The Star of Istanbul

by Robert Olen Butler

  “The matter at hand,” she said to him with surprising gentleness.

  He nodded in acknowledgment without looking at her. He said, “Three weeks ago, three hundred of the elite Armenian thinkers and leaders in Istanbul—writers and priests, politicians and publishers, teachers and artists, all of our best minds—were arrested by the government and deported overnight from the capital. They were imprisoned beyond Angora. Those that got that far. We’ve been told reliably that a group of them—twenty or so, ones with voices, writers like you—were murdered on the way to Ayaş.”

  “But they all will die,” Lucine said. “Soon.”

  Her voice faltered ever so slightly. She paused. She was about to speak again when we all heard feet scuffling on the fieldstones from the direction of the courtyard door.

  Two men stood there. They were suited up looking like Turks but I knew somehow they belonged. They could have been Tigran’s sparring partners. One was a light heavyweight, one a welterweight. All three of them were swarthy and rough featured, of the same blood as the boys in the bar on the London Docks.

  Part of me sensed trouble.

  Tigran and Arshak stood up at once. Lucine looked to me and she rose. I rose with her. She stepped to me.

  “I’m going back to the hotel now,” she said.

  “Who are these men?” I asked.

  She looked in their direction.

  “They’re with Tigran,” she said.

  “Look me in the eyes,” I said.

  She did.

  They were steady. But she was an actress.

  “I thought you and your father had something to explain,” I said.

  “A thing has come up,” she said. “They’d like to take you a little farther.”

  “Not you?”

  “You can ride a horse?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where you will go is out of the way. I need to get back to the hotel and prepare for Enver Pasha.”

  Her eyes lost their focus a little now, drifted. But not from lying. “First impressions,” she said. “This one for him has to be distractingly good.”

  Arshak was beside me now. “Will you come with us?” he asked, as if I had a choice. But he was an actor.

  “If I say no?” I said.

  “Why would you?” he said. “You have come a very long way with us already.”

  I looked at Lucine.

  I had.

  But as far as I’d come, I didn’t yet instinctively trust her. And why would I trust her father? Or these three Armenian toughs? She could have made her own arrangement with the Pasha, letting passion overrule protocol.

  My only alternative was to walk away. Or if I couldn’t simply walk away, then shoot my way out. But to go on with them now seemed more or less what I’d signed up for when I said yes to the secret service of my country. This was a rough-riding charge up a hill.

  I looked at Arshak. “Let’s go,” I said.

  54

  The welterweight Armenian—he and the other had shaken my hand but no names were exchanged—led us farther up the hill, he and Arshak talking low and intensely up ahead. Soon the wooden warrens abruptly gave way to a several-acre market garden. We turned toward the center, moving through an orchard of apricots and peaches, and we came out of the trees in an open space with a central, span-roof greenhouse growing lemons and oranges. We circled the building and five horses awaited us, a boy tending them.

  Arshak nodded me to a brindle and I stroked his nose and puffed in his nostrils and whispered in his ear and he nodded and gave me the eye like we could be pals for a few hours. I went up on him and the other boys mounted, and as they did, the sack suit coat of the welterweight fell open and I could see a pistol in a shoulder holster. I suspected the light-heavy and Tigran were armed too. Maybe even Arshak, all this time.

  My little Mauser suddenly—reasonably—ceased being much of a comfort. If I needed it, I’d simply go down fighting. But I shrugged this off in my head. I’d made my decision some time ago.

  And we rode away on a back path out of the gardens and we were soon beyond Ortakiöi, beyond greater Istanbul, beyond Turkey for all you could tell from the rising country and the upspringing of forests of sessile oak and oriental birch and hornbeam and chestnut.

  This was a very good thing. I hadn’t realized how full my lungs and my head had gotten with the stink and yowl of Istanbul. Of cities in general. We climbed a trail until the air grew cool in spite of the high sun and then we were plateaued for a short time and then began to descend, picking up a quick-running stream.

  And we didn’t talk. We had a clear enough way for much of the time to keep up a nice hand gallop, and my brindle was a good boy, very responsive to the lightest press of a calf, a heel, a shift of my center of gravity.

  We rode till the stream gave way and the land grew flat again and we cut across an open stretch of meadow grass and onto dirt road. Arshak and the guy who was leading us were just ahead of me, and they exchanged a few words, the first words of this hour and a half we’d been riding.

  The road was canopied in oak for a quarter mile or so and we rounded a bend and the trees fell away and we entered a village. A gathering of small houses, some of stone, some of mud and wattle, though these were nicely whitewashed. Then a fieldstone threshing floor. And some more houses on both sides, all stone. And the striking thing was the silence. And the emptiness. My first thought: Everyone has run away.

  We were riding slowly now. The men around me turned to look from the waist, their shoulders swinging around; these guys had gone stiff, gone vaguely urgent, vaguely agitated. And there was something in the air. A battlefield smell when the ground was contested and lost and the action moved elsewhere and the dead had been dealt with but a faint afterstench remained.

