The Star of Istanbul (3 page)

“Any danger is passed,” I said, feeling even more stupid saying this a second time.

She nodded. “So I've heard.” But her voice was soft-edged. Appreciative.

“All right,” I said. “I'll confess. There was no one around. I spoke it aloud in passing in case you were worried.”

She nodded again. Faintly. As if in thanks. She was far more subtle in this corridor than she was on the screen.

I grew up backstage in a thousand theaters and watched my mother being a star and I knew how she sized herself for each stage she was on. Since film actresses all seemed to be playing to a vast auditorium, though their faces were ten feet tall—even the great Selene Bourgani—I was surprised she knew how to seem real in this corridor. As for my own face, I had no control at all. It was flushing hot and, I suspected, it was even turning red.

“I wasn't worried,” she said.

“No,” I said. “Of course not.”

“But thank you.”

I nodded. Too big a nod, as if I were a hambone of a film actor.

I collected myself and steadied my body and stood there for a long moment, and the moment went on as she stayed motionless where she was, standing in her kimono in her doorway.

Finally she said, in what felt like a whisper but which filled my head, “Good night.”

“Good night,” I said, and I turned away from Selene, who, according to my childhood Bulfinch, if not the evidence of my own eyes a few moments ago, was the Greek goddess of the moon.

3

After I'd gone to my cabin following our release from the fog, I slept. But I was already awake at the distant sound of six bells being rung on the morning watch—7:00 A.M. by the landlubber time zone we carried along with us. The bell had hardly stopped vibrating when I heard the slip of something under the door. I needed a war; I needed the whisk of rifle rounds past my ears. Here's how I knew: I thought it might be a note from her. It was, instead, an invitation to dine with the captain at his table that evening.

I did not see Brauer again or Selene until the night came and I was dressed in a suitcase-wrinkled monkey suit, packed at Trask's insistence for any secret-agent contingency, the thought of which had made me consider letting my country down to just chase the gunfire. But I packed the tux and now I tied my black tie and squared my shoulders and took the main staircase down three levels to the Saloon Deck. Indeed, I had a saloon ticket to a saloon cabin and I'd spent time very early this morning on the saloon promenade and I was, all in all, a saloon passenger, “saloon” being what the Brits sometimes called first class. But when I walked into the grand dining room, my first wish—a devout one—was that this would somehow suddenly turn into a good old American saloon, with swinging doors and spittoons. I did, however, know how to act this other role I'd been cast in.

I took three steps into the place and stopped. It was swell, all right. The main floor of the dining room, here on D Deck, was decorated in harmony with the writing room and library I'd passed through yesterday, though in a more extravagant way: ivory-colored walls and the straight-lined simplicity of eighteenth-century neoclassicism, with Louis XVI chairs upholstered in rose-colored horsehair and with similarly roseate Brussels carpet runners and with more Corinthian columns, these rising from the oak parquet floor up through the front edge of a large open oval space where the C Deck upper dining room encircled us diners below. The columns rose on to their capital at the base of a floor-high dome, done in ivory-white and gilt and with oil paint-rendered cherubs in tableaux of the four seasons. The dome sat in the center of B Deck, the high-heavenly vault of a three-story floating cathedral of fancyman's food.

The place was full of tuxedoed men and gowned and bejeweled women. They milled murmuringly about, finding their tables, drinking cocktails. I stepped farther in, alert for a center-parted, hennaed head of hair. It didn't take me long to see Brauer. He was at one end of the massive brass-fit veneered mahogany sideboard on the forward center wall. He was alone there, leaning with his back to the sideboard as if it were a bar, but with only a waiter nearby, arranging tumblers on a tray. Brauer held a glass with what looked like a couple of fingers of whiskey—no doubt a good whiskey, in this joint. He did not seem uncomfortable in his solitude. Rather, he seemed quite content to watch the swells milling about before him.

My assignment was too vague: What's he up to? My reporter's instincts had been most famously employed in figuring out the next move of bands of armed men representing governments or organized factions aspiring to become governments. I knew what they were up to from the get-off: destroy the opposing bands of armed men and seize a physical objective on the way to seizing power. I had to slide back to my earlier reporting days to figure out what to do now. I had to think of Brauer as I would a dirty Chicago politician. But with the politician there were plenty of sources to go to. Enemies. Co-conspirators. Facilitators. Victims. And the überobjective of the man I was after was always money, which made certain lines of inquiry pretty clear. With Brauer, on this ship, there was no one to go to but him. And money was unlikely to be the coal in his engine.

So it would just be him and me. I figured my strategy was to treat him like a source for a larger story, somebody who knows something I need to know and doesn't want to give it up, so I don't let him know I want it. I strolled off in his direction.

But I didn't go straight to him. I bellied up to the sideboard as if I expected it to be the bar and he was a couple of paces to my right and I looked around like I was puzzled, like where was the bartender, like where were the taps and the bottles, like what is this useless piece of furniture, anyway. “Huh,” I said aloud, and I turned around the way he was turned, and he wasn't looking in my direction. It was like I wasn't even there.

I checked out his drink a bit more closely. Certainly that was a good Scotch. He may have been an expert on Islam but I was thinking he wasn't a convert. His tuxedo looked like it fit him pretty well and he was used to wearing it. Maybe a big cheese academician at King's College who spent all day in his academic robes was used to monkeying up at night to drink with his fellow lecturers in a first-class British saloon where nobody ever raised his voice.

I figured I better stop disliking this guy so actively if I wanted to get something out of him.

“From across the room this sure looked like the bar—and a good one.” I said this aloud, keeping my eyes forward, as his were, but keeping my attention on him in my peripheral vision. I'd spoken in half a voice so that I could simply have been a guy avid for a drink talking mostly to myself.

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.