“I know this has been scary for you,” I said.
She shot me a look that confirmed my gut feeling. This intensity wasn’t about a release of fear. It was something else.
She was on her feet and moving to her clothes.
She bent to them and I tried to memorize the flash of her body. Each time always felt like the last time with Selene Bourgani.
“Selene,” I said.
She turned to me, pressing her dress to her chest.
At least she did turn.
“I know you’re not afraid,” I said.
I could see her mind working for a moment, trying to figure me out. Then she said, “I know you’re not either.”
38
She dressed.
I dressed.
The deal sealed, we were all business now.
“We need to search his cabin,” I said.
“I have the key,” she said.
“I know,” I said. “I gave it to you.”
“I knew it was in his pockets somewhere,” she said. “You couldn’t have actually fooled me, now could you.”
“I didn’t need to fool you,” I said.
“You hadn’t yet taken the precaution of stealing my pistol,” she said.
“You needed me,” I said.
“I still do,” she said.
All business.
I reached into the pocket of my jacket and removed her Colt. “I think we’ll be all right for the trip,” I said. “But you never know.”
I opened my palm to her, with the pistol lying in the center.
She looked at it. She looked at me. “I’m grateful,” she said. And she took the pistol. “That’s the truth,” she said.
“I believe you,” I said.
Selene stepped to the smoking table and picked up her bag. She put the pistol inside. And when her hand came out, she had the key to Brauer’s cabin. She handed it to me.
“Let’s see what we can find,” she said.
And we were standing in the center of Brauer’s cabin, an exact replica of hers.
We looked around for a moment before starting to dig.
His waistcoat on the back of a chair. A large suitcase under the window.
“Was he really a homosexual?” Selene said.
“Yes.”
“How do you know?”
“I knew.”
“He didn’t try to strike up with you, did he?”
“No. He had a rendezvous on the ship.”
“That other man he was with?”
“Yes.”
“I only saw them across the dining room.”
“Not sure if it was prearranged,” I said. “It could’ve been casual.”
“So Walter had depths,” Selene said. “Poor man. His friend apparently didn’t survive.”
“I didn’t see him in Queenstown.”
“Walter seemed a bit dazed. How does a man like that mourn? I’d think perhaps more readily. More like a woman?”
Walter’s love life was no longer relevant. He was dead, after all. Maybe Selene’s little surge of interest was an aftermath of her killing him. I wondered if he was her first.
I crossed the room to his suitcase, picked it up—it was heavy, still packed—and I laid it on the bed. I undid the straps and opened the lid. It was neatly packed with clothes.
I doubted that the things I was looking for would be in here if there was an alternative. He’d keep those closer. “Was this the only bag he was carrying?” I said.
“Here it is,” Selene said.
I turned to her.
She was at the narrow wardrobe beyond the foot of the bed. The door was open and she was bent inside. She straightened and carried a morocco valise toward me. I moved the suitcase toward the head of the bed and she placed the valise at the foot.
It opened from the top.
She stepped to the side, let me do this, though with a keenly watchful eye.
I dipped in.
A fitted toilet case. I checked inside. It held only the usual items, including the straight razor that first told me about him and the late Edward Cable. I put the case on the bed above the valise, starting a stack with a reflex impulse to note the layers and the arrangement for repacking. As if to prevent Brauer from later realizing his bag had been searched. But he was dead.
A folded dressing gown. These were things he wanted in his own hands if his suitcase went astray. I removed the dressing gown and it struck me: black silk. This and everything else Brauer was carrying was new. But he’d had a black silk dressing gown on the Lusitania. He’d replaced it exactly. I found myself not liking this task. Old Walter was getting to be too real to me, watching him make very personal decisions.
And a union suit. Really too personal. I felt like his mortician, learning way too much about him in order to put him finally to rest. Toothpowder. Hair brush. Other things that hardly registered. And then near the bottom, a book. He did not replace his Heinrich von Treitschke. But he was reading Deutsche Schriften by a similar German ideologue: the Orientalist, biblical scholar, and anti-Semite Paul de Lagarde. Walter was keeping up with his early-childhood first language. That was good to know and a very useful thing when I portrayed him. I couldn’t fake Turkish. But I could do German.
I put the Lagarde on the bed, and next from the dim depths of the bag came another book. It gave me a pleasing jolt. This one he did replace exactly: The Nuttall Encyclopaedia of Universal Information. The 1909 edition, I had no doubt. I did not let myself show any interest in it, immediately putting it on the bed next to the Deutsche Schriften.
I glanced at Selene, who was craning her neck to read the book titles.
“Not my personal choice of train reading,” I said.
Selene grunted but left off looking at the books.
The last object at the bottom of the bag was a long sealskin wallet. I removed it. I opened the wallet and drew out a sheaf of documents.
