The Star of Istanbul

by Robert Olen Butler

  19

  I did hammer some words from my new Corona 3 through the day, the faux Louis XVI furniture of my room vanishing from my mind, even as the Lusitania filled my foolscap. I was out in the street by five in the afternoon and walking the half mile east along the Strand, St. Paul’s dome the distant reckoning point. I entered the much narrower Fleet Street, with some of the big papers located along here and most all of the rest of London journalism headquartered on the side streets sloping down toward the river. I turned into Whitefriars, which was narrower still, the sky above me strung thick with telegraph wires, and I went in at a fine old sixteenth-century building, which may have watched Sam Johnson pass by. This was the office of the London Daily Transcript, the English-language flagship of Griswold’s international Post-Express syndicate.

  None of the dailies in London did a Sunday edition, as odd as that might have sounded to a Chicagoan, but only the working class read the news in Britain on the Sabbath and the advertisers could sell only so many tinned sardines and corn plasters. So the lobby of the Transcript was barely starting to warm back up after a few extra hours of quiet. But I made a stir. I said my name and the young man in the glass reception cage in the lobby jumped up. He’d read some of my stuff over the years, I supposed, loving the war stories, seeing as he was a young man.

  I was soon on the top floor with Reginald Bryce, the editor of the Daily Transcript, leaping up from his desk in much the same manner as his boy on the ground floor.

  “Mr. Cobb, it’s a superb and coincidental pleasure,” he said, offering a handshake with enough firmness to qualify for a Chicago street corner meeting between a couple of old Rough Rider buddies.

  “Our men at the Post-Express like your work a lot,” I said.

  “A fine honor. A fine honor indeed.”

  “The coincidence?” I asked.

  “Your story will rule majestically over our front page tomorrow morning,” he said. “And an excellent thing too, since that was contingent, of course, upon your surviving the Huns’ vile attack.”

  “It was vile, wasn’t it,” I said.

  “If there’s anything we can do for you.”

  “Thanks,” I said, and of course that was why I was standing before him. “Do you have somebody on staff who knows the motion picture business?”

  I ended up three floors down, personally delivered by Reginald Bryce to the small but windowed office of Gwendolyn Bryce, the big man’s very own wisp of a searingly green-eyed daughter, a pioneer of British motion picture journalism. She did not jump up from her desk but stayed framed against her twilight gray window. Her handshake was just about as firm as her old man’s.

  I sat. The old man left. Gwendolyn, having only repeated my name in greeting so far, instantly said, “Do you know the fate of Selene Bourgani? She was on the ship with you.”

  This girl was all reporter. She and her kind would probably have to get the vote first, just for appearance’s sake, but I got the feeling she could replace her dad one day.

  “She’s alive,” I said.

  “Superb,” she said, flipping open a shorthand notebook on her desktop and taking up a pencil. “How do you know?”

  “I saw her in Queenstown. As we were being processed.”

  Gwendolyn made a few quick, thin-line Gregg notes, and she would continue to write whenever I spoke, though her eyes always remained on mine. “Do you know how she survived?”

  I hesitated only a moment. I didn’t intend to write about Selene. “You’ll not attribute this to me,” I said.

  “Of course,” she said.

  “You understand I’ll be giving you a scoop,” I said.

  Her eyes did not flicker. “I do,” she said, with an ellipsis of reportorial negotiation at the end.

  “I’d like some information from you, as well, unattributed.”

  “I’ll do what I can,” she said. “I would very much like to know all there is to know about the fate of one of the great stars of motion pictures.”

  “I understand she went into the water quite near the last moment,” I said. “In a life jacket. She is a very good swimmer and got clear of the ship. She was picked up by a fishing smack and ended up in the customshouse at Queenstown wearing the fishing captain’s yellow slicker and his sou’wester. She is presently in London, as of early this morning, but I don’t know where.”

