Free Istanbul by Colin Falconer

had always been a rather remote mother. Even when they were babies, she had preferred to hand them over to their nannies. In that respect, he imagined being a diplomat’s wife had suited her well, because the boys had both, by necessity, been sent to boarding schools in England at a young age. He wondered if she regretted that lost time now; he knew he did.
    ‘Do you still love me, Nick?’ she whispered.
    He came to stand behind her, put his hands on her shoulders. ‘I won’t let anything happen to you,’ he said.
     
     
     
    He went downstairs to the bar. Even in the candlelit dark, the scheming was still going on. An official from the Romanian Ministry of Defence was trying to sell transcripts of wiretaps from Antonescu’s office. They might have been genuine; Nick passed on them. The man wanted too much money and, anyway, what did it matter now?
    He met Max in the American Bar. They had the place to themselves. The Nazis disappeared into their rooms at ten o’clock and most of the German military mission had moved to the Ambassador Hotel and only came back to the Athenee Palace when they wanted to sleep with a girl.
    By midnight the corridors and stairs were lit only by a few sparse violet bulbs. As he crossed the foyer, headed back to his room, he had the eerie feeling he was being watched. A grim-faced Gestapo man sat by the stairs pretending to read newspapers.
    He heard laughter in the foyer behind him, a German bringing his girlfriend back for the night. In the cavernous gloom of the foyer, he saw a mane of long dark hair and he knew it was her . He felt as if he had been stabbed in the heart.
    For some insane reason he stopped and waited on the stairs, let them catch up. When he saw him Maier grinned wolfishly. ‘My Englisher friend!’ he shouted.
    Daniela looked radiant. For almost a week he had worried over her, wondered if she might be languishing in some hospital, or lying among the piles of blackened corpses now being buried in unmarked graves all around the city.
    She would not meet his eyes.
    ‘Still awake, Herr Davis?’
    ‘Stayed up for a nightcap.’
    ‘You don’t conquer Europe with a hangover,’ Maier said laughing. ‘Goodnight!’
    Nick let them pass him on the stairs, smelled her perfume, was transfixed by the perfect sway of her hips. She turned once and their eyes met. In the violet dark he thought he saw a movement of her lips and he wondered what it was she might have wanted to say to him.
    Later, in his own bed, he tried not to imagine Maier’s possession of her, but he conjured every detail of their joining in his imagination anyway.
    What was he doing? He had no claim to her.
    He had to get out of this damned place.
     
     
     
    He and Jennifer lay like the entombed kings and queens in Westminster Abbey, on their backs, side by side, silent and cold.
    Finally he swung his legs out of bed and put on his silk dressing gown – one of the few possessions they had rescued from their apartment – and went down to the lobby, feeling his way in the violet gloom of the lamps.
    It was cold, like a catacomb. Shadows moved about the entrance, German sentries on patrol. The Gestapo man dozed in his chair under the stairs. The reception clerk slept with his head on the desk.
    He paced for the sake of pacing, trying to walk off his agitation, as if this razor edge of confusion could somehow be blunted with movement.
    ‘You look like a tiger trapped in a cage,’ a voice said.
    He knew her voice, though he could not see her, a silhouette in a chair set against one of the pillars.
    For a moment he was too surprised to speak. ‘What are you doing down here?’
    ‘The same as you. I couldn’t sleep.’
    ‘Maier will wonder where you are.’
    ‘He’s snoring like a bulldog. Why don’t you sit down for a while?’
    He found a hard-backed chair. What a strange life, he thought, the two of us sitting here while my wife and her lover sleep alone upstairs.
    Daniela was wearing a fox fur coat