The Star of Istanbul Page 4

  I’m not the sort of man who could answer such a thing. It was odd enough, under the circumstances, that I was even able to use the part of my brain that could rationally assess her outward signs and could pose these questions. This was my reporter’s brain, my reporter’s self. I was good at that, but I was very bad at that when I was simply being a man with a woman. A woman who knew something I wanted to know about a story: that was one thing. But not when a woman held some secret upon her body I could read only with mine, a secret I would never tell. In those circumstances, I tended to act first and assess later, if at all.

  But Selene had me trying to figure her out. Had me thinking too much.

  All right. It was up to me.

  I said, “I had to get away from that table for a few minutes.”

  “What are washrooms for?” she said.

  I was ready to think she was here because she wanted us to meet alone. In this last exchange we had both crept closer to each other, close enough to comfortably speak on. Would we banter now? Was that how it was done in her circle? It felt as if we’d begun, but I was hearing something in her voice: the words slid downward at the end of her question. They should have been light; they should have risen up, as if to say: Here I am; we know how this game is played. But I heard something else in them, that faintly sad resignedness I’d seen in her eyes at the table: This is how it’s done, but it’s not going to work.

  I did not know what to do. So we looked at each other awhile longer. Then she took a step in my direction and said, “Mr. Cobb, isn’t it?”

  “Christopher,” I said.

  “Do your friends call you Kit?”

  She was the only woman I’d ever met who assumed that.

  “My middle name is Marlowe,” I said.

  She laughed.

  “Christopher Marlowe Cobb. Kit then,” she said. “May I?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “You’re a famous war correspondent, as I understand it.”

  “You’re a famous film actress,” I said, “as I’ve learned firsthand.”

  “An actress,” she said, softly.

  And my mother swirled into my head, draped in ivory himation and chiton but with long black sleeves, playing Medea, perhaps as I first saw her on stage as a child.

  I hesitated even to introduce the thought of her to the woman standing before me. But Selene Bourgani was a widely celebrated woman. Though for some reason—perhaps that very celebrity—Selene was making me think like a reporter, what I really wanted to do was put my hands upon her. And so a famous mother could be helpful, given Selene’s apparent obliviousness to my own wide demi-celebrity among Chicago cabdrivers and shoe shine boys and shop owners and ballplayers and bowlered-and-bespoken politicians and their equivalents in a hundred syndicated cities, all of whom knew my name pretty well. Maybe film stars didn’t read the papers, at least not past the gossip columns.

  So I said, “My mother was an actress.”

  “And Kit Marlowe was her favorite playwright.”

  “Close to. She was kind enough not to name me William Shakespeare Cobb.”

  Selene nodded at this, but distractedly, since her brow had furrowed ever so slightly a moment earlier as she began to put my surname with the possibilities; not that my name would necessarily be part of my mother’s stage name, though it happened to be. Selene’s brow unfurrowed and she narrowed her eyes at me and I knew what she was about to ask.

  “Yes,” I said. “Her.”

  “No.”

  “Yes.”

  “Isabel Cobb?”

  “I am her son.”

  It was the right thing to tell her, as it turned out.

  Selene thumped the back of her right wrist against her forehead and swayed to the side. She provided her own title card: “She swoons,” she said.

  But instantly she straightened and reached out and touched my forearm. “How foolish of me,” she said. “To do a cheap, film-actress emotion at that news. I loved your mother. I wanted to be your mother when I was a girl.”

  That came out wrong and instantly she heard it. She straightened abruptly as if she’d been startled by an unknown sound.

  “Those aren’t the feelings I hoped to inspire,” I said.

  I expected another film-actress gesture. Wide-eyed abashed, perhaps, or flutteringly flirtatious. But a dark something passed over her, leaving her face as I’d seen it across the table: subtle outwardly; unreadable without knowing the full context of her present life; perhaps numbingly bored, perhaps inexpressibly sad.

  Her hand was still on my forearm. She removed it.

  She seemed as if she wanted to say something from that darkness. I felt I’d done the wrong thing to try to sneak in a reference to possible feelings between us. It had only made her take her hand from me, after all.

  But instead, she managed a smile. I felt her exertion. She said, “Your mother is a very great actress. I wish I’d been able to do what she has done.”

  “Your films . . .”

  She cut me off, which was just as well, as I’d plunged into a comment I did not know how to complete; I had no idea how to intelligently compliment her on her films.

  She said, “My films are melodrama at best. And there’s always the terrible silence. Not that I ever came close to doing what she did, in the time I spent striving for the stage, even with Shakespeare’s words in my mouth.”

  “Many people love you,” I said.

  She ignored the comment. “All I have is my life,” she said.

  By which she seemed to suggest that making films was not part of her life. I thought to ask her if that’s what she meant, but I did not. It would sound as if I disagreed. I didn’t want to disagree with her about anything at the moment.

  “The lamb,” she said.

  I didn’t understand at first. Things had suddenly gotten serious enough that my first thought was that she was segueing into speaking of religion.

  But it was simply dinner.

  “They’re surely serving it by now,” she said.

  “Ah, the lamb,” I said. “Yes.”

