The Star of Istanbul

26

The courtyard was very dark and it stank of garbage and waste and it rustled with rats. My remorse was gone and I shuffled my feet not to trip on unseen things, and then I was at the rear door of Metzger & Strauss.

The window I’d passed and the window in the door were painted black.

I expected that trying to pick the lock in the impenetrable dark of this doorway within this courtyard surrounded by these multistoried buildings on this moonless London night would be a tricky business, but I was getting used to my job, and once I found the opening of the keyway with my fingertip and got my pick and torque wrench inside, it was good doing this in the dark. The darkness made it entirely about the feel of things unseen in the keyway, and that was how it should have been anyway. And when the last pin yielded and I felt the shear line go clear and I was ready to rotate the plug, I paused. I focused on being quiet. I eased the plug around and opened the door with the meekest of clicks.

And I froze.

Voices and light.

But not in this room, I quickly realized. And the voices murmured on without a hitch even now, even after the sound of my entry. They were distant, from another room.

Which is what I should have expected. This was the back room I was entering. I’d seen through to it in the rear wall of the bookshop office this morning. I realized that door must still be open.

This was dangerous but it was also an opportunity.

I stepped inside.

Across the rear storage room was the open door to the office, and framed brightly there in modernist composition was a center cut of the refectory table and Brauer’s brown tweedy back overlaid with the curves of a bentwood chair. No eyes were visible.

I closed the door softly behind me. I turned and waited where I was standing for a moment. The voices were pretty low and I couldn’t pick up the words clearly. The floor was stacked on both sides of me with boxes in irregular rows, and I ducked down and circled behind them to the left, out of sight of the door, moving along the nearest row.

I gave a brief thought to the contents of these boxes. Books. This was an ongoing plausible bookstore, after all. But what else could be delivered here as if they were books? If the Germans wanted to mount a sabotage campaign in England, the explosives could well pass through here. But that was not my business tonight.

I was treading softly now in a severe crouch behind the chest-high row of boxes nearest the office.

As I drew near the open door, I was concentrating fully on being quiet and not yet trying to render the murmuring into words.

But an abrupt silence caught my attention.

I froze again.

Had they heard me?

I’d move no more if I hadn’t already given myself away.

But now a man’s voice spoke in German: “You are all right? You are making sounds again.” The voice was soft-edged in timbre but hard-edged in tone.

Another man answered, also in German, “I will be all right when he is dead.” German can transform a voice, and I’d heard his only briefly in English, but from the context I figured this was Metzger, attending the meeting with his broken foot and not taking it real well. I was certainly on the other side of the wall from my meditating Quaker: I had a sharp little twist of pleasure at the present state of Metzger’s murderous pal in the doorway across the street.

“You expect word on that shortly?” the first man said.

“If he is what we think he is,” Metzger said, “he’ll come and we’ll have him.”

“Can we get on with this?” a third person said. I went rigidly silent inside once more, though I’d expected to hear this voice. It was Selene.

“Of course,” a man said in English. This was the first German speaker, I surmised. His overtly impatient tone with Metzger and his stepping in as the commander of the agenda to reassure Selene suggested he was the one in charge. Perhaps Herr Strauss? “Herr Metzger,” he said, with an intonation as if prompting him to do a prearranged thing.

In the brief silence that followed, I heard a rustling of papers, perhaps pulled from a pocket and pushed across the tabletop.

Metzger said in English, “Herr Brauer, if you would be so kind as to keep the envelope with your name upon it and hand the other to the lady.”

“Of course,” Brauer said.

Metzger said, “They canceled the daylight passage. I’ve rebooked you on the boat train to Flushing, night after tomorrow. You’ll cross over to German territory at Baarle. Everything you need is in the envelopes.”

“My apologies to Herr Brauer,” Selene said, “but is the escort necessary?”

Metzger said, “Constantinople is a long way.”

“But it’s by your vaunted Baghdad Express, yes?”

Metzger began clumsily to explain. “Most of the way but. .”

The man I figured to be Strauss cut him off. “We have arranged all of this so far, Miss Bourgani. Please trust us further. Herr Brauer will handle what remains to be done in Istanbul.”

