The Star of Istanbul

35

Selene lifted her face and looked me in the eyes. If this were the movie version of what she’d done, I would have expected her to act out a major emotion. Choose one: shock, horror, fear, rage, guilt, relief. Choose a couple of those. And they would have been bigger than life. But she showed none of that. Her beautiful face — and it was very beautiful indeed, for her having just shot a man — merely subtly acknowledged me, showed that she knew me. Was that the faintest nod she had just given me? The title card might well have read: Oh, it’s you. Are you off to Holland as well?

I left the window. I entered at the aft portal and approached her door. I knocked. I expected to have to knock a few times. I was only just now getting my brain to start to work. I was afraid that the cabin doors would begin opening down the way, that people would be right behind me when I finally got her to open up.

But apparently no one was stirring. And many of the cabins were empty. I knocked again. More softly.

The door opened.

“Come in, Mr. Cobb,” she said.

I did.

She closed the door behind me.

I took a step toward Brauer’s body.

He was wearing his coat but he had no waistcoat, and his white shirt had a tight, red, silver-half-dollar-sized circle just beneath the sternum.

“I believe you know Mr. Brauer,” Selene said.

Only now — with me seeing Selene’s handiwork from her point of view and hearing her voice immediately behind me, and with the smell of hot metal and gunpowder lingering in the room like the smell of recent sex — did it occur to me that she’d just killed one man who she thought was helping her and that she had before her another man who she figured was out to stop her and was a killer himself. And she had a pistol in her hand.

“I do know him,” I said. “Can’t say I like him very much.”

I was relieved that Selene slid up beside me.

We both were looking down at Walter Brauer.

In my periphery I could see the pistol still in her hand.

I glanced at it.

Her gun hand was not quite as composed as the rest of her. It was holding the weapon as if it expected Brauer to suddenly spring up and it would have to finish the job. And maybe it was starting to tremble a very little bit, this hand.

The pistol was a Colt 1908 Vest Pocket model. I liked a small and unobtrusive pistol, if you knew how to apply it. I was carrying one myself on this trip, though it was — stupidly — packed in my bag in my cabin. That snub-barreled Colt, though, looked excessively small and I glanced at the more or less instantly dead man and it struck me that Selene knew how to apply her tiny pistol excessively well. And I suddenly thought I might not yet be out of the woods.

She was continuing to study Brauer and I turned back to him too.

So I took as a premise, for the sake of argument, that she wouldn’t use that pistol on me, at least for now. What then? What was my next move? She’d just shot a guy to death. He was clearly unarmed.

She interrupted my train of thought.

“He tried to rape me,” she said.

Okay. She was offering an explanation, so I figured she probably wasn’t going to shoot me, at least not right away. But I knew Mr. Brauer better than she realized, so I also knew she was lying. She wasn’t his type.

Not that this was a point to argue with her.

The quick and simple question was: If my government wants to stop this woman’s secret mission, why not just turn her over to the authorities for shooting an unarmed man?

This was all going through me not as reasoning, however, but as a crackle of emotion. These were the issues but I could smell that complicated lavender and hay and musk thing she put on herself and I could visualize the naked parts of her where she would touch on that scent with her fingertip. And I felt Metcalf’s hot little mandate slide down my throat like birdsong fat: my government not only sanctioned me to kill; this was the guy they wanted dead. I thought: How do I blow the whistle on a dame I’m still crazy about for doing my own dirty work?

So I looked at her. That profile. Her father’s profile. And I said, “Can I help?”

She turned her face to me.

She looked at me with take-me-in-your-arms eyes. Which I figured looked pretty much the same as can-you-get-rid-of-this-dead-body eyes.

She nodded yes. I can help.

I kneeled beside Brauer and I bent near, into his own lavender smell, cheap and strong, from the pomade on his slicked-down hair. I placed two fingers in the hollow beside his windpipe. He was still warm, but I moved my fingertips around, pressing and waiting, pressing and waiting, and I felt nothing stirring. He was dead. Given the placement of her shot, I wasn’t surprised.

I pulled back a bit and looked at his shirt, where the bullet went in. The silver-half-dollar bloodstain had blossomed into a ragged-petaled red boutonniere. And on these petals was a dark dusting of soot and gunpowder. She’d been pretty close for the kill.

In helping her now, the blood was my concern. There wasn’t much here at the entry point. If the entry angle had been a little upward, from below — and from the way I’d first seen Selene through the window, that was likely — then the wound would be a flap of skin that had mostly closed back up. If I was wrong about the angle, the entry spot might still pretty much seal up, but it’s what happened after entry that I was concerned about: a tumbling bullet, splintering bone into shrapnel, maybe even exiting the body at the back. It was what he was lying in that was my present worry.

I didn’t want to move him too drastically until I understood the situation. So I ran a hand behind his right shoulder, along the rough tweed of his coat, and I lifted at his spine between his shoulder blades. I leaned over him and reached around and more or less hugged him — which made me uneasy for more reasons than one — and I ran my right hand downward, gingerly, expecting perhaps to feel blood.

There was nothing.

I laid him back down.

She was lucky or she was good. Good was what I was afraid of.

I was acutely aware of her presence behind me, standing over me.

But I was useful to her for now.

Perhaps she’d moved her little bag before her as they argued, waist high; perhaps she’d feigned tears and sought a hankie and pulled her little Colt. Brauer had been standing close to her. She simply drew the pistol and kept it there at her waist and maybe took a step nearer and angled the barrel upward and shot him beneath the sternum and toward the heart. No bones in the way. Nothing to make the bullet tumble. It went straight through a ventricle but did not exit the body.

