Robert Butler - The Star of Istanbul

“And what will you want after the starters?” she said.

“That depends on what the truth is.”

“I want more too.”

I shrugged again. Like I was ready to walk out of the cabin and let her handle her own problems.

She said, “Only if the truth makes it worth your while.”

“What more do you want?”

“The truth,” she said. “For starters.”

We both fell silent for a moment.

I said, “It was a hell of a lot easier for us to agree to have sex.”

She drew that big breath back in; her shoulders and chest rose. “Sex is always easier than the truth,” she said.

I nodded. I wasn’t quite sure why. Maybe at the probable truth of that. Maybe just to act as if this was now some sort of intellectual discussion, as if I weren’t ready to take the easy path, right then and there. A tendril had fallen from the thick, up-pinned coil of her hair and down her neck, kindled in the electric light. Her smell in the room seemed more of the musk now than the hay and there was no longer anything in it of flowers. Sex is easier than patriotism as well.

But I bucked myself up the way I did when my job was to face a field of fire with soldiers who were making news. I said, “What were you planning to do for the Germans in Istanbul?”

She pushed the tendril of hair back off her neck. As if she’d known it was there all along and now that it had failed at its appointed task she was dismissing it. She said, “You may have missed your journalistic calling, Mr. Cobb. Your movie-gossip reportage was correct. I had some private times with Kurt Fehrenbach. Actresses and directors.”

She actually paused now to tuck that bit of hair back up into the rest of it on the top of her head.

I waited.

“The movie ended and all of that did too,” she said. “Though we’ve remained friendly.”

“Remaining friendly is always easier than the truth,” I said.

“But harder than the sex,” she said.

I thought: Which is why I’m glad I have your pistol.

“So Kurt went on to become the darling of the Kaiser,” she said. “His personal filmmaker. And a hobnobber with important people on the Emperor’s staff as well.”

She paused. She turned her face to her bag and reached for it. But her hand stopped, hung in the air.

“Did you forget I have your little friend?” I said.

She withdrew her hand and looked at me. Her brow furrowed ever so slightly, as if I’d just hurt her feelings.

“I forgot I have no cigarettes,” she said.

I reached into my outside right coat pocket. Next to the piece of paper from Brauer’s pants I found my Fatimas. I withdrew the pack and I stood and stepped across the space between us.

She lifted her face to me. It was one of those looks from one of those positions that made you want to take a woman into your arms. Instead, I tapped the closed half of the top of the pack on my forefinger. One cigarette emerged from the open half. I moved the pack near her.

Her face, waist high, was still upturned. She smiled at me. Then she lowered her face and looked at the extended cigarette. I expected her to lift her hand to take it.

She didn’t. She leaned forward and put her lips around the cigarette and pulled it from the pack with her mouth.

I did not move. I probably could not have moved if I’d wanted to.

But she was waiting for a light.

I dipped into my left-hand coat pocket and drew out a box of matches. I lit one. I brought it toward her face. She touched my hand and guided the flame to the end of her cigarette.

She leaned back, inhaled long and deeply, turned her profile to me, and blew the smoke toward the window through which, not long ago, I’d seen her standing over the man she’d just killed.

I waited for her face to come back to me. For a long moment it did not. She kept her eyes on the window. Perhaps she was thinking of that same moment.

She seemed a long way from answering my question, truthfully or otherwise, and the smoke of easy sex was in the air between us. I could see through it, but that didn’t make the more difficult thing any less difficult.

What did help, in this particular moment, was the sharp nip of pain on my fingertips. The match was still burning.

I waved the flame away and tossed the match on the floor. Right where she’d planted Brauer, as a matter of fact.

I stepped back to the bed and sat down.

She turned her face. She looked faintly disappointed once again. But not for long. We were still working on the new rules of the game between us.

She said, “Who would you say is currently the most important man in the Ottoman Empire?”

She still seemed to be far from the answers I wanted. But I was willing to play along with her for now.

The answer to her question was easy. Eight years ago a mixed bag of nationalists, secularists, pluralists, and various other haters of the despot “Crimson Sultan” Abdul Hamid II got together and hatched the Young Turk Revolution, which overthrew the Sultan and tried to reinvent the Empire. Three of the Young Turks achieved pasha status and became a ruling triumvirate, but one of them was clearly running the country from the position of minister of war, and he also happened to be the primary instigator of the Ottoman alliance with Germany.

“Enver Pasha,” I said.

Selene nodded. “Enver Pasha. And it turns out movies are all the rage in Istanbul and he’s my biggest fan. Biggest as in most intense, or so I’m told. One of the biggest in the world-leader category as well. Maybe old Wilhelm is a fan too and has him beat in that department. Who knows about Woodrow Wilson.”

“From the way he conducts his foreign policy,” I said, “I don’t think you’re Wilson’s type.”

“Be that as it may,” she said. “Enver somehow conveyed his intense regard for me to the Kaiser who told Kurt who conferred with a bigwig at the Foreign Office who had his minions find me, and they had the right documents and I received some impressive telegrams from all the impressive people in that daisy chain of impressive people and they all wanted me to. .”

At this point, though she had been rolling out this tale with absolute aplomb and wry worldliness, she abruptly broke off. The crack in her voice didn’t seem scaled for a theater audience. Indeed, it seemed like something she wanted to suppress. All right: perhaps wanted to portray as something she wanted to suppress. But I was prepared to keep both possibilities on the table.

She straightened and looked away and composed herself, and she said, “They want me to do certain things. The fundamental one being to spy on him.”

She stopped talking.

I said nothing.

There was this odd sense of plummeting in me, in my chest, in my limbs. An image of the man flashed into my head. It was vague, really, derived from the grainy news photos I’d barely glanced at over the past few years. But it was clear enough to accelerate the plummet: he was merely a thin-framed swarthy little man with black, uptwirled, Kaiser mustaches, downright dudish-looking, as a matter of fact. To hell with this, I thought, I already figured this was her primary skill as a spy.

I almost said something stupid. About Turkish men still having their personal harems. About Enver maybe making room for her.

I didn’t. I was glad I didn’t.

But she seemed to read it in me. Or maybe even in herself. She abruptly shrugged and turned her face away and said, “You know, maybe you should just walk out the door. I’ll deal with the consequences.”

That wasn’t what I wanted.

“I’m already in pretty deep with you,” I said.

She gave me her face, her eyes, once more.

“How was it all supposed to happen?” I said.