The Star of Istanbul

11

The next time I saw Selene Bourgani, it was nearly ten o’clock on the last night of the last voyage of the R.M.S. Lusitania. We were in the War Zone and due to arrive in Queenstown tomorrow afternoon.

I wandered into the back of the large mahogany-paneled first-class Lounge and Music Room, its Georgian easy chairs and settees all turned to face the piano-end of the place and holding all the swells, every sitting space filled and all the standing spaces in the room as well. The traditional last-night talent concert was under way, a benefit for the Seamen’s Charities.

I entered as they were laughing and applauding a man in a tux who was catching the last of half a dozen oranges he’d been juggling. I lingered at the back door for a moment, and a young woman, smartly dressed — one of the voyagers doing a bit of volunteer work — sidled up to me with a stack of gold-embossed programs, which were selling for ten cents each. “The Welsh Choir has already sung,” she said. “But Selene Bourgani’s going to perform soon. Buy a program to remember her? It’s for the cause.”

I gave her a quarter and told her to keep the change for the cause. I shoved the program in my pocket and began to edge my way around the room, excusing myself, squeezing through the standees, wanting to get closer to the front, more than a little surprised that Selene had emerged for this, but maybe not so surprised, reflecting on it as I moved: this was a public event, an audience, a keeping up of the identity she offered to the world, even as she played some other, quite private role.

I’d already settled into the only conclusion I could about Brauer and Bourgani. She was the contact he’d been intending to make on the Lusitania. She was the person of interest to the German Secret Service, the reason Brauer was traveling in first class. The “delivery” in the coded message almost certainly referred to Selene Bourgani. I’d accepted this as the only possible conclusion. And yet I was baffled as hell.

A man was ragtiming “By the Beautiful Sea” on the Broadwood grand and I found a place against a support pillar near the front where I could see between heads to the performance space. The pianist was followed by a Scottish comedian. I could barely understand the heavily brogued words of his jokes, much less their humor. Some in the audience seemed to catch on — the Scots, no doubt — but most were politely waiting for the next act. I endured this for a time, letting my mind drift to trivial things, and finally I looked around the room.

Edward Cable was sitting in one of the easy chairs in the second row, his arms pulled stiffly to his sides. I sensed this much from his place and his pose and from the manner of the women on either side of him, not to mention from their gender: he was alone, having arrived early to the event, with nothing else to do, pining for his lost companion. The comic tended to raise his voice to a near shout at the climax of each joke. One of those shouts came as I watched Cable. He made the slightest flinch at the volume and did not otherwise move.

Then the comic was done. I looked to the front. A tuxedo bounded up and began talking, but I did not listen. My gaze slid on to the far side of the room. And there stood Selene. She was waiting to go on. Her long, empire-waisted dress was sleeveless, as was her sea-green wrap, and she wore long, black gloves. Her throat and the swell of her chest were bare, as were her arms from her shoulder to the middle of her biceps. I found myself stirred most by the unexpected nakedness of that six inches of arm.

The tuxedo yammered about her fame and beauty, and her face was turned slightly away from the audience but not focused on the speaker either. I wanted her to shift her gaze a bit to her left, toward me. I wanted her to look at me. To see me.

Instead, she closed her eyes for a long few moments. As I’d grown up backstage in countless theaters, I’d often seen actresses do this before going on. But even across this room I sensed something else in her at that moment. She was looking inward. And she was looking ahead. She was about to sing to us and she was reflecting on the secret context. I felt sure of all this.

Her eyes still closed, she lifted her face a little and turned it slightly to the left, as if she had just concluded something in her meditation. And the tuxedo announced her: “The internationally renowned, the incomparably beautiful Miss Selene Bourgani!”

Selene’s face descended and she opened her eyes, and she found herself looking straight at me.

The crowd was applauding mightily and a few of the young Brit collegiates were crying “Right ho!” and Selene should have been moving to center stage. But she lingered one beat, and then another, looking at me, though her eyes — at least from across the room — showed me no feeling at all. But the lingering did.

Then she shifted her gaze away and she glided to the place where the juggler and the comic had stood and she turned to the throng and smiled. I expected a radiant, film-actress, outsized smile. But it was not. It was quite small, really, this smile, considering the audience, considering their ardor. And then she gave us her famous profile, as she nodded over her bare shoulder to the pianist.

He played a few bars of introduction and she turned back to us all and she began to sing the first verse.

I knew the song. A couple of years ago, a girl in Chicago and I had a rough-and-tumble, me blowing off steam after covering the Second Balkan War. She owned a cylinder of this song and about played the grooves off it in our couple of months together.

Selene sang it with a deep, dark vibrato:

“I’ve been worried all day long.

Don’t know if I’m right or wrong.

I can’t help just what I say.

Your love makes me speak this way.”

This much was just as it had been seared into my brain from spin after spin of Mr. Edison’s cylinder. But then Selene turned her face to me and she found my eyes and she slowed the song down just a little — the pianist subtly adjusted as he heard this — and I could see her mind working as she improvised and interpolated new words:

“Why, oh why, did I close the door?

You must know I wanted more.

But now I’m crying.

No use denying:

I vanish on the nearing shore.”

I can be dense about these things sometimes, but it was me she’d closed the door on, and I had no doubt she intended to disappear from me in England. So when she let go of my eyes and faced the audience and sang the familiar chorus to us all, I had no choice but to think she was still singing to me. Just to me:

“You made me love you.

I didn’t want to do it.

I didn’t want to do it.

You made me want you,

And all the time you knew it.

I guess you always knew it.

You made me happy sometimes,

You made me glad.

But there were times dear,

You made me feel so sad.

You made me sigh, for

I didn’t want to tell you.

I didn’t want to tell you.

I want some love that’s true.

Yes I do,

Deed I do,

You know I do.

Give me, give me what I cry for.

You know you got the brand of kisses that I’d die for.

You know you made me love you.”

And she was done. The crowd was on its feet, applauding and shouting “Brava!” and she closed her eyes again, as she had when she was waiting to go on, as if she were meditating. Briefly. And she bowed. She did not curtsey. She bowed. A long, slow, stiff bow from the waist. The bow of a Prussian officer in a social setting with civilians, feeling uncomfortable, waiting to leave.

She did this once. She bowed only once, and then she looked fleetingly to me, one last time, and she turned away and moved quickly to the far side of the room and disappeared from my sight beyond the crowd.

I followed her progress to the back of the lounge by watching the bodies turning to send their ongoing applause straight to her as she was leaving them.

Then she was gone. And everyone was facing back to the empty space where she had just sung, and they continued to applaud her, even though she had vanished.