My Blue Peninsula

THE FIRST NOTEBOOK

This morning

I was standing at my window this morning, sipping my tea, when all at once the sun broke through to chase away the winter. The Bosphorus turned silver, and the long black tanker that had been churning past – slicing the rough waters and scattering ferries – seemed to be gliding across a rumpled satin sheet. Then the clouds closed up again. But not securely. As I made my way down Istiklâl, pushing through the crowds, there were other shafts of unexpected light, rescuing storefronts and wet paving stones from oblivion, and in due course alerting me to a ragged row of bright white banners on the approach to Taksim Square.

The demonstration was small but noisy. Beyond, I could see the usual wall of police. Or at least, I could see their helmets. So I slipped into a side street. It took me past Aghia Triada. There was not much green left in its courtyard, but in muffling the chants, it offered a sort of peace. Glancing up, I caught the last shaft of light I would see all day, playing on its lovely silver cross.

It was while I was negotiating the broken pavements of Sıraselviler that the dread descended. I kept it at bay by banishing all thought. But then, having arrived at the building that still houses our office, I saw a young woman waiting for the lift. And in spite of myself, I screamed.

In fact, all I’d seen was her red headscarf. When she turned, I immediately saw my mistake. I must have raised a hand to my mouth, because now, with genuine alarm playing on her open face, she asked if I was all right. I stupidly pretended to have twisted my ankle, so she insisted on seeing me into my office. Even then, she would not leave me. Her mother also suffered from weak ankles, she explained. Before I knew it, she was placing my foot on a chair, and darting into our little office kitchen, and making me tea, and telling me that it was only her second day at her new job with one of the dentists upstairs. I can no longer remember which.

Politely, but without much curiosity, she asked what sort of work we did here. Carefully, I explained: we’d been forced to shut down. Before that, we’d run a sort of digital history platform. But even when she glanced up at the logo featured in so many news reports during the hate campaign, even when she found me in the poster beneath it – ‘Dora,’ she said, ‘What a pretty name for a foreigner!’ I detected not a glint of recognition. It was with some relief that I noted this as a sign of the times, after all, the raids and bombs and purges of recent years, our own small bloodbath had faded from public memory.

She left me at last, with a promise to return. ‘I could bring in your lunch,’ she said. ‘I could save you the trouble.’ And how my heart ached to meet her daughterly gaze. I wondered, as I so often did with covered girls, what colour her hair was. But even more, I wondered how I could have confused her with that other one, and why it was that I saw covered girls as suspect.

I stood up, banishing that thought too. But the shell had cracked. I could no longer pretend, even to myself, that I was fine, just fine, absolutely fine, or any of the other variations of fine with which I had managed, so far, to fend off the kindly and concerned.

There was, nevertheless, a job to be done. I had just one more day to clear this office and to archive as best I could our own little pocket of history before it, too, disappeared. I had already done the bookshelves. I was leaving the walls for last. So it was time for the desk drawers that we’d all treated in the same random way. After assembling the assorted contents on their tops, I lingered unnecessarily over the yellow velcro watchbands, the heart shaped sunglasses, the bent business cards, the receipts from a previous life. I picked up a rough and wrinkled piece of paper, torn from the sort used as table coverings in simple restaurants. I turned it over to find the words:

WE WERE HERE

And the date. And the place. And our signatures, merged into one.

I cannot say what exactly I had in mind as I bolted down the stairs, buttoning my coat as I went. I knew only that I had to get to the sea, the sea, wherever I could find it. It had begun to rain, but in my haste I hardly noticed. Having reached the bottom of the hill, I boarded a ferry, with no other aim than to cross the Bosphorus. I must have taken a dozen ferries. I must have walked five miles along each shore. I have memories only of the obstacles: the heavy machinery around the road works, the sudden, ear splitting calls to prayer, the cars parked on the pavements, the busses that wanted to run me over, the fishermen who almost blinded me as they cast their lines, the winds that whipped around the promontories, the ancient potholes, and the iron bars that rose up from the pavement to trip me up.

Then, late in the afternoon, I had my meeting with the sea. I was standing on the wet steps at Kuzguncuk, watching the approaching ferry, one of the old ones, cutting through opaline currents that seemed, just then, to be made of liquefied marble.

