dandy he’d once been, known in all the cafes on the Calea Victoriei.
“Besides, to see the rats leaving-” he said, brooding. “They wouldn’t let us out. Now look at them.”
“You did what you could.” A Palestinian passport, free to come and go in Bucharest, to beg for funds, leasing creaky boats, a last lifeline, until that was taken away too.
Mihai drew on the cigarette, staring at the water running down the windshield. “So how is it with you?” he said finally. “You look tired.”
Leon shrugged, not answering.
“Why are you doing this?” He turned to face him. “The war’s over.”
“Yes? Nobody told me.”
“No, they want to start another one.”
“Nobody I know.”
“Be careful you don’t get to like it. You start enjoying it-” His voice trailed off, rough with smoke, the accent still Balkan, even now. “Then it’s not about anything anymore. A habit. Like these,” he said, holding out his cigarette. “You get a taste for it.”
Leon looked at him. “And you?”
“Nothing changes for us. We’re still saving Jews.” He made a wry face. “Now from our friends. No visas for Palestine. Where should they go, Poland? And I’m helping you talk to a Nazi. A wonderful world.”
“Why a Nazi?”
“Why all this? Some poor refugee? No, someone who knows the Russians, I think. And who knows better?”
“You’re guessing.”
“It doesn’t matter to you? What you deliver?”
Leon looked away, then down at his watch. “Well, he’s not coming tonight. Whoever he is. I’d better call. Make sure. There’s a cafe.”
Mihai leaned forward to start the car again. “I’ll pull around.”
“No, stay here. I don’t want the car-”
“I see. You run across the road in the rain. Get wet. Then you run back. Again, wet. To a waiting car. That will be less suspicious. If anyone is watching.” He put the car in gear.
“It’s your car,” Leon said. “That’s all.”
“You think they haven’t seen it by now?”
“Have they? You’d know,” he said, a question.
“Always assume yes.” He made a turn across the road, pulling up in front of the cafe. “So do the expected thing. Stay dry. Tell me something. If he had come, your package, was I going to drive him to-wherever he’s staying?”
“No.”
Mihai nodded. “Better.” He motioned his head to the side window. “Make the call. Before they wonder.”
There were four men playing dominoes and sipping tea from tulip glasses. When they looked up, he became what he wanted them to see-a ferengi caught in the rain, shaking water from his hat, needing a phone- and he flushed, a little pulse of excitement. A taste for it. Had Mihai seen it somehow, the way it felt, getting away with something. The planning, the slipping away. Tonight he’d taken the tram to the last stop in Bebek and walked up to the clinic. A trip he’d made over and over. If he’d been followed, they’d stay parked a block away from the clinic gates and wait, relieved to be snug, out of the rain, knowing where he was. But just past the big oleander bushes, he’d headed for the garden side gate, doubling back to the Bosphorus road where Mihai was waiting, feeling suddenly free, almost exhilarated. No one would have seen him in the dark. If they were there, they’d be smoking, bored, thinking he was inside. This other life, just walking to the car, was all his own.
The phone was on the wall near the WC. No sounds in the room but the click of tiles and the hiss of boiling water, so the token seemed to clang going in. A ferengi speaking English, the men would say. If anyone asked.
“Tommy?” At home, luckily, not out to dinner.
“Ah, I was hoping you’d call,” he said, a genial club voice with the clink of ice at the back of it. “You’re after that report- I know, I know- and my steno never showed. Trouble with the boats. Typical, isn’t it? First hint of weather and the ferries-” Leon imagined his round face at the other end, the jaw line filling in, fleshy. “I can have it for you tomorrow, all right? I mean, the contract’s all right. We’re just waiting for the quotas. I’ve had American Tobacco on the phone half the day, so you’re all in the same boat on this one. All we need now are the signatures.” At Commercial Corp., the wartime agency that was Tommy’s cover at the consulate.
“That’s all right. I’m stuck here at the clinic anyway. Just wanted to check. If it was on its way.”
“No. Tomorrow now. Sorry about this. Let me make it up to you. Buy you a drink at the Park.” An off note. This late?
“I’m in Bebek.”
“I’ll get a head start.” An order, then. “Don’t worry, I’ll roll you home.” Their standard joke, Leon’s apartment building just down the hill from the Park Hotel, before Aya Pasa made its wide curve.
“Give me an hour.”
“From Bebek?” Surprised, an edge now.
“Take a look outside. It’ll be a crawl in this. Just save a me stool.”
The domino players were looking down, pretending not to listen. But what would they have made of it anyway? Leon ordered a tea, a way of thanking the barman for the phone. The glass was warm in his hand, and he realized he was cold everywhere else, the wet beginning to seep through his shoes. And now the Park, everyone looking and not looking, Tommy’s old-boy voice getting louder with each drink.
“Rain check,” he said to Mihai, getting into the car. “You free tomorrow?”
Mihai nodded.
“Something’s up. We’re having a drink at the Park.”
“Very exciting, the tobacco business.”
Leon smiled. “It used to be.”
In fact, it had been sleepy, as routine and predictable as a Book of Hours. Agents bought the cured Latakia leaf, and he arranged the shipments, then took the train to Ankara to get the export permits. Leave Haydarpasa at six, arrive the next morning at ten. That’s how it had started, carrying things on the train for Tommy, papers they couldn’t put in the diplomatic pouch, something for the war effort. No money involved then. An American helping out, not just standing around at the club getting drunk with Socony and Liggett amp; Myers and Western Electric, the men interchangeable, lucky businessmen sitting out the war. Tommy asked him to help Commercial Corp. buy up chromium, so the Germans wouldn’t get it, and suddenly he was in the war after all, the peculiar one that played out over dinner at Abdullah’s or those consulate receptions where the sides lined up on either end of the room, cocktail wars. What surprised him later, when he knew more, was how many others were in it too. Tracking shipping through the straits. Collecting gossip. Turning a commercial attache who needed the money. Everyone spinning webs, watching each other, the Turkish Emniyet watching them. Nothing sleepy anymore.
“I’ll drop you home. You’ll want to change.”
“No, just back to the village. I want to go to the clinic. Just look in.”
Mihai waited until they were almost there. “How is she?”
“The same,” Leon said, his voice neutral.
And then there was nothing to say. Still, he’d asked. Anna was still alive to him, a presence, not just someone in Obstbaum’s clinic who had retreated into herself, gone somewhere behind her own eyes. People used to ask all the time- painful questions at the club, an awkward concern at the office- but gradually they began to forget she was still there. Out of sight, out of mind. Except Leon’s, a wound that wouldn’t close. Any day she might come back, just as quickly as she had gone away. Someone had to be there waiting.
“You know what I think?” Mihai said.
“What?”
“Sometimes I think you do this for her. To prove something. I don’t know what.”
Leon was quiet, not answering.
“Do you still talk to her?” Mihai said finally.
“Yes.”
“Tell her we got a boat out. She’ll like that.”
