The Star of Istanbul

by Robert Olen Butler

  Perhaps she’d moved her little bag before her as they argued, waist high; perhaps she’d feigned tears and sought a hankie and pulled her little Colt. Brauer had been standing close to her. She simply drew the pistol and kept it there at her waist and maybe took a step nearer and angled the barrel upward and shot him beneath the sternum and toward the heart. No bones in the way. Nothing to make the bullet tumble. It went straight through a ventricle but did not exit the body.

  He was bleeding all right. But it was all going into his lungs, and when those were full it would flow over into the cavity of his gut.

  “Neat job,” I said.

  Which was a bit of unnecessary bravado on my part.

  But she simply grunted. A short, sharp exhalation of a sound rather like the sound she made, over and over, during the rough-stuff pounding she’d asked for in our last encounter on the Lusitania.

  Which reminded me of another moment that night. She’d asked if I’d ever killed a man. Was she planning this all along?

  That was a matter to consider later.

  Brauer was about to leave us, so I began to go through his pockets. I did not look at her but I could feel Selene watching me carefully.

  A fountain pen in an inner coat pocket. I could keep it there, but I wanted to make sure she knew I wasn’t hiding anything—in case I wanted to hide something—so I held the pen in the air in the direction of her previous grunt. The pen disappeared from my hand.

  A handkerchief in his breast pocket. I offered it. She took it.

  His cabin key. My hand found it in a side pocket of his coat and I had a fraction of a second to decide what to do. She would no doubt like to check out his things on her own. She would know the key was on him if the door was locked, so I wouldn’t accomplish anything by palming it and hiding it. Besides, I had my lock picks. It was best to make her think I was being open with her. All this went through me in a flash.

  I pulled the key from his pocket and held it up.

  There was a brief pause. She knew what it was; she was taken aback at my offering it. Good.

  It vanished from my hand.

  I eased him over just enough, first one side and then the other, to pat down his rear pants pockets. They were empty.

  I leaned over him and pressed my left hand into his left front pocket. Empty.

  The right pocket, immediately in front of me, was easier. I slid my right hand inside, at the angle he would.

  And something was here. A piece of paper. Folded.

  No figuring necessary. Instantly I palmed it.

  I drew my hand from the pocket and I sat back on my haunches.

  “Is there a hand towel at your basin?” I said.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Get it.”

  I waited, not watching her move, keeping my eyes on Brauer, keeping the hand with the palmed note hanging limply at my side. She would be watching me, even as she did what I asked.

  The towel dangled down in front of my face.

  I didn’t look up at her.

  I said, “Keep it. Watch his mouth when I pick him up. There might be some blood.”

  “All right,” she said. She stepped beside me, on my right.

  “Other side,” I said. “Be ready when his head falls to the side.”

  As she circled me to my left, I moved around on my knees to place myself at a right angle to Brauer’s body. I also slipped the palmed piece of paper into my right-hand coat pocket.

  I crossed Brauer’s legs at the ankles and his hands at his waist.

  “I’ll need you to open doors,” I said. “Cabin door. Door to the promenade. Look through them first to make sure no one is around.”

  I put my left arm behind Brauer’s shoulders and strained him upward. Dead weight. Bad leverage from my knees. My arm began to slide upward and I forced it down, into the center of his shoulder blades, and his torso was coming up.

  His head lolled to the right.

  Selene’s hands and the towel rushed to it, and I shifted my attention to his knees. I put my right arm beneath them and he felt steady in my grasp and I strained hard in a dead lift, sliding him up my thighs far enough to raise my right leg beneath him and place that foot flat on the floor, and I set him on my right leg.

  “Door,” I said.

  I had leverage at last and I used my arms but also my right leg, rising up from the knee, and both my feet were on the floor and it was simple now. I was standing with Walter Brauer in my arms.

  I looked at Selene for the first time since I’d answered her eyes: Yes, I can get rid of this dead body. She was at the door, opening it, her head bare and her hair rolled up high, the long line of her body dressed once again in form-clinging black. Maybe this was the occasion she’d been outfitting herself for since Monday night.

  The cabin door was open and she leaned outside. She looked both ways and drew back in and pressed against the wall, clearing a path for me.

  “It’s okay,” she said.

  I stepped to her with Brauer and motioned with my head for her to come inside the room.

  She slipped past me. I turned sideways and squeezed through the door with Walter, rolling him flatter against me, chest to chest, for a moment, scraping through the jamb.

  I was standing now in the center of the corridor and feeling very exposed. I looked in both directions.

  Still empty.

  The door clicked behind me and I followed Selene to the end of the corridor and we turned left into the vestibule. She opened the portal to the promenade and stepped outside. Framed darkly in the doorway, she spoke from there. “We are alone,” she said.

  I moved forward and squeezed through and I was abruptly buffeted by the wind of our twenty-two knot run. The deck quaked under my feet and the urgency of all this rushed suddenly upon me.

