The Star of Istanbul (37 page)

Selene said, “This is no lie. I shot him. It was me. With a pistol from my purse. I shot him in the heart.”

Cable believed this. His eyes narrowed ever so slightly. He was thinking about this present balance of power. And I was talking to him in my head:
Go ahead, Eddie. If I shoot you, your Hun shoots my woman. So you can look at her. Just start to turn that pistol. I won't shoot you first because that would kill her too. Just start.

My growing thought was as firmly rooted in the nature of our bodies as Cable's flexor observations: in the presence of great and sudden lower body pain, a man's dominant hand will automatically move in that direction.

And Cable's Luger started to turn—with the deliberateness of restrained fury—toward Lucine.

So I whipped my Luger downward and to the left, my eye fixing instantly on the target, my hand following my eye in thoughtlessly muscled ease, and I squeezed. And that target was the
Kapitän
's exposed right knee. And the knee exploded with his shriek and his pistol hand was dropping and Lucine was slipping to her left and from beneath his loosened grasp and I was lifting my pistol, pulling it back toward Cable even as I urged my body to the right even as I leaned away at the hip and at the chest and as my right foot started to slide and my eyes swung toward this pistol that was recently pointing in my direction, the Luger in Cable's hand was in profile now rushing away from me like a bird breaking cover—he was smart, fast smart, he knew if he shot her I'd have him and he knew I was already coming back to him even as he was in those split seconds of figuring out what just happened and I'd have him anyway so he was getting the hell out—and I was coming around and he was already starting to duck and twist away to the side and I thought now of the
Kapitän
and how he might struggle through the pain for a shot and I wasn't ready but I squeezed a round at Cable and the veranda window to the left shattered outward and Cable was ducking low and lunging for the doors and I stopped my slide.

And Lucine cried, “Kit!” and I was swinging back left and the
Kapitän
was fighting his pain with rage even as he buckled downward on his shattered leg and he was pulling his pistol around toward me and I squeezed a round that went elsewhere beyond him and I was propelling right again and the
Kapitän
shot and I felt the whisk of his bullet past my left arm, glad that the pain had fogged his eyes and stiffened his shooting hand and he was falling fast now as the leg crumpled, and I stopped my slide and braced into the floor and I shot him in the right shoulder and then in the left chest and he spun away and backward.

And I was circling the desk and then easing out of the open doors, my pistol in both hands before me, expecting Cable to be waiting to try to gun me down as I came out. But he wasn't there and I figured he was permanently forgoing the gunfight. He was a pro. He was not a man who would seriously risk his own life simply to try to take mine, at least not with that sudden shift in the balance of power.

He would be content to track me later. So I needed to deal with this now.

I was falling behind and I dashed along the veranda and down the steps to the loggia below and he was nowhere before me in the arcade, but the light from the villa was spilling into the yard and I heard a distant panting thump going outward and I looked into the grounds at the back of the house and I saw him vanishing into the dark.

And I ran. Ran hard. Onto concrete and around a fountain and along the turf and into the same shadow where Cable had disappeared, my eyes adjusting to the night. The stars were very bright. I went down the back stairs of the terrace and onto a slope that fell toward the Bosporus, and maybe seventy-five yards away was a boat dock lit by a single electric lamp on a high post, and there was Cable jumping into a twenty-foot two-seat runabout.

I scrambled downward as fast as I could without pitching forward but the runabout's engine was beginning to spark into life and it was revving now and then fading and revving again and I stopped and I sat down on the slope at once and planted my elbows on my thighs and I held the Luger up before me in both hands and this was about a hundred-foot shot and he was lit just enough by stars and electric spill for me to see him as a dark shape and he was hunched forward working at the throttle and spark but he wasn't sitting down yet—he still had to cast off—and I sighted between him and the bollard on the dock and I waited, and he rose, crouching a little, but I had enough of his torso as he moved. I had him now, and I squeezed and the pistol barked and he rose up and backed away, toward the portside, and I shifted and sighted and squeezed again and his dark shape veered farther to port and over the gunwale and was gone.

The boat sat there, its engine idling, and I rose and I walked down the slope and along the dock, and the runabout's engine muttered and muttered and I arrived. And the boat was empty. I stepped in and switched the engine off, and it sputtered and fell silent.

The boat rocked a little.

The night was quiet.

The Bosporus was running past, and Edward Cable was gone. Dead. Carried away by the deep current of history that was bearing us all.

60

I walked back along the dock with the Luger still in my hand, feeling comfortable with it there, and a figure was running down the slope toward me. But before my shooting hand could rise, I heard Arshak's voice. “Cobb. Are you all right?”

I walked more briskly now. We'd made quite a lot of noise in the last few minutes.

