The Star of Istanbul

16

That she was seeking Brauer did not surprise me. Whatever hesitation about him she’d had in response to the torpedoing of the Lusitania was overcome by her rescue. And whatever had been the allure of her rescuer, that was overcome by the renewal of her mission for the Germans, no matter what those transient reservations might have been. What did surprise me was that Brauer had figured out how to save his own skin. Perhaps luck had played a part. But I knew I’d better not underestimate his resourcefulness or his toughness, bookman-fancying King’s College lecturer though he be.

Selene, in response to something Brauer said, lifted her chin a little to gesture over his right shoulder. He looked in that direction — at the Queen’s Hotel — and I knew enough for tonight, given that someone was seeking me out. I needed to attend to that.

So I backed away from the door, turned, and made my way through the hall to the ledger table. As I approached and passed beside him, the Cunard man taking names gave me a relieved glance.

I stood behind him, as he’d asked, and almost at once a serious weariness shuddered through me. I bucked myself up and even did a long-habitual bucking-up gesture: I shot my cuffs. Except over the past few hours my cuffs had apparently decided to permanently shoot themselves. I considered my body down to my squishing brogues, surprised that I’d left them on. I’d gone into the water in a gentleman’s blue serge suit and I now stood in a schoolboy’s blue serge suit, my adolescent wrists and ankles protruding like cowlicks from cuffs and pant legs.

“Mister Cobb?” a man’s voice said.

“Master Cobb,” I said, lifting one outgrown sleeve as I looked at the speaker. He had a round face and most everything about it was the color of wheat spike before a harvest, skin and hair and eyebrows that wheat-field yellow, and in the midst were unblinking pale eyes, their color hard to identify in the shadows of the customshall but they were pale, unflinching; he was a fleshy, wheaty man wearing a three-piece suit of his own money-crop color but a shade or two darker, baked for a while.

He flashed a willful little smile and he nodded at my right wrist. “We’ll take care of that.”

He offered a doughy hand doing one of those I’ll-hesitate-a-second-and-muscle-up-my-squeeze-to-equal-yours kind of shakes; I had the feeling I could squeeze harder than he could, though I also had an inkling this guy could surprise me. He said, in a flat plains accent common to a large number of Post-Express readers, “I’m James Metcalf. United States embassy in London.”

He paused now and lowered his voice a bit, turning it into a covert elbow nudge in the ribs. “We have a mutual friend in Washington.”

“The other James,” I said. James Polk Trask.

Metcalf doled out one more of those little smiles. “He’s the one.”

Then the smile vanished at once and his manner changed abruptly to the studied gravity of an embassy Guy. “I’m glad to see you’ve made it.”

“I am too,” I said.

And Metcalf took charge, which was fine with me. So I found myself in the well of a two-wheel jaunting car pulled by a sixteen-hand mule, a bundle of new clothes beside me and two bespoke suits being done up overnight. We were bone-rattling our cobblestoned way up the hill behind the wharves, bound for the Admiralty House that sat above the city, where an Admiral Lewis Bayly ran the British Fleet in the North Atlantic and where I’d get some decent food and a bed but I shouldn’t expect a drink.

“Sorry, old man,” Metcalf said. “The admiral’s a teetotaler and so is everyone else, as long as they’re under his roof.”

I grunted. I hadn’t the time or focus or opportunity to think about a drink so far, but this struck me instantly as bad news.

But Metcalf removed a flask from his inside coat pocket and handed it across to me. There was a pretty good whiskey inside and I took a couple of bolts of it as he watched in silence. That was enough of the whiskey for tonight. In spite of the past eight or ten hours, I wasn’t interested in getting drunk and I handed the flask back to him.

“Thanks,” I said.

He offered me a cigarette. A Capstan Navy Cut in a flat tin.

I took one and he did too and he lit them for us and I blew the smoke out to sea, which lay below me now, sucked up into this harbor, all sparkly calm from the harbor lights and acting like it never could hurt a soul.

“They call this Spy Hill,” Metcalf said.

“Imagine that,” I said.

“From back when it meant just a place to watch the ships.”

