The Hemingway Valise Page 3

  She took a moment to draw out a smile, a faint one, and she said, “Who was I when we first made love?”

  Not the answer I expected. Not what I wanted. Whoever she was when we first made love on the Lusitania, or even whoever she was when we made love again not long after, on a steamship in the night in the English Channel—with our separate paths toward Constantinople about to converge—whoever she was before we got to Turkey, I was now a different Kit Cobb. Different and the same. “You were Selene,” I said.

  “Then that’s who I am this afternoon,” she said.

  “We apparently work for the same company these days,” I said.

  “Yes. And I am any number of people for them. I learned my craft well as Selene Bourgani.”

  We looked at each other in silence for a few moments more. I would not let myself remember that earlier Selene. I knew the danger.

  But I turned my hand upward. Our palms touched. I clasped her there for the length of one reflexive breath, as if the fault line that had ripped open in the middle of Paris had just, miraculously, fallen together again and sealed itself shut. And then I took my hand away.

  She understood.

  “How can I help you?” she said.

  I told her Ernest Hemingway’s story. In the midst, Selene waved a hand at a hovering waiter, and near the end of the story the Turkish coffee arrived. She drank thoughtfully while I spoke, and I did not drink at all.

  When I was done, she said, “Your coffee is growing cold.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  She waited. I made no move to it.

  She nodded.

  And she said, “If you find this man, would you expect to deal with him physically?”

  “That would not be my first plan.”

  “I recognize his description.”

  “Are you recommending physical?”

  “Not as a first plan. I know only a very small handful of Kemal’s men in Paris and I’d rather not lose one, as odd as that sounds. We can keep an eye on the ones we know.”

  “I understand.”

  “Alternatively,” she said, “I’d rather not lose you.”

  I let the ambiguity of that pass. I said, “I’m trying not to lose my friend Hemingway.”

  “His name is Devrim Koprulu,” she said. She told me the bar he frequented.

  She hesitated.

  I waited.

  She told me his personal address.

  “Be careful,” she said.

  “Is he primarily muscle?”

  “He can do things of that sort. But he’s also a handler. Runs some agents.”

  “Can he make a decision to lay off of Hemingway if I can make it attractive to him?”

  “From what I know.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “For all of it.”

  I needed no more from Selene. I let the silence begin to sit between us. For the moment, I found myself reluctant to leave her.

  She understood. Then she surprised me. “You’re married,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m glad for you.”

  “The work you gave yourself over to in Turkey,” I said. “It’s still incomplete.”

  “Sadly.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She nodded.

  I said, “And are you simply disguised today? Or are you mourning?”

  “Only for the world,” she said. “For the things in people’s hearts and what they might do about them. The Great War is over but the battles go on. There are still victims everywhere.”

  I nodded, and our shared gaze grew still, abided for a long moment.

  But time was short.

  “I have to go,” I said.

  “As do I,” she said. “I didn’t expect to play this scene again.”

  “Nor did I.”

  She lowered her veil.

  “I’ll wear the mourning clothes an extra day,” she said.

  I stood.

  She turned her head away.

  When I emerged from the bistro I paused before its door to decide which way to go, but Selene prompted a last reflexive breath, though this one was slow going in and just as slow coming back out.

  Selene had led me to make a decision I’d been deferring. Part of me expected simply to confront the Turk as a tough guy. I’d offer a trade in his boss’ best interests, but if he didn’t want to make it, I’d propose that he end up face-down in the Seine floating toward England. Something like that. A clear, violent alternative to accepting my bargain. Said strongly enough to get him to make the first move, if that was going to be his choice. Him first. To salve my conscience for another killing. I was temperamentally ready for this eventuality. The success I’d had over the years often relied on having to enact just such a solution.

  I was fine with that.

  I may even have enjoyed that.

  Yes, something in me enjoyed that.

  And I despised that.

  But I had another skill. Not unlike Selene’s. For this boy Hemingway, I’d play out the other rope first. Which involved my assuming another identity. A familiar one.

  Koprulu’s apartment and the bar he frequented were a short walk up Boulevard de Strasbourg. But first I had to get the goods for the trade proposal. So I headed to Shakespeare & Company. It was past noon. Hemingway’s phantom story on Kemal and his reporter’s notes should be waiting for me.

  I stepped into the shop and Sylvia was away from the front desk. Then I spotted a familiar figure mid-shop, drinking something from a teacup in the chair where Pound had been sitting when I first met Hem.

  Familiar indeed, this guy, with his gray goatee and owlish-round wire-rimmed glasses, his London tweeds and his silk shirt with a floppy, turned-down, Byronic collar. And he still combed his hair forward into ancient-Roman bangs.

  Lincoln Steffens.

  I strode in, approaching him. He looked up. He stood up.

  “Kit Cobb,” he proclaimed and we shook hands.

  A good man with a muckraker’s soul, but also with a sweet-tooth for totalitarians. Mugs like Lenin and Mussolini. A good journalist if you liked your news done up with political bias in a big sloppy bow, like that tie around his neck.

