The Star of Istanbul

32

The meal lingered on till past midnight.

When I was at last released from the tuxedo and ready to have a final night’s sleep in a good bed before heading off to an unknown number of nights’ sleep in unknown circumstances, I lay down in my bed at the Arundel and almost at once a knock came at my door. Three quick, firm raps.

I rose and moved quietly across the room, and as I did, my mind finally began to work properly and I anticipated what this was, the mention of it seeming to have been a very long time ago, with all that food in between. But I did not touch the doorknob; I turned my head to listen; and as if I’d been observed the whole time, a voice outside immediately said, “Cobb. It’s Smith.”

I opened the door.

He had his suit jacket on, but his tie was askew. I was willing to bet his shirt sleeves were rolled up under there as well.

He held a kit bag and an oversized, cabin-top leather valise.

“Come in,” I said.

He passed by me. “Sorry to disturb you in your union suit,” he said.

“It’s one in the morning,” I said, closing the door.

“The boss wanted this done before dawn.”

Smith was at the bedside. He closed the covers and laid the two bags on top.

“The boss has one hell of an expense account,” I said.

Smith turned to me and he shot me a sly little smile. “I told you it was good pudding.”

“I’m thinking the government didn’t pick up that tab.”

“He’s got serious family money, our Mr. Metcalf. As I understand it. He’s a bit secretive.”

“As we might expect.”

“As we might expect,” Smith said, turning his back on me, though he went on with his point. “He dines at the Carlton once a week. Often alone. Usually alone. You got his attention.”

“Did he give you the same treatment?”

“Nope.” Smith turned around holding a Mauser pocket pistol in his hand, sideways so I could see its lines, pointed toward the ceiling. “This is yours, I believe,” he said.

I extended my right hand and he put the pistol in it.

The last time I saw one of these it was coming out from inside a suit coat with the intent to kill me. I’d seen a similar one with a similar intent not too long before that. This little thing had begun to get my goat. I was happy to make its friendly acquaintance at last.

It rested easy and light in my hand, hardly more than a pound.

“Thirty-two caliber,” Smith said. “Magazine’s in, but empty. Shells in the bag.”

I wanted him to stop talking. This pistol and I were getting to know each other. I turned away from him and lifted the Mauser and settled the front post of its barrel in the rear V-sight, with the head of a rose in the wallpaper as the target. All through last year’s little adventure in Mexico, I’d carried a Colt 1911. A fine but large weapon that was now at the bottom of the North Atlantic, a loss that only just now fully struck me. Too bad. But this covert, diminutive Mauser, with a.32-caliber kick, seemed just fine too. Like going to a lighter bat to get around on a Walter Johnson fastball. Very nice.

I lowered my arm.

I looked at Smith, who was looking at me with an expression that seemed part respect, part fear, and part distaste.

Maybe I was wrong. Maybe that was too much for a look and I was just under the spell of Escoffier putting a bunch of crazy things together onto a single plate. Or maybe I was just feeling all those things about myself.

“What is it?” I asked Smith.

“There’s no it,” he said. “Just watching a guy who knows what he’s doing.”

“I hope,” I said.

“You got a tux for me?”

“In the wardrobe.”

“I’ll trade you for the three-piece wool suit in the kit bag,” he said, and he crossed to the wardrobe and pulled out the tux.

“What’s special about the suit?” I said.

“Berlin tailor. So in a pinch you don’t have to explain a British label.”

“This German with a tailor in Berlin. He’s got a name?”

“I didn’t look. It’s on documents in the portfolio. Including a diplomatic passport.” Smith was crossing back to the bed. “I’ll take the kit bag. You keep the valise. You’ve got a lot of stuff in there. Some alternate selves. Whatever doesn’t fit with who you are should go into the false bottom in the valise. The least whiff of your being a spy and any of the countries you’ll be passing through would walk you into the nearby woods and shoot you.”

“I get it,” I said.

“One thing you don’t need to hide. The ticket for your cabin on the Mecklenburg tomorrow night, heading for Vlissingen. The Brits call it ‘Flushing.’ You take a train from Charing Cross to Folkestone.”

I was going in through still-neutral Holland, my corridor to Germany.

Smith laid the German suit on the bed, and now he was pulling out more candy-store treats from the kit bag: a belt holster and a couple of boxes of.32 caliber bullets.

Smith stuffed the tuxedo into the kit bag, closed it, and turned and stepped to me, offering his hand. I went to tuck the Mauser in at my waist, to free my right hand to shake with him, but I found this didn’t work.

“You need trousers for that,” Smith said.

“Right,” I said, shifting the pistol to my left hand and beginning to shake Smith’s hand good-bye.

