The Star of Istanbul

by Robert Olen Butler

  A longer silence fell upon the room as they drank, broken only by Metzger praising the pleasing sweetness of the wine and by a desultory murmuring of agreement.

  This thing would soon end.

  I had to decide what to do. They’d leave in several taxis, as they’d come. Who might linger? I’d heard some useful things but nothing of the details of what Selene was expected to do in Istanbul. I could wait for whoever remained possibly to reiterate informally some of what I’d missed.

  But Squarebeard might clear out quickly and he was the one—the obvious leader of the group—I was most interested in.

  He didn’t give them much drinking time. Suddenly a chair scooted and it must have been his. He said, “So we must go now.”

  Glasses clinked down to the table.

  Chairs began to move.

  Shoes began to scuff and shuffle.

  I backed away and circled around the side of the rows of boxes and I reached the rear wall. I crouched low again and moved toward the door as quickly as I could without audible footfalls.

  Before I stood in full—though shadowed—sight of the office, I peeked from my crouch a last time. The bright frame of the doorway for the moment showed only a center slice of the refectory table, and then a body moved into frame, the large, laboring body of Metzger, bracing himself with his hand on the tabletop, hobbling in severe pain on his broken foot.

  He was heading for the front of the shop, to show his visitors out. I did not have time to wait till the office was clear. I rose slowly and then took a brisk step to the door, eased it open, and went out into the night, carefully closing the door behind me.

  My passage was in darkness now but I moved as fast as I dared. Along the back of the shop to the Friends Meeting House. Through the Quakers’ back rooms. I paused only before I entered the Meeting Room.

  It was dark. The candle was out. The old man was gone. Matches lit my way past the empty benches and through another door, and before me, in the windows of the front entrance, was the street, almost bright by contrast, with its taint of electric light.

  The handle did not yield to my turn. Of course. The old man had locked up on his way out. I turned the bolt key and I opened the door slowly, quietly. Voices were coming from nearby to the right. My German spies scattered from under their rock.

  I took a step back and pulled the sling from my pocket and reset my left arm in it. I tapped my cane to the floor. I touched the gauze on my cheek to make sure it was there. I could cross the street. But I was still hungry for any scrap of information. For a closer look at Squarebeard. For a glimpse of Selene. I had to be bold now and trust my disguise. I would pass before their very eyes. I figured at the very worst there’d be a delay for them to realize who I was. I could handle any of them in a scrap and could simply outrun them if need be. They’d soon know I’d been around anyway when the dead body in the doorway made his appearance in their little drama.

  I took a quick initial look in their direction before stepping out. It would help if they didn’t realize I’d entered the scene from just next door.

  Squarebeard was disappearing into a taxi.

  “Damn,” I said, almost aloud. Almost.

  The others were distracted.

  It was too late for the boss man, but I stepped out quickly, dragging my putative bad leg—overacting terribly—and the taxi containing Squarebeard slipped past me, his shadowed face flashing by in the tonneau.

  He did not look my way.

  Ahead were agitated voices. Hushed, not rendering themselves into words, but the contentious intensity was clear.

  Selene and Brauer had moved a ways down the street, toward the corner, and they were face to face at the edge of the sidewalk, Brauer with his back to me. He raised his left arm, signaling for a taxi.

  I limped slowly their way.

  Selene’s voice rose, lost its hush: “Mr. Brauer, the next taxi is yours or it is mine. You will not escort me. Is that clear?”

  I was passing the front window of the bookstore. In my periphery I saw shadows moving behind the front desk lamplight.

  Brauer’s voice rose to match hers. “I am following my orders.”

  Selene said, “You will take me to my final destination but not to my hotel.”

  I slowed to keep as much of the conversation before me as I could, lowering my face and turning a little to the right, showing my bandaged cheek, which would arrest any brief glance.

  Brauer said. “I will fetch Herr Metzger. He will tell you.”

