The Star of Istanbul

57

We made our way toward the Bosporus, following the Grand Rue through the traffic circle at Taksim and then, just before the Palace of Dolmabahçe, we joined the road along the European shore. We turned north toward Ortakiöi and almost immediately we were running past the palace wall, the very ground I’d covered this morning with Arshak and Lucine.

I was itchy to do something. We were heading to her now. I was convinced she was in serious trouble. And I would be too, as soon as Enver Pasha took a look at me. I wanted badly to slip my hand into my coat and to the small of my back and get this started. But I had to wait. The Huns had to show me where she was.

Ströder lit a Turkish cigarette.

I watched out the window.

We passed through Ortakiöi, the dome and minarets of the big mosque at the quay barely visible in the gathering night. Outside of Pera on the hill, Istanbul was a dark city at night. A very dark city. Except for the handful of motorcars and their headlights, I caught only glimpses now of isolated candles and kerosene lamps: through a house window, before a sidewalk coffee shop, inside a café.

Then all at once the off-road light changed; the fleeting bursts were brighter, steadier. These were electric lights in upper-floor windows behind privacy walls as we entered the long run of waterside yalis, the villas of the wealthy that stretched on up the Bosporus a dozen more miles to Büyükdere and the edge of the Belgrad Forest. Enver Pasha had a yali along here. Of course. The roadside was lit now, a flash of electric lamp light rushed into our windows and away and then another and then darkness and then another.

I moved my head slowly, a small increment at a time, away from the window and toward Ströder. He was steadily lit at the moment from behind. He had taken off his field cap and the back of his head was bright, though his face was in shadow, and this I could discern: he was putting out a cigarette by squeezing the tip between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand.

The Hun behind the wheel made two small, simultaneous movements — a lean forward and a turn of his face to the right — small enough to suggest that the place he was looking for was still up ahead but he expected it soon.

I started slipping my right hand under my coat but careful not to shift my shoulders. I’d cut the flap off the holster in London and now I gently wedged it farther open and I slid my hand inside and took my Mauser into a shooting grip.

I was sure Ströder had seen no movement in me. His gaze was going forward with the driver’s. I looked too. The road took a curve to the right, moved closer to the water, and then straightened, and a couple of hundred yards up ahead the street was lit bright.

Ströder leaned forward in his seat. “There it is,” he said to the driver, who began abruptly to slow down.

I started to pull the Mauser from behind my back, still making as little stir as possible. Even as the pistol came free I was planning ahead. His weapon. Surely he wore it Geladen, loaded. As my right hand emerged and crossed before me, while Ströder was leaning back again into his seat, I switched the Mauser to my left hand just in case. This was the pistol he had to assume would go off at the slightest move, and I needed my right hand for his Luger to easily cover the driver down the road.

The Mercedes engine whined and the gears ground heavily as we slowed and the driver shifted down. The street lights approached.

I wrenched my torso around to face Ströder and I pressed the barrel of the Mauser against his head, into the soft space just above his cheekbone, between his ear and his temple, holding my arm high at the elbow and squaring the muzzle into his head even as I reached into his holster and removed his Luger.

This was all quick, the Mauser leading the way. Ströder was smart enough to go absolutely still at its first touch.

The Mercedes engine was noisy in its deceleration. I leaned toward Ströder and said, as low as I could for him still to clearly hear me, “We must drive on by.”

We were going very slow, nearing the villa where no doubt there were armed guards that Ströder was thinking about.

I let only the briefest fraction of a second pass without him speaking and I nudged the Mauser muzzle into his head. “I will do this now,” I said.

“Drive on,” Ströder said, firmly, loudly.

The Mercedes didn’t have a rearview mirror. The driver could not see the Mauser pointed at Ströder and his head bobbled a bit in the impulse to look back to us. He had his own pistol somewhere on or around him. I thumbed the Luger’s safety forward into the off position, but I kept the pistol low behind the front seat for now. It would be unfortunate to have to shoot the driver in a moving car, though not as unfortunate as his shooting me.

At that moment another automobile passed us from behind, moving into the oncoming lane and going around and swinging back in front of us.

I saw all this peripherally with my main focus on the Hun behind the wheel. He didn’t take his eyes off the road, settling for sliding his head sideways and angling his ear toward us. “Sir?”

I pushed with the Mauser.

“Do it now,” Ströder said. “Drive on.”

“Yessir,” our driver said.

He sped up.

And we passed into the bright light.

I let myself take a quick glance.

A stone wall. A gate and two guards in uniform. The stone wall. And we were past and into the darkness. But I could find this villa again.

Now my plan was vague.

Incapacitate these two. That much was clear enough. I was not yet prepared to go back into the villa. The first audible gunshot would make their advantage in numbers impossible to get past. And it would instantly jeopardize Lucine inside. Metcalf gave me a good weapon for a shipboard murder. My pistol-shaped Winchester with a silencer. It was the right weapon for slipping into Enver Pasha’s yali as well. But it was in the bottom of my valise, in the bottom of the wardrobe, in my room at the Pera Palace.

So these two had to be incapacitated for a good long while. But I kept rapidly playing that possible scene over and over in my head, staging it this way and that, and I was having trouble figuring out even how to safely get these two out of the automobile, much less effectively restrain them, and the only plan that seemed to have a chance of working was to preemptively shoot them both pretty much simultaneously in the head. Which was not what I wanted to do.

In the meantime we were driving north, accelerating again, and one of these two was still armed.

“Not too fast,” I told Ströder.

And he repeated the order to the driver.

We stopped accelerating.

Ahead, just out of the range of our headlights, was the dim form of the automobile that had passed us at the villa.

