The Star of Istanbul (31 page)

49

And she fled.

She rose up instantly and walked away. I wasn't about to try to stop her. The Germans could be watching us from any of a dozen occupied tables around the salon.

Maybe that saved my life. She probably had her pistol in her little bag. Maybe she would have liked to shoot me dead there in the Kubbeli Salon for endangering her plan.

I could see how that plan would seem mortally important, once you'd committed to it. This was the manifesto of any band of nationalists whose numbers were small and whose people were unfocused and unorganized and accustomed to repression: one isolated act could change everything. And they figured this belief had been confirmed last June. An anonymous, undersized Bosnian teenager with a nationalist cause and a sandwich in his hand started the war with two bullets.

I gave her a few minutes to get to her room and then I rose and left the salon.

I was a bit unsteady on my feet. I'd had a lot to drink today. And I didn't know what to do next. This woman who had a hold on me had a new name and a deadly mission. I didn't give a good goddamn about Enver Pasha's life. But I was afraid for Selene.

No.

I was afraid for
Lucine
.

I was afraid she and her nationalist cohorts, whoever they might be, didn't have an adequate way out for her after the deed was done. How could they? This whole thing was full of unknowns.

I wobbled before my door.

I thought to knock on Lucine's.

But there was nothing to be done for now.

And so I went in and I lay down on the bed, and from the darkness coming upon me, I figured I would slip at once into asleep. But there was another darkness first. I thought:
She might even be in this alone. She might even be expecting to die.
Another thing she said that first night we touched, that goddamn first night:
An actress is a fallen woman
.

And I woke to her voice.

I opened my eyes. The sun was bright through my balcony doors.

I'd dreamed her voice, I thought. And I'd forgotten already what it was she'd said.

“Kit. It's me.” Selene's voice. Lucine's voice.

I sat up.

She was outside the door.

A clear but restrained knock.

“Kit,” she said. “Please.”

I got up and crossed the room. I opened the door.

Admittedly I was groggy and my head was pounding from
raki
and wine, but I had trouble comprehending what was before me: an undersized teenage boy dressed in shirt and trousers of dark blue duck and wearing an oversized sunrain hat. A boy gone to sea. And then the pale face was familiar, and this was Lucine's little brother standing there. And then it was Lucine herself, as if playing some Shakespearean comedy heroine disguised as a boy. She was Viola or Julia or Rosaline, and she stepped into my room and closed the door.

She placed herself squarely before me and very near and she reached out and laid her palm in the center of my chest.

“Listen to me,” she said. “I'm sorry for the way things ended last night. You are a very smart man. A very capable man. I'm not used to feeling that unprepared.”

She took a minute breath and words were rushing to form in my mouth and she stayed them with a very soft push of that hand on my chest. “Especially about something so important,” she said.

I insisted on speaking the words that had formed: “I wish I'd
thought of some better way.”

“No,” she said. “None of this is easy. Will you come with me now, please? No questions?”

Without hesitating I said, “All right.”

“I woke you up,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Make sure you're ready.”

I seemed to be dressed except for my shoes. My Mauser was in place. I excused myself and I stepped into the bathroom and pushed the door mostly to and somehow this was not awkward with Lucine now. “Have you practiced doing this for your role?” I asked from where I stood.

“To hell with you and your Stanislavsky,” she said.

I was ready.

I stepped out and she was standing in front of the door, facing me. She waited for me to cross to her.

She said, “I'll raise some eyebrows walking through the lobby. But it will be quick. Follow me at a distance. Just make sure no one is following
you
.”

“Will we turn at the corner of the hotel?”

“Yes.”

“Give me a few moments afterward,” I said.

“I understand,” she said.

Briskly now she spun and put her hand on the doorknob.

But she slowed herself; she paused.

She did not, however, look at me. She said, “Thank you.”

“I've never kissed a boy,” I said.

Now she turned.

“For good luck,” she said.

I bent to her. She was no goddamn boy. We kissed, and in spite of her yet again withholding something important from me and in spite of her being in the midst of overtly portraying someone she was not, this felt like the first kiss between us in which our mouths truly, fully touched.

The kiss ended. Her eyes seemed bright as they opened to me. Our faces drew away slowly.

She said, “Have I changed you forever?”

“We'll see,” I said.

And we went out.

I stayed four or five paces behind her as she moved across the salon with her hips fixed and her legs a little bowed—a boy from a ship at the quay—and a couple of faces turned to look at her but we were through the doors and into the foyer and past the bellhops without a word being said and she turned left and left again at the corner of the hotel and we were heading down the hill toward the Bosporus.

