The Star of Istanbul

by Robert Olen Butler

  And then at last—after a too-brief period of be-stupored happiness lying in a great porcelain tub of hot water and after donning my new cotton pajama suit and silk dressing gown and after a lamb chop in the Admiralty kitchen and a pot of strong coffee—at last, shortly before midnight on the day the Lusitania was sunk by a German U-boat in the North Atlantic, I sat high on the widow’s walk of the Admiralty House smoking British cigarettes with James Metcalf of the U.S. embassy.

  The admiral had departed from our company soon after the handshake, but in the few parting words he’d referred to Metcalf as “Gentleman Jim.” So as Metcalf and I took our first drag of our second cigarette together, Queenstown now simply stacks and hedgerows of rooftops and a scattering of harbor-front lights below us, I said, “‘Gentleman Jim,’ is it? From the boxer?” Meaning the former heavyweight champion Gentleman Jim Corbett.

  “Do you have a taste for irony, Mr. Cobb?”

  “Kit. From the playwright,” I said.

  “Kit,” he said.

  “Sure,” I said. “I like a good irony.”

  “Yes, from the boxer, thanks to the ambassador and his fondness for the prizefights. But I am among the least violent of men.”

  “A gentleman,” I said.

  “An irony within an irony,” he said.

  We concentrated on smoking for a little while. Or I did, at least. The tobacco was smoothing a few of the day’s jagged edges in my head. I took a deep drag and let it go with a long exhalation, and I did that once more. Metcalf simply watched me as he let his own cigarette smolder between fore and middle fingers, suspended near his face with his elbow on the arm of his chair.

  Like a real gentleman.

  After the second long pull on my Captsan, I said, “So what are we authorized to say to each other?”

  “Whatever you would say to your stateside James.”

  I nodded, but for now I quietly took another drag on the cigarette.

  “At this point,” Metcalf said, “it might merely be moot, but were you able to learn anything about our man Walter Brauer?”

  “The most recent thing I learned is that it’s not moot,” I said.

  Metcalf straightened a bit in his chair. He seemed suddenly to become aware of his cigarette. He flicked the long ash and took a drag. “So he’s alive?”

  “He is.”

  “What were the earlier things?”

  “His business is with Miss Selene Bourgani.”

  This brought Metcalf forward in his chair. “The film actress?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Are you sure?”

  I told him the events on the ship. Many of them. I told him about finding out the connection between Bourgani and Brauer after suspecting an American bookseller. I told him about Nuttall and the coded message and the planned delivery of something—likely the actress—to the address on St. Martin’s Lane on Monday night. I told him about Brauer’s personal interest in the seller of books, the necessary secrecy of it being a potential point of leverage with the man.

  I told Metcalf nothing of my own personal interest in Selene. Or of hers in me. Like I was a real gentleman. I also kept the anony­mous German film director to myself for now; it was too vague anyway, and I didn’t want to have to explain how I came to know about him.

  I told my story and then I said, “She’s in the Queen’s Hotel.”

  “And Brauer?”

  “I don’t know where he’s staying. But from the look of them on the ship, if we know where she is, we’ll soon find him.”

  Metcalf rose from his chair. “I’ll wire our man in Washington for instructions.”

  “And Bourgani?”

  “We’ll see what our instructions are. But in the meantime I’ve got a local here who can keep an eye on her.”

  I stood up as well. “I need a couple of things right away. For my public self. The war correspondent.”

  “Of course,” Metcalf said. “You’ve happened upon a story, it seems.”

  “It happened upon me,” I said.

