with sagging bellies made monstrous by the heat and vapours.

He sat down on a bench, feeling the sweat ooze out of his skin. He closed his eyes and forced himself to relax.

A man lumbered towards him and sat down on the bench beside him.

Nick knew Maier’s body better than he knew any man’s; he knew, for instance, that he had a birthmark on his left hip and that there was a scar on his chest just below his collarbone. He had learned these things from Daniela. This private knowledge was now profoundly disconcerting.

What else did he know about his intimate enemy? He knew he had a fondness for a glass of vodka before bed, that he slept on his back with his hands folded across his stomach and that he liked black olives.

Nick had imagined, even hoped, that he had run to fat, but he looked remarkably fit.

‘My Englisher friend.’

He wiped a hand across his chest and flicked away the sweat with a casual sweep of his hand. ‘Herr Maier.’

In a nearby cubicle he heard a masseur pummelling away at soft flesh.

‘Why here?’

‘The SD are watching me.’ The SD, the Sicherheitdienst, was the overseas branch of the Gestapo. They hated the Abwehr more than all the Allied intelligence services put together.

Nick waited.

‘Did you hear the one about Goerring? He and his wife give a party. After dinner everyone retires to the drawing room and then Frau Goerring realizes her husband is missing. She hears this terrible crash from the dining room. She goes in and there is Goerring trying to pull the Viennese chandelier off the ceiling. “Hermann!” she shouts. “What are you doing? I told you to leave that alone, you have enough decorations without it!”’

He laughed at his own joke and Nick laughed with him.

‘You don’t like the Nazis any more, Herr Maier?’

‘I never did,’ he said. ‘Today I am just a courier, Herr Davis. I have very influential friends here and in Berlin. But you already know this.’

Nick nodded.

‘What I am about to say is highly sensitive. I will trust you to keep it in your confidence and find someone inside the consulate with whom you can trust this information. My life and the lives of millions of others depend on it.’

Millions?

‘Naturally, I will treat anything you tell me with the utmost confidence, Herr Maier.’

Maier wiped perspiration from his eyes. ‘You know our Führer prides himself on his benevolence. It is the reason Germany took Romania and Bulgaria and Hungary under her protection. Your Churchill didn’t seem to understand that.’

‘I have a little difficulty myself discerning the difference between protection and invasion.’

‘Hitler, Churchill and Roosevelt are at a peace conference. They have been talking for a long time and they start to get hungry. On the mantelpiece there is a goldfish in a bowl and they talk about how they might catch the fish and eat him. So Churchill makes a noose out of his watch chain and tries to catch the fish, but it doesn’t work. So Roosevelt catches a fly and lowers it into the fishbowl on the end of a piece of string as bait, but the little fish ignores it. So finally it’s Hitler’s turn. He patiently ladles all the water out of the bowl with a teaspoon until the little fish is just lying at the bottom of the bowl gasping and flapping.

‘“Well hurry up then, Adolf,” Churchill says, “now you fry him!”

‘“Oh,” Hitler says, “I won’t do that unless he asks me to!”’

‘You want to talk to me about Hitler?’ Nick asked.

‘I want to talk to you about peace conferences.’

‘Herr Maier?’

‘What do you know about Admiral Canaris?’

‘I know he is head of the Abwehr. That he is well connected and comes form an aristocratic family.’

‘And a patriot like myself. Our families know each other well. We love our country but that does not mean we also love the Nazis. That is not the same thing.’

‘Why are you telling me this?’

‘We are going to lose this war, Herr Davis. Not today, not tomorrow, but we
will
lose it. And when we do, the Russians will send in their tanks and their commissars and then what will happen to Germany? While I was in Berlin I spoke to many well-connected and patriotic Germans who wish to start a dialogue with the Allies. Admiral Canaris himself asked me to make an approach.’

Nick remembered the papers Daniela had stolen from Maier’s safe. So they were genuine, after all. ‘You are the conduit to Admiral Canaris?’

‘Initially, yes.’

‘Who else?’

‘I cannot furnish you with further details unless you provide us with proof that someone in the British and US governments is willing to negotiate with us.’

It was hard to sit there with sweat dripping off his nose and remain cool and composed. ‘There seems little point in negotiating with Admiral Canaris if he has no power to change the course of the war.’

