Jasmine Nights (41 page)

‘Well golly, golly, golly. Tremendous!’ Cleeve clapped his hands together softly when, on the following day, she told him about the party. ‘Safely over the first fence. The band like you, Ozan is besotted, the rest should be a piece of cake.’

They were sitting in his flat – an anonymous room, scruffy like the Alexandria one; his unpacked suitcase in the corner, a half-eaten kebab on a table whose wonky leg was propped up with a faded copy of
Le Monde
.

‘But I’ve interrupted you.’ He leaned forward eagerly. ‘Carry on. What happened next?’

They were drinking Turkish tea together out of mismatched glasses. Saba looked at her watch. Eleven o’clock.

‘I can’t stay long,’ she warned him. ‘As a treat, Mr Ozan wants to take Leyla and me for a drive. He’s going to try and find the place where my family once lived.’

‘Really.’ Cleeve’s smile was a quick grimace – he had no interest in this whatsoever. He pushed away the kebab wrapper. ‘This place is a dump, sorry, I’ve only hired it for a couple of days – it’s better we don’t meet in hotels.’

‘I wasn’t even born then,’ she said. ‘It feels like I took no interest in them before I came here.’

‘Isn’t that true of most people?’ He dropped two discarded pieces of meat into the wrapper, and threw it into the waste-paper basket. ‘Your parents only really exist for you as your parents.’ He lit a cigarette.

I know nothing about you either, Saba thought. Only the twinkly smile, the jokes, the matey conversations about music.

‘So,’ he said. ‘The party.’

‘It was the most glamorous party I’ve ever been to,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t believe it.’

‘Some of these people have made colossal profits from the war,’ Cleeve said. ‘Chiefly from sugar, salt, fuel. They’ve never had so much money, and they’re not shy about spending it. What happened?’

‘We played for about an hour,’ Saba continued, ‘and when we stopped, Mr Ozan asked me to dance with some of the men who had come. He seemed proud of the fact that I was Turkish, that I’d come home, kept telling them how much I loved Istanbul.’

‘And do you?’

‘Far more than I’d expected.’

‘And did you mind? The dancing, I mean.’

She hesitated.

‘I don’t like Ozan telling me who to dance with – it makes me feel cheap – but that’s hardly the point, is it?’

‘Did you say anything?’

‘No – in case I heard something.’

‘Good girl, oh they’ll give you a great big medal for this when you get back.’

Patronising prat.

‘And some dolly mixtures?’

‘Don’t get cross, Saba, and please go on, this is all tremendous. Who did you dance with?’

‘A man called Necdet, a Levantine tobacco trader; he speaks seven languages and he smelt of almonds. Yuri somebody or other, fat and jolly. He said that most of the ships going up and down the Bosphorus belong to him. A White Russian, Alexei something like Beloi was his surname – he’s here to write a book on economics. He made a pass at me.’

‘A serious one?’

‘No. He told me Istanbul was stuffed to the gills with spies, all waiting to see which way the Turks jump. He made it sound like a joke.’

‘Well, true up to a point. Anything else?’

‘Yes. There were four German officers there. I danced with two of them. That felt horrible but I didn’t show it.’ She looked at him anxiously. ‘I’m just used to thinking of them as people who drop bombs, who kill people . . . Anyway,’ seeing his neutral expression, ‘I wanted to spit in their eyes, but I smiled nicely, and they smiled nicely back. One was called Severin Mueller; he’s something in the embassy but didn’t say what. He only wanted to talk about the music.’

‘Ah.’ Cleeve’s head jerked up. ‘Now he is quite important to us – he’s a new attaché from the embassy in Ankara. Why did you leave the best bit till last? Did you say anything to him?’

‘Only a few words, but I was frightened – what if they realise I am English?’

He gave her his sincere look. ‘There are lots of parties here, Saba, where the German big brass and the English are in the same room together. I’m not saying they’re making beautiful love to each other, but they talk, exchange the odd frigid smile, that sort of thing. And also, when you’re with Ozan you’re as safe as houses. Anything else?’

‘Nothing else. Some of the men got pretty drunk by the end of the evening. They asked me to sing “Lili Marleen”. I’d rehearsed it with Felipe in German. But Dermot,’ she was determined to tell him this and make him listen, ‘lovely as it is here, I don’t want to swan around indefinitely. When will I get back to North Africa?’ She heard her voice rising and made an effort to control herself. ‘Do you understand what I’m saying? If you have a definite job for me to do here I will do it as well as I can, but I’m not a spy, I’m a singer.’

