The Star of Istanbul

by Robert Olen Butler

  This was Edward Cable.

  He resumed the Midwest accent, which was, perhaps, his own. “I’d dramatically strip off my mustache for you now, Mr. Cobb, as if we were in one of Miss Bourgani’s movies. But I’m afraid I’d abrade myself. I’ll take it off properly when you’re dead. Besides, I’d look a fright with my white upper lip in the midst of all this Turkish-tainted skin.”

  I stripped off mine.

  It did hurt but I felt I had to make the point.

  Given the fastidious lift of his right brow, the point seemed lost on him.

  He was a different breed of cat.

  “I’d hoped we might talk,” he said.

  “Is that why you’re in costume?”

  “I thought it would be interesting to hear your approach to the Pasha. I’m quite intrigued at America’s involvement in all this.”

  “I think you mostly like dressing up.”

  Cable—if indeed that was his name—unfurled a smile that was part irony, part taffeta. “What else do we really have in this world but the small pleasures of a chosen and portrayed self?” he said. “The current of history runs far too deep. You and your Armenian friends and even the Enver Pasha. And yes, even I, as an individual. We are all ultimately helpless. We’re all being borne along on the surface of things, moving our arms and our legs, giving the appearance of volition, but our course is set. Miss Bourgani will not stop the slaughter of her people. You will not preserve your country from this war. The Ottoman Empire will soon dissolve.”

  He paused. He seemed to have finished his point.

  “And the German Empire?” I said.

  “Ah,” he said. “That is the deep-running current.”

  He was right, of course, about the flexor muscles. Still, I was tempted.

  I think he saw it in my eyes.

  He smiled again. No taffeta.

  “I’m a good judge of people,” he said, and he had resumed speaking German. “You’re not a man who would sacrifice your own life simply to take mine.”

  “But as you pointed out,” I said, shifting to German with him. “We neither of us count for that much.”

  “Except to ourselves,” he said. “Don’t mistake me. I admire you for that. And I will freely admit that I share the same attitude. But you understand why I can be so frank with you.”

  “Because you expect to win this standoff,” I said.

  We each glanced at the unwavering Luger muzzle of the other.

  “Of course,” he said.

  “I have to ask,” I said. “Have you been drawing this out in the expectation that one of your downstairs boys will appear behind me?”

  “The thought had crossed my mind,” he said.

  “Given the silence of my arrival.”

  “I suppose there are alternate explanations for that.”

  “There’s one,” I said. “They’re all dead.”

  He took this in without showing anything on his face.

  “Well then,” he said, “it’s time to change the balance of power.”

  And in a voice pitched to the back row of the upper balcony, he called out, “Captain, if you please.”

  There was movement off to my left but nearer to Cable. A door was opening in the side wall.

  I glanced.

  Lucine emerged first, though a feldgrau arm was angled over her chest from left clavicle to right hip and she was dressed in a white nainsook chemise; attached to the uniformed arm was a bareheaded Kapitän with golden hair, and in his right hand he was holding the third Luger in the room, muzzled up against the same soft spot on Lucine that I’d threatened on Ströder, between the temple and the ear.

  These two sidled into the room and ended up—with Cable saying “That’s good”—freestanding an arm’s length from the edge of the desk. I could keep both my Luger and one eye focused on Cable—he knew I would not relinquish that relationship—but I could also clearly see Lucine’s peril.

  The Hun with the gun to her head was showing only his right shoulder and arm, his right side, his right leg; the corresponding left side of him was pressed against her from behind, his arm across her breasts.

  She seemed impossibly small and impossibly fragile in every way but her eyes. Her vast eyes were burning hotly at me and, indeed, if it weren’t for a German officer, a German spy, and two extra Lugers, I could have fancied from this look that she’d just stepped into the room to have rough sex with me.

  “Selene,” I said. “Have they hurt you?”

  She said, “Besides throwing a coat around me and making me leave the hotel in my least interesting chemise, no.”

  “You might imagine from that,” Cable said, “what a fruitlessly amusing time we’ve had in our conversations so far, Miss Bourgani and I. That will change quite dramatically now.”

  I said to her, “Do you know who this man is?”

  “Not who I expected,” she said.

  “He’s the man Brauer was with on the Lusitania,” I said, glancing at her.

  I saw her eyes cut sharply toward him.

  But Cable wasn’t taking his eyes off me.

  I said, “One wouldn’t expect the fussy little bookseller from Boston to be capable of saving himself from a sinking ship.”

  “Who knows?” Cable said. “He could have had a boyhood near a lake.”

  “But a wolf, on the other hand,” I said.

  Cable narrowed his gaze at this.

  And I said in German, “The wolf is a good swimmer, I think.”

  He smiled at my knowing about Der Wolf.

  He answered in German: “The wolf is quite a powerful swimmer, with strong, tight-muscled legs.”

  This he said with a complex little smirk. At his forcing an image of his body upon me, no doubt.

  I have at times a freely associating mind, particularly when I am thrashing inside for a course of action.

  And so I was led to a thought about what to do.

