The Star of Istanbul

by Robert Olen Butler

  I had him talking to himself even as he talked to me, so I pushed it: “Have you seen him with anyone?”

  He furrowed a little at this, but he clearly hadn’t.

  “Did he speak of anyone on board?” I asked.

  Cable shook his head no. I was sitting, I realized, with a jilted lover. One who had trusted completely.

  I could have pushed harder. But I wasn’t all that ruthless after all. And Cable wasn’t holding anything back. He hadn’t held back from his Walter either, sadly. Once again it was easy to despise Brauer. Which was just as well.

  10

  So I left Edward Cable with his whiskey and smokes and broken heart, and I sat at the desk in my stateroom with my penknife and a Blaisdell No. 624 self-sharpening pencil and the seemingly blank page from Brauer’s notebook. The Blaisdell was a clever thing invented in the last century for big-volume pencil-using offices—beloved by the copydesk at the Post-Express—but also, as it happened, perfect for my present task. Its soft, black, graphite lead was wrapped not in cedar but in a narrow, tight band of paper, the new segment of lead being freshly exposed by nicking the next in a long row of indents arranged up the barrel and then unwrapping the paper. This I did several times; in between, I scraped the accessible lead into an ashtray, finely grinding it into a soft, black, graphite powder, with no wood scraps to interfere.

  Then I laid out the notebook page and began a process of dipping my fingertip into the black powder and lightly rubbing it all across the surface of the page. The graphite turned the page dark wherever I touched, but the indentations made by Brauer recording the decoded words on the previous page gradually emerged, not fully absorbing my superficial dusting and coming out lighter by comparison.

  I did not let myself read the note piecemeal. I concentrated on a uniformity of stroke and the lightest of touches so as not to darken the shallow impressions of his writing. Then I was done. And on the notebook page was this telegram from Brauer’s German bosses, decoded from Nuttall: Deliver to 53 Saint Martin Lane Monday night at 8.

  Maybe it wasn’t a person on the Lusitania that was of interest to Brauer. Maybe it was a thing. A thing too big to carry with him in his baggage—a thing to deliver—and his traveling first class ensured its being handled more carefully.

  I pushed back from the desk and I felt I’d probably done as much as I could do for Trask and for country on this voyage. Brauer seemed to be lying low, even divesting himself now of his forbidden bookman. And the more I let it sit in me, the more I figured I was right, that his mission on the ship was to accompany something, which he would deliver to St. Martin’s Lane in London, and which presently was stashed in the cargo hold.

  I needed some air.

  I was still wearing my evening clothes, though I’d stripped off the tie. The North Atlantic night at twenty knots could be pretty chilly, but I could use some bucking up so I simply rose and stepped out of the room. I turned the corridor that passed Selene’s suite on the way to the door onto the promenade.

  I had no intention of knocking. Her attitude seemed clear.

  But I stopped in front of her door.

  I hesitated.

  I stepped back and looked closely at the tiny gap at the bottom of the door. A light shown there.

  I stepped forward again and I knocked. I immediately leaned near to listen. There was a rustling inside, quite close. She was in her parlor, not her bedroom.

  The night was waning, however. I didn’t bring my watch, but it was well past ten. I used this to justify saying, “Selene?”

  Instantly the handle clicked and the door was opening. But it went only far enough to let her face appear, and one shoulder. A few moments later I would struggle to remember what was covering that shoulder, but for the moment I was focused ardently on her dark-of-the-night eyes, trying to read them in conjunction with the tone of her voice as she said, “Mr. Cobb.”

  On the surface, this was pretty damn formal for a woman who was stashed in my arms not even twenty-four hours earlier. But the eyes were soft, almost supplicant, almost as supplicant as they were when she and I had begun last night, made more so, oddly enough, by the faux-brittle ironic upturn of her “Cobb.”

  I was prepared for the door to open fully now, without my even having to utter a word.

  But it didn’t.

  “Miss Bourgani,” I finally said, though it sounded flat, a tone prompted by the door remaining mostly closed.

  “It’s late,” she said.

  “Forgive me,” I said.

  “I’ve not been well,” she said.

  “My fear of that was why I knocked,” I said, a statement that may actually have been as much as thirty-two percent true.

  “I probably won’t emerge till Queenstown,” she said.

  “I won’t trouble you again,” I said, thinking what I found myself not infrequently thinking: I do not understand women even a little bit.

  “Good night,” she said.

  “Good night,” I said.

  Those eyes that twice I’d personally seen fill with tears seemed as if they might yet again. But the door moved and clicked shut before I could be sure.

  I should have simply walked away. I’d already reconciled myself to having simply played a one-nighter in a provincial theater with a big guest star. But I didn’t walk. I leaned. Toward her door. I had the impulse to listen to her weep.

  But there was no weeping from her cabin. Instead, I heard a sharp, low utterance by a man’s voice. And she responded in kind. None of the words were clear. But the situation seemed very clear.

