The Star of Istanbul

by Robert Olen Butler

  “Yes,” I said.

  Selene took a drag on her cigarette. She held the smoke inside her for a long moment. Then she exhaled slowly, filling the air directly before her. “Why?” she said.

  I was not getting into this. “It had to be done,” I said, hoping this would be sufficient for her.

  It seemed to be. She nodded. She said nothing more.

  We sat side by side in silence for a long moment, and I realized she was trembling slightly.

  I touched her quaking arm. “You’re cold.”

  “I believe I mentioned that before,” she said.

  “Sorry,” I said, and I instantly got up from the bed and picked up her kimono and turned back to her.

  She’d risen to her knees, and she took the wrap from me, the cigarette dangling at the corner of her mouth like she was a Chicago street thug. “You stopped looking anyway,” she said.

  I was surprised to realize that she was right. I didn’t know how to explain that. It was the pound-and-sleep in me, I supposed. I didn’t know how to explain that either. So I said nothing.

  She pulled her kimono around her tightly, her hands crossed on her chest.

  I went to the other bed and put on my pants and shirt.

  When I returned to her, she was still holding her wrap against her. She did not look up. I understood I was supposed to go.

  I picked up the rest of my clothes and threw them over my arm.

  I stopped before her one last time.

  She lifted her face to me. The tears had returned to her eyes. But she said, “It’s all right. Thank you for tonight.”

  I nodded and I left her there on the bed, where she held herself close and said nothing—but at least was not lying—where she was perhaps trying to forget whatever it was that she remembered.

  And as I stepped into the empty corridor and closed Selene Bourgani’s door, I could not help but wonder who she might be thinking of killing.

  8

  She remained invisible again the next day. I did not question that all along she’d intended for me to touch her only once. Did I therefore think of her as fallen? No. I thought of her as an actress. I roamed the A Deck promenade in my shirt sleeves in the cold late afternoon to get my body square with how I was thinking about her.

  Brauer and Cable were invisible as well. Brauer’s suite had its PLEASE DO NOT DISTURB sign hanging on the doorknob both times I checked, midmorning and midafternoon. One stateroom on B Deck—Cable’s, I’d’ve been willing to bet—also had its sign on the door. Both men were sick, or hungover. Something.

  I dressed for dinner that evening, and I arrived deliberately a few minutes late. I stepped in through the starboard doors and discreetly looked across the room and into the corner. The two men had recovered and were in their places, just commencing to touch their wineglasses in a toast.

  I backed away and out of the dining room and I went up the Grand Staircase to A Deck and into the starboard corridor and down to Brauer’s door. I already had my set of lock picks in my pocket.

  I stood before the door, and a man and a woman suddenly emerged from the forward en suite stateroom. They were all decked out for dinner, and Madame’s liveried personal maid trailed behind them, her mistress ragging her for having buttoned too slowly. The man locked the door as the maid vanished in the other direction and I slipped the tools into my pocket. The couple hurried toward me. I knocked on Brauer’s door. “Walter?” I said.

  The couple passed and I nodded at them. They ignored me. They were late. She was blaming her maid. It occurred to me that Selene seemed not to be traveling with a maid. And that calmed my still niggling unease at our having sex and then her disappearing on me. A woman like her was used to having people around who helped her with every commonplace thing. She obviously wanted to be alone on this trip from the start. I thought: I should be glad to have gotten what I did from her.

  The tardy couple disappeared around the corner, and the corridor was empty. I withdrew the two implements I needed and bent to the lock. I inserted the shorter, bent end of a torque wrench into the hole and then I slid the pick inside and gently worked it farther and farther along, lifting each tumbler in turn, sensing them with my fingertips, and then I felt the last one lift for me and I turned the wrench and the bolt yielded and I stepped inside Walter Brauer’s suite.

  I’d noted in Selene’s suite which part of the wall to move to and where to put my hand. I found the key in its ceramic mounting and I turned it. All the lights on their sconces flared up brightly through the sitting room.

  The place was similar to Selene’s in period replication, and, indeed, to most of the rest of the done-up parts of the ship: early neoclassic—sofa, small desk, three-drawer commode, an overstuffed chair and a smoking table—but with a green and yellow motif in place of rose, and with the electric lights on the wall not pretending to be candles.

  I focused exclusively on Brauer’s things.

  In this room, a box of Spanish cigars on the table.

  On the desk a couple of books, one on top of the other.

  No other signs of habitation. Very neat. The DO NOT DISTURB sign must have gone up after the stewardess cleaned the suite this morning.

  I stepped to the desk. I picked up the top book, noting its exact position. Gilt-stamped on the cover was the title—Germany, France, Russia & Islam—and a small German Imperial eagle. This was an English translation of essays written by Heinrich von Treitschke, who was a nineteenth century German historian, an imperialist ideologue and an avid advocate of racial purity. I flipped through the pages and found none of the passages marked, nothing inserted. The essays might speak to Brauer’s Germanic politics, and perhaps even to his covert mission. But this would not be an unusual book for any lecturer on Islam at a British university.

