The Star of Istanbul

29

I flipped some fingers at the bottom of the bandage on my left cheek. The gesture led me to put on a light Italian accent for my English, still keeping the volume low, all to further mask me from Selene’s nearby ear.

“They make the bandages not so good anymore,” I said.

At once I figured this was a mistake. Although they still hadn’t entered the war, the Italians were part of the Triple Alliance.

But the barman looked me in the eye and gave me a nod — a guy’s nod, like he knew about fights with sharp objects — and he stepped away to draw me an ale.

Selene and her older man were still trading low words in their mystery language, and my eyes briefly followed the bartender. But I stopped at the cleared space around the cash box beneath the mirror.

Attached to the wall, low, just over the tin box, was an image of a flag, not much larger than a postcard. It was divided into three equal vertical stripes: red, green, blue. This wasn’t Greek. It wasn’t any flag I recognized.

I glanced into the mirror.

Selene was the one who was making the move. Her hand was groping out over the table now, falling upon the man’s wrist. He put his own hand over hers and they talked on in the language, I suspected, of red, green, and blue. I looked at the beer that was just now landing in front of me. It was pale.

I took a drink.

Too much hops, as far as I was concerned.

I had blood on my shirt and a beer I didn’t like in front of me. I was obviously out of place in this bar in the presence of a woman who I didn’t want to recognize me, and I wasn’t understanding anything she and her man were saying anyway.

It was time to wait outside.

I didn’t want to cause a stir on my departure, however, so I downed the bitter Burton ale in three swallows, wiped my mouth, put some money on the bar, and eased away. I passed the now intertwined hands, and I gave the man one last, reflexive glance. He had a long straight nose and my mind photographed it and I briefly registered her own famous profile as I went by, but I did not let my mind linger on her, and Selene and her man were behind me and I approached the door. I lowered my face for Brauer and went out the door and around the corner and up to my taxi.

I stopped by the driver’s side of the vehicle and he was sitting there behind the wheel, not off having a quick beer in another pub, not even lounging in the street, but behind the wheel. A good man. He turned his face to me as I approached and I took his cap off my head and fitted it on his. He let me.

“Thanks,” I said. “Turn us around and bring us close to the corner.”

He nodded.

Only when I was climbing into the tonneau, when he thought I wasn’t looking, did he adjust his cap to suit him.

And we waited.

Perhaps fifteen minutes went by and I held myself in suspension.

I didn’t want to, but finally I looked again in my mind at Selene’s profile. I didn’t want to, but something was nagging at me, something from my eyes, not my reason.

Then it struck me: her man’s thin, straight nose, the precise curve where bridge and brow met, the angle of the forehead. I’d registered this same profile in person more than a week ago. And it was Selene. From the first time I saw her in person, as she was suffering the questions of the reporters on the deck of the Lusitania. This was familial similarity. This was her father.

And as if on cue, he came around the corner.

He was striding briskly. He and his daughter had been in a preexisting state of estrangement in their first moments together in the pub. A long and hard estrangement, for them to have been separated by an ocean and then to have taken up with each other like that from the start, looking like wounded old lovers. And yet they came to entwine their hands. They came to some reconciliation. But now she was off to Istanbul — had she told him where she was going, what she was doing? — and so this was a hard parting for him. He was striding away from her firmly, as a man would, to control his feelings and maintain his manhood.

This assessment ran quickly in me as I shrank into the shadows of the tonneau and he passed by across the street. I slid to the streetside door, was ready to follow him, but as my hand went to the handle, he turned in at a doorway to a three-story brick tenement fifty yards or so down Coleman.

I opened the door and stepped out.

I moved into the middle of the street and looked for a number on the building. Over the lintel, a dingy 22.

I watched the facade, looking every few moments to the corner of New Gravel.

Soon a light came on in a second-floor window. I noted its position. I stepped back to the taxi and told my driver to be ready for the resumption of our little parade.

I entered the tonneau and leaned forward to watch out the front window.

The ’08 Unic rolled into view from before the pub and crossed our line of sight, heading south on New Gravel Lane. A few moments later, Brauer’s Napier passed by in pursuit. We followed.

I was aware at once that something was going on. Not with our three-character melodrama. Out to the east. In the sky. I thought it was lightning. I didn’t think any further about that, as I was preoccupied with the first clues of an alternate biography for Vitagraph’s Most Mysterious Woman in the World. But we didn’t drive very far before the lightning yielded a clap of distant thunder. But it seemed to be thunder only if you’d already distractedly assumed you’d seen lightning. Part of me instantly recognized the punch-thump of an exploding shell. My taxi stopped abruptly, and a few moments later my driver leaned across the front seat to try to see something in the eastern sky.

I slid across and looked. Three narrow columns of white light were separately, restlessly sweeping the sky. Searchlights.

The speaking tube jingled and I took it up. “Zeppelins, sir,” my driver said. “Raiding the East India Docks, I’d say. The two taxis have stopped before us and will not be entering the Wapping High Street — nor will aught else — till this be finished.”

I thanked him and looked again at the sky. The searchlights still had not found the airships, but they were drawing nearer each other.

I stepped out of the taxi on the left side, into the street.

The near warehouses were low and scattered, south of the Shadwell Basin, and then there was a clear view across the meander of the Thames and into the distant light flecks of Dog Island, which held the West India, Millwall, and South Docks. The stars were blotted out, but the ceiling was pretty high, plenty high enough for the German dirigibles to drop their bombs. At the distant edge of my view — at the East India Docks, as my man had reckoned — a column of flame had flared up.

Now the tip of one searchlight, nearer in, was suddenly clipped downward and clotted at the end by a bright tubular object. The air defense boys had found a Zeppelin. The other two searchlights whisked to that vicinity as well, one of them quickly finding a second airship, which closely trailed the first, and the third light rushed on behind, to continue the search.

As interested as I was in the air assault, I lowered my face and looked to the south. A mere fifty yards ahead, against the darkness, Selene Bourgani had stepped from her taxi and become an even more deeply dark shape, immobile, elegantly erect, facing the raid. I tried to see her figure there in the night by the reality of what she was planning to do. In this moment she was a sentinel for the German airships, a monument to their assault on the Fatherland’s enemy. I still had trouble getting this to make sense. I may have discovered her own living father, but she was still the Most Mysterious Woman in the World. What was she doing with these people?

And another dark shape passed before me, this side of Selene. Brauer had also stepped from his taxi, his face lifting to the eastern sky.

I looked too.

The searchlights had all converged on the two Zeppelins and I could hear the distant report of three- and four-inch guns, the far off rattle of machine guns. The Brits were using what they had — utterly unsuited for firing upward at airships — to stop what now began: a flash of quick-climbing, flaring light beneath the Zeppelins, and a fragment of a moment later the brittle thump of a bomb, and then the flare and thump again, and again. We were near enough to all this that with each bomb we instinctively braced ourselves for a frontal blow from the concussion, but instead a blow surprised us from behind: a quick aggression of air that rushed against us and then onward to fill the vacuum created by the updraft of explosives from above.

And their salvos spent, the Zeppelins came toward us, the lights tracking them, the great glistening white hulls drifting to us and above us as if we were on the floor of the sea and these were the dead and bloated bodies of sunken ships, this one above me now the Lusitania itself, torpedoed and glowing in its ghostly afterlife and come to reclaim those who had escaped, to take the three of us away with it.

But that impression flared brightly in my head and vanished instantly.

This was, in fact, the fiercely deployed German war machine passing overhead. And I was well aware that the man and woman standing near me in the dark were in its service.