The Star of Istanbul (10 page)

I said, “That was Walter Brauer, wasn't it?”

Though I could not see her in the dark, I could sense her face turn to me.

Perhaps she didn't know I'd encountered him. This could be just as useful, her abruptly realizing I knew him. I could even hint I knew
about
him.

I waited. She waited. Then she said, “Yes.”

“How do you know him?” I asked.

She called my bluff before I could get it started. “How do you?” she said.

I still wanted to seem to both of them to be an ignorant third party. No verifiable lies. Nothing suspicious. “I met him around,” I said. “Had a drink and a smoke with him and a bookseller friend of his a few nights ago.”

She did not reply to this. But along all the places where our arms and thighs were touching, I felt a faint loosening of tension in her.

“And you?” I said.

“Something similar,” she said.

“Really?” I meant this rhetorically, but I heard it sound like a challenge. It was already spoken, so I went ahead with the rest of it, even as I felt her tensing again. “He seemed awfully forward in the middle of the night,” I said.

She snorted. It was that female, dismissive “men” snort that is recognizable even in the pitch black.

I was relieved. She was taking it as jealousy.

“The night's over, Mr. Cobb,” she said.

I couldn't dispute that. But I didn't move.

“Time for you to go,” she said, though once again the softness of her tone surprised me.

I rose. I gathered my clothes from the floor, my eyes finally adjusting a little to the dark, with the help of the crack of corridor light beneath the door.

As I put on the first thing, my shirt, I heard her move away toward the bedroom. Without a word.

Later, after I slipped on my shoes and after I kneeled to them and tied them and rose, after I'd finished with dressing, I hesitated, thinking to go to the bedroom door, to say something to her.

But I didn't. A darkness like hers was spreading into my mind, like the darkness in the eyes after taking a blow to the head.

I moved toward the corridor door.

And then there was a rushing from behind me.

I turned.

I think part of me would not have been surprised if she were rushing to me with a knife that she'd plunge into my chest. But neither was I surprised when she leapt into my arms, still naked, hooking her legs around me, and she kissed me hard on the lips.

Nor was I surprised, when I tried to move into the room with her, that she just as rapidly disentangled from me and dismounted and backed away into the darkness, saying, “I'm sorry. That was good-bye. We're done now, Kit Cobb.”

13

And the
Lusitania
steamed into its last sunrise. And we all steamed with it. I slept only a little after leaving Selene. I rose and I wrote some and I packed my things and I ate lunch, with the ship orchestra playing “The Blue Danube,” and I went down to the Purser's Bureau in the Entrance Hall on B Deck and I retrieved the constant hidden companion of every foreign excursion of my war correspondent career: my money belt, with a stash of gold coins and with reporter credentials and a passport protected inside, for hot countries and cold, for wet countries and dry, for mountain battlefields and city back alleys.

Then I returned to my cabin and I opened my shirt and I strapped the belt around me and fastened my clothes around it as if I were about to mount a horse and ride into actual danger, and I chuckled. I don't chuckle. But I affected a tough-guy ironic chuckle, like a bad actor doing a melodrama hero. Like I was such a well-equipped tough guy who thrived on danger but here I was, trapped in a chuckle-worthy lesser world that booksellers and pamphlet writers and sons of tycoons and mothers with their toddlers inhabited. Here I was, simply about to go through customs in Queenstown, Ireland, and board a train for London, England, with a secret mission to sneak around and think about what college lecturers and film actresses might be up to, having lately been used up and kicked out the door by a beautiful woman. This latter probably was the main thing that prompted the phony chuckle.

And even while I was going through this little fit of pique, like an actor in a repertory company peeved by the no-account role he'd been given to play, a U-boat captain was watching us do fifteen substandard knots in a goddamn straight line directly toward him and wondering just how lucky he was going to get.

Pretty goddamnn lucky, as it would soon turn out.

I stepped onto the promenade and the sky was clear and the sun was high and I felt how slow we were going right away. I walked aft, and the portside was full of people crammed at the brief stretches of open railing between lifeboats. The coast of Ireland was distantly visible out there. Some people were murmuring reassuring things about that. Others, who knew ships and their speed and their bearing, were muttering about our vulnerability. And even the ones who were made hopeful by the sight of land were unsettled by the absence of Turner's promised Royal Navy. We were alone.

I knew the muttering was right. I had a pretty refined nose for the whiff of war, but it was attuned to land forces, clashing armed men, so I was willing, in all fairness, to temper my instinctive assessment of officers out here on the ocean, even civilian ones, in spite of the fact that Captain Turner, from my two encounters with him and from this present sailing strategy, seemed to me a classic example of military hierarchy: a guy who was mediocre and competent at some lower level but who had inevitably been promoted to a rank and responsibility where he was finally stupid and incompetent. But that conclusion was more from my mind than my gut, and I liked to rely on my gut in combat zones. So I took on the enlisted man's attitude. I put my mind off the forces I could not control. Somebody else was guiding this ship.

