Stardust

by Kanon, Joseph

  “You’re in love with him.”

  “What a boy you are,” she said, moving her hand across the back of his head, smoothing his hair. “You think it’s like War Bride. Love forever. But how can it be like that? Nothing is like that. You know, when we first left home, left Germany, I thought it’s all finished for me, everything. But then Vienna. France. All right, it’s somewhere new. Not the same, but I can live here. I think it’s like that. Not the same. Another place. But you can live there for a while. And you don’t forget it, it’s something special to you, somewhere you lived.”

  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.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  STARDUST 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.

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  ISTANBUL PASSAGE

  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

  1

  BEBEK

  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, caïques 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—”

  Mihai waved this off. “He’ll be German. One of your new friends.”

  “You don’t have to do this.”

  “It’s a small favor. I’ll get it back.”

  He lit a cigarette, so that for a second Leon could see his grizzled face and the wiry salt-and-pepper hair on his head. Now more salt than pepper. When they had met, it had been dark and wavy, styled like the Bucharest dandy he’d once been, known in all the cafés on the Calea Victoriei.

  “Besides, to see the rats leaving—” he said, brooding. “They wouldn’t let us out. Now look at them.”

  “You did what you could.” A Palestinian passport, free to come and go in Bucharest, to beg for funds, leasing creaky boats, a last lifeline, until that was taken away too.

  Mihai drew on the cigarette, staring at the water running down the windshield. “So how is it with you?” he said finally. “You look tired.”

  Leon shrugged, not answering.

  “Why are you doing this?” He turned to face him. “The war’s over.”

  “Yes? Nobody told me.”

  “No, they want to start another one.”

  “Nobody I know.”

  “Be careful you don’t get to like it. You start enjoying it—” His voice trailed off, rough with smoke, the accent still Balkan, even now. “Then it’s not about anything anymore. A habit. Like these,” he said, holding out his cigarette. “You get a taste for it.”

  Leon looked at him. “And you?”

  “Nothing changes for us. We’re still saving Jews.” He made a wry face. “Now from our friends. No visas for Palestine. Where should they go, Poland? And I’m helping you talk to a Nazi. A wonderful world.”

  “Why a Nazi?”

  “Why all this? Some poor refugee? No, someone who knows the Russians, I think. And who knows better?”

  “You’re guessing.”

  “It doesn’t matter to you? What you deliver?”

  Leon looked away, then down at his watch. “Well, he’s not coming tonight. Whoever he is. I’d better call. Make sure. There’s a café.”

  Mihai leaned forward to start the car again. “I’ll pull around.”

  “No, stay here. I don’t want the car—”

  “I see. You run across the road in the rain. Get wet. Then you run back. Again, wet. To a waiting car. That will be less suspicious. If anyone is watching.” He put the car in gear.

  “It’s your car,” Leon said. “That’s all.”

  “You think they haven’t seen it by now?”

  “Have they? You’d know,” he said, a question.

  “Always assume yes.” He made a turn across the road, pulling up in front of the café. “So do the expected thing. Stay dry. Tell me something. If he had come, your package, was I going to drive him to—wherever he’s staying?”

  “No.”

  Mihai nodded. “Better.” He motioned his head to the side window. “Make the call. Before they wonder.”

  There were four men playing dominoes and sipping tea from tulip glasses. When they looked up, he became what he wanted them to see—a ferengi caught in the rain, shaking water from his hat, needing a phone— and he flushed, a little pulse of excitement. A taste for it. Had Mihai seen it somehow, the way it felt, getting away with something. The planning, the slipping away. Tonight he’d taken the tram to the last stop in Bebek and walked up to the clinic. A trip he’d made over and over. If he’d been followed, they’d stay parked a block away from the clinic gates and wait, relieved to be snug, out of the rain, knowing where he was. But just past the big oleander bushes, he’d headed for the garden side gate, doubling back to the Bosphorus road where Mihai was waiting, feeling suddenly free, almost exhilarated. No one would have seen him in the dark. If they were there, they’d be smoking, bored, thinking he was inside. This other life, just walking to the car, was all his own.

  The phone was on the wall near the WC. No sounds in the room but the click of tiles and the hiss of boiling water, so the token seemed to clang going in. A ferengi speaking English, the men would say. If anyone asked.

  “Tommy?” At home, luckily, not out to dinner.

  “Ah, I was hoping you’d call,” he said, a genial club voice with the clink of ice at the back of it. “You’re after that report— I know, I know— and my steno never showed. Trouble with the boats. Typical, isn’t it? First hint of weather and the ferries—” Leon imagined his round face at the other end, the jaw line filling in, fleshy. “I can have it for you tomorrow, all right? I mean, the contract’s all right. We’re just waiting for the quotas. I’ve had American Tobacco on the phone half the day, so you’re all in the same boat on this one. All we need now are the signatures.” At Commercial Corp., the wartime agency that was Tommy’s cover at the consulate.

