The Star of Istanbul (18 page)

26

The courtyard was very dark and it stank of garbage and waste and it rustled with rats. My remorse was gone and I shuffled my feet not to trip on unseen things, and then I was at the rear door of Metzger & Strauss.

The window I'd passed and the window in the door were painted black.

I expected that trying to pick the lock in the impenetrable dark of this doorway within this courtyard surrounded by these multistoried buildings on this moonless London night would be a tricky business, but I was getting used to my job, and once I found the opening of the keyway with my fingertip and got my pick and torque wrench inside, it was good doing this in the dark. The darkness made it entirely about the feel of things unseen in the keyway, and that was how it should have been anyway. And when the last pin yielded and I felt the shear line go clear and I was ready to rotate the plug, I paused. I focused on being quiet. I eased the plug around and opened the door with the meekest of clicks.

And I froze.

Voices and light.

But not in this room, I quickly realized. And the voices murmured on without a hitch even now, even after the sound of my entry. They were distant, from another room.

Which is what I should have expected. This was the back room I was entering. I'd seen through to it in the rear wall of the bookshop office this morning. I realized that door must still be open.

This was dangerous but it was also an opportunity.

I stepped inside.

Across the rear storage room was the open door to the office, and framed brightly there in modernist composition was a center cut of the refectory table and Brauer's brown tweedy back overlaid with the curves of a bentwood chair. No eyes were visible.

I closed the door softly behind me. I turned and waited where I was standing for a moment. The voices were pretty low and I couldn't pick up the words clearly. The floor was stacked on both sides of me with boxes in irregular rows, and I ducked down and circled behind them to the left, out of sight of the door, moving along the nearest row.

I gave a brief thought to the contents of these boxes. Books. This was an ongoing plausible bookstore, after all. But what else could be delivered here as if they were books? If the Germans wanted to mount a sabotage campaign in England, the explosives could well pass through here. But that was not my business tonight.

I was treading softly now in a severe crouch behind the chest-high row of boxes nearest the office.

As I drew near the open door, I was concentrating fully on being quiet and not yet trying to render the murmuring into words.

But an abrupt silence caught my attention.

I froze again.

Had they heard me?

I'd move no more if I hadn't already given myself away.

But now a man's voice spoke in German: “You are all right? You are making sounds again.” The voice was soft-edged in timbre but hard-edged in tone.

Another man answered, also in German, “I will be all right when he is dead.” German can transform a voice, and I'd heard his only briefly in English, but from the context I figured this was Metzger, attending the meeting with his broken foot and not taking it real well. I was certainly on the other side of the wall from my meditating Quaker: I had a sharp little twist of pleasure at the present state of Metzger's murderous pal in the doorway across the street.

“You expect word on that shortly?” the first man said.

“If he is what we think he is,” Metzger said, “he'll come and we'll have him.”

“Can we get on with this?” a third person said. I went rigidly silent inside once more, though I'd expected to hear this voice. It was Selene.

“Of course,” a man said in English. This was the first German speaker, I surmised. His overtly impatient tone with Metzger and his stepping in as the commander of the agenda to reassure Selene suggested he was the one in charge. Perhaps Herr Strauss? “Herr Metzger,” he said, with an intonation as if prompting him to do a prearranged thing.

In the brief silence that followed, I heard a rustling of papers, perhaps pulled from a pocket and pushed across the tabletop.

Metzger said in English, “Herr Brauer, if you would be so kind as to keep the envelope with your name upon it and hand the other to the lady.”

“Of course,” Brauer said.

Metzger said, “They canceled the daylight passage. I've rebooked you on the boat train to Flushing, night after tomorrow. You'll cross over to German territory at Baarle. Everything you need is in the envelopes.”

“My apologies to Herr Brauer,” Selene said, “but is the escort
necessary?”

Metzger said, “Constantinople is a long way.”

“But it's by your vaunted Baghdad Express, yes?”