I had my own present jitters, but they were professional and personal, and the sight of Ireland held no appeal for me, so I turned and hustled forward, passing beneath the portside Bridge Wing, casting, as I did, a quick glance up toward where Turner was bungling along. I followed the curve of open passageway beneath the Main Bridge and arrived at the starboard side, where there weren't so many passengers, and I slowed down and I thought to step to the rail just forward of Lifeboat 1. The vast, indigo sea lay out there with the sunlight scattered brightly upon it, and it struck me that Turner might have once been a brilliant guy, a potential genius of an officer in any self-respecting, land-based army, but he had been driven to stupidity and incompetence by staring too long at vast indigo seas with sunlight scattered brightly upon them.

So I kept walking. I'd gather a few last quotes for my sea-voyage-through-a-war-zone feature story and yes, maybe take a peek at the Irish coast to work in a few pretty landscape details. I passed Lifeboat 3 and 5 and 9 and passed Lifeboat 11, beneath the high-towering
­number-three funnel, and then it seemed that a great iron door
slammed shut behind me and the deck beneath my feet quaked and I stopped and I knew instantly what it was. I turned and from beneath the starboard Bridge Wing a plume of water was rising and dark scraps of the hull and smoke from 350 pounds of TNT and hexanite—a U-boat had just plugged us—and I reflexively sucked in the still-pristine air around me and my breath caught and I hardly let go of the breath, I hardly began to lift my face to the rise of torpedo-spew when a second sound began. A quick-gathering massive thunder-roll of sound slammed against me and the deck bucked—and I knew—I knew it was the half dozen forward boilers ripping us open—and I staggered back and the plume that had begun from the torpedo-strike bloated instantly, rising and thrusting and scrabbling upward suddenly full of steam and coal and cinder and wood and iron and it rose above the funnels, as high as a Chicago skyscraper, and it expanded and it seemed it would cover me, and I turned and sprinted aft two strides and a third, but I wanted to see, I wanted to be able to write this moment accurately and I had to see, so I stopped now.

I turned and shoulders were bumping me, people were scrambling past, and down the way at about Lifeboat 5 the steaming rain was beginning to fall, the black metal hail of boiler and hull, and as it came down I lowered my eyes and a man in morning clothes was vanishing there and the clang and clatter of it all filled the air and yet I could also hear the heavy exhalation of human breath rushing past me and Lifeboat 5 was splintering and tumbling beneath the crashing and thudding fragments of the
Lusitania
. And yes. Yes, I could see now the soundless fall of body parts from belowdecks, a torso, a leg, a head. And the falling and the tumbling and the raining went on for a time, and a time more, and it seemed a long time, but it was a short time, and then there was silence.

For a breath-snagged moment, there was silence.

A seagull cried out above me.

And then more silence.

Except now the great metal groaning of the ship. The deep, vast grinding of metal.

And a distant heavy rushing of water into the gash of our forward starboard hull.

Suddenly I was light in the feet and in the leg and in the shoulders as the bow of our ship plunged to the right and the whole starboard length of the ship began to fall over with it.

My chest seized as I expected to fly beyond the railing and into the sea. I threw my arms out, danced like a boxer, to try to balance.

And the ship's plunge ceased as abruptly as it began.

I was still on deck, still on my feet.

We listed maybe fifteen degrees starboard and downward but we were stable at that angle for the moment and we were plowing forward.

Even as the wordless cries of fear began all around and the first of the lying sons of bitches who wore Cunard uniforms called out from somewhere behind me that we were just fine, that we couldn't sink, this much was clear to me right away: because of the deep inner engine room source of the second blast and because of the pitch of the deck and the angle of our bow into the sea, the
Lusitania
was going to sink, and pretty goddamn quickly.

And a thing came into me, and it was not a thought; it came from nowhere near my mind but rather from my skin, from my blood, from my bones: I was filled with Selene. I was filled with her and I was apart from her and I had to lay my hands upon her now and carry her away from this sinking ship.

I loaded and locked a battlefield focus: there were others around
me, many others, and we all shared our mortality and our peril,
but as with an infantryman in a company across a field of fire from a bunker and a gun, the assault on which was the single and utter purpose of his life, all the other people around me blurred into the background, became immediate only when they were directly involved in my mission.

