The Star of Istanbul (16 page)

22

These two were very confident. The guy with the knife paused
where he stood and drew his free hand across his chest to wipe off the apple juice. Metzger was breathing in my ear and waiting for me to come up with an answer to his mostly rhetorical question. Granted, I myself should have been hesitating, as surprised as I was at his identifying me. But when I signed on with Trask and the boys in Washington to do these secret things for my country, I resolved in tight spots to strike first and reason later. And though time did seem to be going rather slowly, given the sudden intensity of the ­situation—like being thrown from a horse and seeming to fly through the air in a downright dawdle—in fact, it took only the briefest of instants for me to decide between Metzger's balls and his instep, choosing the latter, on his right foot, being that I was right-footed and a pretty damn good stomper and this was a more direct and immediate act than lifting my leg and trying to kick blindly behind me into his crotch.

So: up and down and my nice new Queenstown brogue crunched hard and deep and pulverizingly into the top of this guy's foot and his dog-bite hand flew off me toward the pain, and the knife man went wide in his eyes and I was spinning to my left now, around Metzger, who was screaming in a German I hadn't studied, and I was behind him and he was listing to the side and making an effort to turn with me but I put my hands behind his shoulders and shoved him into the office just as the guy with the knife was arriving and they both went sprawling, the bentwood chair clattering against the wall, but I'd done all I'd needed to for now and so I hustled down the aisle, betting I could find a copy or two of a 1909
Nuttall
on the shelves if I had the time, and I was out the door, and though there was a pretty good flow of midmorning pedestrian traffic and maybe, therefore, a bobby or two around, it was nevertheless not out of the question that the guy with the knife would hide the thing somewhere on his person and vault over old man Metzger and come after me. So I plunged straight on across St. Martin's Lane, dodging a honking taxi, and I rushed into Cecil Court at not quite a run but a pretty quick almost-jog, dodging around and behind every little gaggle of passersby, trying to stay out of the sight lines behind me, and finally, seeing no coppers and having a relatively free fifty yards ahead, I all-out ran till I turned sharp into Charing Cross Road.

And as I beat it south down this busy street, I had the time and focus to wonder what the hell had just happened. When I'd feared a photo in the morning paper, it was simply one of those overwrought precautionary worries I'd consciously taken on in my new role, for to my knowledge there had never been a photo taken of me with my post-Mexico beard. And this beard—along with closer cut hair and a dustup scar or two—was a transformative thing. I'd even had an office girl at the
Post-Express,
who was sweet on me, look twice when I presented my bewhiskered self to her, close up, on my own home turf. There were only two people who could have tipped off the boys at number 53 about the nosy journalist who got very close to their special delivery package: Walter Brauer and the package herself, Selene Bourgani. And it was unlikely to have been Brauer on his own. For him to have risked speaking about me—his German bosses would likely blame him for any breach of security from a fellow American—he had to have gotten at least some confirmation from Selene that I'd survived the
Lusitania.
And probably more. I felt pretty certain Brauer had not seen me on his own after our rescue. I was more certain of that than I was of Selene not betraying me.

This notion slowed me drastically, made me veer away from the street, made me stop and put out a hand and lean against a honey-colored facade of Bath Stone. This emotionalism about Selene Bourgani had to stop now. She'd been two brief interludes of jazz. Done with. She was nothing now. She was dangerous now, the object of my work now.

I lowered my hand and straightened. I looked over my shoulder at the building that had been holding me up. The Garrick. Another theater. Of course. I walked on.

And fifteen minutes later I was in the corridor leading to my room at the Waldorf Hotel and I was thinking it would do me well to focus on the danger at hand. Danger it was. I was known to the Germans in London, known as a suspicious person at the beginning of this day, known as worse now.

I approached my door, took out my key, put it in the lock.

Something was wrong.

I couldn't place it at first.

Then I realized: my
Please Do Not Disturb
sign was hanging straight and loose from the doorknob. I'd left it caught in the door.

