The Star of Istanbul

8

She remained invisible again the next day. I did not question that all along she’d intended for me to touch her only once. Did I therefore think of her as fallen? No. I thought of her as an actress. I roamed the A Deck promenade in my shirt sleeves in the cold late afternoon to get my body square with how I was thinking about her.

Brauer and Cable were invisible as well. Brauer’s suite had its PLEASE DO NOT DISTURB sign hanging on the doorknob both times I checked, midmorning and midafternoon. One stateroom on B Deck — Cable’s, I’d’ve been willing to bet — also had its sign on the door. Both men were sick, or hungover. Something.

I dressed for dinner that evening, and I arrived deliberately a few minutes late. I stepped in through the starboard doors and discreetly looked across the room and into the corner. The two men had recovered and were in their places, just commencing to touch their wineglasses in a toast.

I backed away and out of the dining room and I went up the Grand Staircase to A Deck and into the starboard corridor and down to Brauer’s door. I already had my set of lock picks in my pocket.

I stood before the door, and a man and a woman suddenly emerged from the forward en suite stateroom. They were all decked out for dinner, and Madame’s liveried personal maid trailed behind them, her mistress ragging her for having buttoned too slowly. The man locked the door as the maid vanished in the other direction and I slipped the tools into my pocket. The couple hurried toward me. I knocked on Brauer’s door. “Walter?” I said.

The couple passed and I nodded at them. They ignored me. They were late. She was blaming her maid. It occurred to me that Selene seemed not to be traveling with a maid. And that calmed my still niggling unease at our having sex and then her disappearing on me. A woman like her was used to having people around who helped her with every commonplace thing. She obviously wanted to be alone on this trip from the start. I thought: I should be glad to have gotten what I did from her.

The tardy couple disappeared around the corner, and the corridor was empty. I withdrew the two implements I needed and bent to the lock. I inserted the shorter, bent end of a torque wrench into the hole and then I slid the pick inside and gently worked it farther and farther along, lifting each tumbler in turn, sensing them with my fingertips, and then I felt the last one lift for me and I turned the wrench and the bolt yielded and I stepped inside Walter Brauer’s suite.

I’d noted in Selene’s suite which part of the wall to move to and where to put my hand. I found the key in its ceramic mounting and I turned it. All the lights on their sconces flared up brightly through the sitting room.

The place was similar to Selene’s in period replication, and, indeed, to most of the rest of the done-up parts of the ship: early neoclassic — sofa, small desk, three-drawer commode, an overstuffed chair and a smoking table — but with a green and yellow motif in place of rose, and with the electric lights on the wall not pretending to be candles.

I focused exclusively on Brauer’s things.

In this room, a box of Spanish cigars on the table.

On the desk a couple of books, one on top of the other.

No other signs of habitation. Very neat. The DO NOT DISTURB sign must have gone up after the stewardess cleaned the suite this morning.

I stepped to the desk. I picked up the top book, noting its exact position. Gilt-stamped on the cover was the title—Germany, France, Russia & Islam—and a small German Imperial eagle. This was an English translation of essays written by Heinrich von Treitschke, who was a nineteenth century German historian, an imperialist ideologue and an avid advocate of racial purity. I flipped through the pages and found none of the passages marked, nothing inserted. The essays might speak to Brauer’s Germanic politics, and perhaps even to his covert mission. But this would not be an unusual book for any lecturer on Islam at a British university.

I laid it aside. It had been sitting on a slate-colored paperbound copy of the April issue of The American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures. This was clearly part of Brauer’s academic persona. I ruffled through the journal as well, finding nothing, and put both journal and book back on the desktop precisely in their previous position.

The desk had a single drawer. I opened it.

On one side were three yellow Mongol pencils, finely sharpened. In the center was a ten-cent stationer’s notebook with pasteboard covers. I thumbed through it, starting from the back, and all the pages flipping by were blank. I arrived at the first page — also blank — and was about to close the cover. But I noticed where the cover joined the pages: a minute, ragged edge ran along the hinge. I looked closely. A couple or three pages had been torn out.

I closed the notebook and put it back where it had lain.

I kneeled before the drawer and looked underneath, as I drew it out as far as I could. Nothing was affixed there.

I stood up and closed the desk drawer.

I went to the commode at the forward wall.

The top drawer held folded shirts and a couple of waistcoats. I gently probed between them and beneath them, making sure the objects did not shift, did not alert Brauer to my having searched. I found nothing. The next drawer had sweaters on one side and, on the other, gloves, four-in-hands, handkerchiefs. I searched it and closed it and opened the bottom drawer. It pulled out slightly heavy on one side, but the surface contents were lightweight and uniformly distributed: underdrawers and socks and, on the heavy side, a tightly folded black silk dressing gown.

