The Star of Istanbul

49

And she fled.

She rose up instantly and walked away. I wasn’t about to try to stop her. The Germans could be watching us from any of a dozen occupied tables around the salon.

Maybe that saved my life. She probably had her pistol in her little bag. Maybe she would have liked to shoot me dead there in the Kubbeli Salon for endangering her plan.

I could see how that plan would seem mortally important, once you’d committed to it. This was the manifesto of any band of nationalists whose numbers were small and whose people were unfocused and unorganized and accustomed to repression: one isolated act could change everything. And they figured this belief had been confirmed last June. An anonymous, undersized Bosnian teenager with a nationalist cause and a sandwich in his hand started the war with two bullets.

I gave her a few minutes to get to her room and then I rose and left the salon.

I was a bit unsteady on my feet. I’d had a lot to drink today. And I didn’t know what to do next. This woman who had a hold on me had a new name and a deadly mission. I didn’t give a good goddamn about Enver Pasha’s life. But I was afraid for Selene.

No.

I was afraid for Lucine.

I was afraid she and her nationalist cohorts, whoever they might be, didn’t have an adequate way out for her after the deed was done. How could they? This whole thing was full of unknowns.

I wobbled before my door.

I thought to knock on Lucine’s.

But there was nothing to be done for now.

And so I went in and I lay down on the bed, and from the darkness coming upon me, I figured I would slip at once into asleep. But there was another darkness first. I thought: She might even be in this alone. She might even be expecting to die. Another thing she said that first night we touched, that goddamn first night: An actress is a fallen woman.

And I woke to her voice.

I opened my eyes. The sun was bright through my balcony doors.

I’d dreamed her voice, I thought. And I’d forgotten already what it was she’d said.

“Kit. It’s me.” Selene’s voice. Lucine’s voice.

I sat up.

She was outside the door.

A clear but restrained knock.

“Kit,” she said. “Please.”

I got up and crossed the room. I opened the door.

Admittedly I was groggy and my head was pounding from raki and wine, but I had trouble comprehending what was before me: an undersized teenage boy dressed in shirt and trousers of dark blue duck and wearing an oversized sunrain hat. A boy gone to sea. And then the pale face was familiar, and this was Lucine’s little brother standing there. And then it was Lucine herself, as if playing some Shakespearean comedy heroine disguised as a boy. She was Viola or Julia or Rosaline, and she stepped into my room and closed the door.

She placed herself squarely before me and very near and she reached out and laid her palm in the center of my chest.

“Listen to me,” she said. “I’m sorry for the way things ended last night. You are a very smart man. A very capable man. I’m not used to feeling that unprepared.”

She took a minute breath and words were rushing to form in my mouth and she stayed them with a very soft push of that hand on my chest. “Especially about something so important,” she said.

I insisted on speaking the words that had formed: “I wish I’d thought of some better way.”

“No,” she said. “None of this is easy. Will you come with me now, please? No questions?”

Without hesitating I said, “All right.”

“I woke you up,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Make sure you’re ready.”

I seemed to be dressed except for my shoes. My Mauser was in place. I excused myself and I stepped into the bathroom and pushed the door mostly to and somehow this was not awkward with Lucine now. “Have you practiced doing this for your role?” I asked from where I stood.

“To hell with you and your Stanislavsky,” she said.

I was ready.

I stepped out and she was standing in front of the door, facing me. She waited for me to cross to her.

She said, “I’ll raise some eyebrows walking through the lobby. But it will be quick. Follow me at a distance. Just make sure no one is following you.”

“Will we turn at the corner of the hotel?”

“Yes.”

“Give me a few moments afterward,” I said.

“I understand,” she said.

Briskly now she spun and put her hand on the doorknob.

But she slowed herself; she paused.

She did not, however, look at me. She said, “Thank you.”

“I’ve never kissed a boy,” I said.

Now she turned.

“For good luck,” she said.

I bent to her. She was no goddamn boy. We kissed, and in spite of her yet again withholding something important from me and in spite of her being in the midst of overtly portraying someone she was not, this felt like the first kiss between us in which our mouths truly, fully touched.

The kiss ended. Her eyes seemed bright as they opened to me. Our faces drew away slowly.

She said, “Have I changed you forever?”

“We’ll see,” I said.

And we went out.

I stayed four or five paces behind her as she moved across the salon with her hips fixed and her legs a little bowed — a boy from a ship at the quay — and a couple of faces turned to look at her but we were through the doors and into the foyer and past the bellhops without a word being said and she turned left and left again at the corner of the hotel and we were heading down the hill toward the Bosporus.

I took a few steps after the turn and I stopped and faced back the way I’d come. If a Hun was following, he’d come around that corner shortly.

I would wait. And I waited, and a couple of men in suits and fezes came round and went by talking intensely and seeming to utterly ignore me.

They continued on past the lingering Lucine fifteen yards or so farther along. She was standing a step or two into the street, smoking a cigarette.

After they were gone, I looked over my shoulder and a phaeton came around the corner at a gallop and rushed by, but there was no one coming on foot.

I looked back at Lucine and nodded, and she nodded, and she took off.

I followed her.