by Joseph Kanon
“All right,” Leon said. “The American working for the Russians. Let’s talk about him.”
Alexei stared at him.
“I need to know.”
Alexei held his gaze, sipping some tea, calculating, as if he were running his finger over a chess piece, not yet ready to move.
“How long have you been doing this?” he said finally. “This work. Maybe you’re new to it. Maybe that’s it. So let me explain something to you. If I knew such a thing, would I tell you? We talk in Bucharest—enough information so you know it’s real. The rest? When I’m out, safe. If I tell you here? You squeeze a lemon, what’s left? So you throw it away.”
“We don’t do that.”
“Everybody does that,” he said flatly. “Everybody. So you can wait.”
“Not anymore. I need to know. For your sake. If he had anyone else here.”
“Here? An American here?” Alexei said, a little surprised, relieved. “Well, you wouldn’t have to wait for that. It’s not such a bargaining chip.” He stopped. “I mean—”
Leon looked at him, turning this over. “Not worth a trip to the States. But someone in Washington would be.”
Alexei met his glance. “Yes, he would be. But we’re here. Wasting time. These questions. I don’t know anyone here.” He sipped more tea. “You’re so sure there is such a person.”
Leon nodded.
“How?”
“I shot him last night. On the pier.”
At first there was only a flicker of movement in Alexei’s face, the composure still fixed, then his eyes began darting, as if they were involuntarily following his thoughts, leaping from point to point.
“They identified the man,” he said, leading. “Not a Russian.”
“No. One of us. Who knew you were coming out. And who tried to kill you. Why would he do that? In the open? Take that chance. Unless you were someone he had to stop. He couldn’t give you back to the Russians—he’d expose himself—so he’d have to kill you.”
“Expose himself?”
“He was running this operation, getting you out. Which makes for some complications.”
“Running—”
“This piece of it anyway. So the trip had to end here. Things go wrong, but he’s safe, no one blames him, and the Russians get their rat. But then I shot him and I got you instead. So I need you to tell me. Are there others? Am I wrong?”
Alexei put the tips of his fingers together in a pyramid, pressing them against his lips, almost prayerlike, thinking. “No,” he said finally, then hesitated, as if he were eliminating more possibilities. “They had a man in Ankara. Why not here.”
“Ankara,” Leon said dully, seeing himself at Karpić’s, leaving an envelope on the banquette.
“During the war. Now I’m not sure. You understand, it’s only GPU I know, not the other agencies. But you see what this means. The Russians know. The whole operation. We have to leave this place. It’s not safe.”
“He never knew about the flat. So they don’t know, either. We’re back where we started.”
“No. Everything is compromised now. The plane—that’s still your plan?”
“I don’t see why not—if there is one.”
But Alexei was shaking his head. “They must know. If I show myself there they’ll kill me. We have to start over. Everything. I’ll help you. We’ll work together.”
Leon looked up, caught off guard. His new partner.
Alexei started coughing, a smoker’s hack. “Amateurs. It’s my life, and the man in charge is working for them.”
“Was.”
“And now it’s you,” Alexei said, peering at him. “The new gazi. And who else?”
Leon shook his head. “I only knew Tommy.”
“So,” Alexei said. “And you had no idea. What he was.”
“Not until he shot you.”
“Not even me. The Romanian. Amateurs.” He started coughing again, his face getting paler. “Istanbul,” he said, choking on the word, still trying to stop the cough. “Maybe it ends here. I always wondered, what would that be like. When they finally get you.” He looked up. “So. We make a new plan.”
“We,” Leon said.
“You can’t trust anybody now. Not here. Not in Ankara.” He put his hand to his mouth, thinking. “But we have one piece of luck.”
“What’s that?”
“Nobody’s looking for you. Or they’d already be here. They’ll think I’m running, not hiding. Who would be hiding me?”
“Who would.”
“And then they’ll think I’m gone. We can do it.” He paused. “If no one else knows. Just you.”
“Do what?”
