Robert Butler - The Star of Istanbul

“Greek-Cypriot or Turk-?”

“Both. I come from far back, intermingled. We didn’t take a side in that fight.”

All this came easily from her. Which didn’t mean any of it was necessarily true. But there was even less reason to believe the overt publicity tales about her.

“So the island was Cyprus, not Andros,” I said.

She exhaled softly, without smoke. “Part of me comes from Andros, I guess. My first lover was a Greek and he took me to Andros for the deed. I was fifteen. He was forty-five. I had a certain look about me and a certain willingness and a certain freedom to act. He owned ships. I was fond of Andros. I was fond of him. He was like the leaves of the olive trees on the mountains there. Silver laid upon green.”

We both fell silent for a long while. Both of us smoking. This thing about her first lover: it was maybe the only thing she’d ever said to me that had instantly felt true.

Then she broke the silence. “How will you save me, Kit Cobb?”

I took a long drag on my cigarette and began my own moment of contemplating the smoke I was blowing. But she interrupted.

“I was glad to stop your damn questions,” she said. “Glad to do what we just did. But we have to face facts now. My usefulness to the United States of America won’t last long when the Germans and Turks find out about Brauer. I’m afraid the best you can do is shield me long enough so I can get on a train or a ship or a donkey cart and try to vanish.”

All that was delivered with a flat, steady tone. This was a tough dame, even without a pistol in her hand.

I said, “Did you have any sense that Brauer would remain in Istanbul as your contact?”

“No. I got the impression he’d be coming back to London.”

“Did you hear anything to give you the impression he was personally known in Istanbul?”

“I think he’d studied there some years ago. But I didn’t pick up on anything else, one way or the other.”

This was a chance we’d have to take, I thought. Obviously Metcalf figured Brauer was unknown by sight in Istanbul or he wouldn’t have urged me to kill the man and take his place. Not that Metcalf would hesitate to take a chance — even a big one — on my behalf, seeing as he was advising a man of a different temperament from himself.

“I can play Brauer,” I said.

She turned her head to me sharply. “You can pull that off?”

“I can.”

“Good,” she said, with an intensity that struck me as odd. Maybe it was relief. Maybe she suddenly felt her place on a train or ship or donkey cart was enssured. That made sense. But there was something in her at that moment I wished I could get her to talk about.

“I know this has been scary for you,” I said.

She shot me a look that confirmed my gut feeling. This intensity wasn’t about a release of fear. It was something else.

She was on her feet and moving to her clothes.

She bent to them and I tried to memorize the flash of her body. Each time always felt like the last time with Selene Bourgani.

“Selene,” I said.

She turned to me, pressing her dress to her chest.

At least she did turn.

“I know you’re not afraid,” I said.

I could see her mind working for a moment, trying to figure me out. Then she said, “I know you’re not either.”

She dressed.

I dressed.

The deal sealed, we were all business now.

“We need to search his cabin,” I said.

“I have the key,” she said.

“I know,” I said. “I gave it to you.”

“I knew it was in his pockets somewhere,” she said. “You couldn’t have actually fooled me, now could you.”

“I didn’t need to fool you,” I said.

“You hadn’t yet taken the precaution of stealing my pistol,” she said.

“You needed me,” I said.

“I still do,” she said.

All business.

I reached into the pocket of my jacket and removed her Colt. “I think we’ll be all right for the trip,” I said. “But you never know.”

I opened my palm to her, with the pistol lying in the center.

She looked at it. She looked at me. “I’m grateful,” she said. And she took the pistol. “That’s the truth,” she said.

“I believe you,” I said.

Selene stepped to the smoking table and picked up her bag. She put the pistol inside. And when her hand came out, she had the key to Brauer’s cabin. She handed it to me.

“Let’s see what we can find,” she said.

And we were standing in the center of Brauer’s cabin, an exact replica of hers.

We looked around for a moment before starting to dig.

His waistcoat on the back of a chair. A large suitcase under the window.

“Was he really a homosexual?” Selene said.

“Yes.”

“How do you know?”

“I knew.”

“He didn’t try to strike up with you, did he?”

“No. He had a rendezvous on the ship.”

“That other man he was with?”

“Yes.”

“I only saw them across the dining room.”

“Not sure if it was prearranged,” I said. “It could’ve been casual.”

“So Walter had depths,” Selene said. “Poor man. His friend apparently didn’t survive.”

“I didn’t see him in Queenstown.”

“Walter seemed a bit dazed. How does a man like that mourn? I’d think perhaps more readily. More like a woman?”

Walter’s love life was no longer relevant. He was dead, after all. Maybe Selene’s little surge of interest was an aftermath of her killing him. I wondered if he was her first.

I crossed the room to his suitcase, picked it up — it was heavy, still packed — and I laid it on the bed. I undid the straps and opened the lid. It was neatly packed with clothes.

I doubted that the things I was looking for would be in here if there was an alternative. He’d keep those closer. “Was this the only bag he was carrying?” I said.

“Here it is,” Selene said.

I turned to her.

She was at the narrow wardrobe beyond the foot of the bed. The door was open and she was bent inside. She straightened and carried a morocco valise toward me. I moved the suitcase toward the head of the bed and she placed the valise at the foot.

It opened from the top.

She stepped to the side, let me do this, though with a keenly watchful eye.

I dipped in.

A fitted toilet case. I checked inside. It held only the usual items, including the straight razor that first told me about him and the late Edward Cable. I put the case on the bed above the valise, starting a stack with a reflex impulse to note the layers and the arrangement for repacking. As if to prevent Brauer from later realizing his bag had been searched. But he was dead.

A folded dressing gown. These were things he wanted in his own hands if his suitcase went astray. I removed the dressing gown and it struck me: black silk. This and everything else Brauer was carrying was new. But he’d had a black silk dressing gown on the Lusitania . He’d replaced it exactly. I found myself not liking this task. Old Walter was getting to be too real to me, watching him make very personal decisions.

And a union suit. Really too personal. I felt like his mortician, learning way too much about him in order to put him finally to rest. Toothpowder. Hair brush. Other things that hardly registered. And then near the bottom, a book. He did not replace his Heinrich von Treitschke. But he was reading Deutsche Schriften by a similar German ideologue: the Orientalist, biblical scholar, and anti-Semite Paul de Lagarde. Walter was keeping up with his early-childhood first language. That was good to know and a very useful thing when I portrayed him. I couldn’t fake Turkish. But I could do German.

I put the Lagarde on the bed, and next from the dim depths of the bag came another book. It gave me a pleasing jolt. This one he did replace exactly: The Nuttall Encyclopaedia of Universal Information . The 1909 edition, I had no doubt. I did not let myself show any interest in it, immediately putting it on the bed next to the Deutsche Schriften .