  I laid it aside. It had been sitting on a slate-colored paperbound copy of the April issue of The American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures. This was clearly part of Brauer’s academic persona. I ruffled through the journal as well, finding nothing, and put both journal and book back on the desktop precisely in their previous position.

  The desk had a single drawer. I opened it.

  On one side were three yellow Mongol pencils, finely sharpened. In the center was a ten-cent stationer’s notebook with pasteboard covers. I thumbed through it, starting from the back, and all the pages flipping by were blank. I arrived at the first page—also blank—and was about to close the cover. But I noticed where the cover joined the pages: a minute, ragged edge ran along the hinge. I looked closely. A couple or three pages had been torn out.

  I closed the notebook and put it back where it had lain.

  I kneeled before the drawer and looked underneath, as I drew it out as far as I could. Nothing was affixed there.

  I stood up and closed the desk drawer.

  I went to the commode at the forward wall.

  The top drawer held folded shirts and a couple of waistcoats. I gently probed between them and beneath them, making sure the objects did not shift, did not alert Brauer to my having searched. I found nothing. The next drawer had sweaters on one side and, on the other, gloves, four-in-hands, handkerchiefs. I searched it and closed it and opened the bottom drawer. It pulled out slightly heavy on one side, but the surface contents were lightweight and uniformly distributed: underdrawers and socks and, on the heavy side, a tightly folded black silk dressing gown.

  I slipped my hand beneath the gown and felt another book. I lifted away the gown and set it aside, and I picked up a copy of The Nuttall Encyclopaedia of Universal Information. Sixteen thousand self-described “terse articles” in seven hundred pages, edited by a Reverend James Wood, published in London. Placed under Brauer’s dressing gown in the bottom drawer of the commode, it felt hidden.

  I thumbed the densely set, two-columned pages and found no
markings, nothing placed in the leaves.

  On a personal impulse I turned to a listing under “C.” And I read: Cobb, Isabel, a celebrated American actress, born in St. Louis, Missouri; appeared in London in 1885 and 1897; represented, among other characters, Juliet, Rosalind, Kate, and Lady Macbeth. b. 1859.

  My mother’s entry was five lines long. I turned to the entry on “Islam.” That major religion, one of Brauer’s lecture topics, was dealt with in nine lines, terse to the point of vapidity.

  Brauer was intellectually arrogant. He found me and my work beneath him, even as it rated the captain’s table, a thing that quite literally stopped him in his tracks in the dining room the other night. He would find Nuttall contemptible.

  And the reason he was traveling with it was instantly clear to me, thanks to my months with Trask’s own lecturers. It was a code book. The exact same volume was in the possession of Brauer’s handler, wherever he might be posted; it was no doubt sitting, as well, on a desk in the Auswärtiges Amt, Wilhelmstraße 76, Berlin, the German Foreign Office. Perhaps the book was even in the possession of other German secret agents. Some, perhaps, with different cover stories, different useful skills, might even have lain in bed at night in their rented flats in London or Edinburgh or Liverpool or Southampton and browsed the book, might even have hidden the book proudly in plain sight.

  Not Brauer. This book tweaked his lifted nose. But he had to use it to decode the instructions he got from the boys in Berlin. They’d telegraph him blocks of numbers referencing page and column and line and word in the book. An unbreakable code, without knowing what the shared book was. Books like this went through various editions; I checked the copyright page. 1909. This would be useful to Trask. We would know the Huns by their Nuttalls. Perhaps even read their secret messages.

  I put the book back in its place and the dressing gown on top of it. Silk seemed out of character for Brauer. Maybe this was a gift for a woman. You wouldn’t think it to talk with him. But you wouldn’t think in private he’d suddenly dress like a dude.

  I closed the drawer and thought about the process: he’d get a telegram; the telegram consisted of blocks of numbers; he’d follow the numerical instructions to find each word in Nuttall; he’d write the words down. Perhaps he’d even received a message on the Lusitania. For war security, passengers couldn’t send telegrams, but we could receive them.

  I looked back to the desk.

  I stepped to it and opened the drawer and removed the notebook. Whenever he’d received his last message—on the ship or before he sailed—it was decoded into this notebook. I opened the cover and carefully tore out the top sheet. The paper was pretty thin and the Mongol was a hard No. 2, perhaps requiring enough pressure that it would make an indent on the page below. The tear went cleanly. Its absence would not be noticed. I had hopes.

  Then I gave every piece of furniture in the suite the treatment, looking behind and beneath, and with the commode I drew the drawers out as far as possible and checked their undersides as well.

  The sitting room had given me all that it could.

  I had one more room to go.

  I stepped through the darkened bedroom doorway. I have a pretty keen sense of smell, and in the dark, without the distraction of my primary sense, it was even keener. I could not place the faint smell but something was in the air. My first thought: saltwater mildew from the first-class bathroom in the far wall.

  I turned the electrical key and the place lit up. I looked toward that far wall. On the left, the door into the bathroom was closed; I myself stood in the mirror directly before me, hanging over the dresser; and on the right, built as a wedged corner piece, was a marble-topped washbasin. Something caught my eye there. I moved the length of the room, aware in my periphery of the two beds arranged foot to foot, as in Selene’s suite, but keeping my eyes on what seemed the unusual detail.

