“Maybe you can …”
“You’re busy?”
“It’s frightful. Half the world trying to get in the door. I’m over January’s limit now, for entry visas, and my superiors in Istanbul are becoming tiresome.”
Zannis shook his head. “Damned war.”
“We could’ve done without, that’s certain. Why don’t you just smuggle them in? Everyone else does.”
“They’re kids, Ahmet. Sweet kids. I don’t want them to pee their pants every time some cop looks at them in the street.”
“Oh, yes, well, you’re right then. They’ll need real documents.”
“Can you reason with Istanbul?”
“Umm, yes and no. But, truth is, I may have to sweeten somebody.”
“Well, that won’t be a problem.”
“No?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
Celebi took a cigarette from a silver case and twisted it into his cigarette holder.
Zannis flicked a lighter and, as Celebi bent toward the flame, said, “What do you think, four hundred?”
“I assume you don’t mean drachmas.”
“Dollars.”
“Apiece?”
“Yes. An adult and two children.”
“Can she get dollars?”
“In Salonika?”
Celebi nodded, amused, to himself: of course. “I’ll send Madam Urglu along, say, tomorrow afternoon?”
“I’ll expect her. I have an envelope with me-German exit visas, you can get the information from them.”
“On the way out,” Celebi said.
Zannis nodded in agreement. So elegant, the dining room of the Club de Salonique, not a place to be passing envelopes across the table.
Blue sky, that afternoon, sparkling air after the rain, the snow-capped Mount Olympus visible across the bay. Zannis walked back to the office along the busy Via Egnatia, taking his time, pausing to look at the windows of the shops. He made a mental note to contact Emilia Krebs when he reached the office, giving her time to arrange the money for the bribe-he doubted any of it would ever reach Istanbul-so that by the following afternoon he could give an envelope to Madam Urglu.
He didn’t much care for Madam Urglu, said to be Celebi’s chief spy. In her fifties, pigeon-breasted and stout, with glasses on a chain around her neck and a sharp tongue. Spiraki at state security claimed she served as a spymaster for various secret agents-“coded wireless transmission Monday and Thursday nights,” he’d said, “from the top floor of the legation.” Probably he was right, Zannis thought, staring at a display of tennis rackets and a poster of a blond woman in mid-backhand, but he wondered what intelligence, secret intelligence, the Turks wanted in Salonika. Whatever it might be, he was hardly shocked.
After all, they’d been fighting the Turks forever-famously in Troy, in Homeric days, but that surely wasn’t the first time. The last time it started was in 1919, when the Greek armies had gone up into Turkey and occupied the coastal city of Smyrna. There was even talk in those days about getting Constantinople-Byzantium-back, the great capital of the Byzantine Empire, taken by Moslem Turks in 1453. They’d had it long enough, no?
Well, they still had it, now Istanbul. And the Turkish armies had retaken Smyrna in 1922: burned the town, slaughtered the Greek population, and changed the name to Izmir. In the following year a treaty was signed: three hundred and fifty thousand Turks left Greece, and a million and a half Greeks came to Greece from Turkey, came back home, where they hadn’t lived for a thousand years. Thus, in the autumn of 1940, there was still a taverna called Smyrna Betrayed, located on what had once been known as Basil-the-Slayer-of-Bulgars Street. Renamed the Street of the Franks, in memory of yet another conquest. Easy enough to find new names in a city where the wars outnumbered the streets.
Back at the office, he telephoned Emilia Krebs at the Lux Palace. She was very emotional, close to tears-as close as she ever came, he thought, and these would’ve been tears of relief. Yes, she had the money, and the minute she got off the phone she’d go out and buy dollars. Victory. He supposed you had to call it that: two kids off to grow up in a foreign country, perhaps never to see their parents again, but at least alive.
And late in the afternoon on 16 October, he rode in a taxi to the railway station so Emilia and the children could board the 17:20 express to Istanbul. In the waiting room, Nathanial and Paula sat quietly-too quietly, too much had happened to them-and Emilia Krebs gave him a sheet of Lux Palace notepaper with her address and telephone number in Berlin. “There may come a time,” she said, “when I can return the favor.”
“Maybe,” he said, meaning likely never.
“The way the world is going now, you can’t tell about the future.” The approaching train sounded its whistle and she put a hand on his arm. “I can never thank you enough,” she said. “For helping me.”
“You don’t have to thank me,” he said. “Who could say no?”
He left the office early that day and headed back to his apartment-two small rooms on a cobbled lane called Santaroza, between the railway station and the port. Not the best part of town, on the border of what had been the Jewish district before the Great Fire. He would play with his big mountain sheepdog, Melissa-honeybee-who would be waiting for him in the doorway after a hard day’s work in the neighborhood. This was a night, one of two or three every week, when he would go to his mother’s house for dinner. Melissa always accompanied him and would stay until he returned for the next visit.
She was a big girl, eighty pounds, with a thick soft black-and-white coat and a smooth face, long muzzle, and beautiful eyes-not unlike the Great Pyrenees. Queen of the street, she started her morning by walking him a few blocks toward the office, to a point where, instinct told her, he was no longer in danger of being attacked by wolves. Next, she returned home to protect the local kids on their way to school, then accompanied the postman on his rounds. That done, she would guard the chicken coop in a neighbor’s courtyard, head resting on massive paws. If a marauding fox didn’t show up, she’d wait until it was time to trot off to the school and see the kids safely home.
Nobody taught her any of this, it was all in her bloodline, coming from the mountains where her ancestors-perhaps descendants of Turkish Akbash dogs-guarded flocks but didn’t herd them. Thus she would never trot in front of or behind her charges, but stayed always to one side. Watchful. And independent; when Zannis had tried putting her on a leash she’d responded by lying down and refusing to move. Nonetheless, a splendid girl, from a mountain village where these dogs were highly valued. Zannis counted himself lucky to have been able to buy a puppy from a good litter.
She stood when he appeared, gave a single low bark of greeting, then had her pretty ears smoothed back, her muzzle flapped, and her ruff given a few affectionate tugs. Across the lane, two old ladies sitting on kitchen chairs-always brought out in good weather-beamed at the spectacle. Then he took her up to his apartment. There were two floors in the narrow building; he had the second. “We’re going to see Grandma tonight,” he told her. Melissa’s ears shot up. At the house in the old Turkish quarter by the battlements, Zannis’s grandmother always brought home the most succulent butcher’s scraps on the nights when Melissa came for dinner.
But the shopping didn’t end there. Accompanied by Zannis’s mother and his brother, Ari, his grandmother campaigned through the markets, coming home with fresh creamy feta, baby red mullet, calamari, or a chicken with yellow skin-the best kind of chicken, the only kind of chicken-making sure that she got extra feet for the soup pot. Oh they spoiled him rotten, begged him to stay over, which he often did, then sent him off with two of his shirts, boiled white and perfectly ironed.
17 October. Life back to normal, thank heaven. A few cases referred to the office-not much to be done with most of them. A local politician’s wife had gone missing; they could work on that, likely to discover she’d run off with her lover. Otherwise it was quiet. Strange-with half the continent occupied by Germany, and Great Britain standing alone in opposition and fighting for its life-but quiet. At one time, Zannis had received letters from Laurette, in Paris, but now, with the occupation, the letters came only once in a great while. He answered them, carefully, carefully, because they would be read by the German censor. So Laurette would know he was well, that he often thought of her, and something of the Salonika weather.