The Star of Istanbul

17

For the following two hours, in an office papered in war maps, I banged at a clumsy old Imperial Model A with a curved keyboard and a downstrike type bar. My body wanted badly to collapse after the events of what was now the previous day, but a pot of coffee kept me afloat like a kapok-filled life jacket, and I wrote a hell of a front-page, king-beat, firsthand, exclusive story about the sinking of the Lusitania. The Admiralty’s Marconi man even transmitted it for me to the Post-Express at what was fifteen minutes past nine in the evening, Chicago time. We’d miss the morning bulldog edition, which had to be leading with the worst possible hobo mulligan of a Lusitania story, full of wire bits and speculations and anti-German fulminations, but this one would be way ahead of the other stories, the real stories, even with Trask needing to sign off on it, per his agreement with Griswold.

I had a copy sent directly to Trask in Washington as well. And I just gave all of them straight facts and some war correspondent derring-do. I was that kind of reporter anyway, believing the inevitable anti-German fulminations should be printed on the editorial page, not on the news pages. And as of a day before yesterday, Germany was still happy to let American reporters into Berlin to hear their side of things. Trask had always expected me to end up in der Vaterland, and if I stayed objective about this murderous sucker punch they’d delivered, it might make things go easier for me. The facts spoke for themselves anyway.

Among the facts, however, were none about the film actress I saved along with myself. That was her story to tell, if she was of a mind to.

And then I finally got to bed in an upper-floor officer guest room. I did a lot of heavy-legged, slant-decked, wave-lapped running in my dreams, and I woke in a sweat before dawn. I got up and walked around and around the room, happy to have an even-keeled floor and dry feet. But what was floating and moaning in my head in my waking state was a thing I’d done and totally forgotten about till now: coldcocking that junior officer on the bridge of the Lusitania. Did he wake up in time to save himself? Did he wake up in time and with a clear enough head? Did he die because of me? If he did, that was too bad. But I’d necessarily figured at that moment, given what he was trying to insist on, that it was either him or me. No. It was either him or me and Selene. I did what I had to do. He shouldn’t have been blindly enforcing a wrongheaded order in a stupidly literal way at a time like that. He should have let us pass on by.

I slept some more and woke to James Metcalf making an ungentlemanly door-banging entrance into my room. He had a large, leather Gladstone bag and a couple of tailored suits and big plans for me. He pointed out that the bright light outside was being provided by a well-risen sun.

“How well, exactly?” I asked.

“Nearly ten o’clock well,” he said.

I was sitting now on the side of the bed and had found the floor with my feet, a simple act that I realized was registering in me as a great relief.

Metcalf set down my new bag and laid out my two new suits on the bed next to me. He said, “You need to dress quickly. We have to get you to Kingstown by this evening. Which means by automobile.”

“What’s in Kingstown?”

“Bourgani and Brauer. They rented the hotel owner’s auto and hired a driver and took off an hour ago. They’re crossing the channel tonight to catch the train to London from Holyhead at one-thirty tomorrow morning.”

“And so am I.”

“And so are you.”

“They still want to make that Monday delivery.”

“So it seems.”

“Did you hear from Trask?”

“He said to keep doing what you’re doing, at least for now. Follow and observe. Our boys are looking into the film star, and we may know more about her by the time you get to London. You’re at the Waldorf. We don’t know where Bourgani will be. Follow and observe. But we’ve got the address of Brauer’s flat.”

Metcalf pulled an envelope from his inside coat pocket and handed it to me. “What we know is in here. If things happen quickly, just go to the embassy and identify yourself and ask for Smith. If Smith’s out, the front desk is secure. You can leave a message in a sealed envelope. I’ll be in London about twenty-four hours after you. I’ve given you some new documents as well. I presume yours are damp.”

I nodded. “But I saved the government’s gold.”

“Good man,” Metcalf said. “Some pounds sterling in there to see you through, however. We can assess your further needs in London.”

“I can tell you the biggest one right now,” I said.

I paused and puffed a heavy breath and squared my shoulders to make sure he knew I was serious.

“Yes?”

“I’ve lost two of these in the past twelve months on your behalf.”

I paused again.

“You’ve got my full attention,” Metcalf said.

“A Corona model number three portable typewriter,” I said.

