The Star of Istanbul

by Robert Olen Butler

  In the meantime we were driving north, accelerating again, and one of these two was still armed.

  “Not too fast,” I told Ströder.

  And he repeated the order to the driver.

  We stopped accelerating.

  Ahead, just out of the range of our headlights, was the dim form of the automobile that had passed us at the villa.

  We caravanned, the two of us, for maybe half a mile, and then the car ahead dropped back a little and came into the clarity of our lights.

  I looked at it for the first time with my full attention.

  It was a Unic taxi.

  The Armenian model.

  Arshak had hung around after he dropped me off and he’d followed us.

  He was beginning to slow.

  We slowed.

  Arshak slowed even more, dropping back right in front of us.

  The German driver honked his horn. He craned his neck to the left to see if the oncoming lane was clear for us to pass.

  I nudged Ströder’s head. “Let’s stay behind this guy.”

  Ströder’s face was in shadow so I didn’t see him cut his eyes to me, but I felt the faintest push against the Mauser’s barrel as he had the reflex to turn his head to look in my direction. He’d been making his own plans about how to handle this. All that just got overturned. He hadn’t figured on an accomplice.

  “Stay behind that vehicle,” Ströder said loud and firm.

  We were in a stretch of road either without a villa or in the owned and managed adjoining grounds of two villas. Arshak was going slower and slower.

  We were going slower and slower.

  Arshak was probably beginning to figure I’d gained some sort of control in the Mercedes.

  The driver turned his head now, abruptly, as if to question these odd orders.

  He had only a fragment of a moment to start to put things together before the muzzle of the Luger was pointed at the right eye of his half-turned face.

  “Pull over,” I said, straight to the driver.

  “Sit very still, Colonel,” I said, pushing lightly at Ströder’s head. “Hair trigger.” But I kept watching the driver, whose face was swinging away from me, going back to the road.

  “Driver,” I said sharply. “Both hands visible on the wheel.”

  Both the man’s hands appeared at the top of the steering wheel.

  He pulled to the side of the road.

  The Unic rolled only a little farther and also pulled off.

  I said to both my Germans, “It is very convenient to shoot both of you in the head now. So you need to sit very still. I will kill you at the smallest movement.”

  They complied.

  “Cut off your engine,” I said, and the driver moved the throttle lever on the steering wheel and the engine sputtered and went silent.

  “Leave your lights on,” I said.

  He did.

  And we waited, the three of us, with me sitting as still as these two, as if the pistols were pointed at me.

  I figured Arshak was waiting for some sign from the car. But I couldn’t step out or these two would do something stupid, especially the driver.

  I could have asked for his weapon. But I had control of his empty hands. I didn’t want to invite him to put a pistol in one of them, especially in this dim light and out of my sight.

  So we waited some more. It felt like a long time, though it couldn’t have been. But I knew the longer it went on, the more likely it was that one of these guys would try something stupid.

  Finally the driver’s door of the Unic opened. It stayed open for a moment and then Arshak appeared and drew back at once.

  I was a lot braver when I was acting from my gut and quickly. This sitting was starting to get me steamed at Arshak. But he was only an actor, after all. He was used to being brave on a stage with fake whiskers. It was tougher to play the role you needed to play in the real dark by a real road along the goddamn Bosporus. So I wasn’t upset. I was simply firm in thinking to this Armenian ham: Jump out of your trench and charge.

  And he did.

  He suddenly burst from the Unic with his pistol drawn and he hustled into our headlights and up to the driver’s window.

  “We’re all taking it easy here,” I said to him, having to will myself back to English. This whole incident was strictly German in my mind.

  He looked in.

  “Point your pistol at the driver and watch his hands,” I said. “He’s still armed.”

  And Arshak popped the muzzle of a Colt 1889 onto the driver’s left temple hard enough that the guy’s head jerked and his hands flew up.

  “Hands!” I shouted.

  They flew back down to the wheel.

  I felt Ströder stir.

  I kept my Luger pointed at the driver but twisted my torso and face to the colonel, tracking the little flinch of his head with the muzzle of the Mauser. Keeping him zeroed.

  These kinds of things—small reflex twitches—could too easily escalate, take on a life of their own, get out of control.

  “Settle down,” I said to the colonel, flipping back to German. And then to Arshak in English, “Keep the driver covered.”

  “Got it,” he said.

  I opened my back door.

  I swung the Luger to the left and aimed it at Ströder’s chest. I eased the Mauser off his head.

  “Careful now,” I said to him. “Let me see your hands.”

  He held them up, framing his face.

  “If one drops, you die,” I said and I backed out onto the running board. “Follow me.”

  He did.

  I put Ströder with his hands on the hood of the car, near the front passenger-side door, his legs stretched far out behind him and spread wide, leaving him on the verge of falling down. Then I opened that front door, and while Arshak kept his Colt on the driver’s head from the other side, I reached in and relieved the man of his Luger.

