The Star of Istanbul

10

So I left Edward Cable with his whiskey and smokes and broken heart, and I sat at the desk in my stateroom with my penknife and a Blaisdell No. 624 self-sharpening pencil and the seemingly blank page from Brauer’s notebook. The Blaisdell was a clever thing invented in the last century for big-volume pencil-using offices — beloved by the copydesk at the Post-Express—but also, as it happened, perfect for my present task. Its soft, black, graphite lead was wrapped not in cedar but in a narrow, tight band of paper, the new segment of lead being freshly exposed by nicking the next in a long row of indents arranged up the barrel and then unwrapping the paper. This I did several times; in between, I scraped the accessible lead into an ashtray, finely grinding it into a soft, black, graphite powder, with no wood scraps to interfere.

Then I laid out the notebook page and began a process of dipping my fingertip into the black powder and lightly rubbing it all across the surface of the page. The graphite turned the page dark wherever I touched, but the indentations made by Brauer recording the decoded words on the previous page gradually emerged, not fully absorbing my superficial dusting and coming out lighter by comparison.

I did not let myself read the note piecemeal. I concentrated on a uniformity of stroke and the lightest of touches so as not to darken the shallow impressions of his writing. Then I was done. And on the notebook page was this telegram from Brauer’s German bosses, decoded from Nuttall: Deliver to 53 Saint Martin Lane Monday night at 8.

Maybe it wasn’t a person on the Lusitania that was of interest to Brauer. Maybe it was a thing. A thing too big to carry with him in his baggage — a thing to deliver — and his traveling first class ensured its being handled more carefully.

I pushed back from the desk and I felt I’d probably done as much as I could do for Trask and for country on this voyage. Brauer seemed to be lying low, even divesting himself now of his forbidden bookman. And the more I let it sit in me, the more I figured I was right, that his mission on the ship was to accompany something, which he would deliver to St. Martin’s Lane in London, and which presently was stashed in the cargo hold.

I needed some air.

I was still wearing my evening clothes, though I’d stripped off the tie. The North Atlantic night at twenty knots could be pretty chilly, but I could use some bucking up so I simply rose and stepped out of the room. I turned the corridor that passed Selene’s suite on the way to the door onto the promenade.

I had no intention of knocking. Her attitude seemed clear.

But I stopped in front of her door.

I hesitated.

I stepped back and looked closely at the tiny gap at the bottom of the door. A light shown there.

I stepped forward again and I knocked. I immediately leaned near to listen. There was a rustling inside, quite close. She was in her parlor, not her bedroom.

The night was waning, however. I didn’t bring my watch, but it was well past ten. I used this to justify saying, “Selene?”

Instantly the handle clicked and the door was opening. But it went only far enough to let her face appear, and one shoulder. A few moments later I would struggle to remember what was covering that shoulder, but for the moment I was focused ardently on her dark-of-the-night eyes, trying to read them in conjunction with the tone of her voice as she said, “Mr. Cobb.”

On the surface, this was pretty damn formal for a woman who was stashed in my arms not even twenty-four hours earlier. But the eyes were soft, almost supplicant, almost as supplicant as they were when she and I had begun last night, made more so, oddly enough, by the faux-brittle ironic upturn of her “Cobb.”

I was prepared for the door to open fully now, without my even having to utter a word.

But it didn’t.

“Miss Bourgani,” I finally said, though it sounded flat, a tone prompted by the door remaining mostly closed.

“It’s late,” she said.

“Forgive me,” I said.

“I’ve not been well,” she said.

“My fear of that was why I knocked,” I said, a statement that may actually have been as much as thirty-two percent true.

“I probably won’t emerge till Queenstown,” she said.

“I won’t trouble you again,” I said, thinking what I found myself not infrequently thinking: I do not understand women even a little bit.

“Good night,” she said.

“Good night,” I said.

Those eyes that twice I’d personally seen fill with tears seemed as if they might yet again. But the door moved and clicked shut before I could be sure.

I should have simply walked away. I’d already reconciled myself to having simply played a one-nighter in a provincial theater with a big guest star. But I didn’t walk. I leaned. Toward her door. I had the impulse to listen to her weep.

But there was no weeping from her cabin. Instead, I heard a sharp, low utterance by a man’s voice. And she responded in kind. None of the words were clear. But the situation seemed very clear.

I backed away. This suddenly felt terribly familiar. Boyhood familiar. A memory hooked into the same part of my brain as catching frogs and skipping stones and playing mumblety-peg in an empty lot and hitting a rubber ball with a broomstick handle while pretending to be Big Ed Delahanty; or more like falling and flaying both my knees while rounding third base at a manhole cover or spearing the side of my foot with my pocket knife playing Flinch or instantly, drastically regretting throwing a caught frog into a bonfire; or like all of that mixed together, good and bad: me placed outside a closed door in the hallway of some actor’s boardinghouse or cheap hotel with my mother letting herself be a woman in a woman’s body with a woman’s needs but with me being a boy who basically knew what was going on but didn’t know nearly as much about it as he wanted and who wanted to expunge from his mind the thought of her doing something like this with a man but who also, deeper in that mind, wanted in some classic way to be the one in her arms. My standing there in a first-class corridor outside Selene’s door was drastically different, of course, but similar in just enough ways that I wanted to wipe my hands hard on something and maybe spit, and I turned and strode down the corridor, wondering who the hell this might be inside there with the woman who I myself jazzed just last night. Some dude. Some leading man type. The next actor for her to hold in the next filmed episode of Selene Bourgani’s life.

I stepped out onto the promenade.

And I looked to my right. Her two windows. The parlor lit. The bedroom dark.

I had to know one thing. But at least I was above spying in her window.

So I stepped back into the corridor. I turned right — away from her — and moved along the few short steps to the doorway that led into the writing room and library. I stopped. I turned and faced down the corridor toward Selene’s suite. I was maybe twenty yards from her door.

I waited. For a few moments I tried to remember what she was wearing, from the little of her shoulder I’d seen. I’d been so instantly and totally riveted by her eyes — I wished I’d looked more carefully into her eyes when we’d been together — that I couldn’t even say for sure whether her shoulder was covered in crimson silk. It might have been. I’d never expected a man to be with her, so I just couldn’t say.

Then I stopped trying to remember and simply waited. This wasn’t jealousy, after all. This was curiosity. This was bemusement. I could just wait. I stepped aside for people who wanted into the writing room and who wanted out. I did that half a dozen times. Maybe more. I waited and I tried to look as if I was expecting to meet someone, and people simply excused themselves to go around me, and I excused myself and let them, and I waited.

And then, with no one else in sight at the time, I heard her door opening. I started to take a step forward, going in slow motion, ready to speed up as the man emerged so that I could seem simply to be coming out of the writing room.

But the man emerged and immediately turned to head forward in the corridor, never noticing me, and it was just as well for a couple of reasons. I’d stopped cold and I was sure I was gaping, and I was glad not to appear suspicious to him. Because it was Walter Brauer.