The Star of Istanbul

36

So we straightened at the railing and turned our backs to it and stood there a moment looking like a couple who’d simply had a nice meal in the dining saloon and now had come out for a breath of air, a long-married couple who could stand beside each other on the deck of a ship on a night that was full of bright stars — I happened to notice this as I’d turned away from the sea — and not say a thing and not quite touch and seem entirely comfortable with that. As if everything important had already been said long ago.

Then we left the promenade — it would have been hard to say which of us initiated this; perhaps we’d both done it at the same moment, spontaneously — and I held the deck door open for Selene and I followed her to her cabin and she held that door open for me. I stepped in and stopped in the center of her floor and she closed the door and crossed past me. We still had that air of taking each other for granted after long familiarity.

She sat on a woven-reed bergère chair that faced the bed and I sat on the edge of the bed directly opposite her, and now the language of our bodies said that we intended to have a conversation on a topic we both anticipated. But in fact we remained silent for a long while.

I imagined that she was trying to figure out how much to lie to me and what sort of lies might be convincing and, indeed, if it made any difference if she were convincing or not.

But it did matter, of course. She needed to be very convincing. She’d just killed the Germans’ agent who was playing an integral part in their larger plan; this was all improvised; they hadn’t sent her out here to do that. She’d just torpedoed her own steamship and here I was again apparently ready to help her swim away. I’d already saved her sweet stern once tonight.

I had my own personal figuring out to do. My own calibrating of lies. Certainly I knew a great many things she did not realize I knew and I had to decide what to continue to keep to myself, what to let out to her, what to lie about. Now that I’d dumped Brauer I was committed to keeping her mission going for my own benefit.

So we sat.

The ship’s turbines hummed. The room swayed. Both rather distantly, however.

And we sat. And there was a moment when she looked carefully at the bandage on my left cheek.

I wondered if she was trying to place it, if she’d had some brief, peripheral glimpse of it in the bar.

But she studied it only briefly and I saw nothing behind her eyes. She was good at masking things, but I figured I’d see at least a little something in her if she realized I’d followed her to the rendezvous with her father.

And we sat.

And I had time to wonder what had happened to her pistol. It was no longer visible. She had no pockets. My eyes moved to the smoking table beside her chair. In its center lay a small, black, snakeskin bag with a silver frame. I’d already hypothesized its use. She must have discreetly taken that with her to the promenade deck and put the pistol away.

I moved my eyes back to her and she was watching me closely.

Somebody needed to speak.

But we both stayed silent a few moments more.

Finally she said, “Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it.”

She hesitated. As if what would follow were spontaneous. But she had a plan now. She said, “You killed a man.”

Another neat shot, her ambiguity. She could be talking about our conversation on the Lusitania; when she asked if I’d ever killed, I said yes. Or she could be talking about the Hun on St. Martin’s Lane. She could even be talking about me taking the fall for Brauer. I had more apparent reason to kill him than she did. She was letting me choose how to take this. Which would suggest a direction for her lies.

“So did you,” I said.

“He was trying to rape me,” she said, as if I’d believed it the first time.

“I’ve never killed a man who wasn’t trying to kill me,” I said.

“Then we are both innocent souls,” she said.

I gave that a moment of silence.

Then I said, “That’s something I haven’t seen yet in the filmic art.”

I expected to have to explain the comment. But without a hesitation she said, “Irony?”

Which was one of the reasons I was still enchanted with her, this quick, telling thrust of her mind. And, under the present circumstances, one of the reasons I was more than a little afraid of her.

“Irony,” I said.

She smiled. Like here we were communicating so effectively.

I smiled the same smile. I said, “Tell me what you think the present irony is.”

This she did hesitate about. I was letting her choose.

But after a few moments, she decided to smile again, a small, sweet — and yes, ironic — smile. She said, “That we should be innocent, though we have killed.”

If we had actually decided, as it was beginning to seem, that we would banter now instead of getting down to serious lies and revelations, I would have contradicted her by saying, No, the irony is that you say we are innocent souls when we are not.

But I wasn’t ready to banter.

“The irony,” I said, “is that Walter Brauer was a homosexual.”

What flickered in her face may have been the first spontaneous expression of off screen emotion I’d ever seen in her. No simple label for it existed; she couldn’t make it larger than life if she tried.

But she’d be back in full control of herself any moment now. I pressed my advantage. “So why did you really kill him?”

“Who are you?” she said.

“Who are you?”

“Did you kill that man on St. Martin’s Lane Monday night?”

“You mean the guy they would’ve sent after you when they found out you murdered Brauer?”