“Don’t get me wrong,” Smith said, keeping the handshake going, “Mr. Metcalf is no dilettante. He knows his job. And he says you do too. Good luck out there.”

Metcalf’s declaration of my competence took me by surprise and I said nothing in return but finished the shake with Smith. As soon as our hands separated, he slipped past me and headed for the door.

But he stopped abruptly and turned back. “I almost forgot,” he said.

He dug something out of his inner coat pocket and handed it to me. “Telegram from your boys in Chicago.”

I took it with a thank you and he was gone.

I opened the cable and it was from Clyde Fetter, my editor in chief at the Post-Express. He wrote: Lusitania escape story a killer. Excuse the expression. Follow up solid. Loved the airships. Regular Joes on State Street and beyond agree. You are still the king of the king beat. Keep throwing strikes. Clyde

Which was a good thing.

Nevertheless I tried to give my attention right back to the Mauser. My skill with it seemed more important to me for the foreseeable future. I loaded its magazine and tucked it into the nightstand drawer.

But when I’d returned to bed and the room was dark, I didn’t fall asleep for a time. I found myself thinking hard about the Christopher Cobb that I still tried to believe was me, tried even to believe was the primary me: Christopher Cobb, the newsman. And so I thought of dessert this evening at the Carlton Hotel.

Metcalf and I had eaten songbird together and had spoken openly of my license to kill. There was nothing more to say except to speak of the food and to eat dishes built around foie gras and asparagus and sea oysters and on and on in voluptuous silence. But with the imminent arrival of dessert, Metcalf roused himself from the culinary trance he’d put us both in to praise Escoffier’s brilliant young assistant pastry cook.

He said, “You’d never know to look at him. A thin little wisp of an Indochinese man you’d expect to find pulling a jinrikisha somewhere out there in the French Far East. Or throwing a bomb for a gang of anarchists in the Balkans. But you’d be wrong. This guy is a native genius. The maestro plucked him off the cleaning brigade. He caught him routinely putting aside half-eaten food to give to the poor. But the maestro saw something in him and made him an offer: give up your ideas of revolution and learn to make pastry. Which he did. And his work is about to arrive.”

And it did, on a black plate. Pleine Lune Sur Indochine. In the center was a large, white glutinous globe. The full moon over Indochina. On its face was a drizzling of pomegranate juice. There was blood on this moon. Which was, in fact, a sticky-rice cake filled with fruit, both fresh and dried, and with nuts, but dominated by the flavors of mango and brandy and a citrusy flavor, but not a citrus I knew, as if the fruit grew in the ground instead of in the air. Lemongrass, Metcalf told me. And it was very good indeed, the handiwork of this apparent jinrikisha runner.

And I met him in Escoffier’s kitchen, where the Carlton’s once-a-week Gentleman Jim Metcalf and I were invited after dinner, and I was introduced to Georges Auguste Escoffier himself — a tiny man, dressed not like a chef but like a diplomat or a banker, in a frock coat and striped pants — and to the young genius of a pastry chef, who wore the traditional kitchen whites and a tall toque blanche and whose name — I finally heard it properly from his own lips — was Nguyê˜n Tâ´t Thành. I was introduced as Christopher Cobb, the famous American newspaper foreign correspondent. This made Mr. Thành’s eyes widen.

And at his first opportunity, while Escoffier and Metcalf ardently talked truffles, Mr. Thành drew me aside, beneath a hanging row of gleaming copper pots, where we quickly found a common language — an outsider’s passable French. He spoke to me rapidly, softly.

He said, “I was in your country three years ago. In New York City and then in Boston. I admire what your Declaration of Independence says, though I looked for its fruits in your streets and in your government. I’m sorry. I looked with very little success. But your press. Your newspapers. Your magazines. I have seen them speak openly about the evils of your society and about the evils abroad in the world. I urge you, Monsieur Cobb, to turn your skills of. . what is your English word? Muckraking. Please I implore you to turn your skills toward the evils of empire. Empire driven by business. This present war is about empire, and empire is about rich people getting richer, exploiting the people that they rule by imperial force. And please. .”

“Cobb.” This was Metcalf’s voice. “I want you to hear this.”

I kept my eyes on Thành. “Please,” he repeated. “Begin with the Vietnamese people.”

Metcalf said, “It’s what I was telling you about black and white.”

He was referring, I assumed, to truffles.

But I was having trouble drawing my eyes away from the unblinking eyes before me, eyes as black as the heavens surrounding a moon touched with blood.

Thành said, “You are a man who seeks the truth. You can give the news of this to the world.”

I turned away from him now, this Indochinese, this Vietnamese.

But in my hotel bed, on the night before Christopher Cobb, the American secret agent, was to put out to sea once more in pursuit of German secret agents, it was not so easy to let that little man go.