  Now we had two German soldiers—allies of the Turks and abettors of the massacre of the Armenians—pressed side by side against the hood of the car, the headlights starting to dim as they drew down the battery, Lucine sitting a mile up the road in mortal danger and me convinced that our only chance to get her out alive was to slip in silently, which meant going back to the Pera Palace before making a move. And time was ticking by.

  My Mauser was tucked away again in its holster but my Luger was raised and pointing at the back of Ströder’s head. I looked at Arshak and he was looking at me. His own new Luger was pointed at the back of the driver’s head.

  Here we were, Arshak and I: two men; two Lugers; two enemies who would do anything they could to reverse this situation; the opportunity of vengeance by proxy for the death of the innocents in the well; the shortness of time and the urgency of our mission; the sloppiness of any alternate plan. And a tidy, obvious solution before us. My trigger finger was prickling to do this.

  But Arshak and I continued to look at each other.

  “It’s what they would do to us,” he said.

  “Exactly,” I said.

  A few accelerating pulse beats of silence later, I understood how I felt about that. I said, “You figure you’ve got tow-ropes in the back of that taxi?”

  “Unics do get stuck,” he said.

  And it was decided.

  58

  Funny how this kind of thing sometimes works. We didn’t kill our captive Huns, and as a direct result—while Arshak was off getting the ropes and I stared at the field-gray colonel blending into the ­shadows—my plan refined itself. I had Ströder remove his uniform, and after Arshak—who had learned some things in his working time at the London Docks—did some fancy knots on our two boys, I turned myself into a German army colonel.

  The uniform
fit pretty well. The hat was a bit small, but it squeezed on okay. The Luger in its holster and a magazine pouch were strapped to my waist. And just as the Mercedes headlights died, I carefully stripped off the gauze bandage from my left cheek.

  “You’re pretty frightening in that costume,” Arshak said as I approached him.

  I turned my face so he could see the scar in the starlight.

  “Mother of God,” he said. “Is that makeup?”

  “No.”

  “Where’d you get it?”

  “Long story,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  “The battery went dead.”

  “We’ll catch a taxi,” I said.

  And I quickly explained where we had to go, what we had to do. To his credit, the ham took direction pretty well and we were off in the Unic.

  We parked around the corner from the hotel, beside the iron fence along the public gardens. Arshak and I gave a wordless nod to each other and I got out and walked back down the street and approached the hotel. I ran an iron rod up my back and played my role, returning the salute of a major emerging from the front hotel doors, and I passed into the lobby and kept my eyes forward, looking at no one, walking briskly.

  I approached the elevator, which had just arrived at the ground floor. The wooden and glass doors of the car opened and a man in a suit took the couple of steps to the outer cast-iron gate and pushed it open. I drew near.

  It was the colonel from down the hall, the guy in uniform and Pickelhaube that Lucine and I followed into the hotel upon our arrival.

  He took another step and still I wasn’t registering on him and now we were about to pass and he focused on my face and then on my epaulet pips and then on my scar and then on my face—all in very rapid succession. And he stopped. The officers I’d encountered so far were of lesser rank. This guy was my equal and it was his business to know other full colonels in town. Maybe he thought he knew them all.

  I brazened on by him with a little nod—he was in mufti, after all, and if he didn’t know me, I didn’t know him. I took another step beyond him and was about to pass through the art nouveau proscenium that led to the elevator carriage.

  And the colonel said, “Colonel?”

  I stopped and I turned and I said to the colonel, “Colonel.”

  I figured he had a strong hunch I wasn’t a colonel.

  I could see in his eyes that indeed he did think he knew all the colonels.

  Maybe he was even in the process of placing my face as the man who’d followed him into the hotel thirty-six hours ago. He’d seemed to look past or through me in my couple of encounters with him, but he might simply have been cagily observant.

  I kept my eyes on him but turned my face slightly to the right, thoughtfully, as if I were trying to figure out where I knew him from. In the process, I reminded him of the Schmiss he’d noticed a few moments ago.

  This drew him away from the broader face recognition he’d been attempting. It was a big thing to a man like him, this university fencing scar. It was a nobleman’s badge of courage.

  His eyes were still on it.

  He had no such scar.

  I smiled and chuckled patronizingly. “Heidelberg,” I said.

  He clicked his heels.

  After all, even if he recognized me, what had he seen me do yesterday? I’d simply checked into the hotel dressed as he was now. And with a beautiful woman.

  “I am sorry to be out of uniform,” he said. “They’ve asked us to look like civilians when we are off duty. I am Colonel Conrad Lüdike.”

  I clicked my heels and flipped him a courtesy salute. He was flattered, giving an ardently crisp salute in return.

  Then we shook hands with Germanic fervor.

  “You are new to Constantinople,” he said.

  “I am. Let’s soon have a drink together, Colonel,” I said. “And we can speak of it.”

  “Yes,” he said. “By all means.”