‘You think Hitler will keep power if Germany start to lose?’

Nick raised an eyebrow.

‘I cannot say more than this,’ Maier added.

‘You can try, can’t you?’

‘We have plans. In order to recruit others, we must have assurances that ridding ourselves of Hitler will have tangible and immediate benefits.’

‘I will pass on your message, Herr Maier.’

‘Thank you.’ Maier hesitated. ‘I am not a traitor, Herr Davis. I love my country. That is why I am doing this.’ For a moment Nick saw a mirror image of himself, a man wrestling with his conscience, his duty and his heart. ‘I will wait to hear from you.’

As he turned to go, Nick said: ‘How is your Romanian mistress?’

A look. Maier gathered himself, reconstructing his fictions so he would not be caught out. He was not supposed to know that Nick was sleeping with her. ‘You remember her?’

‘From the train.’

‘The train,’ he said, his face blank, the etiquette of the deception taxing him. ‘I remember now. There was a commotion. You left the train unexpectedly.’

‘I got off in Istanbul, as planned.’

‘I was misinformed, then.’

‘Apparently.’ The heat of the
hammam
made him feel faint. ‘You are still with her?’

‘Who?’

‘The Romanian. What was her name?’

‘Daniela. Yes, she is installed in my house in Taksim. She is exhausting. I go home to my wife in Berlin every few months for a rest.’

Maier smiled. Nick felt his gut tighten like a fist.

‘When the war is over,’ Maier said, ‘I should not be surprised if we become friends.’

‘I very much doubt that,’ Nick said.

Maier wrapped the towel tighter around his midriff.

‘I should like to see this war end,’ he said. ‘I was never enthusiastic.’

‘You seemed enthusiastic enough in Romania.’

‘Well, we were winning then. Good luck. I hope you have good news very soon for Admiral Canaris.’ And he disappeared into the steam.

CHAPTER 59

Lieutenant General Leonid Feoderev got out of the taxicab, and walked past the doorman into the lobby of the hotel. He was being watched by the Emniyet, the SIS, and by his own GRU. But he expected this. He checked into a room at Askatliyan’s at the woman’s suggestion.

He noted the Turk in the dark brown suit seated in a chair in the foyer, smoking and pretending to read
Cumhurriyet
; he saw a tall, fair-haired man follow him in off the street and then go into the dining room, even though it was not yet twelve o’clock. He wondered which of them it was, perhaps both.

He signed his name in the register and went up to the room in a creaking iron lift. The room was shabby and smelled of tobacco. He sat down in a chair by the window to wait. He took out his cigarettes.

She was late.

Someone tapped at the door. He edged it open and saw a woman, dark-haired, beautiful.

‘Daniela Simonici?’

She nodded and moved past him into the room, holding a black leather briefcase.

‘Is that it?’

She did not answer. Instead she took off her coat and snapped the locks on the case. ‘Shall we start?’ she said.

He went for a walk in the rain. Winter was drawing in, and the sky was overcast. He thought about England. He had been away so long that he wondered how he would cope; the crowding domes of Asia was home to him now. He had gone native.

The mosque of Süleyman loomed over the old city, the grey dome flanked by other smaller domes, like a mother with her brood. The fruit market spilled into the streets at its feet, between the bazaars of the old city and the warehouses of the Golden Horn.

Under the arcades professional letter-writers sat at rickety tables, transcribing letters for their patrons. The younger men clattered away at big Remington typewriters, while the older scribes used old-fashioned quills and wrote in traditional Arabic. They looked careworn by the daily outpouring of human emotions, much the same as priests and doctors; here was a girl sending a letter to her boy-friend in the army; there, an old father writing to his son in some faraway province.

He imagined how Jennifer might look sitting at one of these tables, relating her letter to an unfaithful husband in some faraway country. Tell him I’ve met someone else and I want a divorce. He imagined the expression on the scribe’s face; theirs would not be a new story to him, or to history.

Insh’allah
, any good Moslem would have said.

As God wills.

‘I received a coded dispatch from London this morning,’ Abrams said.

‘About Maier?’

Abrams nodded and Nick understood it was not good news.