Istanbul (32 page)

‘Mr Davis. You are looking better,’ the doctor said.

‘Am I okay?’

‘You have severe bruising to your kidneys. There was some internal bleeding. I feared at first that you had suffered serious damage but you were very fortunate. I must warn you, you will be in considerable pain for some time. But with luck your stay here will not be too long.’ He checked the chart at the end of the bed and nodded, satisfied. ‘I shall leave you alone with your colleague.’

He walked out.

Abrams’s face swam into his vision. ‘How are you feeling?’ He sat down on the chair next to the bed. ‘Well, what a pickle.’

A pickle. Was that what it was? They hung him from the ceiling and beat him with truncheons and Abrams called that a pickle. Nick started to laugh, but the pain cut his laughter short.

A pickle.

‘The night you disappeared there was hell to pay. We didn’t find your car until next morning and by then it was too late to do anything. We followed your tyre tracks to a disused pier. We guessed what had happened.’

‘What about Daniela?’

Abrams frowned.

‘Trojan - she was with me at the casino.’ Nick nursed a last vain hope that she had been spared, left behind on the beach.

Abrams shook his head. ‘No sign of her.’

Nick closed his eyes.

‘I know you need to rest. First, tell me what happened.’

He recounted everything he remembered from the moment they left the casino. He told him what he had told Overath during the interrogation; almost all of it had been false. He had not been particularly brave, he didn’t think. They had not had enough time to work on him; he would have told them everything in the end.

But Abrams seemed satisfied. ‘You have great fortitude,’ he said. ‘This could have been disastrous.’

‘You mean it wasn’t?’

‘You’re alive. We got you back,’ he said, as if he himself deserved some credit for it.

The nurse came into the room. ‘You should leave now,
monsieur
. He needs to rest.’

Abrams got up to leave, stopped at the door. ‘We have to persuade Maier to come over,’ he said and left.

CHAPTER 77

A few weeks later he saw Maier in the bar of the Pera Palas. He looked greyer, thinner. Abrams said the SD were watching him night and day. He had still been unable to get his wife and son out of Berlin and the pressure was telling.

They couldn’t be seen talking in public so he called him later at his office in the bazaar. Nick finally gave up all pretence and asked him outright what had happened to Daniela.

‘I don’t know,’ Maier said, his voice flat. ‘She went out one night and never came back. Do you know perhaps?’

There was nothing Nick could tell him.

He woke to the clamour of the telephone beside the bed. In his dream, he had been running through sand, hunted by faceless men. The bedsheets were soaked in sweat.

He fumbled for the telephone in the dark.

‘Davis?’

‘Who is this?’

‘It’s Abrams.’

‘What’s happened?’

‘The SD are arresting Abwehr officers all over the city.’

Nick turned on the lamp beside the bed and looked at his wristwatch. A quarter to three in the morning.

‘We have to get Maier out now. I’m sending a car round. Do what you can.’

He hung up.

Nick swung his legs out of the bed and dialled Maier’s number. Maier picked it up on the first ring. ‘Where are you?’ Maier said.

‘At home. I just heard the news. The SD are making their move.’

‘Yes, there’s two of them standing in my living room right now.’

‘Stall them,’ he shouted into the telephone. ‘I’ll be there.’

He pulled on a shirt and a pair of trousers. As he ran down the stairs, he heard a car pull up in the street outside. He was still pulling on his jacket and buttoning his shirt as he jumped in. ‘Hurry!’ he shouted to the driver.

They drove across the bridge and up the hill to Pera, through dark, cobbled streets. Nick saw a light burning at a second-floor window as they pulled up outside Maier’s apartment in Taksim. A Horch limousine was parked in front of the building near Maier’s Mercedes. Two stiff Nazi flags framed the radiator.

Nick’s driver punched the horn.

Maier had been at the window, watching. He told Nick later that the two SD men had been quite civil, had merely told him he was being sent back to Berlin, and gave him time to pack his suitcase. When Maier saw the consulate limousine, he simply dropped the case and dashed out of the door.

A few moments later he ran out of the apartment. Nick threw open the door and Maier jumped in.

As they drove off, Nick looked out of the rear window and saw two SD agents running towards the Horch. But by then they were already turning into Istiklal, speeding away towards the British Consulate with their prize.

CHAPTER 78

Early the next morning Maier sat in Abrams’s office eating scrambled eggs and bacon. He was getting better hospitality than he would have got from Himmler.

When he had finished he pushed his plate away. ‘Bastards,’ he said, lighting a cigarette.

Abrams sat down in an armchair close to the window and sipped his tea. ‘The German Embassy has told the Turkish police that you’ve been kidnapped and they have asked them to look for you.’

‘Will they?’ Maier said.

‘They’ll leave not a piece of paper on their desks unturned. But I doubt very much that you’ll show up.’ He leaned forward. ‘So, Colonel Maier, what do you have to tell us?’

Abrams’s secretary sat unobtrusively in a corner of the room with a shorthand pad open on her lap. She picked up her pencil.

Maier sat back and wiped his mouth with a napkin. He shook his head. ‘They will call me a traitor at home.’

‘We have an arrangement. It’s too late for negotiation.’

‘Hitler is a madman. I always said so.’

‘I’m sorry, colonel, but we’re not here to discuss philosophy, just facts.’

