Istanbul Passage Read Online Free Page A

better go. Start being invisible. Here, finish this.”
    “Well, since I’m paying—”
    Leon stood up. “Some evening.”
    “Tomorrow then. One more and you’re a free man.”
    Leon looked at him, disconcerted by the phrase. “Who is he, Tommy?”
    “He’ll answer to John.”
    “As in Johann? German?”
    “As in John Doe.” He glanced up. “No funny business, okay? Let Washington ask the questions. Just do your piece. There’ll be a bonus in it, if I can talk them into it.”
    “I don’t care about that.”
    “That’s right. Good of the country. Still. Think of it as—I don’t know, for old times’ sake.” He turned his head to the room.
    “You coming?”
    “I’ll just finish this. Give the place one last look. Goddam three-ring circus, wasn’t it?” he said, his voice drooping, like his eyes, maudlin.
    Leon picked up his damp coat.
    “By the way,” Tommy said, sharp again. “Separate pieces, but where the hell’s Laleli?”
    “Past the university. Before you get to Aksaray.”
    “Christ, who goes out there?”
    “That’s the idea.”

    It was still raining hard enough to get wet again and he was shivering when he got home. The Cihangir Apartments, just down Aya Paşa from the Park, had been put up in the twenties and still had a few moderne touches in the lobby, but the plaster had begun to chip, a sign of larger decay to come. Reynolds had bought a company flat here because it had central heating, a luxury, but fuel shortages had kept the radiators tepid all during the war, and now Leon relied on space heaters, a few rows of toaster coils barely strong enough to warm your hands. The elevator was sporadic. Hot water came through the geyser in a trickle, so that it was cool by the time the tub had filled.
    None of it mattered. The first time he and Anna had come to the flat, a ritual handing over of keys, all they saw was the window with its view across the rooftops of Cihangir, past the mosques at Kabataş and Findikli to the open mouth of the Bosphorus, alive with boats. On a clear day you could see Leander’s Tower, the green park at Topkapi. That first year they’d sit with a drink after work andwatch the ferries crossing to Asia, the freighters passing up the strait. There was no balcony, just the window, a private movie screen.
    “You’ll like it here,” Perkins had said, a little wistful. “Of course, it helps if you’re handy yourself. Mr. Cicek, that’s the building—well, manager, I suppose. Not much with a wrench. With anything, really. So if you need something—”
    “Oh, it’s wonderful. Just the way it is,” Anna had said, eyes fixed on the view. “How can you bear to leave it?”
    But that was when everything was new, Istanbul something almost magical after Germany, somewhere you could breathe. Leon remembered the very first day, stepping out of Sirkeci station into a swarm of motorbikes, the smell of frying fish, trays piled with simits balanced on vendors’ heads, boats crowding the Eminönü piers, everything noisy and sunlit. In the taxi crossing Galata Bridge he had turned back to look at Sinan’s graceful minarets pricking the sky, and at that moment a flock of birds rose up, swooping around the dome of the Yeni Mosque, then diving back to the water, rippling with light, and Leon thought it was the most wonderful place he had ever seen.
    During those first weeks they didn’t see the old wooden houses, listing and creaking from neglect, the backstreets with clumps of garbage and mud, cracked fountains seeping moss. They saw color, heaps of spices, everything that wasn’t Germany, and water everywhere, a city where you took ferries just to be out on it, looking at domes and spires, not the crooked dirty streets. Anna wanted to see everything, the famous sights, then things she found in books, the Camondo Stairs, twisting down Galata Hill, the cast-iron Bulgarian church, the Byzantine mosaics out near the old city walls where they could eat picnics on the