The Star of Istanbul

56

It was not easy to catch a taxi from the ghetto in Ortakiöi and so Arshak led me down the hill and we took the covertly Armenian Unic to get me back to the Pera Palace as fast as possible. Arshak drove, expecting trouble, leaving the young man with his mother. But I convinced Arshak to let me off before the hotel. For now it was best that he stay in the background. We were jumping to a lot of conclusions. And if the Germans were suspicious but had missed the direct connection between Arshak and me at the quay — which was quite possible — it was best not to give them a chance to see us together. They might still be playing this out slow. I’d drop out of the Unic in a side street a block or so from the hotel. We set up a time to meet later tonight after I’d been able to make sure Lucine was safe. We’d meet at the coffeehouse of the yellow dog.

We stopped a block down the hill and a block south of the Pera Palace.

I’d ridden beside him in the front and I opened the door.

We did not shake hands at the parting. Didn’t even think to. But before I could step out, he said, “I trust you.”

“Thanks,” I said.

And then, with a slightly overplayed earnestness in his voice, he said something in Armenian that either meant “May God be with you” or “Don’t fuck this up.”

I simply nodded and I was out of the taxi and striding up the hill.

I entered the Pera Palace, crossing the lobby, heading for the marble steps up to the entryway of the Kubbeli Salon, keeping my eyes more or less forward but carefully noting everyone — not just forward but in my periphery as well — eliminating the locals and the uniformed Germans, though Der Wolf could have traded in his muttonchops for something else. But I saw no one I could take as particularly suspicious as I moved quickly into the Kubbeli and across the parquet floor.

The piano was playing ragtime and I looked at the drinkers and diners. A table near the doorway to the elevator had three German junior officers with pistols on their belts. They all three gave me a glance as I went by.

The elevator door was open and I went in and I told the operator in what was surely the new lingua franca of this hotel: “Der fünfte Fußboden.” He knew exactly what floor I meant. We started to rise.

There were tall, slender windows in the three walls of the elevator, side and rear. I stepped to the rear and craned my neck to focus on the fifth floor and I picked up the balustrade at once. But of course he wouldn’t be cooling his heels outside my room, if he’d come for me. He’d have the key or he’d have picked the lock and he’d be inside, waiting.

I got off the elevator and I stepped quietly to the end of the passageway that led to my room. I let the elevator clank and grind its way back down to the bottom floor. I waited. I waited longer. If he were listening for me, he’d think I hadn’t been the passenger this time. And while I waited, I played over the worst scenario, the one that ground inside me with the sharpest edges. The Germans were waiting for me but they’d already decided Lucine was a danger and they’d grabbed her.

It was time now. I started down the hall, treading lightly on the carpet. I reached Lucine’s door and I stopped. I knocked. Softly.

There was no answer.

Behind me the elevator chains jangled into life.

I knocked again, louder, and I even put my hand into my coat to touch my lock-picking tools. I’d left them in my room.

Lucine wasn’t answering.

I put my mouth near the door. “Selene,” I said, loud enough to be heard inside.

Nothing.

She wasn’t there.

The elevator was rattling its way upward.

I moved on down the passageway. Quickly now. Perhaps she’d left a note for me.

I arrived at my door. I put the key in the lock. I opened the door.

At the open French windows a man was standing with his back to me, wearing a feldgrau German officer uniform, blending into the darkening sky beyond him. The nightstand light was on. His peaked field cap lay on the foot of the bed. I restrained my hand from going to the Mauser, even as he was turning, even as I was beginning to recognize this man.

Colonel Martin Ströder, Enver Pasha’s aide-de-camp.

“Hello, Mr. Brauer,” he said. He had a Luger in a holster strapped around his waist. I didn’t remember that from his first visit to me.

“Colonel,” I said, closing the door behind me.

“I have come to take you to Enver Pasha.”

He and I both kept standing where we were, he by the window, I by the door.

“I’m sorry to have kept you waiting,” I said. “I thought you told me it would be tomorrow.”

“So,” he said. “The plan has changed once more.”

I still didn’t know how to deal with Enver Pasha, given that he was a friend of Brauer.

“Please come with me,” Ströder said, taking a step in my direction.

I was thinking quick and hard about the room. He wasn’t explaining why he was inside. Everything incriminating was in the false bottom of the valise. But things were already decided anyway, I suspected. He hadn’t even asked where I’d been.

“I’ve been horseback riding,” I said. “I’m not presentable.”

He stopped.

“Can I have a few minutes?” I said.

He gave me a once-over look. “Time is more important to the Pasha,” Ströder said. And then he smiled a little, flipping his chin slightly upward. “The Turks are not so scrupulous as we Germans in those matters.”

“Do we need to get the woman?” I said.

He did not answer at once. He was reading me. The news was bad, I realized.

And he said, “We have taken her along already.”