He was bleeding all right. But it was all going into his lungs, and when those were full it would flow over into the cavity of his gut.

“Neat job,” I said.

Which was a bit of unnecessary bravado on my part.

But she simply grunted. A short, sharp exhalation of a sound rather like the sound she made, over and over, during the rough-stuff pounding she’d asked for in our last encounter on the Lusitania.

Which reminded me of another moment that night. She’d asked if I’d ever killed a man. Was she planning this all along?

That was a matter to consider later.

Brauer was about to leave us, so I began to go through his pockets. I did not look at her but I could feel Selene watching me carefully.

A fountain pen in an inner coat pocket. I could keep it there, but I wanted to make sure she knew I wasn’t hiding anything — in case I wanted to hide something — so I held the pen in the air in the direction of her previous grunt. The pen disappeared from my hand.

A handkerchief in his breast pocket. I offered it. She took it.

His cabin key. My hand found it in a side pocket of his coat and I had a fraction of a second to decide what to do. She would no doubt like to check out his things on her own. She would know the key was on him if the door was locked, so I wouldn’t accomplish anything by palming it and hiding it. Besides, I had my lock picks. It was best to make her think I was being open with her. All this went through me in a flash.

I pulled the key from his pocket and held it up.

There was a brief pause. She knew what it was; she was taken aback at my offering it. Good.

It vanished from my hand.

I eased him over just enough, first one side and then the other, to pat down his rear pants pockets. They were empty.

I leaned over him and pressed my left hand into his left front pocket. Empty.

The right pocket, immediately in front of me, was easier. I slid my right hand inside, at the angle he would.

And something was here. A piece of paper. Folded.

No figuring necessary. Instantly I palmed it.

I drew my hand from the pocket and I sat back on my haunches.

“Is there a hand towel at your basin?” I said.

“Yes,” she said.

“Get it.”

I waited, not watching her move, keeping my eyes on Brauer, keeping the hand with the palmed note hanging limply at my side. She would be watching me, even as she did what I asked.

The towel dangled down in front of my face.

I didn’t look up at her.

I said, “Keep it. Watch his mouth when I pick him up. There might be some blood.”

“All right,” she said. She stepped beside me, on my right.

“Other side,” I said. “Be ready when his head falls to the side.”

As she circled me to my left, I moved around on my knees to place myself at a right angle to Brauer’s body. I also slipped the palmed piece of paper into my right-hand coat pocket.

I crossed Brauer’s legs at the ankles and his hands at his waist.

“I’ll need you to open doors,” I said. “Cabin door. Door to the promenade. Look through them first to make sure no one is around.”

I put my left arm behind Brauer’s shoulders and strained him upward. Dead weight. Bad leverage from my knees. My arm began to slide upward and I forced it down, into the center of his shoulder blades, and his torso was coming up.

His head lolled to the right.

Selene’s hands and the towel rushed to it, and I shifted my attention to his knees. I put my right arm beneath them and he felt steady in my grasp and I strained hard in a dead lift, sliding him up my thighs far enough to raise my right leg beneath him and place that foot flat on the floor, and I set him on my right leg.

“Door,” I said.

I had leverage at last and I used my arms but also my right leg, rising up from the knee, and both my feet were on the floor and it was simple now. I was standing with Walter Brauer in my arms.

I looked at Selene for the first time since I’d answered her eyes: Yes, I can get rid of this dead body. She was at the door, opening it, her head bare and her hair rolled up high, the long line of her body dressed once again in form-clinging black. Maybe this was the occasion she’d been outfitting herself for since Monday night.

The cabin door was open and she leaned outside. She looked both ways and drew back in and pressed against the wall, clearing a path for me.

“It’s okay,” she said.

I stepped to her with Brauer and motioned with my head for her to come inside the room.

She slipped past me. I turned sideways and squeezed through the door with Walter, rolling him flatter against me, chest to chest, for a moment, scraping through the jamb.

I was standing now in the center of the corridor and feeling very exposed. I looked in both directions.

Still empty.

The door clicked behind me and I followed Selene to the end of the corridor and we turned left into the vestibule. She opened the portal to the promenade and stepped outside. Framed darkly in the doorway, she spoke from there. “We are alone,” she said.

I moved forward and squeezed through and I was abruptly buffeted by the wind of our twenty-two knot run. The deck quaked under my feet and the urgency of all this rushed suddenly upon me.

I crossed the promenade quickly — one step and another and another — and I was at the railing. I set my feet squarely beneath me and I lifted Brauer higher, up to the top rail, and I rested him on it for a moment, my arms dilating with ease at the release of his weight, happy now just to balance him there.

We were on the first-class promenade. Below was another promenade on the second-class deck.

“Selene,” I said.

She came at once to my side. “Yes?”

“Lean out to see if there’s anyone at the railing beneath us.”

She put her hand on her hair as if she were keeping a hat from flying off in the wind. She bent over the railing and looked down.

She straightened again. She stuffed the bloodstained towel into Brauer’s jacket. Smart. If she tried to throw it away on its own, it could fly back onto the deck below.

“Get rid of him,” she said.

I moved my arms from beneath Brauer and quickly put my hands on him, one at the shoulder and one at the hip, and I pushed hard.

He leapt out and then away to our left as if caught in the wind, and I leaned forward, watched him falling rearward toward the face of the sea, his arms flaring open, and he splashed into our wake and lifted on a wave, and the Mecklenburg rushed on, leaving Walter Brauer in the darkness behind us.