“Get me out. Istanbul—it’s a trap now. We have to leave here.”
Leon was quiet for a minute, then got up. “To save your skin.”
“My skin? I saw your face, when I told you about Washington. A valuable chip, no? People will want to hear about him.” He looked up. “Always have something to trade.”
Leon stood still for a second, as if he were balancing himself, testing his footing. Alexei’s eyes, gray and clear, insistent. Which hadn’t seen anything at the abattoir. He said. Holding up his bargaining chip.
“Let’s start with the gun then,” Leon said. “One less complication. I’d better have it back.”
“The gun?” Alexei said, not expecting this. “What are you going to do with it?”
“Get rid of it,” Leon said, picking up the empty food bag.
“And how do I protect myself here?”
“Use the one you brought with you,” Leon said, looking at him. “You’d have to have one. You just wanted this for a little insurance. And maybe to see if I was dumb enough to give it to you.” He held out his hand. “It’s a murder weapon now. Evidence. You might use it to put me there. In Bebek. If things don’t go well. Right?”
Alexei looked at the open hand, then reached into his pocket and took out the gun, smiling a little. “A quick learner.” He handed it over.
“You’re right about the plane,” Leon said, putting the gun in the bag. “I’ll arrange something else.” He started for the door. “Just stay put. You’re safe here.”
“And that’s my protection now,” Alexei said, nodding to the lock. “A door.” He looked at Leon. “And you.”
Leon reached for the knob.
“By the way, it matters to you? What happened at Străuleşti? I wasn’t part of that. What they did. If your friend says yes, he’s lying.” Making a case now, reassuring. “I wasn’t part of that.”
Leon turned. “That must be a comfort.”
On the ferry back, Leon stayed out on the lower deck, dropping the bag over the side halfway across, even the sound of the small splash covered by the grind of the motors. Ibrahim the Sot had drowned his whole harem here, sewn into sacks. The gun was easier. Just another secret in the Bosphorus. Nothing to connect him now to the quay, nothing to connect Mihai. Not even Alexei once he could pass him along the chain Tommy had tried to break. His new partner. He looked down at the dark water, uneasy again. The gun would be settling on the bottom, lodging itself in the silt, too heavy for the current. Except there were two currents in the Bosphorus, he’d read somewhere, the surface current flowing south and a deep undercurrent kanal flowing north, dense and saline, strong enough to drag a fishing boat by its net, pull someone off course.
Inside the cabin, the tea man was handing a tulip glass to a man in a knit cap, the kind Mihai had worn. A dockworker? A thief? Who was anybody? Tommy ordering drinks at the Park, every second a betrayal. Years of it. You can’t trust anybody now, Alexei had said, asking Leon to trust him.
3
PERA
THE FUNERAL WAS HELD at Christ Church, near the Galata Tower, with a reception to follow in one of the private rooms at the Pera Palas. It was the same service Tommy would have had however he had died—the same hymns, the same homily about a man taken too soon, the same teary handkerchiefs. But he hadn’t just died, rel
eased from illness. He’d been killed, the violence of it disturbing, somehow shaming, as if he’d been complicit in his own death. So people said comforting things to Barbara and fidgeted in their seats, wondering.
Leon sat to the side, watching people take their places. Ed Burke was next to Barbara as chief mourner, with the staff of Commercial Corp. filling out the pew behind. The business community had come out and most of the consulate, an almost official gathering, except for a sprinkling of unknown faces, part of Tommy’s wide social net. Near the back were a few Turks secular enough to risk being in a church and two burly men Leon assumed to be police, scanning the crowd, their faces expressionless.