I took a few steps after the turn and I stopped and faced back the way I'd come. If a Hun was following, he'd come around that corner shortly.

I would wait. And I waited, and a couple of men in suits and fezes came round and went by talking intensely and seeming to utterly ignore me.

They continued on past the lingering Lucine fifteen yards or so farther along. She was standing a step or two into the street, smoking a cigarette.

After they were gone, I looked over my shoulder and a phaeton came around the corner at a gallop and rushed by, but there was no one coming on foot.

I looked back at Lucine and nodded, and she nodded, and she took off.

I followed her.

50

It was a Monday morning and the city was in high stir. Which felt, in some basic ways, not unlike Chicago or St. Louis or New York for a couple hundred yards, if you factored out the Frenchy flavor to the stores. But we crossed the Grand Rue de Péra and not long afterward we were heading downhill pretty severely and the street narrowed and the sidewalks filled with people and they were hurtling always and looking utterly through you and bumping your shoulders.

All the garbage and waste on this street and in every side street had been transformed by tramping feet and rolling cart wheels and dissolving rain into a Turkish carpet of unnameable waste, and you had to work hard to keep your balance with the angle of the hill and the broken cobbles and this slumgum of scum underfoot.

The buildings turned from stone to wood and smacked of the German expressionist cinema, with all the upper floors corbeled out to hang over one another and the street, and at all times they seemed about to tumble down upon you, and among these the Muslim residences identified themselves by the window latticework of the second and third stories, where the women sat to see the world without allowing themselves to be seen.

And still the bodies surged and bumped and went on and the
air was full of the smell of rot and offal and mammal waste and the assertions of new food, as well, the stuff to keep you alive
now
, the roasting of a lamb, the cutting of a melon, the airing and cooking of pepper and garlic and onion, and of course the smell of coffee and the smell of tobacco.

Along the storefronts and along the rubble-strewn empty lots between buildings and along the ashlar walls were barbers and coffee servers and fruit sellers, and now I passed even a couple of scribes at tiny desks on the sidewalk hiring themselves out to the illiterate to write letters that dunned an acquaintance for repayment of a loan or begged a rich uncle for money or supplicated a woman's father to arrange a marriage or even wooed the woman herself.

With the lurch and surge of bodies it was always a struggle to keep the sailor boy in duck blue and the big hat in sight. But we made it to the bottom of the hill and entered the Place Karakeuï at the mouth of the Galata Bridge, and Lucine slowed and I didn't know if I was supposed to come closer.

She glanced over her shoulder and nodded and I came up. The welter around us was a great shrouding fog of humanity, though instantly we had to dodge aside as two
hamals
—men of the porter guild—bore down on us carrying their loads on their backs, one man lashed with three enormous gunnysacks, the other bent almost double with a four-foot-square wooden box strapped to him with leather, and they were screaming at each other in Kurdish and would have run us over if we had not looked for them and leaped away. And though their voices were near and were loud, they vanished at once in the great ocean roar of the voices and the languages of the drivers and porters and soldiers and boatmen and hawkers who all gabbled and cried and cursed in Turkish and Greek and Macedonian and Arabic and Albanian and Montenegrin and Corsican and a dozen more tongues, and these waves of human sounds crashed through the sounds of the steamer whistles and the auto engines and the snorting and panting of horses laboring by and now a camel brushing past grumbling and spitting.

Lucine plucked at my sleeve and we wove our way to the edge of the square and down stone steps smelling of fish long dead but also of the sea—the incongruously bright blue Bosporus was immediately before us—and we cut along the cobbles of the quayside.

“We're meeting the
Principesa Maria,
” she said.

She pointed along ahead. A ship was mooring off the quay, a one-stack steamer that looked to be a shipyard cousin to the
Dacia.

“In from ConstanÅ£a?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “I'll go ahead now. Stay close. I'll find you.” She nodded toward a loose gathering of people near the stand of phaetons and taxis at the quayside road.

I moved off in that direction, stopping short of the group, finding a place to stand alone and watch Lucine play the dockside boy, acting as if he were waiting at the bollard to tie off the incoming launch from the
Principesa Maria,
though hanging back enough from the actual dockhand so as not to be challenged.

It took a while, of course, the offloading of the first wave of passengers from the ship, the trip to the quay, the docking there, and Lucine playing her part, in the manner now of an apprentice to the work, watching intently, and then sliding away as the passengers came down the gangplank.

This was a bit of theater for me, with an actress I admired in a starring role, and it happened with a constant flow of people and carts around and before me, and for some time now—even in the descent from Pera—I'd more or less stopped closely observing things in specific. I'd begun taking things in as broader impressions, which was not my way as a newsman but which I'd lapsed into as I'd let go to Lucine directing the scene.

