In 1945 Istanbul, American undercover agent Leon Bauer's attempt to save a life leads to a desperate manhunt, a game of shifting loyalties, and an unexpected love affair.

"Reminiscent of the works of Graham Greene."

Autorentext

Joseph Kanon is the Edgar Award–winning author of Los Alamos and nine other novels: The Prodigal Spy, Alibi, Stardust, Istanbul Passage, Leaving Berlin, Defectors, The Accomplice, The Berlin Exchange, and The Good German, which was made into a major motion picture starring George Clooney and Cate Blanchett. Other awards include the Hammett Award of the International Association of Crime Writers and the Human Writes Award of the Anne Frank Foundation. He lives in New York City.

Klappentext

The "New York Times"-bestselling tale of an American undercover agent in 1945 Istanbul who must navigate a murky world of compromise and betrayal. Expatriate American businessman Leon Bauer was drawn into Instanbul, doing undercover odd jobs. As the espionage community packs up and a city prepares for the realities of postwar life, Leon is given one last routine assignment.

Zusammenfassung
In the bestselling tradition of espionage novels by John LeCarre and Alan Furst, Istanbul Passage brilliantly illustrates why Edgar Award–winning author Joseph Kanon has been hailed as "the heir apparent to Graham Greene" (The Boston Globe).

Istanbul survived the Second World War as a magnet for refugees and spies. Even expatriate American Leon Bauer was drawn into this shadow world, doing undercover odd jobs in support of the Allied war effort. Now as the espionage community begins to pack up and an apprehensive city prepares for the grim realities of postwar life, Leon is given one last routine assignment. But when the job goes fatally wrong—an exchange of gunfire, a body left in the street, and a potential war criminal on his hands—Leon is trapped in a tangle of shifting loyalties and moral uncertainty.

Played out against the bazaars and mosques and faded mansions of this knowing, ancient Ottoman city, Istanbul Passage is the unforgettable story of a man swept up in the dawn of the Cold War, of an unexpected love affair, and of a city as deceptive as the calm surface waters of the Bosphorus that divides it.

Leseprobe
1
BEBEK

THE FIRST ATTEMPT HAD to be called off. It had taken days to arrange the boat and the safe house and then, just a few hours before the pickup, the wind started, a poyraz, howling down from the northeast, scooping up water as it swept across the Black Sea. The Bosphorus waves, usually no higher than boat wakes by the time they reached the shuttered yalis along the shore, now churned and smashed against the landing docks. From the quay, Leon could barely make out the Asian side, strings of faint lights hidden behind a scrim of driving rain. Who would risk it? Even the workhorse ferries would be thrown off schedule, never mind a bribed fishing boat. He imagined the fisherman calculating his chances: a violent sea, sightless, hoping the sudden shape forty meters away wasn’t a lumbering freighter, impossible to dodge. Or another day safe in port, securing ropes and drinking plum brandy by the cast-iron stove. Who could blame him? Only a fool went to sea in a storm. The passenger could wait. Days of planning. Called by the weather.

“How much longer?” Mihai said, pulling his coat tighter.

They were parked just below Rumeli Hisari, watching the moored boats tossing, pulling against their ties.

“Give it another half hour. If he’s late and I’m not here—”

“He’s not late,” Mihai said, dismissive. He glanced over. “He’s that important?”

“I don’t know. I’m just the delivery boy.”

“It’s freezing,” Mihai said, turning on the motor. “This time of year.”

Leon smiled. In Istanbul’s dream of itself it was always summer, ladies eating sherbets in garden pavilions, caïques floating by. The city shivered through winters with braziers and sweaters, somehow surprised that it had turned cold at all.

Mihai ran the heater for a few minutes then switched it off, burrowing, turtlelike, into his coat. “So come with me but no questions.”

Leon rubbed his hand across the window condensation, clearing it. “There’s no risk to you.”

“Wonderful. Something new. You couldn’t do this yourself?”

“He’s coming out of Constancia. For all I know, he only speaks Romanian. Then what? Sign language? But you—”

Mihai waved this off. “He’ll be German. One of your new friends.”

“You don’t have to do this.”

“It’s a small favor. I’ll get it back.”

He lit a cigarette, so that for a second Leon could see his grizzled face and the wiry salt-and-pepper hair on his head. Now more salt than pepper. When they had met, it had been dark and wavy, styled like the Bucharest dandy he’d once been, known in all the cafés on the Calea Victoriei.

“Besides, to see the rats leaving—” he said, brooding. “They wouldn’t let us out. Now look at them.”

“You did what you could.” A Palestinian passport, free to come and go in Bucharest, to beg for funds, leasing creaky boats, a last lifeline, until that was taken away too.

Mihai drew on the cigarette, staring at the water running down the windshield. “So how is it with you?” he said finally. “You look tired.”

Leon shrugged, not answering.

“Why are you doing this?” Mihai turned to face him. “The war’s over.”

“Yes? Nobody told me.”

“No, they want to start another one.”

“Nobody I know.”

“Be careful you don’t get to like it. You start enjoying it—” His voice trailed off, rough with smoke, the accent still Balkan, even now. “Then it’s not about anything anymore. A habit. Like these,” he said, holding out his cigarette. “You get a taste for it.”

Leon looked at him. “And you?”

“Nothing changes for us. We’re still saving Jews.” He made a wry face. “Now from our friends. No visas for Palestine. Where should they go, Poland? And I’m helping you talk to a Nazi. A wonderful world.”

“Why a Nazi?”

“Why all this? Some poor refugee? No, someone who knows the Russians, I think. And who knows better?”

“You’re guessing.”

“It doesn’t matter to you? What you deliver?”

Leon looked away, then down at his watch. “Well, he’s not coming tonight. Whoever he is. I’d better call. Make sure. There’s a café.”

Mihai leaned forward to start the car again. “I’ll pull around.”

“No, stay here. I don’t want the car—”

“I see. You run across the road in the rain. Get wet. Then you run back. Again, wet. To a waiting car. That will be less suspicious. If anyone is watching.” He put the car in gear.

“It’s your car,” Leon said. “That’s all.”

“You think they haven’t seen it by now?”

“Have they? You’d know,” he said, a question.

“Always assume yes.” He made a turn across the road, pulling up in front of the café. “So do the expected thing. Stay dry. Tell me something. If he had come, your package, was I going to drive him to—wherever he’s staying?”

“No.”

Mihai nodded. “Better.&#8221…