by Alex Gerlis
‘Chromium, Roly…’
‘I fear I must have been dozing when we did that particular mineral in science. Tell me, Mathers…’
‘It’s a metal, Roly. It’s a vital ingredient in the manufacture of stainless steel. The Turks are supplying it to the Germans in unacceptably large quantities. Without it their manufacture of armaments and the machinery of war is – not to put too fine a point on it – buggered. With it, our chances of winning the war are buggered. There’s a real danger of complacency on our part, Roly. Certainly things are going in our favour at the moment but all that could change. Nazi Germany is still a formidable war machine. But we may be able to salvage something from this. We may have failed in persuading the Turks to switch sides, but we could ensure that if they’re going to remain neutral then at least it could be our kind of neutrality, if you get my drift. Apparently that chap Mehmet Demir’s here?’
‘Yes, but very much in the background, like me. We nodded from a distance.’
‘How well do you know him?’
‘Not terribly well, but well enough for him to know who I am and vice versa.’
‘Tell me a bit more about Demir.’
‘A career army officer captured by us in the Great War and held in one of our prison camps in India for five years, which doesn’t make him terribly well disposed towards us. Joined their intelligence outfit the MAH sometime in the late 1920s, we think, promoted to number two in the mid thirties and to head of it a couple of years ago. Very smart, holds his cards close to his chest – not the clubbable type. Certainly not to be trusted from our point of view but then one would hardly expect that.’
‘I think you ought to meet him while we’re here, Roly.’
Chapter 2
Istanbul
February 1943
In the end he was undone by a stupid mistake: a basic, schoolboy error – such an obvious trap to fall into they’d hardly even bothered to cover it during his training. He could have kicked himself, except three or four men were already in the process of doing a pretty good job of just that.
In the shockingly short amount of time he had to reflect he thought what a shame this all was. Things had been going so well. He knew he could sometimes be accused of overconfidence – a degree of cockiness bordering on arrogance perhaps – but even taking that into account he felt he had good cause to think he’d made a pretty good fist of things.
* * *
The chaps at Istanbul station had been hand-wringing in their caution. Bryant and Stone came as a pair and Cooke felt they sounded like the manufacturers of matches, a far safer profession.
‘Don’t jump into anything, Cooke. Be careful. Be sceptical,’ said Bryant.
‘And don’t forget to run everything past us, any little thing you’re told,’ was Stone’s advice.
‘That’s right, Cooke, keep us informed,’ echoed Bryant.
‘And don’t go gallivanting around the city. Turkey may be neutral but this is a dangerous place,’ said Stone.
‘In fact, Cooke, all the more dangerous for being neutral.’ The last piece of advice came from both of them, speaking in unison like an out-of-tune choir.
‘And if you make any contacts let us know. We can run their names past our contacts in the police. We’ll soon flush the wrong ’uns out.’
He honestly didn’t know why Bryant and Stone bothered. After all, if they’d been half decent at their jobs they’d have already found out about the shipments. Because they hadn’t, he’d been sent out by London.
He’d nodded along to Bryant and Stone’s words of wisdom. Of course he wouldn’t do anything rash, of course he’d keep them in the picture, and of course he knew he was part of a team.
But in just a couple of weeks he made more progress than they’d managed in months and he was damned if he was going to hand everything over for them to take all the credit. He’d see this through to the end; it would be a feather in his cap, not theirs.
He’d met a charming taxi driver called Harun who’d been in the rank round the corner from his hotel and who offered to be his driver for a very reasonable daily rate. As far as Cooke was concerned, Harun was above suspicion: after all he’d found him on the rank – not the other way round – and he didn’t seem to ask awkward questions. There certainly wouldn’t be any need to check Harun out with Bryant and Stone.
On top of that Harun loved Britain: he was a passionate Anglophile. Harun assured him he loved Winston Churchill almost as much as he loved Kemal Atatürk.
