Robert Butler - The Star of Istanbul

I drew closer to the window and tented my eyes from the sunlight. A desk sat facing the street in a front reception space, and at the desk sat a broad-shouldered, beardless man with upstanding bristled hair. The writing lamp beside him was off. He was reading loose pages on the desktop and I rapped on the window with one knuckle. Just loud enough to be heard. A confidential rap.

The man looked up at me.

I touched my chest and opened that hand toward him: I wished to come in.

He pointed at the hand-written sign.

I said, loud enough to be heard through the window, but barely. No louder. “ Bitte, ” I said. I put my head and tongue and lips into my German impression. Like an actor. But not simply to do an accent. I would speak only German now for these Germans. “Please may I come in,” I said.

The man behind the desk straightened.

His cover identity was a bookshop keeper. German perhaps even in that, at least until lately. His deeper identity was quite ardently German. I was perhaps a countryman, in dangerous times. He rose.

He motioned me toward the door as he himself moved to it.

I stepped there and I waited and the lock clicked at the handle and I listened to the welcoming sound of tumblers falling into place. I could have picked that thing easily last night.

The door opened.

The man was maybe sixty and his face was wide and craggy, a face more suited for making book than selling books.

“Thank you, my dearest sir,” I said. Mein liebster Herr . I laid it on thick.

He did not soften. That face probably was incapable of softening. But he stood aside and let me in.

“I have lived in this country for some few years now,” I said, “and I did not trust these people before. Today it is much worse. It is very dangerous.” This declaration was not as much to explain my insistence on entering as it was to explain a possible trace of an accent in my German, something I’d worked hard to expunge but still worried about a little.

The man grunted.

He’d let me in. But I needed a reason to hang around.

“I’m sorry to come at this late hour,” I said. “But on this night I felt the strong need to read in my own language. I have nothing in my flat but English words.”

“Look then,” he said. Though the statement was terse, his tone was almost comradely.

“This part of the city seems quiet still,” I said.

“We must all of us be careful,” the man said.

I was lifted by the pronoun.

He waved generally at the shelves. “The books in our language,” he said, “are found in each subject.”

“Thank you,” I said. And then, “Do I have the honor of speaking to Mr. Metzger or Mr. Strauss?”

“Metzger,” he said.

I waited only a moment, expecting him to ask me my name, and I had decided to be Herr Vogel, a private nod toward a former comrade.

But he did not ask.

He crossed to his desk and sat down.

Arrogant goddamn Hun.

I moved to the aisle along the wall that separated Metzger and Strauss from the Quakers. I faced the high shelves, hung with a ladder on a rail, stretching toward the back of the shop. The place buzzed faintly from the silence and was redolent of the vanilla and turf smells of old books.

I moved along, touching them, seeming to read their titles intently, pulling one now and then from its place to thumb the pages. I was seeing nothing. I was vaguely aware that I was in a section devoted to volumes on history. But I was most keenly aware of the twisting iron staircase to a basement that I was approaching, and the open door to a back room, an office, beyond that.

I was here on a long shot. I was not happy with the present need simply to sneak and snoop. If I was going to do that, at least I wanted to do it in the Germans’ lair. I had it in my head that there might be a place inside 53 St. Martin’s Lane to hide away, to be present at the evening meeting. A stupid thought. There seemed no way to secret myself in such a place even if I found one. Perhaps if I could somehow transmit an anonymous threat, or news of an East End mob coming to this neighborhood, I could induce them to leave the place for a while. But I was not thinking clearly: in that case, they would also move the site of the meeting.

But here I was. At least I could see what there was to see.

I looked toward the front of the shop.

Metzger and I were out of each other’s sight from the near-ceiling-high cases of books. I turned to the office and moved toward the open door quietly but quickly.

Before me I could see the bentwood back of a chair facing into the room and then the whole chair and the end of a refectory table, and then, on the back wall, to the right of the storage room door, the edge of a steel gray hulk of a thing I thought I recognized. I reached the office door and stopped just this side of it. The hulking thing revealed itself now as what I’d expected: a safe with a spinning combination lock. To the right of it was another open door, into a darkened rear storage room, wooden boxes of books dimly visible, stacked inside. More stupidity: I could not see the far third of the refectory table, much less the rest of the room, but I stepped inside.

And someone was there, sitting at the other end of the table. If Metzger had the face of a bookie, this guy was his debt collector. He was my age and a big guy, and by the broken and mended face of him, a brawler for all of his spawn-of-Attila life. He was coring an apple with a staghorn hunting knife. He looked up sharply at me and put the apple down.

And even as the fruit hit the tabletop, a great dog jaw of a hand landed on my shoulder and dug in.

The debt collector was rising, though rather slowly, it seemed to me, almost in leisure, like this was no kind of surprise, and the knife was rising with him. And without hearing its approach, without feeling the slightest stir of air, I was suddenly aware of the wide, craggy face from the front of the store — rather like the sea might feel the tidal pull of the moon from behind the clouds — and very near my left ear, Metzger said, “Now what would make you think to come here, Mr. Cobb?”

These two were very confident. The guy with the knife paused where he stood and drew his free hand across his chest to wipe off the apple juice. Metzger was breathing in my ear and waiting for me to come up with an answer to his mostly rhetorical question. Granted, I myself should have been hesitating, as surprised as I was at his identifying me. But when I signed on with Trask and the boys in Washington to do these secret things for my country, I resolved in tight spots to strike first and reason later. And though time did seem to be going rather slowly, given the sudden intensity of the situation — like being thrown from a horse and seeming to fly through the air in a downright dawdle — in fact, it took only the briefest of instants for me to decide between Metzger’s balls and his instep, choosing the latter, on his right foot, being that I was right-footed and a pretty damn good stomper and this was a more direct and immediate act than lifting my leg and trying to kick blindly behind me into his crotch.

So: up and down and my nice new Queenstown brogue crunched hard and deep and pulverizingly into the top of this guy’s foot and his dog-bite hand flew off me toward the pain, and the knife man went wide in his eyes and I was spinning to my left now, around Metzger, who was screaming in a German I hadn’t studied, and I was behind him and he was listing to the side and making an effort to turn with me but I put my hands behind his shoulders and shoved him into the office just as the guy with the knife was arriving and they both went sprawling, the bentwood chair clattering against the wall, but I’d done all I’d needed to for now and so I hustled down the aisle, betting I could find a copy or two of a 1909 Nuttall on the shelves if I had the time, and I was out the door, and though there was a pretty good flow of midmorning pedestrian traffic and maybe, therefore, a bobby or two around, it was nevertheless not out of the question that the guy with the knife would hide the thing somewhere on his person and vault over old man Metzger and come after me. So I plunged straight on across St. Martin’s Lane, dodging a honking taxi, and I rushed into Cecil Court at not quite a run but a pretty quick almost-jog, dodging around and behind every little gaggle of passersby, trying to stay out of the sight lines behind me, and finally, seeing no coppers and having a relatively free fifty yards ahead, I all-out ran till I turned sharp into Charing Cross Road.