by Joseph Kanon
“Really. You’d just be sitting in the waiting room.” Down the hall. “There’s no point. I’m sorry the evening had to—”
“Nobody’s fault,” she said vaguely, trying not to look wounded.
“I’ll call tomorrow,” he said. “Let you know how he is.”
She looked at him, eyes still puzzled. “Not the best timing, was it?”
“Things just happen sometimes.”
She nodded. “And sometimes they don’t.”
“Now, please,” Obstbaum said from inside the van.
Leon climbed up, closing the door behind him. He looked back through the oval window as the ambulance pulled away, Kay in her party dress with Altan, boats bobbing behind them, and for a second he wanted to open the door and jump out, then Georg moaned and when he looked again she had got smaller, too far away.
At the clinic, Georg was put on a gurney and wheeled into one of the medical rooms where nurses attached electrodes to his chest from a bulky machine next to the bed.
“If it gets worse we’ll have to move him to a hospital,” Obstbaum said. “We’re not equipped here—” He looked at his wristwatch. “So where’s Kosterman? Şişli’s fifteen minutes.” He glanced up. “Maybe you’d better wait outside. The less talking the better. We need to keep him quiet.”
Anna’s room was dark, just the dim night-light near the door and a thin strip of hall light underneath. She was asleep when he came in, so he tiptoed to the chair. Eyes still closed. Usually she was aware of movement, and he wondered whether they’d given her a sleeping pill, more rest after a day spent not quite awake. Outside the door, the hushed sounds of the clinic at night.
He sat for a few minutes watching the faint movement of her breathing. Did she dream? Melancholia, from the Greek, black bile, what they used to think it was, a gloom spreading through the body, addling the mind. Something you could drain away.
Georg’s here, he said, the voice in his head, imagining her listening. A heart attack. Serious. We were at Lily’s, at the yali. You know what I thought about? The first time we went there, her garden party. I could hear you. Worried about your parents. You said it was wrong to be so happy. Those words. And I said no, and then—I couldn’t remember any more. What we said. It just faded, your voice. It keeps getting harder to remember. Even your face—I see it and then it fades too. The way it looked then, I mean.
He touched his hair. Not just a little gray, Lily’s flattery, older, someone else. No one stayed the same. But what happened when everything just stopped? The air still, memory suspended in it, getting fainter. In the garden earlier he’d felt he could hear his own pulse, his senses so alive they seemed to be outside his skin, touching, listening. Now he barely heard the voice in his head, a steady murmur that seemed as far away as that first party. What it must be like to be dead, when you couldn’t even hear yourself. Then suddenly a louder voice came in over it, not really talking to Anna anymore, to anyone, just pouring out.
You were the only idea I ever had. To be with you. The way we were at the yali. That’s all I wanted, to be like that. Not change. But it did. I still don’t know why. The child. Then the war. Everything. Sometimes I blame you—and then it’s worse. But Lily’s right, we’re both dying this way. And I don’t want to. I see a woman, near Tünel. And it doesn’t mean anything. How can something like that not mean anything? Like the lab frogs in school. You could make their muscles twitch, with electricity. Even after they were dead. It’s like that. A jolt, but you don’t feel anything. Then tonight. I did. I think so anyway.
He shrugged to himself, the voice taking a breath. So what did I do? I sent her away. So I could come here. Sit with you. That was right, wasn’t it? The right thing. But I can’t even remember your voice—a few minutes and then it goes. I’m not sure anymore what I’m holding on to.
The voice stopped, the sudden quiet a vacuum in his head. He looked over at the bed. Anna lay still, not moving, as if she were holding her breath, waiting. I’m sorry. Listen to me. One kiss and now all this. Like a kid. He paused. But it’s true. It’s getting harder to remember.
Outside, there were footsteps in the hall, a nurse hurrying past. Kosterman had probably arrived. Why sit here brooding? Check on Georg and leave. Move Alexei. Where? Georg wouldn’t be going home to Nişantaşi. Just one night. But there’d be neighbors taking care of the dog—Georg never left her alone. Mihai had a cousin in Kuzguncuk, on the Asian side. A street with old wooden houses and plane trees, as quiet as an Anatolian village. And just as small—everyone would know in an hour. Much safer in an impersonal flat. A cheap hotel, no questions.
