The Star of Istanbul

by Robert Olen Butler

  She was sitting with her back to the door. I stepped in.

  The guy she was with could have looked up and noticed me, but he didn’t. They were leaning a bit toward each other now, across the table, and they were talking.

  I was standing still and I didn’t want to make my interest in these two obvious, so I looked around and found that the dozen or so men scattered about were, most of them, looking at me. They all had an off-the-same-boat look, all from a crew hired from the same bunch of locals somewhere, maybe in Tangier or Port Said, with a dark intensity of face and features. Maybe they had the same origins as the guy with Selene, though without the mix of some other peoples in them.

  I was starting to think the bar did indeed have an ethnic core to it. At that point, I just didn’t know what it was.

  I myself clearly wasn’t part of the core. The dark sets of eyes in the bar were still lingering on me. I nodded at a few. I was just a guy from a ship in his going-ashore clothes out to get a drink.

  After I’d openly acknowledged enough of these stares, these guys all finally looked away.

  To the right was a long, stand-up bar with a wall of bottles and a wide central mirror. I moved past Selene and her man. She was speaking low. It wasn’t English. The words I heard were often throaty, sometimes almost Greek, sometimes almost a Semitic language. It was neither, I felt certain. Well, maybe Greek. That was Selene’s movie-magazine story, after all. Maybe everyone in this bar was Greek. But I’d known a few Greeks along the way, covering Chicago First Ward politics. And this didn’t quite sound Greek to me.

  The man was listening intently, one hand now on the tabletop. He’d be reaching across soon to give her wrist a pat or her elbow a squeeze.

  I moved a couple of small steps past them, planning a sight line by way of the mirror. I bellied up to the zinc bar and hunched over, anchoring my elbows. I turned my head a little to the right and there they were in reflection. I could see her face. I could see the side of his head. He hadn’t reached out to her yet, though that hand was still lying on the tabletop. She’d finished talking. Over my shoulder I could pick out his voice, a richly deep voice, those throaty sounds floating across to me, strings of h’s tracking after consonants.

  “Drink?” Another voice, with the same throatiness in its accented English.

  I straightened.

  The bartender was one of the boys from the core. Dark in skin and hair and eyes. A commanding nose.

  I had to keep my voice low. Few words. I motioned toward the taps. “Burton,” I said.

  The bartender nodded but didn’t go.

  He let his eyes travel down me, from my face to the center of my chest and onward, quite deliberately, till they stopped, and he angled his head a little. “You okay?” he said.

  I looked.

  There was a splash of blood on my white shirt, around my lower abdomen, just above the belt line. From my work in St. Martin’s Lane. I’d been carrying the Hun’s blood around on me ever since.

  29

  I flipped some fingers at the bottom of the bandage on my left cheek. The gesture led me to put on a light Italian accent for my English, still keeping the volume low, all to further mask me from Selene’s nearby ear.

  “They make the bandages not so good anymore,” I said.

  At once I figured this was a mistake. Although they still hadn’t entered the war, the Italians were part of the Triple Alliance.

  But the barman looked me in the eye and gave me a nod—a guy’s nod, like he knew about fights with sharp objects—and he stepped away to draw me an ale.

  Selene and her older man were still trading low words in their mystery language, and my eyes briefly followed the bartender. But I stopped at the cleared space around the cash box beneath the mirror.

  Attached to the wall, low, just over the tin box, was an image of a flag, not much larger than a postcard. It was divided into three equal vertical stripes: red, green, blue. This wasn’t Greek. It wasn’t any flag I recognized.

  I glanced into the mirror.

  Selene was the one who was making the move. Her hand was groping out over the table now, falling upon the man’s wrist. He put his own hand over hers and they talked on in the language, I suspected, of red, green, and blue. I looked at the beer that was just now landing in front of me. It was pale.

  I took a drink.

  Too much hops, as far as I was concerned.