We caravanned, the two of us, for maybe half a mile, and then the car ahead dropped back a little and came into the clarity of our lights.

I looked at it for the first time with my full attention.

It was a Unic taxi.

The Armenian model.

Arshak had hung around after he dropped me off and he’d followed us.

He was beginning to slow.

We slowed.

Arshak slowed even more, dropping back right in front of us.

The German driver honked his horn. He craned his neck to the left to see if the oncoming lane was clear for us to pass.

I nudged Ströder’s head. “Let’s stay behind this guy.”

Ströder’s face was in shadow so I didn’t see him cut his eyes to me, but I felt the faintest push against the Mauser’s barrel as he had the reflex to turn his head to look in my direction. He’d been making his own plans about how to handle this. All that just got overturned. He hadn’t figured on an accomplice.

“Stay behind that vehicle,” Ströder said loud and firm.

We were in a stretch of road either without a villa or in the owned and managed adjoining grounds of two villas. Arshak was going slower and slower.

We were going slower and slower.

Arshak was probably beginning to figure I’d gained some sort of control in the Mercedes.

The driver turned his head now, abruptly, as if to question these odd orders.

He had only a fragment of a moment to start to put things together before the muzzle of the Luger was pointed at the right eye of his half-turned face.

“Pull over,” I said, straight to the driver.

“Sit very still, Colonel,” I said, pushing lightly at Ströder’s head. “Hair trigger.” But I kept watching the driver, whose face was swinging away from me, going back to the road.

“Driver,” I said sharply. “Both hands visible on the wheel.”

Both the man’s hands appeared at the top of the steering wheel.

He pulled to the side of the road.

The Unic rolled only a little farther and also pulled off.

I said to both my Germans, “It is very convenient to shoot both of you in the head now. So you need to sit very still. I will kill you at the smallest movement.”

They complied.

“Cut off your engine,” I said, and the driver moved the throttle lever on the steering wheel and the engine sputtered and went silent.

“Leave your lights on,” I said.

He did.

And we waited, the three of us, with me sitting as still as these two, as if the pistols were pointed at me.

I figured Arshak was waiting for some sign from the car. But I couldn’t step out or these two would do something stupid, especially the driver.

I could have asked for his weapon. But I had control of his empty hands. I didn’t want to invite him to put a pistol in one of them, especially in this dim light and out of my sight.

So we waited some more. It felt like a long time, though it couldn’t have been. But I knew the longer it went on, the more likely it was that one of these guys would try something stupid.

Finally the driver’s door of the Unic opened. It stayed open for a moment and then Arshak appeared and drew back at once.

I was a lot braver when I was acting from my gut and quickly. This sitting was starting to get me steamed at Arshak. But he was only an actor, after all. He was used to being brave on a stage with fake whiskers. It was tougher to play the role you needed to play in the real dark by a real road along the goddamn Bosporus. So I wasn’t upset. I was simply firm in thinking to this Armenian ham: Jump out of your trench and charge.

And he did.

He suddenly burst from the Unic with his pistol drawn and he hustled into our headlights and up to the driver’s window.

“We’re all taking it easy here,” I said to him, having to will myself back to English. This whole incident was strictly German in my mind.

He looked in.

“Point your pistol at the driver and watch his hands,” I said. “He’s still armed.”

And Arshak popped the muzzle of a Colt 1889 onto the driver’s left temple hard enough that the guy’s head jerked and his hands flew up.

“Hands!” I shouted.

They flew back down to the wheel.

I felt Ströder stir.

I kept my Luger pointed at the driver but twisted my torso and face to the colonel, tracking the little flinch of his head with the muzzle of the Mauser. Keeping him zeroed.

These kinds of things — small reflex twitches — could too easily escalate, take on a life of their own, get out of control.

“Settle down,” I said to the colonel, flipping back to German. And then to Arshak in English, “Keep the driver covered.”

“Got it,” he said.

I opened my back door.

I swung the Luger to the left and aimed it at Ströder’s chest. I eased the Mauser off his head.

“Careful now,” I said to him. “Let me see your hands.”

He held them up, framing his face.

“If one drops, you die,” I said and I backed out onto the running board. “Follow me.”

He did.

I put Ströder with his hands on the hood of the car, near the front passenger-side door, his legs stretched far out behind him and spread wide, leaving him on the verge of falling down. Then I opened that front door, and while Arshak kept his Colt on the driver’s head from the other side, I reached in and relieved the man of his Luger.

Now we had two German soldiers — allies of the Turks and abettors of the massacre of the Armenians — pressed side by side against the hood of the car, the headlights starting to dim as they drew down the battery, Lucine sitting a mile up the road in mortal danger and me convinced that our only chance to get her out alive was to slip in silently, which meant going back to the Pera Palace before making a move. And time was ticking by.

My Mauser was tucked away again in its holster but my Luger was raised and pointing at the back of Ströder’s head. I looked at Arshak and he was looking at me. His own new Luger was pointed at the back of the driver’s head.

Here we were, Arshak and I: two men; two Lugers; two enemies who would do anything they could to reverse this situation; the opportunity of vengeance by proxy for the death of the innocents in the well; the shortness of time and the urgency of our mission; the sloppiness of any alternate plan. And a tidy, obvious solution before us. My trigger finger was prickling to do this.

But Arshak and I continued to look at each other.

“It’s what they would do to us,” he said.

“Exactly,” I said.

A few accelerating pulse beats of silence later, I understood how I felt about that. I said, “You figure you’ve got tow-ropes in the back of that taxi?”

“Unics do get stuck,” he said.

And it was decided.