Metzger began clumsily to explain. “Most of the way but . . .”

The man I figured to be Strauss cut him off. “We have arranged all of this so far, Miss Bourgani. Please trust us further. Herr Brauer will handle what remains to be done in
Istanbul
.”

He stressed the Turks' preferred name for the city, no doubt shooting Metzger a critical look. Their kaiser was the self-avowed brother to Islam. Istanbul, not Constantinople. This was an important detail.

I made this quick assessment while the sound of the man's voice buzzed in my head like subtext. Until this moment I'd heard him speak fewer than half a dozen words in English. Now he sounded familiar.

“The Pasha's people and ours must meet to arrange the first contact.”

I strained at placing the voice but felt blocked in some odd, undefinable way.

New sounds now: an opening of a door—the door from the front of the shop—and a slight scraping of chairs.

The man I took to be Strauss said, “Herr Strauss. These are Miss Selene Bourgani and Herr Brauer, whom I think you've met.”

The actual Strauss had a voice raspy from a lifetime of heavy smoking. His manner was old-school courtly. “Miss Bourgani,” he said in British-inflected English. “I am enchanted. Your face fills the dreams of millions.”

“Herr Strauss,” Selene said.

Strauss said, “We deeply appreciate your assistance in this most delicate of tasks.”

She did not reply in words and I longed to watch all the physical nuances of the characters in this scene. I particularly longed to see the face of the man I'd mistaken for Strauss, the man whose voice still echoed in my head. Where had I heard it?

I assessed the shadows around me, wondered if I dared to lift my head above the boxes.

Metzger said in German, “Any sign outside?”

“I only looked for a moment, getting out of the taxi,” Strauss said, also in German. “I didn't see Karl. But that's the point, yes?”

Metzger grunted.

I shrank back deeper into the darkness and began to rise a bit from my crouch to look.

“Can we speak in English, gentlemen?” Selene said.

The familiar man replied, “I'm very sorry, Miss Bourgani. It's rude of us.” His English was perfect. And his accent was American, though without any regional hint at all. Whatever “standard American speech” was, this was it. Meticulously learned.

The bright, angled slice of the office appeared before me: Brauer, seen from behind but also now from the side, sitting upright, blocking the view to the far end of the table, though I couldn't say for sure I would've seen that far even if he wasn't there.

“Sometimes we have peripheral matters to discuss and we speak in German by reflex,” the man went on.

“Is there more?” Selene said and I saw a movement just to the right of Brauer: Selene's black-sheathed shoulder rolled into my view and then out again.

The man with the soft-timbred familiar voice ignored her. “
Bitte,
” he said. Then he quickly repeated in English, “Please.” And a gray-tweed-clad wrist, a delicate-fingered hand appeared in the air beyond Brauer, from the end of the table, gesturing toward an invisible chair. “Sit for a time, Mr. Strauss.”

A chair scraped.

The wrist and hand vanished.

“It will only be for a
brief
time, Miss Bourgani,” the invisible man said.

I crept back farther, leaned to my left, trying to catch a glimpse of him. Though the angle improved, the visible slice of the doorway shrank as well. I could see Selene's shoulder; I could see that she had not raised the veil on her hat. She was sitting there shrouded before these men. Given the familiar man's impulsive leveraging of his empowered status—making Strauss sit—it must have been nagging the hell out of him that Selene wouldn't show her face clearly to him.

“Perhaps if we can have a little drink together before we go,” he said. “We humbly request this gesture of friendly feelings, dear lady.”

I thought:
This guy is good. He'll lift her veil yet.

He did not wait for her reply. He said, “Mr. Brauer. If you'd be so kind as to pour the wine.”

Brauer twisted his body in the direction of the man. This had taken him by surprise. He was being put in his place as well. He might have thought he was a high-toned university intellectual, but in this room he was the office girl being sent for coffee.

He straightened and began to push his chair back.