  17

  For the following two hours, in an office papered in war maps, I banged at a clumsy old Imperial Model A with a curved keyboard and a downstrike type bar. My body wanted badly to collapse after the events of what was now the previous day, but a pot of coffee kept me afloat like a kapok-filled life jacket, and I wrote a hell of a front-page, king-beat, firsthand, exclusive story about the sinking of the Lusitania. The Admiralty’s Marconi man even transmitted it for me to the Post-Express at what was fifteen minutes past nine in the evening, Chicago time. We’d miss the morning bulldog edition, which had to be leading with the worst possible hobo mulligan of a Lusitania story, full of wire bits and speculations and anti-German fulminations, but this one would be way ahead of the other stories, the real stories, even with Trask needing to sign off on it, per his agreement with Griswold.

  I had a copy sent directly to Trask in Washington as well. And I just gave all of them straight facts and some war correspondent derring-do. I was that kind of reporter anyway, believing the inevitable anti-German fulminations should be printed on the editorial page, not on the news pages. And as of a day before yesterday, Germany was still happy to let American reporters into Berlin to hear their side of things. Trask had always expected me to end up in der Vaterland, and if I stayed objective about this murderous sucker punch they’d delivered, it might make things go easier for me. The facts spoke for themselves anyway.

  Among the facts, however, were none about the film actress I saved along with myself. That was her story to tell, if she was of a mind to.

  And then I finally got to bed in an upper-floor officer guest room. I did a lot of heavy-legged, slant-decked, wave-lapped running in my dreams, and I woke in a sweat before dawn. I got up and walked around and around the room, happy to have an even-keeled floor and dry feet. But what was floating and moaning in my head in my waking state was a thing I’d done and totally forgotten about till now: coldcocking that junior officer on the bridge of the Lusitania. Did he wake up in time to save himself? Did he wake up in time and with a clear enough head? Did he die because of me? If he did, that was too bad. But I’d necessarily figured at that moment, given what he was trying to insist on, that it was either him or me. No. It was either him or me and Selene. I did what I had to do. He shouldn’t have been blindly enforcing a wrongheaded order in a stupidly literal way at a time like that. He should have let us pass on by.

  I slept some more and woke to James Metcalf making an ungentlemanly door-banging entrance into my room. He had a large, leather Gladstone bag and a couple of tailored suits and big plans for me. He pointed out that the bright light outside was being provided by a well-risen sun.

  “How well, exactly?” I asked.

  “Nearly ten o’clock well,” he said.

  I was sitting now on the side of the bed and had found the floor with my feet, a simple act that I realized was registering in me as a great relief.

  Metcalf set down my new bag and laid out my two new suits on the bed next to me. He said, “You need to dress quickly. We have to get you to Kingstown by this evening. Which means by automobile.”

  “What’s in Kingstown?”

  “Bourgani and Brauer. They rented the hotel owner’s auto and hired a driver and took off an hour ago. They’re crossing the channel tonight to catch the train to London from Holyhead at one-thirty tomorrow morning.”

  “And so am I.”

  “And so are you.”

  “They still want to make that Monday delivery.”

  “So it seems.”

  “Did you hear from Trask?”

  “He said to keep doing what you’re doing, at least for now. Follow and observe. Our boys are looking into the film star, and we may know more about her by the time you get to London. You’re at the
Waldorf. We don’t know where Bourgani will be. Follow and observe. But we’ve got the address of Brauer’s flat.”

  Metcalf pulled an envelope from his inside coat pocket and handed it to me. “What we know is in here. If things happen quickly, just go to the embassy and identify yourself and ask for Smith. If Smith’s out, the front desk is secure. You can leave a message in a sealed envelope. I’ll be in London about twenty-four hours after you. I’ve given you some new documents as well. I presume yours are damp.”

  I nodded. “But I saved the government’s gold.”

  “Good man,” Metcalf said. “Some pounds sterling in there to see you through, however. We can assess your further needs in London.”

  “I can tell you the biggest one right now,” I said.

  I paused and puffed a heavy breath and squared my shoulders to make sure he knew I was serious.

  “Yes?”

  “I’ve lost two of these in the past twelve months on your behalf.”

  I paused again.

  “You’ve got my full attention,” Metcalf said.

