Father Wynne sweltered in Istanbul's summer heat. He sat on a blanket-draped wooden bench and looked down a colonnade of domes stretching along the alleyway, each held by pillars painted with brown and black geometric patterns. The view was mesmerizing, the receding corridor of identical domes and pillars shrinking in the distance like a mirror image caught in a mirror image caught in a mirror image.
Beyond the pillars and domes of this tranquil alley was the hustle and chaos of a city at work. Pedestrians, food carts, mules burdened with woven baskets, horse-drawn carriages, streetcars and automobiles all wove around each other, all competing for limited space and trying to find some break in the thick traffic. It felt to Father Wynne that time had converged here, that this city was some vortex of lifestyles stretching from the present all the way back to the middle ages. Old technology was not supplanted here like it was at home in the United States. Here the old continued to exist side by side with the new.
That strange clash of technology and aesthetic helped mask Father Wynne. His Western-style suit and Caucasian features were as common here as the fez hats and robes worn by Istanbul traditionalists. Father Wynne's Priestly collar was more unique, but the mostly Muslim city was no stranger to Christian tourists. Its recent revolution and subsequent secular government had begun to welcome pilgrims hoping to see its Christian holy treasures.
So although Father Wynne's appearance made him stand out, it did not draw unwelcome suspicion. Natives undoubtedly marked him for a Westerner but they probably just assumed he was an English or American Priest seeing the Christian sights. And in some ways they would have been correct in that assumption. Father Wynne was an American Priest, and he was also a teacher of Latin at an Episcopal Boy's School in New Hampshire. He'd come east during a leave of absence, and he did intend to see the sites and tell his students about them. But that wasn't his primary reason for being here. His primary reason was because in addition to being a Priest and an English teacher, Father Wynne was a spy.
He'd met his O.S.S. recruiter several years ago, while he was finishing his Seminary studies at Yale. At the time he'd had no idea the man was a government agent, he looked and acted more like an Ivy League professor. But that was before the war. And shortly after the war started, he'd been visited by that man again, and that man had extended an invitation to Father Wynne – an invitation to serve his country.
Father Wynne had considered doing his patriotic duty by joining the military as a Priest. But there was something about ministering to soldiers that made him uneasy. It was guilt, really, that was the source of the unease. If he was going to minister to soldiers, he wanted to share their danger. He knew he would feel guilty advising them spiritually and then not joining them in combat. Of course he couldn't in good conscious join them in combat, because one of the commandments was "Though shalt not kill". So as a compromise he had begun to consider joining the army as a combat medic, instead
The O.S.S. recruiter had convinced him otherwise. Father Wynne's particular talents would be wasted as a combat medic, the recruiter argued. Father Wynne was a member of a profession that offered special access to hearts and minds. He would do better for his country as a spy than as a medic. The recruiter urged Father Wynne to join the Office of Strategic Services, a brand new American central intelligence agency modelled after Britain's SIS. Father Wynne was intrigued by the idea, so intrigued that eventually he agreed. He took a sabbatical from his high school, was given rudimentary training, and then, by virtue of his fluency in Greek, he was sent to Eastern Europe. There he liaised with the Greek resistance, staying one step ahead of the German Army until he was ordered here, to neutral Turkey.
Although Father Wynne's new job was dangerous, he loved it. Travel stimulated his senses. Unfamiliar sights and sounds forced his brain to pay attention, to stop taking his surroundings for granted. The stench of donkey dung and body odor mingled with the scents of roasting coffee beans and sweetened tobacco sent his synapses firing. The gurgle of hubbly bubbly water pipes and the click of backgammon pieces and the lilting song of a language he didn't understand pushed his reasoning to a higher level. The taste of the strange coffee, black but almost creamy in its consistency, so different from the comparatively watery Maxwell House back home, forced his mind to reclassify and register it as an entirely new sensation. As a result, this young blonde man wearing a priest's collar with a cup of coffee in one hand and an English-language newspaper in the other, looking to all the world like an English or American tourist enjoying a relaxing afternoon, was in fact enjoying a state of high anxiety rivaling that of a mountain lion on the prowl or of a fox that knows it's being hunted.
