The Star of Istanbul (6 page)

“So he says,” Cable added, with a playful little twirl of the words. I figured he was suddenly aware that his statement seemed to contradict their just having met.

Brauer said, “Merely a small bachelor flat in a building full of them. Not typical Saint James's.”

They were an odd sort of vaudeville team, these two, in their public roles. It made me wonder if I'd gotten one or the other or both of them wrong. But Trask had no doubt about Brauer. And these two were fast and seemingly exclusive companions three days into the voyage. Which was why Brauer was here. Trask wanted more from me than Cable's name, but that wasn't going to come in casual conversation.

I wanted to read Brauer's face once more. I'd found in the ward rooms and courthouse corridors of Chicago that the most boldly direct question sometimes actually got an answer, or at least a revealing evasion.

So I turned back to Cable and said, “Rare books must be pretty good money, but Dr. Brauer and I are living way over our heads traveling Cunard Saloon.” I came back to Brauer and looked him straight in the eyes. “Forget hod carriers and dirt farmers. Underpaid teachers and newswriters are the ones ripe for the Bolsheviks. I got a whole syndicate footing my bill to the war. How'd you wangle first class, Doc?”

His eyes did not shift away from mine. The pause in him was minute. He said, “It was God's will.”

6

This sank the conversation.

Brauer grew even less willing to speak. Cable grew thoughtful. I understood I had to take other measures to learn anything more about these two.

I stubbed my cigarette and excused myself and went out of the Smoking Room at the promenade door.

The night was bright with stars.

I walked forward a ways, in the direction of the entrance door to the stateroom corridor.

I could take the most obvious of the next measures right now. I had a small leather roll of picks, rakes, and miniature torque wrenches and a few weeks of intensive training and rehearsal in their use. I'd pick Brauer's cabin lock and go in.

But I didn't know how long the boys would linger in the Smoking Room. They weren't having a swell experience there so far. I didn't want Brauer walking in on me. Better to wait till the dinner hour tomorrow so I had a substantial and predictable block of time.

A couple approached, leaning into each other and talking low, and they straightened abruptly as they saw me. I passed. They were, I was willing to bet, a shipboard romance just beginning, from their new ardor risking a public show of their feelings but not wanting anyone to actually notice. A little farther along, the canvas cover of Lifeboat 10 was in place but undone at the prow. I listened as I went by. I could hear rustlings inside. Still another couple. They'd been careful to put the tarp back into place, but of course they couldn't refasten it from the inside. These two were young. Each of them traveling with parents or siblings, sharing their staterooms, stealing some privacy.

I liked the nascent romances. Liked it professionally. I thought a good activity tonight would be to go to my Corona Portable Number 3—which was a swell companion who never failed to take me by the fingertips and lead me to my newswriter self—and work on the lead paragraphs of my feature story. Young love blooming, ragtime playing, and the swells of London and New York dolling up as we rushed toward the War Zone.

I reached the aft doorway into the A Deck stateroom corridors. I stopped. Before me in the deck wall were the portholes—rectangular, with iron flower filigrees crowning them—proper windows at sea. I counted them along: one for the first small stateroom and then a gap for the vent and for, I suspected, the en suite bathroom, and then the two windows of the suite. Selene's suite. They were lit. I stepped toward the railing and I could see that the curtains were drawn in both. She was inside. She was awake.

I was grinding a bit now in places on my body I did not want to think about. I'd exchanged words with her. One could even consider that we'd flirted ever so slightly, ever so preliminarily. But what took no consideration at all was that she'd vanished. She'd known where to find me, if she'd been so inclined, but she'd vanished.

I entered at the door and turned down the immediate forward-leading corridor—which, however, led straight past her suite—and I started to stride along, conscious of my first two footfalls, hearing the clear squinch of them on the rubberized floor tiles, wondering if she heard them, and I stopped abruptly, as if to quiet the racket I was making. Not incidentally, however, I was standing now before her door. But I did not knock. I did not make a further sound, except perhaps for a quick intake of air. And perhaps a brief clearing of the throat. Loud enough, I supposed. But I strode on, forgetting to walk softly—I was beyond her suite anyway now—and then I was at the turning of the corridor. I stopped again. Without a plan. ­Intending—sincerely—simply to take another buck-up-boy big breath or two and then vanish into my stateroom.

And I heard the click of an opening door behind me.

I turned.

Selene was standing just outside her suite, her crimson kimono wrapped around her, her golden dragons plunging down her chest. Her hair was up. Her legs and feet were bare. She saw it was me. She'd suspected it was me. She'd come out because it was me.

I began to walk toward her. She wasn't moving.

I stopped before her.

I'm stupid about women more often than not, but I'm not stupid. I made sure I was standing very close to her. She hadn't budged.

Selene Bourgani was looking up into my eyes, saying nothing. She didn't smell of the forest anymore. She'd found some bed of flowers to lie down in. I didn't feel like trying to name them. She smelled damp. Freshly damp like she'd just come in out of the rain.

