A Colder War

17

Kell woke before dawn on the Istanbul sleeper with a coronary headache and a raging thirst directly linked to the bottle of Macallan he had polished off the night before with two young Turkish businessmen who were en route to Bulgaria for a three-day conference on ‘white goods’. Two ibuprofen and half a litre of water later, Kell was gazing out of the scratched window of his four-man sleeper compartment drinking a cup of sweetened black Nescafé and listening to the snores of the moustachioed widower occupying the bunk below his own.

The train shunted into Haydarpaşa station just after six o’clock. Kell zipped up his bag, bade farewell to his travelling companions and took a ferry across the Bosporus to Karaköy. Ordinarily he might have felt the traditional romantic excitement of the Western traveller arriving by sea in one of the great cities of the world, but he was in a frustrated mood, hungover and tired, and Istanbul felt like just another staging post on his quest to solve the riddle of Paul Wallinger’s death. He might as well have been arriving in Brussels or Freetown or Prague. There would be endless meetings at the Consulate. There would be long telephone calls to London. He would have to spend many hours searching Wallinger’s yali in Yeniköy. An indoor life. At no point — if past experience was anything to go by — would he have the chance to relax and to enjoy the city, to visit the Topkapi, for example, or to take a boat trip to the Black Sea. He remembered visiting Istanbul as a twenty-year-old university student, Claire at his side on their first summer together as boyfriend and girlfriend. They had stayed for five days in a cheap backpacker’s hostel in Sultanahamet, surviving on raki and chickpea stews. A few months later, on the eve of his twenty-first birthday, Kell had received the tap on the shoulder from SIS. It was like remembering a bygone era. His twenty-year-old self was now a stranger to him; Claire had walked the streets of Istanbul with a different man.

He texted Claire then walked through sporadic crowds towards the Galata Bridge. It was a warm, blustery morning. Ferries were bumping the quay, eight lanes of traffic stalled in both directions in the rush-hour crush of Kennedy Avenue. Men were selling steamed mussels and blackened husks of corn from makeshift barbecues erected beside the newspaper kiosks and ticket booths on the promenade. Kell bought a copy of the International Herald Tribune and walked along the lower, pedestrianized section of the Galata Bridge, aiming for a restaurant that he knew fifty metres along the walkway. Above him, clumps of men were fishing from the eastern side of the bridge; thin plastic lines dropped down in front of the restaurant, near-invisible against the bright clouds and silver waters of the Bosporus. A young, unshaven waiter showed Kell to a table adjacent to a group of German tourists who were drinking glasses of tea and staring at a fold-up map of Turkey. As he sat down, Kell immediately pointed at a photograph of some fried eggs on a five-language, laminated menu. The waiter smiled, said: ‘Chips?’ and Kell nodded, eager to see off his hangover.

It was only then, settling into his chair and looking out across the water at the boats on the swollen sea, at the far Asian shore, that the city at last began to open up for him, the magic and the romance of Constantinople. Kell was himself again. To the south-east, he could see birds twisting on warm swells above the minarets of Hagia Sophia; to the north, the huddled wharfs and buildings of Galata, splashed by sun. He drank a double espresso, smoked a Winston Light, and read the headline stories on the Tribune as a sudden wind cracked the pages of his newspaper. A tourist poster of Cappadoccia was tacked to the wall of the restaurant. Kell mopped up the yolks of his fried eggs with hunks of soft white bread, ordered a second cup of coffee, then paid his bill.

Half an hour later he was walking into the dimly lit lobby of the Grand Hotel de Londres, an old world Istanbul institution a stone’s throw from the British Consulate. The small, red-carpeted lobby was empty save for a cleaning lady dusting a framed oil painting on the stairs. Above her, an ancient glass chandelier rattled in the draught of the street door as it closed behind Kell. A tap on the reception desk bell summoned a voluminous man from an office hidden behind a small brown door. Kell signed the register in his own name, handed over his battered passport and took his bags upstairs in a cramped lift to a bedroom with views over Beyoğlu and, in the distance, a slim, shimmering strip of the Golden Horn.

At around eleven o’clock, having showered and shaved and swallowed two more painkillers, he wandered downstairs. He wasn’t due at the Consulate until after lunch and wanted to finish My Name Is Red in the hotel bar. He took the stairs, passing the same cleaning lady, who had now made her way to the second floor where she was reverently wiping the glass on a framed picture of Atatürk.

Kell heard their conversation long before he saw their faces. A sing-song English, decorated by laughter, and the elegant, well-spoken tones of his old friend and colleague, suddenly not in London anymore, but staying in the very same hotel.

Amelia Levene and Elsa Cassani were seated opposite one another on an ornate sofa in the residents’ lounge looking, for all the world, like a mother and daughter who had just returned from a sightseeing trip to Sultanahamet. Kell instantly sensed the rapport between them; it had been evident in the timbre of Amelia’s voice, a particular softness that she employed only with trusted friends and confidantes. Elsa was plainly in awe of her, yet her manner was not nervous or overly respectful; she seemed relaxed, even slightly mischievous in Amelia’s company. There were two glasses of tea in front of them, on small white saucers, and a packet of Turkish chocolate biscuits, doubtless bought at a nearby shop.

‘We must stop meeting like this,’ Kell said as he walked towards them. Amelia looked up and smiled at the joke. Elsa turned to see who had spoken and seemed to suppress a desire to yell ‘Minchia!’ again at the sight of him.

‘I was wondering when you’d get here,’ Amelia said, glancing pointedly at her watch. ‘Elsa told me you were on the sleeper?’

‘And I thought you were in London,’ he replied, and could not work out if he was pleased to see her, or irritated that Amelia had yet again kept him out of the loop. They kissed one another and a waiter appeared, asking Kell if he would like a drink. He ordered a tea and sat beside Elsa, wondering how long it would take for somebody to tell him what the hell was going on.