That was good, that was important. Because this afternoon Father Wynne knew he was both the hunter and the prey.
The newspaper – a copy of the London times dated August 16, 1942 – was two days old. Father Wynne wasn't really reading it. That wasn't its purpose. The newspaper's real purpose was to identify Father Wynne to a Russian defector.
Folded into the pages of the newspaper, camouflaged by it, was a dossier. The dossier, only three-pages long, had been sent via a teletype machine in Washington, D.C. Father Wynne's purpose, the reason he had been re-directed from Greece to Turkey, was to make that dossier longer. The defector Father Wynne was meeting claimed to have information that could do just that.
"Karen Hamilton" was the name on the dossier. She was an American woman, a girl, really, only eighteen years old. She was a musician, a cellist who had been, at one time, a child prodigy. She'd spent her childhood summers travelling up and down the Eastern Seaboard performing with and for adults. American audiences loved child prodigies. Youth and talent were qualities that Americans worshipped, a cultural phenomenon that had turned Shirley Temple into a national treasure. It was a trait that Karen's father, George Hamilton, had exploited, parading Karen in front of audiences like a trained monkey.
The O.S.S. wasn't interested in Karen Hamilton because of her youth. In fact, they were interested in her despite it.
The O.S.S. didn't trust young agents. By definition youth was fleeting. It was dangerous. It was inexperienced. And yet, in her eighteen years, Karen Hamilton had collected an impressive number of very unique experiences – the kinds of experiences Father Wynne's superiors at the O.S.S. wanted to know more about.
When she was fifteen years old, Karen's dossier explained, she had emigrated from the United States the Soviet Union. She and her father were guests of the Leningrad Music Conservatory, where she studied under the world famous composer Dmitri Shostakovich.
A year and a half later, when Karen was only seventeen, Germany invaded the Soviet Union. German warplanes, tanks and troops took the Soviets completely by surprise, smashing through defenses and destroying entire Russian armies. The German "Army Group North" drove relentlessly toward Leningrad, and foreigners like Karen and her father should have been evacuated.
But George Hamilton wanted to stay. He was helping Shostakovich write his 9th symphony, a masterpiece that would soon be known the world over as "The Leningrad Symphony". Karen's father didn't want to give up that work, so he did the only thing he could to stay in Leningrad. He defected and, because she was legally a minor that meant Karen defected, too. She was no longer an American citizen; she was now a citizen of the Soviet Union.
That meant she wasn't evacuated from Leningrad. That meant she was forced to stay, like all the other Russian residents of that doomed city. And it meant that when, a few weeks later, the Germans surrounded Leningrad, that Karen was trapped.
She and her father joined the Leningrad citizen's brigade. They dug trenches and prepared for Germany's attack. But that attack never came. Germany's mission wasn't one of conquest. It was of extermination. The Nazis were cleansing the land of Slavic "undesirables" in order to prepare it for German colonization. So they instigated what they called a "Starvation Plan". The Germans surrounded Leningrad, firebombed the city granaries, and waited for every Russian inside the city to starve to death.
Among the civilians that died that first winter was Karen's father. Karen should have shared his fate. But somehow, miraculously, she escaped.
And she didn't just escape Leningrad, she escaped the German Army. She somehow fought her way or snuck her way past enemy lines. Then she travelled all the way through Siberia and managed to contact an American diplomatic delegation in Chelyabinsk. They agreed to help her escape, to smuggle her out on a plane back to her remaining family in the United States.
But then the girl changed her mind. One of the American pilots – a boy, really, only nineteen years old – had confessed to her the true reason for the American delegation's visit to Siberia. They were scouting bombing routes, he had told Karen, so that when Russia surrendered America could bomb her factories and oil fields in order to keep them out of German hands.
