Istanbul Passage

by Joseph Kanon

  “So you saw some action?” The standard welcome-back question.

  “Some. The camera crews got the worst of it. They had to work the front lines. We lost a lot of them.”

  Sometimes just yards away. Ed Singer, so glued to his lens that he never saw the shell that ripped his arm off, just turned and looked down, amazed to see blood gushing out. Ben scooting over. To do what? Dam the blood with a wad of shirt? A stump, spraying blood as it moved, even the camera covered with it. Ed looking at him, frantic, knowing, until his eyes got calmer as shock set in, then closed, no longer there to watch his life run out.

  “I was lucky,” Ben said. “The closest I came was in a plane. When nothing was supposed to happen. You see Target Berlin? Some of the night footage in that. They told us the AAs had been wiped out, but they forgot to tell the Germans. Our gunner was hit. We get back, the plane is full of holes.”

  He stopped, embarrassed, then took out a cigarette.

  “Sorry. What am I doing now, telling war stories?” He inhaled, then blew smoke up toward the round observation roof, in this light oddly like the glass bubble of the Lancaster. “The thing was, I used to live there. Berlin. So it was the enemy, but also someplace you knew. It’s a funny feeling, bombing someplace you know. You think what it must be like on the ground.”

  Lasner stared at him for a minute, saying nothing. “And then— what? You’re showing Zanuck around Europe. In uniform. He had it made, you know that? A tailor.” Almost a wink, a joke between them. “And for that they needed—what’s it again?—an MOS. Because your father was in pictures. Where, Germany?”

  “Uh huh,” Ben said casually, sorry now that he had brought it up. “He came here for a while. Years ago. I was born here, in fact. California. But he went back.”

  “Collier,” Lasner said, thumbing a mental file.

  “Kohler then. Otto Kohler. He was a director.” The old hesitancy, as if the name, once his own, would somehow brand him.

  “Otto? My god, why didn’t you say so? Wait a minute. I thought his kid was already over here—at Republic or some place. We were going to do something with him once, but then it didn’t work out. I forget why.” He stopped, confused. “Same name, though, as Otto. Kohler.”

  “My brother,” Ben said, about to say more, and then the moment was gone. Why not tell him? But why would Lasner care? Something still private, and somehow not real. “He changed it back. Kids pick sides in a divorce. He was closer to my father.” Moving away from it. “You knew him? Otto?”

  “Of course I knew him. He worked for me. You didn’t know that?” He glanced at Ben, a slight suspicion. “We made Two Husbands. You must have seen that.”

  Ben spread his hands. “I was only—”

  “That picture was a classic. He didn’t keep a print? Never mind. I’ll run it for you. You should see it. The talent that man had.” Lasner was off now, waving his cigar to draw Ben along with him. “He was the one that got away. The Ufa directors who came over. The great ones.” He raised three fingers. “Murnau—well, he got away, too, that car crash. Lang we’ve still got. And Otto. His trouble? Expensive. Sets. He thought we were making Intolerance.” He looked again at Ben. “Why didn’t you tell me before? Now I know who you are,” he said, leaning back and opening his jacket, visibly relaxing.

  Ben smiled to himself. An industry, but still a family business.

  “He was ahead of his time with those sets, you know,” Lasner was saying. “But they were all like that, the Ufa people. Even the ones who came later. You know why? No Westerns. They never learned to shoot outside. It was all controlled light with them. Of course, they had the facilities. In those days, what they had in Berlin—I’m still knocking my brains out in Gower Gulch trying to borrow arc lamps, and over there they’re making cities. Otto,” he said, shaking his head. “I can see the resemblance now, around the eyes. I knew your mother, too. A looker. So what happened? They split, you said.”

  “Another woman, I guess. That’s what I heard. My mother never talked about it.”

  “Well, he was like that. He always had an eye. So that’s why he stayed there? Some skirt?”

  “I don’t know. He probably thought he’d get through it—that’s what people thought then. He was making pictures with Monika Hoppe. Goebbels liked her. Maybe he thought that would protect him, they’d look the other way. Anyway, they didn’t. He was arrested in ’thirty-eight. They sent a notice to my mother. This was when they still thought they had to explain it.”

