Robert Butler - The Star of Istanbul

“We were going to the Pera Palace Hotel. Walter Brauer was going to meet someone. I’d wait. That’s all I know.”

I didn’t say anything.

She said, “Except then Brauer would deliver the goods.”

This line was delivered cold. Okay. She was going back to the frame of mind that was letting her do these certain things she was supposed to do but which were so much against her inner nature. It seemed to me now — and I was relieved at the feeling — that Selene Bourgani was overwriting her little scene, was overplaying her little part.

“Clearly this is difficult for you,” I said, trying to keep the irony out of my voice.

“Yes,” she said. She was ready to sniffle.

“So we’re back to truth time,” I said. “Not that I’m in so deep that I don’t still need the straight dope, if you want me to hang around and help you.”

Her face did not change in the slightest.

I made sure mine didn’t either as I tried to focus on what I needed to know. I’d been a bit too eager to show off my knowledge when I’d dropped Kurt Fehrenbach into the conversation. I was an idiot showing off for a woman. I missed a logical step. I jumped in with her director-boyfriend after she asserted her allegiance only to herself and not to the Germans. Old Kurt might indeed have something on her that was the leverage to make her work with the German secret service, but the issue at hand had been why she killed Brauer. Fehrenbach’s scoop on her couldn’t be the same as Brauer’s. Fehrenbach used his to make her a spy; it already had to be okay with Berlin. Brauer’s lowdown could have been worth her killing him only if it put her in serious danger with the Huns.

I said, “I need to understand two things. If the Germans want you to seduce Enver Pasha and work him for what he knows and they don’t, why did you agree? And why did you kill an unarmed Walter Brauer? Those two answers need to make sense to me together.”

Again, nothing going on in the face before me. Outwardly. The spinning of her brain’s turbines, however, was pretty much drowning out the ship’s at that moment.

“I’ll give you an answer,” she said. “But a little truthful clarification from you first.”

I presented the blank face and the silence, which I’d been learning from her.

She didn’t care. “You think I’m a German spy,” she said. “And you’re an American spy. Correct?”

This much was obvious. “Correct,” I said.

“Your people know some things about Brauer and about me and no doubt about Metzger and Strauss, as well. Correct?”

“And about the guy with the phony beard,” I said.

There was a little loosening in her. “So you think it was phony too,” she said.

“Who was he?”

“The boss.”

“Any name?”

“They called him Herr Buchmann.”

“The ‘bookman.’ Phony beard, phony name probably.”

“Aren’t they clever?” She let the irony ooze thickly this time.

He was known to the Brits, I thought. Or making sure he never would be known to them.

I put this out of my mind. It was my own fault, bringing Squarebeard up at this point, helping her slide away from straight answers.

“My questions remain,” I said.

She waved off my prodding. “So isn’t that all we need to know? We both of us are playing the same role. You happen to be doing it for the American government. Willingly, I presume. I did hear you pledge allegiance a few minutes ago, didn’t I?”

I nodded.

“And I pledged disallegiance to Germany. I may be out for myself, but your country is mine too. And don’t ask that damn ‘why’ again. America’s fine but it’s in second place with me. Do you really need to know what my old boyfriend has on me and why I’d shoot Walter Brauer to death and why I’d have sex with a small-sized, waxy-mustached, garlicky Turk with three wives and a Napoleon obsession? Maybe I didn’t like Walter’s tie. Maybe I’m a sucker of a slut for guys with garlicky breath, especially if they’re running a whole empire. Maybe I’d have sex with Enver Pasha for free but in addition the Huns are paying me big, in real, imperial gold. What difference does it make? Why should you help me out? Because whatever the Germans want to learn on the sly from Enver Pasha, you and your boys would like to know as well. Let me work for you both. All you sons of bitches. Why don’t you and I agree to that right now and stop all the idiot questions and then have some easy sex to seal the deal?”

This, for the moment, seemed reasonable.

This time the question of gentle or rough didn’t even come up. This deal was sealed in hot wax. I pounded and she pounded and the only disagreement between us was when she declared, with her words broken into eight distinct phrases from our ongoing activity: “If you finish. . now. . or even soon. . Kit Cobb. . I will get. . my pistol. . from your coat. . and kill you.”

I heeded her warning. Selene Bourgani and I extended things to her satisfaction, though my own personal problem with extending this sort of thing cropped up: my body kept on, but my mind drifted off. At first, not entirely, as the departure point was a surge of jealousy at Enver Goddamn Pasha. With the thought of what a man like him was mysteriously able to command from a woman like Selene Bourgani, I began, indeed, to despise Enver Pasha, despise him perhaps not with the depth but surely, I fancied at that moment, with the intensity felt by even the Greeks and the Armenians. Of course not with their intensity either, but yes, my mind had wandered as far as the massacres of both those peoples in recent years, and I thought how these Young Turks were no better than the Crimson Sultan in this regard, given what had already been reported of their actions against the Greeks in Smyrna last summer and Thrace the summer before, and against the Armenians in Adana soon after these new boys came to power, six years ago, those actions being the wholesale slaughter of every Greek and Armenian in sight — man, woman, and child. Which gave me a thought that got drowned out by screaming.

This was from Selene beneath me, though it was not — I was happy to realize — a scream of rebuke. I was still working out okay for her. Maybe, indeed, my thoughts of politics and massacres were helpful in that regard. She was finishing up and would soon let me do likewise. And then she stopped screaming and her own mind apparently wandered off and I was happy to finally put my stamp in the sealing wax and blow it till it cooled.

Afterward, as we lay wrapped tightly together on the narrow bed, the thought that slid into me a few minutes ago returned. And when we rather gently untangled and sat side by side with our backs against the wall smoking Fatimas, I said, “Your Greeks have a real beef with your garlicky Turk.”

She finished blowing a plume of smoke before her as if she hadn’t heard. But then she turned her face to me. “ My Greeks?”

“Your life story.”

“I think I told you once already that was all lies.”

“I figured you might have lied about some of the lies.”

She nodded faintly. “I could do that,” she said. “But I didn’t.”

She looked away again and took another drag on her cigarette.

I made my voice go quite soft. Actually it wasn’t so willful as that. I did know that if I wanted an answer, I needed to be soft. I’d often used the trick with news sources. But at that moment I did indeed feel a little surge of gentleness about Selene and her phony public life and her raging private dramas and desires. I said, “What is your story?”

“I’m American.”

“By birth?”

“Not quite.”

“And your parents?”

She watched the smoke she’d just blown in a long, thin ribbon till it dissipated into the cabin air. When it was gone, she said, “Cypriot.”