  I crossed the promenade quickly—one step and another and ­another—and I was at the railing. I set my feet squarely beneath me and I lifted Brauer higher, up to the top rail, and I rested him on it for a moment, my arms dilating with ease at the release of his weight, happy now just to balance him there.

  We were on the first-class promenade. Below was another promenade on the second-class deck.

  “Selene,” I said.

  She came at once to my side. “Yes?”

  “Lean out to see if there’s anyone at the railing beneath us.”

  She put her hand on her hair as if she were keeping a hat from flying off in the wind. She bent over the railing and looked down.

  She straightened again. She stuffed the bloodstained towel into Brauer’s jacket. Smart. If she tried to throw it away on its own, it could fly back onto the deck below.

  “Get rid of him,” she said.

  I moved my arms from beneath Brauer and quickly put my hands on him, one at the shoulder and one at the hip, and I pushed hard.

  He leapt out and then away to our left as if caught in the wind, and I leaned forward, watched him falling rearward toward the face of the sea, his arms flaring open, and he splashed into our wake and lifted on a wave, and the Mecklenburg rushed on, leaving Walter Brauer in the darkness behind us.

  36

  So we straightened at the railing and turned our backs to it and stood there a moment looking like a couple who’d simply had a nice meal in the dining saloon and now had come out for a breath of air, a long-married couple who could stand beside each other on the deck of a ship on a night that was full of bright stars—I happened to notice this as I’d turned away from the sea—and not say a thing and not quite touch and seem entirely comfortable with that. As if everything important had already been said long ago.

  Then we left the promenade—it would have been hard to say which of us initiated this; perhaps we’d both done it at the same moment, spontaneously—and I held the de
ck door open for Selene and I followed her to her cabin and she held that door open for me. I stepped in and stopped in the center of her floor and she closed the door and crossed past me. We still had that air of taking each other for granted after long familiarity.

  She sat on a woven-reed bergère chair that faced the bed and I sat on the edge of the bed directly opposite her, and now the language of our bodies said that we intended to have a conversation on a topic we both anticipated. But in fact we remained silent for a long while.

  I imagined that she was trying to figure out how much to lie to me and what sort of lies might be convincing and, indeed, if it made any difference if she were convincing or not.

  But it did matter, of course. She needed to be very convincing. She’d just killed the Germans’ agent who was playing an integral part in their larger plan; this was all improvised; they hadn’t sent her out here to do that. She’d just torpedoed her own steamship and here I was again apparently ready to help her swim away. I’d already saved her sweet stern once tonight.

  I had my own personal figuring out to do. My own calibrating of lies. Certainly I knew a great many things she did not realize I knew and I had to decide what to continue to keep to myself, what to let out to her, what to lie about. Now that I’d dumped Brauer I was committed to keeping her mission going for my own benefit.

  So we sat.

  The ship’s turbines hummed. The room swayed. Both rather distantly, however.

  And we sat. And there was a moment when she looked carefully at the bandage on my left cheek.

  I wondered if she was trying to place it, if she’d had some brief, peripheral glimpse of it in the bar.

  But she studied it only briefly and I saw nothing behind her eyes. She was good at masking things, but I figured I’d see at least a little something in her if she realized I’d followed her to the rendezvous with her father.

  And we sat.

  And I had time to wonder what had happened to her pistol. It was no longer visible. She had no pockets. My eyes moved to the smoking table beside her chair. In its center lay a small, black, snakeskin bag with a silver frame. I’d already hypothesized its use. She must have discreetly taken that with her to the promenade deck and put the pistol away.

  I moved my eyes back to her and she was watching me closely.

  Somebody needed to speak.

  But we both stayed silent a few moments more.

  Finally she said, “Thank you.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  She hesitated. As if what would follow were spontaneous. But she had a plan now. She said, “You killed a man.”

  Another neat shot, her ambiguity. She could be talking about our conversation on the Lusitania; when she asked if I’d ever killed, I said yes. Or she could be talking about the Hun on St. Martin’s Lane. She could even be talking about me taking the fall for Brauer. I had more apparent reason to kill him than she did. She was letting me choose how to take this. Which would suggest a direction for her lies.

  “So did you,” I said.

  “He was trying to rape me,” she said, as if I’d believed it the first time.

  “I’ve never killed a man who wasn’t trying to kill me,” I said.

  “Then we are both innocent souls,” she said.

  I gave that a moment of silence.

  Then I said, “That’s something I haven’t seen yet in the filmic art.”

  I expected to have to explain the comment. But without a hesitation she said, “Irony?”

  Which was one of the reasons I was still enchanted with her, this quick, telling thrust of her mind. And, under the present circumstances, one of the reasons I was more than a little afraid of her.

  “Irony,” I said.

  She smiled. Like here we were communicating so effectively.