  “So,” Lasner said, looking away. “Some story.”

  With everything Ben remembered left out. The good days in the big house on Lützowplatz. The parties, sometimes with just a piano, but sometimes with a whole band, the air full of perfume and smoke, Ben looking down through the banister. Faces even a child recognized. Hertzberg, the comedian with the surprised round eyes; Jannings, jowly and grave even with a glass in his hand. And afterward, sometimes, the quarrels—were there women even then?

  Sunday mornings, the room still smelling of stale ashtrays, his father got them ready for their walk. Scarves in winter. Umbrellas if it rained. But the walk without fail, because that’s what you did on Sundays in Berlin. Down Budapesterstrasse to the zoo, afterward a cake at Kranzler’s, his father desperate by now for a drink. Later, when they were too old for the zoo, they would head straight for the cafés, where his father met friends and Danny tried to sneak cigarettes. Then, a few years after that, they were on a train for Bremen, an American woman with her two boys, their father back on the platform at Lehrter Bahnhof.

  They were meant to go home, but stayed in London. Did his mother think Otto would follow, that it was somehow important to be near him, at least on a map? When it didn’t matter anymore, after the official letter, she lacked the will to leave, and they stayed longer. By the time Ben finally did get back to America, to the Army training camp, he was grown up. The accent they teased him about now was English so he lost that one, too. And then, full circle, the Army wanted the old language of his boyhood. They polished off the rust, and it came back, as fluent as memory, bringing everything else with it, even the smell of the cakes, until finally the war took him to Berlin and he saw that it was gone for good—Kranzler’s, the zoo, all of it just rubble and dust, as insubstantial now as his father, all ghosts.

  “Then what?” Lasner said, an old hand at story conferences. “She remarried? A woman like that—”

  “No, she died. During the war.” He caught Lasner’s expectant look and shook his head. “She got sick.” No drama, a daily wearing away, medicines to keep the retching down, then a final exhaustion.

  “So now it’s just the brother?” Lasner said, suddenly sentimental. “Let me tell you something. Stay close. What else have we got? Family. You trust blood. Don’t be like—” He took a puff on the cigar, moving farther away, drifting into anecdote again. “Look at Harry Warner. Jack makes him crazy. Screaming. Shouting. Sometimes, they’re in the same room, you don’t even want to watch. Don’t be like that.”

  “But they’re still—”

  Lasner shrugged. “Who else would work with Jack? He is crazy. You know, I said to him once, you hate him so much, come work with me, partners, your name first, I don’t care. At the time, this is worth a fortune to him. You know what he said? ‘You want that bastard to run my studio?’ His studio. So they’re stuck with each other, till one of them keels over. You put that kind of pressure here,” he said, touching his heart, “and sooner or later they wheel you out on a stretcher. Well.” He stood up, glancing at his watch again, then out the window. “What I hate, this time of night, is you never know where you are.” He put his hand on Ben’s shoulder, an uncle. “Remember what I said. Don’t be like Jack. Stay close.”

  And what was there to say to that? Danny had gone to California in ’40, using Otto’s name to get a Second Unit job at Metro. Just to see what it was like. And then the war had closed the door behind him, eight thousand miles away, so that all they’d had for years
were sheets of blue tissue V-mail. Danny playing parent. Keep safe, out of combat. Their mother’s health. War news. But still Danny’s voice, the same wink in it. Stories he knew Ben would like, could pass on to his friends. Meeting Lana Turner. Going to hear the King Cole Trio. You have to come out here. The whole make-believe world real when Danny wrote about it, the same kid sneaking cigarettes, talking late at night from his bed across the room. About what? Anything. Ben wrapped up in the sound of it.

  He got up, feeling Lasner’s hand still on his shoulder. “Don’t forget to call Freeman.”

  “I don’t forget anything,” Lasner said, peering at him. “I’ll tell you one thing I don’t forget. Your father cost me a bundle. So maybe I’d better watch out—you’re an expensive family.”

  “No sets this time,” Ben said.

  Lasner nodded, finally dropping his hand. “We’ll talk. Where are you staying in Chicago?”

  “I’m just changing trains.”

  “The Chief? That’s seven fifteen. That gives you what? Nine hours to kill.” Everything measured and counted. “What’re you going to do for nine hours?”