  I had blood on my shirt and a beer I didn’t like in front of me. I was obviously out of place in this bar in the presence of a woman who I didn’t want to recognize me, and I wasn’t understanding anything she and her man were saying anyway.

  It was time to wait outside.

  I didn’t want to cause a stir on my departure, however, so I downed the bitter Burton ale in three swallows, wiped my mouth, put some money on the bar, and eased away. I passed the now intertwined hands, and I gave the man one last, reflexive glance. He had a long straight nose and my mind photographed it and I briefly registered her own famous profile as I went by, but I did not let my mind linger on her, and Selene and her man were behind me and I approached the door. I lowered my face for Brauer and went out the door and around the corner and up to my taxi.

  I stopped by the driver’s side of the vehicle and he was sitting there behind the wheel, not off having a quick beer in another pub, not even lounging in the street, but behind the wheel. A good man. He turned his face to me as I approached and I took his cap off my head and fitted it on his. He let me.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Turn us around and bring us close to the corner.”

  He nodded.

  Only when I was climbing into the tonneau, when he thought I wasn’t looking, did he adjust his cap to suit him.

  And we waited.

  Perhaps fifteen minutes went by and I held myself in suspension.

  I didn’t want to, but finally I looked again in my mind at Selene’s profile. I didn’t want to, but something was nagging at me, something from my eyes, not my reason.

  Then it struck me: her man’s thin, straight nose, the precise curve where bridge and brow met, the angle of the forehead. I’d registered this same profile in person more than a week ago. And it was Selene. From the first time I saw her in person, as she was suffering the questions of the reporters on the deck of the Lusitania. This was familial similarity. This was her father.

  And as if on cue, he came around the corner.

  He was striding briskly. He and his daughter had been in a preexisting state of estrangement in their first moments together in the pub. A long and hard estrangement, for them to have been separated by an ocean and then to have taken up with each other like that from the start, looking like wounded old lovers. And yet they came to entwine their hands. They came to some reconciliation. But now she was off to Istanbul—had she told him where she was going, what she was doing?—and so this was a hard parting for him. He was striding away from her firmly, as a man would, to control his feelings and maintain his manhood.

  This assessment ran quickly in me as I shrank into the shadows of the tonneau and he passed by across the street. I slid to the streetside door, was ready to follow him, but as my hand went to the handle, he turned in at a doorway to a three-story brick tenement fifty yards or so down Coleman.

  I opened the door and stepped out.

  I moved into the middle of the street and looked for a number on the building. Over the lintel, a dingy 22.

  I watched the facade, looking every few moments to the corner of New Gravel.

  Soon a light came on in a second-floor window. I noted its position. I stepped back to the taxi and told my driver to be ready for the resumption of our little parade.

  I entered the tonneau and leaned forward to watch out the front window.

  The ’08 Unic rolled into view from before the pub and c
rossed our line of sight, heading south on New Gravel Lane. A few moments later, Brauer’s Napier passed by in pursuit. We followed.

  I was aware at once that something was going on. Not with our three-character melodrama. Out to the east. In the sky. I thought it was lightning. I didn’t think any further about that, as I was preoccupied with the first clues of an alternate biography for Vitagraph’s Most Mysterious Woman in the World. But we didn’t drive very far before the lightning yielded a clap of distant thunder. But it seemed to be thunder only if you’d already distractedly assumed you’d seen lightning. Part of me instantly recognized the punch-thump of an exploding shell. My taxi stopped abruptly, and a few moments later my driver leaned across the front seat to try to see something in the eastern sky.

  I slid across and looked. Three narrow columns of white light were separately, restlessly sweeping the sky. Searchlights.

  The speaking tube jingled and I took it up. “Zeppelins, sir,” my driver said. “Raiding the East India Docks, I’d say. The two taxis have stopped before us and will not be entering the Wapping High Street—nor will aught else—till this be finished.”

  I thanked him and looked again at the sky. The searchlights still had not found the airships, but they were drawing nearer each other.

