Alan Furst - Blood of Victory

The taxi was slow, returning to Beyoglu, the melancholy driver sighed and dawdled in the back streets, lost in a world of his own. Meanwhile, in Serebin’s imagination, the Emniyet agents sitting in the lobby grew angrier and angrier when he didn’t show up, but there was nothing he could do about that.

In the event, they weren’t there. He reached the hotel after midnight, to find that a note had been slipped under his door. A Russian note, typed on a Cyrillic typewriter, asking if he would be good enough to drop by the office-an address in Osmanli street-in the morning and see Major Iskandar in Room 412. So, for a long night, he was to have the pleasure of thinking about it.

The desk of Major Iskandar. Born as conqueror’s furniture in the days of the Ottoman Empire, a vast mahogany affair with legs like Corinthian columns and ball feet. But time passed, empires drifted into ruin, coffee cups made rings, neglected cigarettes left burn scars, stacks of dossiers appeared and established a small colony, then grew higher and higher as a hostile world hammered on the national door. Or picked the lock.

Major Iskandar, not very military in a rumpled uniform, had spectacles and a black mustache, with hair and patience thinning as he moved through his forties. He was chinless, with something waxy and unhealthy in his complexion, and reminded Serebin of an Armenian poet he’d once known, a great sensualist who died of drinking valerian drops in a sailors’ brothel in Rotterdam.

Iskandar hunted through his dossiers until he found what he was after. “Well,” he said, “we’d planned to have a, a chat, with you when we saw the shipping manifest.” Suddenly annoyed, he snapped his fingers twice at the doorway to an outer office. That produced, a moment later, an orderly carrying two cups of black, sandy coffee. “But then, yesterday’s bombing on Rasim street…” He opened a dossier and turned pages. “Any theories? Who? Why?”

“No, not really.”

“Was Goldbark a friend of yours?”

“An associate. I knew him as one of the directors of the IRU office.”

“Been to his house?”

“No.”

“Met his wife?”

“Maybe once. At some kind of event.”

“The crate of eggplants was sent to him, specifically. Three other people died, there are five or six in various hospitals.” He offered Serebin a pack of cigarettes, then lit one for himself. “You got out, it would seem, just at the right moment.”

“A telephone call.”

“A warning?”

“No.” Serebin’s voice was very cold.

“Then what?”

“‘Please meet me outside. It’s urgent.’”

“And who was it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Really don’t?”

“No.”

“An unknown stranger calls, and you go charging off in the middle of a party held in your honor.”

“‘An old friend’ is what he called himself. I thought that was possible, and the tone of the voice was serious, so I thought I’d better go.”

The major tilted his head to one side, like a listening dog. What do I hear? Then decided that, for the moment, it didn’t matter. He leaned back in his chair and said, “This comes at a bad time for us, do you understand? There is a war going on in Europe, and we are under pressure from both sides. And in this country, and particularly in this office, we feel it. The more so because we know the thing is heading south. I could drive you up into Thrace, to the Bulgarian frontier, and there, in the border villages, you would see a new sort of tourism. Vacationing Germans, all men, in overcoats and alpine hats, with cameras or binoculars around their necks. It must be the birds, don’t you think? That makes them so passionate to be in the Bulgarian countryside in November?

“And these days, where such tourists go, tanks follow. It isn’t far from here, maybe six hours. And much faster by aeroplane. It’s sad to see a city like London being bombed, night after night, terrible, a nice brick city like that. But here, of course, it wouldn’t be night after night. Because one night would be enough. A few hours’ work for the bomber pilots, and the whole thing would just, burn.”

Serebin knew. Dense neighborhoods of old, dry, wooden houses.

“So, we stay neutral, and treat every act of political violence as a potential provocation. A shooting, a stabbing, a bombing-what does it mean? Is it an incident? What comes next? Well, maybe nothing, in this case. It’s England and Germany we worry about these days. Russia maybe not so much-we’ve spent three hundred years worrying about them, so we’re used to it. Still, we have to be concerned, an attack of this sort, and our concern is, ah, concentrated by the fact that Goldbark was no virgin. There is at least some possibility that he asked for it.”

Serebin said “Oh?” He meant fuck you.

But Iskandar was ready for him. Slid a photograph from the dossier and laid it on the desk, like a playing card. A clandestine photograph, a gray man on a gray street on a gray afternoon. Hands thrust deep in overcoat pockets, brooding as he walked. Perhaps a Slav, grave lines in the face, the corners of the mouth pulled down, a sensitive man who had long ago chosen the wrong life, one where the Emniyet took his photograph.

“Know him?”

Serebin shook his head.

“This woman?”

She was buying oranges from a market stall.

“No.”

“Sure?”

“Yes.”

“Goldbark knew them.”

Did he?

Iskandar laid down a photograph of Goldbark and the woman, leaning side by side on the railing of a ferry.

“Who are these people?” Serebin asked.

“Professionals-from the way they behave. Was Goldbark a Zionist?”

“I have no idea.”

“Communist?”

“Unlikely. He left the country, after all.”

“All kinds of people leave all kinds of countries. How much pressure would it have taken to force him to work for Germany?”

Serebin stared.

“It is not unheard of. I am sorry, but it is not.”

“He was too strong for that,” Serebin said. What remained of Goldbark was the memory of him.

Major Iskandar raised an eyebrow. He drank down the last of his coffee and snapped his fingers. Perhaps a comment on Serebin’s answer, or maybe he just wanted more coffee.

“Do you plan to remain in Istanbul?”

Serebin thought it over. “For a week or two, maybe.”

The major paged through an appointment book. “That would make it the twelfth. Of December.” He made a note by the date.

They drank a second cup of coffee. The major said that it often rained, this time of year. Still, they hardly ever had snow. Spring, on the other hand, was pleasant, with wildflowers in the countryside. When Serebin left, a man he recalled, vaguely, from the IRU party, was sitting in the outer office. Their eyes met, for a moment, then the man looked away.

My God, who is she? She was radiant, strange, had the face of an uncomfortably beautiful child. Twenty minutes from Major Iskandar’s office, in a tiny square with a fish market, Serebin sat at a table outside a lokanta, a neighborhood restaurant, and she came and sat on the edge of the other chair. When she pushed the hair back from her eyes he could see that her hand was shaking. She wet her lips, then spoke a few words-memorized, he thought-in guttural French: his friend, Monsieur Serge, wanted very much to see him. Then she waited, unsure of the language, to see if he’d understood her. She is Kubalsky’s lover, he thought.

He nodded, tried to look encouraging. “In Tatavla,” she said.

The Greek district.

“At Luxe cinema, tomorrow night.”

Her hands clutched the top of a purse, tight enough so that her knuckles were white and sharp. He said he understood and thanked her for the message, which earned him a sudden, luminous smile, on and off, then she stood and walked away, striding around the corner and out of sight.