  “See Chicago, I guess.”

  Lasner waved his hand. “You’ve seen it. You need a place to rest up, I’m at the Ambassador East. They get me a suite. Plenty of room.” He started to move toward the end of the car. “Otto’s kid. You live long enough—” He turned. “He was shot?”

  “That’s what the letter said.”

  “But who knows with the Nazis.” The unspoken question, a quick bullet or days of pain, clubs and wires, and screams. Years ago now.

  “Anyway, he’s dead,” Ben said. “So it doesn’t matter.”

  Lasner nodded. “No. It’s just my age, you think about the how.” He was silent for a minute, then looked up. “You got a budget on this thing?”

  Ben held up his hand, checking items off his fingers. “Hard costs. The footage we’ve got. Prints, I can req the raw stock from the War Production Board. You do the prints. And the sound—an engineer for the track, some bridge scoring, somebody to do the narration. American. Fonda, maybe?”

  Lasner shook his head. “Use contract. Frank Cabot?”

  “Fine. All I need is a cutting room and a couple of hands. We can do it either place, but yours would be better—Army studio, someone’s always taking your equipment. You provide the space, I can get the hands from Fort Roach. The stock would be an Army expense,” Ben said, looking at him directly. “We’ll make it for you. If you put it out.”

  “Nobody makes pictures for me,” Lasner said, looking back, the rhythm of negotiation. “At my studio.” He held Ben’s eyes for another second, then smiled. “You know, if your father had been like you, he’d still be—” He looked away, at a loss. “I mean—”

  Ben said nothing, waiting.

  Lasner held up a finger. “Don’t take advantage. People don’t forget that.” He lowered the hand, a dismissal, and walked away, followed by his moving reflection on the glass roof. “We’ll talk in the morning,” he said, the words in a slipstream over his shoulder.

  BUT WHEN the train pulled into LaSalle Street it was the scene from Grand Central all over again—Lasner surrounded by hats, tips given out, telegrams handed over, the group moving down the platform in a huddle. Ben followed behind, not wanting to interrupt, then lost him outside in the line of waiting taxis. Dearborn Street, where the Chief would pull out, was only a few blocks away, but what would he do there? He turned east instead, past the murky bars and shadowy streets under the El, light poking through the girders in latticework patches. Off the train, things seemed to pass in a plodding slow motion. Nothing whizzed by the window. He had all day.

  He crossed Michigan to the lakefront, hoping for a breeze, but the lake was flat, a sheet of hot tin. In the park, dogs panted under bushes. He thought of Warner being wheeled out on a stretcher in Lasner’s imagination. But anyone could have an attack, even someone as young as Danny. Except he hadn’t. What had his life been like? Maybe the same pressure cooker the Warners steamed in. Not the easy California you saw in magazines, men in open-necked shirts. Did he look like that? His wife would have pictures. Hans Ostermann’s daughter, the only thing Ben knew about her. She’d be at the hospital now, waiting things out.

  He got up from the park bench, restless. How could he not know Danny’s life? Ben had followed him everywhere, just wanting to be part of things. Wild, just like your father, his mother had said, meaning impulsive. But he wasn’t. A letter every week, staying in touch, still taking care of him. And now gone, without even a note. Maybe he hadn’t really meant to do it, not at the very end. A fall. How did she know for sure it hadn’t been like that? He stopped in the street, caught not just by the heat and the night of half sleep, but a deeper weariness, tired of thinking about it, going round in circles.

  On State Street he saw an AIR COOLED banner running along a marquee and went inside. The picture was a Betty Grable on second run, something with snow. Caesar Romero danced. Charlotte Greenwood did her split high kick, right over her head. Betty was put out over some romantic mix-up with John Payne, all of it so airy that it melted away as you saw it, like touching beer foam. The newsreel brought him back with a jolt. Europe in grainy black and white, where he’d been just two weeks ago. People going through PX garbage cans. Then war criminals passing sentences on themselves before the courts could—cyanide capsules for the privileged, amateur nooses for the others. Not a botched accident, a Hollywood indulgence. Meaning it. In the camps, they threw themselves on electric fences. You never asked why, not over there. He stood up, desperate to move again.