  I backed away. This suddenly felt terribly familiar. Boyhood familiar. A memory hooked into the same part of my brain as catching frogs and skipping stones and playing mumblety-peg in an empty lot and hitting a rubber ball with a broomstick handle while pretending to be Big Ed Delahanty; or more like falling and flaying both my knees while rounding third base at a manhole cover or spearing the side of my foot with my pocket knife playing Flinch or instantly, drastically regretting throwing a caught frog into a bonfire; or like all of that mixed together, good and bad: me placed outside a closed door in the hallway of some actor’s boardinghouse or cheap hotel with my mother letting herself be a woman in a woman’s body with a woman’s needs but with me being a boy who basically knew what was going on but didn’t know nearly as much about it as he wanted and who wanted to expunge from his mind the thought of her doing something like this with a man but who also, deeper in that mind, wanted in some classic way to be the one in her arms. My standing there in a first-class corridor outside Selene’s door was drastically different, of course, but similar in just enough ways that I wanted to wipe my hands hard on something and maybe spit, and I turned and strode down the corridor, wondering who the hell this might be inside there with the woman who I myself jazzed just last night. Some dude. Some leading man type. The next actor for her to hold in the next filmed episode of Selene Bourgani’s life.

  I stepped out onto the promenade.

  And I looked to my right. Her two windows. The parlor lit. The bedroom dark.

  I had to know one thing. But at least I was above spying in her window.

  So I stepped back into the corridor. I turned right—away from her—and moved along the few short steps to the doorway that led into the writing room and library. I stopped. I turned and faced down the corridor toward Selene’s suite. I was maybe twenty yards from her door.

  I waited. For a few moments I tried to remember what she was wearing, from the little of her shoulder I’d seen. I’d been so instantly and totally riveted by her eyes—I wished I’d looked more carefully into her eyes when we’d been together—that I couldn’t even say for sure whether her shoulder was covered in crimson silk. It might have been. I’d never expected a man to be with her, so I just couldn’t say.

  Then I stopped trying to r
emember and simply waited. This wasn’t jealousy, after all. This was curiosity. This was bemusement. I could just wait. I stepped aside for people who wanted into the writing room and who wanted out. I did that half a dozen times. Maybe more. I waited and I tried to look as if I was expecting to meet someone, and people simply excused themselves to go around me, and I excused myself and let them, and I waited.

  And then, with no one else in sight at the time, I heard her door opening. I started to take a step forward, going in slow motion, ready to speed up as the man emerged so that I could seem simply to be coming out of the writing room.

  But the man emerged and immediately turned to head forward in the corridor, never noticing me, and it was just as well for a couple of reasons. I’d stopped cold and I was sure I was gaping, and I was glad not to appear suspicious to him. Because it was Walter Brauer.

  11

  The next time I saw Selene Bourgani, it was nearly ten o’clock on the last night of the last voyage of the R.M.S. Lusitania. We were in the War Zone and due to arrive in Queenstown tomorrow afternoon.

  I wandered into the back of the large mahogany-paneled first-class Lounge and Music Room, its Georgian easy chairs and settees all turned to face the piano-end of the place and holding all the swells, every sitting space filled and all the standing spaces in the room as well. The traditional last-night talent concert was under way, a benefit for the Seamen’s Charities.

  I entered as they were laughing and applauding a man in a tux who was catching the last of half a dozen oranges he’d been juggling. I lingered at the back door for a moment, and a young woman, smartly dressed—one of the voyagers doing a bit of volunteer work—sidled up to me with a stack of gold-embossed programs, which were selling for ten cents each. “The Welsh Choir has already sung,” she said. “But Selene Bourgani’s going to perform soon. Buy a program to remember her? It’s for the cause.”

  I gave her a quarter and told her to keep the change for the cause. I shoved the program in my pocket and began to edge my way around the room, excusing myself, squeezing through the standees, wanting to get closer to the front, more than a little surprised that Selene had emerged for this, but maybe not so surprised, reflecting on it as I moved: this was a public event, an audience, a keeping up of the identity she offered to the world, even as she played some other, quite private role.

  I’d already settled into the only conclusion I could about Brauer and Bourgani. She was the contact he’d been intending to make on the Lusitania. She was the person of interest to the German Secret Service, the reason Brauer was traveling in first class. The “delivery” in the coded message almost certainly referred to Selene Bourgani. I’d accepted this as the only possible conclusion. And yet I was baffled as hell.

  A man was ragtiming “By the Beautiful Sea” on the Broadwood grand and I found a place against a support pillar near the front where I could see between heads to the performance space. The pianist was followed by a Scottish comedian. I could barely understand the heavily brogued words of his jokes, much less their humor. Some in the audience seemed to catch on—the Scots, no doubt—but most were politely waiting for the next act. I endured this for a time, letting my mind drift to trivial things, and finally I looked around the room.

  Edward Cable was sitting in one of the easy chairs in the second row, his arms pulled stiffly to his sides. I sensed this much from his place and his pose and from the manner of the women on either side of him, not to mention from their gender: he was alone, having arrived early to the event, with nothing else to do, pining for his lost companion. The comic tended to raise his voice to a near shout at the climax of each joke. One of those shouts came as I watched Cable. He made the slightest flinch at the volume and did not otherwise move.

