Istanbul by Colin Falconer

Episcopiei before throwing themselves in the doorway of the nearest salon. Once, it sold the latest Paris fashion, but the windows and doors were boarded up now. There would be no winter collection this year.
    They were both breathing hard. The dirty white wedding cake of the Athenee Palace already seemed hopelessly remote.
    Max couldn’t get his breath. Hardly surprising; his morning exercise consisted of propping up the American Bar with a brandy and a cigarette.
    Cars and buses were abandoned all along the boulevard. The city smelled of burning and black smoke hung over the rooftops like a pall. Nick saw a corpse sprawled across the driver’s seat of a taxi, blood congealed in thick clots on the upholstery.
    The streets were empty. He and Max were the only ones out on the street in this city full of snipers and madmen.
    Max’s apartment was just two blocks from the hotel and the Humber was parked outside in the street. There were burnt-out cars behind it and in front of it but for some inexplicable reason it had been spared.
    They crawled inside the car and Max fumbled with the keys but his hands were shaking so badly he couldn’t find the ignition. Nick snatched them away from him.
    ‘Get out of the way, Max.’
    ‘I can do it, sport.’
    ‘No, you can’t.’
    Max crawled across the seat and cowered in the floor-well on the passenger side. Nick tried the ignition. The engine was too cold to start. He hoped the water in the radiator hadn’t frozen.
    There was a starter handle. He got out of the car and bent down in front of the bonnet, his back an inviting target for every sniper in Bucharest. The engine coughed and coughed again, and then the handle kicked back and almost smashed his wrist. ‘Start you bastard!’
    It stuttered into life.
    The windscreen was caked with ice. He scraped it off with his gloves and then crawled behind the wheel. ‘Going to get us killed, old boy,’ Max said.
    Nick drove at walking pace through the deserted streets, crouched down over the wheel, waiting for a bullet to shatter the windscreen at any moment. Max crouched on the floor, his head on the passenger seat. ‘Don’t know how I let you talk me into this.’
    ‘Sorry.’
    ‘Fucking should be, sport.’
    They drove almost five blocks. The walls of the buildings were pocked with bullet holes. Bodies had frozen in bizarre attitudes of death.
    They reached the outskirts of the Jewish Quarter. Nick stopped the car. ‘We’ll go on foot from here.’
    He got out, and crouched down beside the front wheel. Max crawled across the driver’s seat and slid out beside him. ‘We’re going to die, old sport. You know that?’
    They heard a crack of rifle fire from the next street. Too close. If the Guards came round the corner right now they were finished. ‘Let’s get going,’ Nick said.
     
     
     
    They heard screams, very close. Instinctively, they dropped on their bellies in the wet snow.
    ‘Christ,’ Max said, ‘think I’ve pissed myself.’
    ‘Wait here,’ Nick said.
    He crawled to the corner. There were perhaps half a dozen greenshirts in the next street and they had found a Jew to play with. The man looked like a student, a Hassid with a shaved head and long curls around his ears. His long black coat was stained with all manner of filth from his hiding place.
    One of the greenshirts aimed his rifle at the man’s feet, and fired. The bullet sparked off the cobblestones and his terrified prisoner screamed and danced. One of the others had a can of petrol and threw the contents over him. Realising what was about to happen, he tried to run, but one of his tormentors knocked him down with the butt of his rifle.
    The man with the petrol can threw a lighted match and his victim erupted into a writhing ball of flame.
    Nick crawled back to where Max lay face down in the slush of wet snow. He hauled him into a nearby doorway by his collar. ‘Don’t move, just keep quiet!’
    The screaming went on and on. The stink of