That information was secret. The indiscreet pilot was arrested for revealing it, and was even now facing court martial in front of a military tribunal. But the damage had already been done. Karen Hamilton joined the Red Army and disappeared.
The O.S.S. wanted to find her again, needed to find her again. She was an American, fluent in Russian, fighting for the Red Army. She would make an invaluable spy. The O.S.S. had other agents in Russia, of course, but none as well-placed as Karen Hamilton.
And America needed spies in Russia. The Soviet Union was doomed, everyone knew it. It was only a matter of time before Russia surrendered. And when it did, America had to launch her bombers. If the Nazis gained access to Russian oil and Russian industry, then America, too, would be doomed.
But there would only be a narrow window of time between the Soviet Union's surrender and Germany's consolidation of the newly-conquered territories. Within that window Russia's factories and oil fields would be vulnerable. That window of opportunity might only be a few days long. If America hoped to bomb Russia's natural resources and save itself, it had to act quickly. America needed to know exactly when Russia was going to surrender and it was the O.S.S.'s job to give America that information.
Karen Hamilton, fighting with the Red Army, could do just that. The soldiers would know the instant that the Red Army surrendered, well before that information was made public. So the O.S.S. wanted to recruit her, needed to recruit her. But in order to recruit her, the O.S.S. first needed to know where she was. The Russian defector Father Wynne was meeting in Turkey claimed to be able to provide that information.
"Hey mister, you want a cigarette?"
Father Wynne looked up from his newspaper, surprised to have been addressed in English. A little boy, nine or ten years old, stood on the street side of his table, holding out a pack of Turkish cigarettes, one extended toward him from a tear in the top of the pack. The boy was dirty and barefoot, his face smudged, his hair matted and his eyes dark. The way he was pointing the cigarettes looked like he was shooting a toy gun.
"No thank you," Father Wynne replied with a dismissive smile.
"You sure, mister?" the boy persisted. "The lady already paid."
At mention of "the lady" Father Wynne grew suddenly interested. His contact, a woman who called herself Madame Nadia, was late. Had she sensed something wrong? Had she sent this young boy to make contact in her stead?
Father Wynne looked carefully around the coffee house. He wasn't exactly in the restaurant, nor was he, exactly, outside of it. Concepts of "inside" and "outside" didn't seem to apply in this part of Istanbul. The open-air coffee house could transform into an indoor space with the deployment of a tarp and the closing of a dozen doors. Nothing seemed permanent, apart from the thick pillars and shady domes.
Two men sat on cushions, backs propped against once such pillar, their attention focused on the backgammon board placed between them and the stack of paper money they'd wagered on the game. A man and a woman, voguishly dressed in the latest Paris fashions, shared a hubbly bubbly pipe, staring into each other's eyes as they sucked on the hookah's tubes.
Other than those customers, the boy, himself, and the coffee house's proprietor, the alley was empty. Could those men playing backgammon be Gestapo men? Could the couple smoking sweetened tobacco be Russian agents?
Father Wynne doubted it. He recognized the need to be careful, but if this Madame Nadia woman was afraid to approach him because of four restaurant patrons she was being downright paranoid. Father Wynne forced another smile on his lips and reached for the pack of cigarettes. "In that case," he said, "I suppose it would be rude to refuse."
The boy dropped the pack into Father Wynne's hand, turned, and ran away.
Father Wynne froze, the cigarettes elevated over the table in his fist. Why had the boy run? Could the packet of cigarettes be booby trapped? Father Wynne pushed the thought from his mind. Now he was being paranoid. He drew the pack to his bespectacled eyes and examined them.
There was only one cigarette, it turned out. The rest of the pack was empty. Father Wynne pulled out the cigarette and turned it over, taping it against the little table that held his coffee. He found the paper's seam and unrolled it. Turkish tobacco spilled out. It was a cigarette; that was all. There was no message hidden inside.
So Father Wynne turned his attention to the pack itself. He turned it over in his hands: nothing. He pulled it inside out. And that's where he found a series of intersecting lines drawn on the inside cover. An "X" was written on one of the lines, and under it: "6E".
