The Star of Istanbul

31

The next day I had a fine morning and afternoon at the Arundel doing what I tried to convince myself I still primarily did. I wrote newspaper stories. I finally finished a follow-up feature about life after having a steamship sunk out from under you. I curved and faded and even plausibly made up some of that one, seeing as my life after the sinking had some atypical and secret elements to it. Which was okay, since second-day, stretch-it-out-no-matter-what-it-takes stories after very big ones often were full of curves and fadeaways and lies, and it was just something you lived with as a reporter and you figured the Joes on the street who read you didn’t give a damn about that anyway, if the story was good. And I also wrote a pretty damn fine authentic eyewitness story about a Zeppelin raid on London. I got those telegraphed off and had a good hot bath, seeing as the blood of the Hun had seeped on through the shirt and also colored Kit Cobb. Though a little water cleared me of that deed just fine.

When I got out of the tub there was a knock on the door. I wrapped a towel around me and I went to the door, but I didn’t open it at once.

“Yes?” I said.

“Bellhop, Mr. Cobb. I have a parcel for you.” It was a thin, reedy voice, almost adolescent, and I remembered the bellhop on duty tonight looking very young.

I opened the door.

It was the bellhop.

And inside the parcel was a tuxedo and a note from Metcalf. Wear this. But watch your cigarette ash. It’s a rental.

So I got duded up in my monkey suit and went out in a taxicab to the Carlton Hotel, which seemed just like the place for Metcalf, since it was cut out of the same pâte pâtisserie as his embassy, with French Second Empire pavilion roofs and high mansards, and with a green slate dome foamed up on top to boot.

Metcalf was waiting in the vestibule inside the front doors on Pall Mall.

He brightened at the sight of me coming through, the fleshy wheatiness of him now a harmonious part of his decor, draped bespokenly as it was in the black and white of his tux.

He stepped to me and offered his hand, greeting me in full moniker, though he sounded devoid of irony, almost admiring: “Christopher Marlowe Cobb.”

I shook the hand. “Gentleman Jim Metcalf,” I said, also without irony.

He laughed. “My element, here,” he said. “I have good food for you.”

“And some information?” I said, a little regretful at once for pushing the business when he wanted to push the eats.

He took it in stride, the smile never faltering. “Of course,” he said. “In due time.”

He led me into an inner quadrangle that suddenly made London — given the central lobby experience at the Waldorf as well — seem to be as enchanted with palm trees as Mexico City. Here was another Palm Court, covered over in a glass roof and full of trees and green-cane easy chairs.

We brisked through and then up a wide marble staircase and into a clotted-cream-colored restaurant with garlands of gold leaves on the ceiling and cut-glass chandeliers wired for a softly glowing electricity. Beneath us was a densely soft claret carpet upon which a man in tails glided soundlessly to us and bowed stiffly at the waist. “Mr. Metcalf,” he said. “Right this way.”

And so we ended up in a secluded far corner of the culinary home of the Cy Young of chefs, Georges Auguste Escoffier, whose eminence I already knew even before Metcalf dropped his voice into a reverential hush and made the case for him in somewhat different terms, Metcalf being a guy who knew his food. I took only some of this in — though the food itself would shortly make me pay more attention — but for now I had my mission heavy on my mind.

Metcalf stopped talking abruptly and smiled up at the waiter who had just arrived, not with a menu — I learned that we were in Maestro Escoffier’s hands, for seventeen courses — but with Caviar Oeufs de Pluvier—caviar arranged spillingly from the eggs of a plover as if the fertility of a bird was expressing the fertility of a fish. I was intrigued by all this but took the occasion of Metcalf’s silence to say, “Am I going to follow them?”

Meaning Brauer and Bourgani.

He well knew who I meant, but he ignored me and nodded a thank you to the waiter and he leaned forward over his plate. I thought at first that he was saying a silent grace, but his nostrils were flaring, delicately but purposefully, and I understood Metcalf to be — for all his gentlemanliness and professionalism — a sensualist and not a religionist. He said, without looking up from the eggs upon eggs, “Didn’t you tell Mr. Smith that you intended to treat this like a last meal?”

“I did.”

