The Star of Istanbul Read online

  I saw him turn his face in my direction. I waited a beat and then looked at him. He let our eyes meet. “Sorry to bother you,” I said, “but I was admiring your whiskey and thinking you got it here.”

  He looked at his glass as if he were slightly surprised to find it in his hand. “No,” he said. “Someone will inquire shortly.”

  He had a faint wisp of a British accent, like the smell of pipe smoke in a tweed jacket. “Good,” I said and I looked away from him. I thought about his cuffs, which I’d noticed were beginning to fray. Befitting an academic who’d been in London for a decade. I thought: What’s this guy doing in first class?

  I looked his way and he was sipping his drink, still watching the first-class diners gathering in the room, ignoring me.

  From above us, in the upper dining room, the ship’s salon orchestra struck up a waltz. The group sounded like about six pieces, with a violin and a piano leading the way. They were playing Archibald Joyce’s “Songe d’Automne,” a lovely, wistful thing made rather sad by its tune being in a minor key. After the first few bars, Brauer’s face lifted and turned—ever so slightly—in the direction of the sound, his eyes moving very briefly in that direction and then returning at once to the dining room before him. But his face remained slightly lifted to the tune.

  He seemed utterly oblivious of me, so I watched him closely, waiting for him to show his response to the music he was clearly aware of, seeing if, by his nostalgia, perhaps Trask was wrong to be vitally suspicious of our Arabic-speaking spy’s American visit, seeing if maybe it was about love or family. But nothing changed in him, not a wrinkle in the brow, not a minute dip of his whiskey hand, not the slightest pause of his eyes in their ongoing desultory tracking of the passing swells.

  But then he turned his face to me, slowly, his eyes going straight to mine. At some point he’d begun watching me in his periphery, as I was watching him.

  “Sad little waltz,” I said, lifting my chin toward the upper dining room.

  He did not answer for a moment but kept his eyes fixed on me. They were as black and inanimate as any lump of coal flying at that moment into the ship’s boilers. I did not flinch. I kept my own eyes unwaveringly on his, so as to suggest that my staring at him was simply to wait for—even to prompt—his attention.

  After a long moment of this, he finally responded, picking up on the waltz of it, not the sadness: “I don’t dance,” he said.

  “I wasn’t asking you to,” I said, not sarcastically, just drily, figuring he was evidently going to resist any conversation anyway and perhaps my showing a pipe-smoke wisp of aggressive irritation would suggest I’d been just a guy wanting to chat.

  He surprised me. He laughed softly at this. As if he appreciated that I’d expressed my irritation with him. “Good,” he said.

  He looked back to the other diners. But not to dismiss me. Almost at once he said, “They all seemed to know the waltz meant to sit.”

  So he was indeed new to first class.

  “Too bad,” I said. “I didn’t get my whiskey.”

  He took the card from his pocket that assigned him a table. He looked off to the left, beyond the nearest Corinthian column. “You nearby?” I asked.

  He nodded toward the forward portside corner of the dining room.

  Since he seemed determined to say as little as possible, we had an awkward moment as he clearly wanted to move off in that direction and I had him feeling buttonholed. I saw the impulse of his body and he was about to excuse himself in a way that would make it hard for me to stick with him, so I smoothed the way for both of us before he could speak.

  “Time to be seated,” I said and I took a step forward. We moved off together into the portside main aisle through the dining room.

  Brauer said, “And where’s your place for dinner?” Was he accepting my acquaintance? Or was this a low-key challenge of my walking along with him? He was hard to read.

  “I’m at the captain’s table tonight.” I said this without hesitation—no feigned humility about it—but I did say it offhandedly. As if I considered it a trifle.

  Still, I found myself suddenly a step ahead of Brauer. I stopped and turned back to him.

  The announcement had made him pull up, and now he’d fully stopped. “So you are a man of acclaim?” he said.

  I offered my hand. “My name is Christopher Cobb.”