  “You go do that,” she said.

  “Taxi,” Brauer cried.

  I glanced their way. Brauer had taken a step into the street. An earlier model Unic, a 1908 12/14, tall and sputtery, with a foreshortened tonneau, approached. Selene turned to watch the taxi.

  And then a whistle cried sharply from across the street—the garbled, trilling sound of a bobby, like two differently pitched whistles blowing at the same time, not quite blending but not quite separating themselves. The cop blew three short, sharp times in a row, a call for other bobbies in the area.

  My handiwork had been discovered.

  Brauer jerked his head in the direction of the sound. Selene didn’t look at all but stepped forward and flung open the back door of the taxi and vanished inside, and before Brauer could turn back, she’d slammed the door.

  I realized I had to follow her. She certainly didn’t think Brauer was putting the mash on her and this wasn’t about proving her independence. She had somewhere to go.

  I wanted to sprint away back to my own taxi, but that could draw the attention of the bobby, and so I walked briskly instead.

  I glanced into her tonneau and Selene was giving her driver instructions.

  I pushed on more quickly.

  My driver was alert. He’d turned his Unic around to face this way, so he could watch for me, and he started up now, even as another taxi cut me off, turning from New Street into St. Martin’s.

  I heard Brauer cry, “Taxi!”

  I figured he was going to follow her as well.

  I glanced back and I caught a glimpse of her old Unic puttering off as Brauer’s taxi, a British Napier Landaulet, slid into its place. The Napier’s cloth rear top was down, but Bauer opened the door into the forward hard cabin and he began to climb in.

  I took the last few strides to my Unic and leaped into the back. I grabbed the speaking tube and told my man to follow the taxi in front of us, which was following the taxi I was primarily interested in, and he said “Yessir” as if he actually knew what I wanted, and we were all off.

  28

  We went south on St. Martin’s and then swung east into the Strand and almost at once were passing the massive, rusticated stone, Edwardian-Baroque Cecil Hotel. The Savoy was next door. Maybe I was wrong about Selene.

  But the driver hailed me on the speaking tube and said, “The taxi of interest has turned in. Would tha like me to stop?”

  “What’s the taxi just ahead doing?”

  “He has gone by but is stopping now.”

  “Turn in,” I said, “and park like you did earlier, facing the Strand.”

  And we did. I leaned forward to watch for the ’08 Unic to emerge from the covered front court. It came out almost at once. Too quick to have dropped Selene and gotten a new fare. She played this smart but assumed Brauer would have gone off at once when he saw her turn in at her hotel. And sure enough, as the taxi puttered past, I caught a brief glimpse of her turban hat and veil in silhouette.

  I told my man to follow. Selene’s taxi turned right, onto the Strand, and I told him to pause long enough to see if the other taxi was going to follow as well.

  Brauer did. He was as suspicious as I was, and he was going to check this out.

  We three wagon-trained along the Strand, passing the neocla
ssical facade of Somerset House, which was full of the quotidian, no-spies-necessary government—taxes and probate and the records of birth and death and marriage—and then, in exactly the same architectural style, the Strand campus of Brauer’s own King’s College drifted past.

  I settled back in my seat and stopped watching the city for now. We trekked on into Fleet Street. I wondered how far east Selene would go.

  I turned my thoughts back to Squarebeard. A voice heard briefly or distantly or long ago sticks in your head, it seemed to me, not just from the sound of it but from the circumstance, the location, the face of the speaker when you hear it. I tried one last time to recognize Squarebeard’s voice, but since I’d seen his face, none of this was coming together. He used his voice well. My hands flexed at his softly sneaky masher-pitch about late-harvest grapes. That voice was familiar but perhaps because it sounded similar to somebody from my own past. Probably some actor I’d met along the circuit with my mother. Someone, after all this time, I would never be able to identify. Nor did I need to.

