The Star of Istanbul

48

Selene Bourgani and I arrived at the corner table where I’d spent the afternoon. After four reels’ worth of piano music at the cinema tonight, another piano was playing at the far end of the salon. We settled into our chairs and Selene lifted her veil, but the piano’s slow, sad little waltz turned both our faces toward it.

Then she looked at me.

She shivered. Very faintly, but I saw it and I knew what it was about. I sensed it more than saw it, really. And I knew what it was because I felt a small, similar tremor myself.

“We both heard that,” I said.

“Yes,” she said.

On the Lusitania the night we met. “Songe d’Automne.”

I laid my forearm on the tabletop, stretching halfway toward her, and she looked at it.

She slowly removed her black gloves, watching the process closely as she did so.

She sensed the incipient lift of my arm from the table, more intention than action.

“Wait,” she said softly.

I stopped.

She put her bare right hand on top of mine for a moment. She squeezed. She withdrew.

“I haven’t forgotten what you did,” she said.

I wished I could omit the talk for this evening, could just drink with her and take her to her room and hope for gentle please on this night, as uncharacteristic as I’d always thought that was for me with a woman.

But it was I who had to get rough now, in another way.

I think she knew it.

She was reading my face. “Let’s order some wine before we speak,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Something French,” she said.

And so we decided upon a white, a chilled bottle of an oakey Pouilly-Fuissé.

We took our first sips without touching glasses. We weren’t superstitious types. We both knew we had business to do.

“When did you see me tonight?” I asked.

“Before I stepped into the salon,” she said.

“I’m glad you’re taking precautions,” I said. “Things will get difficult now.”

She laughed softly. “As if they haven’t already?”

“I prefer surprises to unknowns.”

She nodded.

I said, “And there are too many unknowns ahead of us as it is. We can’t have any between us now.”

She looked at me. “I thought we had an agreement.”

“That lapsed,” I said.

She waited.

I had to play my possibilities as certainties.

“Why would an Armenian go to bed with a Turk?” I said. And even as her eyes flickered, telling me I was right, I added, “Especially a Turk with the blood of your people on his hands.”

She made her eyes go dead and she took a sip of her wine.

“I told you I’m only doing this for myself,” she said, though her voice was too soft, too much on the verge of a tremor.

“You need to hope the movies never start to talk,” I said.

She knew what I meant.

“I’m not acting,” she said.

“That’s why I can tell you’re lying,” I said.

“Don’t you think my people want to know his plans?”

That thought had continued to kick around in me and I figured it would stop kicking once she confessed it. It didn’t.

“What’s your name?” I said, moving away to the unexpected question for now, the easier question to answer. I would play this in that other persona, a role I found myself missing: Christopher Cobb, reporter. I missed simply getting a fragment of a fact here, another there, and then wedding them in my Corona, putting it on the street and moving on.

But my life was on the line. Hers too. I could do this like a reporter only if it worked.

“Selene Bourgani,” she said, but she played the lie now. Her voice said to me: Guess.

Selene was the Greek goddess of the moon. “What’s the Armenian word for the moon?” I asked.

She smiled. “My name,” she said.

I waited.

She leaned to me across the table. Her voice went very soft. She said, “Can’t we just go upstairs now and fuck?”

I am a man of words. Words and theatrics. King James for words. Shakespeare for theatrics. For both, actually. I love that forbidden word, to be honest. The possibility of that word. And at this moment her using that word felt as if she had just put her hands together at the center of her chest in this public place and ripped open her black bodice and exposed her naked breasts.

But I said, “No. We can’t.”

She didn’t speak. She looked at me and I looked at her. Then she said, “Lucine.”

I did not speak.

And she said, “My name is Lucine Bedrosian.”

“Thank you,” I said.

She did not speak.

“It’s a beautiful name,” I said.

Her eyes filled with tears. These were not sentimental tears. Her face had tightened; her jaw had clenched. I thought for a moment she was angry at me for forcing her to say her name.

But she said, “If we are ever alone again. .” And she stopped. She worked to control her voice. “In the way that we have been alone.” She was in control now. “I would like you to say that name.”

“I will,” I said.

“But never anywhere else,” she said.

I nodded. I lifted my glass and held it between us. She lifted hers and she touched mine and we drank. And I wanted the curtain to come down on that. The chapter to end. But it couldn’t.

Her glass was empty. I poured in three fingers. I did the same in mine.

I said this as gently as I could. “Did your father try to talk you out of coming here?”

There was a stopping in her.

I didn’t mean to play upon her so ruthlessly. She had no idea I’d been there.

“Briefly,” she said.

“I was at the pub on the docks in London.”

This was a moment like the moment that eventually arrived in the sex between us. After she’d held her own, after she’d worked back at me, at some moment she would let go, she would let me carry us forward.

“You were there?”

“Yes.”

She shook her head no, not to doubt what I said but to wonder at how she’d missed this.

“I was standing at the bar,” I said.

“You followed me.”

“Yes. Brauer did too. He was outside, waiting. I followed both of you.”

She’d been sitting in the way women sit, dining or drinking in public: upright, nearly at the edge of the chair. But at this, her head and her shoulders did a slow slump, stopped by her elbows landing on the arms of the chair, and she turned her face away, looking off vaguely toward the far end of the salon, where the piano was playing a Chopin nocturne.

“That’s why he came to me on the North Sea,” she said.

Mostly to herself, explaining what she never quite understood.

When she let a few moments go by without speaking, I said, “And why you shot him.”

She straightened a bit; she looked at me. “Yes,” she said. “He didn’t figure it out as completely as you did, and I guess that night at the bar he convinced himself this man was just some aging money bag who’d been keeping me. But some of the details kept working at him. And he finally came to my cabin and confronted me. He wasn’t cut out for this work. He hadn’t said anything to anyone else about his suspicions and he was stupid enough to tell me so. And he was starting to talk crazy. He was threatening to make trouble in Istanbul. What I did, it felt like self-defense. And he was going to hurt a lot more people than me.”

This all came out in a quiet rush.

Then it stopped, and she took a slug of wine like it was whiskey. When her glass was down, she looked me hard in the eyes. “You would’ve done the same,” she said.

And things began to fit together. The Armenians seemed to be, from all accounts, particularly inept at organizing and defending themselves. What good would a little bed talk from Enver Pasha do them? She wasn’t giving herself to him for that. And then there was her question on the first night she and I made love. Have you ever killed a man?

And then tonight. As if I were picking a lock, the final tumbler lifted: she’d needed to see her German movie. The climactic scene. She’d played this role once before.

“You’re going to kill him,” I said.