Robert Butler: The Star of Istanbul

I could barely make out the lifeboat hanging a few paces before me. The ship was wrapped in a gray felt fog. But I stepped away from the door, turned aft, walked into the murk. It was as if the inside of my own head had billowed out to surround me. Inside the fog, I found James P. Trask, the President’s man in charge of covert service, talking to me again.

We met a week ago in Washington, at the massive, limestone and terra cotta Raleigh Hotel on Twelfth and Pennsylvania. The after-dinner trade was waning and we began at the mahogany bar but soon carried our Gin Rickeys to a far corner table to speak in private. No one was nearby. High above us, from the center of the roof, a searchlight was lighting up the Washington Monument half a mile to our southwest.

Trask lifted his drink and I did likewise. Each glass held half of the same lime. We touched glasses and took a good swallow. Trask said, “These were invented back in ’83 at Shoomaker’s, around the corner from all you newspaper boys on Fourteenth. By old Colonel Joe Rickey. He owned the bar but he was also a professional glad-hander and arm-twister. Inventing this, he almost redeemed his whole tribe of lobbyists.”

“To Colonel Joe,” I said, lifting my glass again.

“Colonel Joe,” Trask said. We drank, and he said, “I’d have taken you there but it’s still full of reporters.”

James Trask was hard to read in any way that he wasn’t consciously intending. As befitted his job, I supposed. I was pretty good at reading a man. He delivered this last declaration by angling his square-jawed, man’s-man face slightly to the right and drawing out the word “reporters” like slowly pulling a piece of chewing gum off the sole of his shoe. He was clean shaven and — perhaps influenced by my new relationship to my left cheek — I found this a little deceitful in him. Trying too hard to suggest he was transparent.

He was tweaking my nose. I said, “I don’t hang around with reporters anymore.” Not true, but he knew I was lying and he knew I knew he knew I was lying, and that was the best return-tweak I could manage at the moment.

He smiled. “Don’t change your public ways for me,” he said. “To the world, you have to be Christopher Cobb.”

I did a slow, seemingly thoughtful stroke of my beard, my thumb pressing my right cheek and my fingers descending my left.

Trask knew what I was most conscious of, even before I realized it myself. It was under my hand.

“That was a fortunate little accident down in Mexico,” he said, referring to my scar.

I didn’t like him reading me. I turned the gesture into an extending of my forefinger, which I lifted and ran from my lower lip to the bottom of my chin, and which I then did once again, as if my intention all along had been simply to smooth my whiskers down. I didn’t really expect him to believe it.

“How’s your German coming along?” he asked.

“Pretty good.”

“You’ve got an ear for it, I understand.”

“I do.”

“Are you ready to work?”

“I am.”

“I’ve already informed your paper.”

My publisher — that great American mogul, Paul Maccabee Griswold — was an old-style Democrat, the sort who worshipped Grover Cleveland, and he had big political ambitions; he was only too happy to have me play this grand game for his own private political credit.

Trask took an envelope from the inside pocket of his impeccable black suit with the thin, gray stripe, the suit as snuggly, perfectly fit to his boxer’s body as the Woolworth Building’s glazed terra-cotta. Inside were the photos of Brauer. His jowly face in a formal head and shoulders pose, likely taken for a passport. A snapshot of him standing dressed in academic robes in a grassy courtyard with the arches of a Gothic colonnade behind him.

“Walter Brauer,” Trask said. “German. Technically an American citizen. Travels on our passport. But he’s been a lecturer at King’s College in London for more than a decade. One of the side benefits of our president’s pacifism is our present occupation of the German embassy in London. We’re looking after their affairs. Playing go-between. Not that my office takes our role as the Swiss too seriously. We’ve been carefully examining whatever the Huns left behind. I’m happy to say that Prince Lichnowsky and his boys made a rather hasty departure. Though I should point out we’re being careful to leave even the prince’s cigarettes in their silver case on his desk, exactly as they were last August, in the event the Germans return someday.”

“Think they’ll fall for that?” I said.

Trask winked at me.

The Lusitania ’s whistle bellowed me back to the deck. I pulled up my coat collar. I’d not put on a hat and I ran my hand through my hair, which had gone damp from the fog. But the chill was okay with me. I’d spent plenty of time in hot countries these past few years. The whistle faded and then instantly sounded again, as if this were in response to something looming in our path. But what could they possibly see from the helm until it was too late? I could barely see beyond the stretch of my arm. It was all a yellow blur along an invisible deck wall. On the railing side, in a vague, somewhat more coalesced wedge of the universal gray, were an electric light and a lifeboat only a few paces away, but in this fog their identity was nothing more than informed guesswork. I swelled with that kinesthetic burn I’d always felt before the clash of men on a battlefield. The Titanic was too much with me.

I needed to focus on my assignment, which was how I managed my war nerves in Nicaragua and Macedonia and Mexico. I stood in the fog and continued drinking with Trask in the bar at the Raleigh.

“He’s an agent of the German secret service,” he said. But he didn’t go on. Instead, he drained the last of his Gin Rickey and then lifted his empty glass to me. “We should have another round of these, don’t you think?”

Trask had done this before. Even in our first meeting, he would suddenly decide, in the midst of our conversation, to throw me off balance by making me ask for what I clearly needed to know next. I should have waited him out at the Raleigh, but I wasn’t in a mood to play. At least I put it to him in a way he didn’t expect.

I said, “What does he lecture about?”

Trask let me see the fleeting dilation of surprise in his eyes. He smiled. “Oriental studies,” he said.

“Meaning?”

“He spent his childhood in Jerusalem. His father was in the export business there before he brought the family to Providence.”

“So he picked up some languages.”

“Arabic. Persian. Turkish.”

“He lectures on this.”

“And on Islam. He’s an expert.”

This was the telling thing. The Kaiser had been wooing the Islamic nations since the end of the last century. And in November, three months into the war, in Constantinople, the Turkish Sultan Mehmed V, as Caliph, declared a worldwide jihad, a Holy War, on the British Empire and all its allies. The Ottoman Empire embraced Willie, who had been claiming a spiritual affinity with Mohammed for fifteen years.

Trask said, “He’s used his expertise to make some friends at their Foreign Office. The Brits have one hundred million Muslims in their empire.”

“What’s he doing over here?”

“That’s the question.”

“His family?”

Trask shrugged. “The ones who stayed are dead. He arrived in Washington a week ago. We always watch the Huns on Thomas Circle pretty closely, and Brauer went straight to the embassy. But somehow he slipped out again without us seeing him. We don’t know what he did here. But we do know he’s booked passage back to Britain. That gives you a week to get ready to sail. You’ve got a first-class cabin right near his. First of May. The Lusitania .”