Jasmine Nights

by Julia Gregson

  ‘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.

  ‘Forget it, Dom,’ Barney had advised flatly. ‘It’s our first afternoon off in weeks.’ Barney had tried to tempt him with pleasant Cairo alternatives: some cold beers for once instead of the warm rubbish they were drinking now; Dorothy Lamour at the Sphinx – Barney waggled his hips, outlined huge bosoms with his hands. It could be their last day off for a long, long time.

  All true.

  ‘We need the Spits,’ Dom said flatly.

  Which was true too – every single aircraft was needed now, because Bingley’s confident assertion that they would banish the Luftwaffe from Africa during the August raids had proved a pipe dream and now a new last push was planned. There had been no formal briefings yet, but the mess and the bars of Cairo were buzzing with rumours that the Allies were about to descend on North Africa in the biggest seaborne invasion the world had ever seen; that once the beaches and ports had been secured, the ground bases and airfields could be quickly established, and then tick, tick, tick, like a game of Chinese chequers, Italy would be open to invasion, the Allies would have dominance in the air, and the whole sodding thing would soon be over. Dom was in two minds as to how he felt about that. He wanted it over now, and dreaded it too. How did one come down from this – this nerve-shredding life, this death. Life post-Africa. And life post-Saba, even though, as he often reminded himself, he hardly thought of her now.

  When Dom didn’t answer, Barney stopped his silly Dorothy dancing.

  ‘You are not seriously thinking about it, are you?’

  ‘Not thinking about it. I’ve said yes.’

  There was a long, tense silence.

  ‘You’re a silly bugger, Dom,’ Barney said at last. ‘You’re exhausted.’

  ‘I’m not.’ Though he hardly slept now – his body felt the shudder and vibration of an aircraft all the time.

  Barney tried again, screwing his face up in the effort.

  ‘I don’t know if you remember this, Dom, but my father used to train a couple of racehorses, and he told me once that there was a very fine line between the horse who was a wonderfully brave jumper and the one that was an absolute fucking eejit. You’ve stepped over it.’ Barney pronounced eejit in a jokey Irish way, to soften the words, but there was a flash of real fury in his eyes.

  They’d looked at each
other, breathing heavily.

  ‘You of all people should know that,’ Barney said next.

  Barney had seen Jacko go down too; he’d taken Dom aside before take-off, and said, ‘Tell him not to go – he’s too windy.’ He’d heard the fading screams as the plane twirled like a useless piece of charred paper until it hit the sea.

  They never spoke of it.

  ‘If you want to blame me for that,’ said Dom, ‘don’t bother. I do a good job of it every single day.’

  ‘Dom, that’s mad.’ It took Barney a moment to decode this, and now the expression on his face was one of sorrow and concern. ‘He was a free agent – we all were.’

  And Dom, looking down on Barney, whose enormous feet now dangled over the end of his camp bed, wished with all his heart he could subscribe to the free-agent idea too, but it was not possible and never would be.

  ‘So, shutting up now.’ Barney’s face grew cold and dark. He reached for a cigarette. ‘Fly the bloody thing.’ When he looked like that, Dom saw how he’d aged. He seemed long-suffering, like quite another person.

  ‘Great,’ said Dom. ‘Give my regards to Dorothy.’

  Dom had a brief conversation with a nineteen-year-old mechanic inside a hangar when he got to Marsa Matruh. The boy’s face was waxy green with fatigue, he’d worked all through the night to repair the Spit. They shared a quick meal from a random collection of half-empty tins. After the last mouthful of beans, Dom put on his damp flying suit, stuffed torch, map, parachute and revolver under the cockpit seat, and took off again as quickly as he could, hoping to be home before night fell.

  Grey afternoon light, the desert a dun-coloured porridgy mass below him, a bank of cumulus cloud in the west where more rain threatened.

  He was flying at 15,000 feet and making good progress, concentrating hard on the engine’s noise, when he heard another sound, insignificant at first, like a fly swatter landing on cardboard. Glancing through the canopy, he saw from the corner of his eye the black shadow of an Me 109, and then heard the rat-tat-tat of more bullets before the plane sped away.

  His first reaction was to swear, and then the weary everyday thought, oh fucking hell, not again, wondering how much he’d be hurt this time. In a heartbeat he heard his own voice, panicked, shouting no, no, no, then he was gagging, the wet of his vomit in the gas mask now, the cockpit full of choking cordite fumes and glycol that made his nose run and his eyes stream. Eight seconds, eight seconds, the words pounded in his ears – eight measly seconds in which to bale out, to tear off his oxygen mask, release straps, turn the plane upside down and get himself out.

  He wrestled desperately with the controls for a moment, and then realised it was no good. He grabbed the parachute from under the seat, ripped open the canopy and flung himself into the air, crying out as the parachute bunched between his legs, refusing to open, and then the long swooning dive towards the tilting earth.

  Chapter 36

  They were driving towards the German party house for their first engagement when Felipe glanced at Saba almost coyly, and said, ‘Were you surprised when Mr Cleeve told you about me?’

  ‘Yes. I was, very,’ she said. ‘And relieved too. I haven’t done this sort of thing before.’

  ‘Don’t be nervous, Saba.’ He patted her hand, the long fingernails on his playing hand scratched her slightly. ‘I don’t think our pilot will come for a few days, and these men don’t want to make trouble; they want to have a good time, to eat a lot of bratwurst, get a bit little drunk, forget about the war for one night. You have nothing to fear.’

  She sat watching the light fade from the tops of the trees, hoping all this was true. Felipe’s usually excellent English seemed a little more garbled during this explanation. His red satin shirt had a ring of sweat around armpits that smelled of ripe fruit.

