Robert Butler - The Star of Istanbul

I nodded. “But I saved the government’s gold.”

“Good man,” Metcalf said. “Some pounds sterling in there to see you through, however. We can assess your further needs in London.”

“I can tell you the biggest one right now,” I said.

I paused and puffed a heavy breath and squared my shoulders to make sure he knew I was serious.

“Yes?”

“I’ve lost two of these in the past twelve months on your behalf.”

I paused again.

“You’ve got my full attention,” Metcalf said.

“A Corona model number three portable typewriter,” I said.

“Right,” Metcalf said. “Which reminds me. Trask also thinks the news story is fine as is. Thinks you’d write pretty fair novels, but just make sure they’re not about spies.”

And so I spent the next eight hours in a Vauxhall-D staff car, with a blessedly laconic sublieutenant driver, heading north to Kingstown, sometimes creeping behind cattle on dirtways and sometimes running at sixty miles an hour on straight tarmacadams. For the first hour or so I had trouble telling my brain to shut the hell up, and I found myself thinking about Woodrow Wilson and his own odd brain, how unlike a commander in chief he was, how he invaded Mexico last spring to kick out a tin-pot dictator he didn’t like and to protect American oil interests but then immediately hunkered down in Vera Cruz and went no farther. How he’d been avidly talking neutrality in Europe and then expedited the ongoing sale and shipment of American arms to Britain. I figured I could see the consistency of all that: the big-business wing of the Democratic party holding sway. But there had to be at least a hundred American dead on the Lusitania . I wondered if he’d pull the trigger now.

Probably not. It made better business sense to sell American arms to Europe than to sell them to ourselves and use them. I wanted to doze off at that thought, but I slid on to the Germans torpedoing the ship with their own agents on board. Did that cast any doubt on Brauer and Bourgani? It was unlikely that those who knew about the agents would think to coordinate with the German navy. The U-boat captains were lone wolves; they didn’t raise their periscopes and then worry about who booked passage on a major British steamship that had suddenly, miraculously appeared in their sights. And with the Knockmealdown Mountains of County Waterford rising out against the horizon, all this thinking I was doing finally blurred into the fatigue of my North Atlantic adventure and I slept.

And then at last I was in Kingstown. The RMS Leinster, a two-funnel Irish mail packet, was at anchor and blowing its all-ashore whistle, and I boarded, not catching any sight of Brauer and Bourgani. I found myself in a private cabin, with double berth beds on one wall and a train compartment bench seat on the other and not enough space between to do a six-whiskey stagger. What I knew, from Metcalf’s information, was that the cabin next to mine held Selene Bourgani, and somewhere on the other side of the ship a similar cabin contained Walter Brauer. What Metcalf didn’t know was that we all were directly over the engine room, and as we hammered our way into the Irish Channel, the cabin and our bodies quickly merged into one quaking entity, making it impossible to distinguish the vibration of the floor from the vibration of the metal frame of the berths from the vibration of our stomachs and our teeth and our brainpans.

I tried for a long while to sleep, but I found myself staring at the wall, beyond which, I was given to believe, lay Selene Bourgani, who was as remote to me now as one of those made-up women mugging their emotions on a moving picture screen.

At last I got up and dressed and went out of my cabin. I turned away from her door and made my way down the corridor to the Cabin Deck entrance hall. I went up the staircase to the Boat Deck and directly into the large, aft wooden-bench lounge for passengers making the five-hour trip without a cabin.

The space could hold maybe four hundred travelers. A hundred or so were scattered, sleeping, throughout the lounge. But I turned to step out onto the deck, and in the three rows of benches nearest the exit doors were a dozen sleeping passengers. They seemed to be together but not together, near to each other but not touching. Men and women; some sleeping, some awake; a few smoking, no one talking. But something seemed to bind them together. I drew near, and then I knew. I quickly scanned back into the lounge to see if the City of Dublin Steam Packet Company had given a certain overt departing instruction. It hadn’t. This little eddy of travelers was singular in this: all but two of them were wearing their life jackets. And I knew at once where they’d come from. Indeed, as I passed them by, I looked more closely at their life jackets, one after another, and all the jackets were the same. A word was stamped on the bosom, in a Bodoni bold font, like a Post-Express headline: LUSITANIA.

I hurried on through the doors and out onto the deck and it was utterly dark out here. The portholes were all closed and the running lights were off, and though the ship was shrouded in a mist thick enough to be called a fog, we were sounding no warning, we were making no sound at all, and we were pounding along at better than twenty knots. Of course the U-boats were in the Irish Channel as well. And I was struck by a thought I didn’t remember ever having on any official battlefield, where, no matter how extensive the field of operations, everyone knew there were places behind the lines or across the sea where things were peaceful, things were safe. On the deck of the Irish mail packet Leinster I thought: All the world is plunging forward in darkness now, and nowhere is safe.

Over the next few hours of fitful sleep and brain-rattled thought, I decided that for now it would be best to keep as much away from the sight of Selene and Brauer as I could. I knew where Brauer lived. I could wait to follow him whenever I wanted. I knew where both of them would be tomorrow night. And if Selene wasn’t there — if Brauer’s coded message was an instruction to deliver something or someone else — then he was more centrally important than the film star anyway. And there were a few things I needed to do before that appointed time in St. Martin’s Lane.

So I hid out and hung back on the Leinster and then again on the London train, waiting till the conductor found me lingering in the sleeping car vestibule in Euston Station and he said, “You need to move on along to your destination, sir. We’re off now to the switching yard.” I picked up my bags and stepped down to the platform, and up ahead the flock of reporters had already descended to pick the brains of the several dozen Lusitania survivors, who were identifiable by their dazed looks, occasional bandages, and ill-fitting clothes. I was glad for my Queenstown special privileges, as they included a deceptively well-fitted suit and crisp-brimmed trilby, and I plowed through with hardly a glance from anyone.

The Waldorf still had a reservation for me, though I was a day late. The desk clerk, with a paste-brush mustache on his stiff upper lip, drew himself up proudly to explain that the hotel checked with the Cunard Line through the night and as recently as an hour ago before canceling yesterday’s no-shows. He was happy to announce that the hotel would have a room for anyone confirmed by Cunard, whenever they might arrive.

This was good but the hotel gave me the willies and I suspected it would do the same for any of the other confirmees. The Waldorf’s Portland stone facade was all eighteenth century Frenchy neoclassicism, as was every stick of furniture and every lamp and every bit of trim in its lobby and its Palm Court. I did not doubt the rooms would carry on the style. In other words, we who survived the Lusitania would be checking into its immobilized doppelgänger, as if we’d in fact all drowned on Friday and this was a meticulously bespoke purgatory.