Istanbul Passage

heavy furniture and Meissen figurines a relic of old Europe. He’d been fond of Anna, a kind of substitute father, and now like an aging parent was becoming easy to neglect. He shouldn’t have to be sending cards, gentle reminders. A game once a week, some gossip, just being company-it wasn’t a lot to ask. Call tomorrow and set a date.

He put the invitation on the piano, the upright Georg had found for them. Keys dusted, in tune, ready for her to play again. During the war it had been Mendelssohn because you couldn’t play him in Germany, judische Musik, Anna thumbing her nose at the Nazis with lieder. Along the piano top was the row of framed photographs Leon had come to think of as his war memorial. Anna’s parents, dressed for a walk in the Tiergarten, the last picture they’d sent before they were taken away. Anna herself, mouth open in laughter, when she still had words. Phil kneeling with the ground crew on an airstrip somewhere in the Pacific, the propellers just behind their heads. His unexpected baby brother, so many years between them that they had never been friends and then suddenly were the only family each of them had. The telegram had come to him, the only one left. Missing in action over New Guinea. Then, months later, a letter from an officer who’d survived the Japanese camp, who wanted Leon to know that Phil had been brave to the end. Whatever that meant. Maybe a samurai sword to the back of the neck, maybe dysentery, anyway gone, Leon’s last tie to America. And yet, oddly, losing Phil had pulled him closer to it, wanting to be part of it, even carrying papers for Tommy, as if that would help somehow, like a ground mechanic who checked the oil and waited for the others to come back.

He draped an afghan over his shoulders and sat next to the electric fire. One of your new friends, Mihai had guessed. Now on a VIP ticket to Washington. What would Anna have said? Who else would have reconnaissance pictures? A Nazi or a thief. Your new friends. Not what he imagined doing when it had started. An innocent train to Ankara, then dinner at Karpic’s to leave the papers. No need to go to the Embassy, just in town on business. And then Tommy had other things for him.

“You have a gift for languages,” he’d said. “Who picks up Turkish? And Kraut.” Leon’s grandfather’s legacy-English at school, German at home. “You should be proud-the language of Schiller.” But of course he wasn’t, hiding it from his friends, an embarrassment, until one day it got him a job, not Paris, where he wanted to go, but still overseas and paid in dollars. One job to another, Hamburg then Berlin, where he met Anna.

After that the trips home became less frequent and then, when his mother died, there was no reason to go. They stayed in Berlin until Kristallnacht when Anna’s parents, in a panic, pleaded with him to take her to New York. They would follow, as soon as things could be arranged. But when would that be? An ocean between them, something final. And then, almost a fluke, the Reynolds job came up, somewhere safe but still close enough to help get them out. You could take a train there, Vienna-Sofia-Istanbul, twice a week.

But they never did, delaying until no one got out unless they were rescued, unless Anna and Mihai somehow got them on one of their boats. Anna never stopped trying, even after they couldn’t be found, two more who had disappeared. And Leon had started working for Tommy, his own way of helping. Fighting Nazis. And now he was hiding them.

He looked at the window, still blurry with water. What if it hadn’t rained tonight? What if John Doe had made it through? Would Tommy have told him about the pictures? Any of it? Just do your piece. While I make plans. It wasn’t the money, there were always ways to get more money, but the end of things. Just like that. He shivered again, now a chill that wouldn’t go away, but something else too, an uneasiness. About what? Maybe just the quiet. With the windows closed, there were no sounds-no foghorns on the water or even cars grinding up the steep streets below. When he struck a match he could hear it, a loud rasp. He pulled the afghan tighter, an old man huddling in front of the fire. But not exactly a fire, and not really old yet, either. Too old to be asked back to Washington? Tommy was going. Nagging at him. Take a pill and get into bed, under Anna’s old duvet, always warm.

