The Star of Istanbul

18

Over the next few hours of fitful sleep and brain-rattled thought, I decided that for now it would be best to keep as much away from the sight of Selene and Brauer as I could. I knew where Brauer lived. I could wait to follow him whenever I wanted. I knew where both of them would be tomorrow night. And if Selene wasn’t there — if Brauer’s coded message was an instruction to deliver something or someone else — then he was more centrally important than the film star anyway. And there were a few things I needed to do before that appointed time in St. Martin’s Lane.

So I hid out and hung back on the Leinster and then again on the London train, waiting till the conductor found me lingering in the sleeping car vestibule in Euston Station and he said, “You need to move on along to your destination, sir. We’re off now to the switching yard.” I picked up my bags and stepped down to the platform, and up ahead the flock of reporters had already descended to pick the brains of the several dozen Lusitania survivors, who were identifiable by their dazed looks, occasional bandages, and ill-fitting clothes. I was glad for my Queenstown special privileges, as they included a deceptively well-fitted suit and crisp-brimmed trilby, and I plowed through with hardly a glance from anyone.

The Waldorf still had a reservation for me, though I was a day late. The desk clerk, with a paste-brush mustache on his stiff upper lip, drew himself up proudly to explain that the hotel checked with the Cunard Line through the night and as recently as an hour ago before canceling yesterday’s no-shows. He was happy to announce that the hotel would have a room for anyone confirmed by Cunard, whenever they might arrive.

This was good but the hotel gave me the willies and I suspected it would do the same for any of the other confirmees. The Waldorf’s Portland stone facade was all eighteenth century Frenchy neoclassicism, as was every stick of furniture and every lamp and every bit of trim in its lobby and its Palm Court. I did not doubt the rooms would carry on the style. In other words, we who survived the Lusitania would be checking into its immobilized doppelgänger, as if we’d in fact all drowned on Friday and this was a meticulously bespoke purgatory.

The clerk slid my key across the desktop. “One other thing, Mr. Cobb,” he said, and he turned a bit aside and bent beneath the front desk.

He emerged with what I instantly recognized as the leather and wood carrying case of a Corona Number 3.

Purgatory is heaven if you can write about it and hang your byline on it. The rest of the day was clear before me.

“From a Mr. Metcalf,” the clerk said.

“Thanks.” I put the key in my pocket and picked up the typewriter by the case handle. But just as I was about to move away, I finally remembered something about the Waldorf. Something that had niggled at me ever since Metcalf told me where I’d stay. Now it suddenly struck me.

“Pardon me,” I said to the clerk.

“Yessir?”

“I want to check on a friend of mine who was scheduled to come in.”

“What’s the name?”

“Edward Cable,” I said.

The guy’s mustache seemed wired to his column-running forefinger, shifting restlessly from side to side as he scanned his reservation book. But then both finger and mustache stopped abruptly.

He looked up at me. “I’m sorry,” he said, his voice pitched very low. “Mr. Cable’s reservation was canceled this morning by the Cunard Line.”

There was no reason for this to surprise me. He’d have no skills to save himself. Cable had become a mere footnote to this whole affair anyway. And I had long since developed the battlefield skill of taking the death of even somebody you were chummy with — nascent pals with, even — pretty much in stoic stride. But for the first two or three steps I took away from the front desk at the Waldorf, it was all I could do to keep from buckling at the knees.