I quickened at this. I leaned just a little more to my left. He was about to reveal his boss.

The chair screaked on the floor, the noise consciously made worse, I suspected, by Walter daring to express his displeasure.

He rose and stepped to his left, and he was gone from my sight.

And there, at the end of the table, was the man with the square-trimmed beard who'd been reading his newspaper across the Palm Court this morning.

27

Almost at once his face swung in my direction. I ducked below the bookcase. I'd made no sound. He was probably turning to Selene.

His face was a blur now in my head from this quick glance, and there was very little that was new. The beard again dominated my impression of him. His eyebrows were bushy; that was something I'd not noticed across the Palm Court. His plastered hair with that center part was vaguely brown. But I still needed a clear and steady look at him from close up.

His attention did indeed go to Selene. He was talking trivially to her about the wine. A nice German wine.

He'd been watching me this morning. That much was clear. There were other things to consider about this man, though I felt further away than ever from recognizing his voice. I might have been wrong about that. But I had to shut down my mind for now. I was still lurking a few feet from my own little den of German spies and I needed to listen.

Playing up that soft-edged quality in his voice, Squarebeard prattled on about how they discovered the beauties of late harvest grapes in the Rheingau. “What seemed to be too old, what seemed to be rotten, turned out to be the sweetest and finest of all,” he said, and I could imagine him leaning to her, touching her wrist lightly, putting the mash on Selene Bourgani.

Then for a time there were only clinking sounds and bits of conversation about everyone getting a nice glass of late-harvest Riesling, and then a silence fell over the table.

I wanted to rise up once again to look into the room. But either Brauer was back in his chair and I'd see nothing or I'd be directly in Squarebeard's line of sight and it would be too dangerous. I stayed where I was.

“So then,” Squarebeard said. “It is time for us soon to go, but first a toast. To Miss Bourgani and to international understanding that will help bring about a quickly achieved but eternal peace in the world.”

A beat of silence during which, no doubt, Squarebeard repressed the gagging reflex from his tripewurst of a toast, poor man. Surely he didn't fool Selene; he could have simply toasted to the crushing victory of Germany over all her enemies and to the establishment of a vast new Germanic Empire and saved himself this discomfort. Then the glasses clinked and Metzger and Strauss, in unison, murmured “
Zum Wohl.
”

A longer silence fell upon the room as they drank, broken only by Metzger praising the pleasing sweetness of the wine and by a desultory murmuring of agreement.

This thing would soon end.

I had to decide what to do. They'd leave in several taxis, as they'd come. Who might linger? I'd heard some useful things but nothing of the details of what Selene was expected to do in Istanbul. I could wait for whoever remained possibly to reiterate informally some of what I'd missed.

But Squarebeard might clear out quickly and he was the one—the obvious leader of the group—I was most interested in.

He didn't give them much drinking time. Suddenly a chair scooted and it must have been his. He said, “So we must go now.”

Glasses clinked down to the table.

Chairs began to move.

Shoes began to scuff and shuffle.

I backed away and circled around the side of the rows of boxes and I reached the rear wall. I crouched low again and moved toward the door as quickly as I could without audible footfalls.

Before I stood in full—though shadowed—sight of the office, I peeked from my crouch a last time. The bright frame of the doorway for the moment showed only a center slice of the refectory table, and then a body moved into frame, the large, laboring body of Metzger, bracing himself with his hand on the tabletop, hobbling in severe pain on his broken foot.

He was heading for the front of the shop, to show his visitors out. I did not have time to wait till the office was clear. I rose slowly and then took a brisk step to the door, eased it open, and went out into the night, carefully closing the door behind me.

My passage was in darkness now but I moved as fast as I dared. Along the back of the shop to the Friends Meeting House. Through the Quakers' back rooms. I paused only before I entered the Meeting Room.