There were more steps outside, nurses’ shoes, a hospital sound. How many times had he sat with Anna listening to rubber soles and swishing skirts? The sound echoed, back to the other hospital, Anna lying with her hair spread out on the white pillow, not crying, her face drained, facing it.
“We can have another,” he’d said, not knowing what else to say.
“Don’t give it a name,” she’d said, her eyes far away for the first time, something he thought now he should have noticed, but didn’t. “If you name it, we won’t be able to forget.” As if it had existed, had personality, a place in one’s heart, all the things that can happen in the first seconds of life.
The hospital listed it as “baby,” or “infant,” he forgot which, the form tucked away in some box of papers where Anna wouldn’t see it. You couldn’t lose a child who’d never existed. But she’d known the sex, her boy, and here he was, years later, still in the room with them. All it took was the sound of nurses’ shoes.
“You’d better come,” Obstbaum said at the door. “He’s had another attack.” Not waiting for Leon, starting back, talking over his shoulder. “Kosterman’s working on him, but he’s not responding.”
In the room a gray-haired man was pushing down on Georg’s chest, kneading it, nurses around him, glancing nervously at a monitor.
“Nichts,” he said, but kept pumping, somehow angry, as if Georg were being stubborn.
Another minute, then a quick knowing look from the nurse, and finally his hands stopped. He moved them away slowly, and shook his head.
“He’s gone,” Obstbaum said, needlessly.
Leon looked down at Georg’s face, already different, empty. For a moment the room seemed motionless, stunned by the gravity of death, then nurses began to remove the electrodes, wheel a cart away, cover the body. Kosterman looked at his watch, noting the time, already preparing the certificate in his mind. Leon kept staring. Something you never got used to, no matter how many times you’d seen it, the stillness of a dead body. Not Georg anymore, irretrievable in a second. Not coming back, not in any life, whatever the Hindus imagined.
“There was nothing you could have done,” Kosterman said to Obstbaum in German. “Like a bomb.” He opened his fingers, mimicking an explosion. “I told him.”
“Have you finished?” a nurse said to Leon, holding the sheet, waiting.
Leon nodded.
“There’s no family,” Obstbaum said to the doctor. He turned to Leon. “Did he ever say anything to you? What he wanted?”
Leon shook his head. “The dog. The neighbors must have her. Someone should make sure. And call Lily,” he said, making a list, things to do, a way of not thinking about it. “She’ll want to know. She can have someone tell the papers. An obituary—he knew a lot of people. I’ll call Vogel at the university. He can arrange a memorial service later.”
And then there seemed nothing more to say. Georg disposed of, gone. He wondered suddenly how easy his own death would be—a notice to the Reynolds office, an insurance claim for Anna, Mihai settling the apartment. Maybe a piece in Hürriyet. American businessman. Nothing about the trains to Ankara or Tommy or Alexei. Would Anna know he was gone? A paragraph would do it.
Two aides came to wheel the gurney away, and Leon felt people moving around him, busy. Why wasn’t everyone standing still, letting it sink in? But they hadn’t known him, hadn’t
just lost something. It was Georg who’d explained about the storks that Sunday when they went out to see the Byzantine walls, a picnic in the shade, looking up at them perched on their high rickety nests. “They migrate south, over Arabia, so the Muslims believe they make the pilgrimage to Mecca every year.” Was it true? Did it matter? Anna delighted, smiling. Sandwiches in waxed paper. Beer. The wheeling stopped, the aides looking at him, in the way.
He thanked Obstbaum and started back to Anna’s room, then stopped, his feet suddenly lead. Not another vigil, talking to himself about Georg, regretting their last conversation, sneering at his Marxist heaven. Then on the landing, still your friend. Maybe his own form of warning—the landlord was talking, it wasn’t safe anymore. But where would be? Hotels with sleepy night clerks checking the tezkere Alexei didn’t have? What would be open? The Muslim world went home at night, whole sections of the city blacked out in a medieval dark, streetlights like the old torches. Only the Greeks and Armenians and foreigners went out, drinking in noisy mihanyes. But eventually they closed too. Even the Taksim Casino went dark, forcing the streetwalkers to lurk by the late-night kebab stalls and the dim lights of the taxi ranks. He stopped.
