The Star of Istanbul

38

She dressed.

I dressed.

The deal sealed, we were all business now.

“We need to search his cabin,” I said.

“I have the key,” she said.

“I know,” I said. “I gave it to you.”

“I knew it was in his pockets somewhere,” she said. “You couldn’t have actually fooled me, now could you.”

“I didn’t need to fool you,” I said.

“You hadn’t yet taken the precaution of stealing my pistol,” she said.

“You needed me,” I said.

“I still do,” she said.

All business.

I reached into the pocket of my jacket and removed her Colt. “I think we’ll be all right for the trip,” I said. “But you never know.”

I opened my palm to her, with the pistol lying in the center.

She looked at it. She looked at me. “I’m grateful,” she said. And she took the pistol. “That’s the truth,” she said.

“I believe you,” I said.

Selene stepped to the smoking table and picked up her bag. She put the pistol inside. And when her hand came out, she had the key to Brauer’s cabin. She handed it to me.

“Let’s see what we can find,” she said.

And we were standing in the center of Brauer’s cabin, an exact replica of hers.

We looked around for a moment before starting to dig.

His waistcoat on the back of a chair. A large suitcase under the window.

“Was he really a homosexual?” Selene said.

“Yes.”

“How do you know?”

“I knew.”

“He didn’t try to strike up with you, did he?”

“No. He had a rendezvous on the ship.”

“That other man he was with?”

“Yes.”

“I only saw them across the dining room.”

“Not sure if it was prearranged,” I said. “It could’ve been casual.”

“So Walter had depths,” Selene said. “Poor man. His friend apparently didn’t survive.”

“I didn’t see him in Queenstown.”

“Walter seemed a bit dazed. How does a man like that mourn? I’d think perhaps more readily. More like a woman?”

Walter’s love life was no longer relevant. He was dead, after all. Maybe Selene’s little surge of interest was an aftermath of her killing him. I wondered if he was her first.

I crossed the room to his suitcase, picked it up — it was heavy, still packed — and I laid it on the bed. I undid the straps and opened the lid. It was neatly packed with clothes.

I doubted that the things I was looking for would be in here if there was an alternative. He’d keep those closer. “Was this the only bag he was carrying?” I said.

“Here it is,” Selene said.

I turned to her.

She was at the narrow wardrobe beyond the foot of the bed. The door was open and she was bent inside. She straightened and carried a morocco valise toward me. I moved the suitcase toward the head of the bed and she placed the valise at the foot.

It opened from the top.

She stepped to the side, let me do this, though with a keenly watchful eye.

I dipped in.

A fitted toilet case. I checked inside. It held only the usual items, including the straight razor that first told me about him and the late Edward Cable. I put the case on the bed above the valise, starting a stack with a reflex impulse to note the layers and the arrangement for repacking. As if to prevent Brauer from later realizing his bag had been searched. But he was dead.

A folded dressing gown. These were things he wanted in his own hands if his suitcase went astray. I removed the dressing gown and it struck me: black silk. This and everything else Brauer was carrying was new. But he’d had a black silk dressing gown on the Lusitania. He’d replaced it exactly. I found myself not liking this task. Old Walter was getting to be too real to me, watching him make very personal decisions.

And a union suit. Really too personal. I felt like his mortician, learning way too much about him in order to put him finally to rest. Toothpowder. Hair brush. Other things that hardly registered. And then near the bottom, a book. He did not replace his Heinrich von Treitschke. But he was reading Deutsche Schriften by a similar German ideologue: the Orientalist, biblical scholar, and anti-Semite Paul de Lagarde. Walter was keeping up with his early-childhood first language. That was good to know and a very useful thing when I portrayed him. I couldn’t fake Turkish. But I could do German.

I put the Lagarde on the bed, and next from the dim depths of the bag came another book. It gave me a pleasing jolt. This one he did replace exactly: The Nuttall Encyclopaedia of Universal Information. The 1909 edition, I had no doubt. I did not let myself show any interest in it, immediately putting it on the bed next to the Deutsche Schriften.

I glanced at Selene, who was craning her neck to read the book titles.

“Not my personal choice of train reading,” I said.

Selene grunted but left off looking at the books.

The last object at the bottom of the bag was a long sealskin wallet. I removed it. I opened the wallet and drew out a sheaf of documents.

I sorted through them with Selene watching closely. His tickets to Istanbul, arriving on the sixteenth. And tickets back to London for the twenty-second. His passport. I was glad to see that it was like my bogus one: American, not British. Letters of passage and recommendation to officials along the way. I’d examine them more carefully later.

“These are what I need,” I said.

I replaced the papers in the wallet and put the wallet into my right inside coat pocket.

She did not protest.

I repacked the valise but I left the two books on the bed. It was the Nuttall, of course, that I truly wanted. I just didn’t want to draw attention to it.

Then Selene and I rummaged through Walter Brauer’s clothes in the suitcase, both of us feeling very uncomfortable, betokened by our bated silence and the quick agreement that there was nothing here.

I stuffed the clothes back in the suitcase and closed the lid. I glanced at Selene. She was leafing through the Lagarde.

I let her. I began to buckle the straps on the suitcase.

“Did you mean to leave these out?” she said.

I looked at her.

She was thumbing the Nuttall.

“Yes,” I said.

“Why?”

“I’m preparing for my role of Walter Brauer,” I said.

“Did your mama teach you to prepare like that?” I couldn’t tell whether this was skeptical of me or sarcastic about her. It would not have been my mother’s assumed method of preparing for an acting role. She was a larger-than-life actress of the old school, or had been when she rose to her young-leading-lady stardom, though a few of the things I’d seen her do as she moved into middle age were smaller, more intensely real. Moscow-Art-Theaterish, even.

“She had big-paying audiences in a big space, not a Hun with a gun standing in front of her,” I said.

Selene closed the Nuttall, reached down and picked up the Lagarde again, stacked the two books together, and handed them to me.

“Your props,” she said.

I said, “Is there anything else you want to look at in here?”

“No.”

“Then would you carry these for me?”

I handed the books back to her.

She furrowed her brow in puzzlement.

“I need both hands,” I said. “Why leave any questions behind? If you’ll hold doors and check for insomniacs on the promenade, let’s complete Walter’s disembarkation.”

The brow unfurrowed with a small, sweet head tilt of respect.

“Of course,” she said.

I moved Brauer’s bags off the bed, opened the covers and disarranged them, and punched a head dent in the pillow. I picked up the bags and followed Selene to the door. She switched off the lights and we left Brauer’s cabin and dropped Walter’s bags in the sea.

And then we stood in front of Selene’s cabin door as if we’d been on a dinner date and the delicate question was just arising of whether or not we would kiss good night.

Her eyes, though, narrowed a little, like a cat showing it trusted you, and they mellowed and went suppliant and then flitted wide and willed themselves to be quite calm and rational. A whole run of feelings had come and gone inside her, and at the end of it, she said nothing at all. She simply handed me Brauer’s books, turned and opened her door, and disappeared.