The Star of Istanbul

by Robert Olen Butler

  And at his first opportunity, while Escoffier and Metcalf ardently talked truffles, Mr. Thành drew me aside, beneath a hanging row of gleaming copper pots, where we quickly found a common language—an outsider’s passable French. He spoke to me rapidly, softly.

  He said, “I was in your country three years ago. In New York City and then in Boston. I admire what your Declaration of Independence says, though I looked for its fruits in your streets and in your government. I’m sorry. I looked with very little success. But your press. Your newspapers. Your magazines. I have seen them speak openly about the evils of your society and about the evils abroad in the world. I urge you, Monsieur Cobb, to turn your skills of . . . what is your English word? Muckraking. Please I implore you to turn your skills toward the evils of empire. Empire driven by business. This present war is about empire, and empire is about rich people getting richer, exploiting the people that they rule by imperial force. And please . . .”

  “Cobb.” This was Metcalf’s voice. “I want you to hear this.”

  I kept my eyes on Thành. “Please,” he repeated. “Begin with the Vietnamese people.”

  Metcalf said, “It’s what I was telling you about black and white.”

  He was referring, I assumed, to truffles.

  But I was having trouble drawing my eyes away from the unblinking eyes before me, eyes as black as the heavens surrounding a moon touched with blood.

  Thành said, “You are a man who seeks the truth. You can give the news of this to the world.”

  I turned away from him now, this Indochinese, this Vietnamese.

  But in my hotel bed, on the night before Christopher Cobb, the American secret agent, was to put out to sea once more in pursuit of German secret agents, it was not so easy to let that little man go.

  33

  And it was, indeed, Christopher Cobb the newsman who boarded the SS Mecklenburg just before midnight. In his passport photo he had a close-cropped beard. In the flesh, he was clean shaven with a fresh bandage on his left cheek, but people do shave, and they do injure themselves, particularly escaping from a torpedoed ship. If you were to look inside his suit coat, you’d find the label of Eisner und Söhne, but Cobb was a famous, world-traveling American journalist and he could plausibly have gone to a German tailor in his travels. The Dutch were unlikely to take him into the woods and shoot him over a thing like that.

  Cobb or not, I had to stay out of sight of the firm of Brauer und Bourgani. This was going to be an ongoing challenge all the way to Istanbul. In the Gladstone bag I had some spirit gum of my own and some items of facial disguise I’d purchased at a theatrical supply house in London on my writing day; I was going to have to be resourceful. And somewhere near the Belgian border, I was going to have to turn into someone else.

  For that, I had choices in the valise. Choices and a wily surprise from Metcalf. When I’d risen this morning I’d opened Metcalf’s leather valise. First out, wrapped in a leather band, was a bundle of letters-of-passage and credentials, using photographs of me clean shaven, with my naked Schmiss. These would transform me into Jacob Wilhelm von Traube, with diplomatic passport and with alternate credentials making me either a press attaché or a military attaché, as it might suit the situation.

  The next thing out of the valise was an American passport. It had a photograph of me in my close-cropped beard. But I was not Christopher Cobb. I was Walter Brauer. Metcalf without qualms. Metcalf advising. Not ordering, of course, this Gentleman Jim, but subtly advising a man with a certain knack to consider what might be good for his country.

  Subtly until I found the hidden flaps on the edges of the lid to the false bottom. I lifted the lid away to expose the recess beneath.

  And there lay a weapon the like of which I’d handled and learned to shoot in my training late last year.

