Robert Butler - The Star of Istanbul

A handkerchief in his breast pocket. I offered it. She took it.

His cabin key. My hand found it in a side pocket of his coat and I had a fraction of a second to decide what to do. She would no doubt like to check out his things on her own. She would know the key was on him if the door was locked, so I wouldn’t accomplish anything by palming it and hiding it. Besides, I had my lock picks. It was best to make her think I was being open with her. All this went through me in a flash.

I pulled the key from his pocket and held it up.

There was a brief pause. She knew what it was; she was taken aback at my offering it. Good.

It vanished from my hand.

I eased him over just enough, first one side and then the other, to pat down his rear pants pockets. They were empty.

I leaned over him and pressed my left hand into his left front pocket. Empty.

The right pocket, immediately in front of me, was easier. I slid my right hand inside, at the angle he would.

And something was here. A piece of paper. Folded.

No figuring necessary. Instantly I palmed it.

I drew my hand from the pocket and I sat back on my haunches.

“Is there a hand towel at your basin?” I said.

“Yes,” she said.

“Get it.”

I waited, not watching her move, keeping my eyes on Brauer, keeping the hand with the palmed note hanging limply at my side. She would be watching me, even as she did what I asked.

The towel dangled down in front of my face.

I didn’t look up at her.

I said, “Keep it. Watch his mouth when I pick him up. There might be some blood.”

“All right,” she said. She stepped beside me, on my right.

“Other side,” I said. “Be ready when his head falls to the side.”

As she circled me to my left, I moved around on my knees to place myself at a right angle to Brauer’s body. I also slipped the palmed piece of paper into my right-hand coat pocket.

I crossed Brauer’s legs at the ankles and his hands at his waist.

“I’ll need you to open doors,” I said. “Cabin door. Door to the promenade. Look through them first to make sure no one is around.”

I put my left arm behind Brauer’s shoulders and strained him upward. Dead weight. Bad leverage from my knees. My arm began to slide upward and I forced it down, into the center of his shoulder blades, and his torso was coming up.

His head lolled to the right.

Selene’s hands and the towel rushed to it, and I shifted my attention to his knees. I put my right arm beneath them and he felt steady in my grasp and I strained hard in a dead lift, sliding him up my thighs far enough to raise my right leg beneath him and place that foot flat on the floor, and I set him on my right leg.

“Door,” I said.

I had leverage at last and I used my arms but also my right leg, rising up from the knee, and both my feet were on the floor and it was simple now. I was standing with Walter Brauer in my arms.

I looked at Selene for the first time since I’d answered her eyes: Yes, I can get rid of this dead body. She was at the door, opening it, her head bare and her hair rolled up high, the long line of her body dressed once again in form-clinging black. Maybe this was the occasion she’d been outfitting herself for since Monday night.

The cabin door was open and she leaned outside. She looked both ways and drew back in and pressed against the wall, clearing a path for me.

“It’s okay,” she said.

I stepped to her with Brauer and motioned with my head for her to come inside the room.

She slipped past me. I turned sideways and squeezed through the door with Walter, rolling him flatter against me, chest to chest, for a moment, scraping through the jamb.

I was standing now in the center of the corridor and feeling very exposed. I looked in both directions.

Still empty.

The door clicked behind me and I followed Selene to the end of the corridor and we turned left into the vestibule. She opened the portal to the promenade and stepped outside. Framed darkly in the doorway, she spoke from there. “We are alone,” she said.

I moved forward and squeezed through and I was abruptly buffeted by the wind of our twenty-two knot run. The deck quaked under my feet and the urgency of all this rushed suddenly upon me.

I crossed the promenade quickly — one step and another and another — and I was at the railing. I set my feet squarely beneath me and I lifted Brauer higher, up to the top rail, and I rested him on it for a moment, my arms dilating with ease at the release of his weight, happy now just to balance him there.

We were on the first-class promenade. Below was another promenade on the second-class deck.

“Selene,” I said.

She came at once to my side. “Yes?”

“Lean out to see if there’s anyone at the railing beneath us.”

She put her hand on her hair as if she were keeping a hat from flying off in the wind. She bent over the railing and looked down.

She straightened again. She stuffed the bloodstained towel into Brauer’s jacket. Smart. If she tried to throw it away on its own, it could fly back onto the deck below.

“Get rid of him,” she said.

I moved my arms from beneath Brauer and quickly put my hands on him, one at the shoulder and one at the hip, and I pushed hard.

He leapt out and then away to our left as if caught in the wind, and I leaned forward, watched him falling rearward toward the face of the sea, his arms flaring open, and he splashed into our wake and lifted on a wave, and the Mecklenburg rushed on, leaving Walter Brauer in the darkness behind us.

So we straightened at the railing and turned our backs to it and stood there a moment looking like a couple who’d simply had a nice meal in the dining saloon and now had come out for a breath of air, a long-married couple who could stand beside each other on the deck of a ship on a night that was full of bright stars — I happened to notice this as I’d turned away from the sea — and not say a thing and not quite touch and seem entirely comfortable with that. As if everything important had already been said long ago.

Then we left the promenade — it would have been hard to say which of us initiated this; perhaps we’d both done it at the same moment, spontaneously — and I held the deck door open for Selene and I followed her to her cabin and she held that door open for me. I stepped in and stopped in the center of her floor and she closed the door and crossed past me. We still had that air of taking each other for granted after long familiarity.

She sat on a woven-reed bergère chair that faced the bed and I sat on the edge of the bed directly opposite her, and now the language of our bodies said that we intended to have a conversation on a topic we both anticipated. But in fact we remained silent for a long while.

I imagined that she was trying to figure out how much to lie to me and what sort of lies might be convincing and, indeed, if it made any difference if she were convincing or not.

But it did matter, of course. She needed to be very convincing. She’d just killed the Germans’ agent who was playing an integral part in their larger plan; this was all improvised; they hadn’t sent her out here to do that. She’d just torpedoed her own steamship and here I was again apparently ready to help her swim away. I’d already saved her sweet stern once tonight.

I had my own personal figuring out to do. My own calibrating of lies. Certainly I knew a great many things she did not realize I knew and I had to decide what to continue to keep to myself, what to let out to her, what to lie about. Now that I’d dumped Brauer I was committed to keeping her mission going for my own benefit.

So we sat.