I could not help but gasp at the beauty of this illusion, short lived though it was. My fellow travellers gave no indication of having seen a thing. They just stood there on the landing, lost to the opposite shore. It was, I think, their placid expectation that gathered up what was left of my fury. You fools! I thought. You fools!

At once, the reprimand turned inwards. For who more foolish than we?

All the way home, as I battled with the crowds and hills and wet cobblestones, I chastised myself. If only. If anything. If nothing else. It was not until later, when I was standing at my window, watching the Bosphorus which was just a black expanse by now, traversed by ever-shifting lights, that I was able to still my mind.

And then, for the first time since his death, I felt his presence. His arm, cradling my shoulders. His silence, speaking.

I listened, as best I could. I listened, as he summoned all the others. Together they crowded in. First consoling, then chastising. And finally, guiding me to this little table that is only just wide enough for the dark, stark notebook to which I am consigning these words.

I would have preferred something prettier, with marbled covers perhaps. But my ghosts won’t have it. They have run out of patience. And I have run out of time. This story they’ve bequeathed me – it is not mine to keep.

It belongs to you, dear girls. For better or worse, it is your legacy.

So first, let me clear up a few misunderstandings that perhaps arose from that unfortunate altercation we had, just after your father’s funeral. Do you remember? We’d decamped to the back of that rather lovely café near Tünel. We had your stepmother with us, and she’d ordered us stiff drinks. And it was, I think, while we were waiting for those drinks to arrive that one of you, I can no longer remember which one of you, found the truth on your phone.

By which I mean the tableau that your father’s assassins had left in their wake. Why I’d thought I could spare you this horror, I cannot say. In this day and age, it’s not enough to hide the odd newspaper. Of course it was going to go viral. It had, after all, been arranged for just that purpose, for who was going to look away from a scimitar arranged so artfully beneath those three severed heads?

‘Tell me this was photoshopped.’ Clem, I think that was you. Maude, you spoke at the same time. ‘Tell me it isn’t true.’ Alas, I could not. Neither could I tell you how it had come to this. As you may recall, I was unable to say a thing.

Your stepmother couldn’t speak either. Until those stiff drinks arrived and she offered up that strange toast. To our health, she said, to our courage, she said, and then, screwing up her face, she added, but most of all to our refusal.

Whereupon one of you asked, in a harsh and strangled whisper, ‘Refusal of what?’ Upon which Anais crumpled. You’ll remember, I’m sure, how she took hold of my shoulder, how her own shoulders shook as she hid her face and wept. How, once she had collected herself, she said, ‘But I can no longer refuse. From now, I lack the strength. Perhaps the time has come,’ she said, ‘to accept that we are cursed.’

No sooner had she left – the moment she vanished from view, in fact – you girls both turned to me. On me. At least, that was how it felt.

You wanted to know what Anais had meant by a curse.

You were not impressed by my answer.

I was lying to myself, you said. All this airy talk about history and justice. It meant nothing. It was just a clever way of shunting the blame. I was afraid, you said. Afraid of admitting that I had let this happen, with this mad crusade of mine. All, you said, in the name of some hundred-year-old secret that no one except me would ever have cared about, if I hadn’t made such a ruckus.

Of course, I protested. But seven years have passed now since that day. As I sit here at my desk, thinking back and back and back, I’m ever more inclined to accept your verdict. I could have chosen differently. We could all have chosen differently. Instead, we pulled each other in.

By which I mean to say: if our family is cursed, it is not only because of what the older generations passed down to us. It’s what we made of it, and failed to make of it. It’s what I’m still struggling to understand as I retrace my steps, consumed once again by a desire I cannot name, and unable, even now, to imagine the roads not taken.

What I knew from the beginning

From a very young age, I knew there were things my mother wasn’t telling me. Things she refused to explain. Like who my father was. Or why she didn’t like me calling her Mother. Why she insisted that I address her, most especially in company, as Delphine. Why I had two birth certificates, the first placing me in Istanbul on the 18th of November 1949, and the other placing me in New York City on the same date.

I would have been seven when I spotted that anomaly. This on a typical Saturday morning, when Delphine was sleeping late, and I was doing what all girls that age love doing when their mothers’ eyes are closed – going through her chest of drawers.

I found the two certificates rolled up inside a sock. I took them to the dining room to examine them with my magnifying glass – a gift from one of my mother’s so-called gentleman callers.