  There was no flicker of recognition in his face. But he did take my hand and shake it. He surprised me with a very solid grip.

  “I’m Dr. Walter Brauer,” he said.

  “I write for a newspaper,” I said.

  “Ah,” he said, letting go of my hand. “Newspapers.” The word tasted bad in his mouth, a rancid morsel of food he wanted to spit out but couldn’t in public. But this I discerned only in his tone of voice, not his face. He was showing nothing outwardly.

  I wished I could simply walk away from this cuff-frayed egghead who scorned popular reading tastes. I couldn’t. “I’m strictly a war correspondent,” I said, thinking this would mitigate things.

  It seemed to.

  “I see,” he said, and his face did change ever so slightly, with a certain gravity coming over him.

  He was an arrogant ass. Fine. I had a little something on him anyway. Doctor Brauer indeed. “And you’re a man of medicine,” I said. “I so admire that.”

  “Doctor of philosophy,” he said, his voice gone weary. As if I should have recognized one “doctor” from another by sight.

  I could have given him a disappointed “I see,” but I still wanted to find out if I could break through his social walls before I tried anything more extreme to learn about him.

  “Just as admirable,” I said. “A man of the mind.”

  I saw what I thought was an incipient smile at this, but before it could emerge, his eyes shifted slightly, and then he overtly looked past me. Whatever he saw induced a clear flicker of outreaching life that I’d not yet perceived in Walter Brauer. But it passed almost at once, and he looked at me again.

  I turned to see what he had seen.

  So egghead Doctor Brauer was also a man, all right, to have been diverted by this sight, even in the midst of receiving an appropriate compliment for his mind. But he wasn’t much of a man, for turning away from this image so quickly.

  This was a room of ivory-colored walls and full of women dressed in flounces and loose panel drapes and floating sleeves of silks and chiffons and satins, all in the ivory of our walls or in lilac or in pastel blue or green, a muted space with muted women. And all of it had just been struck by a bolt of black lightning from la mode moderne: Selene stood alone, barely inside the doorway, and she was wearing a black velvet gown that held her close even at her legs and the neck was high and sharp-pointed and the sleeves were long and she was edged at hem and wrist and throat with the pale gray of chinchilla fur. The only physical brightness about her—and dazzlingly bright she was—were her hands and her face and her long neck and a flame of a diamond barrette in her upgathered hair.

  The band waltzed on, but beneath it the room grew quickly silent as she was noticed, and she did not move and she was noticed by others who told others and then all faces were turned to her and all voices were stilled and I ached to see her hair unfastened and falling upon her shoulders and down upon her breast.

  Did her face turn ever so slightly in my direction and did her eyes move to me? I could not say for certain.

  4

  She did look at me across the captain’s table. Most notably in the wine-sipping interval between the snipe en cocotte and the quarters of lamb. We sat directly beneath the apex of the dining room dome at a table for ten, a rectangle with four chairs on each long side and the ends curved for two more places, one of which held Captain Turner himself, a small, sailor-muscled man whose very few words were accented straight from the Liverp
ool docks. She’d been placed by the dining room steward next to a silly ass of a playboy millionaire, Alfred Vanderbilt, primary inheritor of the Cornelius Vanderbilt steamships-and-railroads millions, infamous, a few years back, for having to settle $10 million on a Cuban diplomat for having jazzed his wife, who subsequently divorced the Cuban and then killed herself, alone, in a London hotel. When Selene shot me the look, he was bending to her, whispering something.

  The look on her face was too complex for me to understand. It was not What an ass, rescue me from his company. But neither was it I’m being charmed here by this guy, who’s in my league and you’re not, so stop looking at me like that. I felt it wasn’t about Vanderbilt at all, really. There was a stark resignedness in her look. A look of I’d lift my hand to you, reach across to you, but there’s no use. She looked at me the way she would if she’d fallen off the ship and was about to sink and she knew I could not save her.