  Gwendolyn’s shorthanding raced at more than a hundred words a minute, nearly as fast as I spoke, and her eyes went from a jaded “what-have-you-got-for-me” to a giddy “oh-my-stars.”

  I stopped speaking. Her hand stopped writing a few moments later.

  She asked, rather breathlessly, “Any other details, Mr. Cobb?”

  I said, “From beneath her sou’wester, tendrils of her black hair clung to the back of her long, white neck.”

  Gwendolyn’s bosom rose with a sharp intake of air and caught and her eyes went almost dreamy, as if she were crazy about me and I’d just told her I loved her and had taken her into my arms.

  I smiled at her. “You are made for reporting, aren’t you,” I said.

  She let go of her breath and wrote her Gregg symbols with exaggerated slowness as she unfurled—just as slowly—a very sweet smile. “I have not buttered your toast in this conversation, Mr. Cobb, but I do know your reputation and it seems well earned. Thank you for these details. They are golden.”

  “I know you’ll put them to good use.”

  “And what can I do for you?”

  Part of me wished mightily to say “Let me take you away for a drink when your paper goes to bed.” But I didn’t. I couldn’t.

  “Details in return, Miss Bryce.”

  She put her pencil down.

  I said, “Who is Selene Bourgani’s German-director lover?”

  Her head did a very faint snap at this. Not the question she expected. I let her know I could read her mind: “Not a war correspondent’s sort of question, I am well aware. But it was you on the Transcript’s staff I came to see, after all.”

  She smiled again, a quick, sly one. “I’m sure, nevertheless, you’ll put my details to good use.”

  “I will.”

  She said, “No longer her lover, I would guess, since she’s been in the United States making movies for the past two years while he’s been in Germany turning into the Kaiser’s personal documentarian.”

  My own breath caught at that. But I kept quiet.

  “Kurt Fehrenbach,” Gwendolyn said. “He came out of Max Rein­hardt’s troupe and did a film called Der Lilim. Very interesting. Propelling our infant art form into precocious adolescence. A work of expressionism about a modern-day daughter of Lilith. Played by Miss Bourgani. Do you know about succubi, Mr. Cobb?”

  “They are quite passionate women who keep late hours,” I said.

  I had already passed up a chance to flirt with Gwendolyn Bryce—rightly—but here I was doing it again, though quite archly, expecting her not even to pick up on it. But for the very reason I wanted to flirt, she picked up on it.

  “I am all work, Mr. Cobb,” she said, though with a glint about her that made her declaration ironic, which was, no doubt, her own style of flirting.

  This had to end.

  “So they broke up,” I said.

  “She came home. He went to Berlin.”

  “What’s her real story?”

  “The gaps? Nobody has found out. She stays mysterious, which is how she wants it. And she’s good at it. You want to know about Theda Bara? Born in Egypt to an Arab sheikh? Stuff and nonsense. She’s from Cincinnati, Ohio, and her father was a tailor. Lillian Gish, the gorgeous child? She was nineteen, not sixteen, when Griffith started her off, which is just as well because he started her off in more ways than one. But Selene Bourgani? Her romantic, humble beginnings on the island of Andros of course
have no records to confirm them, and who knows where to look next.”

  “So what you know about her is that no one knows anything.”

  “We do know about Herr Fehrenbach. What happens on and around movie sets are things a reporter can work on. So there are some other names, if you’d like the list.”

  “I wouldn’t,” I said, and I tried to sound cynically bored about that. I tried not to stir around in my chair. Both these things were difficult. One might have expected my squirminess to lead me to reconsider making that offer to Gwendolyn Bryce: You put your newspaper to bed and I’ll put you to bed. But even if I tried, I couldn’t have done that now. The image of the damp wisps of hair clinging to Selene’s neck had been tormentingly revived by the thought of her other men. And the lock I most wanted to pick later tonight was on St. Martin’s Lane.

  20

  I would’ve had more luck with the editor’s daughter.

