The Star of Istanbul

46

The door was shut and I leaned back against it.

Of course, in becoming Walter, I’d wondered what his role would be in all of this. Why him? I’d figured somehow he was a man both the Germans could trust and a bigwig Turk could feel comfortable with. I figured the role of go-between was a cultural nicety that didn’t get widely broadcast. If the leader of the Turkish government wanted to take an American film-star lover by way of her German-director ex-lover, the protocol would be to have such a man as Walter bring her along to him and make the introduction. A formality for a Westerner to enter a Turkish goddamn harem. And maybe it was indeed something of the sort. But Walter had a history with Enver.

I had some planning to do.

And I had to get Selene to talk with me.

I went out of my room and stood before her door.

I put my ear to it.

There was only silence inside.

I knocked. There was no answer. I knocked again and I said, “Selene. It’s Kit. Are you there?”

“What is it?” Her voice startled me. It came from inside but very near the door.

“I have some news,” I said.

“I don’t feel well,” she said.

“About the meeting.”

A few moments of silence. And then the doorknob turned.

I expected to enter, but she merely opened the door to the length of the chain lock. Her face appeared in the narrow gap.

“What is it?” she said.

“Are you all right?”

She looked pale. But perhaps no more than usual.

“I already told you I’m not feeling well.”

“Can I help?”

“You can help by telling me what you have to say and letting me rest.”

“Enver Pasha is preoccupied with matters of the war. We have to wait.”

“Not tonight?”

“Not tonight.”

“Good,” she said. “Thank you.”

She closed the door before I could reply.

I stood there for a while thinking what to do.

I had a hunch about her. The things still withheld from me might send her from this room.

I moved away.

I installed myself at a table in a corner of the Kubbeli Salon, my back to the wall, able to watch anyone emerge from the doors that led from the elevator and staircase. She would have to pass by me to leave the hotel, and unless she looked sharply over her right shoulder as soon as she entered the salon, she would never notice me.

I drank raki, a clear, fine Turkish brandy that reminded me in its clarity and burn of the aguardiente I’d come to like very much last year in Vera Cruz. I nursed a moderate sequence of raki all afternoon and into the early evening with an equally slow graze through a few orders of meze, small-portion plates, kashar cheese and mixed pickles and ripe melon and a paste of hot peppers with walnuts.

It was good to eat the local food, by turns hot and sharp and sour and sweet. The raki smoothed my mind and let me work at the challenges before me without an edge; though, to be honest, without the edge I could make no progress.

But I’d finished drinking before the evening and then I had a little more food and I was feeling good and collected and energized again and I’d been paying as I was served so as to be ready to leap up and follow Selene at once, but now I was beginning to think she wouldn’t appear.

And then a figure in black floated before me, across the parquet floor, and I was the only one in Istanbul who could recognize her, because nothing of her showed. I’d seen the dress before and it fit her pretty close, but not an inch of flesh was visible, her hands in black gloves, her face shrouded in a black veil. This was the movie star burqa. But I knew who was inside.

I rose and I followed.