I wasn't saying anything either.

I stopped trying to read her eyes, which were on me, which was enough.

Then she said, very softly, “Should I assume by your stopping to clear your throat that we've emerged from the fog?”

And though she was guying me, these words came out of her as if it was the saddest thing in the world. As if she was playing Juliet, as if she was saying “O happy dagger, this is thy sheath.”

I firmly pushed that thought away, lest the great Isabel Cobb, whose Juliet I saw a hundred times as a boy, should start filling my head with her voice.
The curtain has fallen, Mother. Go away.

Selene's hands rose, but not to me. She undid her hair and it tumbled down before me, and as far as my body was concerned, she might as well have just sloughed off the kimono: to see the long, black, cascaded fullness of her hair was to see her naked.

And still another remarkable thing: her eyes were filling with tears.

I didn't know if it was stupid or wise, but I had long before come to the conclusion that you did not ask a woman why she was crying. You didn't stop her from telling you, if she must, but you did not ask.

I did not ask.

But I did care about this. I lifted my hand, though I wasn't sure what to do with it. Before I could lower my hand again, she took it. And she turned and led me into her suite. I closed the door behind me.

I had sense enough to keep my mouth closed as well.

She led me from the parlor of her suite to her bedroom, ivory walled and roseate furnished, with settee and dressing table on one side of the room and two single beds on the other, placed foot to foot, one of which she set me on as she stepped back and squared around to face me. The electric lamps burning in sconces on the walls were made to look like candles and she left them on for me to see. She sloughed off the kimono and now she truly was naked, tumbled hair and lamp-ambered skin and tear-sparkled eyes and all.

Though in Mexico I'd begun to learn that this was one of my stupidities with a woman, I still tended, in these matters, simply to pound and then to sleep. But Selene Bourgani would not let that happen on this night. Soon after we'd begun, she whispered to me, “Please go gentle, Kit. Go slow. All this will end too soon as it is.”

And I obeyed her. And she would be right.

7

But for now, after we'd finished, we did not sleep but held each other close on one of the narrow beds, entwined like the two snakes on Hermes' staff. We'd been silent for a long while, so I said, “We're like the two snakes on Hermes' staff.” She was Greek, after all. I was trying not to doze off.

We were both lying mostly on our sides, facing each other; her cheek was against my chest; my throat was laid on the curve of her head. She moved her head when I said this, tilting her face upward, and though I could not see her eyes, I sensed she was looking up at me. “Of course,” she said. “He was the god of travelers and liars.”

I'd bantered with smart women. I grew up the son of a very smart
woman who bantered to beat the band. When a smart woman
banters, she means at least half of everything she says. At least. My mother schooled me herself as we steamer-trunked from city to city, theater to theater, schooled me by giving me, through all my learning years, a good three thousand books to read and then asking me, all totaled, a good hundred thousand questions about them. I dared not forget a thing. And from what I remembered of the Greek deities, this was a very selective list of Hermes' godly patronage, so
I figured Selene thought I was a liar. Or she knew she was. Not that we'd had much of a chance to lie to each other yet.

“God of poets too,” I said.

“Are you a poet, Kit Cobb?”

“Nah,” I said. “But if they'd been around at the time, he'd've been the god of newspaper writers as well.”

“To fit with the liars?” She lifted her face from my chest. I pulled my head back and looked her in the eyes. The electrical filaments of those phony candles were still burning in the room. I was glad. I liked looking at her face, even if she was ragging me. “He was the messenger of the gods,” I said. “I'm just a messenger, bringing the news.”

She put her head back onto my chest.

“Are you a liar, Selene?”

“Of course,” she said. “I'm an actress.”

I didn't have an answer for that. We were quiet for a few moments.

Then she said, “I'm sorry.”

“Because you're an actress?”

“Because I'm a liar.”

There was a little catch in her. “I'm sorry,” she said.

This was about something else.

“That you're an actress?”

“Yes. But your mother . . .”

“It's all right.”

“I didn't mean to say . . .”

“That she's a liar too.”

“But we do that.”

Her head felt heavier on my chest, as if she were pressing in, burrowing, hiding. She grew still. I should've qualified calling my mother a liar. But I felt Selene struggling with something. I kept quiet.

She said, “An actress is trained to be anyone, to do anything.” She paused and then, very low, Selene said, “An actress is a fallen woman.”

Somewhere outside, distantly on the promenade, in the dark, a woman laughed. Perhaps the lovers from the lifeboat, emerging.

I thought of the newspaper stories of Selene's life, the few things known about her past. She was Greek, the firstborn of a fisherman and his wife on the island of Andros. Shortly before she was born, her father drowned in a storm in the Cavo d'Oro channel. A week later her mother gave birth, and after swaddling her daughter in a basket and placing her on the doorstep of the local monastery, she threw herself off the lighthouse.

