The Star of Istanbul Read online

  I could barely make out the lifeboat hanging a few paces before me. The ship was wrapped in a gray felt fog. But I stepped away from the door, turned aft, walked into the murk. It was as if the inside of my own head had billowed out to surround me. Inside the fog, I found James P. Trask, the President’s man in charge of covert service, talking to me again.

  We met a week ago in Washington, at the massive, limestone and terra cotta Raleigh Hotel on Twelfth and Pennsylvania. The after-dinner trade was waning and we began at the mahogany bar but soon carried our Gin Rickeys to a far corner table to speak in private. No one was nearby. High above us, from the center of the roof, a searchlight was lighting up the Washington Monument half a mile to our southwest.

  Trask lifted his drink and I did likewise. Each glass held half of the same lime. We touched glasses and took a good swallow. Trask said, “These were invented back in ’83 at Shoomaker’s, around the corner from all you newspaper boys on Fourteenth. By old Colonel Joe Rickey. He owned the bar but he was also a professional glad-hander and arm-twister. Inventing this, he almost redeemed his whole tribe of lobbyists.”

  “To Colonel Joe,” I said, lifting my glass again.

  “Colonel Joe,” Trask said. We drank, and he said, “I’d have taken you there but it’s still full of reporters.”

  James Trask was hard to read in any way that he wasn’t consciously intending. As befitted his job, I supposed. I was pretty good at reading a man. He delivered this last declaration by angling his square-jawed, man’s-man face slightly to the right and drawing out the word “reporters” like slowly pulling a piece of chewing gum off the sole of his shoe. He was clean shaven and—perhaps influenced by my new relationship to my left cheek—I found this a little deceitful in him. Trying too hard to suggest he was transparent.

  He was tweaking my nose. I said, “I don’t hang around with reporters anymore.” Not true, but he knew I was lying and he knew I knew he knew I was lying, and that was the best return-tweak I could manage at the moment.

  He smiled. “Don’t change your public ways for me,” he said. “To the world, you have to be Christopher Cobb.”

  I did a slow, seemingly thoughtful stroke of my beard, my thumb pressing my right cheek and my fingers descending my left.

  Trask knew what I was most conscious of, even before I realized it myself. It was under my hand.

  “That was a fortunate little accident down in Mexico,” he said, referring to my scar.

  I didn’t like him reading me. I turned the gesture into an extending of my forefinger, which I lifted and ran from my lower lip to the bottom of my chin, and which I then did once again, as if my intention all along had been simply to smooth my whiskers down. I didn’t really expect him to believe it.

  “How’s your German coming along?” he asked.

  “Pretty good.”

  “You’ve got an ear for it, I understand.”

  “I do.”

  “Are you ready to work?”

  “I am.”

  “I’ve already informed your paper.”

  My publisher—that great American mogul, Paul Maccabee Griswold—was an old-style Democrat, the sort who worshipped Grover Cleveland, and he had big political ambitions; he was only too happy to have me play this grand game for his own private political credit.

  Trask took an envelope from the inside pocket of his impeccable black suit with the thin, gray stripe, the suit as snuggly, perfectly fit to his boxer’s body as the Woolworth Building’s glazed terra-cotta. Inside were the photos of Brauer. His jowly face in a formal head and shoulders pose, likely taken for a passport. A snapshot of him standing dressed in academic robes in a grassy courtyard with the arches of a Gothic colonnade behind him.

  “Walter Brauer,” Trask said. “German. Technically an American citizen. Travels on our passport. But he’s been a lecturer at King’s College in London for more than a decade. One of the side benefits of our president’s pacifism is our present occupation of the German embassy in London. We’re looking after their affairs. Playing go-between. Not that my office takes our role as the Swiss too seriously. We’ve been carefully examining whatever the Huns left behind. I’m happy to say that Prince Lichnowsky and his boys made a rather hasty departure. Though I should point out we’re being careful to leave even the prince’s cigarettes in their silver case on his desk, exactly as they were last August, in the event the Germans return someday.”

  “Think they’ll fall for that?” I said.

  Trask winked at me.

  The Lusitania’s whistle bellowed me back to the deck. I pulled up my coat collar. I’d not put on a hat and I ran my hand through my hair, which had gone damp from the fog. But the chill was okay with me. I’d spent plenty of time in hot countries these past few years. The whistle faded and then instantly sounded again, as if this were in response to something looming in our path. But what could they possibly see from the helm until it was too late? I could barely see beyond the stretch of my arm. It was all a yellow blur along an invisible deck wall. On the railing side, in a vague, somewhat more coalesced wedge of the universal gray, were an electric light and a lifeboat only a few paces away, but in this fog their identity was nothing more than informed guesswork. I swelled with that kinesthetic burn I’d always felt before the clash of men on a battlefield. The Titanic was too much with me.

  I needed to focus on my assignment, which was how I managed my war nerves in Nicaragua and Macedonia and Mexico. I stood in the fog and continued drinking with Trask in the bar at the Raleigh.

  “He’s an agent of the German secret service,” he said. But he didn’t go on. Instead, he drained the last of his Gin Rickey and then lifted his empty glass to me. “We should have another round of these, don’t you think?”