I'd already made a rattle with my key. But I slipped it straight out and I took a step backward and I looked quickly both ways along the corridor. It was empty.

If someone were inside, they'd be standing much like me, perhaps in the center of the room. Perhaps we were facing each other now.

I thought it could have been the maid. But the sign said not to enter. The Waldorf would be strict about that with its employees.

I looked both ways again.

I needed a weapon. I'd had a pistol in my bags on the
Lusitania.
The damn war correspondent in me had kept that item off my priority replacement list. A little irony: I'd always gone to shooting wars armed only with my Corona. This sneak and snoop stuff was a different matter.

It was time to decide: walk away—even perhaps making sure my departure was audible and then waiting and watching at the end of the corridor—or go in.

This was easy.

I stepped forward and put the key in the lock and pushed the door open hard and spun back, away from the door, and I pressed against the wall beside it.

I heard not the tiniest stirring inside.

I took a deep breath and looked around the jamb.

No one was visible inside.

I stepped in and backed the door closed, noting the possible hiding places.

The door to the bathroom was open—as I'd left it—and no one was there.

Across the room was the massive mahogany Louis XVI wardrobe. A man could hide in the space behind the tall central doors.

The other possibility was beneath the bed. But the wardrobe was the only place he could effectively use a pistol upon discovery. I figured I could handle anything else. So I moved quietly to the desk and brought the chair to the wardrobe and set it on its back legs and leaned it against the doors beneath the brass handles, standing away to the side as I did so.

Then I moved to the bed and knelt and looked beneath. No one was there.

I stood, and the wardrobe was silent, and I thought of what an intruder might have learned from the room.

Nothing here suggested an identity other than war correspondent. The incriminating documents were inside the money belt strapped around my waist beneath my clothes. But I needed to know if someone had been looking. It felt likely, though my first surge of readiness for physical struggle was receding.

This let me slow down, let me realize that I smelled a faint trace of something. Vanishing perhaps even as I smelled it. Something vaguely familiar. I grasped at it as it dissipated, or as I became accustomed to it. Smells could be like that, even odd ones, even bad ones; they could be there and then vanish from your nose even though someone else just arriving would notice it anew.

This was what? Something of alcohol, ether even, a little resiny, none of these and all of these and something else and my nose just quit on me with this scent.

I tried to place it, but it was gone.

Okay. What else?

A car honked distantly somewhere down Aldwych. The clock ticked on the nightstand.

I turned back to the wardrobe. He was too quiet to actually be there. But if he was indeed hiding this quietly, he was too much a coward and probably unarmed.

I set the chair aside, and I yanked open the doors.

Before me were my clothes and my stashed Gladstone bag. Just that.

Was anyone here at all? A punctilious maid could simply have freed the sign on my door in passing.

I looked more closely at the objects in the closet. I was always pretty careful in how I put things away, and I felt certain the bag had been clasped when I left this morning. It wasn't now. But I couldn't be sure.

I closed the wardrobe and moved to the desk.

I liked to square the edges of the foolscap I'd written on. This I did with something like a compulsion. For my own sake, but also, of course, for this very purpose, to detect a prying eye. The eight pages of the follow-up
Lusitania
story I'd been writing were carefully stacked beside the Corona, the bottom of the pages even with the bottom of the machine, as they should have been. But I looked more closely. The paper edges were squared up, all right. Someone was careful. But the stack had not been tapped on the tabletop until even and then gently fingertip squared. There was a minutely visible layering of the pages at the bottom edge. Someone certainly had been here.

Neither Brauer nor Selene knew I would be at the Waldorf. I myself didn't know until Saturday morning, well after the last time I saw either of them.

Something else was wrong and I didn't know what.

The Germans had their own mystery to figure out. How did Cobb know to go to the bookstore? Brauer would swear up and down that the coded message had safely been destroyed.

We none us would get very far in our figuring.

I had a few hours till their meeting with Selene.

In the meantime, I needed to find myself another hotel.