He went into the bathroom, about to open the medicine chest, and stopped. The same mirror he used every morning, but someone else in it. When had that happened? It wasn’t the gray hair or the tired eyes. He looked the same, more or less. Something worse, a sense of time running out. Why hadn’t Tommy ordered a backup? That was one of the rules. Not even ask for the safe house address? Careless, his mind already on the plane, leaving Leon behind to mop up. I’m not invisible here. Then why have a drink in the most visible place in Istanbul? To tell Leon he was leaving? But he could have done that after. Why even make contact before the job was finished? To be in Mehmet’s report. Somebody’s. Tommy King spent the evening getting soused with a business colleague at the Park, not waiting for a boat in the rain. Covering himself, the way he did. One step ahead.

He was restless all morning, moving papers and fidgeting with pens, sending Osman out twice for coffee. He glanced at the telephone. Tommy wouldn’t call today, he’d keep his distance until after the pickup. Outside, Taksim Square, scrubbed almost clean by the storm, was sunny. Perfect sailing weather. There was nothing to do now but wait out the day. But the clock barely moved.

He was always anxious before a job. Simple, but you never knew. And today was Thursday, his afternoon with Marina, and that anticipation had already begun, a prickling all over his skin, his mind filled with how it would be-the afternoon sun through the curtains, catching the dust, the thin silk wrapper she called a kimono, loosely belted so that it came apart at a touch, his breath getting shorter on the stairs, almost there, not wanting her to see how eager he was, but already hard when she opened the door. The way it always was. And then, afterward, the sudden deflation, embarrassed at wanting it so much, something he shouldn’t be doing. Only once a week, so that it wouldn’t feel like cheating, more like a medical appointment, just a time you set aside. An affair would have meant one of the European wives, unpredictable emotions, a betrayal. This was a simpler transaction-if you paid, it didn’t mean anything.

He had never bought sex before, but what other choices were there in Istanbul? The houses in the alleys on the water side of Galata Hill, waiting downstairs with sailors and stevedores for ten minutes upstairs and months of disease? The apartments over the clubs near Taksim, fading red wallpaper and businessmen, the risk of meeting someone you knew? Then he had overheard a man talking about her in the bar at the Pera Palas, a girl with her own place, and he had gone once, nervous, almost drugged with the thought, his first woman in a year, and then it was every week.

What he hadn’t expected was that sex itself would be different, not what he had known with Anna, but something furtive and heady, the way it had been in adolescence. He knew that if he saw her more often everything would change, that strings would begin to attach themselves, guilt, the afternoons no longer just physical, just pleasure. He thought she felt it too, a kind of relief that he only wanted her body, leaving the rest of her to herself. They had sex, that was all. They didn’t want to touch anything else.

Once he offered to keep her, pay for the room.

“No, I don’t want that. Just pay me like always.”

“Why not? It would make things easier for you.”

“Oh, for me. And why would you do that? So I wouldn’t see anybody else. That’s what it means. Just you. But I would, and then I’d lie to you. Let’s just stay as we are.”

“How many do you see?”

“You’re jealous? If you want a virgin, go somewhere else.”

“I don’t want to go anywhere else.”

“You know when I was a virgin? When I was twelve. So it’s too late to be jealous.”

“You like them, the others?”

“Everyone wants to know that. Now you. Some yes, some no. I like it with you-that’s what you want to know, yes? Nobody really cares about the others, just ‘how is it with me?’ But they ask anyway. What are they like, the men who see you? They want to hear stories.”

“Do you tell them stories about me?”

She shook her head. “What could I tell them? Thursday afternoon-that’s all I know about you. Somebody who doesn’t ask me questions. Until today. And now what? Pay for the room. I pay for it. I told myself, if you ever get out of that place, you’ll have your own room, just yours, not in some house with people walking around. It’s mine,” she said, looking at the room. “I pay for it.”

“But this is how you pay for it,” he said, nodding at the bed, the tangled sheets.

“Yes.”

“Then I’m paying anyway.”