I strode forward and already people were rushing out of the Main Staircase doors to the Boat Deck and I was thinking to enter at the point closest to Selene's suite. But as I veered to the rail and around the bodies flowing onto the promenade I could see up ahead. All the rubble from below and the remains of Lifeboat 5 lay blocking the doorway I wished to enter. Lay, as well, outside Brauer's windows.

I wondered for a moment about him, about what skills he might have to save himself. I knew the further trouble we were all in. From our list to starboard, the lifeboats on this side of the ship had swung out on their davits to the farthest extent of their snubbing chains and would be brutally difficult to launch, especially as our momentum would carry us for miles yet, sucking in the sea, and on the portside the lifeboats would be pinned against the hull and be even harder to launch.

I had to go in through the doors to the Main Staircase. And I had to stop thinking. There were two sets of double doors, double but narrow, fine for elegant comings and goings but this was the Boat Deck and everyone from the Lounge and the Writing Room were already jammed here, and the Main Staircase was no doubt filling with the upsurge of people from the lower decks who were mobbing up behind, and everyone was pressing hard, trying to get to the lifeboats.

I didn't want to cross the current of that mob inside to get to the forward-leading corridor, so I danced through the dispersing flow of bodies out here on the promenade and then planted myself on the far side of the jamb on the forward set of double doors, beside the desperate outrush of bodies. I took a breath—like preparing to leap from a trench on the front—and I turned my shoulder forward and I concentrated on the seam between jamb and emerging body and I inserted my shoulder there, braced my legs, pressed forward to lever myself inside, and a man's shoulder met mine hard and he was coming from above me by the angle of our list and he drove me back around.

And I did it again, this time with a woman emerging, all seal coat and honeysuckle scent, and she was coming out straight and I wedged at the seam and turned her sideways just enough, putting my hands onto her arms so she would not fall, and she continued on out as I slid across her and around the door frame, and I was in a tiny vestibule and the slow thick flow of bodies pressed me against the side wall and I edged inward and then to another door jamb and to a small man in a rain slicker who I turned sideways and he was all right and sidling away and I levered my way inside and the crowd surged from behind and I was slammed hard into the wall, but it was only a short few sideways-driving steps more and I curled to the right around the corner, and I was free of the mob.

The doors to the Writing Room and Library were before me. I
stepped to them and through them and the list made it hard to
sprint but I moved as fast as I could, skirting tipped chairs and scattered books, and now half a dozen bodies were lurching toward me, strapped into their life jackets, heading away from their blocked door onto the Boat Deck, and I jinked between and around them. I passed through the forward doors of the Writing Room and into the starboard forward-leading corridor, and as I did, I finally was struck by the brightness of the space I'd just left. The room's portholes, which were square and large as proper windows, were filled with the afternoon sun, which meant the outside porthole covers were open. The quick sinking would escalate even faster without a chance to execute porthole discipline across the ship.

Now the false assurance of the dimness of the cabin corridor warned me of a different imminent danger. The electric lights blinked off and everything went black and they flickered back on. The crossway to the portside was just ahead and I stepped to the intersection and two more bodies bumped into me and then veered past, heading aft, ignoring our collision, a woman weeping heavily and a man murmuring “It's all right” and “It's all right, my darling.”

I stood at this juncture—before me was Brauer's suite and beyond was my own stateroom—and I took a quick inventory. My money belt was strapped to me. I patted the pockets of my sack coat and felt, deep in an inside pocket, my leather-pouched set of lock picks. I gave one brief thought to the things still in my cabin. Only my Corona Portable Number 3 and the words I'd written on it these past few days gave me a twist of serious regret, but this was, in fact, a meaningless exercise. There was no time. It was impossible now to do anything except turn and press on, which I did, my legs suddenly heavy from the incline, as heavy as in a bad dream.

As if they'd been trapped belowdecks and finally found the staircase, a couple of fears scrambled up into my chest and then into my head:
She's probably already gone. And you have no plan even if you find her.

But I knew this from the wars I'd covered: thinking is how you die. You react. And either you do things right or you don't. But nobody can think fast enough to live.

A few steps more and I turned into the portside forward-running corridor and then I was at her door and I pounded on it.

From outside, from the portside promenade, I heard men suddenly cry out together, men in some heavy, physical, coordinated task, and then a scraping and a scuffling and then shouts and a clanking and creaking and suddenly very nearby a massive clang of struck iron and a crack of wood and the corridor quaked beneath my feet and many voices were screaming, and I could picture in my head the whole quick terrible sequence: some crewmen tried to launch a lifeboat against the list of the ship, tried to push it out together and away and the men working the falls failed to let the ropes out in their split second of opportunity and the lifeboat swung back on board on its davits and crushed the crew and threw the passengers against the deck wall.

Selene could have been out there.

She might have just this moment died.