“I myself have come to treat every meal that way,” Metcalf said, and he turned his face to me now for the first time since I’d breached the protocol of the repas du connaisseur. He smiled a complex little smile, part of which was “What a pleasant but stupid child” and part of which, I suspected, was “Given the job you’ve signed up for, you better be serious about the last-meal stuff.”

But I answered his words: “Even with your desk job?”

This caught him a bit off guard. The smile disappeared. But nothing unpleasant took its place. He shrugged and said, “One can get hit by a taxi on a London street.”

Okay, I thought. I was in this whole thing with Metcalf, however he wanted to play it. He knew what I needed. So I broke off our conversation and I leaned over my caviar and flared my nostrils to the saltwater low-tide smell of animal fertility.

And we were silent when we were eating and consciously made only small talk when we weren’t, going through a Consommé aux Pommes d’Amour, the “apples of love” in this case turning out to be a very different view of a damn sweet Illinois tomato; and egg-shaped dumplings of Rouen duck ground up and whipped up with egg whites and with spit from a swift’s nest, a thing I was happy not to have known about as I ate it; and a dish that wedded crayfish and a hot pepper cream, which would have gone over pretty well in my birth city of New Orleans; and a course of baby chicken roughed up by ground pepper; and a frogs’ legs course, with lowly frogs not sounding quite up to this kind of treatment, so Escoffier renamed these creatures nymphes, which was an unsettling leap of imagination, as these naked legs were arrayed on our square plates flushed pink with paprika. I figured that guy Freud would have a field day with the maestro’s dreams.

Then we had a dish before us, in silver timbales, that would lead Metcalf to speak more fully. We leaned toward it together, as had become our custom, and he said, “Croûtons of bread crumbs fried in butter. Black truffles in a reduced demi-glace. And cocks’ kidneys. No hens. Only cocks. They’re hot, as you can feel on your face and in your nose. You eat a cock’s kidney when it is hot. Begin.”

I did.

And, as was his custom, he kept his eyes shut as he chewed. But this time, after he was finished chewing, he kept his eyes closed for a few moments more, saying, “You’ve done good work.”

“Eating cocks’ kidneys?”

“That too,” he said.

“What’s next?”

“It’s not where we expected you to end up.”

“At least the war’s arrived,” I said. “There’s Gallipoli.”

“There’s Gallipoli,” he said.

“How’s that going?”

Metcalf wagged his head. “The English bungled it. Caught the Turks unprepared at the Dardanelles, but when it was time to move from the sea assault to the land, the Brits couldn’t get their troops in for a month. They let the Germans and Turks wire the beaches, deploy their men, arm the forts, even build supply roads, for Christ’s sake. It’s going to be long and bloody out there.”

“So am I going?”

“You’re going.”

“As?”

“Well, that depends on how it unfolds.”

“I take it you’ve got a German whipped up for me as a possibility,” I said. “I don’t expect any more unfolding between now and tomorrow night.”

“Smith will bring you a packet after dinner,” Metcalf said. “We’re preparing you for a number of possibilities. Nice thing about having control of the German embassy. We’re a fine little document factory.”

“You understand about my shaving.”

“I do.”

“Sorry it limits us.”

“The gauze helps with that,” Metcalf said, studying my left cheek. I’d freshened the bandage. He said, “An American journalist is still more or less persona grata from here to Constantinople.”

I was tempted to pointedly correct Metcalf on the name of the city, in the way Squarebeard had corrected Metzger, but I let it pass.

And Metcalf continued: “You could stay bandaged as Christopher Cobb till you grew your beard back.”

“I could.”

“On the other hand, at least among the core group of Huns in this matter, Kit Cobb is known to be a dangerous man.”

“And the two principals tomorrow night both know me by sight.”

“Even with a Schmiss,” Metcalf said, agreeing.

“Dangerous, huh?”

Metcalf lifted an eyebrow. Of course, he said, without saying it.

I said, “You understand. .”

He stopped me with a wave of his hand. “Of course I understand. I’m glad you have the knack.”

“Knack?” I wasn’t getting sanctimonious on him. It just struck me as an odd choice of a word.

“To effectively save your own life.”

“That knack,” I said, letting go of the qualm.

“It’s gotten a workout the last few days,” he said.

“Which reminds me,” I said. “You got my pistol?”

“Smith.”