Frank Bishop had come from the embassy in Ankara, stiff and formal in a black suit and owlish horn-rimmed glasses. He had brought his wife, a woman Leon hadn’t met, his dealings with Frank usually a drink at the Ankara Palas or an early dinner at Karpić’s, just long enough to leave papers. She kept her head half bowed, so Leon had to crane slightly to see her face, or the part of it not shadowed by her hat. Pale skin, just a hint of makeup, reddish hair, younger than Frank. Next to them, the Liggett & Myers rep was handing out candy to his restless children. A committee from the club had sent a wreath. Barbara wept during the reading of the Twenty-third Psalm. The minister spoke of Tommy’s open heart and concern for others. No one in the solemn, drafty room, Leon realized, had known him at all.
Afterward, they clustered at the door, hugging or shaking hands, then started the steep climb up. A taxi had been ordered for Barbara, its width almost filling the narrow street, but everyone else went on foot, wives clinging to their husbands’ arms, careful of their heels on the paving stones.
“Christ, I don’t know how the hamals do it,” Frank said, winded, when they reached the top.
“Hamals?” his wife said.
“You know, stevedores, whatever you call them. Who carry things. You see some of the loads, you don’t know how they can stand up.”
“It’d be mules this far up,” Leon said.
“I don’t think you know my wife, Katherine,” Frank said.
“Kay,” she said, almost fiercely, as if she were angry about something. She was wearing dark glasses against the winter sun, her eyes no more visible that they’d been in church.
“Nice of you to come,” Leon said, taking out a cigarette. “It’s a long trip, Ankara.”
“Could I have one of those? Do you mind? Or isn’t it all right? On the street, I mean. I never know what the right thing to do is in this country.” Not anger, more a general impatience, waiting for everyone else to catch up.
“You’re among friends,” Leon said, lighting hers.
“Katherine, I wish you wouldn’t,” Frank said, her name some pointless tug-of-war between them.
“Oh, I know. Set an example. Just two puffs. Those hymns. Barbara carrying on. I never thought she cared two cents for him.”
“Katherine—”
“All right. Not appropriate.” She dropped the cigarette and ground it out. “Sorry,” she said to Leon. “I didn’t mean to waste it.”
Leon smiled. “I’ve got plenty. I’m in the business.”
“What business?”
“I buy tobacco. For export.”
“I thought you were with the consulate. Like everyone else,” she said, dipping her head toward the others.
“Only when I need a permit.”
“There’s Barbara,” Frank said. Her taxi had now reached the square and was waiting for the tram to turn. “At least we’ll get decent grub at the Pera. And it’s right by the consulate.”
“Convenient,” his wife said.
“Mm. Tommy’s second office. Funny to think of having his wake there.”
The tram moved and they started across.
“Ted,” Frank said to the man ahead of them. “Katherine, do you mind tagging along with the Kiernans? I need to have a word with Leon. We’ll catch up.”
She lifted her head, about to protest, but Ted had already taken her elbow, so she settled for being annoyed, not bothering to say good-bye.
“Do you have another?” Frank said, nodding to Leon’s pack. “We need to talk,” he said while he lit it. “Walk with me.” A self-satisfied boarding school voice, used to getting his way.
They started up the Istiklal Caddesi.
“This is a real mess,” Frank said.
“Tommy, you mean.”
Frank nodded. “And I don’t have a lot of time. What did you do for Tommy? Besides the courier job, I mean.”
“Just a few favors,” Leon said, hesitant. “I know a lot of people in Istanbul.”
“And speak Turkish, I know,” he said, checking off some invisible list. “Tommy liked to work outside. Now it looks like he had his reasons, but it makes it hell with the books.”
“What books?”
“Petty cash. Special funds. Tommy liked special funds. So, all right, informants, they don’t want their names floating around on check stubs, but it makes things hard to trace.”
“Are you asking if Tommy paid me? He bought me a meal once in a while,” Leon said.
“I’ll buy you more than that.”
Leon stopped. “To do what?”
“To be Tommy.”
“What?”
“You’re a businessman. You can read books, can’t you?”
Leon nodded, suddenly light-headed, a new mix of absurdity and caution.
“Maybe you can read Tommy’s. A fucking mare’s nest. Maybe you can make some sense of them.”
“You’ve already been through them,” Leon said, still stitching things together.
