The Star of Istanbul

by Robert Olen Butler

  But as I stood in front of Selene’s door, there was only silence. I had hesitated for a long while, roaming the promenade decks, wanting to confront her about the man—and the government—she was dealing with, but knowing that now more than ever I needed to play the supporting role of the usable and disposable newspaperman-lover so that I could play the leading role of an American secret agent.

  All of which sounded suddenly ridiculous in my head. I was crazy about this woman. I’d soon have to deal with what she was and what she was doing, but I wanted her badly now. I lifted my hand to knock, but before I could, the door swung open and she was a vision in scarlet silk and golden dragons.

  She had asked me to come here with her eyes and her song. She knew it was going to be me; I knew she knew it was going to be me; and yet I stood there struck motionless and dumb at the door’s abrupt opening.

  Now the vision of her was intensified by another opening: her hands moved to the knot of her silk belt and undid it and the belt fell away and her hands rose to her chest and grasped the edges of the wrap and she spread her arms—opening the kimono—and I had to work hard to bolster my dissolving knees.

  Since standing up was a struggle for me at the moment, moving forward was out of the question. She did not seem to mind. She sloughed off the kimono and she was utterly naked, instantly, in the open doorway, and she did not move either, though I’m sure she had more of a choice in the matter than I did, and we stood before each other and it was a tribute to her eyes that they were all I was looking at.

  She seemed happy to set the rules, as she had our first time. She lifted a hand and touched my lips with her fingertips. Only they were different rules. “Not a word,” she said. “And forget the last time. Go rough with me. I think you know how.”

  This fortified my knees, and I stepped into her cabin and swept her up in my arms and kicked her door shut with my heel. And I did this thing with Selene Bourgani in the War-Zone dark, and though I did it the way I was used to doing it, and though I didn’t even have to make myself assume that the woman beneath me wanted it done this way, and though it was all proceeding just fine as far as the bodies involved were concerned, the damnedest thing started going on.

  My mind separated itself, my mind went off somewhere quite a ways away and raised a periscope and watched this vessel sailing by in the dark, watched me doing what I wanted with this woman, whose beautiful eyes I could not see, whose beautiful body was simply something to pound inside, whose beauty and public place in the world I was merely turning into a classy version of all the bodies I’d ever pounded inside, and yet all the while, my lurking mind was wondering what was going on with her. She’d wanted me slow and gentle before her meeting with Brauer. She’d wanted me slow and gentle when we were out in the middle of the North Atlantic, when she was still days and nights away from the place where she was going and from the things she would do there. But tonight she wanted it like this. As our arrival grew nearer, was she feeling guilty about what she was going to do? Was she having me punish her for it? Some women wanted to be punished like this.

  And then I was done. My body knew it quite well. But with my mind submerged far away, watching, working on its own questions, I missed the moment.

  Selene was gasping, was whimpering, she was saying, “More. Keep going. Please.” My body had enough left to do that. And I did that. But all I was caring about was what, exactly, Selene Bourgani had gotten herself into, and why, and how I could get her out.

  Then she said she was all right. She wasn’t. Her body maybe had what it wanted, but I could feel the darkness inside her welling up again and she was not all right. And then we were holding each other close in this outer darkness, on the floor of her parlor in her suite on the Lusitania, and now that my body was done, I was fully there beside her again and we neither of us seemed inclined to move. Not to the bed in the other room. Not even to the overstuffed sofa here in her parlor. We lay on the floor and she put her head on my chest and I drew her close.

  After a while she shifted her head to my shoulder and immediately laid her hand where her head had been. Upon my heart, I realized. I knew how to grill possible news sources, even by indirection when I didn’t want to put them completely off me. I figured this might be my only chance with Selene. I said, “Are you awake?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you all right?”

  She wasn’t going to say no. But her yes was slow and quiet. “Yes,” she said.

  “I think the Germans could do this,” I said.

  She was quiet.

  “Sink us,” I said.

  She still said nothing. I didn’t like the dark. I wanted to read her face. Was it paining her to confront the perfidy of the men she was working for? Was she like them? I wanted to see her eyes.

  “What they did in Belgium when they went in,” I said. “In Dinant. Louvain.”

  She stirred. Her hand came off my chest. Her head lifted from my shoulder, but only for a moment, returning almost at once. And she said, “The world’s pretty selective in the massacres it cares about.”

  She herself applied the word “massacre” to the civilian killings in Belgium. But somehow I heard in her a world-weary justification of the Germans. That’s what I wanted her to talk about. If I was to get more from her at this juncture I needed to start with something like: “Which other massacres do you mean?” It needed to sound like an ignorant challenge. I needed to rile her to get her to say things. But I knew what she was talking about. The Brits in India, for example, killing a million locals by exporting their rice in the midst of famine. The Belgians themselves in the Congo, massacring by amputation over failed rubber quotas. I was holding Selene close and I was still a little in her thrall, and contrary to my reporter’s instincts, I was reluctant to sound stupid and calloused.

