The Star of Istanbul

by Robert Olen Butler

  25

  I looked left and right. No one was near. This had all happened quickly. He seemed not to have any confederates out here or they likely would have been arriving. I could see the Hun in the deep shadows. He was sitting upright with his back against the door, his head angled to the side. I looked down at his legs. They were stretched onto the sidewalk. I kneeled beside them. I caught his legs at the backs of the knees and raised them so they were out of the way, so that he was in a hunched sitting position in the doorway. He was a drunk sleeping one off. He was bothering nobody. There were plenty of drunks and beggars sitting in the darkened doorways of London. Until an actual bobby came along and decided to poke him, he’d be ignored. I would have a little time.

  I picked up the sling from the sidewalk and stuffed it in my pocket. I reached into the darkness beside the dead man and retrieved my cane.

  I crossed the street and stood before the window of the booksellers Metzger and Strauss.

  The shop was dark and seemingly empty. I moved to the front door. A shade was drawn but I put my eye to the very edge of the pane of glass, and in the narrow gap I could see along the main corridor to the rear of the shop. The stairwell was dark; the office door was closed but its bottom was edged in electric light.

  My only question now was how to get in. My lock picks were in my inside pocket. I racked my memory for a crucial detail: was there a bell on the door? I’d gone through only this morning but I could not bring that one sense detail back. I was very good at noticing things and I cursed myself softly at this little slip. I didn’t know if there was a bell. But I had to assume there was. Many shops had bells and no shop in London had a more acute need to be alerted if someone entered than Metzger & Strauss. I did not know how to deal with a doorbell from the outside, especially if it was wired to ring in the back of the shop.

  I’d been along this block of St. Martin’s twice. A detail I did remember was a null observation: I saw no passageway back to the courtyard or whatever sat behind these buildings. The whole four-street cincture was likely the same, a monolithic frontage of shops. The way to the rear of these storefronts was through one of them. So I stepped one doorway south, to the Friends Meeting House.

  Through the double glass-paned doors there was only darkness. I picked the lock.

  I closed the door quietly behind me but left it unlocked. I turned. Only darkness lay before me and I walked into it, the potted plants and wall-hugging furniture of the reception area fading at once from my sight. I lit a match and held it up.

  I found the door into the Meeting Room immediately before me. I simply had to keep heading straight to the rear of the building. I opened the door and stepped in as my match flickered out.

  But a light remained.

  I could see the dim forms of bench seats in rows facing the far platform, where a dozen wooden chairs were lined up. Upon one of the chairs burned a candle. It gave me enough light to find my way to the center aisle and I went down, and as I moved, I saw, in the penumbra of the candle glow, the door out the back of this sanctuary, leading in the direction I wanted. Focused as I was on this, I pulled up with a start at the hunched back and bowed head of a man on the aisle seat of the second row. I was nearly upon him and he’d heard my approach, and now that I’d stopped, he straightened up, but he did not turn.

  He wore a stand collar and a dark coat; his head was bare and his hair was white. He spoke without looking at me. “Are you a friend of the truth?” he asked.

  I understood this to be a thing some Quakers called each other. But it was also a fundamental question of philosophy and intent. So I said, “Yes.”

  “We must not fight,” he said. “The world must not fight. The Lord put that on my heart and I am glad to have said it aloud in your presence.”

  I had to move by him now.

  With this man, in this room—and the feeling would pass, I knew—but at that moment, I felt suddenly heavy-limbed, felt suddenly empty in the place in my own body where the knife had plunged into the Hun. I felt remorseful. Remorseful at lying to this man, letting him think I was a fellow Quaker, remorseful at what I had just done in the street. I’d killed before, in the past year. Killed, as tonight, in self-defense: after all, I’d let the Hun draw his knife first. But as I stepped even with the old man, and he lifted his face to me, I felt remorseful at how much easier it was to kill than it had been only a year ago, remorseful at how quickly all this remorse would pass.

  And the old man looked at me, the candlelight flickering in his dark eyes. He would never lift his hand against anyone. He would sit alone in this place of quiet, and he would meditate with God about how we all should never lift a hand against anyone. And he would be dead wrong about that, as far as the practical world of governments and of modern weapons and of the vast, institutionalized wickedness of humankind was concerned. But he was also right.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  He nodded at me. And he turned his face away and he bowed his head and I beat it out the back door.

  26

  The courtyard was very dark and it stank of garbage and waste and it rustled with rats. My remorse was gone and I shuffled my feet not to trip on unseen things, and then I was at the rear door of Metzger & Strauss.

  The window I’d passed and the window in the door were painted black.