So Cooke was happy to let Harun drive him round the city. On their third evening Harun took him to a bar run by his very good friend Vasil, in Unkapani. Vasil turned out to be Bulgarian and he soon assured Cooke – whom he knew as Gilbert, the cover name Cooke was using – that he already regarded him as a brother and a man he could trust with all the money in the world.
They were sitting in Vasil’s private lounge, a bottle of raki on the table between them, Vasil pressing more and more of it on Cooke who was drinking it neat. By the time he realised the Bulgarian was diluting his with water the Englishman was feeling quite light-headed. Vasil’s bar turned out to be a front for a brothel, though Cooke had to admit it was such a tasteful and friendly place where the exchange of money was more of an afterthought than anything else that it wasn’t really a brothel as such, certainly not in the way people like Bryant and Stone would understand it. Not at all like the one he’d visited in Paris before the war with such unpleasant and frankly embarrassing consequences.
Vasil’s place, Cooke decided, was more like an upmarket hotel where one made friends and where one thing naturally led to another. The particular friend Cooke made there was called Yvette, and Vasil told him Yvette was French which Cooke doubted: her inability to speak more than the odd word of French was a clue and he suspected she may be Turkish. But he didn’t push the matter, so to speak. Yvette was enthusiastic and experienced and seemed to be genuinely fond of him; he was happy to give her money if only to help with her widowed mother who lived in Izmir, which also cast doubt on her being French.
Harun took him to Vasil’s place most nights and on the fourth or fifth occasion Yvette asked why he was in Istanbul. It wasn’t that he volunteered the information as such – she’d asked him what he was doing in the city and he’d told her he was a salesman. A couple of nights later, propped up on the same pillows and smoking the same cigarettes, she said she didn’t believe him because he was too smart to be a salesman. So he mentioned – in passing really – that actually he worked for the British government and he hoped she’d understand if he couldn’t tell her any more than that, which he immediately regretted; however, fortunately it appeared Yvette hadn’t been listening.
Two evenings later Vasil took him aside before he had the chance to join Yvette. ‘Yvette will be with you soon, my friend. And as a special treat she will be joined by her sister – she’s just seventeen! Have you ever been with two women?’
Cooke shook his head, the rest of him shaking in anticipation.
‘It is a wonderful experience, I can promise you. And because you’re an Englishman, this will be on the house, as you say.’
Cooke said he was terribly grateful…
‘…but first,’ said Vasil, ‘you’ll meet a friend of mine!’
Which was how he met Ulrich, who according to Vasil was a Swiss gentleman, a good client of his and a very big admirer of the British – if anything, Ulrich loved the British more than Vasil.
Cooke did wonder whether he’d been a bit too forthcoming with Ulrich. While one didn’t want to be as cautious as Bryant and Stone suggested, nor did one want to be careless. But Ulrich was a particularly charming and, it had to be said, persuasive man. He was the kind who moved a conversation along with a series of seemingly innocuous but perfectly timed questions which it would have been rude not to answer. It also had to be said Cooke was perhaps distracted by the excitement of what lay ahead with Yvette and her seventeen-year-old sister.
Ulrich told
him he was from Zurich and was a shipping agent: he arranged the transportation of goods by sea and beyond. ‘The Mediterranean, the Aegean, the Black Sea, even the Danube… my clients are from all sides of this dreadful war, but my heart is with the British.’
Cooke reckoned this was too good an opportunity to miss. Did Ulrich by any chance know anything about chromium shipments?
Ulrich’s face remained impassive and then there was a frown which seemed to indicate the question needed to be more detailed, as if he was waiting for Cooke to finish.
‘By which I mean specifically from Turkey to the Nazi territories.’
Ulrich nodded as if he knew exactly what he was talking about. He paused while he lit up a Turkish cigarette, its distinctive aroma soon filling the small room.
‘I think I can probably help you – perhaps if you come back here this time tomorrow night? And between now and then I think it would be best not to say anything to anyone about our meeting. There are so many enemies of the British out there.’
