The Star of Istanbul

20

I would’ve had more luck with the editor’s daughter.

At 2 A.M. on Monday morning, my leather roll of entry tools tucked in an inside pocket, I moved briskly along St. Martin’s Lane, the crowds of diners and theatergoers that nightly jammed this narrow, electric-lit street mostly dissipated, and the shops darkened. The numbers were descending and I passed a pub at the corner of New Street, number 58, and then a narrow alley of bow-windowed houses, still lit by gas, and only a few more steps ahead was number 53, and from the storefront I reckoned it to be, a piss-yellow light was dribbling into the street. I stopped. I crossed to the other side. Almost directly opposite the meeting site was the opening to Cecil Court. I stepped around the darkened pub at the corner and then edged back to lurk and watch.

Number 53 split the ground floor of a four-story brick building with number 52, a Friends Meeting House, the Quakers narrowly on the right, behind a pair of double doors, and the Germans sporting a wide storefront window to the left of their oaken door with a three-tier glass transom. They were Metzger & Strauss, Booksellers. The locus of German agents in London was a bookshop sharing a wall with a bunch of pacifists.

The light was coming from the back of the bookshop, through an inner door, and from a nearer spot of light — a desk lamp, I supposed — in the midst of the massive shadows of bookshelves. I could see no figures. But this was hardly the time for breaking and entering. Too bad. I would have liked a private preview of the evening’s meeting spot. I’d have to do it another way in a few hours, after they were open, not so private but still a preview. And that meant deciding about who I would become — who I would portray — a decision that had lately been looming anyway.

I slipped away south on St. Martin’s Lane, striding quickly, and I passed before The Duke of York’s Theatre, its neoclassic columns a trifling echo of the portico columns of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, just down at the end of the lane. Mother played a trifling comedy at the Duke of York’s in a short run after Taming of the Shrew, when I had my adolescent London adventure with her.

The ironies of the last few minutes multiplied and I fairly trotted back to the hotel, where I slept fitfully and woke to find, in my morning paper over my eggs and bacon and marmalade in the Palm Court, a Christopher Cobb byline pinned beneath a trumpet blare of a double-deck headline:

LUSITANIA HORROR

Eyewitness Account

Reginald Bryce, true to his word. I held my breath as I scanned the front page of the Daily Transcript and its jump-page spread, and I saw only stock photos of the Lusitania and of a German U-boat and a cartoon of the Kaiser thigh-deep in the ocean with blood dripping from his hands. I let go of the breath when I found no stock photos of me.

I needed now to consider a disguise for my book browsing this morning; this gave me more options. I put my paper down and picked up my coffee to think. Across the sunken floor — bright beneath the glass roof — between the potted palms, near the piano at the far side, sat a man who’d caught my eye when he’d come in a few minutes ago. He was a thin man in a gray tweed suit with a beard and Brilliantine-assaulted hair made to lie flat on either side of a center part. It was the beard that caught me now. He had a newspaper before him — not the Transcript—slightly raised but not enough to shield his face. He glanced up very briefly, directly at me from across the way, and I looked off abruptly. His beard wouldn’t change by his realizing I was studying him, but my impulse was to observe unobserved. I glanced back at him and he was reading.

His beard was full but moderately so, trimmed square beneath his chin. It was a beard that registered strongly as one but didn’t draw attention to itself. If I were to do a beard that wasn’t my own, that would be the one. But the principle I’d learned — not just from Trask’s boys but from my years hanging around theaters — was that simpler is better. The less you change of yourself to resemble someone else, the more comfortable you’ll be in your role.

No one at 53 St. Martin’s Lane knew what I looked like. I could be anyone. I could be German. Outwardly I was ready.