  At 2 A.M. on Monday morning, my leather roll of entry tools tucked in an inside pocket, I moved briskly along St. Martin’s Lane, the crowds of diners and theatergoers that nightly jammed this narrow, electric-lit street mostly dissipated, and the shops darkened. The numbers were descending and I passed a pub at the corner of New Street, number 58, and then a narrow alley of bow-windowed houses, still lit by gas, and only a few more steps ahead was number 53, and from the storefront I reckoned it to be, a piss-yellow light was dribbling into the street. I stopped. I crossed to the other side. Almost directly opposite the meeting site was the opening to Cecil Court. I stepped around the darkened pub at the corner and then edged back to lurk and watch.

  Number 53 split the ground floor of a four-story brick building with number 52, a Friends Meeting House, the Quakers narrowly on the right, behind a pair of double doors, and the Germans sporting a wide storefront window to the left of their oaken door with a three-tier glass transom. They were Metzger & Strauss, Booksellers. The locus of German agents in London was a bookshop sharing a wall with a bunch of pacifists.

  The light was coming from the back of the bookshop, through an inner door, and from a nearer spot of light—a desk lamp, I ­supposed—in the midst of the massive shadows of bookshelves. I could see no figures. But this was hardly the time for breaking and entering. Too bad. I would have liked a private preview of the evening’s meeting spot. I’d have to do it another way in a few hours, after they were open, not so private but still a preview. And that meant deciding about who I would become—who I would portray—a decision that had lately been looming anyway.

  I slipped away south on St. Martin’s Lane, striding quickly, and I passed before The Duke of York’s Theatre, its neoclassic columns a trifling echo of the portico columns of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, just down at the end of the lane. Mother played a trifling comedy at the Duke of York’s in a short run after Taming of the Shrew, when I had my adolescent London adventure with her.

  The ironies of the last few minutes multiplied and I fairly trotted back to the hotel, where I slept fitfully and woke to find, in my morning paper over my eggs and bacon and marmalade in the Palm Court, a Christopher Cobb byline pinned beneath a trumpet blare of a double-deck headline:

  LUSITANIA HORROR

  Eyewitness Account

  Reginald Bryce, true to his word. I held my breath as I scanned the front page of the Daily Transcript and its jump-page spread, and I saw only stock photos of the Lusitania and of a German U-boat and a cartoon of the Kaiser thigh-deep in the ocean with blood dripping from his hands. I let go of the breath when I found no stock photos of me.

  I needed now to consider a disguise for my book browsing this morning; this gave me more options. I put my paper down and picked up my coffee to think. Across the sunken floor—bright beneath the glass roof—between the potted palms, near the piano at the far side, sat a man who’d caught my eye when he’d come in a few minutes ago. He was a thin man in a gray tweed suit with a beard and Brilliantine-assaulted hair made to lie flat on either side of a center part. It was the beard that caught me now. He had a newspaper before him—not the Transcript—slightly raised but not enough to shield his face. He glanced up very briefly, directly at me from across the way, and I looked off abruptly. His beard wouldn’t change by his realizing I was studying him, but my impulse was to observe unobserved. I glanced back at him and he was reading.

  His beard was full but moderately so, trimmed square beneath his chin. It was a beard that registered strongly as one but didn’t draw attention to itself. If I were to do a beard that wasn’t my own, that would be the one. But the principle I’d learned—not just from Trask’s boys but from my years hanging around theaters—was that simpler is better. The less you change of yourself to resemble someone else, the more comfortable you’ll be in your role.

  No one at 53 St. Martin’s Lane knew what I looked like. I could be anyone. I could be German. Outwardly I was ready.

  21

  Two hours later I figured the shop at 53 St. Martin’s Lane would be open and I went out of my hotel room, thinking about the challenge before me and closing my door even as the Please Do Not Disturb sign flapped at my hip. The door clicked shut and I took a step away and saw the girl with her cleaning cart down the corridor. I stopped and turned back. But the sign had caught its lower edge in the doorway and was angled directly at me, telling me not to disturb the room. Perhaps my readiness to pick locks had made me more sensitive about people entering my own space. I accepted the sign’s advice and went on. I’d always wondered why you’d make a bed you were going to unmake a few hours later anyway.

