The Star of Istanbul

22

These two were very confident. The guy with the knife paused where he stood and drew his free hand across his chest to wipe off the apple juice. Metzger was breathing in my ear and waiting for me to come up with an answer to his mostly rhetorical question. Granted, I myself should have been hesitating, as surprised as I was at his identifying me. But when I signed on with Trask and the boys in Washington to do these secret things for my country, I resolved in tight spots to strike first and reason later. And though time did seem to be going rather slowly, given the sudden intensity of the situation — like being thrown from a horse and seeming to fly through the air in a downright dawdle — in fact, it took only the briefest of instants for me to decide between Metzger’s balls and his instep, choosing the latter, on his right foot, being that I was right-footed and a pretty damn good stomper and this was a more direct and immediate act than lifting my leg and trying to kick blindly behind me into his crotch.

So: up and down and my nice new Queenstown brogue crunched hard and deep and pulverizingly into the top of this guy’s foot and his dog-bite hand flew off me toward the pain, and the knife man went wide in his eyes and I was spinning to my left now, around Metzger, who was screaming in a German I hadn’t studied, and I was behind him and he was listing to the side and making an effort to turn with me but I put my hands behind his shoulders and shoved him into the office just as the guy with the knife was arriving and they both went sprawling, the bentwood chair clattering against the wall, but I’d done all I’d needed to for now and so I hustled down the aisle, betting I could find a copy or two of a 1909 Nuttall on the shelves if I had the time, and I was out the door, and though there was a pretty good flow of midmorning pedestrian traffic and maybe, therefore, a bobby or two around, it was nevertheless not out of the question that the guy with the knife would hide the thing somewhere on his person and vault over old man Metzger and come after me. So I plunged straight on across St. Martin’s Lane, dodging a honking taxi, and I rushed into Cecil Court at not quite a run but a pretty quick almost-jog, dodging around and behind every little gaggle of passersby, trying to stay out of the sight lines behind me, and finally, seeing no coppers and having a relatively free fifty yards ahead, I all-out ran till I turned sharp into Charing Cross Road.

And as I beat it south down this busy street, I had the time and focus to wonder what the hell had just happened. When I’d feared a photo in the morning paper, it was simply one of those overwrought precautionary worries I’d consciously taken on in my new role, for to my knowledge there had never been a photo taken of me with my post-Mexico beard. And this beard — along with closer cut hair and a dustup scar or two — was a transformative thing. I’d even had an office girl at the Post-Express, who was sweet on me, look twice when I presented my bewhiskered self to her, close up, on my own home turf. There were only two people who could have tipped off the boys at number 53 about the nosy journalist who got very close to their special delivery package: Walter Brauer and the package herself, Selene Bourgani. And it was unlikely to have been Brauer on his own. For him to have risked speaking about me — his German bosses would likely blame him for any breach of security from a fellow American — he had to have gotten at least some confirmation from Selene that I’d survived the Lusitania. And probably more. I felt pretty certain Brauer had not seen me on his own after our rescue. I was more certain of that than I was of Selene not betraying me.

This notion slowed me drastically, made me veer away from the street, made me stop and put out a hand and lean against a honey-colored facade of Bath Stone. This emotionalism about Selene Bourgani had to stop now. She’d been two brief interludes of jazz. Done with. She was nothing now. She was dangerous now, the object of my work now.

I lowered my hand and straightened. I looked over my shoulder at the building that had been holding me up. The Garrick. Another theater. Of course. I walked on.

And fifteen minutes later I was in the corridor leading to my room at the Waldorf Hotel and I was thinking it would do me well to focus on the danger at hand. Danger it was. I was known to the Germans in London, known as a suspicious person at the beginning of this day, known as worse now.

I approached my door, took out my key, put it in the lock.

Something was wrong.

I couldn’t place it at first.

Then I realized: my Please Do Not Disturb sign was hanging straight and loose from the doorknob. I’d left it caught in the door.