  “A Corona model number three portable typewriter,” I said.

  “Right,” Metcalf said. “Which reminds me. Trask also thinks the news story is fine as is. Thinks you’d write pretty fair novels, but just make sure they’re not about spies.”

  And so I spent the next eight hours in a Vauxhall-D staff car, with a blessedly laconic sublieutenant driver, heading north to Kingstown, sometimes creeping behind cattle on dirtways and sometimes running at sixty miles an hour on straight tarmacadams. For the first hour or so I had trouble telling my brain to shut the hell up, and I found myself thinking about Woodrow Wilson and his own odd brain, how unlike a commander in chief he was, how he invaded Mexico last spring to kick out a tin-pot dictator he didn’t like and to protect American oil interests but then immediately hunkered down in Vera Cruz and went no farther. How he’d been avidly talking neutrality in Europe and then expedited the ongoing sale and shipment of American arms to Britain. I figured I could see the consistency of all that: the big-business wing of the Democratic party holding sway. But there had to be at least a hundred American dead on the Lusitania. I wondered if he’d pull the trigger now.

  Probably not. It made better business sense to sell American arms to Europe than to sell them to ourselves and use them. I wanted to doze off at that thought, but I slid on to the Germans torpedoing the ship with their own agents on board. Did that cast any doubt on Brauer and Bourgani? It was unlikely that those who knew about the agents would think to coordinate with the German navy. The U-boat captains were lone wolves; they didn’t raise their periscopes and then worry about who booked passage on a major British steamship that had suddenly, miraculously appeared in their sights. And with the Knockmealdown Mountains of County Waterford rising out against the horizon, all this thinking I was doing finally blurred into the fatigue of my North Atlantic adventure and I slept.

  And then at last I was in Kingstown. The RMS Leinster, a two-funnel Irish mail packet, was at anchor and blowing its all-ashore whistle, and I boarded, not catching any sight of Brauer and Bourgani. I found myself in a private cabin, with double berth beds on one wall and a train compartment bench seat on the other and not enough space between to do a six-whiskey stagger. What I knew, from Metcalf’s information, was that the cabin next to mine held Selene Bourgani, and somewhere on the other side of the ship a similar cabin contained Walter Brauer. What Metcalf didn’t know was that we all were directly over the engine room, and as we hammered our way into the Irish Channel, the cabin and our bodies quickly merged into one quaking entity, making it impossible to distinguish the vibration of the floor from the vibration of the metal frame of the berths from the vibration of our stomachs and our teeth and our brainpans.

  I tried for a long while to sleep, but I found myself staring at the wall, beyond which, I was given to believe, lay Selene Bourgani, who was as remote to me now as one of those made-up women mugging their emotions on a moving picture screen.

  At last I got up and dressed and went out of my cabin. I turned away from her door and made my way down the corridor to the Cabin Deck entrance hall. I went up the staircase to the Boat Deck and directly into the large, aft wooden-bench lounge for passengers making the five-hour trip without a cabin.

  The space could hold maybe four hundred travelers. A hundred or so were scattered, sleeping, throughout the lounge. But I turned to step out onto the deck, and in the three rows of benches nearest the exit doors were a dozen sleeping passengers. They seemed to be together but not together, near to each other but not touching. Men and women; some sleeping, some awake; a few smoking, no one talking. But something seemed to bind them together. I drew near, and then I knew. I quickly scanned back into the lounge to see if the City of Dublin Steam Packet Company had given a certain overt departing instruction. It hadn’t. This little eddy of travelers was singular in this: all but two of them were wearing their life jackets. And I knew at once where they’d come from. Indeed, as I passed them by, I looked more closely at their life jackets, one after another, and all the jackets were the same. A word was stamped on the bosom, in a Bodoni bold font, like a Post-Express headline: LUSITANIA.

