The Star of Istanbul

50

It was a Monday morning and the city was in high stir. Which felt, in some basic ways, not unlike Chicago or St. Louis or New York for a couple hundred yards, if you factored out the Frenchy flavor to the stores. But we crossed the Grand Rue de Péra and not long afterward we were heading downhill pretty severely and the street narrowed and the sidewalks filled with people and they were hurtling always and looking utterly through you and bumping your shoulders.

All the garbage and waste on this street and in every side street had been transformed by tramping feet and rolling cart wheels and dissolving rain into a Turkish carpet of unnameable waste, and you had to work hard to keep your balance with the angle of the hill and the broken cobbles and this slumgum of scum underfoot.

The buildings turned from stone to wood and smacked of the German expressionist cinema, with all the upper floors corbeled out to hang over one another and the street, and at all times they seemed about to tumble down upon you, and among these the Muslim residences identified themselves by the window latticework of the second and third stories, where the women sat to see the world without allowing themselves to be seen.

And still the bodies surged and bumped and went on and the air was full of the smell of rot and offal and mammal waste and the assertions of new food, as well, the stuff to keep you alive now, the roasting of a lamb, the cutting of a melon, the airing and cooking of pepper and garlic and onion, and of course the smell of coffee and the smell of tobacco.

Along the storefronts and along the rubble-strewn empty lots between buildings and along the ashlar walls were barbers and coffee servers and fruit sellers, and now I passed even a couple of scribes at tiny desks on the sidewalk hiring themselves out to the illiterate to write letters that dunned an acquaintance for repayment of a loan or begged a rich uncle for money or supplicated a woman’s father to arrange a marriage or even wooed the woman herself.

With the lurch and surge of bodies it was always a struggle to keep the sailor boy in duck blue and the big hat in sight. But we made it to the bottom of the hill and entered the Place Karakeuï at the mouth of the Galata Bridge, and Lucine slowed and I didn’t know if I was supposed to come closer.

She glanced over her shoulder and nodded and I came up. The welter around us was a great shrouding fog of humanity, though instantly we had to dodge aside as two hamals—men of the porter guild — bore down on us carrying their loads on their backs, one man lashed with three enormous gunnysacks, the other bent almost double with a four-foot-square wooden box strapped to him with leather, and they were screaming at each other in Kurdish and would have run us over if we had not looked for them and leaped away. And though their voices were near and were loud, they vanished at once in the great ocean roar of the voices and the languages of the drivers and porters and soldiers and boatmen and hawkers who all gabbled and cried and cursed in Turkish and Greek and Macedonian and Arabic and Albanian and Montenegrin and Corsican and a dozen more tongues, and these waves of human sounds crashed through the sounds of the steamer whistles and the auto engines and the snorting and panting of horses laboring by and now a camel brushing past grumbling and spitting.

Lucine plucked at my sleeve and we wove our way to the edge of the square and down stone steps smelling of fish long dead but also of the sea — the incongruously bright blue Bosporus was immediately before us — and we cut along the cobbles of the quayside.

“We’re meeting the Principesa Maria,” she said.

She pointed along ahead. A ship was mooring off the quay, a one-stack steamer that looked to be a shipyard cousin to the Dacia.

“In from Constanţa?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “I’ll go ahead now. Stay close. I’ll find you.” She nodded toward a loose gathering of people near the stand of phaetons and taxis at the quayside road.

I moved off in that direction, stopping short of the group, finding a place to stand alone and watch Lucine play the dockside boy, acting as if he were waiting at the bollard to tie off the incoming launch from the Principesa Maria, though hanging back enough from the actual dockhand so as not to be challenged.

It took a while, of course, the offloading of the first wave of passengers from the ship, the trip to the quay, the docking there, and Lucine playing her part, in the manner now of an apprentice to the work, watching intently, and then sliding away as the passengers came down the gangplank.

This was a bit of theater for me, with an actress I admired in a starring role, and it happened with a constant flow of people and carts around and before me, and for some time now — even in the descent from Pera — I’d more or less stopped closely observing things in specific. I’d begun taking things in as broader impressions, which was not my way as a newsman but which I’d lapsed into as I’d let go to Lucine directing the scene.

I’d stopped thinking. I’d stopped being fully, concretely aware. I simply waited to see what Lucine would do next.

It did not occur to me — distracted as I was by Lucine the young man — that Der Wolf might be on that ship. Not till later.

And so I waited. I stood there on the quay, a little apart from the others who were waiting, while passengers from Constanţa and beyond flowed up the cobbled quay toward me and around me and past me.

And then there was a moment when Lucine fell out of character. I could see it in her body, its abrupt change from hovering apprenticeship to a motionless, upright focus directed at the gangplank. I looked for who it might be in the present file of passengers emerging from the launch.

At the top of the gangplank, pausing briefly, scanning widely and quickly and then, starting to descend, was a broad-shouldered man in a suit, a man whose face was strikingly featured and came into recognizable clarity halfway down the plank. It was Lucine’s father.