Joseph Kanon - Istanbul Passage

Leon turned back. Or was it just his imagination, jumpy about everything now. A public tram, a man Marina said she didn’t know. Don’t turn to look again. The car was heading down the hill into the swirl of Sirkeci. He had begun to sweat.

When the doors opened, the crowd pushed in. For a second he felt out of breath, as if they had taken all the air out of the car. The buzzer rang. He held back, waiting, then plunged through the door just as it was closing. Don’t look back. A face at the window. Or maybe not. Something he’d never know. Keep moving. He took a gulp of air, heavy with diesel fumes and charcoal smoke, and headed over to the Eminönü piers. Out on the water you could think. Follow the logic, one thing leading to another. Tommy had used someone outside.

He took the ferry to Üsküdar, sitting in the open back of the boat with a glass of tea, something warm, his coat pulled tight. He went over it all again, each move like a step into open space with nothing to break the fall. He glanced over at the birds, circling, and tried to fix on landmarks, Galata Tower, the shipping offices in Karaköy, but they seemed insubstantial too, just something to graze with your fingers as you fell past. In over your head, a phrase he could actually picture now. Where Tommy had wanted him to be. Grab onto that, follow it.

Someone must still be expecting Alexei. There had been people in Bucharest, the fishing boat. Only Tommy’s link had broken. And now they’d come looking. But not for Leon, not yet. It was the trap that folded in on itself: the minute he went to someone about Alexei he was putting himself on the pier. And Mihai. He watched the boat crunch against the rubber tire buffers on the dock, the gangplanks being slid into place. Everybody in one another’s hands.

He changed boats for Beşiktaş, looking at people, half expecting to see the man from the train. Two places, a coincidence? But there were only clumps of men in woolen peacoats, smoking, indifferent. Didn’t anything show in his face? A man dead. When they landed, he stood on the pier for a minute, at a loss. Commuters brushed past him as if he weren’t there, like the police at the consulate. Nobody knew. Go back to the office. Everything normal. But nothing was normal.

Anna was sitting in a chair, and she lifted her head when he came in. She was aware of physical activity, knew when she was being dressed, helped into clothes, even though her face showed no expression. When he leaned down to kiss her forehead she didn’t flinch, simply accepted it.

“Something’s happened,” he said, then hesitated. Too abrupt. “Are you warm enough?” he said, fidgeting. The nurse had opened the French windows, letting in a crack of air. He put a shawl around her shoulders. “I was thinking about you on the ferry. How you love the water.” But he hadn’t been. Her eyes stayed fixed on the garden. Just say it. “Tommy King’s dead. Shot. In a robbery, they think-”

He stopped and sank into the other chair, falling again.

“Am I doing that? With you? It wasn’t a robbery.” And then he couldn’t say anything more, not out loud. Instead he followed her gaze to the garden, the patch of sun on the bare Judas tree. “I was there,” he said softly. “He tried to kill a man we’re bringing out. He tried to kill me.”

Anna stared ahead, not moving.

“There wasn’t anything I could do. I had to.” Still not finishing it. “It didn’t feel like anything. Not at the time. It’s only later you- But I can’t explain what happened, to anybody, until I get him out, the man we’re moving.” He took a breath, looking away from her. “And I don’t know if I can do it. Tommy was supposed to-” He stopped. “And then there he was, with a gun.”

He heard her question in his head and nodded.

“I’ve been going over it. All night. It has to be. Why else would Tommy have to kill him? I keep coming back to that. Why he’d have to. But think what it means. Tommy. It turns everything upside down. All these years working for- Christ. I worked for him. How long was he-”

He stopped talking, the two of them sitting in silence.

“Nothing was supposed to happen. Just a babysitting job. And now I’ve got him. He’ll be killed if I-” He looked down. “A man who would have killed you. Not even thinking twice.”

He got up and walked over to the French window, careful not to step into her line of sight. A bed of late asters near the wall.

“But if I don’t help him, the Turks’ll get involved. Then it’s murder. And Mihai-” He let the thought drift, his eyes following a bird fluttering between branches. “You know what I was thinking before? If I can do this, deliver him-it’s the kind of thing people notice. In Washington. It would be a chance to show them I could-” He stopped. “And then I thought, maybe it would have been better if Tommy had got him. They’d both be gone. Nothing to explain. Easier if he were dead too. And what kind of person thinks that? What kind of person.”

A reflection in the glass, someone standing in the doorway. Obstbaum.

“Doctor,” he said, turning, his voice changing. “I’ve just been telling Anna-” How long had he been listening?

“Don’t let me interrupt.” Obstbaum held out his clipboard, a visual excuse.

“No, no, please,” Leon said, then glanced down at his watch. “Anyway, look at the time. I’m seeing Georg,” he said to Anna. “I couldn’t put him off again.” Do all the normal things. “An old friend,” he said to Obstbaum. “She was very fond of him. Weren’t you? I’ll give him your love.” He leaned down and kissed her forehead, then looked back up at Obstbaum. What had he heard?

“I hope it’s all right, talking like that,” he said at the door.

“It’s good, your coming. The activity. And two days now. Last night too, I hear.”

From whom? Why?

“How is she?” Leon said, ignoring it.

“No worse.” He caught Leon’s expression. “It’s something, you know, no worse. At least there’s no deterioration. It’s good, the talking.”

“Sometimes I think it’s for me. Just sitting here. It makes me feel calmer.”

Obstbaum nodded. “An oasis. It can have that effect. You know the shooting last night? Up the road? It was in the papers. All the patients so upset, you know what it’s like-just getting them to calm down. But for Anna it never happened.”

Leon looked away. But now it had, his voice registering somewhere in her brain.

“So that’s one good thing,” Obstbaum said.

Georg Ritter had come to Istanbul the week Hitler became chancellor. A job at the university barely paid for his room in an old wooden house in Fener, but he was free, and he’d brought the Lessing manuscript with him, his future. Years later, when Leon and Anna got there, he was still working on the book and by then had become an institution in the foreign community, the man who knew where to get residence permits, secondhand appliances, Turkish lessons. He and Anna shared a passion for the city, out-of-the-way fish restaurants, the best carpet seller in the Bazaar, and he became an ersatz father to her, as cranky as her own, full of convictions that everyone else had abandoned.

When the house in Fener was seized for the wealth tax-the owner, a Greek, sent to a work camp-he was rescued by a former student, a rich Turk who set him up in a building he owned in Nişantaşi. “The only Marxist in the neighborhood,” Georg claimed. But the move suited him. He could now shock the bourgeoisie just by being among them, something he couldn’t afford before, and Yildiz Park was nearby for his dog.

“You don’t mind we take a walk? She’s been in all day.”