The Star of Istanbul E-Book

Robert Olen Butler

• Herausgeber: No Exit Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Serie: A Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thriller
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 587

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

A Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thriller It is 1915 and Germany has allied itself with the Ottoman empire, persuading the caliphs of Turkey to declare a jihad on the British empire, as President Woodrow Wilson hesitates to enter the fray. War correspondent Christopher Marlowe Cobb has been tasked to follow Brauer, a German intellectual and possible secret service agent suspected of holding information vital to the war effort. As they travel on the Lusitania's fateful voyage, Cobb becomes smitten with famed actress Selene Bourgani. Cobb soon realizes that this simple actress is anything but, as she harbours secrets that could add fuel to the already raging conflict. Surviving the night of the infamous German U-Boat attack, Cobb follows Selene and Brauer into the darkest alleyways of London and on to the powder keg that is Istanbul. He must use all the cunning he possesses to uncover Selene's true motives, only to realize her hidden agenda could bring down some of the world's most powerful leaders.

Leseprobe

THE STAR OF ISTANBUL

A Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thriller

It is 1915 and Germany has allied itself with the Ottoman empire, persuading the caliphs of Turkey to declare a jihad on the British empire, as President Woodrow Wilson hesitates to enter the fray. War correspondent Christopher Marlowe Cobb has been tasked to follow Brauer, a German intellectual and possible secret service agent, into perilous waters aboard the ship Lusitania.

On the Lusitania’s fateful voyage, Cobb becomes smitten with famed actress Selene Bourgani. Cobb soon realizes that this simple actress is anything but, as she harbours secrets that could add fuel to the already raging conflict. Surviving the night of the infamous German U-Boat attack, Cobb follows Selene and Brauer into the darkest alleyways of London and on to the powder keg that is Istanbul. He must use all the cunning he possesses to uncover Selene’s true motives, only to realize her hidden agenda could bring down some of the world’s most powerful leaders.

Christopher Marlowe Cobb will return inThe Empire of Night

ROBERT OLEN BUTLER

Robert Olen Butler is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of sixteen novels, six story collections and a book on the creative process, From Where You Dream. A recipient of both a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction and a National Endowment for the Arts grant, he also won the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. He has twice won a National Magazine Award in Fiction and has received two Pushcart Prizes. In 2013 he won the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Literature. He teaches creative writing at Florida State University.

robertolenbutler.com

PRAISE FORTHEHOT COUNTRY

‘The Hot Countrydraws on many elements of the traditional adventure yarn, including disguises, fist fights and foot races, double agents and alluring young women who may be honey traps or spies... though in prose that has been written with serious attention... this first report makes you want to read on into the war correspondent’s second edition.’ –Guardian

‘combines a fast-moving plot with characters of a complexity that is not always found in such fiction’ –Sunday Times

‘a genuine and exhilarating success’ –Times Literary Supplement

‘a historical thriller of admirable depth and intelligence’ –BBC History Magazine

‘Exciting story...The Hot Countryis a thinking person’s historical thriller, the kind of exotic adventure that, in better days, would have been filmed by Sam Peckinpah’ –Washington Post

‘high-spirited adventure.... great writing’ –New York Times

‘Literate, funny, action-packed, vivid, and intriguing’ –Historical Novel Society

‘A fine stylist, Butler renders the time and place in perfect detail’ –Publishers Weekly

‘Butler writes thrilling battle scenes, cracking dialogue and evocative description, and the plot ofThe Hot Countrykeeps twisting to the very end’ –Tampa Bay Times

‘Pancho Villa, fiery senoritas, and Germans up to no good – Butler is having fun inThe Hot Countryand readers will too. An intelligent entertainment with colourful history’ –Joseph Canon

‘a spirited and beautifully told tale of adventure and intrigue in the grand old style, rich in both insight and atmosphere. Going off to war with Kit Cobb is as bracing and fun as it used to be in George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman books, or in Perez-Reverte’s Captain Alatriste novels. And the best part is that there are more to come. Saddle up’–Dan Fesperman, Hammett award-winning author ofThe Double Game

ALSO BY ROBERT OLEN BUTLER

The Alleys of Eden

Sun Dogs

Countrymen of Bones

On Distant Ground

Wabash

The Deuce

A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

They Whisper

Tabloid Dreams

The Deep Green Sea

Mr. Spaceman

Fair Warning

Had a Good Time

From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction

(Janet Burroway, Editor)

Severance

Intercourse

Hell

A Small Hotel

The Hot Country

The Empire of Night

For Kelly, my wife. These words are for her, through her.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to Dr. Wesley Scoles, my physician, my friend, and my go-to Doctor of Mayhem. To Jake Reiss, for the occasional writing space in the Booksmith’s back room, for his support of Kit Cobb, and for a certain, splendid personnel decision. And to Lou Boxer, who read every word.