“And Wesson?”

“Ben Smith.”

“After dinner?” I said.

“After dinner,” he said. “A Mauser, by the way. A small but effective Mauser.”

“I’ve had them pointed at me.”

Metcalf nodded and he sipped at the wine that Escoffier’s sommelier had paired with the last few courses, an eight-year-old white from the Loire Valley. I was a pretty good drinker, but I was a bit overwhelmed with information already, getting it and seeking it, what with the task ahead of me and the things I didn’t know about that, and with what I was learning about this very odd but ravishingly assertive food, and so the subtleties of the wine were entering into and then instantly vanishing from my head. The wines were good. This one was white and dry. For the seasoned drinker in me, that was enough for this night.

And we did not resume our talk until a Samis de Faisan landed before me and I took it all in and kept it: a pheasant twice cooked but still pretty near to gamey raw, surrounded by a muddy-rich sauce based on what the folks in New Orleans would call roux, this roux happening to be an intense one, with the essence of salt belly of pork rolling around on my tongue in the company of the bird.

Metcalf opened his eyes after swimming for a while in those muddy, pheasant-strewn waters, and he tapped his lips with his napkin. Almost daintily. A good roux and pretty-close-to-nature bird meat properly required a stronger gesture, a more assertive mouth wipe than that, it seemed to me. But that was a nuance of this kind of dining that maybe the swells hadn’t considered.

I wasn’t one to criticize or advise a gourmet in his own realm, however, so I simply waited for Metcalf to be satisfied with the state of his lips, and then I said, “The guy I’m calling ‘Squarebeard.’ Ring any bells?”

Metcalf straightened and widened his eyes, as if he was coming out of a reverie. He looked at me and focused. “You never saw him close up?”

“No.”

“That was a good medium-range description, though.”

“He could be any number of people, you’re saying.”

“No one who rings a bell.”

I reached for the glass of white.

Metcalf said, “This thing you smelled in your room.”

“Spirit gum.”

“Yes. Actors use it for what?”

Of course. Beards.

I didn’t answer but we looked at each other for a moment.

“He was around the hotel that morning,” I said, following what I took to be Metcalf’s train of thought. Squarebeard could have been the guy who was in my room.

“It’s possible,” he said.

“That we don’t know what this guy looks like,” I said, finishing his thought.

“Possible,” he said.

“You boys tracking any German agents who like to make up?”

“This has only recently occurred to me,” Metcalf said. “We’ll put our heads together and see who comes to mind.”

“But if Squarebeard does do disguises,” I said, “and if he’s good at it, it’s to make sure he never comes to mind in a situation like this.”

“You’ll soon be fifteen hundred miles away. We’ll try to figure him out while you’re gone.”

“Did you figure out the guy I take to be Bourgani’s father?”

“You sure you got the room right?”

“It’s position in relation to the street. Yes. Absolutely.”

“It was empty,” Metcalf said. “Seemingly uninhabited. Clean as a whistle. Which, in that tenement, in that part of town, is suspicious in and of itself.”

“The flag behind the bar?”

“We’re working on it. It’s not a country we can identify.”

“There are countries out there our State Department doesn’t know about?”

Metcalf shot me what appeared to be that pleasant-but-stupid-child smile again. “Okay,” he said. “We know it’s not a country. Not a current one.”

“Hey,” I said. “It’s a big world. You guy’s could’ve missed one.”

Metcalf chuckled. An indulge-a-pleasant-but-stupid-child chuckle. He’d gotten touchy all of a sudden. He said, “Have you asked yourself how Metzger knew you on sight? Even with you portraying an expatriate German?”

“I’ve asked.”

“And?”

“Brauer.”

“Well, did you give him some cause to be suspicious that didn’t show up in your report?”

“No.”

“So let’s say he mentions your casual shipboard encounter to the boys at the shop. That wouldn’t be enough for them to go straight to strong-arming you.”

I didn’t say a thing.

I’d given the impression in my report that I’d only seen and identified Selene from afar, nodded at her across the captain’s table, and covertly observed her get-togethers with Brauer. Only that.

Yes, it could have been Selene who made a point of me to the boys at the shop.