“Right,” Metcalf said. “Which reminds me. Trask also thinks the news story is fine as is. Thinks you’d write pretty fair novels, but just make sure they’re not about spies.”

And so I spent the next eight hours in a Vauxhall-D staff car, with a blessedly laconic sublieutenant driver, heading north to Kingstown, sometimes creeping behind cattle on dirtways and sometimes running at sixty miles an hour on straight tarmacadams. For the first hour or so I had trouble telling my brain to shut the hell up, and I found myself thinking about Woodrow Wilson and his own odd brain, how unlike a commander in chief he was, how he invaded Mexico last spring to kick out a tin-pot dictator he didn’t like and to protect American oil interests but then immediately hunkered down in Vera Cruz and went no farther. How he’d been avidly talking neutrality in Europe and then expedited the ongoing sale and shipment of American arms to Britain. I figured I could see the consistency of all that: the big-business wing of the Democratic party holding sway. But there had to be at least a hundred American dead on the Lusitania. I wondered if he’d pull the trigger now.

Probably not. It made better business sense to sell American arms to Europe than to sell them to ourselves and use them. I wanted to doze off at that thought, but I slid on to the Germans torpedoing the ship with their own agents on board. Did that cast any doubt on Brauer and Bourgani? It was unlikely that those who knew about the agents would think to coordinate with the German navy. The U-boat captains were lone wolves; they didn’t raise their periscopes and then worry about who booked passage on a major British steamship that had suddenly, miraculously appeared in their sights. And with the Knockmealdown Mountains of County Waterford rising out against the horizon, all this thinking I was doing finally blurred into the fatigue of my North Atlantic adventure and I slept.

And then at last I was in Kingstown. The RMS Leinster, a two-funnel Irish mail packet, was at anchor and blowing its all-ashore whistle, and I boarded, not catching any sight of Brauer and Bourgani. I found myself in a private cabin, with double berth beds on one wall and a train compartment bench seat on the other and not enough space between to do a six-whiskey stagger. What I knew, from Metcalf’s information, was that the cabin next to mine held Selene Bourgani, and somewhere on the other side of the ship a similar cabin contained Walter Brauer. What Metcalf didn’t know was that we all were directly over the engine room, and as we hammered our way into the Irish Channel, the cabin and our bodies quickly merged into one quaking entity, making it impossible to distinguish the vibration of the floor from the vibration of the metal frame of the berths from the vibration of our stomachs and our teeth and our brainpans.

I tried for a long while to sleep, but I found myself staring at the wall, beyond which, I was given to believe, lay Selene Bourgani, who was as remote to me now as one of those made-up women mugging their emotions on a moving picture screen.

At last I got up and dressed and went out of my cabin. I turned away from her door and made my way down the corridor to the Cabin Deck entrance hall. I went up the staircase to the Boat Deck and directly into the large, aft wooden-bench lounge for passengers making the five-hour trip without a cabin.

The space could hold maybe four hundred travelers. A hundred or so were scattered, sleeping, throughout the lounge. But I turned to step out onto the deck, and in the three rows of benches nearest the exit doors were a dozen sleeping passengers. They seemed to be together but not together, near to each other but not touching. Men and women; some sleeping, some awake; a few smoking, no one talking. But something seemed to bind them together. I drew near, and then I knew. I quickly scanned back into the lounge to see if the City of Dublin Steam Packet Company had given a certain overt departing instruction. It hadn’t. This little eddy of travelers was singular in this: all but two of them were wearing their life jackets. And I knew at once where they’d come from. Indeed, as I passed them by, I looked more closely at their life jackets, one after another, and all the jackets were the same. A word was stamped on the bosom, in a Bodoni bold font, like a Post-Express headline: LUSITANIA.

I hurried on through the doors and out onto the deck and it was utterly dark out here. The portholes were all closed and the running lights were off, and though the ship was shrouded in a mist thick enough to be called a fog, we were sounding no warning, we were making no sound at all, and we were pounding along at better than twenty knots. Of course the U-boats were in the Irish Channel as well. And I was struck by a thought I didn’t remember ever having on any official battlefield, where, no matter how extensive the field of operations, everyone knew there were places behind the lines or across the sea where things were peaceful, things were safe. On the deck of the Irish mail packet Leinster I thought: All the world is plunging forward in darkness now, and nowhere is safe.