So Cooke hadn’t said a word to anyone, even though by now it occurred to him that maybe he ought to mention something to Bryant and Stone. After all it was standard operating procedure to let the station know if you’d arranged a meeting or had a strong lead. But he decided against it: to do so would mean him having to explain about Vasil and the brothel and then about Ulrich, whom he’d perhaps told too much.
He was now distracted; so much so the evening with Yvette and her sister was a dismal failure, which made him feel even more uneasy. Whatever age the sister was it was certainly not seventeen and she was quite evidently not related to Yvette; if anything she looked older, and whereas the former was tall and olive-skinned, the sister was short with a pasty complexion. The meeting with Ulrich had disconcerted him; he found he couldn’t stop thinking about his wife and of how appalled she’d be at his behaviour.
* * *
The next day Harun wasn’t there. As he approached the side road behind the hotel where he normally met him, he was met by a whippet of a man who introduced himself as Besim. Besim led him by the elbow to a car which was obviously not a taxi. It was a large ancient Fiat, the letter ‘i’ missing from the badge and almost as wide as the street. Besim explained that Harun sent his apologies but his son was unwell, which took Cooke by surprise: Harun had told Cooke in unnecessary detail about every member of his family. He even knew about second cousins. Not once had he mentioned a son.
Besim drove Cooke to Beyoğlu on the European side of the Bosphorus, the car’s chassis seeming to sway every time Besim changed gear or turned a corner. Cooke had become familiar with Beyoğlu; it was called the new town but in fact the area was older than most European cities. It was only new compared to Sultanahmet. It was where most of the city’s Jews lived and its winding roads led into the Karaköy district. Just off Bankalar Caddesi, Besim pulled into a courtyard and before Cooke had got out of the car high iron gates had closed behind them.
Ulrich was waiting in a basement, the room hazy with cigarette smoke.
‘Do you know where you are, my friend?’
Cooke said he thought he was most probably in Karaköy.
‘There is a dock near here from where they ship chromium across the Black Sea and from there into the Danube where it is taken up to Czechoslovakia – or at least what used to be Czechoslovakia. There is a ship in the dock at the moment which is taking on board a cargo of chromium – they prefer to do that late at night. You’ll find the dock very near the Galata bridge.’
‘Will someone show me?’
‘It will be safer for you to go on your own – you can’t miss it. It looks less suspicious if you have no one with you. The ship is a Romanian vessel called the Alina. When you get back here, Besim will take you to Vasil’s – you’ll be able to relax there. Are you armed, my friend?’
Cooke assured him he wasn’t, though he was beginning to wish he was. He let Ulrich search him nonetheless and then set out to find the Alina.
A bitter wind had picked up as he walked towards the Golden Horn. It seemed to be coming from every direction, down the Bosphorus from the Black Sea and up from the Sea of Marmara. Cooke was now worried. Something about the Swiss made him uneasy and he hadn’t associated the jetties on the Golden Horn with freight traffic.
He paused a few times, checking he wasn’t being followed. He thought about turning back or maybe entering one of the bars whose rear entrances opened onto the alleys he was walking down. His training had been clear enough: if he had reason to doubt, pull out. One of his trainers had made a rhyme out of it and another had made a particularly crude joke out of the phrase.
But he carried on, his loping gait giving the appearance that he was stepping over puddles. It was when he was in a lane close enough to the Golden Horn for him to smell the sea and the diesel, and to feel the spray and hear the waves, that he committed the schoolboy error, the stupid mistake.
‘Timothy Charles Cooke.’
The voice rang out clearly from behind him on the lane, above the wind and the noise of the Golden Horn. His name was announced in the formal way his mother used when she was angry or the head teacher did at boarding school on the one occasion when he was awarded a prize on speech day.
And of course Timothy Charles Cooke should have carried on because as far as he was aware, no one in Istanbul other than Bryant and Stone knew him as Timothy Charles Cooke. He was James Gilbert. Maybe he’d have got away with pausing before carrying on or even – at a stretch – with turning round to see who’d called out, but Timothy Charles Cooke stopped and said, ‘Yes, can I help you?’