  Now I stood before the washbasin. And I was right. Two men’s straight razors were neatly laid side by side. Two shaving mugs sat behind them. And in one drinking glass, two bone-handled toothbrushes leaned away from each other at the top but angled down to the bottom of the glass where their tips touched.

  I knew the smell.

  I turned. On one of the beds the covers were stripped open, the sheet exposed.

  And all the oddness I’d felt in the Smoking Room, trying to understand Edward Cable as a player in the game of German secret service, was explained. He was simply a bookseller from Boston, sharing a secret, certainly, with Walter Brauer, but not the one I was seeking to understand.

  9

  After thoroughly searching the bedroom and finding nothing further of interest, I slipped out of Brauer’s suite and left him and Cable behind for a couple of hours. I ate à la carte in the Verandah Café and I strolled the promenade and I settled into the still mostly empty Smoking Room, and until the moment I pulled out my cigarettes and lit one up, I thought about other things. About my feature story and about the reporting I would do in the other role I still played—no matter where I went, I’d find stories for Christopher Cobb to cover—and I thought about the Cubs, how I’d miss hearing the scores through the summer, and about the new Chicago Federal League team and their swell new ballpark on Addison. And I thought about Selene, though I tried not to, as I was determined for the rest of the night to keep my thinking just as it would have been before I went to Mexico last year, when I was simply Christopher Cobb, war correspondent.

  But when I lit up a cigarette on the end of a couch in the Smoking Room, I let my thoughts turn once more to Brauer. Oddly, he seemed more human to me now. Not so easy to despise. I’d been around a lot of men in tough situations and I knew that these feelings existed in the world. Sometimes men even responded to the stress of battle by reaching out like that. I was ready to think that Brauer wasn’t working on board, that he was simply in transit to London, that I’d simply have to follow him to the city and continue to keep track of him there. And I did have the slip of paper in my pocket and a chance to get a little something out of it.

  But if the Lusitania were merely transportation for him, I still wondered why Brauer was in first class. The cost of his suite would’ve kept a working-class family of four in a London suburb subsisting for two years. A prohibitive extravagance for his German bosses. An impossible lot of money for a college lecturer. Perhaps Cable had lied. Given their relationship, that would’ve been possible. Perhaps they hadn’t met on board. Maybe they’d planned this rendezvous, and the moneyed Cable had sprung for Brauer’s first-class accommodations.

  Two Fatimas later, the first influx of post-dinner smokers began to arrive, and among them was Cable. I assumed Brauer was immediately behind him. But he wasn’t. At least not right away. Brauer could have stopped in the wash room, but I was picking up something in Cable’s manner that suggested he was alone. He drifted in; he looked around as if trying to decide what he would do. If he were expecting Brauer, there would be no doubt: he’d find their accustomed place and claim it before the following surge of diners took away the option. But he was hesitating; he was wondering, it seemed to me, if he should simply leave.

  Then he noticed me. He did not brighten, even in a routinely social way. But he registered my familiarity. I nodded. He nodded in return, and he hesitated some more, made a decision. He crossed the room and arrived before me. “Good evening, Mr. Cable,” I said.

  He nodded again.

  “Would you like to join me?” I asked.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  There was a fresh shaving cut on his chin. I thought of his razor lying beside Brauer’s. Cable’s hand had been a bit unsteady tonight in using it. It was a risky thing, I thought, to keep your face bare.

  He looked behind him and backed into the chair that faced the couch. He sat down and went straight for his smokes. As he fumbled with his matches—his hands were still unsteady—a steward appeared and took
our drink orders. Two whiskeys. He made his a double.

  When the steward was gone and Cable had taken a long, calming drag on his cigarette, I said, “Where’s Walter?”

  Cable had been watching his smoke and he cut his eyes to me as if I should have known better than to ask about this. That attitude instantly passed. But clearly there’d been some sort of break between the two men.

  “Working,” Cable said.

  “Working?”

  “He has a lecture to write.”

  This sounded fishy. From his pinched tone, it sounded fishy to Cable as well.

  I said, “So you two knew each other in London, right?”

  “We’ve only known each other a few days,” he said, and he was looking away, talking as much to himself as to me, thinking: I never really knew this man. He hadn’t been lying about when they met. Now it sounded as if Brauer was through with his bookseller, who no doubt possessed—he did passionately love books, after all—a romantic streak.

  I said, “An experienced teacher like him, writing a lecture shouldn’t take long.”

  Cable didn’t answer but took a drink of his whiskey. Which was itself an answer to the question I really had intended to ask. Brauer had let Cable know he’d be tied up for the rest of the trip.

  I felt a little ruthless now. Cable was just a bookseller. I didn’t need to be indirect with him. “Does he have another friend on the ship?” I asked.

  Cable looked at me. If my impertinence ended the conversation, it made no difference now. But his face went blank. This was a question he hadn’t considered.