The Star of Istanbul

39

I locked my cabin door. I took only one step into the room before stopping and removing Brauer’s folded piece of paper from my pocket. I could see now that it was familiar canary-manila telegraph paper. I unfolded it. Typed in blue, by a Morkrum telegram printer, were 19 groupings of numbers, eight in each.

Nuttall.

The cable was recorded at Western Union, Folkestone. The recipient was Walter Brauer, care of the Zeeland Steamship Company. The sending identifier: Wilhelmstraße 76, Berlin. Which was the address of Auswärtiges Amt. The German Foreign Office.

I tossed Lagarde onto the bed and sat in the woven cane chair. I pulled the smoking table in front of me like a desk. I put Nuttall in the center and laid out the telegram beneath it.

This was a very recent development or Berlin would have contacted him more reliably before he left London. The first number was 00620403. There would have to be four factors: page, column, line, and word. I looked at the last full Nuttall page. Number 699. The maximum number of digits was three. This made sense, since the first group began with two zeros, to let this discretely read as page number 6. I turned to it. There were two columns, expressible by a single digit. I counted the number of lines. Seventy-six. Expressible in two digits. And I saw a couple of lines with ten words. Two digits. Eight digits all together, which squared with the number groupings I was looking at. I could read the code.

And one at a time the words emerged, which I wrote in the space above their corresponding numbers.

change

plan

I was right about the structure of the coded words.

meet

Pasha

man

pass

word

Gutenberg

I paused and briefly considered the odd phrase “Pasha man,” but of course Nuttall simply did not have a possessive form of pasha. I would be meeting the Pasha’s man, his aide de camp, his assistant.

And the next word: 49321301. Pera

Palace

own

room

He would come to me at the hotel. We’d refer to Gutenberg. Another buchmann.

sometime

upon

16th

That was the day of our arrival.

Only four words to go and I paused briefly. The type in Nuttall was small and the electric light was dim and counting the lines and the words was hard going well past midnight.

The next word: 43514204.

This took me to the entry on Thomas Middleton, a contemporary of Marlowe and Shakespeare. The first column on the page, forty-second line, the fourth word was the middle word of the title of one of his tragedies: Women Beware Women.

Beware

I was still inclined to hear this note as being addressed to Walter Brauer. I had to hear it the way it must be played: they were talking to me. Brauer’s dangers were my dangers.

The next word was 15123101: page 151, column 2, line 31, the first word.

And I was looking at my mother’s entry in The Nuttall Encyclopaedia of Universal Information.

Cobb

Beware Cobb. I felt an icy grinding in me at this. Not because they perceived me as a threat. But because the German spymaster had found my mother in this book and used her. It was as if he’d put his hands upon her.

I pushed on. I had to beware of me. Okay.

Two more words.

where

And the last word was page 487, column 1, line 64, word 3.

unknown

Perhaps it was the slight relief I had at this head scratching in Berlin over my whereabouts, but the location of that word in Nuttall made me laugh out loud. A poem from a Victorian English poet named Coventry Patmore: “The Unknown Eros.”

Beware of Cobb, for he was now Brauer, of unknown eros.

I did feel better about one doubt that had begun to creep into me, concerning a secret that Selene was still withholding. What did Brauer say to her to provoke her to kill him? It had to be seriously threatening. I had begun to worry, as I’d decoded this message, that what he confronted her about had come from this telegram. And if it had, then she was already compromised in Istanbul. But it hadn’t.

Perhaps Brauer’s handlers were indeed doing what Smith and Metcalf were doing for me, trying to figure out what the man in the bar was all about. Brauer pretty clearly had not gone inside on that night. He might have returned yesterday, but that tight little group in there would stonewall a man like Brauer. My guys still hadn’t dug up anything; Brauer’s couldn’t have either.

Walter must have come to her tonight and tried to bluff her into revealing something; maybe he threatened her. The bar in the East End was a very touchy subject for Selene. But if that’s what the argument was about, the question remained, even more critically: why was this such a threat to her in Istanbul that she’d lose her head and kill him?

We had some travel ahead of us.

I figured I might find some leverage with her along the way to learn more.