  And at number 53 there was another sign asking for no disturbances, a hand-written one propped in the corner of the window near the door: CLOSED TODAY. I’d seen no troubles on my walk west from the hotel. After all, the Admiralty and the main government offices were only just south of where I was standing, and St. James Park and Buckingham Palace were a little farther west of that. This neighborhood was the haunt of the upper class. But one of the prime page-2, Lusitania-related stories in the Transcript this morning had been an account of the widespread anti-German rioting in the slums. Mobs had been roaming through the East End looting shops run by Germans. In another part of town, not so far away, the Metzger & Strauss, Booksellers sign would have been a billboard for a brick through the window. On the day of the “delivery,” these boys wanted to play it cautious.

  I drew closer to the window and tented my eyes from the sunlight. A desk sat facing the street in a front reception space, and at the desk sat a broad-shouldered, beardless man with upstanding bristled hair. The writing lamp beside him was off. He was reading loose pages on the desktop and I rapped on the window with one knuckle. Just loud enough to be heard. A confidential rap.

  The man looked up at me.

  I touched my chest and opened that hand toward him: I wished to come in.

  He pointed at the hand-written sign.

  I said, loud enough to be heard through the window, but barely. No louder. “Bitte,” I said. I put my head and tongue and lips into my German impression. Like an actor. But not simply to do an accent. I would speak only German now for these Germans. “Please may I come in,” I said.

  The man behind the desk straightened.

  His cover identity was a bookshop keeper. German perhaps even in that, at least until lately. His deeper identity was quite ardently German. I was perhaps a countryman, in dangerous times. He rose.

  He motioned me toward the door as he himself moved to it.

  I stepped there and I waited and the lock clicked at the handle and I listened to the welcoming sound of tumblers falling into place. I could have picked that thing easily last night.

  The door opened.

  The man was maybe sixty and his face was wide and craggy, a face more suited for making book than selling books.

  “Thank you, my dearest sir,” I said. Mein liebster Herr. I laid it on thick.

>   He did not soften. That face probably was incapable of softening. But he stood aside and let me in.

  “I have lived in this country for some few years now,” I said, “and I did not trust these people before. Today it is much worse. It is very dangerous.” This declaration was not as much to explain my insistence on entering as it was to explain a possible trace of an accent in my German, something I’d worked hard to expunge but still worried about a little.

  The man grunted.

  He’d let me in. But I needed a reason to hang around.

  “I’m sorry to come at this late hour,” I said. “But on this night I felt the strong need to read in my own language. I have nothing in my flat but English words.”

  “Look then,” he said. Though the statement was terse, his tone was almost comradely.

  “This part of the city seems quiet still,” I said.

  “We must all of us be careful,” the man said.

  I was lifted by the pronoun.

  He waved generally at the shelves. “The books in our language,” he said, “are found in each subject.”

  “Thank you,” I said. And then, “Do I have the honor of speaking to Mr. Metzger or Mr. Strauss?”

  “Metzger,” he said.

  I waited only a moment, expecting him to ask me my name, and I had decided to be Herr Vogel, a private nod toward a former comrade.

  But he did not ask.

  He crossed to his desk and sat down.

  Arrogant goddamn Hun.

  I moved to the aisle along the wall that separated Metzger and Strauss from the Quakers. I faced the high shelves, hung with a ladder on a rail, stretching toward the back of the shop. The place buzzed faintly from the silence and was redolent of the vanilla and turf smells of old books.

  I moved along, touching them, seeming to read their titles intently, pulling one now and then from its place to thumb the pages. I was seeing nothing. I was vaguely aware that I was in a section devoted to volumes on history. But I was most keenly aware of the twisting iron staircase to a basement that I was approaching, and the open door to a back room, an office, beyond that.