  A secret service special. A pistol crafted by the outside-Washington boys from a .22 calibre, single-shot, bolt-action, 1902 model Winchester rifle. It had a severely sawed-off barrel, trued up very nicely; the two original open sights and a folding peep sight; and a stock of black walnut replacing the Winchester’s varnished gumwood, curving down into a swell pistol grip. It fired a .22 Long rifle cartridge with real punch and tight-cluster precision. What turned it from a tough kid’s target pistol into a serious weapon for America’s on-the-sly warfare was the threaded coupling driven tight into the end of the barrel and the thing that screwed onto it: the black metal tube lying next to the pistol in the bottom of the valise. A Maxim Silencer. With the aid of the box of .22 Long heavies, specially made by the Maxim Silent Firearms Company, that lay next to it, this tough guy could plug a man between the eyes from a hundred yards and not make a whisper of a sound. Not just silent in the report; the Maxim’s special round even took away the whipcrack of a bullet in the air. Not to mention the device cut recoil to almost nothing. It was too bad you had to reload after each shot, but only single-shot weapons gave up their gases completely to the silencer’s mechanism. Not a big price to pay for that big benefit.

  All of which I admired at the sight of Metcalf’s little surprise.

  Admired too much. Admired so much—which was the point, of course—that I got itchy to use it.

  And I understood Metcalf’s message clearly: this was how I was supposed to kill Brauer in his ship cabin without raising an alarm.

  But I simply put the Brauer passport, along with Herr Traube’s, into the recess, as well as my own disguise items; I fit the lid back on top, and I packed the bag.

  Metcalf still stopped short of giving me a direct order. It was my choice how I managed my identity on the way to Istanbul. And I chose at least to begin my journey as the Christopher Cobb I’d always been. The war correspondent. I’d ignore, for now, that I was carrying another kind of war in the bottom of my bag.

  34

  The Mecklenburg was a medium-sized ship, not quite half the length of the Lusitania, not spacious but not cramped, so I hung back on the pier, in the shadows of the terminal building, watching the first-class gangway till Bourgani in black led Brauer in tweeds up the first-class gangway.

  I followed.

  I once again knew the cabin numbers for the two people of interest to me. Metcalf had his sources at the British ticket agents, no doubt through his English counterparts.

  My cabin was the portside equivalent of Selene’s on the starboard side, both of us at the aft end of the inner passageway. My windows looked out on the promenade, as did hers. Brauer’s cabin was just forward of Selene’s.

  We were under way by half past midnight and I lay down on my bunk, intending to sleep, my Berlin jacket and waistcoat hung on the back of a chair, the pants folded on top. Whenever I knew I’d have trouble sleeping, I’d get very neat with my clothes. And I was right. I simply listened to the distant, forced-draft fans feeding air to the turbines and felt the vibration of the ship, prominent in the Mecklenburg but not terribly unpleasant. I hoped it would jiggle me to sleep. But still I didn’t sleep, even after we’d cleared the Thames and revved up to twenty-two knots for the long, dark run across the North Sea.

  I finally gave up. I was restless in the way this job tended to make me restless. Following and snooping: I wasn’t very suited for that. So I dressed in all but my tie and went out of my room. Brauer and Bourgani weren’t going anywhere. And it was wise, when I knew where they were, to just stay completely out of their sight. So I headed forward along the corridor.

  And I began to smell something.

  There was just a whiff of it. It slid into me and then out again and I concentrated and there it was again. Maybe my recent stint in Escoffier’s joint had heightened my sense of smell, made me oversensitive in an often faintly fetid world. This had a whiff of way-too-fancy cookery. No. Not fancy food. Old food, rotten food. No. Not that but with a little taint of that maybe. But something more, something vaguely familiar, which made me interes
ted.

  I reached the first-class reception area, between the cabins and the smoking room. I stepped across to the smoker, and the place was empty but for a couple of gents in a far corner with their cigars diminished to butts and starting to doze. The air was permanently thick with the scent of old tobacco, and this other smell was hiding here. Masked now. I could still pick it up if I concentrated.

  The nearly empty smoking room reminded me of something I’d noticed waiting for Selene and Brauer to board: the ship was only sparsely booked. I stepped back out into the reception hall and looked across to the staircase leading to the second-class deck below. I moved to it.