  Trask had done this before. Even in our first meeting, he would suddenly decide, in the midst of our conversation, to throw me off balance by making me ask for what I clearly needed to know next. I should have waited him out at the Raleigh, but I wasn’t in a mood to play. At least I put it to him in a way he didn’t expect.

  I said, “What does he lecture about?”

  Trask let me see the fleeting dilation of surprise in his eyes. He smiled. “Oriental studies,” he said.

  “Meaning?”

  “He spent his childhood in Jerusalem. His father was in the export business there before he brought the family to Providence.”

  “So he picked up some languages.”

  “Arabic. Persian. Turkish.”

  “He lectures on this.”

  “And on Islam. He’s an expert.”

  This was the telling thing. The Kaiser had been wooing the Islamic nations since the end of the last century. And in November, three months into the war, in Constantinople, the Turkish Sultan Mehmed V, as Caliph, declared a worldwide jihad, a Holy War, on the British Empire and all its allies. The Ottoman Empire embraced Willie, who had been claiming a spiritual affinity with Mohammed for fifteen years.

  Trask said, “He’s used his expertise to make some friends at their Foreign Office. The Brits have one hundred million Muslims in their empire.”

  “What’s he doing over here?”

  “That’s the question.”

  “His family?”

  Trask shrugged. “The ones who stayed are dead. He arrived in Washington a week ago. We always watch the Huns on Thomas Circle pretty closely, and Brauer went straight to the embassy. But somehow he slipped out again without us seeing him. We don’t know what he did here. But we do know he’s booked passage back to Britain. That gives you a week to get ready to sail. You’ve got a first-class cabin right near his. First of May. The Lusitania.”

  A form loomed suddenly out of the murk, almost upon me, a man, a big man, and I jumped back and to the side, throwing myself against the deck wall, but the man did not lunge for me, he kept str
iding on past, too fast, given the fog, just a fool with a British accent, throwing a “Sorry, old man” over his shoulder, taking his after-midnight constitutional. Why didn’t Trask just expose Brauer to the Brits and let them handle him? Because they were like this guy, rushing in the dark. They had their own agenda. If the world is going to blow up on us, we need to know for ourselves what we’re dealing with. And Wilson still wanted to keep us out of the fighting. The way they were all digging in over there, maybe he was right. And maybe I was trained now for this work. I knew how we were supposed to think: figure it out for ourselves, keep to it to ourselves, do what we need to protect ourselves.

  My beard was wet. My left cheek beneath was cold except for the curve of the impervious scar tissue. The fog had etched my Schmiss into my mind.

  And now my eyesight was clearing, as if I were waking from a heavy sleep. The teak deck was rapidly appearing beneath me, before me, stretching forward into the clarifying dark; the lifeboats shaped sharply into themselves all along the way; the electric light glowed nakedly on the deck wall. We were moving faster. I could feel the subtle new vibration beneath my feet. Full ahead.

  I was beginning to shiver.

  I moved down the promenade to the forward door and I went in. I turned at once into the portside corridor and ran both hands over my beard and through my hair and wiped away the condensing mist on my coat and I moved forward. As I passed Selene Bourgani’s door I spoke aloud—louder perhaps than I would have if there actually were someone else in the corridor with me, which there wasn’t, but I spoke as if there were—I said, “We’re out of the fog now. Any danger is passed.”

  I felt instantly stupid. I pressed on down the corridor. I thought she might be awake and worried inside. We all remembered the Titanic. And we all knew there was a war. For our ship to be bellowing through the night, blindly rushing, this could be a worrisome thing even for a woman who says she is afraid of nothing.

  I passed on and I neared the turn of the corridor—I would soon be safely out of sight—but behind me I heard the opening of a cabin door, and I had no choice but to stop, which I did. I would turn. After all, this possibility was also why I’d spoken.

  I turned.

  She was standing just outside her door, in a beam of electric light from the wall, her hair twisted up high on her head. I took a step toward her, and another. I stopped. She hadn’t invited me, but I took this much of a liberty by reflex from the hammer thump of her beauty. Her eyes were as dark as the North Atlantic. She was wearing a crimson kimono with twin golden dragons plunging from her breasts to her knees.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I hope I didn’t disturb you.”

  She looked over her shoulder, as if preparing to sneer: So where is the person you spoke to?

  But she quickly turned back to me.

  How the hell do I know what a woman is about to say? Perhaps she’d looked to make sure we were alone together.

  “Any danger is passed,” I said, feeling even more stupid saying this a second time.

  She nodded. “So I’ve heard.” But her voice was soft-edged. Appreciative.

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll confess. There was no one around. I spoke it aloud in passing in case you were worried.”

  She nodded again. Faintly. As if in thanks. She was far more subtle in this corridor than she was on the screen.

  I grew up backstage in a thousand theaters and watched my mother being a star and I knew how she sized herself for each stage she was on. Since film actresses all seemed to be playing to a vast auditorium, though their faces were ten feet tall—even the great Selene Bourgani—I was surprised she knew how to seem real in this corridor. As for my own face, I had no control at all. It was flushing hot and, I suspected, it was even turning red.