Or it still could have been Brauer. Yes, him. He did walk in on Selene and me. I was jazzing the Huns’ prize spy and then I showed up at their secret headquarters. Sure they’d strong-arm me.

I still didn’t say anything to Metcalf and he’d taken to sipping his lately refilled wine.

I sipped mine, and I consciously kept my face as placid as Metcalf’s in spite of an abrupt, retrospective worry: for the Germans, there was still the matter of my knowing about the bookshop. I was worried now for Selene. But there’d been no indication from the meeting I’d heard that they thought she’d compromised them. There was no reason for Brauer to have told her about the bookshop while onboard the ship. If anything, it was Brauer who had some explaining to do. Yet they clearly still trusted him as well. So that detail was a mystery for the Huns. Discounting a severe coincidence, the only possible explanation for my showing up at the bookstore was my being in the same racket they were.

Then Metcalf and I had before us a flaky, golden pie crust the size and shape of a custard cup, sealed at top and bottom and rim.

He and I leaned and sniffed and, to my surprise, Metcalf started talking even as he began to cut into his fat little pie. Normally he’d talk first and then eat in meditative silence. This time, I realized, I was supposed to listen beneath his words. “There’s something exotic inside,” he said. “And it’s all very simple.”

I started to cut as well, and a warm rush of deep-forest, deep-shadow, dug-deep earth smell rose up and into me.

“Truffles,” Metcalf said, lifting a bite before him. “Rare and beautiful. You dig one up; you strip away the earth from it and lay it out bare; you give it some brandy; you put it under the covers; you heat it up; you eat it.”

He put truffle and crust into his mouth. He closed his eyes and kept them closed.

I looked away from him. I cut myself a good bite of Truffes Sous La Cendre and put it in my mouth, the sweet coating of crust dissolving away, and I closed my eyes and I held the warm fold of a truffle on my tongue, tasting a secret thing, hidden long from view, put now inside me and held.

I knew what Metcalf was actually saying.

I chewed the truffle gently and let it go down inside me and I looked over at Metcalf, his eyes closed, his mouth at rest, perhaps holding his own truffle in there still.

“Of course,” I said. “You take it and you eat it.”

“Be careful of women in this job,” he said, without opening his eyes, without changing the angle of his head.

“Yes,” I said.

“Inadvertently, of course, but did you let on somehow about your true identity? When you were with her?” He leaned just enough on the “with” to be discreet but clear about what he meant.

The secondary lesson in this was to trust your intuition about situations. Which is what he was doing right now, about Selene and me. I was already pretty good at that, but it was worth the reminder.

“Of course not,” I said. “She was jazzed by a famous newspaperman. Strictly that.”

“You figure Brauer knew about it?”

“Yes.”

“There you are,” he said.

“There I am,” I said.

He opened his eyes but directed them to his truffes.

I thought he’d warn me about leaving important issues out of my reports.

But he didn’t. I liked him for that. We simply fell silent again.

And we ate until we had new wineglasses and, in them, a decade-old cabernet from Château La Tour Carnet.

“Now you’ll see something,” Metcalf said.

He was not speaking about the wine, though the first few sips were very good, but about the small, porcelain ramekin that arrived for each of us shortly thereafter.

Within, a tiny bird lay on its back, plucked and missing its legs but, I would later learn, in no other way altered, its having been trapped and fattened on millet and figs and drowned in Armagnac — literally drowned to death in French brandy — and then simply salted and peppered and baked in an oven complete with bones and blood and organs. I had barely taken my first look at it when our waiter appeared and handed me a large, embroidered white napkin.

He gave another to Metcalf, who said, “This, my friend, is an ortolan bunting. Considered by many to be the heart and perhaps even the very soul of French cuisine. As for our own souls, we each place a napkin over our head, hiding our face. It is true that this confines and enhances the aromas. But it is also true that we thus hide our faces from God, as we devour this innocent songbird, the human soul, of course, being not without its flaws. The Big Man’s eye is on the sparrow. It is also on the ortolan bunting. You may bite off the head and set it aside if you wish. There is no shame in that. But you eat everything else. Put it in your mouth whole, and after the first celestial rush of its fat, you chew. Very slowly.”

And with this he vanished beneath his napkin.

Was I going too far for Metcalf?

I put the napkin on my head and it dropped before my face.