  I stepped out of the taxi on the left side, into the street.

  The near warehouses were low and scattered, south of the Shadwell Basin, and then there was a clear view across the meander of the Thames and into the distant light flecks of Dog Island, which held the West India, Millwall, and South Docks. The stars were blotted out, but the ceiling was pretty high, plenty high enough for the German dirigibles to drop their bombs. At the distant edge of my view—at the East India Docks, as my man had reckoned—a column of flame had flared up.

  Now the tip of one searchlight, nearer in, was suddenly clipped downward and clotted at the end by a bright tubular object. The air defense boys had found a Zeppelin. The other two searchlights whisked to that vicinity as well, one of them quickly finding a second airship, which closely trailed the first, and the third light rushed on behind, to continue the search.

  As interested as I was in the air assault, I lowered my face and looked to the south. A mere fifty yards ahead, against the darkness, Selene Bourgani had stepped from her taxi and become an even more deeply dark shape, immobile, elegantly erect, facing the raid. I tried to see her figure there in the night by the reality of what she was planning to do. In this moment she was a sentinel for the German airships, a monument to their assault on the Fatherland’s enemy. I still had trouble getting this to make sense. I may have discovered her own living father, but she was still the Most Mysterious Woman in the World. What was she doing with these people?

  And another dark shape passed before me, this side of Selene. Brauer had also stepped from his taxi, his face lifting to the eastern sky.

  I looked too.

  The searchlights had all converged on the two Zeppelins and I could hear the distant report of three- and four-inch guns, the far off rattle of machine guns. The Brits were using what they had—utterly unsuited for firing upward at airships—to stop what now began: a flash of quick-climbing, flaring light beneath the Zeppelins, and a fragment of a moment later the brittle thump of a bomb, and then the flare and thump again, and again. We were near enough to all this that with each bomb we instinctively braced ourselves for a frontal blow from the concussion, but instead a blow surprised us from behind: a quick aggression of air that rushed against us and then onward to fill the vacuum created by the updraft of explosives from above.

  And their salvos spent, the Zeppelins came toward us, the lights tracking them, the great glistening white hulls drifting to us and above us as if we were on the floor of the sea and these were the dead and bloated bodies of sunken ships, this one above me now the Lusitania itself, torpedoed and glowing in its ghostly afterlife and come to reclaim those who had escaped, to take the three of us away with it.

  But that impression flared brightly in my head and vanished instantly.

  This was, in fact, the fiercely deployed German war machine passing overhead. And I was well aware that the man and woman standing near me in the dark were in its service.

  30

  Istanbul was not where I had expected to end up when the secret service boys finally let me take a crack at this war. They hadn’t either. And deep into that eventful Monday in London, after I’d made sure Selene returned to her hotel and I was heading back to the Arundel, I finally took time to wonder if, in fact, that’s where they would have me go. For all I knew, they already had some other sneak-and-snoop Johnnie in Istanbul, someone who’d get the chance to take his own crack at Selene Bourgani. But either way, him or me, Metcalf was arriving tomorrow and the German team was leaving the next day, and I needed him and his minions to work on a few things right away. Even if it wasn’t for my benefit.

  So I asked my man and his taxi to stay with me for a while longer, at which he gave me a slow nod yes and a touch to the brim of his cap even before we’d talked about money.

  I dashed up to my room and was happy to actually put some words together on my Corona, banging out a report and a list of queries for Metcalf, covering everything from Selene’s German movie director-lover to the man I strongly suspected was her father, from the flag on the bar wall to the smell of spirit gum, from a square beard at the head of a table to a dead Hun in a doorway. And I told him that if I was going forward, I needed a pistol. And—a thing I almost forgot—I let him know I’d changed hotels.

  Then I was off again through the night, back along the Strand, past Charing Cross just south of Metzger & Strauss, Booksellers, across the street from which there’d been a bit of an incident earlier this evening. And the Strand turned into the Mall and the Mall led us to the front gates of Buckingham Palace and we circled good King George V, perhaps just as he was having his man adjust the shoulders of his pajamas.