1

I did not expect to find him until we were on board, this Walter Brauer. I knew where he was booked in first class: en suite on A Deck, with my stateroom just around the corner. In the jostle of the crowd at Pier 54, I was content not even to think about him. If he didn’t show, that would be Trask’s problem. I’d never been late to a war, and here the world was, nine months into the Big One and no one had seen a single Christopher Cobb byline from the action. That was Trask’s doing.

No. More precisely, it was my country’s doing, so I guess I wasn’t as heated up as I know I’m sounding. After my little adventure in Mexico the previous spring, my country had called on me to take some time off and train for the covert work I was happy to be asked to do. But I was also happy to get up on the back of a great greyhound of a steamship and run to the action at last. And I’d still get to be a war correspondent, even as I played this other part as well.

So the quay was jammed and the melting pot was aboil and its ingredients were separating. Thickening at the forward gangway were the third-class kersey caps and head scarves and threadbare motley; aft, the flowered straw hats and derbies and the Sears serge suits of second class; and amidships, the veiled bonnets and the lambskin gloves and the bespoke three-piece sack suits of the first-class swells.

I was traveling with this latter group, and even we were being stopped one by one at the bottom of our gangway stairs, where every parcel, every purse, every box and bag was checked for German bombs. The ship security was tight, and as for the tough Hun talk in the morning papers about it being open season in the North Atlantic on any ship flying a British flag, well, the U-boats had never sunk a vessel doing more than fourteen knots—nor could they—and they’d never dare to sink a passenger ship, especially with Americans on board, for fear it would finally grow Woody Wilson a backbone. I was content to be frisked and stamped and passed along, but it turned out that the strong lavender smell behind me was the pomade slicking down the black, center-parted hair of Walter Brauer, his hat in his hand in calculated deference to the uniformed bull checking us through.

I recognized him from the photos Trask showed me in my last briefing: faintly jowled, densely eyebrowed, wide in the shoulders and short in the legs. The black of his hair was intense—no doubt dyed, as he was pushing fifty—and with the topping of lavender grease he was the very image, it seemed to me, of a petty confidence man working widowed owners of boarding houses. But in fact Walter Brauer was a German-American who’d some years ago left the U.S. and who’d suddenly shown up in Washington on the sly and was known to Trask and his boys as an agent of the German secret service. What wasn’t known was what he was up to, his having stayed in America for not quite two weeks before boarding a steamship to rush back across the North Atlantic. And since it was time for the Chicago Post-Express and the U.S. government to jointly send me abroad anyway, the Federales thought I might as well get my feet wet following this guy. Maybe even introduce myself as the newsman I was known to be.

All in good time. I stayed just ahead of him through the whole process, with the purser and with the baggage steward, and then I lingered at the foot of the Grand Staircase. I affected an interest in the two electric elevators in the staircase’s central well, not trying to enter the just-arrived mahogany car but nodding at the operator and deferring to the handful of women who crowded in. The elevator clanked and ground its way upward and I waited for Brauer, examining the gilded rosettes and medallions on the elevator grillwork as if intending sometime to capture the detail of them in a newspaper story—as indeed I figured I might, to warm up my byline with a “Running the U-Boat Gauntlet” feature story at the other end of our journey.

I saw him in my periphery and I moved away and up the plush, roseate carpet of the staircase. I thought he’d taken casual note of me and it was good to have his first impression be of him following me. On the A Deck we passed through the first-class writing room and library, held up by Corinthian columns, filled with chairs and writing tables done in eighteenth-century rectilinear simplicity, and cramped into a horseshoe shape by the massive intrusion of the prowside wall, behind which lurked the number two funnel.

I led us along the starboard leg of the horseshoe and out the forward door and into the electric-lit passageway. I passed what I knew to be Brauer’s en suite rooms, A23 and A21, and I moved on down the corridor and turned into the transverse passageway. A few steps later, beyond a short, forward-heading corridor from which a stewardess approached with an arm full of towels, I arrived at the door of my own single-room cabin, A12. Still keenly conscious of him, from around the corner, I distantly heard Brauer shutting his door. The stewardess rustled past me and turned into the portside passageway. A rich, vibrantly modulated woman’s voice down the way greeted her: “Ah yes, thank you for these.”

