Robert Butler - The Star of Istanbul

I glanced at Selene, who was craning her neck to read the book titles.

“Not my personal choice of train reading,” I said.

Selene grunted but left off looking at the books.

The last object at the bottom of the bag was a long sealskin wallet. I removed it. I opened the wallet and drew out a sheaf of documents.

I sorted through them with Selene watching closely. His tickets to Istanbul, arriving on the sixteenth. And tickets back to London for the twenty-second. His passport. I was glad to see that it was like my bogus one: American, not British. Letters of passage and recommendation to officials along the way. I’d examine them more carefully later.

“These are what I need,” I said.

I replaced the papers in the wallet and put the wallet into my right inside coat pocket.

She did not protest.

I repacked the valise but I left the two books on the bed. It was the Nuttall, of course, that I truly wanted. I just didn’t want to draw attention to it.

Then Selene and I rummaged through Walter Brauer’s clothes in the suitcase, both of us feeling very uncomfortable, betokened by our bated silence and the quick agreement that there was nothing here.

I stuffed the clothes back in the suitcase and closed the lid. I glanced at Selene. She was leafing through the Lagarde.

I let her. I began to buckle the straps on the suitcase.

“Did you mean to leave these out?” she said.

I looked at her.

She was thumbing the Nuttall.

“Yes,” I said.

“Why?”

“I’m preparing for my role of Walter Brauer,” I said.

“Did your mama teach you to prepare like that?” I couldn’t tell whether this was skeptical of me or sarcastic about her. It would not have been my mother’s assumed method of preparing for an acting role. She was a larger-than-life actress of the old school, or had been when she rose to her young-leading-lady stardom, though a few of the things I’d seen her do as she moved into middle age were smaller, more intensely real. Moscow-Art-Theaterish, even.

“She had big-paying audiences in a big space, not a Hun with a gun standing in front of her,” I said.

Selene closed the Nuttall, reached down and picked up the Lagarde again, stacked the two books together, and handed them to me.

“Your props,” she said.

I said, “Is there anything else you want to look at in here?”

“No.”

“Then would you carry these for me?”

I handed the books back to her.

She furrowed her brow in puzzlement.

“I need both hands,” I said. “Why leave any questions behind? If you’ll hold doors and check for insomniacs on the promenade, let’s complete Walter’s disembarkation.”

The brow unfurrowed with a small, sweet head tilt of respect.

“Of course,” she said.

I moved Brauer’s bags off the bed, opened the covers and disarranged them, and punched a head dent in the pillow. I picked up the bags and followed Selene to the door. She switched off the lights and we left Brauer’s cabin and dropped Walter’s bags in the sea.

And then we stood in front of Selene’s cabin door as if we’d been on a dinner date and the delicate question was just arising of whether or not we would kiss good night.

Her eyes, though, narrowed a little, like a cat showing it trusted you, and they mellowed and went suppliant and then flitted wide and willed themselves to be quite calm and rational. A whole run of feelings had come and gone inside her, and at the end of it, she said nothing at all. She simply handed me Brauer’s books, turned and opened her door, and disappeared.

I locked my cabin door. I took only one step into the room before stopping and removing Brauer’s folded piece of paper from my pocket. I could see now that it was familiar canary-manila telegraph paper. I unfolded it. Typed in blue, by a Morkrum telegram printer, were 19 groupings of numbers, eight in each.

Nuttall .

The cable was recorded at Western Union, Folkestone. The recipient was Walter Brauer, care of the Zeeland Steamship Company. The sending identifier: Wilhelmstraße 76, Berlin. Which was the address of Auswärtiges Amt . The German Foreign Office.

I tossed Lagarde onto the bed and sat in the woven cane chair. I pulled the smoking table in front of me like a desk. I put Nuttall in the center and laid out the telegram beneath it.

This was a very recent development or Berlin would have contacted him more reliably before he left London. The first number was 00620403. There would have to be four factors: page, column, line, and word. I looked at the last full Nuttall page. Number 699. The maximum number of digits was three. This made sense, since the first group began with two zeros, to let this discretely read as page number 6. I turned to it. There were two columns, expressible by a single digit. I counted the number of lines. Seventy-six. Expressible in two digits. And I saw a couple of lines with ten words. Two digits. Eight digits all together, which squared with the number groupings I was looking at. I could read the code.

And one at a time the words emerged, which I wrote in the space above their corresponding numbers.

change

plan

I was right about the structure of the coded words.

meet

Pasha

man

pass

word

Gutenberg

I paused and briefly considered the odd phrase “Pasha man,” but of course Nuttall simply did not have a possessive form of pasha . I would be meeting the Pasha’s man, his aide de camp, his assistant.

And the next word: 49321301. Pera

Palace

own

room

He would come to me at the hotel. We’d refer to Gutenberg. Another buchmann .

sometime

upon

16th

That was the day of our arrival.

Only four words to go and I paused briefly. The type in Nuttall was small and the electric light was dim and counting the lines and the words was hard going well past midnight.

The next word: 43514204.

This took me to the entry on Thomas Middleton, a contemporary of Marlowe and Shakespeare. The first column on the page, forty-second line, the fourth word was the middle word of the title of one of his tragedies: Women Beware Women .

Beware

I was still inclined to hear this note as being addressed to Walter Brauer. I had to hear it the way it must be played: they were talking to me . Brauer’s dangers were my dangers.

The next word was 15123101: page 151, column 2, line 31, the first word.

And I was looking at my mother’s entry in The Nuttall Encyclopaedia of Universal Information .

Cobb

Beware Cobb. I felt an icy grinding in me at this. Not because they perceived me as a threat. But because the German spymaster had found my mother in this book and used her. It was as if he’d put his hands upon her.

I pushed on. I had to beware of me . Okay.

Two more words.

where

And the last word was page 487, column 1, line 64, word 3.

unknown

Perhaps it was the slight relief I had at this head scratching in Berlin over my whereabouts, but the location of that word in Nuttall made me laugh out loud. A poem from a Victorian English poet named Coventry Patmore: “The Unknown Eros.”

Beware of Cobb, for he was now Brauer, of unknown eros.

I did feel better about one doubt that had begun to creep into me, concerning a secret that Selene was still withholding. What did Brauer say to her to provoke her to kill him? It had to be seriously threatening. I had begun to worry, as I’d decoded this message, that what he confronted her about had come from this telegram. And if it had, then she was already compromised in Istanbul. But it hadn’t.