The Star of Istanbul (25 page)

She seemed a long way from answering my question, truthfully or otherwise, and the smoke of easy sex was in the air between us. I could see through it, but that didn't make the more difficult thing any less difficult.

What did help, in this particular moment, was the sharp nip of pain on my fingertips. The match was still burning.

I waved the flame away and tossed the match on the floor. Right where she'd planted Brauer, as a matter of fact.

I stepped back to the bed and sat down.

She turned her face. She looked faintly disappointed once again. But not for long. We were still working on the new rules of the game between us.

She said, “Who would you say is currently the most important man in the Ottoman Empire?”

She still seemed to be far from the answers I wanted. But I was willing to play along with her for now.

The answer to her question was easy. Eight years ago a mixed bag of nationalists, secularists, pluralists, and various other haters of the despot “Crimson Sultan” Abdul Hamid II got together and hatched the Young Turk Revolution, which overthrew the Sultan and tried to reinvent the Empire. Three of the Young Turks achieved pasha status and became a ruling triumvirate, but one of them was clearly running the country from the position of minister of war, and he also happened to be the primary instigator of the Ottoman alliance with Germany.

“Enver Pasha,” I said.

Selene nodded. “Enver Pasha. And it turns out movies are all the rage in Istanbul and he's my biggest fan. Biggest as in most intense, or so I'm told. One of the biggest in the world-leader category as well. Maybe old Wilhelm is a fan too and has him beat in that department. Who knows about Woodrow Wilson.”

“From the way he conducts his foreign policy,” I said, “I don't think you're Wilson's type.”

“Be that as it may,” she said. “Enver somehow conveyed his intense regard for me to the Kaiser who told Kurt who conferred with a bigwig at the Foreign Office who had his minions find me, and they had the right documents and I received some impressive telegrams from all the impressive people in that daisy chain of impressive people and they all wanted me to . . .”

At this point, though she had been rolling out this tale with absolute aplomb and wry worldliness, she abruptly broke off. The crack in her voice didn't seem scaled for a theater audience. Indeed, it seemed like something she wanted to suppress. All right: perhaps wanted to
portray
as something she wanted to suppress. But I was prepared to keep both possibilities on the table.

She straightened and looked away and composed herself, and she said, “They want me to do certain things. The fundamental one being to spy on him.”

She stopped talking.

I said nothing.

There was this odd sense of plummeting in me, in my chest, in my limbs. An image of the man flashed into my head. It was vague, really, derived from the grainy news photos I'd barely glanced at over the past few years. But it was clear enough to accelerate the plummet: he was merely a thin-framed swarthy little man with black, uptwirled, Kaiser mustaches, downright dudish-looking, as a matter of fact.
To hell with this,
I thought,
I already figured this was her primary skill as a spy.

I almost said something stupid. About Turkish men still having their personal harems. About Enver maybe making room for her.

I didn't. I was glad I didn't.

But she seemed to read it in me. Or maybe even in herself.
She abruptly shrugged and turned her face away and said, “You know, maybe you
should
just walk out the door. I'll deal with the consequences.”

That wasn't what I wanted.

“I'm already in pretty deep with you,” I said.

She gave me her face, her eyes, once more.

“How was it all supposed to happen?” I said.

“We were going to the Pera Palace Hotel. Walter Brauer was going to meet someone. I'd wait. That's all I know.”

I didn't say anything.

She said, “Except then Brauer would deliver the goods.”

This line was delivered cold. Okay. She was going back to the frame of mind that was letting her do these certain things she was supposed to do but which were so much against her inner nature. It seemed to me now—and I was relieved at the feeling—that Selene Bourgani was overwriting her little scene, was overplaying her little part.

“Clearly this is difficult for you,” I said, trying to keep the irony out of my voice.

“Yes,” she said. She was ready to sniffle.

“So we're back to truth time,” I said. “Not that I'm in
so
deep that I don't still need the straight dope, if you want me to hang around and help you.”

Her face did not change in the slightest.

