The Star of Istanbul (24 page)

36

So we straightened at the railing and turned our backs to it and stood there a moment looking like a couple who'd simply had a nice meal in the dining saloon and now had come out for a breath of air, a long-married couple who could stand beside each other on the deck of a ship on a night that was full of bright stars—I happened to notice this as I'd turned away from the sea—and not say a thing and not quite touch and seem entirely comfortable with that. As if everything important had already been said long ago.

Then we left the promenade—it would have been hard to say which of us initiated this; perhaps we'd both done it at the same moment, spontaneously—and I held the deck door open for Selene and I followed her to her cabin and she held that door open for me. I stepped in and stopped in the center of her floor and she closed the door and crossed past me. We still had that air of taking each other for granted after long familiarity.

She sat on a woven-reed bergère chair that faced the bed and I sat on the edge of the bed directly opposite her, and now the language of our bodies said that we intended to have a conversation on a topic we both anticipated. But in fact we remained silent for a long while.

I imagined that she was trying to figure out how much to lie to me and what sort of lies might be convincing and, indeed, if it made any difference if she were convincing or not.

But it did matter, of course. She needed to be very convincing. She'd just killed the Germans' agent who was playing an integral part in their larger plan; this was all improvised; they hadn't sent her out here to do that. She'd just torpedoed her own steamship and here I was again apparently ready to help her swim away. I'd already saved her sweet stern once tonight.

I had my own personal figuring out to do. My own calibrating of lies. Certainly I knew a great many things she did not realize I knew and I had to decide what to continue to keep to myself, what to let out to her, what to lie about. Now that I'd dumped Brauer I was committed to keeping her mission going for my own benefit.

So we sat.

The ship's turbines hummed. The room swayed. Both rather distantly, however.

And we sat. And there was a moment when she looked carefully at the bandage on my left cheek.

I wondered if she was trying to place it, if she'd had some brief, peripheral glimpse of it in the bar.

But she studied it only briefly and I saw nothing behind her eyes. She was good at masking things, but I figured I'd see at least a little something in her if she realized I'd followed her to the rendezvous with her father.

And we sat.

And I had time to wonder what had happened to her pistol. It was no longer visible. She had no pockets. My eyes moved to the smoking table beside her chair. In its center lay a small, black, snakeskin bag with a silver frame. I'd already hypothesized its use. She must have discreetly taken that with her to the promenade deck and put the pistol away.

I moved my eyes back to her and she was watching me closely.

Somebody needed to speak.

But we both stayed silent a few moments more.

Finally she said, “Thank you.”

“Don't mention it.”

She hesitated. As if what would follow were spontaneous. But she had a plan now. She said, “You killed a man.”

Another neat shot, her ambiguity. She could be talking about our conversation on the
Lusitania;
when she asked if I'd ever killed, I said yes. Or she could be talking about the Hun on St. Martin's Lane. She could even be talking about me taking the fall for Brauer. I had more apparent reason to kill him than she did. She was letting me choose how to take this. Which would suggest a direction for her lies.

“So did you,” I said.

“He was trying to rape me,” she said, as if I'd believed it the first time.

“I've never killed a man who wasn't trying to kill me,” I said.

“Then we are both innocent souls,” she said.

I gave that a moment of silence.

Then I said, “That's something I haven't seen yet in the filmic art.”

I expected to have to explain the comment. But without a hesitation she said, “Irony?”

Which was one of the reasons I was still enchanted with her, this quick, telling thrust of her mind. And, under the present circumstances, one of the reasons I was more than a little afraid of her.

“Irony,” I said.

She smiled. Like here we were communicating so effectively.

I smiled the same smile. I said, “Tell me what you think the present irony is.”

This she did hesitate about. I was letting
her
choose.

But after a few moments, she decided to smile again, a small,
sweet—and yes, ironic—smile. She said, “That we should be innocent, though we have killed.”

If we had actually decided, as it was beginning to seem, that we would banter now instead of getting down to serious lies and revelations, I would have contradicted her by saying,
No
,
the irony is that you say we are innocent souls when we are not.

But I wasn't ready to banter.

“The irony,” I said, “is that Walter Brauer was a homosexual.”

What flickered in her face may have been the first spontaneous expression of off screen emotion I'd ever seen in her. No simple label for it existed; she couldn't make it larger than life if she tried.

But she'd be back in full control of herself any moment now. I pressed my advantage. “So why did you really kill him?”

“Who are you?” she said.

“Who are you?”

“Did you kill that man on St. Martin's Lane Monday night?”

“You mean the guy they would've sent after you when they found out you murdered Brauer?”

She flickered again. But only very briefly. “Murder? What makes you think you know anything about it?”

“That's how they'd see it.”

“Or anything about them?”

“So then why did you really kill him?”

“Who are you?” she said.

I stood up and took a step in her direction.

She flinched backward in her chair. Another real emotion from Selene Bourgani.

I was surprised to feel a quick, throat-clutching pulse of regret at her fear of me. Though I knew a little fear would be useful.

I gave her a small, sweet, ironic smile.

I lifted my hand and she flinched again, minutely, with her eyes. But without looking directly at it, I reached to her left and picked up her purse. I did not let go of her eyes, where her own sense of irony had now returned. No more flinching. I did not look at the object in my hands as I opened it. I felt the pistol where I'd expected to find it and I took it out. I closed the purse and dropped it in the direction of the smoking table.

And still we did not let go of our gaze. She didn't even glance at the pistol. She knew what I'd done.

I put the pistol in my inner coat pocket. I let my lapel go and my coat closed. The pistol thumped me softly and then lay heavily against my heart.

