Istanbul Passage by Joseph Kanon

thing,” Obstbaum said.

    Georg Ritter had come to Istanbul the week Hitler became chancellor. A job at the university barely paid for his room in an old wooden house in Fener, but he was free, and he’d brought the Lessing manuscript with him, his future. Years later, when Leon and Anna got there, he was still working on the book and by then had become an institution in the foreign community, the man who knew where toget residence permits, secondhand appliances, Turkish lessons. He and Anna shared a passion for the city, out-of-the-way fish restaurants, the best carpet seller in the Bazaar, and he became an ersatz father to her, as cranky as her own, full of convictions that everyone else had abandoned.
    When the house in Fener was seized for the wealth tax—the owner, a Greek, sent to a work camp—he was rescued by a former student, a rich Turk who set him up in a building he owned in Nişantaşi. “The only Marxist in the neighborhood,” Georg claimed. But the move suited him. He could now shock the bourgeoisie just by being among them, something he couldn’t afford before, and Yildiz Park was nearby for his dog.
    “You don’t mind we take a walk? She’s been in all day.”
    “I thought you wanted to play chess.”
    Georg waved his hand. “With you? No surprises. Move the knights out first. Keep the pawns back.” He was snapping on the leash, locking the door. “Are you all right? You don’t look—”
    “Just tired.”
    “At your age. Wait till you see how it feels later.” He sighed, the air seeming to wheeze out of his plump cheeks.
    “How’s the book?”
    “Mendel wants to use the new chapter on Nathan der Weise . He thinks they’ll be interested here, the comments on Saladin. As if the Turks will read it. A German journal in Istanbul. Well, where else? Germany? At least you keep something alive.”
    “Nathan?” Leon said, trying to remember the chronology. “Then how much more to go?”
    Georg shrugged. “The last years. At Wolfenbüttel. Not so happy for him, but very productive. Several chapters at least. A pauper’s grave, you know, in the end. Me too, by the time I’m finished. What about your friend?” he said, tacking. “Where are they going to bury him?”
    “Who? Tommy? You heard about that?”
    “Everybody’s heard about it. Like a Western. Karl May. Shoot-outs in Istanbul,” he said, shaking his head.
    “I don’t know. That’s up to his wife. I knew him, I wouldn’t say he was a friend.”
    “No? Just drinks at the Park.” He caught Leon’s reaction. “You hear things.”
    Leon looked at him, waiting, but Georg moved away from it. “You’ve seen Anna?”
    “Yes, the same.”
    They were passing through the gates into the park, the wooded hills dotted with pavilions, the sultan’s old compound.
    “I wonder what she sees.” Georg gestured to the trees. “A shame to miss these. But of course the mind—Abdul Hamid thought people listened in the trees. Everywhere. So it was very quiet here. Whispers. And that made him worse. Why are they whispering? The mind. You know he thought every week he would be killed. Every Friday, in the great selamlik down to Hamidiye Mosque. Hundreds, all lined up, the only time they could see him. So one of them must be an assassin. The whole time, all during prayers, waiting to be shot. You know there were five hundred slaves in Yildiz then? Not forty years ago, not even history yet. Slaves here. And people listening in trees.” The kind of detail Anna loved.
    “How did you hear about the drink at the Park?”
    “Someone mentioned it. I don’t even remember who. It’s a great place for rumors here.”
    “A farewell drink,” Leon said, answering what hadn’t been asked. “He was going back to the States. They say it was a robbery.”
    “And no money taken. So now everyone has an idea.”
    “Like what?”
    “You know, maybe a coincidence, but there’s a man missing. So one theory, he was meeting your friend Tommy but shot him