  Steffens said, “How’s your man Bunky Millerman?”

  “Good. Good.”

  “He in Paris with you? Shooting the place?”

  “Wish he was.”

  “He’d get some swell photos.”

  “I thought you were in Lausanne with Hemingway.”

  Steffens wagged his head slowly. “Poor bastard. I came down to help him search the train station. I felt bad. Responsible even.”

  “He tell you his theory?”

  “Yes. I felt bad enough I’d made Hadley act crazy. But if my being drunkenly public about his talent gets him killed on top of it, I’ll just go off and be a monk somewhere. I swear.”

  “Maybe it won’t come to that,” I said.

  Steffens wagged his head again, this time in the direction of his shoes. “It’s hard to think his stuff will turn up now. The little I’d seen of the stories was extraordinary. Such an original voice. They were perfect to my ear, these stories. What a loss.”

  He was starting to ramble. His sense of guilt seemed real. But I didn’t say anything about my plan. He was apparently prone to shooting off his mouth.

  Sylvia saved me from him, emerging from the back room.

  I excused myself from Steffens and followed Sylvia to the front of the store.

  “I have something for you,” she said.

  She pulled two Number 9 manila envelopes from her desk drawer. “From Ernest,” she said. One was marked “Story.” One was marked “Notes.”

  The two of them fit nicely together in an inner coat pocket.

  Sylvia leaned near to me and
lowered her voice. “How is he?”

  The word that came to mind was vengeful. But I didn’t say it. I thought of hopeful. I supposed he was, thinking me capable in this task. I didn’t say that either, as I didn’t know how long that mood had lasted. I said, “Holding up.”

  “It’s difficult,” she said in that sweetly sympathetic, almost-child’s voice of hers.

  I reached out and squeezed her elbow. “I may be able to help.”

  “I do so hope you can,” she said.

  “How’s Hadley?”

  “I haven’t seen her. But I can imagine.”

  I leaned to Sylvia and bussed her on both cheeks, like a Frenchman.

  And I went out of the shop.

  Then it was time for the actor to prepare.

  I returned to our apartment in Rue Madame. Louise was out.

  I stood at the kitchen basin with my badger-hair shaving brush and my Solingen razor. And my mugs. The ceramic one whipped full of lather. And the one in the mirror before me.

  I studied my close-cropped beard. It was just as well Louise was not here. Her feelings were unresolvedly ambiguous about the scar on my cheek that I was about to expose. It was acquired long ago, before Louise and I had known each other, and at first it became an object of tenderness for her nurse’s soul. But eventually she learned that the sudden exposure of this secret part of my body meant I needed to play the role of a German with a revered dueling-society scar, and that meant things were about to become dangerous for me.

  The real origin of the long, crescent scar on my left cheek was, in one respect, not unlike a classic Schmiss, its having been administered by a German wielding a saber. But it was done under a markedly unclassic circumstance, in Mexico, by a German agent.

  I was sorry Louise would have to live with this thing for a few weeks. But I needed to show it now. The Turk secret service still had a soft spot in its heart for the Germans. I figured that would be useful in the plan I had for presenting my trade offer.

  After the shaving was done, I stepped away from the mirror with only a brief glance. At least for the moment. This was always a bit of a rough transformation for me.

  Working tools first.

  My Mauser .32-caliber pocket pistol, which I secured, as was my custom, in a holster positioned at the small of my back.

  My leather-pouch of lock-picking tools tucked into a side pocket of my coat.

  A passport for one Josef Wilhelm Jäger, an operative for the German secret service. Sometimes, as well, when my studied excellence in their language might have a faint taint of an English-speaker in it, Jäger was a German-American journalist for a German-language newspaper in the U.S. But today, with a Turk, Jäger would simply be a German spy. For that I also had a nicely done-up document identifying me as an embassy cultural attaché, an American lie of a document that would be taken by anyone in the espionage game as a German lie of a document. I slipped the document and my passport into an inner pocket of my coat.

  I patted the other inner pocket to feel Hem’s story and notes.

  Then I squared up before the mirror to confront Herr Jäger. The man with the scimitar of a scar running from just below the cheekbone to just above the jawbone.

  “You again,” I said to him. To myself portraying him.

  “As always, it’s for a good cause,” I said.

  He did not disagree.

  It was time to find Devrim Koprulu.

  As my fuller plan shaped up in my head, I chose to work his apartment first, one way or another. His building was just off Strasbourg on Rue du Château d’Eau, accessed through a pair of iron doors fronting the sidewalk. I preferred not to pick a big ward lock just off a busy street in the middle of the afternoon. So I stepped to the opposite doorway and leaned against it and lit a cigarette.

  It wasn’t long before the door latch began to clank from the inside. I strode quickly back across the street, and by the time the occupant of the building was opening the door I was ready to come in. Ready even for it to be Koprulu.

  It was a woman with a baby in her arms. I tipped my Trilby and held the door for her, and she fully pulled her baby against her with the help of her freed arm. She thanked me and went her way.