Nick did not wonder that Maier was hesitating, even now. Back in Germany the SD would ensure that his wife and son were punished for his betrayal. Even now they might be knocking down the door of their Berlin house. But Maier had no choice; he had waited until the last moment to try to get them out, and there was nothing more he could have done for them.

So he closed his eyes and began to talk.

He talked for five hours, gave them the names of Nazi sympathisers and Abwehr couriers and agents in Palestine, Syria, Iraq and Egypt; he told them what he knew about Allied operations inside Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania, and what the Abwehr had learned of British and American intelligence inside Turkey. With a great deal more relish, he told them everything he knew about SD activities as well.

By the time Maier had finished, Abrams’s secretary had filled one notebook and was halfway through a second. There it was, Nick thought; Abrams’s career was assured.

Maier’s ashtray was overflowing and the fug of sweat and tobacco smoke made Nick’s head spin. Maier’s hands were trembling; too many cups of strong Turkish coffee, perhaps.

‘What about Donaldson?’ Nick asked him.

Maier looked at Abrams in surprise. ‘I don’t know anything about that.’

‘Daniela said you were behind it.’

‘When did she tell you that?’

‘After she saved my life. If she hadn’t found me and warned me, I’d be dead.’

He shook his head. ‘She lied to you.’

‘She said she overheard you discussing a bomb on the telephone.’

‘Is that what she said?’ He looked at Abrams and smiled.

Nick sat back, a knot of dread in his stomach.

‘Tell us about Daniela Simonici?’ Abrams said.

‘Ah, yes, Daniela Simonici.’

‘Did you ask her to seduce a man named Grigoriev?’ Nick asked him. ‘He worked for the NKVD.’

‘I asked her to do many things. Yes, I had her seduce him. She lured him to a quiet hotel in Taksim where some of my agents were waiting. He was drugged and smuggled across the border into Bulgaria so that he could be interrogated properly.’

Abrams leaned forward, his elbows resting on his knees. ‘Was this the same plan you used to get Davis here out of Istanbul?’

Nick held his breath.

‘I asked her to spy on Major Davis a long time ago.’

‘I know that,’ Nick said, wanting to wipe the smirk from his face. ‘She told me on our very first meeting in Istanbul.’

‘That’s what I told her to do.’

A long silence as the two Englishmen considered the implications of this remark.

‘What do you mean?’ Abrams said.

Nick leaned forward. ‘She was double-crossing us?’

‘I thought that it would be better for us to have her feed you disinformation than try to obtain legitimate documents. I assumed, correctly, that you would only bring paperwork home on very rare occasions and that it would be impossible for Miss Simonici to gain consular access no matter how deeply you fell for her charms.’

‘Everything she gave us was false?’ Abrams said.

‘I made it appear that she was taking these photographs herself by making them as amateurish as possible. And I salted the prize with a few tokens, expendable items.’

Nick closed his eyes. Christ.

‘The second benefit Miss Simonici afforded us was that I knew almost everything she brought
me
was disinformation. Although it was not useful in itself, it allowed us to make the correct interpretation of other intelligence we gathered.’

Abrams sighed heavily.

‘And then there was the capture of Major Davis here. I disagreed with such ungentlemanly behaviour, but the SD insisted, and at the time I was trying to curry favour there, hoping to buy myself more time to plan my defection. It didn’t work, obviously.’

Nick thought for a moment he was going to be physically sick.

‘She knew?’

‘That you were to be captured and tortured? Yes, she knew. Major, for a long time I was under the illusion that she loved me, also. Like you, I found it difficult to separate my professional activities from my personal life. But finally I came to understand that she was totally mercenary and without scruple of any kind. It is a pity you did not understand this also.’

‘What happened to her?’ Abrams asked.

Maier shrugged. ‘I think she is living in Bucharest. With a major in the Siecherheitdienst. Overath, I think his name is.’

Nick went to the window and threw it open. He took long, deep breaths, his knuckles white on the windowsill. He looked down into the garden; there were buds on the branches of the Judas trees.

She lied to me.

She told him that she loved him, yet she had deceived him for three years, and then lured him into a trap. He had been tortured and would have certainly been murdered if not for Stanciu’s intervention.

He imagined he saw her face beneath him on a moonlit pillow.
Baby, baby
.

He tried to mount a defence for her, but he could find no mitigating circumstance. She had played him for a fool. The cold wind made his cheeks burn with shame and with hate.

The fine spring morning had turned foul. Filthy clouds rushed in from the north, and it started to drizzle with rain. He closed his eyes. He felt as if he had been eviscerated with a blunt spoon.

Max King had always told him never to get too involved with a woman. He had a wife at home and Adrienne Varga in his bed in his Istanbul apartment. It was just a casual affair, he had said. She means nothing to me.

On the night Nick rescued Maier from the SD, Adrienne Varga told Max that she had fallen in love with another man, an Italian diplomat. She was leaving him.

A few hours later a Turkish cigarette vendor, on his way home from Taksim Square, saw Max fall from the Galata Bridge into the swirling waters of the Horn below. It was believed that Max was drunk and fell by accident but Nick supposed no-one would ever know the truth of that. Max would have loved the irony; after a lifetime of rampant alcoholism it was too much water that killed him.

You should never go overboard over a woman, Max had said. But in the end he couldn’t keep his own golden rule. Perhaps he never really believed it; as he said many times, he was just a journalist, and one should believe only half of what he said and none of what he wrote.