  “That’s all right. I’m stuck here at the clinic anyway. Just wanted to check. If it was on its way.”

  “No. Tomorrow now. Sorry about this. Let me make it up to you. Buy you a drink at the Park.” An off note. This late?

  “I’m in Bebek.”

  “I’ll get a head start.” An order, then. “Don’t worry, I’ll roll you home.” Their standard joke, Leon’s apartment building just down the hill from the Park Hotel, before Aya Paşa made its wide curve.

  “Give me an hour.”

  “From Bebek?” Surprised, an edge now.

  “Take a look outside. It’ll be a crawl in this. Just save a me stool.”

  The domino players were looking down, pretending not to listen. But what would they have made of it anyway? Leon ordered a tea, a way of thanking the barman for the phone. The glass was warm in his hand, and he realized he was cold everywhere else, the wet beginning to seep through his shoes. And now the Park, everyone looking and not looking, Tommy’s old-boy voice getting louder with each drink.

  “Rain check,” he said to Mihai, getting into the car. “You free tomorrow?”

  Mihai nodded.

  “Something’s up. We’re having a drink at the Park.”

  “Very exciting, the tobacco business.”

  Leon smiled. “It used to be.”

  In fact, it had been sleepy, as routine and predictable as a Book of Hours. Agents bought the cured Latakia leaf, and he arranged the shipments, then took the train to Ankara to get the export permits. Leave Haydarpaşa at six, arrive the next morning at ten. That’s how it had started, carrying things on the train for Tommy, papers they couldn’t put in the diplomatic pouch, something for the war effort. No money involved then. An American helping out, not just standing around at the club getting drunk with Socony and Liggett & Myers and Western Electric, the men interchangeable, lucky businessmen sitting out the war. Tommy asked him to help Commercial Corp. buy up chromium, so the Germans wouldn’t get it, and suddenly he was in the war after all, the peculiar one that played out over dinner at Abdullah’s or those consulate receptions where the sides lined up on either end of the room, cocktail wars. What surprised him later, when he knew more, was how many others were in it too. Tracking shipping through the straits. Collecting gossip. Turning a commercial attaché who needed the money. Everyone spinning webs, watching each other, the Turkish Emniyet watching them. Nothing sleepy anymore.

  “I’ll drop you home. You’ll want to change.”

  “No, just back to the village. I want to go to the clinic. Just look in.”

  Mihai waited until they were almost there. “How is she?”

  “The same,” Leon said, his voice neutral.

  And then there was nothing to say. Still, he’d asked. Anna was still alive to him, a presence, not just someone in Obstbaum’s clinic who had retreated into herself, gone somewhere behind her own eyes. People used to ask all the time— painful questions at the club, an awkward concern at the office— but gradually they began to forget she was still there. Out of sight, out of mind. Except Leon’s, a wound that wouldn’t close. Any day she might come back, just as quickly as she had gone away. Someone had t
o be there waiting.

  “You know what I think?” Mihai said.

  “What?”

  “Sometimes I think you do this for her. To prove something. I don’t know what.”

  Leon was quiet, not answering.

  “Do you still talk to her?” Mihai said finally.

  “Yes.”

  “Tell her we got a boat out. She’ll like that.”

  “Past the British patrols?”

  “So far. Otherwise we’d be in Cyprus. Tell her three hundred. We saved three hundred.”

  He took the same side street back, the same garden entrance. He’d expected to have to ring, but the door was unlocked and he frowned, annoyed the staff had been so careless. But no one was trying to get out and who would want to get in? The clinic was really a kind of nursing home, a place to be out of the way. Dr. Obstbaum had been one of the German refugees welcomed by Atatürk in the thirties to help the new republic get up on its feet. The ones who could afford it had moved to Bebek or, closer in, Ortaköy, where hillsides covered in fir trees and lindens may have reminded them of home. Or maybe, lemminglike, they had simply followed the first settler. Most of the clinic’s medical staff was still German, which Leon had thought might help, her own language something she would understand, if she was still listening. But of course the nurses, the people who bathed her and fed her and chattered around her, were Turkish, so in the end he realized it didn’t matter and now he worried that she was more isolated than ever. Dr. Obstbaum himself encouraged Leon to talk.

  “We have no idea what she hears. This form of melancholia— it may be a matter of responding, not awareness. Her brain hasn’t shut down. Otherwise she wouldn’t be breathing, or have any motor functions. The idea is to keep up the level of activity. Over time maybe it grows. So, music. Does she hear it? I don’t know. But the brain does, somewhere. Something functions.”

  Not disturbing music, but things she knew, had played at home. Lovely notes to fill the silence in her. If she heard them.