I sorted through them with Selene watching closely. His tickets to Istanbul, arriving on the sixteenth. And tickets back to London for the twenty-second. His passport. I was glad to see that it was like my bogus one: American, not British. Letters of passage and recommendation to officials along the way. I’d examine them more carefully later.
“These are what I need,” I said.
I replaced the papers in the wallet and put the wallet into my right inside coat pocket.
She did not protest.
I repacked the valise but I left the two books on the bed. It was the Nuttall, of course, that I truly wanted. I just didn’t want to draw attention to it.
Then Selene and I rummaged through Walter Brauer’s clothes in the suitcase, both of us feeling very uncomfortable, betokened by our bated silence and the quick agreement that there was nothing here.
I stuffed the clothes back in the suitcase and closed the lid. I glanced at Selene. She was leafing through the Lagarde.
I let her. I began to buckle the straps on the suitcase.
“Did you mean to leave these out?” she said.
I looked at her.
She was thumbing the Nuttall.
“Yes,” I said.
“Why?”
“I’m preparing for my role of Walter Brauer,” I said.
“Did your mama teach you to prepare like that?” I couldn’t tell whether this was skeptical of me or sarcastic about her. It would not have been my mother’s assumed method of preparing for an acting role. She was a larger-than-life actress of the old school, or had been when she rose to her young-leading-lady stardom, though a few of the things I’d seen her do as she moved into middle age were smaller, more intensely real. Moscow-Art-Theaterish, even.
“She had big-paying audiences in a big spa
ce, not a Hun with a gun standing in front of her,” I said.
Selene closed the Nuttall, reached down and picked up the Lagarde again, stacked the two books together, and handed them to me.
“Your props,” she said.
I said, “Is there anything else you want to look at in here?”
“No.”
“Then would you carry these for me?”
I handed the books back to her.
She furrowed her brow in puzzlement.
“I need both hands,” I said. “Why leave any questions behind? If you’ll hold doors and check for insomniacs on the promenade, let’s complete Walter’s disembarkation.”
The brow unfurrowed with a small, sweet head tilt of respect.
“Of course,” she said.
I moved Brauer’s bags off the bed, opened the covers and disarranged them, and punched a head dent in the pillow. I picked up the bags and followed Selene to the door. She switched off the lights and we left Brauer’s cabin and dropped Walter’s bags in the sea.
And then we stood in front of Selene’s cabin door as if we’d been on a dinner date and the delicate question was just arising of whether or not we would kiss good night.
Her eyes, though, narrowed a little, like a cat showing it trusted you, and they mellowed and went suppliant and then flitted wide and willed themselves to be quite calm and rational. A whole run of feelings had come and gone inside her, and at the end of it, she said nothing at all. She simply handed me Brauer’s books, turned and opened her door, and disappeared.
39
I locked my cabin door. I took only one step into the room before stopping and removing Brauer’s folded piece of paper from my pocket. I could see now that it was familiar canary-manila telegraph paper. I unfolded it. Typed in blue, by a Morkrum telegram printer, were 19 groupings of numbers, eight in each.
Nuttall.
The cable was recorded at Western Union, Folkestone. The recipient was Walter Brauer, care of the Zeeland Steamship Company. The sending identifier: Wilhelmstraße 76, Berlin. Which was the address of Auswärtiges Amt. The German Foreign Office.
I tossed Lagarde onto the bed and sat in the woven cane chair. I pulled the smoking table in front of me like a desk. I put Nuttall in the center and laid out the telegram beneath it.
This was a very recent development or Berlin would have contacted him more reliably before he left London. The first number was 00620403. There would have to be four factors: page, column, line, and word. I looked at the last full Nuttall page. Number 699. The maximum number of digits was three. This made sense, since the first group began with two zeros, to let this discretely read as page number 6. I turned to it. There were two columns, expressible by a single digit. I counted the number of lines. Seventy-six. Expressible in two digits. And I saw a couple of lines with ten words. Two digits. Eight digits all together, which squared with the number groupings I was looking at. I could read the code.
And one at a time the words emerged, which I wrote in the space above their corresponding numbers.
change
plan
I was right about the structure of the coded words.
meet
Pasha
man
pass
word
Gutenberg
I paused and briefly considered the odd phrase “Pasha man,” but of course Nuttall simply did not have a possessive form of pasha. I would be meeting the Pasha’s man, his aide de camp, his assistant.
And the next word: 49321301. Pera
Palace
own
room
He would come to me at the hotel. We’d refer to Gutenberg. Another buchmann.
sometime
upon
16th
That was the day of our arrival.
Only four words to go and I paused briefly. The type in Nuttall was small and the electric light was dim and counting the lines and the words was hard going well past midnight.
The next word: 43514204.
This took me to the entry on Thomas Middleton, a contemporary of Marlowe and Shakespeare. The first column on the page, forty-second line, the fourth word was the middle word of the title of one of his tragedies: Women Beware Women.