Father Wynne stood up, shoved the pack in his trouser pocket, dropped a paper banknote on the table for his coffee, and strode determinedly out of the alley and onto the busy intersecting street.
He turned right and felt the heat of the heavy traffic. The hot engines and exhaust of automobiles combined with the body heat of so many pedestrians and pack animals to raise the temperature by at least ten degrees. As he pushed forward the traffic around Father Wynne grew thicker. Sweat poured down his face as he was forced to halt, side-step, and plunge forward through the narrowest of gaps. Anything larger than a person was helplessly trapped in the gridlock, now. A streetcar rang its bell over and over again, trying to get the mass of humanity to part in front of it, to no avail. Father Wynne noticed two men hop off the stationary streetcar and start to push toward him. They were beefy men, dressed in ill-fitting suits. They could be Russian Agents, Father Wynne realized, wearing off-the-rack soviet clothing and likely as not carrying off-the-rack soviet pistols.
The realization injected adrenaline into Father Wynne's veins. He removed his glasses, wiped a sleeve across his face to clear the sweat, and began to look for a way to ditch his new pursuers.
The street was hemmed in by three-story apartment buildings on either side. Father Wynne began to feel like a buffalo driven by Comanche up a boxed canyon to a killing ground. The press of people in front of Father Wynne had slowed to a halt. He realized the traffic must be caused by some blockage in the road ahead. He stood on his toes and looked out, expecting to see a traffic accident. But the crowd was too thick; he couldn't see a thing. Father Wynne felt a pressure on his back as the impatient crowd behind him pressed forward.
Father Wynne slid sideways toward an apartment building. He hoped to slip inside but the door was locked. A woman with a scarf covering her hair and a baby covering her shoulder stared at the street through a first story window. But when she noticed Father Wynne gesturing for her to open the door she drew the shades in fright.
Father Wynne glanced back over his shoulder. The two men were still pushing toward him. Up the street he had a momentary clear view of Turkish police blocking the way. They were the cause of the jam, halting traffic so a diplomatic procession could pass unmolested down a perpendicular road. If he could reach them Father Wynne could request police protection, but that would force him to blow his over and it wouldn't guarantee his safety. Neutral Istanbul was a city overflowing with spies, and so Turkish Police were likely to ignore him, satisfied to let the spies kill each other and take care of the problem themselves. The best Father Wynne could hope for was a hasty deportation, in which case his mission would be a failure, anyway.
Father Wynne tapped quietly on the apartment window. His Priest's collar had opened doors for him before. Once it had even caused a Gestapo agent to hesitate just long enough to allow Wynne to escape. But the woman in the apartment either hadn't seen the collar or didn't care. The drapes didn't stir.
Father Wynne doubled back, squeezing against the apartment building's stonework, away from the police barricade. Perhaps that was why Madame Nadia had missed their appointment – perhaps she had been unable to cross to his side of the barricaded street. But if that were the case, how did the boy get across with her cigarette pack?
Father Wynne picked up his pace as the crowd began to thin. He didn't bother glancing back but he knew the men were still following him.
Father Wynne turned left down a street parallel to the blockaded avenue. It, too, was crowded with the spill of diverted traffic, but nothing like the gridlock Father Wynne had just escaped. In two blocks he reached a narrow bridge crossing the Bosporus. Father Wynne squinted to his left and saw a parallel bridge – empty – the terminus of the blockaded road. He needed to cross that road, but he couldn't, even here it was lined with cops. Maybe he could go under it...boats were tied to the river bank, a jumble of fishing trawlers and cargo barges. Perhaps he could hire one to take him under the bridge and drop him off up river.
But that would take time, especially since Father Wynne didn't speak Turkish. And as he glanced over his shoulder he saw that the men were closing in fast. Then Father Wynne had a bolt of inspiration. He had a vision of the urchin who had given him the cigarette pack. He watched in his mind's eye as the urchin ran along the river bank, leaping into and between the moored boats like they were stepping stones, leaving surprised and angry river captains yelling at him and shaking their fists.