  I expected that trying to pick the lock in the impenetrable dark of this doorway within this courtyard surrounded by these multistoried buildings on this moonless London night would be a tricky business, but I was getting used to my job, and once I found the opening of the keyway with my fingertip and got my pick and torque wrench inside, it was good doing this in the dark. The darkness made it entirely about the feel of things unseen in the keyway, and that was how it should have been anyway. And when the last pin yielded and I felt the shear line go clear and I was ready to rotate the plug, I paused. I focused on being quiet. I eased the plug around and opened the door with the meekest of clicks.

  And I froze.

  Voices and light.

  But not in this room, I quickly realized. And the voices murmured on without a hitch even now, even after the sound of my entry. They were distant, from another room.

  Which is what I should have expected. This was the back room I was entering. I’d seen through to it in the rear wall of the bookshop office this morning. I realized that door must still be open.

  This was dangerous but it was also an opportunity.

  I stepped inside.

  Across the rear storage room was the open door to the office, and framed brightly there in modernist composition was a center cut of the refectory table and Brauer’s brown tweedy back overlaid with the curves of a bentwood chair. No eyes were visible.

  I closed the door softly behind me. I turned and waited where I was standing for a moment. The voices were pretty low and I couldn’t pick up the words clearly. The floor was stacked on both sides of me with boxes in irregular rows, and I ducked down and circled behind them to the left, out of sight of the door, moving along the nearest row.

  I gave a brief thought to the contents of these boxes. Books. This was an ongoing plausible bookstore, after all. But what else could be delivered here as if they were books? If the Germans wanted to mount a sabotage campaign in England, the explosives could well pass through here. But that was not my business tonight.

  I was treading softly now in a severe crouch behind the chest-high row of boxes nearest the office.

  As I drew near the open door, I was concentrating fully on being quiet and not yet trying to render the murmuring into words.

  But an abrupt silence caught my attention.

  I froze again.

  Had they heard me?

  I’d move no more if I hadn’t already given myself away.

  But now a man’s voice spoke in German: “You are all right? You are making
sounds again.” The voice was soft-edged in timbre but hard-edged in tone.

  Another man answered, also in German, “I will be all right when he is dead.” German can transform a voice, and I’d heard his only briefly in English, but from the context I figured this was Metzger, attending the meeting with his broken foot and not taking it real well. I was certainly on the other side of the wall from my meditating Quaker: I had a sharp little twist of pleasure at the present state of Metzger’s murderous pal in the doorway across the street.

  “You expect word on that shortly?” the first man said.

  “If he is what we think he is,” Metzger said, “he’ll come and we’ll have him.”

  “Can we get on with this?” a third person said. I went rigidly silent inside once more, though I’d expected to hear this voice. It was Selene.

  “Of course,” a man said in English. This was the first German speaker, I surmised. His overtly impatient tone with Metzger and his stepping in as the commander of the agenda to reassure Selene suggested he was the one in charge. Perhaps Herr Strauss? “Herr Metzger,” he said, with an intonation as if prompting him to do a prearranged thing.

  In the brief silence that followed, I heard a rustling of papers, perhaps pulled from a pocket and pushed across the tabletop.

  Metzger said in English, “Herr Brauer, if you would be so kind as to keep the envelope with your name upon it and hand the other to the lady.”

  “Of course,” Brauer said.

  Metzger said, “They canceled the daylight passage. I’ve rebooked you on the boat train to Flushing, night after tomorrow. You’ll cross over to German territory at Baarle. Everything you need is in the envelopes.”

  “My apologies to Herr Brauer,” Selene said, “but is the escort necessary?”

  Metzger said, “Constantinople is a long way.”

  “But it’s by your vaunted Baghdad Express, yes?”

  Metzger began clumsily to explain. “Most of the way but . . .”

  The man I figured to be Strauss cut him off. “We have arranged all of this so far, Miss Bourgani. Please trust us further. Herr Brauer will handle what remains to be done in Istanbul.”

  He stressed the Turks’ preferred name for the city, no doubt shooting Metzger a critical look. Their kaiser was the self-avowed brother to Islam. Istanbul, not Constantinople. This was an important detail.

  I made this quick assessment while the sound of the man’s voice buzzed in my head like subtext. Until this moment I’d heard him speak fewer than half a dozen words in English. Now he sounded familiar.

  “The Pasha’s people and ours must meet to arrange the first contact.”

  I strained at placing the voice but felt blocked in some odd, undefinable way.

  New sounds now: an opening of a door—the door from the front of the shop—and a slight scraping of chairs.

  The man I took to be Strauss said, “Herr Strauss. These are Miss Selene Bourgani and Herr Brauer, whom I think you’ve met.”

  The actual Strauss had a voice raspy from a lifetime of heavy smoking. His manner was old-school courtly. “Miss Bourgani,” he said in British-inflected English. “I am enchanted. Your face fills the dreams of millions.”

  “Herr Strauss,” Selene said.

  Strauss said, “We deeply appreciate your assistance in this most delicate of tasks.”

  She did not reply in words and I longed to watch all the physical nuances of the characters in this scene. I particularly longed to see the face of the man I’d mistaken for Strauss, the man whose voice still echoed in my head. Where had I heard it?

