Istanbul Passage

“I can’t tonight.”

“Hot date?”

“I’m going to see my wife.”

“Sorry,” Ed said, genuinely embarrassed. “Well, try to drop in late. You’re right there. She’s in Bebek, right?”

Leon nodded. Near the college. But not as far up the coast road as the boat landing. Tommy making a diversion. If anyone followed him, they’d never go farther than Bebek, waiting for him to come down the hill. Hosting a party, not meeting boats.

“I’ll see what I can do,” he said, signaling for the bill. “You find out who’s who first so I don’t say anything I shouldn’t.”

“You think I’m kidding.”

“I think the place is getting to you. Here, let me get that.”

“Tell me one thing then.”

“What’s that?” Leon said, dropping some lira notes on the bill.

“Remember that secretary of von Papen’s? Switched sides?”

“The one asked for asylum. Sure.”

“I was at the consulate that day. And where do they send him? To Tommy. Now why would they do that?”

A flustered attache, an instinctive reaction, forgetting the rules.

“I don’t know, Ed.”

“Think about it,” Ed said, taking another sip of the wine and leaning back, settling in. Leon imagined another hour of this, Ed probing, a meaningless cat-and-mouse game. To learn what, exactly?

“I have to run,” Leon said, glancing at his watch. “End-of-the-month figures.” He got up. “Watch yourself tonight. With the professors. Loose lips.”

“Very funny. But I’ll bet you I’m right.”

“I’ll try to make it later,” Leon said, a lie they both accepted.

He left by the side exit to the fish market, the narrow street slippery with melted ice and old frying grease, then turned through the covered vegetable stalls and out to Mesrutiyet, a long street of apartment buildings looking west to the Golden Horn. What did Ed want, anyway? Imagining Tommy lurking in alleys, missing the real sleight of hand. Follow me to a party while my freelancer does the work up the road.

The street curved, hugging the steep hill, opening up to the water view below. Once there would have been hundreds of sails. A dip in the road, past the Pera Palas and then up, threading through the narrow streets to the Tunel station. Marina’s building was just behind, a gray apartment block grimy with neglect. Some of the windows looked toward the square where commuters poured off the funicular, but Marina’s faced down to the Sishane shipyards, the flat waters of the Horn beyond.

“I can see my whole life from here,” she said once, smoking by the window, her body wrapped again in her kimono. “That’s my childhood.” She nodded toward the streets squeezed behind the docks. “Then, if you lean out this way-well, maybe it’s better, you can’t see that house. But the same hill. A few streets, what a difference. Another life.”

“And now what,” Leon said idly.

“Now here. I like it here. I like looking down on it.”

He checked his watch. A little early, driven away by Ed’s prying, but Marina wouldn’t mind. Thursdays were his. “You couldn’t wait?” she’d say, teasing, opening the robe to her breasts, waiting for him to take them in his hands, lean down.

He had just left the square when he saw the man coming out of the building. Stopping for a minute to adjust to the sunlight, then straightening his hat. A western suit, not the workers’ overalls or jellabas you usually saw in the building. Leon turned, almost a pivot, and stepped toward the station newsstand, looking at a newspaper, waiting for a presence behind him, then turning again. The man was heading to the Istiklal tram. High cheekbones, thin nose, dark but not necessarily a Turk, anybody. Who went to her building in the middle of the afternoon. Now walking past the tram into the crowd. He felt suddenly warm. Of course she saw others, he’d always known that. But not on his day. That was the point. Not to be somebody waiting in line, like a sailor in a Galata house. The illusion of something more, the whole day paid for. Unless the man had been somewhere else, visiting one of the other flats. Except he hadn’t. Sometimes you knew, just by instinct.

“You’re early,” she said, opening the door, the air golden, blinds half shut against the light.

“I know. I just missed your friend.”

She hesitated for a second. “What friend?” she said, not sure, trying to find a tone.

“I saw him coming out.”

“Oh, and I’m the only one who lives here,” she said quickly.

“Who was he?”

“No one. What a little boy you are. Pretending to be jealous.” She tugged a little at his belt. “Close the door. Did you see the pail? On the landing? Another leak.”

“You should complain.”

“Oh, to the kapici. In a building like this.”

“To the owner. Was that him?”

She moved closer to him. “Look at me. My eyes. So you know it’s true. I haven’t been with anyone today. You know you can smell that, when there’s somebody. On the skin. Do you smell anyone?”

“Just perfume.”

“That’s right. The one you like.” She stared at him again. “I haven’t been with anyone today. All right?” She put her hand on his crotch, rubbing him. “I always save today for you. You know that.” Stroking him, the lie like another hand on him, so that he was hard instantly, excited by both, unable to separate them.

He took a dolmus taxi to Bebek this time, making conversation with the other passengers so that he’d be remembered, a foreigner who spoke some Turkish. Anna had already been fed and changed for bed, a soft nightgown she seemed not to notice. “I’ll just sit with her until she falls asleep,” he told the nurse, holding up the magazine he’d brought to read. An open-ended visit, no need to check back. Fifteen minutes later he was through the garden entrance, back on the road where Mihai was waiting.

“Anybody around?”

“Busy night. Egyptians are giving a party,” Mihai said, looking out the windshield toward the old khedive’s summer palace.

“Anybody else?”

“Hard to see. No moon.”

Outside the village the night was black, only a few yellow windows visible through the cypresses and umbrella pines. On the Bosphorus a passing freighter’s lights reflected on the water, then were swallowed up again by the dark.

“Let’s see if we have company,” Leon said, turning to look out back as Mihai started the car.

But no one else pulled into the line of cars, moving quickly tonight, winter traffic, not the usual jam.

“We’ll be early,” Leon said.

“It’s not exact, the time. Like a train.”

“No rain tonight anyway. I checked the reports. It’s clear all up along the coast.”

He looked again at the black water. Where Jason had once sailed the Argo.

“Did you see Anna? Tell her about the boat?”

Leon nodded. “If she heard.”

“They say hearing is the last sense to go. When you have a stroke.”

“She didn’t have a stroke.”

Mihai said nothing. It had been his boat, the one he and Anna had organized, also out of Constancia, as it happened. Overcrowded and listing, stuck in Istanbul for repairs, then waiting for sailing permits, two hundred people taking turns on deck. They’d run tenders out with food and water, medicine that Anna had somehow rounded up out of nonexistent supplies. Black market drugs. And still no permits, then panic, everyone seeing a