I made sure mine didn't either as I tried to focus on what I needed to know. I'd been a bit too eager to show off my knowledge when I'd dropped Kurt Fehrenbach into the conversation. I was an idiot showing off for a woman. I missed a logical step. I jumped in with her director-boyfriend after she asserted her allegiance only to herself and not to the Germans. Old Kurt might indeed have something on her that was the leverage to make her work with the German secret service, but the issue at hand had been why she killed Brauer. Fehrenbach's scoop on her couldn't be the same as Brauer's. Fehrenbach used his to make her a spy; it already had to be okay with Berlin. Brauer's lowdown could have been worth her killing him only if it put her in serious danger with the Huns.

I said, “I need to understand two things. If the Germans want you to seduce Enver Pasha and work him for what he knows and they don't, why did you agree? And why did you kill an unarmed Walter Brauer? Those two answers need to make sense to me together.”

Again, nothing going on in the face before me. Outwardly. The spinning of her brain's turbines, however, was pretty much drowning out the ship's at that moment.

“I'll give you an answer,” she said. “But a little truthful clarification from you first.”

I presented the blank face and the silence, which I'd been learning from her.

She didn't care. “You think I'm a German spy,” she said. “And you're an American spy. Correct?”

This much was obvious. “Correct,” I said.

“Your people know some things about Brauer and about me and no doubt about Metzger and Strauss, as well. Correct?”

“And about the guy with the phony beard,” I said.

There was a little loosening in her. “So you think it was phony too,” she said.

“Who was he?”

“The boss.”

“Any name?”

“They called him Herr Buchmann.”

“The ‘bookman.' Phony beard, phony name probably.”

“Aren't they clever?” She let the irony ooze thickly this time.

He was known to the Brits, I thought. Or making sure he never would be known to them.

I put this out of my mind. It was my own fault, bringing Squarebeard up at this point, helping her slide away from straight answers.

“My questions remain,” I said.

She waved off my prodding. “So isn't that all we need to know? We both of us are playing the same role. You happen to be doing it for the American government. Willingly, I presume. I did hear you pledge allegiance a few minutes ago, didn't I?”

I nodded.

“And I pledged disallegiance to Germany. I may be out for myself, but your country is mine too. And don't ask that damn ‘why' again. America's fine but it's in second place with me. Do you really need to know what my old boyfriend has on me and why I'd shoot Walter Brauer to death and why I'd have sex with a small-sized, waxy-mustached, garlicky Turk with three wives and a Napoleon obsession? Maybe I didn't like Walter's tie. Maybe I'm a sucker of a slut for guys with garlicky breath, especially if they're running a whole empire. Maybe I'd have sex with Enver Pasha for free but in addition the Huns are paying me big, in real, imperial gold. What difference does it make? Why should you help me out? Because whatever the Germans want to learn on the sly from Enver Pasha, you and your boys would like to know as well. Let me work for you both. All you sons of bitches. Why don't you and I agree to that right now and stop all the idiot questions and then have some easy sex to seal the deal?”

This, for the moment, seemed reasonable.

37

This time the question of gentle or rough didn't even come up. This deal was sealed in hot wax. I pounded and she pounded and the only disagreement between us was when she declared, with her words broken into eight distinct phrases from our ongoing activity: “If you finish . . . now . . . or even soon . . . Kit Cobb . . . I will get . . . my pistol . . . from your coat . . . and kill you.”

I heeded her warning. Selene Bourgani and I extended things to her satisfaction, though my own personal problem with extending this sort of thing cropped up: my body kept on, but my mind drifted off. At first, not entirely, as the departure point was a surge of jealousy at Enver Goddamn Pasha. With the thought of what a man like him was mysteriously able to command from a woman like Selene Bourgani, I began, indeed, to despise Enver Pasha, despise him perhaps not with the depth but surely, I fancied at that moment, with the intensity felt by even the Greeks and the Armenians. Of course not with their intensity either, but yes, my mind had wandered as far as the massacres of both those peoples in recent years, and I thought how these Young Turks were no better than the Crimson Sultan in this regard, given what had already been reported of their actions against the Greeks in Smyrna last summer and Thrace the summer before, and against the Armenians in Adana soon after these new boys came to power, six years ago, those actions being the wholesale slaughter of every Greek and Armenian in sight—man, woman, and child. Which gave me a thought that got drowned out by screaming.

