At night the city becomes more than ever a place of two distinct halves. Stamboul slumbers early while the lights of Pera, just across the Golden Horn, seem to burn brightest in the smallest, darkest hours of the morning. Here the meyhanes and jazz clubs fill with Allied soldiers and naval officers. And there are also those other establishments which choose not to outwardly proclaim the sort of entertainment offered. They do not need to; their renown is spread quickly, secretly, among those who have a taste for such things.
Inside the restaurant is a fug of smoke and steam, a clamour of voices and crockery. Beneath it all, not loud enough to do anything other than add to the racket, comes the thin wail of a violin. The man playing it has one of the most tragic faces George has ever seen, and he wonders whether he was chosen specifically for this, rather than his indifferent skill with the instrument. The maître d’hôtel meets them, sweeps them to their table in the other corner of the room.
Calvert is not impressed. ‘The French always get the best seats,’ he says, darkly, indicating a table several rows across where three blue-uniformed figures sit smoking and laughing. There exists among the so-called Allied forces an atmosphere of mutual distrust.
‘What’s so special about that table?’ Bill asks.
Calvert raises one fair eyebrow. He points to the place beyond the table. There, George sees now, sits a rudimentary wooden structure with a platform a few feet from the ground. ‘It’s closer to the stage. They’ll be able to see right up the skirts.’
He looks round for the maître d’hôtel.
‘Do you know,’ George says to Bill, ‘I completely forgot to tell you. The strangest thing happened yesterday.’ He describes the woman on the jetty. Already the idea of her is like something not quite real, a fragment of a dream.
Bill frowns. ‘You should report that.’
‘Why?’
‘Could be espionage. There are resistance groups, you know. The Teşkilât-i Mahsusa, the Karakol. You heard about the fire at the French barracks at Rami?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Well, all of the Algerian soldiers escaped miraculously unharmed. It’s thought that they were in cahoots with the Turkish resistance.’
‘I thought of all that – briefly. But I don’t believe it was for a second. A solitary woman, for goodness’ sake, washing her feet.’
‘Still, you should make a formal note of it. She’d be the perfect choice to scope it, because we wouldn’t suspect her. At the very least it’s British property. She trespassed.’
‘Mmm.’ He is rather wishing he hadn’t said anything. He knows already that he will make no such report. He wonders whether, given the opportunity, Bill would also tell him to turn in the little boy who spat on his shoes.
They are brought chilled glasses of that Russian spirit, which tastes to George like a distillation of nothingness, a void. But it goes well with the food. Particularly caviar, which he ate for the first time in that godforsaken place on the shores of the Caspian Sea, bubbles of salt bursting upon the tongue, a concentration of the sea itself, at once delicious and slightly repellent. But isn’t that the same, he thinks, for all tastes deemed refined? The sourness of champagne, the bitter of coffee, the fleshy gobbet of the oyster. Does one enjoy them as much for their taste as for one’s ability to overcome this brief repulsion, even fear?
Calvert sucks back an oyster, drains his glass of vodka, and turns to him.
‘What are you still doing here, Monroe?’
‘What do you mean? This restaurant? Do you know, I’m really not sure …’
Calvert draws back his lips in an approximation of a smile. ‘No, that isn’t what I meant. I understood that you got offered home, some time ago.’
‘I did.’
‘Well, why …’
‘I suppose I felt that I could be more useful here.’
‘Your sense of duty, was it?’
George looks at him, sharply, but can find no obvious trace of sarcasm. ‘Yes. Something to that effect.’
He does not like Calvert. He realises this with a sudden clarity. Even his face is somehow unlikeable. It has a peculiar fineness of feature: the nose small and neat, the chin delicately carved, the lips full as a girl’s, with a sharp cupid bow. It is these lips, perhaps, that tilt the whole effect into a prettiness that doesn’t quite work. And yet he prides himself upon them, George knows. One might even say that he wields them. It is a face that one cannot quite trust.
Now Calvert leans across the table and says in a conspirator’s murmur, ‘They have the best girls here. All bonafide White Russians – nothing lower than a countess, I assure you. Running from the Red Bolshevik devils.’ His breath is tainted metallic by the spirit.
George casts an eye about the room, at the waitresses in question. They are all pretty, youngish, simpering. Not especially remarkable in any way … or so it seems to him. Perhaps one requires the fine gown and jewels to appear really aristocratic. But then what, exactly, is the difference between these and any other women? If the last few years have shown him anything, it is the mutability of all things. If entire cities – countries – can be denatured in so short a space of time, the odds of any human remaining essentially unchanged seem poor.
But clearly Calvert finds something fascinating in them, he watches them like a fox. Perhaps it is the fall itself that interests him. That he, the scion of shopkeepers – albeit extremely successful ones, as he is wont to remind them – might bed a destitute princess of Russia. The waitress comes over to them, ready for their next order. And George sees, with a small frisson of horror, that in the second before she switches on her smile – an electric flash – her eyes are expressionless as a corpse’s.
He thinks again of the woman on