“Ma’am,” the stewardess said.

The woman’s voice said, “Please put them in the suite. I’m bound for the deck.”

Her voice lingered in my head for a moment: the voice of an actress, I thought. And then, a little later, my bags unpacked and stowed and my own towel poised before my wet face, I looked at myself in the mirror over the cabin washbasin and I was the one who seemed like an actor. The face before me was no longer mine. I was made up. The water clung to my dense but close-cropped beard, the first beard I’d ever had for more than a few weeks. I’d worn this one for nearly a year. Ever since Mexico. What made me pause here to consider myself before a mirror, as if in a scene from a dime novel, was that the bearded one was called by my name, Christopher Marlowe Cobb. It was me. And the beardless face beneath, which had always been mine, was now the face of the invented character, from a play that was yet to be written. That face bore a scar on the left cheek: a long, thin scimitar of a scar. For the character, a Schmiss, the bragging scar of a German aristocrat from his university days in a fencing club. This one earned by me, however, on a dangerous afternoon in estado Coahuila, under the watchful eye of Pancho Villa. The beard of Cobb was consciously put on and could easily be taken off. This other man’s scar was permanent.

I dried my face, rubbing hard at it, and I put my shirt and tie and sack coat back on, and I went out of my cabin and took the starboard corridor aft, passing Brauer’s suite, not pausing to listen at the door because of a young couple—aflurry with handbags and exclamations of pleasure—entering the other en suite stateroom. I edged by them and then turned into the transverse corridor just before the writing room. I pressed on toward the door ahead of me, and my thought of that door made me realize what had, in addition to Brauer, led me out of my cabin: the woman with the actress voice. If she was bound for our deck, this was the door she would have used.

I stepped out onto the A Deck promenade, and it was largely a strolling and sunning deck, with the railings taken up by lifeboats. More completely so in the three years since the Titanic went down: the radial davits had been raised, and stacked beneath each suspended standard lifeboat were an additional three collapsible boats. Even the previously empty railing near the mainmast was blocked by stacks of collapsibles. Indeed, this deck had mostly ship crew moving about. At this point, the passengers seeking a deck instead of a drink likely wanted a railing from which to watch the embarkation.

There was one more deck for the first-class travelers to promenade. I emerged on B Deck. It was more crowded than I’d expected. First class was only half booked in this wartime civilian crossing, but the whole long length of the railing was shoulder to shoulder and there was a throng of others on the promenade as well. I realized the first all-ashore whistle had not yet sounded; the visitors were still on board.

If there’d only been the loose gathering of swells I’d expected, it would have been interesting to stroll along and try to guess which body belonged to the woman’s voice I’d heard. But now I focused on casually looking for Brauer. If he was even here. I moved forward on the promenade, keeping close to the deck wall, and ahead was a particularly large grouping of visitors circled up. I recognized newsmen at once. I drew near as an intense flurry of questions arose, with one male voice prevailing. I caught only a few of his words, the end of a question: “. . . a new film?” The reporters fell silent and no doubt all raised their pens, and from the unseen center of this circle came a woman’s voice.

It was her.

I slid along the outer edge of the circle of newsmen, looking for a sight line between heads, as she responded with words that sounded offhand and faintly put-upon but nevertheless were ringingly projected, even through the wall of newsmen. Yes, an actress. “I’m going abroad for personal reasons,” she said. “No films.”

And I found a place to see through three layers of necks and shoulders. Not just an actress. A star. Her face was recognizable from the magazine shelves of any newsdealer in almost any month of the year: Selene Bourgani. She wore a rolling hemp sailor hat as large as a porthole, with Tuscan trim edging the brim, and with her hair hidden in some thick, black, invisible roll beneath it, all of which framed her dusky thin face with its vast, dark eyes, its wide mouth in a perpetual almost-pout, a face everyone on the deck had seen, at some point or other, flickering before them in a movie theater. The Forest Nymph. Sister of the Sea. The Girl from Athens.

When it was clear she had nothing further to say about her upcoming film plans, the voices all rose together again and the reporters’ bodies shifted and I lost my view of her. I slid on along the circle, trying to recapture the vision of Selene Bourgani, whose sad and uplifting life story played over and over in the periodical press.