  We ended up on the southwest side of the palace gardens, in Westminster, at Number 4 Grosvenor Gardens, at the north end of a long, attached block of grand Second Empire town houses, five stories high with slate pavilion roofs and tall mansards. The houses were three bays wide and each had the same front porch—there were a dozen or more such, arrayed down the street—with squared granite columns holding up garlands of stone flowers.

  Somewhere between my hotel and these stone flowers, I’d also given a brief thought to my killing a man tonight. To my having to kill a man. This thought came shortly after we’d circled Buckingham Palace and I had actually given a few moments of brain time to the King’s pajamas. Ironically. But still. I’d killed a guy tonight and I hadn’t really expected to, given all the little pitter-pat of sneaking and snooping that my recent secret service work had entailed. Now I’d found it necessary to act more like a soldier in the field than a spy. But maybe I didn’t understand the spy stuff yet. Or maybe I was supposed to have finessed that confrontation somehow. But I couldn’t see how. And I’d done this before, killed a man. And even as I was thinking this, as we’d rolled to a stop in front of the embassy and I took in the architectural details as I always did, I knew that I was about to forget the dead Hun, pretty much for good.

  Which made me pause on the sidewalk before the embassy of the United States of America and silently pledge the blood of an enemy—and the ease with which I’d shed it—to the defense of my country. However subtle the circumstances or untraditional the battlefield.

  I rang the bell at the timber double door and it opened to a U.S. Marine in his dress blues. I told him I was Christopher Marlowe Cobb in search of Mr. Smith. Which suddenly sounded like a phony name to me. But after asking me politely to wait and closing the door in my face, it took only a few moments for him to return and invite me in.

  I stepped into a marble foyer hung with an American flag and a framed Woodrow Wilson. The marine joined a similarly attired comrade—they
were both sergeants—and they stood at parade rest, flanking the main staircase. In the center of the foyer was a large oaken desk with a telephone receiver prominent at the sitter’s right hand, the sitter being an apparent civilian in a dark blue sack suit, with the jacket buttoned up tight—even here late at night—and with the same close-cropped hair as the soldiers.

  He nodded me to a wingback chair on the wall.

  I sat, and soon there was a clattering of feet coming down the staircase. And then Smith.

  He strode across the marble floor as I rose and he gave me his hand firmly. “Smith,” he said. “Ben.”

  He was about fifty, with a shock of gray hair, a comfortable vision, like a Chicago City Hall reporter on deadline, his jacket somewhere else, his shirt sleeves rolled up to his elbows, his tie askew. He was working late, and I wondered if he looked the same when Metcalf was around, who I had a feeling didn’t approve of his boys looking like Chicago City Hall reporters. I liked Smith for his casualness around the embassy, even more so if the boss wouldn’t approve but he was doing it anyway, after hours.

  “Cobb,” I said. “Kit.”

  “We got a little worried about you,” he said. “I dropped round to check on you at the Waldorf this evening.”

  “It’s all in here,” I said, handing over the sealed envelope.

  He nodded at my bandaged left cheek. He knew about the Schmiss beneath: “Set to unveil your sordid past at Heidelberg, are you?” he said.

  “Things happened.”

  “You want to go up?” Smith gave a slight toss of his head toward the staircase behind him.

  I hesitated. I was feeling a little weary, having lately escaped a sinking ship and snuck around pretty seriously and killed a man wielding a knife.

  Before I could answer, Smith said, “You probably have a story you don’t want to tell twice.”

  “I wrote the highlights,” I said, nodding at the envelope in his hand.

  “Got it,” he said. He cupped my elbow and turned me toward the front door, stepping up instantly beside me and putting an avuncular arm around my shoulder. We moved toward the night. “Hold down the fort, boys,” he said raising his voice to pitch the comment to the marines covering our retreat.