I knew all about dates by then. We’d been doing them in school. Although I could not read most of the words on the Istanbul certificate, the name of the city was clear. As was my name. And most of my birth date: the day of the month, and the year. It was definitely official. I could tell that from the stamps. But when I took my incriminating evidence to my mother, she just peered at it with a single, half-closed eye, before heaving herself over and planting a pillow over her head.

Later, when I asked her if both birth certificates were mine, she said of course they were. When I asked her how I could be born in two different places at the same moment, she said, ‘Don’t be so literal-minded, Dora. That’s just paperwork.’

Paperwork was something my mother was an expert on. From as early as I could remember, she’d been working as a secretary for the UN. But the salary was not enough for us to live on, and that, she said, was why she also had to work for a man called William Wakefield, who had her on some sort of allowance that was never enough either.

She called him our saviour in those days, and later she would call him our man For all seasons, but I could tell she was afraid of him. They’d first met in at the US Consulate in Istanbul where she had worked in the last years of World War II, and where he had briefly been stationed. In those days, he liked to tell me, Delphine had been the belle of every ball. ‘And isn’t she still,’ he would say, but in a distant way that set him apart in my mind from the gentleman callers.

He would drop by every month or so, always without warning. Flying in from one continent, he’d say. About to shoot off for another. When I was old enough to ask him why, he told me he was a diplomat.

He’d bring me presents. By the time I was seven, the toys had given way to books, I recall. Books I almost always liked. When I asked him why he was such a good guesser, he said it was because he had a daughter of his own. We’d talk about whatever I happened to be reading while my mother was getting dressed, and then, if she was still not ready, which was almost always the case, he’d take me down to the nice Polish lady who picked me up from school and babysat for me a fair number of nights as well, and while we waited, he would talk to this lady about her homeland, of which he knew a great deal.

When at last, long last, my mother was ready, William would shake my hand and say it had been good knowing me, and usher my mother out the door. They never lasted long, these dinner dates. But a few days later, Delphine would have to leave town for a few days. If I asked her why, she’d make as if to zip her lips. Even now, it’s a gesture that provokes an instant fury.

We were still living in Manhattan the autumn I turned eight, but had just moved from the Upper East Side to something a lot lower. I had just started at my third private school, having had to leave the second (and the first) for non-payment of fees. My mother had picked me up early on this particular afternoon in late November, in her words to take me out for a treat, and in my own estimation to make it up to me, after parking me with a new classmate’s family over Thanksgiving while she went off on one of her assignments.

In the Russian Tea Room she leaned across the table – beautifully, even I knew that. Lovingly – I knew that too. Eyes shining, she prodded me for details: the exact location of the house in the Berkshires where I had felt so pitied, and so lonely, throughout that very long weekend, the names and possible professions of my classmate’s relatives, the number of servants, the size of the turkey I had not so much as touched.

‘I hope you realise that I left you with the crème de la crème,’ she said. ‘They’ve founded so many colleges and museums, I’ve lost count.’ Met with sullen silence, my mother sought refuge in the menu, the mirror in her powder case, and, finally, with gushing gratitude, the waiter.

‘A champagne cocktail for me,’ she told him. ‘And a Shirley Temple for the millstone.’

It was after he left that I asked my question. ‘Why don’t we have a family?’

‘Oh, but we do, my little chickadee. You know we do.’

‘Why don’t we ever see them?’

‘You have that back to front, my dear. The problem is that they won’t see us.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because. They cannot bear it.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because. With our very presence, we speak louder than words.’

‘Why, though?’

‘Because they judge me,’ she said. ‘For having a daughter, with no husband in sight.’

She’d said this before, but it made no sense to me.

‘Why does that matter, even?’ I asked.

‘Oh, it does. It does. If you’re a pillar of society, nothing matters more.’

That made no sense to me either. So I reminded her: a pillar was not a person.

‘If only, my little chickadee. If only.’ Looking over my shoulder, she let her tears well over. Then, with a sigh, she dabbed her eyes, dried her fingertips on her napkin, and took out a cigarette. When she turned her head to let out the first plume of smoke, I saw that her whole entire cheek was glistening with tears.

‘How much do you know about the empire?’ she asked.

‘Which one?’

‘The Ottoman Empire, you silly little turnip.’

I kicked my feet against the table. ‘Don’t call me a turnip. And stop going off the subject. I asked you why we don’t have a family. And you start talking about empires. I’m not interested in empires. Empires are boring.’

‘Well, this one isn’t. This is the empire that made our family rich.’