  I assessed the shadows around me, wondered if I dared to lift my head above the boxes.

  Metzger said in German, “Any sign outside?”

  “I only looked for a moment, getting out of the taxi,” Strauss said, also in German. “I didn’t see Karl. But that’s the point, yes?”

  Metzger grunted.

  I shrank back deeper into the darkness and began to rise a bit from my crouch to look.

  “Can we speak in English, gentlemen?” Selene said.

  The familiar man replied, “I’m very sorry, Miss Bourgani. It’s rude of us.” His English was perfect. And his accent was American, though without any regional hint at all. Whatever “standard American speech” was, this was it. Meticulously learned.

  The bright, angled slice of the office appeared before me: Brauer, seen from behind but also now from the side, sitting upright, blocking the view to the far end of the table, though I couldn’t say for sure I would’ve seen that far even if he wasn’t there.

  “Sometimes we have peripheral matters to discuss and we speak in German by reflex,” the man went on.

  “Is there more?” Selene said and I saw a movement just to the right of Brauer: Selene’s black-sheathed shoulder rolled into my view and then out again.

  The man with the soft-timbred familiar voice ignored her. “Bitte,” he said. Then he quickly repeated in English, “Please.” And a gray-tweed-clad wrist, a delicate-fingered hand appeared in the air beyond Brauer, from the end of the table, gesturing toward an invisible chair. “Sit for a time, Mr. Strauss.”

  A chair scraped.

  The wrist and hand vanished.

  “It will only be for a brief time, Miss Bourgani,” the invisible man said.

  I crept back farther, leaned to my left, trying to catch a glimpse of him. Though the angle improved, the visible slice of the doorway shrank as well. I could see Selene’s shoulder; I could see that she had not raised the veil on her hat. She was sitting there shrouded before these men. Given the familiar man’s impulsive leveraging of his empowered status—making Strauss sit—it must have been nagging the hell out of him that Selene wouldn’t show her face clearly to him.

  “Perhaps if we can have a little drink together before we go,” he said. “We humbly request this gesture of friendly feelings, dear lady.”

  I thought: This guy is good. He’ll lift her veil yet.

  He did not wait for her reply. He said, “Mr. Brauer. If you’d be so kind as to pour the wine.”

  Brauer twisted his body in the direction of the man. This had taken him by surprise. He was being put in his place as well. He might have thought he was a high-toned university intellectual, but in this room he was the office girl being sent for coffee.

  He straightened and began to push his chair back.

  I quickened at this. I leaned just a little more to my left. He was about to reveal his boss.

  The chair screaked on the floor, the noise consciously made worse, I suspected, by Walter daring to express his displeasure.

  He rose and stepped to his left, and he was gone from my sight.

  And there, at the end of the table, was the man with the square-trimmed beard who’d been reading his newspaper across the Palm Court this morning.

  27

  Almost at once his face swung in my direction. I ducked below the bookcase. I’d made no sound. He was probably turning to Selene.

  His face was a blur now in my head from this quick glance, and there was very little that was new. The beard again dominated my impression of him. His eyebrows were bushy; that was something I’d not noticed across the Palm Court. His plastered hair with that center part was vaguely brown. But I still needed a clear and steady look at him from close up.

  His attention did indeed go to Selene. He was talking trivially to her about the wine. A nice German wine.

  He’d been watching me this morning. That much was clear. There were other things to consider about this man, though I felt further away than ever from recognizing his voice. I might have been wrong about that. But I had to shut down my mind for now. I was still lurking a few feet from my own little den of German spies and I needed to listen.

  Playing up that soft-edged quality in his voice,
Squarebeard prattled on about how they discovered the beauties of late harvest grapes in the Rheingau. “What seemed to be too old, what seemed to be rotten, turned out to be the sweetest and finest of all,” he said, and I could imagine him leaning to her, touching her wrist lightly, putting the mash on Selene Bourgani.

  Then for a time there were only clinking sounds and bits of conversation about everyone getting a nice glass of late-harvest Riesling, and then a silence fell over the table.

  I wanted to rise up once again to look into the room. But either Brauer was back in his chair and I’d see nothing or I’d be directly in Squarebeard’s line of sight and it would be too dangerous. I stayed where I was.

  “So then,” Squarebeard said. “It is time for us soon to go, but first a toast. To Miss Bourgani and to international understanding that will help bring about a quickly achieved but eternal peace in the world.”

  A beat of silence during which, no doubt, Squarebeard repressed the gagging reflex from his tripewurst of a toast, poor man. Surely he didn’t fool Selene; he could have simply toasted to the crushing victory of Germany over all her enemies and to the establishment of a vast new Germanic Empire and saved himself this discomfort. Then the glasses clinked and Metzger and Strauss, in unison, murmured “Zum Wohl.”