“I bet it’s become that again.”

“Back when you didn’t count and classify the warships and telegraph Berlin.”

Metcalf was clearly the guy I was supposed to report to. I looked toward the driver sitting above us.

“Later,” Metcalf said.

“I figured,” I said.

And then we were at Admiralty House, which was a massive, boxy, neoclassic Adam-style building built into a sharp upslope, with three stories at the back and a fourth, half-underground basement story that showed its windowed facade only at the front. Inside, the place was as sparse and grim as the admiral himself, whose junior officer years were crusted on his face and who gave me a curt smile with his handshake, the kind of smile that would, in other circumstances, seem dismissive but between men sharing a war passed for comradely.

And then at last — after a too-brief period of be-stupored happiness lying in a great porcelain tub of hot water and after donning my new cotton pajama suit and silk dressing gown and after a lamb chop in the Admiralty kitchen and a pot of strong coffee — at last, shortly before midnight on the day the Lusitania was sunk by a German U-boat in the North Atlantic, I sat high on the widow’s walk of the Admiralty House smoking British cigarettes with James Metcalf of the U.S. embassy.

The admiral had departed from our company soon after the handshake, but in the few parting words he’d referred to Metcalf as “Gentleman Jim.” So as Metcalf and I took our first drag of our second cigarette together, Queenstown now simply stacks and hedgerows of rooftops and a scattering of harbor-front lights below us, I said, “‘Gentleman Jim,’ is it? From the boxer?” Meaning the former heavyweight champion Gentleman Jim Corbett.

“Do you have a taste for irony, Mr. Cobb?”

“Kit. From the playwright,” I said.

“Kit,” he said.

“Sure,” I said. “I like a good irony.”

“Yes, from the boxer, thanks to the ambassador and his fondness for the prizefights. But I am among the least violent of men.”

“A gentleman,” I said.

“An irony within an irony,” he said.

We concentrated on smoking for a little while. Or I did, at least. The tobacco was smoothing a few of the day’s jagged edges in my head. I took a deep drag and let it go with a long exhalation, and I did that once more. Metcalf simply watched me as he let his own cigarette smolder between fore and middle fingers, suspended near his face with his elbow on the arm of his chair.

Like a real gentleman.

After the second long pull on my Captsan, I said, “So what are we authorized to say to each other?”

“Whatever you would say to your stateside James.”

I nodded, but for now I quietly took another drag on the cigarette.

“At this point,” Metcalf said, “it might merely be moot, but were you able to learn anything about our man Walter Brauer?”

“The most recent thing I learned is that it’s not moot,” I said.

Metcalf straightened a bit in his chair. He seemed suddenly to become aware of his cigarette. He flicked the long ash and took a drag. “So he’s alive?”

“He is.”

“What were the earlier things?”

“His business is with Miss Selene Bourgani.”

This brought Metcalf forward in his chair. “The film actress?”

“That’s right.”

“Are you sure?”

I told him the events on the ship. Many of them. I told him about finding out the connection between Bourgani and Brauer after suspecting an American bookseller. I told him about Nuttall and the coded message and the planned delivery of something — likely the actress — to the address on St. Martin’s Lane on Monday night. I told him about Brauer’s personal interest in the seller of books, the necessary secrecy of it being a potential point of leverage with the man.

I told Metcalf nothing of my own personal interest in Selene. Or of hers in me. Like I was a real gentleman. I also kept the anonymous German film director to myself for now; it was too vague anyway, and I didn’t want to have to explain how I came to know about him.

I told my story and then I said, “She’s in the Queen’s Hotel.”

“And Brauer?”

“I don’t know where he’s staying. But from the look of them on the ship, if we know where she is, we’ll soon find him.”

Metcalf rose from his chair. “I’ll wire our man in Washington for instructions.”

“And Bourgani?”

“We’ll see what our instructions are. But in the meantime I’ve got a local here who can keep an eye on her.”

I stood up as well. “I need a couple of things right away. For my public self. The war correspondent.”

“Of course,” Metcalf said. “You’ve happened upon a story, it seems.”

“It happened upon me,” I said.