  I went in. And up. To the top floor, the fifth. I slowed to a soft creep as I approached Koprulu’s door. I leaned to it, listened. Nothing. I pulled back. The simplest version of my plan was the most direct. Knock on his door and confront him. I wasn’t sure which version I was hoping for. But this one was first.

  So I knocked.

  No answer.

  I knocked again. Still nothing.

  All right. Now the complications.

  First the lock. A Yale type. I’d gotten very good at opening these over the years. I withdrew a pick and a torque wrench from my pouch, inserted them in the keyway, and then I worked the pick along, lifting the tumblers as I went. The last one yielded, I rotated the wrench, and I was in.

  The place was one room. Fastidious. The bed in the corner was made with tight quilt corners. Military perhaps. But almost prissy. An excessive three pillows, arranged in a tier rising against the wall. A clean sink, clean pots hanging on hooks, though they showed wear, and there was a faint scent of mint about the place, and oregano. Yes, fastidious. Quite a few very good agents had that personality quirk, I’d found. We all had to be good at detail work, after all.

  That trait in Koprulu also made it easy for me to look for what I wanted. There were very few places where Hem’s work could be tucked away out of sight, either in or out of the valise.

  I searched fruitlessly beneath the bed. In a canvas trunk at its foot. In, and under, a small chest of drawers. In a wardrobe. There, however, within a false bottom hidden beneath Koprulu’s folded prayer rug, I found his small arsenal.

  I pulled the centerpiece from its shoulder holster: a Belgian-made version of the Browning 1903, the standard issue pistol in the recently deceased Ottoman Empire. Beneath it was a military issue Jambiya dagger with a chased brass handle and scabbard. He was out and about unarmed. Unless he had a specific task to perform, that was wise for a Turk in Paris in 1922.

  I replaced his weaponry, closed his wardrobe door, and faced a reality. Things did not look good for Ernie’s manuscripts. Not if Koprulu had done the snatching as well as the shadowing. Which was likely.

  But the papers might simply be off with a translator. And there was still the matter of Hemingway’s life to negotiate.

  So I took a cane-back chair from beside the small dining table, set it in the center of the floor, facing the door, drew my Mauser, and I sat down to wait.

  The time passed without my awareness as I settled spontaneously into a fugue on the theme of dark-eyed women, prompted by one who guided me to this chair and one to whom I hoped safely to return.

  Then the apartment lock began to chitter with a key and I rose and stepped swiftly, silently to a place at the wall beside the door.

  The door opened and paused. He was on the other side of it, no doubt looking at the chair before him, wondering how it got there. Then his fingers appeared, curling around the door, giving it a push toward closure as he stepped to the chair.

  As he came into my view—this familiarly swarthy, well-put-together middleweight with his left shoulder higher than his right—I gave the closing door a hard kick shut and instantly placed the muzzle of my Mauser against the back of Koprulu’s skull.

  He stopped at once.

  I reached and tapped beneath his left elbow and he promptly raised his two hands.

  “Buyurun,” I said, the welcome of a Turk shopkeeper hoping to make a sale.

  Koprulu was behaving. Standing very still.

  I said, in French, assuming that was our lingua franca, “I have just used up most of my Turkish vocabulary. Are you good with French? Or perhaps you know German? I am a German. Our two countries have long be
en friends. Perhaps you have learned my language, as an operative of your country’s secret service.”

  My tone was friendly. My words invoked a national friendship. I let him know that I knew exactly what he was, which implied I was a German counterpart. But I kept the pistol against his skull. All this prompted him to turn his head just a little, as if he wanted to look me in the eyes. Turkish men liked to talk to other men with strong eye contact.

  I nudged him just a little with the pistol so he didn’t get any ideas about spinning around.

  He looked fully forward again.

  “So will it be French?” I said.

  “French,” he said.

  I patted him enough to confirm the Browning and dagger in the wardrobe were his only weapons, and I backed off a couple of steps. “Turn around slowly,” I said.

  He did.

  He didn’t have to be asked to keep his hands up.

  His eyes went from mine to the scar on my cheek and back to my eyes.

  I’d turned my head very subtly to the right so he would do just that. “From my university days,” I said.

  He nodded once.

  He knew the Germans.

  “Please sit down in the chair,” I said.

  He did, slowly.

  I said, “You can put your hands on your knees. Just keep them there for the time being.”

  He did what he was told.

  “I’m very sorry about the pistol,” I said. “And about breaking into your apartment. It smells like you are a good cook.”

  His eyes had trouble holding steady in his gaze on mine. My tone was confusing the hell out of him.

  I said, “I let myself in because I needed to approach you in secret. I am in your same line of work.”

  He nodded once again. His shoulders loosened just a little. He was settling down.

  I withdrew the German Embassy document and my passport from my inner pocket. I reached them forward.

  “By way of introduction,” I said. “You may take these and examine them.”

  He lifted his hands, grasped the papers, pulled them toward him—all this slowly, one discrete movement at a time, as if they were fragile, though it was his own present fragility he had in mind—and then he began to look the papers over.