A simple answer, the obvious overlooked. It wasn’t too much to ask. And if it was, there was always Cihangir. But not Laleli anymore, Georg’s warning like an omen now.
“What is it?” Alexei said when he opened the door. Dressed, the way he always was, maybe the way he slept, ready to get out in a hurry.
“I’m moving you.”
“Something’s—”
“No, a precaution. It’s time.”
“Good,” Alexei said, putting out a cigarette and folding up the chess set. “Somewhere better, I hope. The Pera Palas?”
Leon looked up.
“A joke,” Alexei said. “One minute. My razor, that’s all,” he said, heading toward the bathroom.
“I met your buddy Melnikov tonight,” Leon said.
Alexei stopped. “Be careful with that one. A friend of Beria’s.”
“Meaning?”
“He does what he likes. Kill first. He can afford to make mistakes. Is that why we’re moving?”
“No. It’s time, that’s all. He’s still trying to buy you back.”
“How much am I worth now?” Alexei said, coming in with a Dopp kit. “Have I gone up?”
“I didn’t ask. That everything?”
Alexei put on his jacket and woolen sailor’s cap. “You go first,” he said, suddenly in charge. “The street that goes to the big mosque. I’ll use the back. Give me five minutes. If anything seems wrong, come back here. You forgot something.”
“But you’ll be out there.”
Alexei shrugged. “How far is the car?”
“We’re walking.”
Alexei looked at him, then took out a gun and put it in his jacket pocket. “The lights,” he said, nodding to the switch.
Outside, Leon headed past the high walls of the university grounds. He could hear his footsteps. No one else around. Two men in jellabas and skullcaps, lost in their own conversation. He slowed, giving Alexei time, forcing himself not to look back. You could see the great dome from here, a weak milky light in the square facing the mosque. The night, so clear at Lily’s, had turned misty, the cobblestones slick. Alexei would have left by now, slipping through the streets, some route he’d worked out when he should have been inside.
And then he was there, a shadow suddenly turned solid, walking with him, the mosque getting closer, filling the end of the street. Some voices in the square.
Leon felt the hand on his sleeve, Alexei looking back over his shoulder then jerking them off the street, wedging them into an arched doorway on the narrow side street, backs flat against the wood. He took the gun from his pocket and held it, waiting. Leon slowed his breath. No voices, a soft indistinct sound behind, maybe footsteps if you were listening for them. He glanced over at Alexei. His face was rigid, the wool cap covering his short, receding hair, so that the head seemed almost skeletal, like a death mask. As still as Georg had been, and just for a second Leon saw him the same way, already dead. Even if he got him out. Once he said whatever he had to say there’d only be some half existence, listening for sounds. Assuming he got there. Now he was breathing again, fear pumping life back, and Leon could feel his shoulder move and realized they were breathing together, the same adrenaline rushing through them.
Real footsteps now, then a shadow moving down the street, backlit by the streetlamps. It stopped at the side street, as if it were listening too, then started again, a shuffling sound, not trying to be quiet, the shadow weaving slightly. Maybe a drunk. But someone who’d been behind them. They waited, Alexei’s gun close to his chest, following the footsteps down to the square until they were out of hearing. Another minute, nobody coming back up the hill to find where he’d lost them, then another to make sure, and Alexei nudged Leon toward the street.
They walked quickly, making up time, still not talking, but Leon felt shaken, the mask still in his mind. Contours of bone, the shape of a head, lifeless. Süleyman’s Mosque and its outbuildings bulked up ahead, but all the details were lost in the dark. The old medrese, the cylinder burial türbes, the leafy courtyard—Leon’s dream of Istanbul, where he used to come just to sit, listening to the hum of the prayers inside, now all in shadow, someone’s hiding place. The way Alexei saw things. How he had begun to see them too.
He led them past Sinan’s tomb and down the steep streets of broken cobbles littered with clumps of garbage. On Galata Bridge a few fishermen were still tending rods.
“Where are we going?” Alexei said.
“You wanted the Pera. Not far from there.”