  All of this lasted only a few moments. She turned her face to Vanderbilt and instantly she portrayed a laugh, a laugh as false and oversized as any she had ever executed before the cranking of a movie camera.

  “You’re a writer I should know,” a man’s voice said from my left.

  I was ready to look away from Selene, and beside me was Elbert Hubbard, an eccentric jack-of-all-trades American writer with a pageboy haircut who’d sold forty million copies of a pamphlet brazenly exploiting the story of one of the few American war heroes from McKinley’s Cuban affair. So Hubbard could do what? Attack the lack of initiative in office clerks and secretaries and other hirelings in American business.

  He knew me, knew my work, was heading to Europe to report on the “mastoid degenerate” Kaiser Wilhelm and his war. As Hubbard talked, I nodded and portrayed attention as falsely as a movie actress, and I prodded my mind to go where it should have been all along: to a table I could not see from across the dining room, to Walter Brauer. The Germans surely did not book him in first class out of a sense of his or any of their agents’ high standing in the world. He had business here. Something to do en route. Something that was naturally located in first class.

  “Don’t you think?” Hubbard said, as if he’d already asked something and I’d ignored him. Which no doubt he just had.

  “I rely on your judgment,” I said, a line I always found useful in getting phony intellectuals to say quotable things.

  He was satisfied and talked on.

  The orchestra above us was playing a ragtime piece. I hoped I had not just agreed that the music was degenerate.

  Hubbard’s pageboy bangs were degenerate.

  I also hoped he hadn’t asked if I liked his bangs.

  I needed to get away. I wanted to observe Brauer at his table, even if it was in passing. Was he dining near someone intentionally? Was he engaged in conversation?

  Selene Bourgani was engaged in conversation. Vanderbilt’s voice smarmed on in the background. Something, at the moment, about his ninety-horsepower Fiat, how he would drive it to London for a board meeting of the International Horse Show Association.

  I leaned toward Hubbard slightly, interrupted him. “Sorry,” I said. “I have to visit the washroom.”

  Hubbard nodded, but his “Of course” was snipped with disappointment. His wife was on his other side and I was a new ear for his socialist-utopian ideas.

  I rose, ready to quietly excuse myself to anyone at the table who looked at me. I scanned the faces, passing quickly over Selene and Vanderbilt. Her head was angled toward Vanderbilt’s nearby moving lips, her eyes cast into the flower arrangement. The captain lifted his indifferent gaze to me.

  “Excuse me, Captain,” I said, though as softly as I could and still have him hear me. “I’ll be right back.”

  He nodded.

  I began to turn away, but I did glance at Selene once more. Vanderbilt’s face was still drawn near hers; he was speaking of a prize high stepper. But she’d lifted her face and was looking at me with that opaque complexity I’d seen earlier.

  I nodded.

  She nodded in return, I thought, but if I was right, it was the merest possible nod, as if she did not want Vanderbilt to notice.

  I moved away toward the portside forward door.

  I soon saw Brauer. He sat at a round, corner table, facing in my direction, but he did not see me as I slowed to pass. He was turned and was speaking to the man sitting next to him: a thin-faced, clean-shaven man with a tall, brown but lightly graying, Brilliantined pompadour, nodding at Brauer’s words.

  I looked away and kept moving. The steward was standing nearby, monitoring three members of the waitstaff who were simultaneously launching themselves from the sideboard with wine bottles for refills.

  “Pardon me,” I said.

  “Yes sir?” he said.

  “I have a terrible memory for names, and I want to avoid a social offense. Please remind me of the name of the thin-faced man with the large hair in the corner.”

  I nodded with careful precision toward the man next to Brauer, and the steward followed my gesture.

  He pulled some papers from his inner pocket. “I’m still memorizing names myself,” he said. “Let me look, Mr. Cobb.”

  He’d already memorized mine.