Beware
I was still inclined to hear this note as being addressed to Walter Brauer. I had to hear it the way it must be played: they were talking to me. Brauer’s dangers were my dangers.
The next word was 15123101: page 151, column 2, line 31, the first word.
And I was looking at my mother’s entry in The Nuttall Encyclopaedia of Universal Information.
Cobb
Beware Cobb. I felt an icy grinding in me at this. Not because they perceived me as a threat. But because the German spymaster had found my mother in this book and used her. It was as if he’d put his hands upon her.
I pushed on. I had to beware of me. Okay.
Two more words.
where
And the last word was page 487, column 1, line 64, word 3.
unknown
Perhaps it was the slight relief I had at this head scratching in Berlin over my whereabouts, but the location of that word in Nuttall made me laugh out loud. A poem from a Victorian English poet named Coventry Patmore: “The Unknown Eros.”
Beware of Cobb, for he was now Brauer, of unknown eros.
I did feel better about one doubt that had begun to creep into me, concerning a secret that Selene was still withholding. What did Brauer say to her to provoke her to kill him? It had to be seriously threatening. I had begun to worry, as I’d decoded this message, that what he confronted her about had come from this telegram. And if it had, then she was already compromised in Istanbul. But it hadn’t.
Perhaps Brauer’s handlers were indeed doing what Smith and Metcalf were doing for me, trying to figure out what the man in the bar was all about. Brauer pretty clearly had not gone inside on that night. He might have returned yesterday, but that tight little group in there would stonewall a man like Brauer. My guys still hadn’t dug up anything; Brauer’s couldn’t have either.
Walter must have come to her tonight and tried to bluff her into revealing something; maybe he threatened her. The bar in the East End was a very touchy subject for Selene. But if that’s what the argument was about, the question remained, even more critically: why was this such a threat to her in Istanbul that she’d lose her head and kill him?
We had some travel ahead of us.
I figured I might find some leverage with her along the way to learn more.
40
And so a certain Walter Brauer, resident of London but traveling on an American passport and approved in documents from the highest official levels in the German Foreign Office, and Selene Bourgani, also an American traveling with her own weighty German endorsements, entered Holland at Vlissingen. This was the one place we kept our German credentials to ourselves. Then we boarded a train shortly after dawn, and when we were under way, we stood before each other once again, in front of her compartment, and once again we did not speak until it seemed she would simply vanish behind her door. But at last she said, “How far to Berlin?”
“Twelve hours,” I said.
“I need to sleep,” she said.
“The German frontier is four,” I said.
“Till then,” she said.
And our credentials—in the smoke-filled, coal-gritty, body-warmed and body-scented wooden customs hall in Bentheim on the German frontier—drew instant heel clicking and bows from the Kaiser-mustached official.
Which led to lunch on the train, on clean linen and with the rolling outwash plain of northern Germany whisking past. Selene and I did not speak much.
At some point I said, low, “Things went well at t
he border.”
She turned her face to the window. I watched her eyes catching something outside and sliding away with it, catching another thing and sliding, scanning the landscape quickly, over and over, restless eyes even as everything else about her was utterly motionless. I thought: It’s all right for now; I won’t speak to her; she’s preparing herself for what awaits us at the end of our journey.
But suddenly her eyes stopped moving, though they did not turn to me. The afternoon was cloudy and the window gave us back our images if we cared to look, and I imagined she was focused now on herself there, the ghost of her face floating motionless upon the flashing landscape. She said, very softly, “After Berlin . . .” And she stopped.
I lowered my voice to match hers. “Yes?”
“I don’t want to be alone,” she said.
I had the impulse to reach across the table and take her hand. But I did not. I said, “All right.”
In Berlin we changed trains. We walked together on the platform beneath the vast, steel-trussed vault of the train shed at Friedrichstraße Station. As we approached the first-class coaches, Selene slipped her arm inside mine.
And so, as the train still sat in the station, with the scuffle of feet through the coach passageway, with the hiss of steam and the gabble of voices outside the window, with my bags stowed and my tie straightened, when a sharp, clear rap came to my sleeping compartment door, I crossed the floor a little breathlessly and slid the door open expecting Selene.
A thick-necked man in civilian gray filled the doorway, gray also in eyes and in thickly upstanding hair and in walrus mustache. I took an instinctive step backward. Again, my pistol was in a bag.
But I was Brauer.
Indeed, the man asked, “Herr Brauer?”
“Jawohl,” I said, my mind shifting to this language that needed to be part of my reflex self now.
He said, “Welcome, if briefly, to Berlin.” His German was clipped and precise and emotionless.
“Thank you,” I said. “Come in.”
He did, closing the door behind him.
I had no idea who he was. I was having a delayed surge of gratitude that he had no idea who I was either. I was beginning to rely on Brauer’s not being recognizable. But was I supposed to expect this guy?
The Star of Istanbul Page 24