Arshak and I met beneath the electric light at the front end of the dock.

“For the moment,” I said to him. “Let's get out of here.”

Arshak nodded and we jogged up the slope and across the courtyard and into the loggia.

Lucine was waiting just inside the doors of the grand hall. She was wearing a long, black velvet cape, which she held tightly closed over her chemise.

I stopped before her and we touched for a moment but only with our eyes, and then the three of us hustled across the floor and around the dead guard and out into the front courtyard and things were quiet still. Ahead the two entrance guards were gone, and then I saw them inside the wall, where Arshak had dragged them out of sight.

We paused at the front gate and looked. Things were quiet and we beat it back north to the Unic.

Here we paused a moment, huddled together on the off-road side of the taxi.

I said, “We are all three of us marked now to be hunted down. By the Germans and Turks both. But I've got a way out for us. There's a launch from my embassy waiting to take us to an American ship. We can leave Istanbul. We
have
to leave Istanbul. Without delay.”

Arshak and Lucine looked at each other briefly. Arshak nodded a single, slow nod to her.

And Lucine took my hand.

I said to Arshak, “The foot of the street at the west end of the dry docks. Near where you picked me up yesterday.”

He stepped away.

Lucine tugged on my hand and led me into the tonneau.

The Unic engine—familiar now, and comforting at last—muttered into life and we turned back toward the city and headed off.

Lucine held tightly to my hand.

We said nothing for a long while. My body was letting go from the clench and rush and thrash of the past hour. And I figured Lucine and I would have time for talk and time for our own rush and thrash when we were together upon the sea once again. I figured I would have a chance to speak her real name out loud.

After a while she leaned into me. And she said, “Thank you.”

Only now did it strike me how little we'd actually said to each other through all this.

I figured how it maybe was a sign that a man and a woman were actually becoming something together when you could be comfortable in long silences.

So I said “You're welcome.” and she kept her head on my shoulder and we fell silent again. As silent as her motion pictures. One of her good ones. No title cards necessary.

And then we were parked at the foot of Tophane Iskelesi Caddesi.

Lucine and I let go of our hands and we got out of the Unic into the moist dark and a muezzin's voice began its call to prayer somewhere to the north of us and we started down the cobbled quay toward the water and another cry began to the south. These songs came from the strongest voices of the most intensely faithful, but they were still very distant. They were small cries against a very large darkness. And the stars that were lighting our path away from this city, this country, were barely enough for us to see.

But soon I could make out the launch moored at the quay and a figure was coming out of the dark. And another behind it. Lucine and Arshak and I stopped.

A bright light bloomed in the middle of the nearest figure. A flashlight, which flared blindingly into my face and then scanned down my chest.

I was a German officer.

“Steve,” the voice of the near figure said.

The rear shadow came forward, rattling a rifle.

“Ralph sent me,” I said.

“Hold on,” the first voice said to Steve. And then to me: “You are?”

“Christopher Cobb,” I said. “I needed the disguise.”

The man with the flashlight drew near, shining it now on Arshak and on Lucine.

“I told Hansen there might be one or two others who had to go with me.”

“Just follow my light,” the man said and the beam fell to the cobbles and he began to move away.

I turned to Lucine. Arshak had backed off a couple of paces.

Lucine came forward to me.

She stood very close, though we did not touch. She smelled of forest and of newly mown hay, of musk and of lavender. This was my first smell of her, from the
Lusitania,
the smell of her when we first lay down naked together. She'd put this on to kill Enver Pasha. And I knew what was coming. I figured this was the last time she would ever smell like this.

She said, “I can't go, my darling Kit. He might be right. I might simply be swept along and the world will have its way with all of us. But I can make no other choice. We'll stay and do what we can.”

I took her into my arms. And I kissed her long enough and deep enough so she could know that I understood, and that I was riven with regret.

The kiss ended. We held each other a moment, our faces too dark to read.

“I'll write the news of what I've seen,” I said.

As deep as the darkness was upon that quay in Istanbul, the stars let me see the tears that came now to her eyes.

And I let go of her and she turned and she walked past Arshak who had drawn near.

He nodded. I nodded. He did not offer his hand. Give the old ham this: he was content tonight to play a minor part; he knew that the final touch should be hers.

He turned and followed his daughter.

And I followed the flashlight onto the launch and the engine started up and I moved to the stern as we churned away from shore, Lucine and Arshak vanishing into the dark and the voices of the muezzins dying away.

Cable was wrong about the currents carrying us away. For all our insignificance and helplessness, we were actually like the passengers of the
Lusitania
going down. We couldn't save the ship. We couldn't prevent the consequences in the world. We couldn't save a thousand lives. But at least we could grab on to a deck chair and try to save the next life who floated past.