Robert Butler - The Star of Istanbul

I stripped off mine.

It did hurt but I felt I had to make the point.

Given the fastidious lift of his right brow, the point seemed lost on him.

He was a different breed of cat.

“I’d hoped we might talk,” he said.

“Is that why you’re in costume?”

“I thought it would be interesting to hear your approach to the Pasha. I’m quite intrigued at America’s involvement in all this.”

“I think you mostly like dressing up.”

Cable — if indeed that was his name — unfurled a smile that was part irony, part taffeta. “What else do we really have in this world but the small pleasures of a chosen and portrayed self?” he said. “The current of history runs far too deep. You and your Armenian friends and even the Enver Pasha. And yes, even I, as an individual. We are all ultimately helpless. We’re all being borne along on the surface of things, moving our arms and our legs, giving the appearance of volition, but our course is set. Miss Bourgani will not stop the slaughter of her people. You will not preserve your country from this war. The Ottoman Empire will soon dissolve.”

He paused. He seemed to have finished his point.

“And the German Empire?” I said.

“Ah,” he said. “ That is the deep-running current.”

He was right, of course, about the flexor muscles. Still, I was tempted.

I think he saw it in my eyes.

He smiled again. No taffeta.

“I’m a good judge of people,” he said, and he had resumed speaking German. “You’re not a man who would sacrifice your own life simply to take mine.”

“But as you pointed out,” I said, shifting to German with him. “We neither of us count for that much.”

“Except to ourselves,” he said. “Don’t mistake me. I admire you for that. And I will freely admit that I share the same attitude. But you understand why I can be so frank with you.”

“Because you expect to win this standoff,” I said.

We each glanced at the unwavering Luger muzzle of the other.

“Of course,” he said.

“I have to ask,” I said. “Have you been drawing this out in the expectation that one of your downstairs boys will appear behind me?”

“The thought had crossed my mind,” he said.

“Given the silence of my arrival.”

“I suppose there are alternate explanations for that.”

“There’s one,” I said. “They’re all dead.”

He took this in without showing anything on his face.

“Well then,” he said, “it’s time to change the balance of power.”

And in a voice pitched to the back row of the upper balcony, he called out, “Captain, if you please.”

There was movement off to my left but nearer to Cable. A door was opening in the side wall.

I glanced.

Lucine emerged first, though a feldgrau arm was angled over her chest from left clavicle to right hip and she was dressed in a white nainsook chemise; attached to the uniformed arm was a bareheaded Kapitän with golden hair, and in his right hand he was holding the third Luger in the room, muzzled up against the same soft spot on Lucine that I’d threatened on Ströder, between the temple and the ear.

These two sidled into the room and ended up — with Cable saying “That’s good”—freestanding an arm’s length from the edge of the desk. I could keep both my Luger and one eye focused on Cable — he knew I would not relinquish that relationship — but I could also clearly see Lucine’s peril.

The Hun with the gun to her head was showing only his right shoulder and arm, his right side, his right leg; the corresponding left side of him was pressed against her from behind, his arm across her breasts.

She seemed impossibly small and impossibly fragile in every way but her eyes. Her vast eyes were burning hotly at me and, indeed, if it weren’t for a German officer, a German spy, and two extra Lugers, I could have fancied from this look that she’d just stepped into the room to have rough sex with me.

“Selene,” I said. “Have they hurt you?”

She said, “Besides throwing a coat around me and making me leave the hotel in my least interesting chemise, no.”

“You might imagine from that,” Cable said, “what a fruitlessly amusing time we’ve had in our conversations so far, Miss Bourgani and I. That will change quite dramatically now.”

I said to her, “Do you know who this man is?”

“Not who I expected,” she said.

“He’s the man Brauer was with on the Lusitania, ” I said, glancing at her.

I saw her eyes cut sharply toward him.

But Cable wasn’t taking his eyes off me.

I said, “One wouldn’t expect the fussy little bookseller from Boston to be capable of saving himself from a sinking ship.”

“Who knows?” Cable said. “He could have had a boyhood near a lake.”

“But a wolf, on the other hand,” I said.

Cable narrowed his gaze at this.

And I said in German, “The wolf is a good swimmer, I think.”

He smiled at my knowing about Der Wolf.

He answered in German: “The wolf is quite a powerful swimmer, with strong, tight-muscled legs.”

This he said with a complex little smirk. At his forcing an image of his body upon me, no doubt.

I have at times a freely associating mind, particularly when I am thrashing inside for a course of action.

And so I was led to a thought about what to do.

Even as Cable said, once again in English, “I’m getting tired of all this. The simplest thing would have been for me to shoot you dead as soon as you appeared in the doorway. But regrettably your own costume caused me too many moments of doubt. The dueling scar was a nice touch. Very realistic.”

“This still feels like a standoff,” I said.

“I think there was something very personal between you and Selene Bourgani,” Cable said.

And I wondered: Did he know Brauer was dead? He might suspect it. But he could not know for sure. And he certainly didn’t know how.

The thought I had was still working its way along, but it would help if I could get Cable to split his attention.

I moved my gaze to Lucine and she was instantly focused on me and then I quickly cut my eyes to Cable and back to her before returning slowly and fully to him.

“If she dies, so do you,” I said.

“Then by reflex it would be all three of us,” he said in English. “What an idiotic waste that would be. I am an admirer of the captain here, but what a shame if he were the only one of us left standing.”

“I bet you’re an admirer of the captain,” Lucine said.

Cable ignored her. “I don’t particularly care one way or the other about her. If you put your pistol down, I can arrange for her to walk away before you and I have a detailed chat. From which there would even be a possible safe exit for you as well.”

Did he think I’d believe that?

“Selene,” I said. “Our Mr. Cable may suspect something unpleasant has happened to Walter, but he can’t know for sure.”

“Oh, he asked,” Lucine said. “I wouldn’t give him the time of day.”

Cable was staying calm. The gun was steady. His face was placid. But I could see his chest rise and hold and fall. He was trying to control his breathing.

“He’s dead and decomposing in the North Sea,” Lucine said.

He flinched ever so slightly at this.

She knew what I needed. If Cable really thought I would do anything to keep a bullet out of Lucine’s brain — and he was right — he felt safe from me as long as the Kapitän had a gun to her head.

“And you disgusting bastard, Cobb,” Lucine hissed. “What you let Brauer do to you to try to save his life.”

Cable was breathing faster. His chest was moving; he was trying not to let it move his shoulders, move his hand. “Now that is certainly a lie,” he said.