Robert Butler - The Star of Istanbul

Perhaps Brauer’s handlers were indeed doing what Smith and Metcalf were doing for me, trying to figure out what the man in the bar was all about. Brauer pretty clearly had not gone inside on that night. He might have returned yesterday, but that tight little group in there would stonewall a man like Brauer. My guys still hadn’t dug up anything; Brauer’s couldn’t have either.

Walter must have come to her tonight and tried to bluff her into revealing something; maybe he threatened her. The bar in the East End was a very touchy subject for Selene. But if that’s what the argument was about, the question remained, even more critically: why was this such a threat to her in Istanbul that she’d lose her head and kill him?

We had some travel ahead of us.

I figured I might find some leverage with her along the way to learn more.

And so a certain Walter Brauer, resident of London but traveling on an American passport and approved in documents from the highest official levels in the German Foreign Office, and Selene Bourgani, also an American traveling with her own weighty German endorsements, entered Holland at Vlissingen. This was the one place we kept our German credentials to ourselves. Then we boarded a train shortly after dawn, and when we were under way, we stood before each other once again, in front of her compartment, and once again we did not speak until it seemed she would simply vanish behind her door. But at last she said, “How far to Berlin?”

“Twelve hours,” I said.

“I need to sleep,” she said.

“The German frontier is four,” I said.

“Till then,” she said.

And our credentials — in the smoke-filled, coal-gritty, body-warmed and body-scented wooden customs hall in Bentheim on the German frontier — drew instant heel clicking and bows from the Kaiser-mustached official.

Which led to lunch on the train, on clean linen and with the rolling outwash plain of northern Germany whisking past. Selene and I did not speak much.

At some point I said, low, “Things went well at the border.”

She turned her face to the window. I watched her eyes catching something outside and sliding away with it, catching another thing and sliding, scanning the landscape quickly, over and over, restless eyes even as everything else about her was utterly motionless. I thought: It’s all right for now; I won’t speak to her; she’s preparing herself for what awaits us at the end of our journey.

But suddenly her eyes stopped moving, though they did not turn to me. The afternoon was cloudy and the window gave us back our images if we cared to look, and I imagined she was focused now on herself there, the ghost of her face floating motionless upon the flashing landscape. She said, very softly, “After Berlin. .” And she stopped.

I lowered my voice to match hers. “Yes?”

“I don’t want to be alone,” she said.

I had the impulse to reach across the table and take her hand. But I did not. I said, “All right.”

In Berlin we changed trains. We walked together on the platform beneath the vast, steel-trussed vault of the train shed at Friedrichstraße Station. As we approached the first-class coaches, Selene slipped her arm inside mine.

And so, as the train still sat in the station, with the scuffle of feet through the coach passageway, with the hiss of steam and the gabble of voices outside the window, with my bags stowed and my tie straightened, when a sharp, clear rap came to my sleeping compartment door, I crossed the floor a little breathlessly and slid the door open expecting Selene.

A thick-necked man in civilian gray filled the doorway, gray also in eyes and in thickly upstanding hair and in walrus mustache. I took an instinctive step backward. Again, my pistol was in a bag.

But I was Brauer.

Indeed, the man asked, “Herr Brauer?”

“ Jawohl, ” I said, my mind shifting to this language that needed to be part of my reflex self now.

He said, “Welcome, if briefly, to Berlin.” His German was clipped and precise and emotionless.

“Thank you,” I said. “Come in.”

He did, closing the door behind him.

I had no idea who he was. I was having a delayed surge of gratitude that he had no idea who I was either. I was beginning to rely on Brauer’s not being recognizable. But was I supposed to expect this guy?

The large gray man was before me again, offering a hand, which I took. “I am Kaspar Horst,” he said, “from the Foreign Ministry. I wish I had some schnapps for us to drink, but the train will soon depart and I have to leave you to do your work.”

“Please,” I said, motioning him to the bench seat along one wall. We sat beside each other.

“She is nearby?” he asked.

“The next compartment,” I said.

He lowered his voice drastically. “She is stable, this woman?”

“Sufficient for our purpose,” I said.

“Good.” He glanced at my left cheek. I had to repress the impulse of my hand to leap there, to make sure the bandage was in place. As long as I was Brauer, the Schmiss made me a liar. “You are hurt?” Horst asked.

I said, “You are aware, surely, that I had to save my own life on the Lusitania, when our efficient U-boat corps sank it?”

“ Ach so, ” he said, flaring his hands. “Who could have anticipated that? That would have been very bad. Very sadly ironic.”

“We were lucky to escape,” I said.

“The Wolf will follow you,” Horst said.

He paused and I worked to keep calm. He’d changed the subject abruptly. And Der Wolf was somebody he clearly expected me to know. I wondered if it was a reference to me, to Christopher Cobb.

The moment of silence was probably not long but it seemed at the time to go on and on. Then Horst said, “He is afraid this man Cobb will cause more trouble.”

I nodded. “Even in Istanbul?”

“That’s his fear. The Wolf will come to you soon.”

“Good,” I said. Bad, I thought. Very bad.

He rose. This was why Kaspar Horst had been sent to me at the Friedrichstraße Station. To alert me to Der Wolf coming to help.

Shit.

I rose with him. “I have return tickets. .”

“He’ll find you first,” Horst said. “Needless to say, you will take any future direction straight from him.”

Horst offered his hand. I shook it. “Thank you for the help,” I said, using my anxiety to play grateful enthusiasm. The lie of good acting.

“The Emperor is counting on all of us,” he said.

This was the vaunted Berlin-to-Baghdad Express, the great umbilical of Germany’s nascent Asian empire, though it still had big gaps beyond Aleppo and we ourselves would have to leave it in Budapest and head for the Romanian coast and a steamship down the Black Sea to avoid Servia. But immediately before us were twenty hours to Budapest, and Selene and I spent most of it on her narrow bed, even after there was not a drop of anything left in either of us to give or to receive or to exude, and yet we stayed in that bed and we smoked and we slept and, now and then, we tried some more with our bodies, tried to give and to take, and we were fine when that didn’t go much of anywhere, laughing at it even, like an old couple who had sweet intentions and patience with each other because of some good, larger feeling they shared, but we said very little, not like lovers at all in many ways, not like that old couple either, in this respect, though we should have been intensely curious about each other — I should have been about her, professionally at least — but sealed as we were in a room in a coach on a train that surged and slowed and stopped and surged and slowed and surged again, its whistle as distant and as mournfully vowel rich as the cry of a rutting cat, we put away any questions or issues that came from outside this shuttered window, this shuttered door.