  Even as Cable said, once again in English, “I’m getting tired of all this. The simplest thing would have been for me to shoot you dead as soon as you appeared in the doorway. But regrettably your own costume caused me too many moments of doubt. The dueling scar was a nice touch. Very realistic.”

  “This still feels like a standoff,” I said.

  “I think there was something very personal between you and Selene Bourgani,” Cable said.

  And I wondered: Did he know Brauer was dead? He might suspect it. But he could not know for sure. And he certainly didn’t know how.

  The thought I had was still working its way along, but it would help if I could get Cable to split his attention.

  I moved my gaze to Lucine and she was instantly focused on me and then I quickly cut my eyes to Cable and back to her before returning slowly and fully to him.

  “If she dies, so do you,” I said.

  “Then by reflex it would be all three of us,” he said in English. “What an idiotic waste that would be. I am an admirer of the captain here, but what a shame if he were the only one of us left standing.”

  “I bet you’re an admirer of the captain,” Lucine said.

  Cable ignored her. “I don’t particularly care one way or the other about her. If you put your pistol down, I can arrange for her to walk away before you and I have a detailed chat. From which there would even be a possible safe exit for you as well.”

  Did he think I’d believe that?

  “Selene,” I said. “Our Mr. Cable may suspect something unpleasant has happened to Walter, but he can’t know for sure.”

  “Oh, he asked,” Lucine said. “I wouldn’t give him the time of day.”

  Cable was staying calm. The gun was steady. His face was placid. But I could see his chest rise and hold and fall. He was trying to c
ontrol his breathing.

  “He’s dead and decomposing in the North Sea,” Lucine said.

  He flinched ever so slightly at this.

  She knew what I needed. If Cable really thought I would do anything to keep a bullet out of Lucine’s brain—and he was right—he felt safe from me as long as the Kapitän had a gun to her head.

  “And you disgusting bastard, Cobb,” Lucine hissed. “What you let Brauer do to you to try to save his life.”

  Cable was breathing faster. His chest was moving; he was trying not to let it move his shoulders, move his hand. “Now that is certainly a lie,” he said.

  Selene said, “This is no lie. I shot him. It was me. With a pistol from my purse. I shot him in the heart.”

  Cable believed this. His eyes narrowed ever so slightly. He was thinking about this present balance of power. And I was talking to him in my head: Go ahead, Eddie. If I shoot you, your Hun shoots my woman. So you can look at her. Just start to turn that pistol. I won’t shoot you first because that would kill her too. Just start.

  My growing thought was as firmly rooted in the nature of our bodies as Cable’s flexor observations: in the presence of great and sudden lower body pain, a man’s dominant hand will automatically move in that direction.

  And Cable’s Luger started to turn—with the deliberateness of restrained fury—toward Lucine.

  So I whipped my Luger downward and to the left, my eye fixing instantly on the target, my hand following my eye in thoughtlessly muscled ease, and I squeezed. And that target was the Kapitän’s exposed right knee. And the knee exploded with his shriek and his pistol hand was dropping and Lucine was slipping to her left and from beneath his loosened grasp and I was lifting my pistol, pulling it back toward Cable even as I urged my body to the right even as I leaned away at the hip and at the chest and as my right foot started to slide and my eyes swung toward this pistol that was recently pointing in my direction, the Luger in Cable’s hand was in profile now rushing away from me like a bird breaking cover—he was smart, fast smart, he knew if he shot her I’d have him and he knew I was already coming back to him even as he was in those split seconds of figuring out what just happened and I’d have him anyway so he was getting the hell out—and I was coming around and he was already starting to duck and twist away to the side and I thought now of the Kapitän and how he might struggle through the pain for a shot and I wasn’t ready but I squeezed a round at Cable and the veranda window to the left shattered outward and Cable was ducking low and lunging for the doors and I stopped my slide.

  And Lucine cried, “Kit!” and I was swinging back left and the Kapitän was fighting his pain with rage even as he buckled downward on his shattered leg and he was pulling his pistol around toward me and I squeezed a round that went elsewhere beyond him and I was propelling right again and the Kapitän shot and I felt the whisk of his bullet past my left arm, glad that the pain had fogged his eyes and stiffened his shooting hand and he was falling fast now as the leg crumpled, and I stopped my slide and braced into the floor and I shot him in the right shoulder and then in the left chest and he spun away and backward.

  And I was circling the desk and then easing out of the open doors, my pistol in both hands before me, expecting Cable to be waiting to try to gun me down as I came out. But he wasn’t there and I figured he was permanently forgoing the gunfight. He was a pro. He was not a man who would seriously risk his own life simply to try to take mine, at least not with that sudden shift in the balance of power.

  He would be content to track me later. So I needed to deal with this now.

  I was falling behind and I dashed along the veranda and down the steps to the loggia below and he was nowhere before me in the arcade, but the light from the villa was spilling into the yard and I heard a distant panting thump going outward and I looked into the grounds at the back of the house and I saw him vanishing into the dark.