I slipped my hand beneath the gown and felt another book. I lifted away the gown and set it aside, and I picked up a copy of The Nuttall Encyclopaedia of Universal Information. Sixteen thousand self-described “terse articles” in seven hundred pages, edited by a Reverend James Wood, published in London. Placed under Brauer’s dressing gown in the bottom drawer of the commode, it felt hidden.

I thumbed the densely set, two-columned pages and found no markings, nothing placed in the leaves.

On a personal impulse I turned to a listing under “C.” And I read: Cobb, Isabel, a celebrated American actress, born in St. Louis, Missouri; appeared in London in 1885 and 1897; represented, among other characters, Juliet, Rosalind, Kate, and Lady Macbeth. b. 1859.

My mother’s entry was five lines long. I turned to the entry on “Islam.” That major religion, one of Brauer’s lecture topics, was dealt with in nine lines, terse to the point of vapidity.

Brauer was intellectually arrogant. He found me and my work beneath him, even as it rated the captain’s table, a thing that quite literally stopped him in his tracks in the dining room the other night. He would find Nuttall contemptible.

And the reason he was traveling with it was instantly clear to me, thanks to my months with Trask’s own lecturers. It was a code book. The exact same volume was in the possession of Brauer’s handler, wherever he might be posted; it was no doubt sitting, as well, on a desk in the Auswärtiges Amt, Wilhelmstraße 76, Berlin, the German Foreign Office. Perhaps the book was even in the possession of other German secret agents. Some, perhaps, with different cover stories, different useful skills, might even have lain in bed at night in their rented flats in London or Edinburgh or Liverpool or Southampton and browsed the book, might even have hidden the book proudly in plain sight.

Not Brauer. This book tweaked his lifted nose. But he had to use it to decode the instructions he got from the boys in Berlin. They’d telegraph him blocks of numbers referencing page and column and line and word in the book. An unbreakable code, without knowing what the shared book was. Books like this went through various editions; I checked the copyright page. 1909. This would be useful to Trask. We would know the Huns by their Nuttalls. Perhaps even read their secret messages.

I put the book back in its place and the dressing gown on top of it. Silk seemed out of character for Brauer. Maybe this was a gift for a woman. You wouldn’t think it to talk with him. But you wouldn’t think in private he’d suddenly dress like a dude.

I closed the drawer and thought about the process: he’d get a telegram; the telegram consisted of blocks of numbers; he’d follow the numerical instructions to find each word in Nuttall; he’d write the words down. Perhaps he’d even received a message on the Lusitania. For war security, passengers couldn’t send telegrams, but we could receive them.

I looked back to the desk.

I stepped to it and opened the drawer and removed the notebook. Whenever he’d received his last message — on the ship or before he sailed — it was decoded into this notebook. I opened the cover and carefully tore out the top sheet. The paper was pretty thin and the Mongol was a hard No. 2, perhaps requiring enough pressure that it would make an indent on the page below. The tear went cleanly. Its absence would not be noticed. I had hopes.

Then I gave every piece of furniture in the suite the treatment, looking behind and beneath, and with the commode I drew the drawers out as far as possible and checked their undersides as well.

The sitting room had given me all that it could.

I had one more room to go.

I stepped through the darkened bedroom doorway. I have a pretty keen sense of smell, and in the dark, without the distraction of my primary sense, it was even keener. I could not place the faint smell but something was in the air. My first thought: saltwater mildew from the first-class bathroom in the far wall.

I turned the electrical key and the place lit up. I looked toward that far wall. On the left, the door into the bathroom was closed; I myself stood in the mirror directly before me, hanging over the dresser; and on the right, built as a wedged corner piece, was a marble-topped washbasin. Something caught my eye there. I moved the length of the room, aware in my periphery of the two beds arranged foot to foot, as in Selene’s suite, but keeping my eyes on what seemed the unusual detail.

Now I stood before the washbasin. And I was right. Two men’s straight razors were neatly laid side by side. Two shaving mugs sat behind them. And in one drinking glass, two bone-handled toothbrushes leaned away from each other at the top but angled down to the bottom of the glass where their tips touched.

I knew the smell.

I turned. On one of the beds the covers were stripped open, the sheet exposed.

And all the oddness I’d felt in the Smoking Room, trying to understand Edward Cable as a player in the game of German secret service, was explained. He was simply a bookseller from Boston, sharing a secret, certainly, with Walter Brauer, but not the one I was seeking to understand.