I passed the apex of the journalistic circle, and as I moved back toward the railing and the crowd grew thicker, I glanced away. There, quite near, leaning at the railing with his back to the dock, not looking toward the impromptu press conference but away, down the promenade, with an air of casual indifference, was Walter Brauer. The indifference was another calculated pose, it felt to me. What man would not be interested in a woman the press called one of the world’s most beautiful? He was holding a cigarette—rather effetely between the tips of his thumb and forefinger with his other fingers lifted—and he was blowing a plume of smoke toward the bow.

I took all this in while Selene Bourgani denied an interest in the London stage. I looked away from Brauer. I made another step to the side and another and I could see her again, in profile now, her long, straight nose beautifully at odds with the usual standards of beauty of this age. I thought: I bet her feet are large too and her hands and she is all the more beautiful for defying this world’s conventions in these details. And I was still entranced by her nose, absorbing even the precise curve where its bridge met her brow, a perfect fit, I fancied, for my fingertip, when she said, “I am a film actress.”

She’d hardly finished the sentence when one reporter leaped in before another hubbub of questions could begin. “Miss Bourgani,” he said, “the world is at war.”

He was speaking from somewhere to her left. She turned her face instantly to him—in my general direction as well—and her dark eyes riveted him and his voice snagged as if he were suddenly beginning to choke. He managed to stammer a couple of meaningless vowel sounds and then he fell silent.

The other reporters all laughed. But it was a sympathetic laugh. Hers was a face that could stop a thousand ships.

“Yes?” she said, encouraging him to go on with his question, giving the impression that she’d spoken softly, though I could hear her clearly.

“Miss Bourgani,” the reporter began again. “In light of the German threats and this being a British liner, are you afraid to be traveling on the Lusitania?”

She turned her face away from the questioner, the turn energized by a sharp, mirthless laugh, the sort of laugh that suggests some little private irony.

Then she fell silent, and everyone in the crowd fell silent with her. She let the silence tick on, consciously playing it, no doubt. Ever the actress, her timing was splendid: she slowly surveyed us until that precise, peak moment when all her listeners had finally Brownie-snapped their bodies and shallowed their breathing to a stop. Only then did she speak. “I am afraid of nothing,” she said.

2

I woke somewhere in the dark early hours of what would be our first full day at sea, woke to the sounding of the Lusitania’s forward triple-chime whistle. I dozed off, but a few minutes later the whistle sounded once more, a harmonized choir of basso baritones crying out in the night. My mind began to work, and I knew I would remain sleepless for a long while. My initial thinking was pleasantly desirous: I wondered if she was awake in her bed as well, just around the corner, waiting for the whistle to blow again, quaking very faintly from the distant, vibrant working of our turbines. I found myself afraid I would never have a chance to speak to her beyond a passing hello.

I should have been thinking about Walter Brauer. What he was doing. What might have been in his mind on deck yesterday morning. And then I grew afraid that I was ill-suited for the work my country had asked me to do.

I was rushing across the North Atlantic to war, but with an intention I’d never had before. I needed to sort out what I was doing, give myself a pep talk. I was a reporter. A war correspondent. I knew how to look for news, for the truth. It had always been my job to snoop around, and because I knew how to do that well, in Mexico I’d happened upon news of deep importance to Washington. Private importance. So now the process was inverted. Now the snooping would be for Washington and I would just happen upon stories for the Post-Express. I wanted to do this. I had seen too much of the savage impulses of men, impulses that we ultimately could not deal with as individuals. I was lucky to be an American. We Americans were also men and could foul things up pretty badly, but our declared ideal was to find a way to make it possible to stop the savagery. To govern without savagery. To live with other governments without savagery. To live with ourselves without savagery. It is what we believe. And so I remained Christopher Cobb, reporter, even as I began to play a more important role in the world. But I was used to finding things out by following the acts of men that are clear to see, out in the open, with their immediate goals readily understandable. This work I was doing now was different.

The Lusitania’s whistle sounded again.

Now my mind was all shadow and fog.

For all this thinking, I didn’t feel very peppy.

I rose and put on my pants and shoes and overcoat, intending to get some air on deck. I stepped out of my cabin and went to the right and then turned left into the portside corridor. Bourgani’s direction, not Brauer’s. There were two staterooms en suite along here, but I remembered the deck plan from when I booked my passage. Only the aft suite had its own bath. She would surely be in that one. I approached the door, treading softly. A20 and A22. I stopped. I listened. But all I heard was my heart thudding in my ear like the engine of our ship deep below. This was foolish. I moved on and through the door and out onto the A Deck promenade.