She flickered again. But only very briefly. “Murder? What makes you think you know anything about it?”

“That’s how they’d see it.”

“Or anything about them?”

“So then why did you really kill him?”

“Who are you?” she said.

I stood up and took a step in her direction.

She flinched backward in her chair. Another real emotion from Selene Bourgani.

I was surprised to feel a quick, throat-clutching pulse of regret at her fear of me. Though I knew a little fear would be useful.

I gave her a small, sweet, ironic smile.

I lifted my hand and she flinched again, minutely, with her eyes. But without looking directly at it, I reached to her left and picked up her purse. I did not let go of her eyes, where her own sense of irony had now returned. No more flinching. I did not look at the object in my hands as I opened it. I felt the pistol where I’d expected to find it and I took it out. I closed the purse and dropped it in the direction of the smoking table.

And still we did not let go of our gaze. She didn’t even glance at the pistol. She knew what I’d done.

I put the pistol in my inner coat pocket. I let my lapel go and my coat closed. The pistol thumped me softly and then lay heavily against my heart.

I said, “I’m the guy who has helped you out in a big way three times now.”

She said, “The third being the man in St. Martin’s Lane?”

“Who would have come after you,” I said.

The irony dissipated in her eyes.

“They’ve got others to send,” she said, very softly.

I sat down on the edge of the bed once more.

I asked it a third time: “Why’d you kill him?”

“He doubted my allegiance to the German cause.”

“With reason?”

“With reason.”

“Who has your allegiance?”

“Nobody,” she said. “Me. I have my own allegiance.”

“But they thought it was with them.”

“That was in my own best interest.”

“To work for the Germans and make them think you wanted to.”

She said nothing.

“Why was all that in your best interest?”

“Look,” she said. “Just because you chose to help me out a few times and have now taken away my only means of self-defense, doesn’t mean I’m ready to tell you all my secrets. They’re personal. Not political. Personal. And I’m keeping them personal.”

“All right,” I said. “So I’ll just walk through that door and leave it at that. You can figure out on your own what to do next. Do you think Selene Bourgani can actually hide in this world? They’d find you.”

I started to rise.

“Wait,” she said.

I sat.

But we returned to silence.

I didn’t let it go on. I said, “I’m not going to wait long enough for you to think of a new set of lies.”

She shifted her pretty butt on the woven reed seat.

I decided to help her out. “Did your boy Kurt know something about you?”

She let out a long, slow breath, her shoulders and her chest visibly sinking. She said, very, very softly, “I should be more careful who I sleep with.”

“Actresses and directors,” I said. “That’s an old story.” I didn’t need to say this. But Mama and a few of her guys came to mind. And it was time to seem sympathetic with Selene anyway.

She said, “Actresses and handsome newsmen on doomed steamships.”

I shrugged.

And she said, “Especially when he’s not just a newsman.”

The sympathy was a mistake. I needed to press the attack.

But she spoke first: “So where’s your allegiance?”

“To my country,” I said.

She smiled very faintly. That flicker of irony again. “From what I could gather over the past few days,” she said, “you’ve got your own troubles waiting for you up ahead.”

“I can manage mine alone. You can’t.”

“What do you want?” she said.

“For starters the truth.”

She nodded faintly. She waited. She said, “And what do I get?”

“What do you want?”

“As you said.”

“Help.”

“Yes.”

“I can help you,” I said. “I can’t help the Germans.”

“And what will you want after the starters?” she said.

“That depends on what the truth is.”

“I want more too.”

I shrugged again. Like I was ready to walk out of the cabin and let her handle her own problems.

She said, “Only if the truth makes it worth your while.”

“What more do you want?”

“The truth,” she said. “For starters.”

We both fell silent for a moment.

I said, “It was a hell of a lot easier for us to agree to have sex.”

She drew that big breath back in; her shoulders and chest rose. “Sex is always easier than the truth,” she said.

I nodded. I wasn’t quite sure why. Maybe at the probable truth of that. Maybe just to act as if this was now some sort of intellectual discussion, as if I weren’t ready to take the easy path, right then and there. A tendril had fallen from the thick, up-pinned coil of her hair and down her neck, kindled in the electric light. Her smell in the room seemed more of the musk now than the hay and there was no longer anything in it of flowers. Sex is easier than patriotism as well.

But I bucked myself up the way I did when my job was to face a field of fire with soldiers who were making news. I said, “What were you planning to do for the Germans in Istanbul?”