He put his hands out and held her arms as though she had become briefly and unreasonably hysterical. ‘Darling sweets!’ he said. ‘Saba my love.’ He planted a paternal kiss on her forehead. ‘Of course you’re a singer. And of course we’ll have you back soon, but there is something very important for you to do first, which is why I’ve asked you here today – to bring everything, hopefully, to a happy conclusion.’

He drew close enough for her to smell the faint tang of cigarettes on his breath.

‘Right, ready. Now listen.’

Somewhere in the building the lift thunked and squealed.

He steepled his fingers together and looked at her.

‘Saba my love, you are part of an operation that has been going on for months in Turkey. Felipe is a key part of it. While you were dancing with the Germans, Felipe was doing a little exploring in the guest bedrooms of Ozan’s house.’

‘Felipe?’

‘Felipe is one of our key operatives here. Last night he was checking to see if Ozan’s guests had been careless about what they left on their bedside tables.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me this before?’

‘I’m telling you now. We had to see how well you worked first.’

She felt a kick of satisfaction and fear: so there was a reason for this.

‘Does anyone else in the band know?’

‘No one. Now,’ Cleeve drew closer, his voice dropped, ‘here’s the next part. Listen very carefully.

‘One year ago, a German fighter-pilot ace called Josef Jenke was shot down over the Black Sea. A pilot who happens to be on our payroll too. He was picked up by the Turkish police, brought to Istanbul for questioning, and in accordance with international law, he was not sent to prison but billeted in a small pension in Pera. He’s been treated pretty cushily there – allowed out for much of the day on parole, fed nicely, even supplied with the odd girl.

‘Over the months and weeks of his arrest Josef has become part of the German clan. There aren’t all that many of them here and for obvious reasons they stick together. He is a charming fellow, handsome, brave, the ladies like him, and he often dines out discreetly on his fighter-pilot exploits – his longing to fly again and take another shot at Johnny Britisher, that sort of thing. The situation now is that he gets invited to most of the parties, and he has become very close to a man called Otto Engel, who is part of an organisation called the Ostministerium – the Ministry of the East. Their main activities as far as we can work out are black-marketeering and having a rollicking good time.

‘Now here is the point.’ Cleeve looked down, as if someone might be crouching under the scruffy table. ‘Because Istanbul is now the most important neutral city in the world, we need urgently to speak to Jenke – he’s done some brilliant work for us, but we think his days are numbered. We suspect that someone inside the Ostministerium has started to smell a rat. Certain enquiries have been made to his squadron; it’s possible that any day now they will discover that he was a deserter. We need to get him out fast.’

Cleeve anticipated her question.

‘Josef loves women and music. He’s a regular guest at house parties held at a private house that the Germans use in Tarabya, which is close to their summer embassy. One of Ozan’s cronies supplies music and alcohol and girls, but he very rarely goes there.

‘These evenings are very informal; it’s difficult to know exactly what night Jenke will be there, but he knows you are coming, he knows who you are. When you get there you will sing, and maybe dance with a few people, and at some point in the evening Jenke will ask if he can have his photo taken with you. If you pose with him it will seem like the most natural thing in the world, a fan photograph if you like, and then we can snip him off,’ Cleeve scissored his nicotined fingers and smiled briefly, ‘make him a false passport and get him out of the country as quickly as possible.’

‘All in one night?’

‘Felipe is confident it can be done in one night – two at the very most.’

‘How will I know it’s him?’

Cleeve took some sheet music from his briefcase. ‘Jenke will flirt with you, and at some point he will walk up to the stage and you will hand him this, so he can sing a few bars with you. It’s the sheet music to “My Funny Valentine”. He rifled through the pages until he got to a paper clip and a loose page.

‘The instructions he needs are all written here invisibly. All you need to do is to open the music at the right page – he’s experienced, he knows what to do. He’ll take it when he’s ready. It shouldn’t be too difficult; all the lights will be turned down low and everyone will be drinking.’

Saba watched a seagull take off from the windowsill, and dissolve into mist. She heard the lift clanking through the building, the wheeze of its door opening.

‘I can do that.’ Although she wasn’t sure she could, she felt strong feelings stir in her.