‘So what?’

‘What do you mean, so what?’

‘I’m not interested,’ I said.

‘Well, isn’t that a shame now. To think that you spent a whole weekend with those museum people, never suspecting that in our world, they’re just new money. Never knowing that your family, our family – by which I mean, my father’s family – directed the business of one of the greatest empires the world has ever known, not just for a puny generation or two, but for four long centuries! And all that, without ever, not for a single instant, giving up on being French! What would you say, my little chickadee, if I told you that our original French ancestor set sail for the Ottoman Empire in 1536? And oh, if only you could see his portrait. A lady killer if ever there was one! Oh, the tears that were shed by the fine ladies of Marseille as his ship slipped over the horizon. He would be back, of course! Bearing silk from Smyrna. The fine ladies were still there waiting. They couldn’t have enough of this strapping young lad who’d braved untold dangers to make his fortune. But he had eyes only for the fairest…’

‘Mother! Stop exaggerating!’

‘Believe you me, I am telling you the gospel truth. Where do you think we got our good looks? Noses like ours don’t come from just anywhere. But anyway. I’m not conjuring up the facts out of nowhere. Families as great as ours keep records, I’ll have you know. And we never stopped speaking French. We started in silk, as I just said, and then we married into figs and wool. By the time I was born, we’d moved into shipping. Shipping and hypocrisy. My grandfather took care of the first part, and my aunts took care of the second.’ Sighing, she let out another billow of smoke. ‘I’ve told you they brought me up, these two. After my parents fell off that ledge.’

‘When did they do that?’

‘What a question! When they died, of course!’

‘But you said they died in a plane crash.’

‘Yes, of course. But it was that kind of crash. It fell off a ledge. You know. At the end of a runway. Why anyone would think to build a runway at the edge of a cliff though. I guess they thought it would make take-off easier.’

‘But it didn’t,’ I said.

‘No it didn’t. Down they plunged, right down to the sea floor, leaving me at the mercy of the ugly sisters. And oh, were they ever cruel.’

‘Is that why you ran away?’

‘Is that what you think – that I ran away? Not at all, my little chickadee. I never ran away. I was pushed.’

‘Just because you had me?’

‘Let me put it like this, my little chickadee. If we’d stayed, they would never have let me keep you.’

Mysteries and magazines

For all its thrilling drama, this story didn’t make sense to me either. But because I was already reading the mysteries and magazines my mother left scattered across our apartment, I soon came to understand that almost everyone else in the world believed children born outside wedlock to be doomed and damned. Even in New York City. Just as well, I thought, that even here, we hid the truth. We told anyone who asked, and even those who didn’t, that my father, like my mother’s father, had died in a plane crash – yet another plane crash – just days before my birth.

Where was he, though, if he was, in fact, still alive? Why did my mother fob me off every time I asked? Trained in detection by Dorothy Sayers and Ellery Queen, I could not help but notice that her evasions didn’t add up. It wasn’t him, she sometimes said: it was his family we had to worry about. It wasn’t how he felt, it was who he was. It didn’t matter how he felt, because my mother had never once entertained the idea of sharing me. What mattered most, my mother said, was never, ever to breathe his name.

‘Why not?’ I asked.

‘I promised.’

‘So what?’

‘It was a sacred promise. Do you happen to know what happens, when you break a sacred promise? No? I didn’t think so. So let me tell you. They roll right over you. They stamp you out.’

They. It was the icy, ominous way she said it. And what this implied: my mother had made a sacred promise not just to one man, but to an entire league of them. Why?

I pondered this question most deeply whenever she parked me with my latest babysitter and disappeared to parts unknown, for reasons never specified, beyond what she blithely called ‘the obvious’. Namely: that it wasn’t for nothing that she worked at the UN. And it wasn’t just her six languages. In any event, having six languages was not at all remarkable in Istanbul, as she so liked to remind me. Everyone had six languages at least. The things that set her apart, she said – the thing that made her a real treasure – was that she could spot a Communist a mile off. No matter what they said they were or even how they dressed.

‘And I don’t need to explain to you how important that is.’

As indeed she did not. Every child attending American schools in the 1950s was steeped in horror stories about Soviet spies and Communist infiltrators, plotting together to steal our nuclear secrets, building bombs so powerful as to bring about the end of the world.