“We need to put somebody on his desk. Until we can get a new man. Nobody at the consulate knows you worked for him, do they? So they won’t suspect.”
“Suspect what?”
“That you’re working for me,” Frank said, a little surprised, as if Leon hadn’t been following. “I can’t use anybody inside. It’s compromised.”
The same word Alexei had used, the same world.
“You think somebody at the consulate killed him?” Leon said, his voice his own but coming from somewhere outside his body.
“Or set him up.”
“And you want me to find him?” he said carefully, slowing things down, not trusting his voice now.
“I’ll find him. But I need someone to help. From outside. You knew him, the way he worked.”
“How do you know it wasn’t me?” Trying it, irresistible.
“Because your movements are accounted for. Sorry about your wife, by the way. I never knew. Anyway, this operation, it had to be someone inside. He wouldn’t have let you in on this. Nothing personal. Just the rules.”
For a second Leon felt a rush of air in his throat, not a laugh, just an odd release of pressure. Of course they still trusted Tommy. By dying he’d become the only one they could trust.
“What operation,” Leon said, testing.
“Look, you in this? I know you guys during the war—you did it for that. Now you think it’s over. Believe me, it’s not over.” He paused. “Tommy always said you were good.”
Leon turned, focusing on a tram approaching, keeping things straight.
“Reynolds doesn’t have a problem with this. If that’s what’s bothering you.”
“You’ve already talked to them,” Leon said, surprised. He let a minute go by. “What operation?”
Frank dipped his head, plunging in. “He was bringing someone out.”
“One of ours?”
“Theirs. Knows Russian Military Intelligence. The cast list. Lots. We were going to have a nice talk.”
“And now?”
“Well, if Tommy’s dead, I’d say he’s back with the Russians, wouldn’t you? Or dead. Let’s hope so, anyway. Better for everybody now.”
“If he’s dead,” Leon said quietly. Yesterday’s friend.
Bishop nodded. “Now he knows us. Tommy wasn’t the only one in this. So let’s hope he’s dead. We want to be sure o
f that,” he said, almost casually, without menace, only the eyes steely. Leon looked at him. Same sandy hair, probably the same glasses he’d worn at Groton, but everything hardened now, years in the business.
“How can you do that?”
“Whoever sold out Tommy’s in touch with the Russians. Let’s start with him. Let’s find him.”
Leon took a breath, the air in his head clouding again, feeding on itself.
“Look, I know what you’re thinking. Somebody killed Tommy. Maybe they’ll try to take a shot at you.”
“No, I wasn’t thinking that. Really.” An irony almost too complicated. Move away. “What do you want me to do?”
“Start with the people he ran. Who else knew?”
Leon nodded, buying time. Think how to do this. There were no explanations. Not plausible ones. Everyone would rather believe Tommy, whom they’d believed all along.
“I have to tell you, I wouldn’t blame you, if you were thinking that,” Frank said, leading them down to Mesrutiyet. “He’ll want to protect himself.”
“Yes.”
“Nice you don’t scare easy,” Frank said, as if he were putting a note in the file.
They were passing the wrought-iron gates of the American Consulate. Tommy’s office, he remembered, was in back, facing down to the Horn. Now his, as surreal as attending the funeral of a man you’d killed.
“What was the next link?” he said, thinking. “How were you getting the guy out of Istanbul?”
“Plane. Don’t worry, we’ve canceled it,” Frank said, the sound to Leon of a door closing.
The banquet room at the Pera was crowded, spilling over with consulate staff and Turks who hadn’t been to the church and were now lined up at the buffet table, plates in hand. The food was American, chicken and potato salad and cold roast beef, not even a stuffed grape leaf to remind them where they were. Barbara stood near the door, receiving, still blotchy from crying, cheeks puffy.
“Oh, Leon,” she said, embracing him. “Thank you for coming. It still doesn’t seem real, does it? One day everything’s— And shot. I keep thinking, those last few minutes, what was that like.”