From then until she showed up on the doorstep of the Vitagraph Studios in Brooklyn in 1908, things were mysterious in the biography of Selene Bourgani, yielding to reporters, upon questioning, only her classic profile and her most famous quote, “What little I remembered, I have now forgotten.” She could indeed have become, in those lost years, a spectacularly fallen woman. Or, more likely, a Greek immigrant girl waiting tables in a Hoboken diner with a boyfriend at the coffee factory. As it was, she was billed by Vitagraph as the Most Mysterious Woman in the World. Of course she was a liar.

She shifted now against me, moved her hand along my side and then onto my back, pressed me closer to her.

“Were you really born on Andros?” I said.

This was the wrong thing to ask. I was continuing to learn. It did not occur to me till that moment: if a woman tells you she is a liar, it doesn't mean she's suddenly interested in telling the truth.

Selene untangled herself from me. Not angrily. Almost wearily. As if the night had ended and she was sorry for that but it was over.

However, she simply sat up and leaned back against the wall. I was happy to find she was disengaging no further. And I was happy to be looking at her naked, ambered breasts tipped in coffee brown, a part of her I had so far failed to concentrate on as I'd intended.

“You've been reading the movie magazines,” she said.

“Newspapers,” I said.

“All lies.” She turned her face to me.

I didn't answer.

“Willful,” she added.

“The only kind you can trust,” I said.

“Can you get me a cigarette and my wrap?”

“I'm happy to smoke with you, but can't I look at you a little longer?”

“I'm cold,” she said.

“All this will end too soon as it is,” I said.

She smiled. “Okay. The cigarette will do.”

I moved to the other bed where she and I had thrown the pieces of my tux. I found my cigarettes and matches in my coat and turned back to her. I was also still naked and she was looking at me openly. Was this a pleasure for her—I'd never really considered the possibility of this impulse in a woman—or was she just instructing me some more? I took a step toward our bed and the kimono was lying crumpled on the floor. I bent to it, picked it up, straightened. I was facing her and feeling pretty uncomfortable now, to be dangling nakedly before her watchful eye, which is what I figured she intended.

She did not take her eyes off the center of me. And she whispered, “I said the cigarette will do,” but in the actress way that filled the room, that would reach the back of the mezzanine. In the way that sounded as if she were lying. I was sorry we'd talked about lies.

But I dropped the kimono at my feet and stepped naked to her and I offered a cigarette, and she lifted her gaze from my body to my eyes, and she took a cigarette and put it between her lips, and I bent to her and I lit it and she sucked deeply on it, keeping her eyes fixed on mine, and then she turned her profile to me as if I'd just asked about the secrets of her life, and she blew a long, thin slip of smoke into the room.

I sat down beside her, putting my back to the wall as well. I lit a cigarette, and we smoked for a few moments, and then she said, “Have you ever killed a man?”

I'd been around a lot of killing in my professional life. And in Mexico last year it had finally become necessary that I do some myself. I'd not been asked this question before, and I found the simple, true answer difficult to speak. It had been necessary. I had done it without pleasure. But I had done it. More than once. My hesitation now was that killing a man was a private act. Even if it was done publicly. It was between him and me. But I would not lie. And to stay silent, as I was now doing, was also an answer, except it implied things about the doing of it and the having done it that were not true.

“Yes,” I said.

Selene took a drag on her cigarette. She held the smoke inside her for a long moment. Then she exhaled slowly, filling the air directly before her. “Why?” she said.

I was not getting into this. “It had to be done,” I said, hoping this would be sufficient for her.

It seemed to be. She nodded. She said nothing more.

We sat side by side in silence for a long moment, and I realized she was trembling slightly.

I touched her quaking arm. “You're cold.”

“I believe I mentioned that before,” she said.

“Sorry,” I said, and I instantly got up from the bed and picked up her kimono and turned back to her.

She'd risen to her knees, and she took the wrap from me, the cigarette dangling at the corner of her mouth like she was a Chicago street thug. “You stopped looking anyway,” she said.

I was surprised to realize that she was right. I didn't know how to explain that. It was the pound-and-sleep in me, I supposed. I didn't know how to explain that either. So I said nothing.

She pulled her kimono around her tightly, her hands crossed on her chest.

I went to the other bed and put on my pants and shirt.

When I returned to her, she was still holding her wrap against her. She did not look up. I understood I was supposed to go.

I picked up the rest of my clothes and threw them over my arm.

I stopped before her one last time.

She lifted her face to me. The tears had returned to her eyes. But she said, “It's all right. Thank you for tonight.”

I nodded and I left her there on the bed, where she held herself close and said nothing—but at least was not lying—where she was perhaps trying to forget whatever it was that she remembered.

And as I stepped into the empty corridor and closed Selene Bourgani's door, I could not help but wonder who she might be thinking of killing.