She pushed the tendril of hair back off her neck. As if she’d known it was there all along and now that it had failed at its appointed task she was dismissing it. She said, “You may have missed your journalistic calling, Mr. Cobb. Your movie-gossip reportage was correct. I had some private times with Kurt Fehrenbach. Actresses and directors.”

She actually paused now to tuck that bit of hair back up into the rest of it on the top of her head.

I waited.

“The movie ended and all of that did too,” she said. “Though we’ve remained friendly.”

“Remaining friendly is always easier than the truth,” I said.

“But harder than the sex,” she said.

I thought: Which is why I’m glad I have your pistol.

“So Kurt went on to become the darling of the Kaiser,” she said. “His personal filmmaker. And a hobnobber with important people on the Emperor’s staff as well.”

She paused. She turned her face to her bag and reached for it. But her hand stopped, hung in the air.

“Did you forget I have your little friend?” I said.

She withdrew her hand and looked at me. Her brow furrowed ever so slightly, as if I’d just hurt her feelings.

“I forgot I have no cigarettes,” she said.

I reached into my outside right coat pocket. Next to the piece of paper from Brauer’s pants I found my Fatimas. I withdrew the pack and I stood and stepped across the space between us.

She lifted her face to me. It was one of those looks from one of those positions that made you want to take a woman into your arms. Instead, I tapped the closed half of the top of the pack on my forefinger. One cigarette emerged from the open half. I moved the pack near her.

Her face, waist high, was still upturned. She smiled at me. Then she lowered her face and looked at the extended cigarette. I expected her to lift her hand to take it.

She didn’t. She leaned forward and put her lips around the cigarette and pulled it from the pack with her mouth.

I did not move. I probably could not have moved if I’d wanted to.

But she was waiting for a light.

I dipped into my left-hand coat pocket and drew out a box of matches. I lit one. I brought it toward her face. She touched my hand and guided the flame to the end of her cigarette.

She leaned back, inhaled long and deeply, turned her profile to me, and blew the smoke toward the window through which, not long ago, I’d seen her standing over the man she’d just killed.

I waited for her face to come back to me. For a long moment it did not. She kept her eyes on the window. Perhaps she was thinking of that same moment.

She seemed a long way from answering my question, truthfully or otherwise, and the smoke of easy sex was in the air between us. I could see through it, but that didn’t make the more difficult thing any less difficult.

What did help, in this particular moment, was the sharp nip of pain on my fingertips. The match was still burning.

I waved the flame away and tossed the match on the floor. Right where she’d planted Brauer, as a matter of fact.

I stepped back to the bed and sat down.

She turned her face. She looked faintly disappointed once again. But not for long. We were still working on the new rules of the game between us.

She said, “Who would you say is currently the most important man in the Ottoman Empire?”

She still seemed to be far from the answers I wanted. But I was willing to play along with her for now.

The answer to her question was easy. Eight years ago a mixed bag of nationalists, secularists, pluralists, and various other haters of the despot “Crimson Sultan” Abdul Hamid II got together and hatched the Young Turk Revolution, which overthrew the Sultan and tried to reinvent the Empire. Three of the Young Turks achieved pasha status and became a ruling triumvirate, but one of them was clearly running the country from the position of minister of war, and he also happened to be the primary instigator of the Ottoman alliance with Germany.

“Enver Pasha,” I said.

Selene nodded. “Enver Pasha. And it turns out movies are all the rage in Istanbul and he’s my biggest fan. Biggest as in most intense, or so I’m told. One of the biggest in the world-leader category as well. Maybe old Wilhelm is a fan too and has him beat in that department. Who knows about Woodrow Wilson.”

“From the way he conducts his foreign policy,” I said, “I don’t think you’re Wilson’s type.”

“Be that as it may,” she said. “Enver somehow conveyed his intense regard for me to the Kaiser who told Kurt who conferred with a bigwig at the Foreign Office who had his minions find me, and they had the right documents and I received some impressive telegrams from all the impressive people in that daisy chain of impressive people and they all wanted me to. .”

At this point, though she had been rolling out this tale with absolute aplomb and wry worldliness, she abruptly broke off. The crack in her voice didn’t seem scaled for a theater audience. Indeed, it seemed like something she wanted to suppress. All right: perhaps wanted to portray as something she wanted to suppress. But I was prepared to keep both possibilities on the table.

She straightened and looked away and composed herself, and she said, “They want me to do certain things. The fundamental one being to spy on him.”

She stopped talking.

I said nothing.