  Then the comic was done. I looked to the front. A tuxedo bounded up and began talking, but I did not listen. My gaze slid on to the far side of the room. And there stood Selene. She was waiting to go on. Her long, empire-waisted dress was sleeveless, as was her sea-green wrap, and she wore long, black gloves. Her throat and the swell of her chest were bare, as were her arms from her shoulder to the middle of her biceps. I found myself stirred most by the unexpected nakedness of that six inches of arm.

  The tuxedo yammered about her fame and beauty, and her face was turned slightly away from the audience but not focused on the speaker either. I wanted her to shift her gaze a bit to her left, toward me. I wanted her to look at me. To see me.

  Instead, she closed her eyes for a long few moments. As I’d grown up backstage in countless theaters, I’d often seen actresses do this before going on. But even across this room I sensed something else in her at that moment. She was looking inward. And she was looking ahead. She was about to sing to us and she was reflecting on the secret context. I felt sure of all this.

  Her eyes still closed, she lifted her face a little and turned it slightly to the left, as if she had just concluded something in her meditation. And the tuxedo announced her: “The internationally renowned, the incomparably beautiful Miss Selene Bourgani!”

  Selene’s face descended and she opened her eyes, and she found herself looking straight at me.

  The crowd was applauding mightily and a few of the young Brit collegiates were crying “Right ho!” and Selene should have been moving to center stage. But she lingered one beat, and then another, looking at me, though her eyes—at least from across the room—showed me no feeling at all. But the lingering did.

  Then she shifted her gaze away and she glided to the place where the juggler and the comic had stood and she turned to the throng and smiled. I expected a radiant, film-actress, outsized smile. But it was not. It was quite small, really, this smile, considering the audience, considering their ardor. And then she gave us her famous profile, as she nodded over her bare shoulder to the pianist.

  He played a few bars of introduction and she turned back to us all and she began to sing the first verse.

  I knew the song. A couple of years ago, a girl in Chicago and I had a rough-and-tumble, me blowing off steam after covering the Second Balkan War. She owned a cylinder of this song and about played the grooves off it in our couple of months together.

  Selene sang it with a deep, dark vibrato:

  “I’ve been worried all day long.

  Don’t know if I’m right or wrong.

  I can’t help just what I say.

  Your love makes me speak this way.”

  This much was just as it had been seared into my brain from spin after spin of Mr. Edison’s cylinder. But then Selene turned her face to me and she found my eyes and she slowed the song down just a little—the pianist subtly adjusted as he heard this—and I could see her mind working as she improvised and interpolated new words:

  “Why, oh why, did I close the door?

  You must know I wanted more.

  But now I’m crying.

  No use denying:

  I vanish on the nearing shore.”

  I can be dense about these things sometimes, but it was me she’d closed the door on, and I had no doubt she intended to disappear from me in England. So when she let go of my eyes and faced the audience and sang the familiar chorus to us all, I had no choice but to think she was still singing to me. Just to me:

  “You made me love you.

  I didn’t want to do it.

  I didn’t want to do it.

  You made me want you,

  And all the time you knew it.

  I guess you always knew it.

  You made me happy sometimes,

  You made me glad.

  But there were times dear,

  You made me feel so sad.

  You made me sigh, for

  I didn’t want to tell you.

  I didn’t want to tell you.

  I want some love that’s true.

  Yes I do,

/>   Deed I do,

  You know I do.

  Give me, give me what I cry for.

  You know you got the brand of kisses that I’d die for.

  You know you made me love you.”

  And she was done. The crowd was on its feet, applauding and shouting “Brava!” and she closed her eyes again, as she had when she was waiting to go on, as if she were meditating. Briefly. And she bowed. She did not curtsey. She bowed. A long, slow, stiff bow from the waist. The bow of a Prussian officer in a social setting with civilians, feeling uncomfortable, waiting to leave.

  She did this once. She bowed only once, and then she looked fleetingly to me, one last time, and she turned away and moved quickly to the far side of the room and disappeared from my sight beyond the crowd.

  I followed her progress to the back of the lounge by watching the bodies turning to send their ongoing applause straight to her as she was leaving them.

  Then she was gone. And everyone was facing back to the empty space where she had just sung, and they continued to applaud her, even though she had vanished.

  12

  I stood before her door.

  I had approached softly. The corridor itself was very quiet, even though many on the ship were still awake, even now, well past midnight, already a couple of hours advanced into May 7, 1915.

  Before the end of the charity concert Captain Turner had stood in the performance space and made a short, clumsy, self-contradictory speech revealing a special telegraph warning from the naval area commander in Queenstown that German U-boats were known to be presently active off the Irish coast, but Turner urged us not to worry, as our ship was too fast and we would have the Royal Navy to protect us but in the meantime don’t dare light any cigarettes on deck.

  Many of the first-class passengers were now sleeping fully dressed and fitful in the public spaces, on chairs and settees and on pallets on the floors of the Writing Room and the Smoking Room and the Lounge, the Dining Room and the Entrance Hall, even on the landings of the Grand Staircase. Others paced the decks in the dark, wearing their life jackets.