  I hurried on through the doors and out onto the deck and it was utterly dark out here. The portholes were all closed and the running lights were off, and though the ship was shrouded in a mist thick enough to be called a fog, we were sounding no warning, we were making no sound at all, and we were pounding along at better than twenty knots. Of course the U-boats were in the Irish Channel as well. And I was struck by a thought I didn’t remember ever having on any official battlefield, where, no matter how extensive the field of operations, everyone knew there were places behind the lines or across the sea where things were peaceful, things were safe. On the deck of the Irish mail packet Leinster I thought: All the world is plunging forward in darkness now, and nowhere is safe.

  18

  Over the next few hours of fitful sleep and brain-rattled thought, I decided that for now it would be best to keep as much away from the sight of Selene and Brauer as I could. I knew where Brauer lived. I could wait to follow him whenever I wanted. I knew where both of them would be tomorrow night. And if Selene wasn’t there—if Brauer’s coded message was an instruction to deliver something or someone else—then he was more centrally important than the film star anyway. And there were a few things I needed to do before that appointed time in St. Martin’s Lane.

  So I hid out and hung back on the Leinster and then again on the London train, waiting till the conductor found me lingering in the sleeping car vestibule in Euston Station and he said, “You need to move on along to your destination, sir. We’re off now to the switching yard.” I picked up my bags and stepped down to the platform, and up ahead the flock of reporters had already descended to pick the brains of the several dozen Lusitania survivors, who were identifiable by their dazed looks, occasional bandages, and ill-fitting clothes. I was glad for my Queenstown special privileges, as they included a deceptively well-fitted suit and crisp-brimmed trilby, and I plowed through with hardly a glance from anyone.

  The Waldorf still had a reservation for me, though I was a day late. The desk clerk, with a paste-brush mustache on his stiff upper lip, drew himself up proudly to explain that the hotel checked with the Cunard Line through the night and as recently as an hour ago before canceling yesterday’s no-shows. He was happy to announce that the hotel would have a room for anyone confirmed by Cunard, whenever they might arrive.

  This was good but the hotel gave me the willies and I suspected it would do the same for any of the other confirmees. The Waldorf’s Portland stone facade was all eighteenth century Frenchy neoclassicism, as was every stick of furniture and every lamp and every bit of trim in its lobby and its Palm Court. I did not doubt the rooms would carry on the style. In other words, we who survived the Lusitania would be checking into
its immobilized doppelgänger, as if we’d in fact all drowned on Friday and this was a meticulously bespoke purgatory.

  The clerk slid my key across the desktop. “One other thing, Mr. Cobb,” he said, and he turned a bit aside and bent beneath the front desk.

  He emerged with what I instantly recognized as the leather and wood carrying case of a Corona Number 3.

  Purgatory is heaven if you can write about it and hang your byline on it. The rest of the day was clear before me.

  “From a Mr. Metcalf,” the clerk said.

  “Thanks.” I put the key in my pocket and picked up the typewriter by the case handle. But just as I was about to move away, I finally remembered something about the Waldorf. Something that had niggled at me ever since Metcalf told me where I’d stay. Now it suddenly struck me.

  “Pardon me,” I said to the clerk.

  “Yessir?”

  “I want to check on a friend of mine who was scheduled to come in.”

  “What’s the name?”

  “Edward Cable,” I said.

  The guy’s mustache seemed wired to his column-running forefinger, shifting restlessly from side to side as he scanned his reservation book. But then both finger and mustache stopped abruptly.

  He looked up at me. “I’m sorry,” he said, his voice pitched very low. “Mr. Cable’s reservation was canceled this morning by the Cunard Line.”

  There was no reason for this to surprise me. He’d have no skills to save himself. Cable had become a mere footnote to this whole affair anyway. And I had long since developed the battlefield skill of taking the death of even somebody you were chummy with—nascent pals with, even—pretty much in stoic stride. But for the first two or three steps I took away from the front desk at the Waldorf, it was all I could do to keep from buckling at the knees.