  “I wasn’t worried,” she said.

  “No,” I said. “Of course not.”

  “But thank you.”

  I nodded. Too big a nod, as if I were a hambone of a film actor.

  I collected myself and steadied my body and stood there for a long moment, and the moment went on as she stayed motionless where she was, standing in her kimono in her doorway.

  Finally she said, in what felt like a whisper but which filled my head, “Good night.”

  “Good night,” I said, and I turned away from Selene, who, according to my childhood Bulfinch, if not the evidence of my own eyes a few moments ago, was the Greek goddess of the moon.

  3

  After I’d gone to my cabin following our release from the fog, I slept. But I was already awake at the distant sound of six bells being rung on the morning watch—7:00 A.M. by the landlubber time zone we carried along with us. The bell had hardly stopped vibrating when I heard the slip of something under the door. I needed a war; I needed the whisk of rifle rounds past my ears. Here’s how I knew: I thought it might be a note from her. It was, instead, an invitation to dine with the captain at his table that evening.

  I did not see Brauer again or Selene until the night came and I was dressed in a suitcase-wrinkled monkey suit, packed at Trask’s insistence for any secret-agent contingency, the thought of which had made me consider letting my country down to just chase the gunfire. But I packed the tux and now I tied my black tie and squared my shoulders and took the main staircase down three levels to the Saloon Deck. Indeed, I had a saloon ticket to a saloon cabin and I’d spent time very early this morning on the saloon promenade and I was, all in all, a saloon passenger, “saloon” being what the Brits sometimes called first class. But when I walked into the grand dining room, my first wish—a devout one—was that this would somehow suddenly turn into a good old American saloon, with swinging doors and spittoons. I did, however, know how to act this other role I’d been cast in.

  I took three steps into the place and stopped. It was swell, all right. The main floor of the dining room, here on D Deck, was decorated in harmony with the writing room and library I’d passed through yesterday, though in a more extravagant way: ivory-colored walls and the straight-lined simplicity of eighteenth-century neoclassicism, with Louis XVI chairs upholstered in rose-colored horsehair and with similarly roseate Brussels carpet runners and with more Corinthian columns, these rising from the oak parquet floor up through the front edge of a large open oval space where the C Deck upper dining room encircled us diners below. The columns rose on to their capital at the base of a floor-high dome, done in ivory-white and gilt and with oil paint-rendered cherubs in tableaux of the four seasons. The dome sat in the center of B Deck, the high-heavenly vault of a three-story floating cathedral of fancyman’s food.

  The place was full of tuxedoed men and gowned and bejeweled women. They milled murmuringly about, finding their tables, drinking cocktails. I stepped farther in, alert for a center-parted, hennaed head of hair. It didn’t take me long to see Brauer. He was at one end of the massive brass-fit veneered mahogany sideboard on the forward center wall. He was alone there, leaning with his back to the sideboard as if it were a bar, but with only a waiter nearby, arranging tumblers on a tray. Brauer held a glass with what looked like a couple of fingers of whiskey—no doubt a good whiskey, in this joint. He did not seem uncomfortable in his solitude. Rather, he seemed quite content to watch the swells milling about before him.

  My assignment was too vague: What’s he up to? My reporter’s instincts had been most famously employed in figuring out the next move of bands of armed men representing governments or organized factions aspiring to become governments. I knew what they were up to from the get-off: destroy the opposing bands of armed men and seize a physical objective on the way to seizing power. I had to slide back to my earlier reporting days to figure out what to do now. I had to think of Brauer as I would a dirty Chicago politician. But with the politician there were plenty of sources to go to. Enemies. Co-conspirators. Facilitators. Victims. And the überobjective of the man I was after was always mo
ney, which made certain lines of inquiry pretty clear. With Brauer, on this ship, there was no one to go to but him. And money was unlikely to be the coal in his engine.

  So it would just be him and me. I figured my strategy was to treat him like a source for a larger story, somebody who knows something I need to know and doesn’t want to give it up, so I don’t let him know I want it. I strolled off in his direction.

  But I didn’t go straight to him. I bellied up to the sideboard as if I expected it to be the bar and he was a couple of paces to my right and I looked around like I was puzzled, like where was the bartender, like where were the taps and the bottles, like what is this useless piece of furniture, anyway. “Huh,” I said aloud, and I turned around the way he was turned, and he wasn’t looking in my direction. It was like I wasn’t even there.

  I checked out his drink a bit more closely. Certainly that was a good Scotch. He may have been an expert on Islam but I was thinking he wasn’t a convert. His tuxedo looked like it fit him pretty well and he was used to wearing it. Maybe a big cheese academician at King’s College who spent all day in his academic robes was used to monkeying up at night to drink with his fellow lecturers in a first-class British saloon where nobody ever raised his voice.

  I figured I better stop disliking this guy so actively if I wanted to get something out of him.

  “From across the room this sure looked like the bar—and a good one.” I said this aloud, keeping my eyes forward, as his were, but keeping my attention on him in my peripheral vision. I’d spoken in half a voice so that I could simply have been a guy avid for a drink talking mostly to myself.