23

I stepped from the Waldorf with my bags and put them down and took a careful inventory of all the men and automobiles in the vi
cinity. I hailed a taxi—one of the ubiquitous French-made Unic
­Landaulettes—and instructed the driver to just weave around the streets off the Strand till I told him to do otherwise.

I kept a watch on anyone who might be following till I was confident there was no one, and then I directed my driver to the Arundel Hotel, not far away, on the Embankment. It was a Tudor-style building faced with red brick, with rooms about my age, which was okay. Not done in Louis XVI, the furniture sliding all the way up to the rule of Victoria, particularly to the styles of that recent era that drew on dark, heavy Tudor carving, all of which was absolutely
not
sinkably neoclassical, so I actually felt I'd improved on my lodgings.

As soon as I'd unpacked, I stood before the mirror hanging over my washbasin and I confronted my face, which was now recognizable to my adversaries. When I looked at men's faces, tried to assess them as men, the first thing I often noticed was whether they'd been seriously struck by some other guy. I'd been struck. There were some old fighting scuffs here and there. But I'd been lucky never to have my nose rearranged. It was still on the straight and narrow, my nose. And my eyes were pretty clear. Dark as Chicago street tar but clear and steady. Over the left one was a white wisp of a scar the length of the last joint on my thumb, from a bit of tumbling shrapnel in my first real war, in Nicaragua, and mighty lucky I was for it to have just grazed on past.

As I took stock of my own mug, the principle of disguise that was running in my head was
Keep it simple
. Still, the change needed to be striking. If I was to learn anything else in London, I'd have to risk being seen, at least from afar, by people who knew me.

The beard was clearly the thing to change. I kept it pretty tightly cropped, but it definitely registered to the eye. So the beard I'd taken a shine to at breakfast wouldn't work; it wouldn't be enough. Especially from a distance, I'd pretty much be the same man. This one had to go.

I stropped my new razor—bought this morning, and I was glad it was at its sharpest—and I lathered up heavily and I shaved. I did my right cheek first, the easy one, the one I'd always known. Then I did my left cheek, carefully working my way down and up and around until all that remained, traced vividly white by the last of the lather, was the thing that prompted the beard in the first place.

I bent to the basin and rinsed away the heavily stubble-freighted shaving cream from the sink and I silently thanked the Arundel, as it had hot running water even at this hour. I soaked a hand towel in water as hot as I could stand it and wrapped my face from the eyes down. I soaked up the warmth and rubbed both cheeks clean and brought the towel down.

I was prepared for this, but it had been months since I'd faced this man, and I admit my breath clamped tight shut, from chest to throat.

I confronted my familiar, hairless face, but on one cheek was that long Turkish scimitar of a scar, a thing that I knew was there but saw now with a shock, like visiting a childhood memory I'd previously thought was pleasant and now realized had been full of pain.

But this hadn't been child's play, the crossing of swords with another German out to do no good.

And this benefit had come from it: the thing looked exactly like a German collegiate dueling scar. Intentionally so, as a matter of fact. And it was real, my own personal
Schmiss.

The riots in the East End suggested the danger of assuming this identity in London. But I had a solution for that.

I used the room telephone to call for a bellhop to run an errand to a nearby chemist shop and I soon had a roll of gauze and a cloth arm sling, and he was a good boy, this cockney bellhop, as he had to go to another shop to find me the fritz-handled cane I'd asked for, with a hardwood shaft and an iron tip. He also brought a jar of cold cream and a bottle of alcohol and a bottle of spirit gum, which I knew from my theater days would be easier than straight collodion to put the dressing on my cheek and to take it off.

I stood once again before the mirror, having cut some thick squares of gauze to cover the scar. With the cane and the arm sling I would look like the sort of man who was beginning to appear in the streets of London: a wounded soldier, bad enough off to be mustered out. That would be conveyed with the limp and the arm.

I opened the bottle of spirit gum.

And instantly I understood that trace of a smell in my room at the Waldorf. Spirit gum. Of course. It had been a decade since I'd used it. That last time was to affix a stage mustache and muttonchops. The smell in the room was spirit gum.