I said, “I'm the guy who has helped you out in a big way three times now.”

She said, “The third being the man in St. Martin's Lane?”

“Who would have come after you,” I said.

The irony dissipated in her eyes.

“They've got others to send,” she said, very softly.

I sat down on the edge of the bed once more.

I asked it a third time: “Why'd you kill him?”

“He doubted my allegiance to the German cause.”

“With reason?”

“With reason.”

“Who has your allegiance?”

“Nobody,” she said. “Me. I have my own allegiance.”

“But they thought it was with them.”

“That was in my own best interest.”

“To work for the Germans and make them think you wanted to.”

She said nothing.

“Why was all that in your best interest?”

“Look,” she said. “Just because you chose to help me out a few times and have now taken away my only means of self-defense, doesn't mean I'm ready to tell you all my secrets. They're personal. Not political. Personal. And I'm keeping them personal.”

“All right,” I said. “So I'll just walk through that door and leave it at that. You can figure out on your own what to do next. Do you think Selene Bourgani can actually hide in this world? They'd find you.”

I started to rise.

“Wait,” she said.

I sat.

But we returned to silence.

I didn't let it go on. I said, “I'm not going to wait long enough for you to think of a new set of lies.”

She shifted her pretty butt on the woven reed seat.

I decided to help her out. “Did your boy Kurt know something about you?”

She let out a long, slow breath, her shoulders and her chest visibly sinking. She said, very, very softly, “I should be more careful who I sleep with.”

“Actresses and directors,” I said. “That's an old story.” I didn't need to say this. But Mama and a few of her guys came to mind. And it was time to seem sympathetic with Selene anyway.

She said, “Actresses and handsome newsmen on doomed steamships.”

I shrugged.

And she said, “Especially when he's not just a newsman.”

The sympathy was a mistake. I needed to press the attack.

But she spoke first: “So where's
your
allegiance?”

“To my country,” I said.

She smiled very faintly. That flicker of irony again. “From what I could gather over the past few days,” she said, “you've got your own troubles waiting for you up ahead.”

“I can manage mine alone. You can't.”

“What do you want?” she said.

“For starters the truth.”

She nodded faintly. She waited. She said, “And what do I get?”

“What do you want?”

“As you said.”

“Help.”

“Yes.”

“I can help you,” I said. “I can't help the Germans.”

“And what will you want after the starters?” she said.

“That depends on what the truth is.”

“I want more too.”

I shrugged again. Like I was ready to walk out of the cabin and let her handle her own problems.

She said, “Only if the truth makes it worth your while.”

“What more do you want?”

“The truth,” she said. “For starters.”

We both fell silent for a moment.

I said, “It was a hell of a lot easier for us to agree to have sex.”

She drew that big breath back in; her shoulders and chest rose. “Sex is always easier than the truth,” she said.

I nodded. I wasn't quite sure why. Maybe at the probable truth of that. Maybe just to act as if this was now some sort of intellectual discussion, as if I weren't ready to take the easy path, right then and there. A tendril had fallen from the thick, up-pinned coil of her hair and down her neck, kindled in the electric light. Her smell in the room seemed more of the musk now than the hay and there was no longer anything in it of flowers. Sex is easier than patriotism as well.

But I bucked myself up the way I did when my job was to face a field of fire with soldiers who were making news. I said, “What were you planning to do for the Germans in Istanbul?”

She pushed the tendril of hair back off her neck. As if she'd known it was there all along and now that it had failed at its appointed task she was dismissing it. She said, “You may have missed your journalistic calling, Mr. Cobb. Your movie-gossip reportage was correct. I had some private times with Kurt Fehrenbach. Actresses and directors.”

She actually paused now to tuck that bit of hair back up into the rest of it on the top of her head.

I waited.

“The movie ended and all of that did too,” she said. “Though we've remained friendly.”

“Remaining friendly is always easier than the truth,” I said.

“But harder than the sex,” she said.

I thought:
Which is why I'm glad I have your pistol.

“So Kurt went on to become the darling of the Kaiser,” she said. “His personal filmmaker. And a hobnobber with important people on the Emperor's staff as well.”

She paused. She turned her face to her bag and reached for it. But her hand stopped, hung in the air.

“Did you forget I have your little friend?” I said.

She withdrew her hand and looked at me. Her brow furrowed ever so slightly, as if I'd just hurt her feelings.

“I forgot I have no cigarettes,” she said.

I reached into my outside right coat pocket. Next to the piece of paper from Brauer's pants I found my Fatimas. I withdrew the pack and I stood and stepped across the space between us.

She lifted her face to me. It was one of those looks from one of those positions that made you want to take a woman into your arms. Instead, I tapped the closed half of the top of the pack on my forefinger. One cigarette emerged from the open half. I moved the pack near her.

Her face, waist high, was still upturned. She smiled at me. Then she lowered her face and looked at the extended cigarette. I expected her to lift her hand to take it.

She didn't. She leaned forward and put her lips around the cigarette and pulled it from the pack with her mouth.

I did not move. I probably could not have moved if I'd wanted to.

But she was waiting for a light.

I dipped into my left-hand coat pocket and drew out a box of matches. I lit one. I brought it toward her face. She touched my hand and guided the flame to the end of her cigarette.

She leaned back, inhaled long and deeply, turned her profile to me, and blew the smoke toward the window through which, not long ago, I'd seen her standing over the man she'd just killed.

I waited for her face to come back to me. For a long moment it did not. She kept her eyes on the window. Perhaps she was thinking of that same moment.