A stupid mistake: a basic, schoolboy error.
* * *
They’d bundled him into a doorway and from there into what appeared to be an empty building and were now kicking him. But he managed to think clearly: the beating-up he was receiving was little worse than he’d got used to at prep school, and as he did then, he rolled himself into a ball, taking care to protect his head. If they’d wanted to kill him, he reasoned, they’d have done it straight away. And if it was the enemy they certainly wouldn’t want to kill him: they’d want to know what he knew, they’d want names.
He reckoned if he could hold out until the morning, when he’d miss his seven o’clock call to Bryant or Stone, then he’d be all right: they’d press the alarm bells and put the word out to the Turks, ‘…one of our chaps missing, perhaps you could check with the Germans if you’d be so kind…’ and eventually he’d be released once he’d given them some low-grade stuff to be happy with.
But then the kicking stopped and the men who’d been doing it parted. Ulrich stared down at him as if he was a piece of dirt.
‘Timothy Charles Cooke.’
It was a statement rather than a question.
Ulrich shifted his gaze from Timothy Charles Cooke to the man to his right: Besim, the driver. Ulrich nodded and two men grabbed Cooke by the arms while another grabbed his head and jerked it back, exposing his neck.
It was only then Timothy Charles Cooke noticed the blade in Besim’s hand, long and highly polished, its touch ice cold against the Englishman’s skin.
Chapter 3
Thessaloniki, Nazi-occupied Greece
March 1943
They came late at night on the first Friday of March towards the end of the second year of the German occupation of Thessaloniki.
The knocking at the door was tentative at first but became louder and more urgent while the three women hesitated, huddled together in the back room as they tried to decide whether they should answer it.
Perla looked at her mother and mother-in-law, sitting uncomfortably close together on the small sofa. The two women had an intense dislike of each other going back even before she and Alvertos had met. Perla had little doubt that if she asked either woman why she disliked the other it was unlikely they’d remember: it was more a general dislike, two strong-willed women who didn’t get on. But since the beginning of February they’d been thrown together in the g
hetto when Perla, the two children and her mother Klara had been forced to move into her mother-in-law Benvenida’s small basement apartment off Mitropoleos in the heart of the city’s Jewish district.
Since then the two grandmothers had become unlikely allies and even friends. The fear that gripped the fifty thousand Jews in the ghetto bound them together. They would sit on the sofa, rocking back and forth, holding hands, sipping strong mint tea and bemoaning their ill fortune; one breaking down in tears before being comforted by the other. A few minutes later they would reverse the process. All this time, Perla would be trying to look after Moris and his younger sister Eleonora. She was wracked with fear herself but tried hard not to show it in front of the children. When she needed it the most she received scant help from her mother and mother-in-law, other than at meal times when the two older women would get in each other’s way in the cramped kitchen, hostilities resumed as they argued over the correct ingredients for centuries-old recipes.
‘We don’t answer the door, not at this time of night. It can only mean trouble.’ Her mother slowly nodded her head as she pronounced this, as if they were words of wisdom handed down the generations.
‘I think we’d better answer it,’ said her mother-in-law. ‘It may be someone with good news or with food – or even news of Alvertos.’
‘What if it’s not good news, Benvenida? When did we last get good news about anything?’
‘No, Klara, if it’s not good news then whoever it is will break down the door anyway and we could even get into trouble for not opening it. Perla, you’d better go and open it.’
‘You want me to go? It’s your home, Benvenida…’
Neither of the older women responded; they both stared at Perla, making it clear she shouldn’t have questioned them and it was her duty to go to the door. Perla left the tiny sitting room and walked to the entrance. When she’d undone the bolts and opened the door she found herself gripping the handle in fear and her chest tighten. The rumours which had gathered such pace in recent days about all the Jews being arrested must be true. The man on the other side of the door was a police officer. He was not in uniform and she only knew him as Mihalis; however, she did know that her husband was always trying to stay one step ahead of Mihalis because he was Alvertos’ nemesis.