Like every other child in America in the 1950s, I took those horror stories to bed with me each night. And if I woke up before dark to a dark and deadly hush, my first thought would be – they’re here. The Communists. Giving my mother the third degree.

She would never crack. Of that I was certain. But what if these evil traitors managed nevertheless to divine my mother’s true identity? What would become of her? What would become of me?

I would have been nine when I woke up before dawn to the sound of a glass smashing, against a wall or a floor. But when I peered out into the hallway to find out which, I saw my mother standing at the entrance to our living room, holding a high-heeled shoe in each hand but still wearing her fur coat. Beyond her, in our favourite armchair, was our saviour, later to become our man for all seasons. William Wakefield. He was sitting where my babysitter had been, and redder in the face than I had ever seen him.

‘What the hell do you think you’re up to?’

‘At PJ Clarke’s?’ my mother said. ‘What do you think?

‘Happy hour ended a very long time ago, my young friend.’

‘What can I say? One martini leads to another. Especially on Friday nights.’

‘So tell me,’ William snarled. ‘Who was buying? Was it Michal, or was it Sven?’

‘You know them?’

‘How could I not?’

‘Sven from the Social and Economic Council?’

‘That’s a front,’ William said, ‘as you well know.’

‘That’s a given.’

‘So let’s move on to Michal. Do you happen to know what he’s calling himself these days?’

‘He didn’t say,’ my mother said. ‘In any event, we weren’t talking about work.’

‘What were you talking about?’

‘Oh, you know. Gold.’

‘Oh really? What kind of gold?’

‘You know full well what kind of gold,’ my mother said.

‘Aha. How interesting. So you spent the evening prattling on about gold to our fine pair of known operatives. And at no point did you wonder if they were playing on your weak spot, to reel you in? What did they promise you?’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, William. Nothing.’

‘Nothing but all those martinis.’

‘You’ve got it.’

‘Plus a few leads on your favourite conspiracy theory.’

‘That gold exists, William!’

‘Yes, but where?’

‘That’s what I intend to find out one day.’

‘And that,’ bellowed William, ‘ is how they intend to play you.’

‘No one plays me.’

‘That is very good to know, Delphine. Music to my ears, in fact.’ Standing up, he sighed heavily, before taking himself over to the sideboard, there to pour two tumblers of bourbon. Handing one to my mother, he said, ‘I take it they had questions to ask about a certain friend of ours in a certain Soviet consulate. You know. From the old days.’

‘I don’t know who you’re talking about,’ my mother said.

‘Oh, yes, you fucking do.’ He pointed at our sofa. ‘Sit down.’

She sat down.

He did the same. First to savour his drink, then to lean forward and ask, ‘So tell me. Whose side are you on?’

‘Our side. Your side! Of course!’

‘Then what are you doing spending Friday night with a pair of Soviet spooks, lapping up tall tales about Armenian gold?’

‘It j happens to be an interest of mine, William! As you well know.’

‘I can’t believe I’m having to spell all this out for you. But, Baby, if you don’t want to end up electrocuted or at the bottom of a lake, I’d advise you to put a lid on that particular fetish. For the time being, at least.’

‘Can you at least tell me why?’

‘It marks you out. Raises questions. Attracts the wrong sort of attention. Need I say more?’

‘I still don’t get it,’ my mother said. ‘I speak to known Soviet operatives all the time.’

‘Not to talk about Armenian gold, you don’t.’

‘I wasn’t the one to mention it! They were! And so what if they did?’

William sighed and shook his head. ‘Maybe I should buy you an atlas. Maybe then you’d remember that there happens to be a Soviet republic called Armenia.’

‘That’s not where the gold is,’ my mother said.

‘Exactly. So tell me. Did they happen to have any ideas as to its current whereabouts?’

Pressing her lips together, widening her eyes, my mother reached over for the handbag she had thrown on the sofa next to her and dumped out its contents.

‘Now we’re getting somewhere,’ said William in a happier voice. He sat back, lit up a cigarette, and waited for my mother to rummage among the lipsticks, the mints, and the pencils, the matchboxes and the keys.

‘Here,’ she said finally, handing him a rumpled napkin. ‘This is all I got.’

With his free hand he straightened it out on his knee, crumpling up his nose as he read the notes she had jotted down on it. ‘Interesting,’ he said. He sounded almost impressed. ‘Yes, I think we can use this.’

‘As leverage, you mean.’