I’d already made a rattle with my key. But I slipped it straight out and I took a step backward and I looked quickly both ways along the corridor. It was empty.

If someone were inside, they’d be standing much like me, perhaps in the center of the room. Perhaps we were facing each other now.

I thought it could have been the maid. But the sign said not to enter. The Waldorf would be strict about that with its employees.

I looked both ways again.

I needed a weapon. I’d had a pistol in my bags on the Lusitania. The damn war correspondent in me had kept that item off my priority replacement list. A little irony: I’d always gone to shooting wars armed only with my Corona. This sneak and snoop stuff was a different matter.

It was time to decide: walk away — even perhaps making sure my departure was audible and then waiting and watching at the end of the corridor — or go in.

This was easy.

I stepped forward and put the key in the lock and pushed the door open hard and spun back, away from the door, and I pressed against the wall beside it.

I heard not the tiniest stirring inside.

I took a deep breath and looked around the jamb.

No one was visible inside.

I stepped in and backed the door closed, noting the possible hiding places.

The door to the bathroom was open — as I’d left it — and no one was there.

Across the room was the massive mahogany Louis XVI wardrobe. A man could hide in the space behind the tall central doors.

The other possibility was beneath the bed. But the wardrobe was the only place he could effectively use a pistol upon discovery. I figured I could handle anything else. So I moved quietly to the desk and brought the chair to the wardrobe and set it on its back legs and leaned it against the doors beneath the brass handles, standing away to the side as I did so.

Then I moved to the bed and knelt and looked beneath. No one was there.

I stood, and the wardrobe was silent, and I thought of what an intruder might have learned from the room.

Nothing here suggested an identity other than war correspondent. The incriminating documents were inside the money belt strapped around my waist beneath my clothes. But I needed to know if someone had been looking. It felt likely, though my first surge of readiness for physical struggle was receding.

This let me slow down, let me realize that I smelled a faint trace of something. Vanishing perhaps even as I smelled it. Something vaguely familiar. I grasped at it as it dissipated, or as I became accustomed to it. Smells could be like that, even odd ones, even bad ones; they could be there and then vanish from your nose even though someone else just arriving would notice it anew.

This was what? Something of alcohol, ether even, a little resiny, none of these and all of these and something else and my nose just quit on me with this scent.

I tried to place it, but it was gone.

Okay. What else?

A car honked distantly somewhere down Aldwych. The clock ticked on the nightstand.

I turned back to the wardrobe. He was too quiet to actually be there. But if he was indeed hiding this quietly, he was too much a coward and probably unarmed.

I set the chair aside, and I yanked open the doors.

Before me were my clothes and my stashed Gladstone bag. Just that.

Was anyone here at all? A punctilious maid could simply have freed the sign on my door in passing.

I looked more closely at the objects in the closet. I was always pretty careful in how I put things away, and I felt certain the bag had been clasped when I left this morning. It wasn’t now. But I couldn’t be sure.

I closed the wardrobe and moved to the desk.

I liked to square the edges of the foolscap I’d written on. This I did with something like a compulsion. For my own sake, but also, of course, for this very purpose, to detect a prying eye. The eight pages of the follow-up Lusitania story I’d been writing were carefully stacked beside the Corona, the bottom of the pages even with the bottom of the machine, as they should have been. But I looked more closely. The paper edges were squared up, all right. Someone was careful. But the stack had not been tapped on the tabletop until even and then gently fingertip squared. There was a minutely visible layering of the pages at the bottom edge. Someone certainly had been here.

Neither Brauer nor Selene knew I would be at the Waldorf. I myself didn’t know until Saturday morning, well after the last time I saw either of them.

Something else was wrong and I didn’t know what.

The Germans had their own mystery to figure out. How did Cobb know to go to the bookstore? Brauer would swear up and down that the coded message had safely been destroyed.

We none us would get very far in our figuring.

I had a few hours till their meeting with Selene.

In the meantime, I needed to find myself another hotel.