I could barely make out the lifeboat hanging a few paces before me. The ship was wrapped in a gray felt fog. But I stepped away from the door, turned aft, walked into the murk. It was as if the inside of my own head had billowed out to surround me. Inside the fog, I found James P. Trask, the President’s man in charge of covert service, talking to me again.

We met a week ago in Washington, at the massive, limestone and terra-cotta Raleigh Hotel on Twelfth and Pennsylvania. The after-dinner trade was waning and we began at the mahogany bar but soon carried our Gin Rickeys to a far corner table to speak in private. No one was nearby. High above us, from the center of the roof, a searchlight was lighting up the Washington Monument half a mile to our southwest.

Trask lifted his drink and I did likewise. Each glass held half of the same lime. We touched glasses and took a good swallow. Trask said, “These were invented back in ’83 at Shoomaker’s, around the corner from all you newspaper boys on Fourteenth. By old Colonel Joe Rickey. He owned the bar but he was also a professional glad-hander and arm-twister. Inventing this, he almost redeemed his whole tribe of lobbyists.”

“To Colonel Joe,” I said, lifting my glass again.

“Colonel Joe,” Trask said. We drank, and he said, “I’d have taken you there but it’s still full of reporters.”

James Trask was hard to read in any way that he wasn’t consciously intending. As befitted his job, I supposed. I was pretty good at reading a man. He delivered this last declaration by angling his square-jawed, man’s-man face slightly to the right and drawing out the word “reporters” like slowly pulling a piece of chewing gum off the sole of his shoe. He was clean shaven and—perhaps influenced by my new relationship to my left cheek—I found this a little deceitful in him. Trying too hard to suggest he was transparent.

He was tweaking my nose. I said, “I don’t hang around with reporters anymore.” Not true, but he knew I was lying and he knew I knew he knew I was lying, and that was the best return-tweak I could manage at the moment.

He smiled. “Don’t change your public ways for me,” he said. “To the world, you have to be Christopher Cobb.”

I did a slow, seemingly thoughtful stroke of my beard, my thumb pressing my right cheek and my fingers descending my left.

Trask knew what I was most conscious of, even before I realized it myself. It was under my hand.

“That was a fortunate little accident down in Mexico,” he said, referring to my scar.

I didn’t like him reading me. I turned the gesture into an extending of my forefinger, which I lifted and ran from my lower lip to the bottom of my chin, and which I then did once again, as if my intention all along had been simply to smooth my whiskers down. I didn’t really expect him to believe it.

“How’s your German coming along?” he asked.

“Pretty good.”

“You’ve got an ear for it, I understand.”

“I do.”

“Are you ready to work?”

“I am.”

“I’ve already informed your paper.”

My publisher—that great American mogul, Paul Maccabee Griswold—was an old-style Democrat, the sort who worshipped Grover Cleveland, and he had big political ambitions; he was only too happy to have me play this grand game for his own private political credit.

Trask took an envelope from the inside pocket of his impeccable black suit with the thin, gray stripe, the suit as snuggly, perfectly fit to his boxer’s body as the Woolworth Building’s glazed terra-cotta. Inside were the photos of Brauer. His jowly face in a formal head and shoulders pose, likely taken for a passport. A snapshot of him standing dressed in academic robes in a grassy courtyard with the arches of a Gothic colonnade behind him.

“Walter Brauer,” Trask said. “German. Technically an American citizen. Travels on our passport. But he’s been a lecturer at King’s College in London for more than a decade. One of the side benefits of our president’s pacifism is our present occupation of the German embassy in London. We’re looking after their affairs. Playing go-between. Not that my office takes our role as the Swiss too seriously. We’ve been carefully examining whatever the Huns left behind. I’m happy to say that Prince Lichnowsky and his boys made a rather hasty departure. Though I should point out we’re being careful to leave even the prince’s cigarettes in their silver case on his desk, exactly as they were last August, in the event the Germans return someday.”

“Think they’ll fall for that?” I said.

Trask winked at me.

The Lusitania’s whistle bellowed me back to the deck. I pulled up my coat collar. I’d not put on a hat and I ran my hand through my hair, which had gone damp from the fog. But the chill was okay with me. I’d spent plenty of time in hot countries these past few years. The whistle faded and then instantly sounded again, as if this were in response to something looming in our path. But what could they possibly see from the helm until it was too late? I could barely see beyond the stretch of my arm. It was all a yellow blur along an invisible deck wall. On the railing side, in a vague, somewhat more coalesced wedge of the universal gray, were an electric light and a lifeboat only a few paces away, but in this fog their identity was nothing more than informed guesswork. I swelled with that kinesthetic burn I’d always felt before the clash of men on a battlefield. The Titanic was too much with me.