  “Can you give me a moment?” she said.

  I didn’t understand.

  “I am always subject to instant and widespread gossip,” she said.

  This seemed at first like a non sequitur. My puzzlement must have shown on my face.

  “If we walk back into the dining room together,” she said. And she waited to see if she needed to explain further.

  She did not.

  “I understand,” I said.

  She nodded faintly.

  I finished her sentence: “They might think you’re my mother.”

  She laughed at this. A low, sharp bark of a laugh, a laugh I was sure she never unleashed in public. It felt like a sudden kiss.

  And she reached out and touched my forearm once more, and then she was gone.

  5

  The next day was cloudless and windless, and but for the sharp chill in the air, the North Atlantic could have been the Mediterranean in its azure brightness. I roamed the saloon promenades on decks A and B, trying to look casual, watching for Brauer and Cable, and watching for Selene as well. They weren’t showing themselves, any of them. I had time to eavesdrop among the other first-class passengers, and I was struck by how many of them were talking about U-boats, worrying about Thursday, when we would enter the War Zone. Midmorning, as I strolled past Lifeboat 11, amidships, on the upper, open A Deck, I turned my ear to a walrus-mustached Brit leaning to his wife—both of them swaddled in blankets on deck chairs—and he was saying, “My dear, we will simply outrun the blighters.”

  Since this very notion was my own primary source of confidence in our safe passage, the Brit’s speaking it led me to reflect on my body’s sense of our speed, in m
y knees and inside my chest and in the press of the air on my face. He led me to remember from B Deck an hour ago, with a clear and open view of the ocean around us, the pace of our passing a great floating tangle of seaweed. And it struck me at last: we were not moving at full speed. No more than twenty knots, I would have guessed, when we should have been doing twenty-five.

  I looked up to the smokestacks, which rose seven stories above me. I stepped toward the railing so I could scan them all at once. The funnels were painted their usual black in the upper quarter, but the orange-mellowed red that normally covered the rest of the stacks down to their base, emblematic of the Cunard Line, was now entirely replaced with dark gray—as if this would make a 787-foot steamship less conspicuous on the face of the sea—and my suspicion about our reduced speed found clear, confirming evidence: the first three funnels were pumping out heavy black billows of smoke, but funnel number four was empty, was coldly silent.

  I had a twist in the chest at this. But it loosened instantly. The top speed of a U-boat was fifteen knots—and that was on the surface of the ocean, exposed for all to see. Submerged, our hunter could do about half that. Even if the Lusitania were running at twenty knots, we would be an utterly impossible target for a U-boat consciously to hunt down and a nearly impossible target to hit even if we got freakishly unlucky and happened into one’s sights, especially if we were executing a standard-procedure zigzag course through the War Zone. When I did my “Running the U-Boat Gauntlet” feature story, I could confirm my instant intuition about what was behind our silent funnel, but on the promenade deck I was certain I already knew. Bucks. Business. Passenger bookings were dwindling because of the war; coal was expensive; one of the four boiler rooms was shut down to save money.

  I strolled on. But my three people of interest never appeared, not through the morning, not through the afternoon. At dinner that night, Brauer and Cable were at their corner table, sitting beside each other again, and my hope was that they’d go to the Smoking Room after the last course. But Selene was nowhere to be found in the grand dining room, and when that was finally clear to me, I had a twist in my chest that squeezed harder than the thought of our idle boiler room. I considered leaving the table before the imminent salambos à la crème—what the hell was I doing eating something called salambos à la crème anyway?—and going to her room and knocking and asking after her well-being, even if only through the closed door. But I didn’t. For now I didn’t. She wasn’t why I was on this ship.

  And as the orchestra had waltzed us to our tables last night, on this night they ragtimed us away, but with a piece just right for our gang, “The Operatic Rag,” syncopating quotations from Wagner and Bizet and Verdi. I joined the first-classers politely swelling out the forward dining room doors. I kept back a ways in the crowd, letting Brauer and Cable stay ahead of me. The after dinner smokers and socializers were all heading up three levels to A Deck to settle into the Smoking Room, if they were men, or the Lounge and Music Room, if they were women. I went up the stairs behind a cacophony of small talk, a welter of perfume, a rustling din of evening clothes, and at the top of the stairs we men separated from the women and entered our preserve, paneled in Italian walnut and filled with settings of sofas and easy chairs with the simple curves and cabriole legs of the Queen Anne style. Above us, the glass-paneled arch of the top-deck ceiling was darkened by the night.

  I hung back at the Smoking Room door and watched Brauer and Cable sit down at one of the arrangements in the center of the room, with four chairs around a small, walnut writing table. The two men sat at right angles to each other, and as the other two chairs remained empty, I moved across the room toward them, making haste when they could not see me, and then arriving in their sight casually, noticing Brauer and affecting a mild and pleasant surprise.

  “Dr. Brauer,” I said. “Good evening.” I looked around the room as if to note how the place was filling up. I looked back to one of the empty chairs. “May I join you?”

  Parties of two in a steamship Smoking Room had to expect strangers to end up in their company. Brauer did not hesitate. He nodded me to the empty chair to his right, facing Cable, and I sat.

