The Star of Istanbul

44

I hustled back toward the hotel. The Nuttall message said first contact would be “sometime” today. Brauer would have stayed put. I had enough problems being convincing as Brauer; I didn’t want one more. But that concern set my pace, not my preoccupation. The street was a blur to me, registering only enough to navigate it, because of Armenia. I knew some of the history. The old Turks had treated the Armenians brutally. And the Young Turks orchestrated a couple of nasty slaughters themselves. If the bar in London was a meeting place for Armenians, then almost certainly the mystery language spoken there by Selene and the man I took to be her father was Armenian. Cyprus was another lie. For her to have fed me a second consecutive lie about her origins meant she thought the truth would be a problem between us, even with me being in the midst of covering up her killing of an unarmed man. And that problem was clear now. She was heading off to be Enver Pasha’s mistress for reasons she still would not fully reveal. I could see why her being Armenian would deepen that mystery. And she didn’t even know that I’d watched her meet her father in a London bar that catered to Armenian nationalists.

I could have speculated about all this. But I preferred to ask.

I hustled even more quickly off the hotel elevator and along the passageway.

I stood before her door.

I knocked.

There was no sound inside. I did not volunteer that it was me. She had no reason to think I knew more than I’d known when I left her earlier this morning. But neither did she have any further wish to speak to me. I wanted her to open the door without expecting me. No sound was coming from within.

I knocked again.

Nothing.

I put my ear to the door. I still heard no sound.

I knocked again.

As the silence persisted, I began to think she’d gone out. She had her own agenda, of course.

I moved away to my own room. I went in and pulled my packet of lock-picking tools from my bag. In the passageway again I made sure I was alone, even looking over the iron balustrade into the atrium. The elevator was out of sight and the chains and gears were silent.

I returned to Selene’s door and bent to the lock and did my work. The tumblers fell into place and I turned the knob and pushed.

The door opened a few inches and abruptly resisted. A slide-chain lock was securely in its groove. Selene was inside the room.

She was not visible and so neither was I. I took a quiet half step farther to the side just in case.

Even as I did, her voice floated out to me. “Please,” she said. “No service.”

She took me for the maid with a pass key.

I pulled the door to.

I figured I would let this be, for now. She would either stonewall me further or lie some more. It would be better for the time being for me simply to be watchful of her. The problem of who would knock on my door and what might then need to be done could make this Armenian question moot anyway.

Moments later I slid my own chain lock into its metal groove. I took off my jacket and tie. The jacket smelled strongly of tunbeki. I thought to work on a news story. The Zeppelins already having yielded some actual hard news, I hadn’t yet figured out what other printable stories I might glean from my secret life of the past week. I could curbstone a good feature with the best of them, and it was in my mind to do so. But then I abruptly recognized this as an old reflex that was dangerously wrongheaded under the circumstances. The typewriter and the story coming out of it would be hard to explain to my Enver contact.

So instead I pulled Lagarde’s Deutsche Schriften from my bag, opened the drapes to the morning light from my balcony, went to the bed, removed my holster, and unsheathed my Mauser. I put the holster out of sight and I lay down, propping myself up with both pillows. I placed the Mauser on the bed beside me at precisely the place where my shooting hand would land at the first sound from outside my door.

In the meantime, I would read in German. Lunatic German, but it was all I could do at this point to anticipate my becoming Walter Brauer. The book would be for the man who didn’t know Walter. The pistol would be for the man who did.

I laid the book in my lap. I put my palm on its cover and I did give Selene and the Armenians one thought: If she was already doing a double — working for the Germans but actually passing on Enver’s plans to the Armenians — then of course she would still be lying to me, at least by omission. In this business you told as little as you strictly had to.

It was time to open Lagarde. He was known as an Orientalist and religious scholar. These “German writings” were his first plunge into political thought. Perhaps Walter saw some of himself in Lagarde.

I opened the book.

On the title page someone had written an inscription with a flexible-nibbed pen. The words were mostly English and the hand had an ornate, über-Spencerian style: Mein Schnüffel, this is a first of a seminal — yes, a seminal — work. Read it closely.

So Walter — the Orientalist, the Islam scholar — received this book as a gift. If his work for the Germans was a political act, then this would have been a logical book for one of his German handlers to have given him.

The German word at the beginning puzzled me. I didn’t know it, though it sounded vaguely familiar. It was a nickname perhaps. Probably so. The Mein suggested a nickname. And the pure sound of Schnüffel suggested a nickname as well, in an almost childish way. I could hear a German parent call a child a Schnüffel; I could hear a young man use the word with his girlfriend.

This last thought made me think of Walter Brauer and what I knew him to be. And the little joke in the inscription suddenly came clear. Yes. A seminal work.

This was a gift from a male admirer.

I passed my hand over the words.

A man like Walter, in that covert culture: perhaps he’d had many lovers. Did such men treat each other the way normal men often treated women? No doubt. They were still men. And if they could not be openly legitimate in the world, then perhaps they accepted as their lot the fugitive physical connection that other men aspired to with easy girls before finding a virgin to settle down.

And yet. Passing my hand over these words, I saw Walter returning to his bachelor flat at number 70 Jermyn Street having just barely saved his own life from the sinking of a great steamship, a calamity that had taken the life of his lover. Perhaps a significant, enduring lover, the breakup on board trivial and deeply regretted now. And perhaps that lover had once given him a book and Walter felt driven to carry that book with him to Istanbul.

Yes. Cable the book dealer from Boston. I saw now the words “a first of a seminal. . work.” It sounded a bit awkward except if you heard it as professional shorthand: “a first” meant “a first edition.” A first edition of a seminal work.

I’d wondered if that assignation with the late Cable had been prearranged. It had. Walter and this bookseller had known each other for a long time, had been connected for a long time. Walter was grieving more than I’d realized.

I could portray this man.

I understood him.

And I also felt stricken that I’d had to unceremoniously dump his body over the side of a ship into the North Sea in the middle of the night. There’d been no alternative. But I was sorry for Walter. Sorry for his friend Edward. I thought: Too bad they could not have come to rest in the same sea.

And a heavy knock came at my door.