  The smell I’d been following wafted more clearly up the steps. I entered the smell, descended into it, and it began to identify itself: sweat and grime and female smells; urinal smells and sick child smells and unchanged-clothes smells; long-on-the-road and living-in-communal-tent smells. I stopped on the landing. I didn’t need to go farther. I knew this smell from the wars I’d covered. It was the smell of refugees. Nine months into the war, going east from England, the Mecklenburg and its sister ships carried rarefied travelers in the direction of the war. Going west, the ships still occasionally carried a sanctioned mass of those who’d fled the Germans from Antwerp and Flanders, from Liège and Luxemburg, and who were still trying to find a final refuge.

  I ascended the steps again.

  The most recent westward passage of the Mecklenburg must have been a passage of the dispossessed. It would take some time at sea to exorcise the scent of these ghosts.

  I needed air myself.

  I turned toward the starboard side.

  I was fully conscious that I did so. I would look carefully before entering the promenade. Surely Selene and Brauer were sleeping. It felt as if everyone was sleeping on this ship but me. It was all right simply to walk past her window, I thought.

  I opened the door onto the deck.

  I eased out, looking aft.

  The promenade was empty. The windows in the last two cabins were lit. Selene’s and Brauer’s.

  All the other windows were dark.

  I should have stepped back in.

  But it was time to snoop.

  I crept aft.

  And up ahead I began to hear their voices.

  They were muffled. The windows were closed. But I heard them. Shouting.

  I quickened my step.

  They would be distracted. I would crouch beneath their windows and listen.

  A few more steps; the voices were becoming clearer; then they abruptly stopped.

  I strode on, expecting them to resume. The silence persisted.

  And then I heard a muffled pop.

  It was small caliber. But it was a gun.

  I bolted the final few yards. The bastard had shot Selene. He’d confronted her about the bar near the London Docks. He’d discovered something. He’d shot her.

  The first window now. No caution. I looked in. Brauer’s cabin. The electric light was burning. But it was empty. Of course. He’d sought her out in her own cabin to confront her.

  The next window. I stepped to it.

  Inside, Selene Bourgani was standing in the center of the floor, back to the door, but with her face angled downward. She held the pistol in her hand waist high, pointed slightly upward and slightly to her right. A small black purse was open in her other hand. I could well imagine she had not moved anything but her face in the few moments since she’d shot Walter Brauer.

  He was lying on the floor on his back, and he wasn’t moving either.

  She must have plugged him straight in the heart.

  35

  Selene lifted her face and looked me in the eyes. If this were the movie version of what she’d done, I would have expected her to act out a major emotion. Choose one: shock, horror, fear, rage, guilt, relief. Choose a couple of those. And they would have been bigger than life. But she showed none of that. Her beautiful face—and it was very beautiful indeed, for her having just shot a man—merely subtly acknowledged me, showed that she knew me. Was that the faintest nod she had just given me? The title card might well have read: Oh, it’s you. Are you off to Holland as well?

  I left the window. I entered at the aft portal and approached her door. I knocked. I expected to have to knock a few times. I was only just now getting my brain to start to work. I was afraid that the cabin doors would begin opening down the way, that people would be right behind me when I finally got her to open up.

  But apparently no one was stirring. And many of the cabins were empty. I knocked again. More softly.

  The door opened.

  “Come in, Mr. Cobb,” she said.

  I did.

  She closed the door behind me.

  I took a step toward Brauer’s body.

  He was wearing his coat but he had no waistcoat, and his white shirt had a tight, red, silver-half-dollar-sized circle just beneath the sternum.

  “I believe you know Mr. Brauer,” Selene said.

  Only now—with me seeing Selene’s handiwork from her point of view and hearing her voice immediately behind me, and with the smell of hot metal and gunpowder lingering in the room like the smell of recent sex—did it occur to me that she’d just killed one man who she thought was helping her and that she had before her another man who she figured was out to stop her and was a killer himself. And she had a pistol in her hand.

