Free Young Turk by Moris Farhi

the Black Sea, would invade the country, Turkish passports were not much in demand. Basically, the market value of a passport was governed by the vagaries of war. On occasion, even passports from war-battered countries could prove a gold-mine – British passports, for instance, though they had the same modest status as Turkish ones, would fetch a fortune from Jewish refugees seeking to settle in Palestine.
    In the main, Bilâl instructed us, the black market in passports was dominated by the Levantines, that tiny minority of Europeans who, enamoured of the Orient, had settled in the Ottoman empire and intermarried with its many peoples. Immensely proud of their mixed ethnicity, the Levantines had evolved, in eastern Mediterranean eyes, into ‘lovable rogues’. In the new Turkey, they had perfected the highly specialized
métier
of
iş bitirici,
‘job-accomplisher’. It was said that once they accepted a commission, only death would prevent them from completing it to the client’s satisfaction.
    Here, Bilâl declared, luck favoured us. Naim had a perfect entrée into this community. His classmate, Tomaso (Turkish name, Turgut), was the son of ‘Neptune’, owner of the famous restaurant in the Golden Horn, which served the best fish in the world. Neptune was a scion of the Adriatiko, an elite strain of Levantines who were the descendants of Venetian sailors taken prisoner in the sea battles of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, then used as galley-slaves in Ottoman men-of-war and, eventually, set free and allowed to settle in the empire. Neptune had a horde of ‘cousins’ who, in pursuit of their smuggling activities, covered Turkey’s four seas with a fleet of trawlers; not surprisingly, they had ended up dominating the fishing trade – which explained the excellence of his restaurant.
    So, if we could get hold of five British passports, Bilâl concluded, we could approach the Adriatiko and arrange a barter for Turkish ones. The latter, he reminded us, were worth about the same but had the advantage of being bona fide for the German occupation forces because Turkey was not only a neighbouring country but also neutral. They offered the only chance of escape for Ester’s family.
    And this is where I came in. I was a member of the British diplomatic community. Perfectly placed to lay my hands on new passports. Fate had brought me to Istanbul for that very purpose.

    We wove an ingenious plan.
    During the rest of the holidays I would be especially friendly with the Johnsons, particularly Mr Johnson, who was His Majesty’s Consul. And I would find out, by asking the sort of casual questions that might occur to any curious youngster, how the consulate issued passports and where it stored them. Then, on my father’s next trip to Istanbul, I would visit him at the consulate on some pretext and, while everybody went on with their work, slip into whichever storeroom contained the passports and pinch the five we needed. If the passports were kept under lock and key, the boys would provide me with a passe-partout. Obtaining such an item from a locksmith would be easy; having worked the markets with their fathers, they knew countless tradesmen.
    Once we had the passports, Naim would prevail on Tomaso to introduce us to the Adriatiko for the exchange with Turkish ones.
    The next phase, slipping into Greece, should be equally simple, we convinced ourselves. We could engineer a good excuse to leave town for a few days. Our district boy scout troop had a progressive programme of fitness and culture that included excursions to famous archaeological sites. Since our parents approved of these activities – to date we had explored several digs in Anatolia – we would ‘invent’ such a jaunt to, say, the Royal Hittite Archives in Boğazköy.
    For entering Greece, we had two options. We could either waft into eastern Thrace by crossing the Meriç river, which ran along the Turkish-Greek frontier, or sail directly, in a hired