  And he continued the handshake.

  “And now if you’ll excuse me,” I said, gently extracting my hand.

  “Of course,” he said, bowing at the waist.

  “Perhaps tomorrow,” I said.

  “Of course.”

  And I turned my back on him and stepped through the iron door and across the carpet and into the elevator carriage, and I stopped in the center of the floor.

  I turned.

  Colonel Lüdike was already passing into the Kubbeli salon, and I let out a breath I hadn’t even realized I’d been holding. “Der fünfte Fußboden,” I said to the operator.

  And I was on the fifth floor.

  I walked briskly, stifling the urge to run.

  I passed Lucine’s room.

  I arrived at my door. I went in.

  I would not be back, I realized. I’d be either dead or on the USS Scorpion before this night was through.

  Too bad. I’d lose my third Corona Portable Number 3 in barely more than year.

  I pulled my valise out of the wardrobe and set it on the bed.

  I extracted the false bottom.

  I pulled out the sawed-off and reshaped Winchester. I screwed the silencer into the muzzle. I laid the weapon on the bed and I put all the .22 Long heavies from the box into the two lower side pockets of my tunic.

  I removed the remaining documents and stuffed them into the inner tunic pockets. No tracks left behind.

  All that remained at the bottom of the valise were a few sets of whiskers and a bottle of spirit gum.

  The German officer persona would help me in making progress through the villa. But it was possible Der Wolf was waiting with Enver Pasha. I figured I might find myself, in my improvisation, needing a little delay time before I was recognized. He’d seen my face. The revealed scar was not enough.

  I removed a Kaiser Wilhelm uptwitched mustache—a good one, densely tied onto sheer lace in two parts—and the screw-stoppered bottle of spirit gum, and I stepped into the bathroom.

  I turned the electrical switch and stood before the mirror.

  I took one bracing glance into my own eyes, shaded beneath the brim of the peaked cap. I removed the cap and laid it aside. I gave myself one last look. My eyes again. And then the scar: that too was mine. It was me. Let anyone else interpret it as they would. I’d earned it.

  I got to work. I brushed on spirit gum and applied the two parts of the mustache, leaving the central hollow of the lip appropriately naked. Done. I dropped the bottle into the basin.

  I pressed my officer’s cap onto my head.

  I strode to the bed. I picked up my Winchester 1902, which had been mutilated and hushed into a deadly frame of mind. A one-handed weapon, all right, but not a small thing. I had to pass across the salon and lobby of this hotel.

  I still had the leather portfolio Metcalf had given me in London. I retrieved it from the Gladstone in the wardrobe, and I stuck the Winchester inside, on the diagonal. I put the portfolio under my arm and went out of the room and down the staircase—hotfooting the steps—and through the salon, reining myself in now, making myself slow down. I should not draw attention, though the brain in my head and the heart in my chest were pounding at me to rush, to run, but I walked, briskly purposeful but controlled, across the lobby and out the door and to the left and to the corner and to the right and across the street and I was walking faster now and the Unic was ahead and I wrenched the passenger door open and slid in next to Arshak.

  He reared back at my mustache. “Mother of God,” he said.

  “She’s far away tonight,” I said.

  And we drove off.

  59

  We made the best time we could down the Grand Rue, quiet for now, Arshak concentrating on rushing without killing the oblivious pedestrians, me catching my breath.

  The streets lo
osened up after Taksim.

  And Arshak said, “So what’s the plan?”

  I said, “I only caught a glimpse of the place. Two guards at the front entrance. I don’t know what’s inside. But whatever it is, I need to get as far as I can without letting anyone know I’m coming. As soon as the audible shooting starts, Lucine’s in immediate danger.”

  “As opposed to inaudible shooting?”

  “Exactly. I’ve got a silencer.”

  I pulled out the Winchester now and dropped the portfolio beneath my feet.

  Arshak whistled between his teeth.

  “The problem,” I said, “is that it’s a single-shot.”

  “I want to go in with you,” he said.

  “The uniform is the best trick we have to make this silent. You’re a walking red flag.”

  “What can I do?”

  “Stay at the front gate after I get in. Take care of anyone arriving from outside. And when you hear a shot, come find me.”

  “All right.”

  “Not till then,” I said.

  “I understand,” Arshak said. “Lucine first.”

  “Yes.”

  “If Lucine can’t do what she came to do . . .” Arshak said, breaking off briefly. “I hope you won’t let my daughter die in vain.”

  I knew what he meant. He wanted me to kill Enver Pasha.

  “I intend to save her,” I said. Indeed, that was the only intention I had at the moment. Whatever else might happen remained to be seen.

  He did not reply. I wondered if he’d heard my own reply as a simple no. Wondered too, if it came to be a mutually exclusive proposition, whether he would prefer to lose his daughter if it meant killing Enver Pasha.

  But that was all we said as we ran through Ortakiöi—I was getting to know this route quite well—and we headed up the shore.