I could not imagine why.

Someone himself in disguise. With fake facial hair.

Again: why? The Germans could send any mug to search a room. Any mug with his own mug that he could show in public.

I had no answer for now, but I knew I was not as lucky as that hypothetical mug; I could not show my actual self.

I brushed the spirit gum onto my face and applied the gauze. I changed into my second suit of clothes, a blue serge. I put my left arm into a sling and hobbled out on my cane into the street. I stepped into a taxi—using an upper-class British accent—and I made for the address Metcalf gave me for Brauer. He had a bachelor flat at number 70 Jermyn Street, between St. James Square and Green Park. I had the taxi driver drop me half a block east of Brauer's building, an odd-looking, seven-floor corner affair with both a gable and a turret sitting pretty much side by side.

I got out of the taxi as quickly as I could in keeping with my new disability and I paid the driver. As I was about to walk away, he called me back to him, “Gov'nor,” he said, and I turned. He pulled off his cap and nodded at my arm. “Thank you for your service,” he said.

“We'll kick their bloody asses,” I said, maintaining my upper-crusty accent. This made his head snap in surprise, and then he lifted his face and laughed.

Which was a good exit line for a good performance and I hobbled off on my cane before he could say any more. Only then did I realize that by cursing with him like a pal—sincerely so, Chicago-style—I'd given him a better feeling about the swells of this country than the swells deserved.

I moved along west, and the taxi went past me with the driver giving me a respectful nod, which I ignored in order to start bringing him back to the class reality of his bloody country.

I crossed Jermyn Street to the north side at Brauer's corner, with Bury Street dead ending there. A couple of doors farther west was a pub, Hotspur, opposite the entrance to these bachelor flats, which had an engraved sign on the lintel:
marlborough chambers
.

I entered the bar and sat at a table at the front window. It was still early and slow in the place. I figured I might be here a long time. The delivery wasn't till eight tonight, about a half hour after sunset. But I didn't know where Selene was and probably didn't know where the meeting would be, now that I'd compromised the shop. So Brauer was my only link, and I was a little nervous that he might've gone out this morning and would stay out. I had to keep his door under surveillance for as much of the day as I could.

I nursed Black and Tans for hours, keeping to myself, ignoring the day drunks, and then the light was waning and then it was getting on toward half past seven o'clock and the darkness was washing over the building facades and I was seriously worried Brauer wasn't in his bachelor flat at all but off somewhere and I'd completely lose the thread.

And then finally there he was, stepping out of the Marlborough Chambers and looking up and down the street. I guessed for a taxicab. I was glad he didn't find one. If he'd caught an isolated taxi passing by, I'd have been hard pressed to get one to follow him. But he turned west and walked off.

I put some cash down and got up quick, belying the bum leg, if any of the guys at the bar were watching. But I was out the door and done with the pub and dotting the pavement with my cane in a quick trot as long as Brauer wasn't looking my way.

Staying always on the opposite side of the street, I followed him along Jermyn and then north on St. James. He never once paused or looked back, never considering he might be followed. The next corner was Piccadilly, and as soon as he reached it, he stopped and looked to his left. For a taxi, I again presumed.

I crossed St. James, trusting my disguise now, and I passed him by, my face averted, dragging my right leg. A newer model Unic, with its headlamps flanking its radiator, was a hundred yards ahead, coming this way slow enough to be scouting a fare. I stepped to the curb and into the street, giving a quick glance in Brauer's direction. He was partway into the street himself, his hand raised, focused on the same taxi.

I turned my back in his direction, lifted my hand discreetly
but
clearly for the taxi, and it stopped. I stepped into the glass-­partitioned
tonneau, and I took up the speaking tube and told the cabbie simply to drive on. When we were clear of Brauer, I looked out the rear window. His back was to me, his attention up the street. I told the driver to pull over and wait. Brauer soon caught a massive Panhard Levassor, which would be easy to spot in traffic. He passed us and we followed.