I'd stopped thinking. I'd stopped being fully, concretely aware. I simply waited to see what Lucine would do next.

It did not occur to me—distracted as I was by Lucine the young man—that
Der Wolf
might be on that ship. Not till later.

And so I waited. I stood there on the quay, a little apart from the others who were waiting, while passengers from Constanţa and beyond flowed up the cobbled quay toward me and around me and past me.

And then there was a moment when Lucine fell out of char
acter. I could see it in her body, its abrupt change from hovering apprenticeship to a motionless, upright focus directed at the gangplank. I looked for who it might be in the present file of passengers emerging from the launch.

At the top of the gangplank, pausing briefly, scanning widely and quickly and then, starting to descend, was a broad-shouldered man in a suit, a man whose face was strikingly featured and came into recognizable clarity halfway down the plank. It was Lucine's father.

51

When he reached the bottom of the gangway, he fixed on the boy before him and I figured he recognized Lucine. After that one beat of a pause, she turned her back on him, faced in my direction, and started walking this way. He immediately followed.

She approached, a couple of arm lengths to my left, and I watched her face closely. Just before she drew near, she caught my eyes and did a careful turn of her head motioning me, as I understood it, to head along the quayside street in the direction away from Place Karakeuï. I had no choice but to trust that interpretation.

She passed, the father passed without looking at me, and I walked off, angling up to Rimtim Caddesi, and I began to follow it north. After about a hundred yards I was approaching the west end of the dry docks, near the nighttime rendezvous place Hansen had set up if we needed to exit Istanbul in a hurry. A short distance ahead was a sharp left turn at a warehouse. I stopped and turned to look back.

This was not a deserted stretch of road. Perhaps such a place as that did not exist within Istanbul during the daylight hours. Turks had been pressing past from the north heading south and a man on a bicycle had just brushed by me on the earthen shoulder of the road to my right, keeping off the cobbles, his bell clinging furiously. So when I turned, I found a Turk was striding toward me. He was close and I started a bit but I did not think for a moment he was following me; he was a Turk of the sort I'd seen dozens of times already along the streets, vending or getting a shave or drinking coffee on the edge of an empty lot. He already was adjusting his course to go around me but not by enough to avoid bumping me. I assessed his authenticity instantly.

But I saw a man following twenty yards or so farther behind, nattily dressed and carrying a kit bag, and this man was a Westerner—trim, moving light on his feet, heavily bewhiskered with muttonchops—and my suspicion sprung instantly into full flame. I made the immediate decision not to let him think he'd been recognized. As soon as I saw him I looked away, focusing without any pause on the Turk, who obliged by bumping me, letting me spin to his receding figure and curse him.

And then I continued to walk north.

If Muttonchops was following me still, I'd find a better place to confront him. And it was now that it struck me that the next ship from Constanţa could also have been bearing
Der Wolf
and there I'd been—standing in plain sight—and if he knew me I would have made his job very easy. I was aware of my Mauser in the small of my back.

Would he shoot me from behind in a busy Istanbul street?

I didn't think so.

The warehouse was approaching. I could make a last-moment dash for the building.

But this guy was a professional. A specialist with the knack. There were too many risks in public. And he didn't know I was portraying Brauer, so he didn't know where I was staying. For now, perhaps he'd just follow.

The warehouse was only a half dozen paces away.

I had to decide.

And then the plosive chatter of an automobile engine rushed up from behind and I saw the vehicle stopping in my periphery as I heard the goose honk of its horn.

I looked.

I stopped.

A Unic taxi was waiting beside me.

The door of the tonneau opened.

I could see inside. Lucine, her sunrain hat off, her hair piled beautifully on her faux-boy's head, and her father beyond her, his face brought forward and turned toward me.

I took the two quick strides to them and stepped into the tonneau and sat down facing father and daughter. Lucine closed the door and leaned across me—smelling only of herself this time, no perfume, just her own hot-morning musk—and she rapped on the front window.

As she retreated to her seat, I slid toward the center of mine and then rose up from it a little so I could see discreetly between her and her father and out the back window.

Muttonchops was continuing to walk in our direction and closing on us steadily. He was keeping his eyes forward with a disinterested air, but as the driver ground the taxi into gear, he turned his face to us.

In the morning sunlight, I didn't know if he could see through the back window and into the depths of the tonneau, but if he could, he and I were looking each other in the eyes.

I sat back down as we began to move, and he appeared again in the window, receding as we accelerated away. He had stopped. He was watching us. We made the turn west and he vanished from my sight. One thing seemed clear, and I strongly suspected another. This man was following me. And I bet he smelled of spirit gum.