Robert Butler - The Star of Istanbul

But if the Lusitania were merely transportation for him, I still wondered why Brauer was in first class. The cost of his suite would’ve kept a working-class family of four in a London suburb subsisting for two years. A prohibitive extravagance for his German bosses. An impossible lot of money for a college lecturer. Perhaps Cable had lied. Given their relationship, that would’ve been possible. Perhaps they hadn’t met on board. Maybe they’d planned this rendezvous, and the moneyed Cable had sprung for Brauer’s first-class accommodations.

Two Fatimas later, the first influx of post-dinner smokers began to arrive, and among them was Cable. I assumed Brauer was immediately behind him. But he wasn’t. At least not right away. Brauer could have stopped in the wash room, but I was picking up something in Cable’s manner that suggested he was alone. He drifted in; he looked around as if trying to decide what he would do. If he were expecting Brauer, there would be no doubt: he’d find their accustomed place and claim it before the following surge of diners took away the option. But he was hesitating; he was wondering, it seemed to me, if he should simply leave.

Then he noticed me. He did not brighten, even in a routinely social way. But he registered my familiarity. I nodded. He nodded in return, and he hesitated some more, made a decision. He crossed the room and arrived before me. “Good evening, Mr. Cable,” I said.

He nodded again.

“Would you like to join me?” I asked.

“Thanks,” he said.

There was a fresh shaving cut on his chin. I thought of his razor lying beside Brauer’s. Cable’s hand had been a bit unsteady tonight in using it. It was a risky thing, I thought, to keep your face bare.

He looked behind him and backed into the chair that faced the couch. He sat down and went straight for his smokes. As he fumbled with his matches — his hands were still unsteady — a steward appeared and took our drink orders. Two whiskeys. He made his a double.

When the steward was gone and Cable had taken a long, calming drag on his cigarette, I said, “Where’s Walter?”

Cable had been watching his smoke and he cut his eyes to me as if I should have known better than to ask about this. That attitude instantly passed. But clearly there’d been some sort of break between the two men.

“Working,” Cable said.

“Working?”

“He has a lecture to write.”

This sounded fishy. From his pinched tone, it sounded fishy to Cable as well.

I said, “So you two knew each other in London, right?”

“We’ve only known each other a few days,” he said, and he was looking away, talking as much to himself as to me, thinking: I never really knew this man. He hadn’t been lying about when they met. Now it sounded as if Brauer was through with his bookseller, who no doubt possessed — he did passionately love books, after all — a romantic streak.

I said, “An experienced teacher like him, writing a lecture shouldn’t take long.”

Cable didn’t answer but took a drink of his whiskey. Which was itself an answer to the question I really had intended to ask. Brauer had let Cable know he’d be tied up for the rest of the trip.

I felt a little ruthless now. Cable was just a bookseller. I didn’t need to be indirect with him. “Does he have another friend on the ship?” I asked.

Cable looked at me. If my impertinence ended the conversation, it made no difference now. But his face went blank. This was a question he hadn’t considered.

I had him talking to himself even as he talked to me, so I pushed it: “Have you seen him with anyone?”

He furrowed a little at this, but he clearly hadn’t.

“Did he speak of anyone on board?” I asked.

Cable shook his head no. I was sitting, I realized, with a jilted lover. One who had trusted completely.

I could have pushed harder. But I wasn’t all that ruthless after all. And Cable wasn’t holding anything back. He hadn’t held back from his Walter either, sadly. Once again it was easy to despise Brauer. Which was just as well.

So I left Edward Cable with his whiskey and smokes and broken heart, and I sat at the desk in my stateroom with my penknife and a Blaisdell No. 624 self-sharpening pencil and the seemingly blank page from Brauer’s notebook. The Blaisdell was a clever thing invented in the last century for big-volume pencil-using offices — beloved by the copydesk at the Post-Express —but also, as it happened, perfect for my present task. Its soft, black, graphite lead was wrapped not in cedar but in a narrow, tight band of paper, the new segment of lead being freshly exposed by nicking the next in a long row of indents arranged up the barrel and then unwrapping the paper. This I did several times; in between, I scraped the accessible lead into an ashtray, finely grinding it into a soft, black, graphite powder, with no wood scraps to interfere.

Then I laid out the notebook page and began a process of dipping my fingertip into the black powder and lightly rubbing it all across the surface of the page. The graphite turned the page dark wherever I touched, but the indentations made by Brauer recording the decoded words on the previous page gradually emerged, not fully absorbing my superficial dusting and coming out lighter by comparison.

I did not let myself read the note piecemeal. I concentrated on a uniformity of stroke and the lightest of touches so as not to darken the shallow impressions of his writing. Then I was done. And on the notebook page was this telegram from Brauer’s German bosses, decoded from Nuttall: Deliver to 53 Saint Martin Lane Monday night at 8.

Maybe it wasn’t a person on the Lusitania that was of interest to Brauer. Maybe it was a thing. A thing too big to carry with him in his baggage — a thing to deliver — and his traveling first class ensured its being handled more carefully.

I pushed back from the desk and I felt I’d probably done as much as I could do for Trask and for country on this voyage. Brauer seemed to be lying low, even divesting himself now of his forbidden bookman. And the more I let it sit in me, the more I figured I was right, that his mission on the ship was to accompany something, which he would deliver to St. Martin’s Lane in London, and which presently was stashed in the cargo hold.

I needed some air.

I was still wearing my evening clothes, though I’d stripped off the tie. The North Atlantic night at twenty knots could be pretty chilly, but I could use some bucking up so I simply rose and stepped out of the room. I turned the corridor that passed Selene’s suite on the way to the door onto the promenade.

I had no intention of knocking. Her attitude seemed clear.

But I stopped in front of her door.

I hesitated.

I stepped back and looked closely at the tiny gap at the bottom of the door. A light shown there.

I stepped forward again and I knocked. I immediately leaned near to listen. There was a rustling inside, quite close. She was in her parlor, not her bedroom.

The night was waning, however. I didn’t bring my watch, but it was well past ten. I used this to justify saying, “Selene?”

Instantly the handle clicked and the door was opening. But it went only far enough to let her face appear, and one shoulder. A few moments later I would struggle to remember what was covering that shoulder, but for the moment I was focused ardently on her dark-of-the-night eyes, trying to read them in conjunction with the tone of her voice as she said, “Mr. Cobb.”

On the surface, this was pretty damn formal for a woman who was stashed in my arms not even twenty-four hours earlier. But the eyes were soft, almost supplicant, almost as supplicant as they were when she and I had begun last night, made more so, oddly enough, by the faux-brittle ironic upturn of her “Cobb.”