Brauer took us to the Savoy.

It was arguably the best hotel in London. Certainly it was the most elegantly out of place in this ubiquitously begrimed city, thick with coal smoke and acrid fog. The Savoy was faced with pale pink terra-cotta and it had a bright green tiled roof. The river side was open and unfettered; Monet had painted the Battersea Bridge and the Houses of Parliament from an upper room. But the Strand approach was down a short street they'd created a decade ago between existing buildings, and the hotel entrance was dim beneath a covered court, lit in the gathering dark of twilight with gas lamps.

Brauer kept his Panhard waiting while he hustled inside. I kept my Unic, engaging the driver, a quiet old man with a crumpled face and an upcountry accent. I had him for the next few hours if need be, and I started his employ by having him turn us around in the short approach street to face the Strand, and we backed up far enough for me to watch the main hotel doors from the taxi rear window.

I mostly kept my mind in suspension for the task at hand. But waiting for Selene to make her entrance was difficult for me, since I expected never to touch her again. I even thought for a few moments about spirit gum. It was a classic smell of the theater. And just that tenuous association with acting gave me a brief, ridiculous thought that it had been Selene in my room. Of course it had not.

Then she appeared. Selene was a dark slash against the glow of gas, wearing a form-fitting ankle-length black coat and a black turban hat with a veil. Brauer was a lapdog trailing pantingly along as she glided from the hotel door and into the taxi. Brauer scrambled in behind, and the Panhard rolled away, disappearing briefly from view and then emerging from the covered court and gliding past us and into the Strand.

We followed.

I suddenly realized where they were heading when we turned from Bedford into the short and narrow New Street. A few moments later the Panhard made the left into St. Martin's Lane. I knew number 53 was just around that corner. The Germans hadn't changed their plans. Brauer was taking Selene to the bookstore.

I took up the speaking tube and told my driver to turn in the opposite direction onto St. Martin's and stop at once by the curb, on the right-hand side.

The night was dense now with the overcast dark. The streetlights were electric and we were parked not much more than fifty yards from number 53. We sat just past and across the street from another West End theater. The New Theatre. Its facade
lights were bright but I was masked in the deep shadow of the tonneau, and I watched through the back window as Selene and Brauer stepped from their taxi and crossed quickly into Metzger & Strauss, Booksellers. The Panhard pulled away and went off down St. Martin's toward Trafalgar Square.

I withdrew my watch, and it said 7:56. As I held the gold-filled Elgin, all the newly acquired objects of my life suddenly lapped at me like the North Atlantic at my ankles. I became keenly conscious that the two people who'd just flashed before me in the dark shared that whole event, and so, as I pressed my post-sinking timepiece back into the watch pocket of my post-sinking pants, an odd little complicated tremor passed through me.

Another taxicab turned out of New Street and rolled to a stop
at number 53. I shook off this upswell of trapped air from the
vanished
Lusitania.
I waited for the taxi passenger to emerge. Another principal player perhaps, not associated with the shop. The streetlight was six or eight yards farther along St. Martin's; Selene and Brauer had appeared mostly as silhouettes. I watched closely as the taxi door opened.

A man emerged. A slim man, informally dressed in a sack suit, with a soft brimmed hat turned down slightly in front and back, and in a brief flash of dark cameo I could see a sharp-featured profile and
a moderate beard. And then he was gone. His cab departed and the street was quiet save for the shuffling past of barhoppers and restaurant diners, the theatergoers already settled in their seats.

I had time now to wonder: given the events of the morning, why had the Germans not moved the venue for their meeting? Perhaps I'd drastically overreacted. Perhaps this morning they'd never suspected me of anything other than being a snoopy newsman. Perhaps that squeeze on the shoulder would have been the worst of it.

But surely they'd felt the danger of my somehow knowing about the bookshop.

And then I went cold. They kept the meeting here to bring me back to them. The guy with the knife and maybe some others were already outside the shop, hanging around the neighborhood, waiting for me to show up so they could finish the work they'd wished to complete this morning.