  She asked, ‘Does Mr Ozan know all these people well?’ When what she really wanted to ask was: do you trust him? Will he keep us safe?

  Felipe glanced at her quickly.

  ‘He knows everyone, all the politicians, most of the Germans. He is a very important man.’

  ‘How do you become so important?’

  ‘In Turkey, if you want to be very, very wealthy, I mean really wealthy, you make deals with politicians, it’s just the way it is,’ Felipe muttered. ‘This war is a nice earner for many of them.’

  ‘But—’ Saba felt alarmed again, but Felipe cut her off.

  ‘That’s enough – he is a very good man. He is good to us, and we have our own other reasons for being here.’

  The car slowed down to avoid an enormous pothole. ‘Now, concentrate, please,’ Felipe said. ‘I want to run through the plan again. As far as they are concerned you are a Turkish girl singer, a friend of Ozan’s, your folks came from a village near Üsküdar and you’re new to my band. What is the name of the village of your father?’

  ‘Üvezli.’

  ‘Üvezli. We need to know if they ask. I don’t think they will. Tonight will be a getting-to-know you night – is for the relax, the music, we have a good time.’ Felipe gave a shaky smile. ‘So, we will play two or three sets of music – you can leave all this to me – and when we’re not playing, we will sit and eat and drink, you may be asked to dance and that is fine. When you are dancing, smile a lot and talk as little as possible – they’ll expect you to be shy.’

  Felipe pulled at his bow tie.

  ‘It’s hot tonight, isn’t it?’

  When he opened the car window, she felt the sticky scented air move over her face and was glad of it.

  ‘Hot for autumn – in winter the winds come down from Russia they cut like a knife.’

  The smell of his sweat and his cologne filled the car. He told her she was not to panic if he occasionally left the room where they would perform. Part of his work there was to make a detailed map of the house, and to check if any of the officers had been careless with the official papers they sometimes travelled with. During these breaks, he might be upstairs under the pretext of having a ‘pee-pee’ or a smoke. If she saw him take a girl upstairs, or having a pinch of naughty salt with the Germans, she mustn’t be shocked. It was important for him to be one of the boys. He would never be gone long.

  The faint pinpricks of light they were driving towards became a small village. The scent of roasting meat and spices filled their car and made Saba’s mouth water – in the excitement of performing, she had forgotten to eat.

  On the outskirts of the village, a group of old men were drinking coffee outside a café lit by a kerosene lamp; further on a family sat eating a meal together underneath a trellis heavy with jasmine and vines. The young woman had a baby on her lap. A toddler rested against the side of a young man and waited for its food; a donkey, munching a bundle of fresh green leaves, looked pleased with itself. A family at rest with the world and each other.

  ‘They looked happy,’ she said to Felipe. For that moment, it seemed like the most seductive thing in the word.

  ‘Yes.’ He gunned the accelerator.

  And the sudden thought came to her that she knew not a thing about Felipe’s private life. He was not a gabby man, and though they had talked about various things – music they liked, future plans, other musicians – their moments of real intimacy came when he accompanied her on his guitar.

  ‘Do you like this kind of work, Felipe?’ she asked. ‘You know . . . the other work at the German house . . . not the music part.’

  She still found it impossible to utter the word spying – it sounded preposterous, like a child’s game of pretend, or maybe too frightening to say out loud.

  ‘No.’ His face glowed green in the dash lights. ‘No! I don’t like it too much, but I do it. Mr Cleeve says our man Jenke has important information – that’s enough for me. We . . .’

  His voice tailed off like a bag with the air punched out of it, then he said, ‘I hate the bloody Nazis – I would like to strangle them all.’

  The air between them seemed to thicken and become full of terrible t
hings. After a silence he added, ‘I had a wife before . . . in Berlin . . . her name was Rachel. A beautiful woman,’ he said, ‘Jewish. I had a daughter too – Naomi – as lovely as her mother, very musical. You remind me of her.’

  ‘Please don’t . . . if you . . . I’m so sorry.’

  ‘No. No. It’s all right. I should say these things before. I was on tour with the band, six months. Barcelona, France, Madrid. Good fun, well, you know. I came back to Berlin. Lots of presents.’ He took both hands off the wheel to show how full his arms had been. ‘Our apartment smashed, family gone.’

  ‘I am so sorry, I . . .’ She could have kicked herself for her stupid question. Felipe was another heartbroken stray like Bog and the acrobats. She seemed to be making a speciality of these innocent enquiries that detonated a bomb.

  The car filled with cigarillo smoke.

  ‘Don’t say sorry.’ He gave a great exhaling sigh. ‘No, don’t. Is necessary you know why I do this – I should have told you before. I had a bad choice to make after it happened: I could stay and be arrested myself – I’m half Jewish, you see – or I could come to Istanbul. I don’t know if I’ve made the good choice, the only thing I know is that without this,’ he turned and touched his guitar on the back seat, ‘I would have killed myself.’

  He started to hum, either to end the conversation, or maybe as an expression of some relief at having poured out even a tiny bit of his heart. By the time they arrived at the white house in Tarabya, he had his work face on again.

  Felipe looked for a place to park, Saba gazed around her. The house was set in a clearing surrounded by a screen of pine trees and bounded by a high wooden fence. Beyond the fence were some nondescript cypress and Judas trees, scrub, a dirt road and no nosy neighbours, which was probably why the Germans had chosen it. Close enough, Cleeve had said, to their official summer residence to be convenient, but far enough away for it to function as a sort of unofficial officers’ mess, where they could bring girls and have gambling parties and entertain local business people without too much bothersome protocol.