Father Wynne didn't hesitate. He broke into a sprint toward the river.
Men and women stopped to gawk at the young-looking priest racing past. Father Wynne didn't just teach Latin to boys in New Hampshire, he also coached their track team. His form was perfect, his speed impressive, and he leaped onto the first boat with a graceful hurdle. Two quick steps and he had crossed the little rowboat before launching himself into the air, crossing open water to land on a garbage barge. There he slipped but caught his balance before he tumbled and quickly corrected his stride.
The two big men following Father Wynne had neither his grace nor his speed, but they made up for it with courage. They plodded determinedly after him. By the time they reached the boats Father Wynne's weight had already caused the little craft to bob precariously on the river's surface. The first man lost his balance on the fishing boat and spun his arms as he leaned over the river. He managed to grab the boom of the fishing boat's sail, which shifted with his momentum and swung him out, dangling, over the river. There his weight tipped the entire craft, comically dumping both his compatriot and the angry fisherman into the dirty water.
The garbage barge was long and crossing it took Father Wynne all the way under the bridge. From there he leaped on a moving water taxi, and then to another fishing boat tied to the shore. He never hesitated, jumping to the safety of the quay and huffing back into Istanbul's warren of alleys without even looking back to check on the fate of his pursuers.
After losing himself around several random corners, Father Wynne leaned on his knees and caught his breath. His suit was ruined with sweat. He pulled the crumpled cigarette packet out of his pocket and puzzled out the hand-drawn lines. He assumed it was a primitive map, and operating under that assumption he was able to determine his current location relative to the "X". As soon as he caught his breath, Father Wynne returned the cigarette map to his pocket and re-emerged from the alley, heading toward the "X".
* * *
Nobody answered the bell at apartment 6E. Father Wynne rang again and waited patiently but again there was no response. A middle-aged man with a long beard and a stack of books under one arm approached the door from the street, key in hand, and hesitated at the sight of Father Wynne. He said something in a language Father Wynne didn't understand and then, perhaps assuming Father Wynne was Catholic, repeated himself in Latin: "Can I help you?"
Father Wynne smiled at the man and nodded, responding also in Latin: "A friend of mine missed an appointment. I came by to make sure she is all right."
"I will let you in and you can check," the bearded fellow offered generously. Father Wynne stepped aside and nodded his thanks. Another door opened by his Priest's collar, he thought to himself, or was it God's providence?
The bearded man swung the door open and stood aside. Father Wynne stepped inside the hot corridor.
It took the Father a few minutes to find Apartment 6E. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to the numbering of the dwellings. As far as he could tell, there was no number 4 at all, and the first apartment was numbered 2 instead of 1. 6E turned out to be on the third floor, between 3A and 5C. 6E's door was not locked. In fact, it wasn't even shut. It stood slightly ajar.
Father Wynne pushed the door open with his toe. The hinges did not squeak. The door swung silently away to reveal a dim apartment.
It was a typical refugee's apartment: utilitarian and bare. Father Wynne had seen many like it. It was run down, with stained and pealing wallpaper. The wood floor was gouged by heavy furniture that no longer existed. A pre-war tenant would have hidden the damage beneath a rug, but not a refugee. A refugee couldn't afford to own anything that didn't fit in their suitcase. Sudden deportation was a common fate of Europe's newly nationless citizens, and they couldn't afford to leave any items of value behind.
There was a stool, rescued from the garbage somewhere, and a small table for meals. A bureau was nothing more than an open suitcase propped up on cinderblocks. A bed was blankets arranged on the hard floor under the apartment's only dirty window.
There was one piece of furniture that set this domicile apart, however: a piano. It was old and beat-up but apparently functional, for a woman sat before it. Father Wynne could already tell that the woman was dead, because she slumped with her forehead on the keyboard. As Father Wynne approached the body, he saw sticky blood staining the white keys red. He reached out and gingerly lifted the woman's chin, turning her head to face him.