  “Mr. Christopher Cobb,” Brauer said to his companion, though in a perfunctory tone, and then he turned to me and said, “Mr. Edward Cable,” his voice warming a little.

  I reached across and offered my hand to Cable, wondering why they were here, with Brauer uncomfortable and their not being free to speak to each other in the way they surely wished. But perhaps they’d done all the business they needed to do during the day and this was to maintain their cover.

  Cable accepted my hand for shaking and he had a gentle grip, the grip of a man used to turning expensive book pages very carefully.

  “Mr. Cable,” I said.

  “Mr. Cobb,” he said. And in just those two words his Boston Back Bay accent rolled over me as dramatically as if he were one of my mother’s leading men making an entrance, the “Mister” coasting on a schwa to a vanished “r” and the vowel of my name reshaped and drawn out like awww-ing at the sight of a Brahmin baby.

  The man offered a smile as well, over the shake, a bookman’s smile for a serious customer. But he surprised me as we settled back into our chairs. “You are a foreign correspondent,” he said.

  “Only if the foreigners are killing each other,” I said.

  He chuckled at this.

  I glanced at Brauer, wondering if he’d spoken of me. But Brauer was looking at Cable with a focus that suggested he was surprised at the man’s familiarity with my byline.

  Cable said, “It’s not your writing about battle that has interested me. Your feature work is as good as anything by Richard Harding Davis.”

  I looked back to Cable, caught his eyes, and searched them for irony. I didn’t see any. Too bad this guy was a German spy. I was starting to like him.

  He went on, “I remember last year a story you did on a young Mexican woman who wanted to fight for the rebels. Very interesting.”

  That was a good story, about a special young woman, a feature story in the midst of my little Mexican adventure, and there was nothing in it to cause any suspicion in a German agent. The whiff of danger I was presently smelling was a mistake, was just the ongoing lighting up of pipes and cigars and cigarettes all around the room going to my head. Nevertheless, this cohort of Brauer citing my story from the land that led me to my own secret work: that was a little unsettling. But I was a public person. I had plenty of followers.

  “Where do you get a chance to read me so closely?” I asked.

  “Boston.”

  This was possible. “The Daily Leader,” I said, which was owned by Griswold and splashed all my words around prominently.

  “Just so,” said Cable. “You should do a book someday.”

  “I may do that,” I said.

  I glanced at Brauer. He’d lit a cigarette and was draping one leg over the other at the knee and turning his body away from Cable. He blew his first drag of smoke into the air and seemed to be carefully striking a pose of indifference.

  “I deal in books, mostly rare,” Cable said.

  I looked back at the Brilliantined man. He was good. He was a mystery.

  “What’s your final destination?” I asked.

  “London.”

  “Book business?”

  “I’m always doing book business.”

  I turned to Brauer, who was still wrenched away from the conversation. “And Dr. Brauer,” I said. “After my little confusion over your honorific, I didn’t have a chance to ask. How do you make use of your doctorate?”

  There was a very brief moment of utter scorn from Brauer: he turned his eyes to me without turning his body, or even his head. But before I could glance at Cable to see if he was witnessing this attitude, to see how he was reacting, Brauer was uncrossing his leg, squaring his body and f
ace around, and he gave me a straight answer in what sounded like a civil tone. “I’m a lecturer at King’s College London.”

  I grew up backstage in hundreds of theaters across the U.S. and in more than a few other countries and I lived with people who were always in the process of memorizing, stretching their memories all the time, and I loved all the details of things, the names of things, and that carried along to my work as a newsman, remembering and naming and treasuring details, and all of this made me able to do what I was about to do for the arrogant priss who sat before me, who no doubt honored a keen memory as a sign—bogus though it was in and of itself—of intelligence: I said, “Sancte et Sapienter.” Which meant, ironically under the circumstances, “With holiness and wisdom.” Which was the motto of King’s College London, where my mother had a lover for a time while she played Kate in Shrew in the West End when I was an impressionable and absorbent thirteen.

  Brauer could not hide a tiny backward head flip of surprise.

  He couldn’t suspect me of being in the same secret business he was, so I figured it was good to keep him from simply dismissing me as a plebian. A little apt Latin seemed to be doing the trick. “So,” I said, looking to Cable and back to Brauer, “you boys pals from one side of the Atlantic or the other?”

  Brauer’s lips disappeared in a thin, hard line.

  “Neither,” Cable said.

  I turned to him.

  He shot Brauer a glance, but with a crooked little smile attached. I was looking at both of them as actors. Actors at the Moscow Art Theater under Stanislavsky, doing Chekhov. Working the nuances. Ignoring the balcony. And this smile was interesting. Like they’d talked over their public story about this and Cable had won but Brauer didn’t like it and this was the first time they had occasion to say this.

  “We’ve only just met,” Cable said.

  What I was hearing was either a lie or only a partial truth. They either knew each other already or indeed this was their first meeting, but it was planned and significant. Cable wasn’t afraid of my seeing the little smile because he liked his little ironies, liked relishing them, and he couldn’t even imagine I’d be on to them.