I picked the bird up in my two hands. Though it weighed less than a pair of kid gloves, it was so clearly a body, I held it with both hands and did not let its head fall back. Though I knew I had to bite that off.

Metcalf was faintly moaning nearby. From the fat, no doubt.

This whole meal. What was this meal? Not a last meal. And surely, it now occurred to me, not a meal at the U.S. government’s expense. Metcalf must have his own money, I thought. A lot of it. He dined here often. He brought me with him. But he was also the man guiding me on behalf of my country.

A crackling sound began nearby. Faint and slow. He was beginning to chew his songbird, this Gentleman Jim.

I lifted the ortolan, inclining my head forward to make way beneath the napkin. I was glad God could not see. Nor anyone else.

I brought the bird to my face and I opened my mouth and my teeth found the bird’s neck and I bit through, the bones yielding easily and the head was free on my tongue and I quickly reached in and removed it and I placed it back into the dish.

I shuddered.

I’ve had some wretched food in my life. I’ve shared food with soldiers at war. Ragtag units badly provisioned in hot countries. I’ve eaten field slumgum, maggoty meat heated in big pots with dirty water and weed roots. But that was from necessity. That was as respite from gunfire. And I had never shuddered.

I shuddered from this songbird’s head.

And from its body, which I now laid on my tongue.

It was tiny, fitting in my mouth as if custom-made for eating, soft there but still structured — I was aware of the whole structure of bones within — and it had settled there only a moment and I had only just closed on it, very gently, when the warm rush of the bird’s body fat — the savor at once rich and delicate — filled my mouth and rolled down my throat.

I did not moan but I understood Metcalf’s exclamation.

Then I began to chew, the bones cracking softly, the taste turning from delicate and reminiscent of hazelnuts to gamey now — bird blood and organ meat, though still in a low key, scaled down to the size of this small singing creature — and even the tiny gamey surges of its lungs and heart carried a hint of the Armagnac, like honey and plum.

And it went on and on, the full chewing of this bird. I eventually grew impatient, but I had a mouth full of tiny bone shards and they were beginning to abrade my mouth and it was as if God found me after all, beneath my embroidered napkin, and His judgment was upon me.

But at last the bird was gone.

I took the napkin from my face.

I looked at Metcalf. He was still covered.

I drank my cabernet. Too fast. Trying to wash the bird from my mouth. Another lesson perhaps. Something about a sensual thing that’s intense and delicious but goes on too long and then goes bad.

My glass was empty and I turned back to Metcalf and I started. He was unmasked and looking at me.

As soon as he knew he had my full attention, he leaned a little in my direction, as if I’d just been delivered to him on a plate. And he said very softly, “You may have to act again as you did last night.”

I knew what he was talking about. But I had the odd reflex to play dumb.

“How so?” I said.

He looked at me steadily and did not reply and I knew what was behind his eyes: I know you know what I’m talking about. Don’t play this game.

“The knack,” I offered.

“That’s the act I was referring to,” he said. “But perhaps a different context.”

Now I really didn’t know what he meant.

“Preemptively,” he said.

In my report to him I hadn’t written of the killing of the Hun in detail. There was already a preemptive taint to what I’d done, which I did not mention. As I chewed slowly on that, I stayed quiet. Metcalf thought I was being dense.

He leaned closer. He spoke even more softly.

“I’m thinking at the moment of Brauer,” he said. “You might find it necessary to kill him.”

I spoke with equal softness. “Gentleman Jim,” I said. “I thought you were among the least violent of men.”

“I am,” he said. “But I have absolutely no qualms about advising men of a different temperament.”

I said, “Knowing what’s necessary when the threat isn’t imminent. That’s a different knack.”

“For the good of our country,” Metcalf said, as if that clarified things.

I could have called him on that. But I didn’t. He seemed to read my eyes or, perhaps, to hear how he’d sounded. He said, “You should trust us and the work we give you. The good of your mission is the good of the country.”

“I understand,” I said. And I suppose I did. I had the sanction to kill.

And when I’d spoken these two words, something apparently shifted in my mouth, from between my teeth, and I felt a small, sharp pain in my cheek.

I turned my head away from Metcalf and reached into my mouth with forefinger and thumb, and I extracted a sliver of songbird bone.