  The silence in this village changed its pitch.

  I glanced at a passing house, and in the street before the door lay a single flower-brocade slipper. A fancy slipper, in a village like this, from some special time in a young woman’s life. A wedding perhaps. She’d once slipped her foot into this shoe to wed. My eyes followed it as I passed. I turned my head to look at it lying there, unretrieved, in a muddy rut on the village street.

  Something very bad had happened here.

  A hundred yards ahead was a small village square.

  Arshak raised his hand and we all stopped.

  No one spoke. We just sat. And even though not a head cocked, not a head inclined even slightly to the side, I could sense these men listening.

  The horses shook a little and nickered a little and also fell silent.

  The treetops hissed with the movement of air. Someone’s saddle creaked with the shift of a body. Nothing else in this moment. Or the next.

  And I was struck by this: there was no sound of birds. Not in this street or in the stand of trees around us or in the fields beyond. The birds had fled.

  Then a stronger leather sound: Arshak was turning in his saddle, throwing his leg over his horse to dismount. The others followed his lead. So did I.

  “Mr. Cobb,” Arshak said.

  The light heavyweight took my reins, holding his own in his other hand.

  I moved forward to Lucine’s father.

  “Will you walk with me?” he said.

  I nodded.

  We began to move toward the village square, a working square with a stone well in the center.

  Arshak said, “One of the intellectuals escaped the net on the night of April 24. A playwright, as a matter of fact. He came here. A village of two hundred of us, including his uncle and aunt. They hid him in a root cellar.”

  He said no more.

  We walked on. Straight for the well.

  And a new smell began to break over me like an invisible wave from a polluted sea, another smell l
ike a battlefield gone silent, a smell that came with a sharp, clinging burn in the nose. The smell of chlorinated lime.

  Two paces more to the waist-high circle of stones, prosceniumed by a simple wood bucket frame. Arshak put his hand on my arm to stop me.

  He looked at me.

  I said, “I’ve seen war.”

  “Perhaps you haven’t seen this,” he said.

  I made the smallest movement as if to begin to step forward and Arshak put his hand on my arm again.

  “I’ve never seen it,” he said, and his voice, his demeanor, which had been confident, purposeful since we’d left Ortakiöi, was suddenly something else.

  Of course. He’d been raging at the situation from London. He’d heard accounts. He was an exile. So far this was all just imagination to him.

  “You don’t have to,” I said.

  He did not answer.

  He took his hand from my arm.

  I found myself backstage, quick-changed into another character. I had two roles in this drama. Not a spy in this scene. I was a reporter. A war correspondent. I was in a country at war, and words for later were already forming in my head. About the ride up here. The silence. The shoe. I thought I was another kind of professional now. Objective. In control of myself.

  I thought wrong.

  The bodies down the hole were children. The lime had been slaked by the well water and by rain and I could see only the limbs of the few immediately below the child on top but there were more beneath. Many more. Of the one I saw whole, I could not say if it was a girl or a boy. The body was on its side and curled into itself as if waiting in the womb of a corpse. My gut said girl because a girl seemed more innocent to me, a girl seemed more vulnerable, a girl made me hear myself gasp as if from a great distance and made the welling in me—in my chest and in my throat and in my eyes—seem like another wave breaking, but now the polluted sea was within me.

  The lime had done its work. She had not bloated. She had not been devoured. She had not come apart. She had been sucked dry. She had begun to shrivel into a thing that you thought might last a thousand years and make a future man wonder what had happened here.

  But I knew what had happened.

  “Mother of God,” Arshak whispered beside me.

  I felt him draw away.

  The Turks had thrown these children in here one at a time. Extorting the whereabouts of a man who wrote plays. Perhaps it took only a few of these children. Perhaps the rest—perhaps this little girl on the top of the pile—were simply the victims of the murderous inertia humans are capable of.

  I stepped back. I turned away.

  Arshak had moved off a few steps.

  I could only take one.

  He and I were both breathing hard.

  The welterweight had come near, out of concern for us.

  Arshak waved him off.

  The man did not go past us to the well; he turned and moved away.

  Arshak said, “There are fifty thousand dead since February in the eastern provinces.”

  I believed what he said. And I took the news with horror. But with an intellectual horror. Fifty thousand was too many. That one little girl was real.

  Arshak said, “The Western world thrashes at a few hundred dead Belgians. And our legion of dead is hardly noted. There are more than a million of us in this country. It has begun now. By forced marches and by starvation and by outright mass killings they will try to wipe us all away. It has begun.”

  I had no words for him. But I moved up beside him.

  He said, very softly, “They have rehearsed for years. Six years ago in Adana there were thirty thousand murdered. The women raped and murdered. My wife was one of them. Lucine’s mother.”

  I felt I was looking down another well.

  “She shouldn’t have been there,” Arshak said. “I took them both away from this country after Sasun in 1904. But Leniya’s own mother was in Adana and was sick and she went to her.”