I needed to focus on my assignment, which was how I managed my war nerves in Nicaragua and Macedonia and Mexico. I stood in the fog and continued drinking with Trask in the bar at the Raleigh.

“He’s an agent of the German secret service,” he said. But he didn’t go on. Instead, he drained the last of his Gin Rickey and then lifted his empty glass to me. “We should have another round of these, don’t you think?”

Trask had done this before. Even in our first meeting, he would suddenly decide, in the midst of our conversation, to throw me off balance by making me ask for what I clearly needed to know next. I should have waited him out at the Raleigh, but I wasn’t in a mood to play. At least I put it to him in a way he didn’t expect.

I said, “What does he lecture about?”

Trask let me see the fleeting dilation of surprise in his eyes. He smiled. “Oriental studies,” he said.

“Meaning?”

“He spent his childhood in Jerusalem. His father was in the export business there before he brought the family to Providence.”

“So he picked up some languages.”

“Arabic. Persian. Turkish.”

“He lectures on this.”

“And on Islam. He’s an expert.”

This was the telling thing. The Kaiser had been wooing the Islamic nations since the end of the last century. And in November, three months into the war, in Constantinople, the Turkish Sultan Mehmed V, as Caliph, declared a worldwide jihad, a Holy War, on the British Empire and all its allies. The Ottoman Empire embraced Willie, who had been claiming a spiritual affinity with Mohammed for fifteen years.

Trask said, “He’s used his expertise to make some friends at their Foreign Office. The Brits have one hundred million Muslims in their empire.”

“What’s he doing over here?”

“That’s the question.”

“His family?”

Trask shrugged. “The ones who stayed are dead. He arrived in Washington a week ago. We always watch the Huns on Thomas Circle pretty closely, and Brauer went straight to the embassy. But somehow he slipped out again without us seeing him. We don’t know what he did here. But we do know he’s booked passage back to Britain. That gives you a week to get ready to sail. You’ve got a first-class cabin right near his. First of May. The Lusitania.”

A form loomed suddenly out of the murk, almost upon me, a man, a big man, and I jumped back and to the side, throwing myself against the deck wall, but the man did not lunge for me, he kept striding on past, too fast, given the fog, just a fool with a British accent, throwing a “Sorry, old man” over his shoulder, taking his after-midnight constitutional. Why didn’t Trask just expose Brauer to the Brits and let them handle him? Because they were like this guy, rushing in the dark. They had their own agenda. If the world is going to blow up on us, we need to know for ourselves what we’re dealing with. And Wilson still wanted to keep us out of the fighting. The way they were all digging in over there, maybe he was right. And maybe I was trained now for this work. I knew how we were supposed to think: figure it out for ourselves, keep it to ourselves, do what we need to protect ourselves.

My beard was wet. My left cheek beneath was cold except for the curve of the impervious scar tissue. The fog had etched my Schmiss into my mind.

And now my eyesight was clearing, as if I were waking from a heavy sleep. The teak deck was rapidly appearing beneath me, before me, stretching forward into the clarifying dark; the lifeboats shaped sharply into themselves all along the way; the electric light glowed nakedly on the deck wall. We were moving faster. I could feel the subtle new vibration beneath my feet. Full ahead.

I was beginning to shiver.

I moved down the promenade to the forward door and I went in. I turned at once into the portside corridor and ran both hands over my beard and through my hair and wiped away the condensing mist on my coat and I moved forward. As I passed Selene Bourgani’s door I spoke aloud—louder perhaps than I would have if there actually were someone else in the corridor with me, which there wasn’t, but I spoke as if there were—I said, “We’re out of the fog now. Any danger is passed.”

I felt instantly stupid. I pressed on down the corridor. I thought she might be awake and worried inside. We all remembered the Titanic. And we all knew there was a war. For our ship to be bellowing through the night, blindly rushing, this could be a worrisome thing even for a woman who says she is afraid of nothing.

I passed on and I neared the turn of the corridor—I would soon be safely out of sight—but behind me I heard the opening of a cabin door, and I had no choice but to stop, which I did. I would turn. After all, this possibility was also why I’d spoken.

I turned.

She was standing just outside her door, in a beam of electric light from the wall, her hair twisted up high on her head. I took a step toward her, and another. I stopped. She hadn’t invited me, but I took this much of a liberty by reflex from the hammer thump of her beauty. Her eyes were as dark as the North Atlantic. She was wearing a crimson kimono with twin golden dragons plunging from her breasts to her knees.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I hope I didn’t disturb you.”