‘Do you love your country, Saba?’ Cleeve said softly. He was watching her closely.

She went very still for a moment. Did she love it enough to put her own life up for grabs? She hadn’t really thought about patriotism except to know that if there was a crowd bellowing ‘There’ll Always Be an England’ or ‘Jerusalem’, her heart would be swelling, but with Germans dropping bombs on your green and pleasant land, this was hardly an unusual emotion.

‘Yes,’ she said at last. ‘I do.’

‘Good girl.’ He patted her hand. ‘Perhaps I should warn you that the parties at Tarabya occasionally get a little wild.’ Cleeve sucked in his cheeks and looked at her waggishly. ‘It’s where the Germans go to let their hair down. But Felipe will be there to keep an eye on you, and of course none of them want to upset Ozan either, he’s much too important to them.’

‘And what then? I mean after this job. I don’t want to stay indefinitely.’

‘Absolutely not,’ Cleeve was indignant. ‘We don’t want you hanging around either. As soon as Jenke has his photo and his papers, he’ll be gone and you’ll be on a courier plane back to Cairo. If you want to come back here after the war, I’m sure Ozan will give you work – so everybody wins.

‘But listen, Saba,’ his smile became a kindly frown, ‘it has to be your decision – are you sure you can do this?’

She bowed her head. Her worst nightmare as a child had her dashing on to a stage in front of a huge audience only to discover she’d forgotten her lines, what play she was in and who she was. But to back out now was more or less impossible – it was too late, and her dander was up, and she had already climbed the steps and was on the high board with Felipe and the others looking down. She took a quick breath and looked at him.

‘I’ll do it,’ she said.

Chapter 35

When Dom woke up, Barney’s size-twelve foot was thumping him on the ear. Rain pattered down on his sleeping bag. He’d been dimly aware of it falling when he’d woken in the night, but now it poured with a steady soaking sound, seeping under the canvas flaps, making their clothes clammy and damp; there would be a sea of mud when they stepped outside.

He shone his torch on his watch – 4.30 – closed his eyes and tried to go back into the dream again, a feat he’d managed quite easily as a boy in cold prep school dormitories, but no more it seemed. In the dream, he’d given birth to twins. His heart burst with love for them – these babies with their Buddha-like tummies, and deep dimples, and wrists that looked as if they had rubber bands on them. He soaped their plump little arms, held his hands over their eyes to stop soap getting in them. He lifted them out of the bath and blew raspberries in their soft flesh; he powdered them and wrapped them in warm towels, and then he handed them to a woman who put them in pyjamas and jiggled them on her knee. When she tickled them with her hair, they made chortling sounds like the deep bubbling of a stream. When he’d propped them up on cushions in front of a fire, their clear blue eyes had looked back at him – entirely content.
We trust you
, they were telling him.
We’re safe
.

Oh what a tit. He opened his eyes and sighing got up, lit a cigarette and smoked it under a dripping tarpaulin outside the tent. And gazing at the sea of mud around him, the grey skies, the rusty plates smeared with beans from last night’s meal, he mocked the midnight dreamer.

Fat babies, fat chance. It was shameful, ridiculous how much he dreamed about her, or some version of her, of which you didn’t have to be Freud to know that the twins were a part, and he was so staggeringly tired now; he simply couldn’t afford to go on like this. Since October, the round-the-clock bombing sorties had gone on with the regularity of seaside trains, and yesterday, flying between Sidi Barrani and LG101, dazed and hallucinatory, he had seen the desert as a huge piece of crinkled art paper on which his plane drew enormous lines back and forth, back and forth. When he saw he’d stopped working the controls and was simply gazing slack-jawed at this, he’d had to pinch himself and sing to get safely home.

They’d lost five Spitfires in the relentless raids of the last few weeks; two pilots, one fitter who’d crashed in a jeep in a dust storm. Today, weather permitting, he planned to fly down on his own to a temporary hangar, close to Marsa Matruh, to see if any of the old patched-up Spits being repaired there would be usable or whether they were death traps.

When Barney had heard about this plan, over supper last night, they’d fallen out about it, and gone to bed angry at each other, a thing he could never remember happening before – not at school, not at university, affable old Barney, normally speaking, was a golden retriever of a man – but tiredness, it seemed, made even the best of them chippy and humourless.