‘Yes, if nothing else, as leverage.’

‘Turn the tables on them, in other words.’

‘Hmmm,’ said William. ‘Now there’s a nasty thought.’

‘It hadn’t occurred to me until this very moment,’ my mother said, a bit too eagerly.

‘But it’s worth considering, certainly. My friend, this could be the moment.’

‘You think so?’ she gasped.

William sat back, to think, inside a cloud of smoke. ‘Let me mull it over. Talk it through with A N Other.’

‘Not that A N Other?’

‘The very one. The next time he and I meet, I mean. Which could be a while. So I wouldn’t pack my bags quite yet.’

‘No, of course not. I couldn’t go now, anyway. Not while a certain friend of ours is still based there.’

‘I take your point,’ said William, ‘But a little bird told me he’s not long for Istanbul. They want to move him to the Embassy in Ankara.’

‘Poor boy. That’s not his style at all.’

‘But as you and I both know, it’s not his choice, either.’

William Wakefield never did buy my mother an atlas. So I used the one at school. And there it was: the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic. I looked it up in the encyclopaedia too and it was here, amidst the bare facts about this republic, that I first read of Armenian massacres in what later became Turkey, in the middle of the First World War. There was no mention of gold, so I widened my search, eventually discovering that there was no private ownership in any part of the Soviet Union, that everything, including precious metals, was owned by the state.

Aha, I thought. So that was why my mother had said that the Armenian gold she was so interested in was no longer in Armenia. It must, I decided, have been moved to the coffers of the Kremlin, in Moscow.

So far, so good. But who was this old friend in Istanbul they kept mentioning? And whose side was he on? Reviewing the conversation I had overheard, I was inclined to think he (a) worked for the Soviets while also (b) working for us.

Acquainted as I now was with Eric Ambler and Ian Fleming, I could not help but worry for this man’s safety. And also for our own, if – as I now suspected – William planned to send my mother and me back to Istanbul. Was this wise? Bearing in mind all the things my mother had told me over the years, about the sacred promise she had made, and what they would do to her, and to me, if she broke her vow?

Was this unnamed Soviet friend one of them? Or had he too made a sacred promise? Why did my mother call him a friend at all, if she didn’t want to risk returning to Istanbul while he was still there?

I was sitting in my school library, reading up on the population, religions, and major industries of Turkey, gazing at a picture of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who was the father of the modern republic, even though he himself had never had any children, when suddenly a rogue thought flew in at me, out of nowhere:

The unnamed Soviet friend whose name my mother dared not breathe must be my father.

Who was he? Who was he really? Did he know of my existence, or had this, too, been hidden from him, and if it had been, why? How had he and my mother met? Had they ever been in love? Who and what had torn them asunder? Was I destined never to meet him, or would a return to Istanbul offer us the chance, at least, of a brief, even accidental, encounter?

What did it say about me, if half of me was Soviet? Even if I knew nothing about it, even if I could never be sure, how could I ever trust myself, knowing one of my hands lived in eternal ignorance of what the other hand might be doing?

What was worse – to know or not to know? Some nights I considered begging my mother never to take me back to the city where the truth might lurk. But then, upon waking the next morning, I would remind myself what so many of my mother’s paperbacks had taught me: no good can come of running away from the truth. Best to face the facts. And first, to prepare.

From Russia with Love is probably the only book my mother ever bought in hardback. She might even have bought it on the day it first came out. She just couldn’t wait, she said, to find out what James Bond made of Istanbul.

That had been a year ago, when I was eight. I’d read it then, too, in the manner the author might have intended though perhaps not for a girl my age, and in the space of one long night. Returning to it with my new suspicions on the eve of turning ten, I viewed it more as a guidebook to the thrilling terrors now awaiting me: a city straddling Europe and Asia, cut through by an unsheltered Bosphorus, a fabled skyline of minarets and imperial palaces, beneath which lay a labyrinth of secret passages – an underworld of rats and hell cats. And under every rock, a Russian spy.

Another two years would pass before I heard another word about Istanbul. By now I had almost if not quite put it out of my mind. At least, I’d stopped believing that the world described by thrillers and mystery stories was entirely accurate. But then, one sodden, steaming August morning, the doorbell rang, and there, before me, was a dowager – no other word will do – draped in silks and jewels, her white hair swept up into a bun topped by a tiny hat with a tinier veil, and clutching an embroidered portmanteau. After