An icepick had been driven through her right eye.
Father Wynne gently lowered her head back on the keyboard. The piano gonged as the keys took the dead woman's weight and hammered the strings. Father Wynne stepped back and looked around thoughtfully.
She'd been killed by the Russians, that was clear, the icepick was a calling card. But they hadn't tortured her. Was it possible they didn't know she was a spy? Had she been killed for the crime of defection instead of that of espionage? If so, the information she had intended to sell might still be here, might even be in plain sight.
Father Wynne's eyes landed on the score propped up on the piano's music stand. Hand-written Cyrillic lettering identified it as "The Stalingrad Symphony by Dmitri Shostakovich and George Hamilton." Father Wynne recognized both of those names. Shostakovich was the famous Russian composer responsible for the so-called "Leningrad Symphony," his 9th Symphony. And George Hamilton was Karen's father, who had helped Shostakovich until the American had starved to death in Leningrad. But Father Wynne didn't recognize the "Stalingrad Symphony". To his knowledge there was no such thing.
Father Wynne read the first few lines of music and recognized them. This was the Leningrad Symphony, Shostakovich's 9th, not some new piece of music for Stalingrad. A key in his mind turned. This was the clue: Stalingrad. Madam Nadia had mis-labeled the music intentionally. Karen Hamilton, daughter of George Hamilton, was in Stalingrad. Father Wynne grabbed the symphonic music and hurried away, descending the apartment steps two at a time.
As he emerged onto the street, Father Wynne slipped the music into Karen's dossier and then threw the entire bundle, newspaper and all, into a garbage bin. It wasn't a real garbage bin. It was a dead drop operated by the O.S.S. American agents would pick it up, encode it, and send it to Washington via teletype machine.
Father Wynne turned blindly down several streets. He noticed his hands were shaking. The sight of Madame Nadia's corpse had disturbed him. He needed a drink. Even though the Turkish government was secular, Turkey was still a Muslim nation, so the only bars Father Wynne knew about were in hotels. He set a course for the tourist quarter and tried to get the vision of Madame Nadia's bloody face out of his mind. Then Father Wynne's thoughts and passage were both interrupted by two men wearing very wet clothes.
They jumped him from a blind alley and pushed him back hard to show him they meant business. He stumbled backward but kept his footing. One of the men drew a pistol "You are coming with us," he warned.
Father Wynne knew he wasn't coming with them, that he couldn't come with them. He couldn't allow himself to be captured and tortured. Some spies carried cyanide capsules for exactly this situation. But Father Wynne was a Priest, and he believed that suicide was a mortal sin. So Father Wynne didn't carry poison, instead he carried a gun.
Murder was a mortal sin, too, of course, so Father Wynne's gun wasn't loaded. That wasn't its purpose. Its purpose wasn't to defend him; its purpose was to prevent capture. These Russian agents weren't her to kill him. They wanted him to "come with them." They wanted him to give them information. So he drew his gun.
The men acted as Father Wynne expected. They didn't know his gun was unloaded. They thought he was drawing with deadly intent. So they shot him.
Father Wynne felt the sharp bite of pain in his left shoulder. It was so intense it made his throat gag and his knees buckle. But a part of his mind remained focused through the shock. It wasn't enough. He couldn't afford to be just wounded. He had to be killed. So he struggled to lift his gun and point –
They shot him again. This time the bullet tore through his throat. But somehow it must have missed his spine because as he fell he remained aware and alert. He felt his head hit the concrete. And he saw his own red blood pool up around his face. He couldn't breathe, though, and he began to slip into darkness, a darkness from which he hoped he would never return. He also hoped God would forgive him. He suspected God would be angry, that He would consider the pistol a legalistic loophole at best and outright cheating at worst. But he also hoped that God would understand.
And he regretted that he would never be able to describe Istanbul to his students.