  “I do know him,” I said. “Can’t say I like him very much.”

  I was relieved that Selene slid up beside me.

  We both were looking down at Walter Brauer.

  In my periphery I could see the pistol still in her hand.

  I glanced at it.

  Her gun hand was not quite as composed as the rest of her. It was holding the weapon as if it expected Brauer to suddenly spring up and it would have to finish the job. And maybe it was starting to tremble a very little bit, this hand.

  The pistol was a Colt 1908 Vest Pocket model. I liked a small and unobtrusive pistol, if you knew how to apply it. I was carrying one myself on this trip, though it was—stupidly—packed in my bag in my cabin. That snub-barreled Colt, though, looked excessively small and I glanced at the more or less instantly dead man and it struck me that Selene knew how to apply her tiny pistol excessively well. And I suddenly thought I might not yet be out of the woods.

  She was continuing to study Brauer and I turned back to him too.

  So I took as a premise, for the sake of argument, that she wouldn’t use that pistol on me, at least for now. What then? What was my next move? She’d just shot a guy to death. He was clearly unarmed.

  She interrupted my train of thought.

  “He tried to rape me,” she said.

  Okay. She was offering an explanation, so I figured she probably wasn’t going to shoot me, at least not right away. But I knew Mr. Brauer better than she realized, so I also knew she was lying. She wasn’t his type.

  Not that this was a point to argue with her.

  The quick and simple question was: If my government wants to stop this woman’s secret mission, why not just turn her over to the authorities for shooting an unarmed man?

  This was all going through me not as reasoning, however, but as a crackle of emotion. These were the issues but I could smell that complicated lavender and hay and musk thing she put on herself and I could visualize the naked parts of her where she would touch on that scent with her fingertip. And I felt Metcalf’s hot little mandate slide down my throat like birdsong fat: my government not only sanctioned me to kill; this was the guy they wanted dead. I thought: How do I blow the whistle on a dame I’m still crazy about for doing my own dirty work?

  So I looked at her. That profile. Her father’s profile. And I said, “Can I help?”

  She turned her face to me.
<
br />   She looked at me with take-me-in-your-arms eyes. Which I figured looked pretty much the same as can-you-get-rid-of-this-dead-body eyes.

  She nodded yes. I can help.

  I kneeled beside Brauer and I bent near, into his own lavender smell, cheap and strong, from the pomade on his slicked-down hair. I placed two fingers in the hollow beside his windpipe. He was still warm, but I moved my fingertips around, pressing and waiting, pressing and waiting, and I felt nothing stirring. He was dead. Given the placement of her shot, I wasn’t surprised.

  I pulled back a bit and looked at his shirt, where the bullet went in. The silver-half-dollar bloodstain had blossomed into a ragged-petaled red boutonniere. And on these petals was a dark dusting of soot and gunpowder. She’d been pretty close for the kill.

  In helping her now, the blood was my concern. There wasn’t much here at the entry point. If the entry angle had been a little upward, from below—and from the way I’d first seen Selene through the window, that was likely—then the wound would be a flap of skin that had mostly closed back up. If I was wrong about the angle, the entry spot might still pretty much seal up, but it’s what happened after entry that I was concerned about: a tumbling bullet, splintering bone into shrapnel, maybe even exiting the body at the back. It was what he was lying in that was my present worry.

  I didn’t want to move him too drastically until I understood the situation. So I ran a hand behind his right shoulder, along the rough tweed of his coat, and I lifted at his spine between his shoulder blades. I leaned over him and reached around and more or less hugged him—which made me uneasy for more reasons than one—and I ran my right hand downward, gingerly, expecting perhaps to feel blood.

  There was nothing.

  I laid him back down.

  She was lucky or she was good. Good was what I was afraid of.

  I was acutely aware of her presence behind me, standing over me.

  But I was useful to her for now.