  Outside there was everything he’d been too preoccupied to notice before. Taxis. Buildings with glass. Stores. No debris in the street. Doormen walking dogs. The bar at The Drake, with silver dishes of nuts. A country so rich it didn’t even know its own luck. Where anyone could be happy.

  At the station, busy with redcaps pushing luggage carts, he saw flashbulbs near the Chief. Not Lasner this time, real stars. Paulette Goddard. Carole Landis. Two girls he didn’t recognize. All of them smiling, holding up a bond drive poster as they perched on the compartment car steps. Other passengers stopped to watch. You’ll never guess who was on the train.

  They left at seven fifteen exactly, sliding out so smoothly that it wasn’t until they began clicking over the points in the yard that Ben looked up to see they were moving. Past sidetracked box cars, then clotheslines and coal sheds and scrap metal yards, the backside of the city, until finally the open country of the prairie. Another day before they saw mountains. Los Angeles Monday morning, half a continent in under forty hours. He opened his bag to change. People dressed up for dinner on the Chief. A wash, a drink in the club car. He looked out again at the late summer’s light on the unbroken fields, a pale gold. Farther away from the newsreel with every mile. And then, not paying attention, he nicked his finger on his razor and watched, dismayed, as blood welled out of the cut. Had there been blood? She hadn’t said. A pool spreading under his head? Where had he fallen? But there must have been blood. There always was.

  THEY WERE three deep at the bar in the club car, talking over each other, a party roar of indistinct voices and ice tinkling against glass. Just a few uniforms, officers with their own money. One of the starlets he’d seen on the platform, lipstick refreshed, was taking a light from a man she’d obviously just met, all eyes and what-are-my-odds. The way every trip should begin, Ben thought, the air bubbling like the tonic in his drink.

  “So what happened to you?”

  Ben turned to the finger poking at his shoulder.

  “I thought you were coming up. Talk some more.”

  Lasner had changed suits but seemed to have kept the same cigar, now just a stub between his fingers. He was with a young man whose eyes darted around the car, a quick sweep, before they settled on Ben. He stuck out his hand.

  “Lou Katz. Morris Agency.”

  “Lou works with Abe Lastfogel,” Lasner explained.


  “I’m his number two,” Katz said, evidently a point. “You’re with Continental?”

  “The Army,” Lasner said. “He’s making pictures for the Army.”

  “Oh,” Katz said, his eyes beginning to move away.

  “You know who this is?” Lasner said. “Otto Kohler’s kid.”

  “Really,” Katz said uneasily, not sure he could admit the name meant nothing.

  “The director,” Lasner said. “Silents.”

  PRAISE FOR STARDUST

  “In Stardust, Kanon rescues postwar Los Angeles from noir clichés. . .. Hovering over it all, like a freakish fog off the Pacific, is the shadow of the Holocaust, its enormity only now becoming apparent. . .. [Kanon] operates with an intelligence that briskly evokes the atmosphere of a vanished era.” —The New York Times Book Review

  “A delicious synthesis of menace and glamour, historical fact and rich imagination. . . . Among the real movie people making appearances here is Paulette Goddard—just one element of a perfect setting for a story in which nothing is obvious.” —The Seattle Times

  “Spectacular in every way . . . wonderfully imagined, wonderfully written, an urgent personal mystery set against the sweep of glamorous and sinister history. Joseph Kanon owns this corner of the literary landscape and it's a joy to see him reassert his title with such emphatic authority.” —Lee Child

  “Stardust is sensational!No one writes period fiction with the same style and suspense – not to mention substance—as Joseph Kanon. A terrific read.” —Scott Turow

  “STARDUST is the perfect combination of intrigue and accurate history brought to life.” —Alan Furst

  PRAISE FOR PREVIOUS NOVELS BY JOSEPH KANON

  The Good German

  “Kanon is the heir apparent to Graham Greene; he writes of moral quandaries that are real and not created to drive a plot. A multilayered story, beautifully told.” —The Boston Globe

  “[Kanon] is fast approaching the complexity and relevance not just of le Carré and Green but even of Orwell: provocative, fully realizes fiction that explores, as only fiction can, the reality of history as it is lived by individual men and women.” —The New York Times Book Review