  And I ran. Ran hard. Onto concrete and around a fountain and along the turf and into the same shadow where Cable had disappeared, my eyes adjusting to the night. The stars were very bright. I went down the back stairs of the terrace and onto a slope that fell toward the Bosporus, and maybe seventy-five yards away was a boat dock lit by a single electric lamp on a high post, and there was Cable jumping into a twenty-foot two-seat runabout.

  I scrambled downward as fast as I could without pitching forward but the runabout’s engine was beginning to spark into life and it was revving now and then fading and revving again and I stopped and I sat down on the slope at once and planted my elbows on my thighs and I held the Luger up before me in both hands and this was about a hundred-foot shot and he was lit just enough by stars and electric spill for me to see him as a dark shape and he was hunched forward working at the throttle and spark but he wasn’t sitting down yet—he still had to cast off—and I sighted between him and the bollard on the dock and I waited, and he rose, crouching a little, but I had enough of his torso as he moved. I had him now, and I squeezed and the pistol barked and he rose up and backed away, toward the portside, and I shifted and sighted and squeezed again and his dark shape veered farther to port and over the gunwale and was gone.

  The boat sat there, its engine idling, and I rose and I walked down the slope and along the dock, and the runabout’s engine muttered and muttered and I arrived. And the boat was empty. I stepped in and switched the engine off, and it sputtered and fell silent.

  The boat rocked a little.

  The night was quiet.

  The Bosporus was running past, and Edward Cable was gone. Dead. Carried away by the deep current of history that was bearing us all.

  60

  I walked back along the dock with the Luger still in my hand, feeling comfortable with it there, and a figure was running down the slope toward me. But before my shooting hand could rise, I heard Arshak’s voice. “Cobb. Are you all right?”

  I walked more briskly now. We’d made quite a lot of noise in the last few minutes.

  Arshak and I met beneath the electric light at the front end of the dock.

  “For the moment,” I said to him. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Arshak nodded and we jogged up the slope and across the courtyard and into the loggia.

  Lucine was waiting just inside the doors of the grand hall. She was wearing a long, black velvet cape, which she held tightly closed over her chemise.

  I stopped before her and we touched for a moment but only with our eyes, and then the three of us hustled across the floor and around the dead guard and out into the front courtyard and things were quiet still. Ahead the two entrance guards were gone, and then I saw them inside the wall, where Arshak had dragged them out of sight.

  We paused at the front gate and looked. Things were quiet and we beat it back north to the Unic.

  Here we paused a moment, huddled together on the off-road side of the taxi.

  I said, “We are all three of us marked now to be hunted down. By the Germans and Turks both. But I’ve got a way out for us. There’s a launch from my embassy waiting to take us to an American ship. We can leave Istanbul. We have to leave Istanbul. Without delay.”

  Arshak and Lucine looked at each other briefly. Arshak nodded a single, slow nod to her.

  And Lucine took my hand.

  I said to Arshak, “The foot of the street at the west end of the dry docks. Near where you picked me up yesterday.”

  He stepped away.

  Lucine tugged on my hand and led me into the tonneau.

  The Unic engine—familiar now, and comforting at last—muttered into life and we turned back toward the city and headed off.

  Lucine held tightly to my hand.

  We said nothing for a long while. My body was letting go from the clench and rush and thrash of the past hour. And I figured Lucine and I would have time for talk and time for our own rush and thrash when we
were together upon the sea once again. I figured I would have a chance to speak her real name out loud.

  After a while she leaned into me. And she said, “Thank you.”

  Only now did it strike me how little we’d actually said to each other through all this.

  I figured how it maybe was a sign that a man and a woman were actually becoming something together when you could be comfortable in long silences.

  So I said “You’re welcome.” and she kept her head on my shoulder and we fell silent again. As silent as her motion pictures. One of her good ones. No title cards necessary.

  And then we were parked at the foot of Tophane Iskelesi Caddesi.

  Lucine and I let go of our hands and we got out of the Unic into the moist dark and a muezzin’s voice began its call to prayer somewhere to the north of us and we started down the cobbled quay toward the water and another cry began to the south. These songs came from the strongest voices of the most intensely faithful, but they were still very distant. They were small cries against a very large darkness. And the stars that were lighting our path away from this city, this country, were barely enough for us to see.

  But soon I could make out the launch moored at the quay and a figure was coming out of the dark. And another behind it. Lucine and Arshak and I stopped.

  A bright light bloomed in the middle of the nearest figure. A flashlight, which flared blindingly into my face and then scanned down my chest.

  I was a German officer.

  “Steve,” the voice of the near figure said.

  The rear shadow came forward, rattling a rifle.

  “Ralph sent me,” I said.

  “Hold on,” the first voice said to Steve. And then to me: “You are?”

  “Christopher Cobb,” I said. “I needed the disguise.”

  The man with the flashlight drew near, shining it now on Arshak and on Lucine.

  “I told Hansen there might be one or two others who had to go with me.”

  “Just follow my light,” the man said and the beam fell to the cobbles and he began to move away.

  I turned to Lucine. Arshak had backed off a couple of paces.