  His voice had grown husky. My mind kept wanting to move to Lucine, to fill in the answers to my remaining questions about her from all this. But Arshak was struggling. Before I could think what to say, he turned abruptly to me.

  He roughed up his voice, played his righteous anger as a way out of his pain: “The rest of the village is in a mass grave in the middle of their spring wheat.”

  I had my own roughing up to do. I was a reporter. It wouldn’t take long for me to confirm this story. “I should look,” I said.

  “All right.”

  They gave me a shovel, and none of these men could face this with me. I didn’t blame them. As I moved off, they were each of them, one at a time, approaching the well and standing before it and making the sign of the cross: three fingers of the right hand joined for the Trinity and brought to the forehead and then to three points on the chest, the bottom first and then the left side and then the right. And finally the hand opened to a palm, in memory of a wound, and was pressed into the heart.

  Amen.

  I walked fifty yards into the wheat, following the cart ruts and drag rows, the spoor of the Turks covering this whole thing up to keep the rumor out of Istanbul until they could get their bigger plans underway.

  I found the place. Fresh turned and refilled earth in a plot fifty feet square. I took only a few steps into it. I had little doubt now. And I felt uneasy standing upon the villagers. I felt uneasy disturbing them.

  But I dug. I dug and sweated and dug and it didn’t take many shovel strokes downward to open a seam into a miasma I knew quite well. I did not need eyes in this place to confirm the story.

  I quickly restored the earth. I stepped off the grave.

  And all around me was the growing wheat, the flag leaves unfurled, the wheat heads beginning to emerge.

  55

  Tigran had brought a bottle of raki in his saddle bag, figuring we’d need it. So before riding away from the village, we stood in a circle before our horses and passed the bottle, drinking it deep and slow, prolonging the burn.

  When the bottle was empty, Tigran returned it to his saddle bag, which deeply struck me as the right thing to do. He didn’t want to litter this place.

  And as we rose to our saddles and settled in, Arshak looked to me and said, “Will you help us do this thing, Christopher Cobb?”

  My answer to this had also been confirmed in the wheat field.

  “I will,” I said. “But we have to figure a way to get her out after the deed is done.”

  He stiffened and nodded and I knew he’d been wrestling with this himself.

  And as well intentioned as I was, it took until the sun was verging into late afternoon and we had crested the mountain north of Ortakiöi before I realized how stupid I’d been for these past few hours. How self-absorbed.

  I spurred my horse ahead and drew alongside Arshak.

  “We need to talk,” I said. “Not at a gallop.”

  He nodded and drew us all up.

  He said something to the others in Armenian, no doubt announcing a piss break. We all dismounted and the other three moved away separately.

  “Look,” I said to Arshak. “I think I’ve been an idiot. On the ship from Constanţa, did you meet a trim man, maybe forty or a little older, with muttonchop whiskers?”

  His face instantly pinched tight in concern. “I did. What is it?”

  “I saw a man like that when I got into the taxi with you at the quay. I think he was following me.”

  “Why?”

  “What did he say to you?”

  Arshak shook his head, like it was nothing, it was trivial. “Just small talk.”

  “What kind of small talk?”

  “Why was he following you?” Arshak said.

  I wanted his account first. But I said, “It’s possible he
’s working for the Germans.”

  “We spoke English. He sounded like an American.”

  “Brauer sounded like an American,” I said.

  “Why was he following you?”

  “To kill me. If it’s who I think it is. Lucine probably didn’t get around to telling you I’d done likewise to a German agent in a doorway in London.”

  “If she did, I might actually be liking you by now,” Arshak said.

  “Look,” I said. “This could involve Lucine. Tell me what he said.”

  “Small talk.”

  “What about? Where you were from?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you said?”

  “London. He was from Philadelphia.”

  “Did he notice your accent?”

  “Yes. Greek, I told him. I’m not stupid.”

  “Was he looking at you closely when he talked?”

  “Yes.”

  “Brauer was also at the Block and Tackle when you met Lucine.”

  Arshak stiffened. No more trying to slough this off.

  “He stayed outside,” I said. “But he saw you leave. He had a good look at you. He knew you were doing something on the sly with Selene Bourgani. You went to a room around the corner.”

  “It’s a safe place for us. It’s clean.”

  “How long were you there?”

  “I left by dawn.”

  “Long enough for them to put somebody outside to follow you.”

  Arshak looked away, his mouth pinched in a thin line. I’d felt like that a few minutes ago. Then he looked back to me. “Did he see us in the taxi?”

  “He saw something,” I said. “I’m not sure how much.”

  Arshak thought hard about this a moment.

  “You’re a theater man,” I said. “Did you believe the muttonchops?”

  This took him off guard. Arshak tried to figure this question out.

  “The man’s muttonchops,” I said.

  “I didn’t look at them closely. Maybe not, now that you mention it.”

  “We need to ride,” I said. “If he puts you and me together, even if he believed Lucine’s disguise—and he’d be the one to see through it—she’s still linked back to me through you.”