  I smiled the same smile. I said, “Tell me what you think the present irony is.”

  This she did hesitate about. I was letting her choose.

  But after a few moments, she decided to smile again, a small, sweet—and yes, ironic—smile. She said, “That we should be innocent, though we have killed.”

  If we had actually decided, as it was beginning to seem, that we would banter now instead of getting down to serious lies and revelations, I would have contradicted her by saying, No, the irony is that you say we are innocent souls when we are not.

  But I wasn’t ready to banter.

  “The irony,” I said, “is that Walter Brauer was a homosexual.”

  What flickered in her face may have been the first spontaneous expression of off screen emotion I’d ever seen in her. No simple label for it existed; she couldn’t make it larger than life if she tried.

  But she’d be back in full control of herself any moment now. I pressed my advantage. “So why did you really kill him?”

  “Who are you?” she said.

  “Who are you?”

  “Did you kill that man on St. Martin’s Lane Monday night?”

  “You mean the guy they would’ve sent after you when they found out you murdered Brauer?”

  She flickered again. But only very briefly. “Murder? What makes you think you know anything about it?”

  “That’s how they’d see it.”

  “Or anything about them?”

  “So then why did you really kill him?”

  “Who are you?” she said.

  I stood up and took a step in her direction.

  She flinched backward in her chair. Another real emotion from Selene Bourgani.

  I was surprised to feel a quick, throat-clutching pulse of regret at her fear of me. Though I knew a little fear would be useful.

  I gave her a small, sweet, ironic smile.

  I lifted my hand and she flinched again, minutely, with her eyes. But without looking directly at it, I reached to her left and picked up her purse. I did not let go of her eyes, where her own sense of irony had now returned. No more flinching. I did not look at the object in my hands as I opened it. I felt the pistol where I’d expected to find it and I took it out. I closed the purse and dropped it in the direction of the smoking table.

  And still we did not let go of our gaze. She didn’t even glance at the pistol. She knew what I’d done.

  I put the pistol in my inner coat pocket. I let my lapel go and my coat closed. The pistol thumped me softly and then lay heavily against my heart.

  I said, “I’m the guy who has helped you out in a big way three times now.”

  She said, “The third being the man in St. Martin’s Lane?”

  “Who would have come after you,” I said.

  The irony dissipated in her eyes.

  “They’ve got others to send,” she said, very softly.

  I sat down on the edge of the bed once more.

  I asked it a third time: “Why’d you kill him?”

  “He doubted my allegiance to the German cause.”

  “With reason?”

  “With reason.”

  “Who has your allegiance?”

  “Nobody,” she said. “Me. I have my own allegiance.”

  “But they thought it was with them.”

  “That was in my own best interest.”

  “To work for the Germans and make them think you wanted to.”

  She said nothing.

  “Why was all that in your best interest?”

  “Look,” she said. “Just because you chose to help me out a few times and have now taken away my only means of self-defense, doesn’t mean I’m ready to tell you all my secrets. They’re personal. Not political. Personal. And I’m keeping them personal.”

  “All right,” I said. “So I’ll just walk through that door and leave it at that. You can figure out on your own what to do next. Do you think Sel
ene Bourgani can actually hide in this world? They’d find you.”

  I started to rise.

  “Wait,” she said.

  I sat.

  But we returned to silence.

  I didn’t let it go on. I said, “I’m not going to wait long enough for you to think of a new set of lies.”

  She shifted her pretty butt on the woven reed seat.

  I decided to help her out. “Did your boy Kurt know something about you?”

  She let out a long, slow breath, her shoulders and her chest visibly sinking. She said, very, very softly, “I should be more careful who I sleep with.”

  “Actresses and directors,” I said. “That’s an old story.” I didn’t need to say this. But Mama and a few of her guys came to mind. And it was time to seem sympathetic with Selene anyway.

  She said, “Actresses and handsome newsmen on doomed steamships.”

  I shrugged.

  And she said, “Especially when he’s not just a newsman.”

  The sympathy was a mistake. I needed to press the attack.

  But she spoke first: “So where’s your allegiance?”

  “To my country,” I said.

  She smiled very faintly. That flicker of irony again. “From what I could gather over the past few days,” she said, “you’ve got your own troubles waiting for you up ahead.”

  “I can manage mine alone. You can’t.”

  “What do you want?” she said.

  “For starters the truth.”

  She nodded faintly. She waited. She said, “And what do I get?”

  “What do you want?”

  “As you said.”

  “Help.”

  “Yes.”

  “I can help you,” I said. “I can’t help the Germans.”

  “And what will you want after the starters?” she said.

  “That depends on what the truth is.”

  “I want more too.”

  I shrugged again. Like I was ready to walk out of the cabin and let her handle her own problems.

  She said, “Only if the truth makes it worth your while.”

  “What more do you want?”

  “The truth,” she said. “For starters.”