Joseph Kanon - Stardust

He looked at her, silent, his skin alive with her again. “As long as it lasts.”

She smiled weakly, her hand moving to the side of his face. “It’s not enough for you? A place you can live? There was no one else there. Nobody was like you, the way it felt. It was different. When I was next to you, the way we used to lie there, it wasn’t somebody else. How could it be? It was you.”

“And now it isn’t.”

“No,” she said softly. “Not anymore.” She leaned into him, putting her head down.

“Liesl-”

“Just stay for a minute like this, like before.”

He felt her against him, as natural as his own skin, and for a second he was weightless, not holding on to anything, falling. All he would have to do was lift her head. Another second passed, suspended, then he leaned down, kissed her hair, and stepped back.

“It can’t be like before. Not now.”

She looked away, then nodded. “I know. I just don’t want to forget. The way it is now, that’s not how it always was. Maybe I want you to remember, too. Someday-I don’t know, we’ll be in a room somewhere.” Setting a scene, her voice caught up in it. “Years from now, an accident. And you see me. I want you to think, I used to live there once. It was nice.”

He stood for a minute, unable to move, in the scene with her. “I’ll remember,” he said finally.

She opened her mouth to speak and then stopped, out of lines. Instead she nodded, then kissed him lightly on the cheek, a good-bye. “Let’s not say any more, then,” she said.

“No,” he said, watching her turn and move to the door.

Secrets didn’t bring you closer. He thought of all the things he’d never say now, things only he would know. How he went over that day in the hospital in his mind, working out its choreography, who was where, until finally he thought he knew, and then asked Ostermann to make sure, that Dieter had always been with him, never alone. That only she had been in the room. That all deaths were not alike, that some secrets had to be kept. That she was the only place he’d ever lived.

He heard the band music through the door. No one would miss him. He drove to the Egyptian to catch the late showing. The picture had already started, so he slipped into a back row. A scene he’d already been in, Liesl looking up at him, luminous, catching all the light. “I don’t care,” she said, eyes darting, her face soft with love. She leaned forward to kiss the GI and the audience seemed to lean forward with her. No sound, not even a gum wrapper. “I don’t care.” Everyone in the scene now, wanting her. Thinking she was wonderful.

S TARDUST IS A work of fiction, not history, and readers familiar with the period will see that liberties, a few chronological, have been taken with events that inspired some of its scenes. Labor unrest in Hollywood actually began before the war was over, in early 1945, but reached its most violent stage in the fall, as in the street brawl here. An information film about the Nuremberg trials, That Justice Be Done, was released in October 1945, but no feature film about the death camps themselves was ever made or, so far as I know, contemplated. (A rough documentary compilation of captured newsreels about the camps, We Accuse, was released in May 1945.) Minot’s hearings are meant to be a premature trial run, a preview, of HUAC’s assault on Hollywood in 1947, but even in 1945 Representative Rankin had announced the committee’s intention to investigate Hollywood, “one of the most dangerous plots ever instigated for the overthrow of this government,” and California state senator Tenney’s fourteen thousand files had been compiled during the war and were certainly in place then. Jack Warner did indeed become a friendly witness but for reasons of his own, not those suggested here. No studio head, in fact, ever stood up to the committee. After a meeting in November 1947 at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, some fifty studio executives issued the anti-Communist Waldorf Statement, effectively starting a blacklist that would last for a decade. Sol Lasner’s principled stand here is imagined, something that might have happened in the movies.

Kanon, Joseph

Stardust

Reader’s Companion

Please enjoy these special bonus materials.

Kanon, Joseph

Stardust

A neutral capital straddling Europe and Asia, Istanbul survived the Second World War as a magnet for refugees and spies. Even expatriate American Leon Bauer was drawn into this shadow world, doing undercover odd jobs and courier runs in support of the Allied war effort. Now as the espionage community begins to pack up, and an apprehensive city prepares for the grim realities of post-war life, Leon is given one last assignment, a routine pick-up job that goes fatally wrong, placing a potential war criminal in his hands, and plunging him into a tangle of intrigue and moral uncertainty.

Played out against the bazaars and mosques and faded mansions of this knowing, ancient Ottoman city, Leon's conflicted attempt to save one life leads to a desperate manhunt that will ultimately put his own in jeopardy. Rich with atmosphere and period detail, Istanbul Passage is the unforgettable story of a man swept up in the dawn of the Cold War, of an unexpected love affair, and of a city as deceptive as the calm surface waters of the Bosphorus that divides it.

Read on for a look at Joseph Kanon’s

Istanbul Passage

Available from Atria Books

Excerpt from Istanbul Passage copyright © 2011 by Joseph Kanon

Kanon, Joseph

Stardust

The first attempt had to be called off. It had taken days to arrange the boat and the safe house and then, just a few hours before the pickup, the wind started, a poyraz, howling down from the northeast, scooping up water as it swept across the Black Sea. The Bosphorus waves, usually no higher than boat wakes by the time they reached the shuttered yalis along the shore, now churned and smashed against the landing docks. From the quay, Leon could barely make out the Asian side, strings of faint lights hidden behind a scrim of driving rain. Who would risk it? Even the workhorse ferries would be thrown off schedule, never mind a bribed fishing boat. He imagined the fisherman calculating his chances: a violent sea, sightless, hoping the sudden shape forty meters away wasn’t a lumbering freighter, impossible to dodge. Or another day safe in port, securing ropes and drinking plum brandy by the cast-iron stove. Who could blame him? Only a fool went to sea in a storm. The passenger could wait. Days of planning. Called by the weather.

“How much longer?” Mihai said, pulling his coat tighter.

They were parked just below Rumeli Hisari, watching the moored boats tossing, pulling against their ties.

“Give it another half hour. If he’s late and I’m not here-”

“He’s not late,” Mihai said, dismissive. He glanced over. “He’s that important?”

“I don’t know. I’m just the delivery boy.”

“It’s freezing,” Mihai said, turning on the motor. “This time of year.”

Leon smiled. In Istanbul’s dream of itself it was always summer, ladies eating sherbets in garden pavilions, caiques floating by. The city shivered through winters with braziers and sweaters, somehow surprised that it had turned cold at all.

Mihai ran the heater for a few minutes then switched it off, burrowing, turtlelike, into his coat. “So come with me but no questions.”

Leon rubbed his hand across the window condensation, clearing it. “There’s no risk to you.”

“Wonderful. Something new. You couldn’t do this yourself?”

“He’s coming out of Constancia. For all I know, he only speaks Romanian. Then what? Sign language? But you-”