Robert Butler - The Star of Istanbul

I crossed St. James, trusting my disguise now, and I passed him by, my face averted, dragging my right leg. A newer model Unic, with its headlamps flanking its radiator, was a hundred yards ahead, coming this way slow enough to be scouting a fare. I stepped to the curb and into the street, giving a quick glance in Brauer’s direction. He was partway into the street himself, his hand raised, focused on the same taxi.

I turned my back in his direction, lifted my hand discreetly but clearly for the taxi, and it stopped. I stepped into the glass-partitioned tonneau, and I took up the speaking tube and told the cabbie simply to drive on. When we were clear of Brauer, I looked out the rear window. His back was to me, his attention up the street. I told the driver to pull over and wait. Brauer soon caught a massive Panhard Levassor, which would be easy to spot in traffic. He passed us and we followed.

Brauer took us to the Savoy.

It was arguably the best hotel in London. Certainly it was the most elegantly out of place in this ubiquitously begrimed city, thick with coal smoke and acrid fog. The Savoy was faced with pale pink terra-cotta and it had a bright green tiled roof. The river side was open and unfettered; Monet had painted the Battersea Bridge and the Houses of Parliament from an upper room. But the Strand approach was down a short street they’d created a decade ago between existing buildings, and the hotel entrance was dim beneath a covered court, lit in the gathering dark of twilight with gas lamps.

Brauer kept his Panhard waiting while he hustled inside. I kept my Unic, engaging the driver, a quiet old man with a crumpled face and an upcountry accent. I had him for the next few hours if need be, and I started his employ by having him turn us around in the short approach street to face the Strand, and we backed up far enough for me to watch the main hotel doors from the taxi rear window.

I mostly kept my mind in suspension for the task at hand. But waiting for Selene to make her entrance was difficult for me, since I expected never to touch her again. I even thought for a few moments about spirit gum. It was a classic smell of the theater. And just that tenuous association with acting gave me a brief, ridiculous thought that it had been Selene in my room. Of course it had not.

Then she appeared. Selene was a dark slash against the glow of gas, wearing a form-fitting ankle-length black coat and a black turban hat with a veil. Brauer was a lapdog trailing pantingly along as she glided from the hotel door and into the taxi. Brauer scrambled in behind, and the Panhard rolled away, disappearing briefly from view and then emerging from the covered court and gliding past us and into the Strand.

We followed.

I suddenly realized where they were heading when we turned from Bedford into the short and narrow New Street. A few moments later the Panhard made the left into St. Martin’s Lane. I knew number 53 was just around that corner. The Germans hadn’t changed their plans. Brauer was taking Selene to the bookstore.

I took up the speaking tube and told my driver to turn in the opposite direction onto St. Martin’s and stop at once by the curb, on the right-hand side.

The night was dense now with the overcast dark. The streetlights were electric and we were parked not much more than fifty yards from number 53. We sat just past and across the street from another West End theater. The New Theatre. Its facade lights were bright but I was masked in the deep shadow of the tonneau, and I watched through the back window as Selene and Brauer stepped from their taxi and crossed quickly into Metzger & Strauss, Booksellers. The Panhard pulled away and went off down St. Martin’s toward Trafalgar Square.

I withdrew my watch, and it said 7:56. As I held the gold-filled Elgin, all the newly acquired objects of my life suddenly lapped at me like the North Atlantic at my ankles. I became keenly conscious that the two people who’d just flashed before me in the dark shared that whole event, and so, as I pressed my post-sinking timepiece back into the watch pocket of my post-sinking pants, an odd little complicated tremor passed through me.

Another taxicab turned out of New Street and rolled to a stop at number 53. I shook off this upswell of trapped air from the vanished Lusitania. I waited for the taxi passenger to emerge. Another principal player perhaps, not associated with the shop. The streetlight was six or eight yards farther along St. Martin’s; Selene and Brauer had appeared mostly as silhouettes. I watched closely as the taxi door opened.

A man emerged. A slim man, informally dressed in a sack suit, with a soft brimmed hat turned down slightly in front and back, and in a brief flash of dark cameo I could see a sharp-featured profile and a moderate beard. And then he was gone. His cab departed and the street was quiet save for the shuffling past of barhoppers and restaurant diners, the theatergoers already settled in their seats.

I had time now to wonder: given the events of the morning, why had the Germans not moved the venue for their meeting? Perhaps I’d drastically overreacted. Perhaps this morning they’d never suspected me of anything other than being a snoopy newsman. Perhaps that squeeze on the shoulder would have been the worst of it.

But surely they’d felt the danger of my somehow knowing about the bookshop.

And then I went cold. They kept the meeting here to bring me back to them. The guy with the knife and maybe some others were already outside the shop, hanging around the neighborhood, waiting for me to show up so they could finish the work they’d wished to complete this morning.

I withdrew farther into the shadows of the backseat.

I scanned all the passersby, all the lingerers, every man within sight of the taxi. Only two that I could see seemed suspicious. But I was relying on the shadows around me in the tonneau, and there were plenty of shadows on St. Martin’s Lane to hide the Huns.

One of the men I didn’t like the looks of was just across the street, in the far left lobby doorway of the theater. He was a burly man in a three-piece tweed without a hat, smoking a cigarette. This one was the right physical type. He was nearby, and he had the best chance to be checking me out as well. He was hatless, which made me notice him as out of place. That should have made me less suspicious of him, the men watching for me not wanting to make themselves noticeable. But the Germans were smart, and hatless in front of a theater would be smart.

So I watched carefully as he finished his cigarette. He dropped the butt and stubbed it out with the toe of his shoe. If he lingered on, if he lit another, that would make him a real suspect. But instead he turned and opened the door and went in. I could see him through the windows, crossing the lobby. The curtain had gone up a few minutes ago. He was the director. Or the playwright. Calming his nerves.

The other guy was farther up and also across the street. I turned my eyes to him. He was still there. He was mostly just a dark shape, but clearly a big guy. He was standing a couple of closed shop doors this side of Cecil Court. Even as I watched, he eased back into the deeper darkness of the doorway behind him.

I would’ve put two bucks on the nose that this one was a Hun.

I figured I could sit here in the shadows and wait it out and follow someone at the end of the meeting. I wasn’t getting inside the shop anyway. This taxi might have seemed a bit suspicious after a while, but the Kaiser’s boys couldn’t clearly see who was inside, and what glimpses of me they might get didn’t square with my known appearance. They sure weren’t going to try to drag a vague someone out of the back of an automobile on the streets of London on spec.