He stressed the Turks’ preferred name for the city, no doubt shooting Metzger a critical look. Their kaiser was the self-avowed brother to Islam. Istanbul, not Constantinople. This was an important detail.

I made this quick assessment while the sound of the man’s voice buzzed in my head like subtext. Until this moment I’d heard him speak fewer than half a dozen words in English. Now he sounded familiar.

“The Pasha’s people and ours must meet to arrange the first contact.”

I strained at placing the voice but felt blocked in some odd, undefinable way.

New sounds now: an opening of a door — the door from the front of the shop — and a slight scraping of chairs.

The man I took to be Strauss said, “Herr Strauss. These are Miss Selene Bourgani and Herr Brauer, whom I think you’ve met.”

The actual Strauss had a voice raspy from a lifetime of heavy smoking. His manner was old-school courtly. “Miss Bourgani,” he said in British-inflected English. “I am enchanted. Your face fills the dreams of millions.”

“Herr Strauss,” Selene said.

Strauss said, “We deeply appreciate your assistance in this most delicate of tasks.”

She did not reply in words and I longed to watch all the physical nuances of the characters in this scene. I particularly longed to see the face of the man I’d mistaken for Strauss, the man whose voice still echoed in my head. Where had I heard it?

I assessed the shadows around me, wondered if I dared to lift my head above the boxes.

Metzger said in German, “Any sign outside?”

“I only looked for a moment, getting out of the taxi,” Strauss said, also in German. “I didn’t see Karl. But that’s the point, yes?”

Metzger grunted.

I shrank back deeper into the darkness and began to rise a bit from my crouch to look.

“Can we speak in English, gentlemen?” Selene said.

The familiar man replied, “I’m very sorry, Miss Bourgani. It’s rude of us.” His English was perfect. And his accent was American, though without any regional hint at all. Whatever “standard American speech” was, this was it. Meticulously learned.

The bright, angled slice of the office appeared before me: Brauer, seen from behind but also now from the side, sitting upright, blocking the view to the far end of the table, though I couldn’t say for sure I would’ve seen that far even if he wasn’t there.

“Sometimes we have peripheral matters to discuss and we speak in German by reflex,” the man went on.

“Is there more?” Selene said and I saw a movement just to the right of Brauer: Selene’s black-sheathed shoulder rolled into my view and then out again.

The man with the soft-timbred familiar voice ignored her. “Bitte,” he said. Then he quickly repeated in English, “Please.” And a gray-tweed-clad wrist, a delicate-fingered hand appeared in the air beyond Brauer, from the end of the table, gesturing toward an invisible chair. “Sit for a time, Mr. Strauss.”

A chair scraped.

The wrist and hand vanished.

“It will only be for a brief time, Miss Bourgani,” the invisible man said.

I crept back farther, leaned to my left, trying to catch a glimpse of him. Though the angle improved, the visible slice of the doorway shrank as well. I could see Selene’s shoulder; I could see that she had not raised the veil on her hat. She was sitting there shrouded before these men. Given the familiar man’s impulsive leveraging of his empowered status — making Strauss sit — it must have been nagging the hell out of him that Selene wouldn’t show her face clearly to him.

“Perhaps if we can have a little drink together before we go,” he said. “We humbly request this gesture of friendly feelings, dear lady.”

I thought: This guy is good. He’ll lift her veil yet.

He did not wait for her reply. He said, “Mr. Brauer. If you’d be so kind as to pour the wine.”

Brauer twisted his body in the direction of the man. This had taken him by surprise. He was being put in his place as well. He might have thought he was a high-toned university intellectual, but in this room he was the office girl being sent for coffee.

He straightened and began to push his chair back.

I quickened at this. I leaned just a little more to my left. He was about to reveal his boss.

The chair screaked on the floor, the noise consciously made worse, I suspected, by Walter daring to express his displeasure.

He rose and stepped to his left, and he was gone from my sight.

And there, at the end of the table, was the man with the square-trimmed beard who’d been reading his newspaper across the Palm Court this morning.