  So I improvised in another direction. “Have you ever had a German lover?”

  This made her head leave my shoulder and stay away. There was just enough spill of light into the room from beneath the door that I could see her turn her body to face me, prop her head on her hand.

  “How did you do that?” she said.

  “Do what?”

  “Go from massacres to my past lovers?”

  “A freely associating mind,” I said.

  She grunted a little.

  “You shouldn’t have asked for it rough,” I said.

  She laughed a little.

  I said, “You wanted our last time together to be the last. Then this. Before we quit forever again, I want to know where I’ll fit in your memory.”

  “He wanted to know that too.”

  “Who?”

  “The German. What is it with the smarter men? They all seem to want to know about the ones before.”

  “The stupid men prefer virgins,” I said. “We’ve got a sense of history.”

  She was quiet for a moment, and then she asked, “Was your mother happy in love?”

  Selene was freely associating now herself. And she wasn’t hesitant to get personal. I didn’t like the associations squirming to be free in my own head at this question, but at least she made it easier for me to press the only issue I had to work with.

  “You’d have to ask her,” I said. “I didn’t keep track.”

  I let that sit in her for a moment, and it did, quietly. Then I pressed on. “And your German,” I said. “Were you happy with him?”

  She wasn’t saying.

  I got to that question too quick. I backed up. “Who was he?”

  “A director.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  She fell silent once more. I waited. She wasn’t talking.

  “Which one?” I asked.

  She moved abruptly and I couldn’t see how in the dark and I flinched. But her body was suddenly against me again, her head returned to th
e place on my shoulder where it had been before the talk began. Her hand returned to my heart.

  I’d been grasping at straws here. Trying to get her to talk about the Germans. Trying to figure out her connections to them. This seemed just a busted romance. But it was the only card I had to play.

  I’m not real smart about women. But I’m smart about reading people, being a pretty good reporter. So after making a certain scale-tipping number of mistakes with women, my reporter skills finally kicked in and taught me a few things. Women, especially ones who have reasons—like jazzing together—to think you’ve got a romantic future, deep down want to talk about their feelings. So for the first time ever while lying around naked with a female, I said, “You want to talk about it?”

  But this wasn’t your usual woman.

  She lifted her head slightly away from me and said, with an edge in her voice she could use for Lady Macbeth, “I’m a movie star. Movies don’t talk. We’re in the last reel of our little smut film, so just shut up now and hold me.”

  Which made me even more interested in her director. I did not believe she was completely at ease with her connection to the German secret service. If they had something on her to coerce her, it might have come from her former lover. I was still thinking about all this when she added, but in the softest of voices, the gentlest of voices, the most natural of voices, a voice beyond the range of her manifest talents as an actress: “Or go the hell away.”

  There was even the faintest hint of a concluding catch in her voice.

  As an agent of the American secret service, there was nothing more I could do now. As a man, I drew her closer and she gave me a kiss on the throat as soft and natural as these last words she’d spoken.

  And a knock came at the door.

  We both flinched upright.

  But she put her hand on my chest, telling me to stop, move no more, make no noise. She clearly wanted to ignore this, whatever it was.

  I figured it to be one of two things. A ship official rousing people for some emergency preparation. But there would be more commotion, if that were the case.

  The knock came again, a little louder.

  Or it could be Brauer.

  It was Brauer. His voice outside: “Miss Bourgani.”

  I felt Selene stiffen.

  The knock came again, though. Stupidly, it was more softly. He was second guessing the wisdom of disturbing her in the middle of the night. Which made him continue to try to disturb her, only more quietly.

  He even lowered his voice: “Miss Bourgani.” He was addressing her formally. I was—in spite of my certainty that there was nothing personal between them—relieved.

  He got even stupider. He said her name softly once more and simultaneously tried the latch on the door. Even though it would certainly be locked. And, of course, since it was most recently kicked shut by my heel while I had things on my mind other than securing the door, it was not locked.

  The door opened.

  A wide shaft of light fell upon Selene and me, sitting naked, side by side, on the parlor floor.

  Framed in dark silhouette in the doorway was Walter Brauer.

  “Get the hell out,” Selene barked.

  Walter flustered there. It made him even stupider. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know.”

  “Get out,” she said.

  This is how stupid: with us sitting naked before him, he felt compelled to justify his middle of the night interruption. “I wanted to reassure you about the U-boats.”

  “Mr. Brauer,” Selene said sharply.

  He blundered on: “They would stop us first, before sinking the ship.”

  “We hardly know each other,” Selene said.

  “The passengers would be allowed to disembark.”

  “I am naked, Mr. Brauer,” Selene said.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “So is this gentleman,” Selene said.

  I knew what was driving Brauer. He was afraid a U-boat attack would upset their plans. This had occurred to him after Turner’s speech tonight. The attack could happen at any time, so for the sake of their conspiracy, he had to instruct her in an alternate plan, even if that meant doing it in the middle of the night.

  “I’m sorry,” he said again.

  “Get out.” Without a single “s” in either word I’m not sure how Selene made that sound like a hiss. But she did.