  He looked at the table charts. “Ah, yes,” he said, pitching his voice low. “That’s Mr. Edward Cable.”

  “Cable,” I said. “Of course. I met him in passing but he wanted to speak later. Do you know anything else about him?”

  “He’s from Boston, Massachusetts. A prominent dealer in rare books.”

  I began to pat the pockets of my tux. “I need to find that paper I made notes on,” I said. “He’s on A Deck, I think.”

  The steward looked at his notes. “B Deck,” he said, though discreetly not speaking the number of his stateroom.

  But he was accommodating. Like any reporter worth his salt, I would keep pumping till the source dried up. “And the name of the dark-haired man sitting to his left?” I asked.

  The steward looked again at his chart. “That’s Mr. Walter Brauer of London. An academic, is what I understand.”

  “Anything else about either of them?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Thanks,” I said and I discreetly pulled a half-dollar coin from my pocket and slipped it into his hand.

  “Thank you, sir,” he said.

  I looked back to the round table in the corner.

  Brauer was the one listening now. Everyone else at the table was absorbed in other conversations, and these two men were posed in a tableau vivant entitled “Private Conversation Conducted in Public.” Both of them had leaned their torsos toward each other, Brauer angling his head still farther in the direction of the other man and casting his face downward, staring at the tabletop as if he were examining a rare book, with Cable likewise moving his head closer to his dinner companion’s but focusing on Brauer’s ear, putting words there.

  The words flowed on and the two faces did not show any emotion during them. Cable stopped speaking and Brauer nodded and the two men straightened. This was not an off-color joke, gleaned from a rare book. Not a critical comment from one man of the mind to another about the vapid conversation going on across the table. This was just about them, and it was serious business.

  I pushed through the dining room doors, across the deck’s entrance hall with its twin elevators, and down the portside corridor a few paces to the gentlemen’s room. I stepped in. I washed my hands at the marble basin. Going through the motions of what I’d publicly said I’d do. And I stood there with my hands dripping for a moment, thinking on the rare book dealer and the lecturer at King’s College, how I might befriend them. If Edward Cable was why Brauer was traveling first class on this ship, the loop was closed now, and my getting nearer to them would be difficult.

  I dried my hands on one of the stack
ed hand towels and dropped it into the wicker basket. I stepped from the washroom and strode off down the corridor.

  I smelled her perfume even before I saw her. Nothing of flowers. This was the smell of the green things in the world, the unadorned things of a field, of a forest, hay newly mown, and beneath this smell a musky scent, but something faintly sweet as well, lavender perhaps. And in its complex fullness, this was a familiar smell, as a matter of fact, though I did not pause to identify it. I emerged from the corridor and there stood Selene, not moving anywhere, not addressing herself to the elevators, just standing there.

  I stopped.

  Why had I not smelled this scent upon her earlier? Had she just now refreshed it while waiting for me?

  She did look toward me without surprise. But also as if without recognition. Perhaps I’d misread the earlier look, at the dinner table, perhaps I’d imagined a complex yearning there that did not exist. At the beginning of the meal, after our Liverpudlian captain had rung three bells lightly on his wineglass with his salad fork and after most of the table offered him a charmed laugh in return—swells only too happy to embrace the social crudities of a man with power, particularly power over their mortal well-being in the middle of the ocean—he made a cursory introduction of each of us. When he spoke my name and my occupational justification for being at the table, I glanced at Selene and her look was the one I was confronting now: I can see that some person or other is present here before me.

  So just outside the first-class dining room, Selene Bourgani and I stood alone, looking at each other, and as the moment stretched on and she did not resort to social boilerplate, nor did I, as we did not speak at all but neither did we turn away, the uninflected silence between us began to seem like actual, engaged communication.

  But then she said, “I believe the washrooms are in this direction.”

  Was I wrong about the initial silence? Or was it true and she had not fully realized what was happening? Or had she realized but not trusted that I was feeling the same way and it was up to me to open all this between us?