It was dark. The candle was out. The old man was gone. Matches lit my way past the empty benches and through another door, and before me, in the windows of the front entrance, was the street, almost bright by contrast, with its taint of electric light.

The handle did not yield to my turn. Of course. The old man had locked up on his way out. I turned the bolt key and I opened the door slowly, quietly. Voices were coming from nearby to the right. My German spies scattered from under their rock.

I took a step back and pulled the sling from my pocket and reset my left arm in it. I tapped my cane to the floor. I touched the gauze on my cheek to make sure it was there. I could cross the street. But I was still hungry for any scrap of information. For a closer look at Squarebeard. For a glimpse of Selene. I had to be bold now and trust my disguise. I would pass before their very eyes. I figured at the very worst there'd be a delay for them to realize who I was. I could handle any of them in a scrap and could simply outrun them if need be. They'd soon know I'd been around anyway when the dead body in the doorway made his appearance in their little drama.

I took a quick initial look in their direction before stepping out. It would help if they didn't realize I'd entered the scene from just next door.

Squarebeard was disappearing into a taxi.

“Damn,” I said, almost aloud. Almost.

The others were distracted.

It was too late for the boss man, but I stepped out quickly, dragging my putative bad leg—overacting terribly—and the taxi containing Squarebeard slipped past me, his shadowed face flashing by in the tonneau.

He did not look my way.

Ahead were agitated voices. Hushed, not rendering themselves into words, but the contentious intensity was clear.

Selene and Brauer had moved a ways down the street, toward the corner, and they were face to face at the edge of the sidewalk, Brauer with his back to me. He raised his left arm, signaling for a taxi.

I limped slowly their way.

Selene's voice rose, lost its hush: “Mr. Brauer, the next taxi is yours or it is mine. You will not escort me. Is that clear?”

I was passing the front window of the bookstore. In my periphery I saw shadows moving behind the front desk lamplight.

Brauer's voice rose to match hers. “I am following my orders.”

Selene said, “You will take me to my final destination but not to my hotel.”

I slowed to keep as much of the conversation before me as I could, lowering my face and turning a little to the right, showing my bandaged cheek, which would arrest any brief glance.

Brauer said. “I will fetch Herr Metzger. He will tell you.”

“You go do that,” she said.

“Taxi,” Brauer cried.

I glanced their way. Brauer had taken a step into the street. An earlier model Unic, a 1908 12/14, tall and sputtery, with a foreshortened tonneau, approached. Selene turned to watch the taxi.

And then a whistle cried sharply from across the street—the garbled, trilling sound of a bobby, like two differently pitched whistles blowing at the same time, not quite blending but not quite separating themselves. The cop blew three short, sharp times in a row, a call for other bobbies in the area.

My handiwork had been discovered.

Brauer jerked his head in the direction of the sound. Selene didn't look at all but stepped forward and flung open the back door of the taxi and vanished inside, and before Brauer could turn back, she'd slammed the door.

I realized I had to follow her. She certainly didn't think Brauer was putting the mash on her and this wasn't about proving her independence. She had somewhere to go.

I wanted to sprint away back to my own taxi, but that could draw the attention of the bobby, and so I walked briskly instead.

I glanced into her tonneau and Selene was giving her driver instructions.

I pushed on more quickly.

My driver was alert. He'd turned his Unic around to face this way, so he could watch for me, and he started up now, even as another taxi cut me off, turning from New Street into St. Martin's.

I heard Brauer cry, “Taxi!”

I figured he was going to follow her as well.

I glanced back and I caught a glimpse of her old Unic puttering off as Brauer's taxi, a British Napier Landaulet, slid into its place. The Napier's cloth rear top was down, but Bauer opened the door into the forward hard cabin and he began to climb in.

I took the last few strides to my Unic and leaped into the back. I grabbed the speaking tube and told my man to follow the taxi in front of us, which was following the taxi I was primarily interested in, and he said “Yessir” as if he actually knew what I wanted, and we were all off.