  Brauer was finally getting the hint.

  He was starting to close the door. Not fast enough.

  “Out!” Selene cried.

  And the silhouette vanished; the door clicked shut; the room went dark.

  Selene and I sat there for a long moment not moving.

  I wanted to say, “Who the hell was that?” It was the best question to ask to perhaps elicit an unguarded response.

  But for maximum effect, it had to be asked instantly. I’d already waited too long.

  Which was for the best anyway: she might have seen Brauer and me speaking together; he might have mentioned me to her, as an unusually snoopy newsman she should take care to avoid. I didn’t want her to catch me in a lie, pretending not to know him.

  I said, “That was Walter Brauer, wasn’t it?”

  Though I could not see her in the dark, I could sense her face turn to me.

  Perhaps she didn’t know I’d encountered him. This could be just as useful, her abruptly realizing I knew him. I could even hint I knew about him.

  I waited. She waited. Then she said, “Yes.”

  “How do you know him?” I asked.

  She called my bluff before I could get it started. “How do you?” she said.

  I still wanted to seem to both of them to be an ignorant third party. No verifiable lies. Nothing suspicious. “I met him around,” I said. “Had a drink and a smoke with him and a bookseller friend of his a few nights ago.”

  She did not reply to this. But along all the places where our arms and thighs were touching, I felt a faint loosening of tension in her.

  “And you?” I said.

  “Something similar,” she said.

  “Really?” I meant this rhetorically, but I heard it sound like a challenge. It was already spoken, so I went ahead with the rest of it, even as I felt her tensing again. “He seemed awfully forward in the middle of the night,” I said.

  She snorted. It was that female, dismissive “men” snort that is recognizable even in the pitch black.

  I was relieved. She was taking it as jealousy.

  “The night’s over, Mr. Cobb,” she said.

  I couldn’t dispute that. But I didn’t move.

  “Time for you to go,” she said, though once again the softness of her tone surprised me.

  I rose. I gathered my clothes from the floor, my eyes finally adjusting a little to the dark, with the help of the crack of corridor light beneath the door.

  As I put on the first thing, my shirt, I heard her move away toward the bedroom. Without a word.

  Later, after I slipped on my shoes and after I kneeled to them and tied them and rose, after I’d finished with dressing, I hesitated, thinking to go to the bedroom door, to say something to her.

  But I didn’t. A darkness like hers was spreading into my mind, like the darkness in the eyes after taking a blow to the head.

  I moved toward the corridor door.

  And then there was a rushing from behind me.

  I turned.

  I think part of me would not have been surprised if she were rushing to me with a knife that she’d plunge into my chest. But neither was I surprised when she leapt into my arms, still naked, hooking her legs around me, and she kissed me hard on the lips.

  Nor was I surprised, when I tried to move into the room with her, that she just as rapidly disentangl
ed from me and dismounted and backed away into the darkness, saying, “I’m sorry. That was good-bye. We’re done now, Kit Cobb.”

  13

  And the Lusitania steamed into its last sunrise. And we all steamed with it. I slept only a little after leaving Selene. I rose and I wrote some and I packed my things and I ate lunch, with the ship orchestra playing “The Blue Danube,” and I went down to the Purser’s Bureau in the Entrance Hall on B Deck and I retrieved the constant hidden companion of every foreign excursion of my war correspondent career: my money belt, with a stash of gold coins and with reporter credentials and a passport protected inside, for hot countries and cold, for wet countries and dry, for mountain battlefields and city back alleys.

  Then I returned to my cabin and I opened my shirt and I strapped the belt around me and fastened my clothes around it as if I were about to mount a horse and ride into actual danger, and I chuckled. I don’t chuckle. But I affected a tough-guy ironic chuckle, like a bad actor doing a melodrama hero. Like I was such a well-equipped tough guy who thrived on danger but here I was, trapped in a chuckle-worthy lesser world that booksellers and pamphlet writers and sons of tycoons and mothers with their toddlers inhabited. Here I was, simply about to go through customs in Queenstown, Ireland, and board a train for London, England, with a secret mission to sneak around and think about what college lecturers and film actresses might be up to, having lately been used up and kicked out the door by a beautiful woman. This latter probably was the main thing that prompted the phony chuckle.

  And even while I was going through this little fit of pique, like an actor in a repertory company peeved by the no-account role he’d been given to play, a U-boat captain was watching us do fifteen substandard knots in a goddamn straight line directly toward him and wondering just how lucky he was going to get.

  Pretty goddamnn lucky, as it would soon turn out.

  I stepped onto the promenade and the sky was clear and the sun was high and I felt how slow we were going right away. I walked aft, and the portside was full of people crammed at the brief stretches of open railing between lifeboats. The coast of Ireland was distantly visible out there. Some people were murmuring reassuring things about that. Others, who knew ships and their speed and their bearing, were muttering about our vulnerability. And even the ones who were made hopeful by the sight of land were unsettled by the absence of Turner’s promised Royal Navy. We were alone.