  And I thought of Selene’s mission. To spy for the Germans, apparently. In Istanbul. On the Turks? They were Germany’s ally, but I only had to look at my own mission—sneaking into Britain’s war—to find that possibility plausible. In the old Chinese military axiom that you kept your friends close and your enemies closer, you had two challenges. Keeping the enemy closer was the obvious one. But you still might have to work hard and secretly to keep those friends close. The military best interests of a Turk-invoked international jihad would not necessarily fit with the Germans’ best interests.

  As of two weeks ago the Turks had begun fighting on their own Eastern Front. The Brits and French had landed on the Gallipoli peninsula with the intention of taking Istanbul and opening a supply route into the Black Sea for the Russians. Hell, everyone figured the Triple Entente had already agreed to let Constantinople turn into Tsargrad. This was a particularly important time for the Huns to get the inside scoop on what their ally was planning to do and how.

  But there was another possibility. Squarebeard mentioned an approach to a pasha, a member of the Turkish ruling elite. Maybe Selene’s real work would be for the Turks themselves. Perhaps the Germans were providing Selene for an Ottoman mission. What would the Turks want that they’d need a female Greek-American film star to do the job? For that matter, of what particular use would such a woman be to the Germans? What covert skills did she possess to make her uniquely useful?

  Only one answer came to mind. But my feelings were too raw about Selene Bourgani to go any further with that.

  So I closed the throttle and let my thoughts sputter out. I found myself looking sightlessly at the passing street. I turned my face to the forward windows of the taxi, and looming before us was the massively becolumned Great West Door of the Christopher Wrenassainced St. Paul’s Cathedral.

  We veered to the right and around the cathedral and still we followed Brauer and Selene. Down Cannon Street we went and past its eponymous train station and soon we were approaching the castle within a castle within a castle of the Tower of London, the spaced, rising stacks of ancient stone seeming to fill the dark of the night ahead. This too we circled, and immediately we were skirting the northern edge of the St. Katharine Docks, the ships invisible behind the high brick facades of the warehouses joined in a long unbroken row.

  Then we angled up onto St. George Street and the only hint of the vast London Docks lying beyond the immediate rows of commercial buildings was the proliferation among the storefronts of ship chandlers, with their windows hung in deck lights and signal lanterns and with their barrels of tar and pitch and rosin huddling dimly inside. And, as well, the clothiers’ windows were showing peacoats and slickers instead of sack suits and frocks.

  And now we turned off St. George into a street of brick warehouses on both sides, which loomed six stories above us in canyon cliff face, and the darkness of the night deepened around us. New Gravel Lane. This was on the way to nowhere. And when we got free of the warehouses and into a run of sack makers and rope merchants and pubs, I expected what soon came: my driver hailed me over the speaking tube and said, “They will be stopping up ahead.”

  I leaned forward to the front tonneau window, and I could see before us Brauer’s taxi pulling abruptly to the curb.

  “Go on,” I told my driver.

  We passed Brauer and fifty yards farther along we approached Selene’s Unic, which had stopped before a pub on a corner.

  “Take the right turn,” I said to my driver.

  He did. Onto Coleman Street. He knew to go slow. I let him roll twenty or so yards farther and I told him to pull over.

  I removed the arm sling, which had been hanging loose for the ride, and put it on the seat. I considered the cane but left it behind as well. I stripped off my jacket and plucked off my hat and I jumped out of the taxi on the driver’s side and stepped forward to him.

  He looked at me. Ready to do whatever I needed. “You’re a good man,” I said. “I’d take you to battle with me any day of the week.”

  He nodded at me once, and his mouth tightened and pursed ever so slightly. The smile of a man with the qualities I was appreciating at that moment.

  “Can I borrow your cap?” I said.

  He was wearing the perfect thing: a good, well cared for but well traveled, working-class cloth cap with a soft, flat one-piece crown.

  He did not hesitate. He grabbed it off and handed it to me.