She looked over her shoulder, as if preparing to sneer: So where is the person you spoke to?

But she quickly turned back to me.

How the hell do I know what a woman is about to say? Perhaps she’d looked to make sure we were alone together.

“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.

4

She did look at me across the captain’s table. Most notably in the wine-sipping interval between the snipe en cocotte and the quarters of lamb. We sat directly beneath the apex of the dining room dome at a table for ten, a rectangle with four chairs on each long side and the ends curved for two more places, one of which held Captain Turner himself, a small, sailor-muscled man whose very few words were accented straight from the Liverpool docks. She’d been placed by the dining room steward next to a silly ass of a playboy millionaire, Alfred Vanderbilt, primary inheritor of the Cornelius Vanderbilt steamships-and-railroads millions, infamous, a few years back, for having to settle $10 million on a Cuban diplomat for having jazzed his wife, who subsequently divorced the Cuban and then killed herself, alone, in a London hotel. When Selene shot me the look, he was bending to her, whispering something.

The look on her face was too complex for me to understand. It was not What an ass, rescue me from his company. But neither was it I’m being charmed here by this guy, who’s in my league and you’re not, so stop looking at me like that. I felt it wasn’t about Vanderbilt at all, really. There was a stark resignedness in her look. A look of I’d lift my hand to you, reach across to you, but there’s no use. She looked at me the way she would if she’d fallen off the ship and was about to sink and she knew I could not save her.

All of this lasted only a few moments. She turned her face to Vanderbilt and instantly she portrayed a laugh, a laugh as false and oversized as any she had ever executed before the cranking of a movie camera.

“You’re a writer I should know,” a man’s voice said from my left.

I was ready to look away from Selene, and beside me was Elbert Hubbard, an eccentric jack-of-all-trades American writer with a pageboy haircut who’d sold forty million copies of a pamphlet brazenly exploiting the story of one of the few American war heroes from McKinley’s Cuban affair. So Hubbard could do what? Attack the lack of initiative in office clerks and secretaries and other hirelings in American business.

He knew me, knew my work, was heading to Europe to report on the “mastoid degenerate” Kaiser Wilhelm and his war. As Hubbard talked, I nodded and portrayed attention as falsely as a movie actress, and I prodded my mind to go where it should have been all along: to a table I could not see from across the dining room, to Walter Brauer. The Germans surely did not book him in first class out of a sense of his or any of their agents’ high standing in the world. He had business here. Something to do en route. Something that was naturally located in first class.

“Don’t you think?” Hubbard said, as if he’d already asked something and I’d ignored him. Which no doubt he just had.

“I rely on your judgment,” I said, a line I always found useful in getting phony intellectuals to say quotable things.

He was satisfied and talked on.

The orchestra above us was playing a ragtime piece. I hoped I had not just agreed that the music was degenerate.

Hubbard’s pageboy bangs were degenerate.

I also hoped he hadn’t asked if I liked his bangs.

I needed to get away. I wanted to observe Brauer at his table, even if it was in passing. Was he dining near someone intentionally? Was he engaged in conversation?

Selene Bourgani was engaged in conversation. Vanderbilt’s voice smarmed on in the background. Something, at the moment, about his ninety-horsepower Fiat, how he would drive it to London for a board meeting of the International Horse Show Association.

I leaned toward Hubbard slightly, interrupted him. “Sorry,” I said. “I have to visit the washroom.”

Hubbard nodded, but his “Of course” was snipped with disappointment. His wife was on his other side and I was a new ear for his socialist-utopian ideas.

I rose, ready to quietly excuse myself to anyone at the table who looked at me. I scanned the faces, passing quickly over Selene and Vanderbilt. Her head was angled toward Vanderbilt’s nearby moving lips, her eyes cast into the flower arrangement. The captain lifted his indifferent gaze to me.

“Excuse me, Captain,” I said, though as softly as I could and still have him hear me. “I’ll be right back.”

He nodded.

I began to turn away, but I did glance at Selene once more. Vanderbilt’s face was still drawn near hers; he was speaking of a prize high stepper. But she’d lifted her face and was looking at me with that opaque complexity I’d seen earlier.

I nodded.

She nodded in return, I thought, but if I was right, it was the merest possible nod, as if she did not want Vanderbilt to notice.

I moved away toward the portside forward door.