The lighted cars of the funicular would be a risk, but Alexei was already winded and climbing the hill seemed worse. Leon looked at him on the platform. A man in a wool cap with a duffel, some sailor docked in Karaköy, out for a good time. No one followed them on top.
Marina opened the door in the silk kimono Leon thought she wore only for him.
“It’s you,” she said, a question.
“Are you alone?”
“It’s late,” she said, another question, noticing Alexei.
“I need a favor. A bed. For a friend. Just the bed.”
She looked past him. “Who is he? He’s trouble for me?”
“Just a customer. Who wants to spend the night. You have customers like that, don’t you?”
She stared at him.
“I’ll give you the going rate.”
“What a bastard you are.”
“I didn’t mean it that way.”
“No?”
“You have no idea who he is. He paid for the night, that’s all. You can show the money. If anybody asks.”
“Who? Police?”
Leon shook his head. “Anybody. But nobody will. One night.” He paused. “A favor.”
She looked at him, then opened the door. “Don’t stand in the hall.”
Alexei dumped the duffel bag inside, looking around the room, then at Marina. “Much better,” he said.
“What’s he done?” Marina said, lighting a cigarette.
“Nothing. He’s a customer. That’s all you know.” He looked down at the kimono, her breasts half showing.
“And you? What have you done?”
“Nothing. I wasn’t even here.”
“If anyone asks,” she finished.
“That’s the favor.”
She snorted, then turned to Alexei. “There,” she said, pointing to the bedroom door.
“I appreciate this,” Leon said. He took out his wallet. “How much?”
“I’ll let you know,” she said, waving the cigarette.
“Then here’s fifty. On account.” He held out the bills.
“Fifty,” she said, raising her eyebrows. “And it’s not police.”
“In case you need to show. That he paid.”
“You think I’d do this for fifty?” she said, slipping the bills
in her kimono pocket.
“Then how much—”
“No, this.” She opened her hand to the room, the risk, everything.
He met her look. “Thank you.”
Alexei was standing in the bedroom doorway smoking, his eyes half shut, fixed on her. He took off his cap, running his fingers through his flattened hair.
Marina put out her cigarette, then shrugged. “Does he speak Turkish?”
“No. German. A little English.”
“All right. Anything special? What does he like?” Her voice wearily matter of fact, taunting him.
“Just the room. I’m not asking you to do that.”
“No,” she said, raising her eyes to him. “Other things.”
The hall light operated on a timed switch but he ignored it, feeling his way instead toward the dim landing. In the dark, the usual wet plaster smell seemed even stronger, feline. He waited at the outside door for a few seconds to see if anyone was in the street, then turned left down the hill for a block and circled back up. No footsteps behind.
In Tünel Square the tram had been turned around and was waiting for the conductor to start, a few passengers slumped in their seats. The whole square seemed motionless in fact, opaque in the misty air, and for a moment Leon imagined them all dead too, the conductor’s hand frozen on the controls, every face like Georg’s and Alexei’s, immobile. He felt his chest squeeze and forced himself to breathe out, a kind of protest. What would happen to him someday. When? Tommy surprised in a second, Georg clutching the table. Alexei jolting himself alert with fear, but already gone.
Leon started for the tram. What you thought about when you were exhausted. But in the doorway he and Alexei had been the same. Get on the tram and go back to Cihangir, watch the ferries, the room as quiet as the clinic. Lily’s garden, seeing ghosts, talking to them, receding. Then real eyes, darting across his face. Do something for me, she’d said, then brought his head down.
The conductor rang the bell, waiting for his straggler. Leon grabbed the pole, about to swing up, then stopped, remembering the doorway again, Alexei’s mask. He stepped away, waving the tram off, even the sleepy passengers now awake watching him. A scene, something noticed. Five minutes ago he’d been slinking around buildings. Now he walked through the lighted part of the square and into Sofyali Sok, still busy with late-night restaurants. Down to Meşturiyet, not looking behind, loud steps, nothing to hide. At the Pera, he went straight to the elevator. An American in a good suit, somebody who might be staying there. The elevator boy, in a pillbox hat and white gloves, took him up without a question. A birdcage lift, Parisian grillwork and red plush. He walked down the hall, not hesitating, a soft tap, then a louder one.