There was this odd sense of plummeting in me, in my chest, in my limbs. An image of the man flashed into my head. It was vague, really, derived from the grainy news photos I’d barely glanced at over the past few years. But it was clear enough to accelerate the plummet: he was merely a thin-framed swarthy little man with black, uptwirled, Kaiser mustaches, downright dudish-looking, as a matter of fact. To hell with this, I thought, I already figured this was her primary skill as a spy.

I almost said something stupid. About Turkish men still having their personal harems. About Enver maybe making room for her.

I didn’t. I was glad I didn’t.

But she seemed to read it in me. Or maybe even in herself. She abruptly shrugged and turned her face away and said, “You know, maybe you should just walk out the door. I’ll deal with the consequences.”

That wasn’t what I wanted.

“I’m already in pretty deep with you,” I said.

She gave me her face, her eyes, once more.

“How was it all supposed to happen?” I said.

“We were going to the Pera Palace Hotel. Walter Brauer was going to meet someone. I’d wait. That’s all I know.”

I didn’t say anything.

She said, “Except then Brauer would deliver the goods.”

This line was delivered cold. Okay. She was going back to the frame of mind that was letting her do these certain things she was supposed to do but which were so much against her inner nature. It seemed to me now — and I was relieved at the feeling — that Selene Bourgani was overwriting her little scene, was overplaying her little part.

“Clearly this is difficult for you,” I said, trying to keep the irony out of my voice.

“Yes,” she said. She was ready to sniffle.

“So we’re back to truth time,” I said. “Not that I’m in so deep that I don’t still need the straight dope, if you want me to hang around and help you.”

Her face did not change in the slightest.

I made sure mine didn’t either as I tried to focus on what I needed to know. I’d been a bit too eager to show off my knowledge when I’d dropped Kurt Fehrenbach into the conversation. I was an idiot showing off for a woman. I missed a logical step. I jumped in with her director-boyfriend after she asserted her allegiance only to herself and not to the Germans. Old Kurt might indeed have something on her that was the leverage to make her work with the German secret service, but the issue at hand had been why she killed Brauer. Fehrenbach’s scoop on her couldn’t be the same as Brauer’s. Fehrenbach used his to make her a spy; it already had to be okay with Berlin. Brauer’s lowdown could have been worth her killing him only if it put her in serious danger with the Huns.

I said, “I need to understand two things. If the Germans want you to seduce Enver Pasha and work him for what he knows and they don’t, why did you agree? And why did you kill an unarmed Walter Brauer? Those two answers need to make sense to me together.”

Again, nothing going on in the face before me. Outwardly. The spinning of her brain’s turbines, however, was pretty much drowning out the ship’s at that moment.

“I’ll give you an answer,” she said. “But a little truthful clarification from you first.”

I presented the blank face and the silence, which I’d been learning from her.

She didn’t care. “You think I’m a German spy,” she said. “And you’re an American spy. Correct?”

This much was obvious. “Correct,” I said.

“Your people know some things about Brauer and about me and no doubt about Metzger and Strauss, as well. Correct?”

“And about the guy with the phony beard,” I said.

There was a little loosening in her. “So you think it was phony too,” she said.

“Who was he?”

“The boss.”

“Any name?”

“They called him Herr Buchmann.”

“The ‘bookman.’ Phony beard, phony name probably.”

“Aren’t they clever?” She let the irony ooze thickly this time.

He was known to the Brits, I thought. Or making sure he never would be known to them.

I put this out of my mind. It was my own fault, bringing Squarebeard up at this point, helping her slide away from straight answers.

“My questions remain,” I said.

She waved off my prodding. “So isn’t that all we need to know? We both of us are playing the same role. You happen to be doing it for the American government. Willingly, I presume. I did hear you pledge allegiance a few minutes ago, didn’t I?”

I nodded.

“And I pledged disallegiance to Germany. I may be out for myself, but your country is mine too. And don’t ask that damn ‘why’ again. America’s fine but it’s in second place with me. Do you really need to know what my old boyfriend has on me and why I’d shoot Walter Brauer to death and why I’d have sex with a small-sized, waxy-mustached, garlicky Turk with three wives and a Napoleon obsession? Maybe I didn’t like Walter’s tie. Maybe I’m a sucker of a slut for guys with garlicky breath, especially if they’re running a whole empire. Maybe I’d have sex with Enver Pasha for free but in addition the Huns are paying me big, in real, imperial gold. What difference does it make? Why should you help me out? Because whatever the Germans want to learn on the sly from Enver Pasha, you and your boys would like to know as well. Let me work for you both. All you sons of bitches. Why don’t you and I agree to that right now and stop all the idiot questions and then have some easy sex to seal the deal?”

This, for the moment, seemed reasonable.