I soon saw Brauer. He sat at a round, corner table, facing in my direction, but he did not see me as I slowed to pass. He was turned and was speaking to the man sitting next to him: a thin-faced, clean-shaven man with a tall, brown but lightly graying, Brilliantined pompadour, nodding at Brauer’s words.

I looked away and kept moving. The steward was standing nearby, monitoring three members of the waitstaff who were simultaneously launching themselves from the sideboard with wine bottles for refills.

“Pardon me,” I said.

“Yes sir?” he said.

“I have a terrible memory for names, and I want to avoid a social offense. Please remind me of the name of the thin-faced man with the large hair in the corner.”

I nodded with careful precision toward the man next to Brauer, and the steward followed my gesture.

He pulled some papers from his inner pocket. “I’m still memorizing names myself,” he said. “Let me look, Mr. Cobb.”

He’d already memorized mine.

He looked at the table charts. “Ah, yes,” he said, pitching his voice low. “That’s Mr. Edward Cable.”

“Cable,” I said. “Of course. I met him in passing but he wanted to speak later. Do you know anything else about him?”

“He’s from Boston, Massachusetts. A prominent dealer in rare books.”

I began to pat the pockets of my tux. “I need to find that paper I made notes on,” I said. “He’s on A Deck, I think.”

The steward looked at his notes. “B Deck,” he said, though discreetly not speaking the number of his stateroom.

But he was accommodating. Like any reporter worth his salt, I would keep pumping till the source dried up. “And the name of the dark-haired man sitting to his left?” I asked.

The steward looked again at his chart. “That’s Mr. Walter Brauer of London. An academic, is what I understand.”

“Anything else about either of them?”

“No, sir.”

“Thanks,” I said and I discreetly pulled a half-dollar coin from my pocket and slipped it into his hand.

“Thank you, sir,” he said.

I looked back to the round table in the corner.

Brauer was the one listening now. Everyone else at the table was absorbed in other conversations, and these two men were posed in a tableau vivant entitled “Private Conversation Conducted in Public.” Both of them had leaned their torsos toward each other, Brauer angling his head still farther in the direction of the other man and casting his face downward, staring at the tabletop as if he were examining a rare book, with Cable likewise moving his head closer to his dinner companion’s but focusing on Brauer’s ear, putting words there.

The words flowed on and the two faces did not show any emotion during them. Cable stopped speaking and Brauer nodded and the two men straightened. This was not an off-color joke, gleaned from a rare book. Not a critical comment from one man of the mind to another about the vapid conversation going on across the table. This was just about them, and it was serious business.

I pushed through the dining room doors, across the deck’s entrance hall with its twin elevators, and down the portside corridor a few paces to the gentlemen’s room. I stepped in. I washed my hands at the marble basin. Going through the motions of what I’d publicly said I’d do. And I stood there with my hands dripping for a moment, thinking on the rare book dealer and the lecturer at King’s College, how I might befriend them. If Edward Cable was why Brauer was traveling first class on this ship, the loop was closed now, and my getting nearer to them would be difficult.

I dried my hands on one of the stacked hand towels and dropped it into the wicker basket. I stepped from the washroom and strode off down the corridor.

I smelled her perfume even before I saw her. Nothing of flowers. This was the smell of the green things in the world, the unadorned things of a field, of a forest, hay newly mown, and beneath this smell a musky scent, but something faintly sweet as well, lavender perhaps. And in its complex fullness, this was a familiar smell, as a matter of fact, though I did not pause to identify it. I emerged from the corridor and there stood Selene, not moving anywhere, not addressing herself to the elevators, just standing there.

I stopped.

Why had I not smelled this scent upon her earlier? Had she just now refreshed it while waiting for me?

She did look toward me without surprise. But also as if without recognition. Perhaps I’d misread the earlier look, at the dinner table, perhaps I’d imagined a complex yearning there that did not exist. At the beginning of the meal, after our Liverpudlian captain had rung three bells lightly on his wineglass with his salad fork and after most of the table offered him a charmed laugh in return—swells only too happy to embrace the social crudities of a man with power, particularly power over their mortal well-being in the middle of the ocean—he made a cursory introduction of each of us. When he spoke my name and my occupational justification for being at the table, I glanced at Selene and her look was the one I was confronting now: I can see that some person or other is present here before me.

So just outside the first-class dining room, Selene Bourgani and I stood alone, looking at each other, and as the moment stretched on and she did not resort to social boilerplate, nor did I, as we did not speak at all but neither did we turn away, the uninflected silence between us began to seem like actual, engaged communication.

But then she said, “I believe the washrooms are in this direction.”