  I gave him the same nod and the same smile he’d lately given me.

  I put his cap on my head—it was a pretty good fit—and I walked back toward the corner, no longer lame and arm-slung, ready to rely on my workingman’s cap and a shirt that was new but unchanged since Queenstown and a beardless face dominated by an already London-dingy bandage. And rely on my showing up in a place that no one would expect me to be. It was worth the risk.

  I approached the Block & Tackle, Spirit Merchant, which had a large bright window looking onto Coleman Street, with the brick facade above it painted: Walkers Warrington and Burton Ales.

  I slowed and looked in at the window. Selene was standing before a table. I shrank back a bit, as she was looking in my direction. She had lifted her veil and she could have seen me watching her if she’d only shifted her eyes. She was just beyond the right shoulder of a man whose back was to me. He was standing in front of a chair pushed away from the table, apparently having just risen for her. He was holding himself stiffly upright.

  It was clear she’d come to see this guy.

  Her eyes stayed fixed on him. For all her screen-actress largeness, I had to look closely to read her. Which was part of what I read, of course. Her face was as stiff in its inexpressiveness as the man’s posture.

  I dared not watch from this angle any longer.

  I moved along the sidewalk, heading for the front door, keeping my eyes on these two all the while.

  Her hands were clasped before her. She was still wearing that clinging, black, high-fashion dress with the chinchilla wrists. She seemed more than ever to be dressed for a state of mourning, though from all I knew, she was merely dressed for a state of film-star vampish mystery.

  Her face was vanishing as I moved, and his face was emerging. I was in no one’s line of sight so I stopped to study him, even as these two seemed to be studying each other. His face gave me a dark under­tow of a thought about what this stiff and untouching and, from what I could see, silent confrontation might be about. He was a good-looking guy but in an odd mix of ways: exaggerated features of a sort, a prominent nose, large eyes, a wide mouth, but for their size somehow delicate still, and his skin was dusky but not quite swarthy-masculine, a Mediterranean or Slavic, cut by some whiter blood. His dark hair was starting to streak with gray and his face was starting to jowl up a bit around the chin. A leading man type gone a little to seed. He wore a three-piece su
it and he looked comfortable in it, though he was broad in the shoulders and the suit was cheap and she had come to him, after all, in a scruffy bar on the docks, clearly his turf. And the thing that ran in me from the way they looked at each other—knowing but estranged, wanting to touch but not wanting to touch—was that this was still another man that the vamp Selene Bourgani had taken to bed for a while and then booted out the door.

  And this made me think again how she likely would conduct her espionage work in Istanbul. The logic of her doing it that way. The ease of it, for her.

  So I kept on jittering around on the sidewalk outside the bar, compulsively trying to read this guy’s face, trying to imagine where the hell she met him, trying to throw a brick and scare off that nasty little rutting street tom of a Manx who was presently trying to claw his way out of the center of my chest.

  The guy’s lips moved now, but not a lot, and he motioned to the chair across the table from him, and they both sat.

  I slipped away, went around the corner, pulling my cap low over my eyes, glancing up the street on this side to Brauer’s taxi, which was still sitting there, beyond Selene’s, which was also still sitting there. At least she expected to leave this guy’s company tonight. Which didn’t mean anything, really, about what they might do in the meantime, somewhere nearby in private, if they could warm this present chill between them.

  Not that any of this mattered to me.

  Not that I actually could rely on anything I was thinking on this subject, stupid as I could be about women. I realized I’d better be grateful the Germans hadn’t targeted me with this woman.

  I stopped for a moment at the front door of the pub, and I lit a cigarette so I could casually glance across the street.

  Brauer was there. Also jittering around, under an electric lamppost, smoking his own cigarette, no doubt trying to decide if and when he should come closer and take a look. He was probably not in a ­position—nor did he have reasons—to distrust her, but he was feeling very uneasy, with her being his responsibility and wildly out of control.