This was from Selene beneath me, though it was not—I was happy to realize—a scream of rebuke. I was still working out okay for her. Maybe, indeed, my thoughts of politics and massacres were helpful in that regard. She was finishing up and would soon let me do likewise. And then she stopped screaming and her own mind apparently wandered off and I was happy to finally put my stamp in the sealing wax and blow it till it cooled.

Afterward, as we lay wrapped tightly together on the narrow bed, the thought that slid into me a few minutes ago returned. And when we rather gently untangled and sat side by side with our backs against the wall smoking Fatimas, I said, “Your Greeks have a real beef with your garlicky Turk.”

She finished blowing a plume of smoke before her as if she hadn't heard. But then she turned her face to me. “
My
Greeks?”

“Your life story.”

“I think I told you once already that was all lies.”

“I figured you might have lied about some of the lies.”

She nodded faintly. “I could do that,” she said. “But I didn't.”

She looked away again and took another drag on her cigarette.

I made my voice go quite soft. Actually it wasn't so willful as that. I did know that if I wanted an answer, I needed to be soft. I'd often used the trick with news sources. But at that moment I did indeed feel a little surge of gentleness about Selene and her phony public life and her raging private dramas and desires. I said, “What
is
your story?”

“I'm American.”

“By birth?”

“Not quite.”

“And your parents?”

She watched the smoke she'd just blown in a long, thin ribbon till it dissipated into the cabin air. When it was gone, she said, “Cypriot.”

“Greek-Cypriot or Turk-?”

“Both. I come from far back, intermingled. We didn't take a side in that fight.”

All this came easily from her. Which didn't mean any of it was necessarily true. But there was even less reason to believe the overt publicity tales about her.

“So the island was Cyprus, not Andros,” I said.

She exhaled softly, without smoke. “Part of me comes from Andros, I guess. My first lover was a Greek and he took me to Andros for the deed. I was fifteen. He was forty-five. I had a certain look about me and a certain willingness and a certain freedom to act. He owned ships. I was fond of Andros. I was fond of him. He was like the leaves of the olive trees on the mountains there. Silver laid upon green.”

We both fell silent for a long while. Both of us smoking. This thing about her first lover: it was maybe the only thing she'd ever said to me that had instantly felt true.

Then she broke the silence. “How will you save me, Kit Cobb?”

I took a long drag on my cigarette and began my own moment of contemplating the smoke I was blowing. But she interrupted.

“I was glad to stop your damn questions,” she said. “Glad to do what we just did. But we have to face facts now. My usefulness to the United States of America won't last long when the Germans and Turks find out about Brauer. I'm afraid the best you can do is shield me long enough so I can get on a train or a ship or a donkey cart and try to vanish.”

All that was delivered with a flat, steady tone. This was a tough dame, even without a pistol in her hand.

I said, “Did you have any sense that Brauer would remain in Istanbul as your contact?”

“No. I got the impression he'd be coming back to London.”

“Did you hear anything to give you the impression he was personally known in Istanbul?”

“I think he'd studied there some years ago. But I didn't pick up on anything else, one way or the other.”

This was a chance we'd have to take, I thought. Obviously Metcalf figured Brauer was unknown by sight in Istanbul or he wouldn't have urged me to kill the man and take his place. Not that Metcalf would hesitate to take a chance—even a big one—on my behalf, seeing as he was advising a man of a different temperament from himself.

“I can play Brauer,” I said.

She turned her head to me sharply. “You can pull that off?”

“I can.”

“Good,” she said, with an intensity that struck me as odd. Maybe it was relief. Maybe she suddenly felt her place on a train or ship or donkey cart was enssured. That made sense. But there was something in her at that moment I wished I could get her to talk about.

“I know this has been scary for you,” I said.

She shot me a look that confirmed my gut feeling. This intensity wasn't about a release of fear. It was something else.

She was on her feet and moving to her clothes.

She bent to them and I tried to memorize the flash of her body. Each time always felt like the last time with Selene Bourgani.

“Selene,” I said.

She turned to me, pressing her dress to her chest.

At least she did turn.

“I know you're not afraid,” I said.

I could see her mind working for a moment, trying to figure me out. Then she said, “I know you're not either.”