“Very well,” I said. “At least may I wash the horse off my hands?”

He hesitated.

I nodded to the bathroom.

He nodded assent.

I stepped into the bathroom, switched on the light, stood at the basin, looked at my own face, the bandage gray from the ride, and I lowered my face to the basin. I let my hands do their task on their own. I had to think.

My mind was inclined to thrash now, but I held my thoughts steady. The Germans didn’t simply come and shoot me. Perhaps the question of the man known at the Pera Palace as Walter Brauer was still open. Perhaps my knowing the password was still carrying me. Brauer’s body was decomposing in the North Sea. If Der Wolf saw me at the quay and recognized me as Cobb, perhaps he still hadn’t placed me at the Pera Palace posing as Brauer.

And perhaps, as well, Lucine had indeed arranged to do this thing on her own. With an insistent offer of her body, an expressed aversion to Brauer, she could have arranged to be taken personally and immediately to Enver Pasha. She didn’t need her father and me to be meddling with this, trying to save her. An actress is a fallen woman, she’d said. Perhaps she was shooting the leader of the Ottoman Empire to death even as I rolled the bar of soap around and around in my palms. Perhaps she was herself being shot to death in this next moment, even as I placed the soap on the side of the basin and rubbed up the lather on my hands.

I was having a bad feeling about this whole thing now.

I had to assume they either knew or seriously suspected who I was.

If the Germans did know who I was, the fact remained: they didn’t simply kill me, right here and now. Why the pretense?

And I understood. I’d been thinking in the old ways. The battlefield ways. They wanted to interrogate me before killing me. And it might suit them to begin the interrogation without tipping their hand. Perhaps even, for a time, to speak to me as if I were getting away with all this. And, of course, they feared me. They too knew I had the knack. They’d wait until I was in a much more controlled space before getting rough.

I could dry my hands, pull my Mauser and shoot Colonel Ströder to death.

I’d save myself but that would surely doom Lucine. I had to hope — and it would make sense — that they were taking me to the same place they were holding her. I had to let Ströder play this out so I could find out where that was.

All right.

I dried my hands and stepped from the bathroom.

Ströder was there, his field cap on his head. He had been watching me from the shadows, the bedroom light extinguished.

“I’m ready,” I said.

“Good,” he said.

I took a step toward the door.

He stopped me with a lifted hand.

“I’m sorry, Herr Brauer, but I must check for a weapon. Enver Pasha requires it.”

I unbuttoned my coat, spread my arms.

For the possibility of his hands going around behind me, I readied my right leg, ever so slightly angling my knee toward his crotch.

He began to pat me down, his hands slipping inside my coat and traveling down my sides. The Mauser in the very center of my back wasn’t even five inches wide. In my Chicago police beat days, I’d only ever heard of one man, a genteel grifter, who carried a weapon in the small of his back. I’d never known a military man to do this.

Ströder was feeling into my coat pockets.

I was ready to have it out with him hand to hand. But I still didn’t know where Lucine was.

He pulled in closer to me.

I heard him stop his breath.

His arms went around me and he touched my back pockets, his two palms falling upon my backside. Gingerly.

It occurred to me I might still be Brauer to him and Brauer might actually have a reputation. Or Ströder had a reputation of his own.

Before he could lift or turn his hands I said, sweetly, coyly, “Careful there, Colonel.”

His hands whipped off me and he stepped back.

“We shall go,” he said.

The Mauser was still mine.

Ströder led me out the door and along the passageway and down in the elevator and across the salon and the lobby and through the front doors.

A closed-cabin Mercedes Torpedo sat at the curb, as gray as Ströder’s uniform, its whole radiator arrowing forward into a point. The driver was a burly Hun in an enlisted man’s uniform and a peakless field cap. As we emerged from the hotel he snapped to attention, saluted the colonel, and stepped to the back door and opened it.

Ströder led the way the few steps across the narrow sidewalk and he plunged on inside, which I was glad to see. The car was pointed north, to my right, and so following the colonel into the backseat, I would be traveling with him to my left and my shooting hand unencumbered and out of his sight.

I went in.

The driver slammed the door behind me.

The interior was pretty tight. But okay to maneuver.

The driver bounced heavily behind the wheel and shut his door firmly. There was no partition. The car smelled of leather and gun oil and garlic: the seats, their weapons, their breath.

None of us spoke.

We immediately went down the hill but then turned north and crawled for a while through the commencing nightlife of the Grand Rue de Péra, all three of us being, I sensed, from our eyes kept forward and our faces grimly set, sincerely of a single mind about this much at least: how ignorant and vapid were the bankers and diplomats and merchants and bureaucrats and ship captains and Western tourists and all their women who were dining and theatergoing and drinking and dancing while a war was going on from the Black Sea to the Irish Sea, from the North Sea to the Red Sea. And while three men were passing by, one or more of whom likely would be dead before the night was done.