The Star of Istanbul (27 page)

41

This was the vaunted Berlin-to-Baghdad Express, the great umbilical of Germany's nascent Asian empire, though it still had big gaps beyond Aleppo and we ourselves would have to leave it in Budapest and head for the Romanian coast and a steamship down the Black Sea to avoid Servia. But immediately before us were twenty hours to Budapest, and Selene and I spent most of it on her narrow bed, even after there was not a drop of anything left in either of us to give or to receive or to exude, and yet we stayed in that bed and we smoked and we slept and, now and then, we tried some more with our bodies, tried to give and to take, and we were fine when that didn't go much of anywhere, laughing at it even, like an old couple who had sweet intentions and patience with each other because of some good, larger feeling they shared, but we said very little, not like lovers at all in many ways, not like that old couple either, in this respect, though we should have been intensely curious about each other—I should have been about her, professionally at least—but sealed as we were in a room in a coach on a train that surged and slowed and stopped and surged and slowed and surged again, its whistle as distant and as mournfully vowel rich as the cry of a rutting cat, we put away any questions or issues that came from outside this shuttered window, this shuttered door.

We did dress, twice, once to eat another meal in the dining car with the landscape dark outside, and once scrambling into our clothes when the passport officials boarded the train at Teschen, on the Hungarian frontier, and they knocked on our door only to quickly click their heels and bow their way back out again in response to our German documents, two youngish men with immaculate Hungarian officer uniforms and large mustaches. Selene and I both noticed them exchanging a knowing little smile over these two lovers as they slid our door closed, which we laughed about much harder than it warranted, which revived our bodies a bit for one more tumbling and soft pounding before a good six hours of deep sleep wrapped in each other's arms.

And then we were in Budapest.

And immediately before us were twenty-four hours to the Romanian port city of Constanţa.

We did not have to say more than a dozen words between us for us to decide that I would go to my own cabin now and close the door and we would not see each other again until we arrived on the shore of the Black Sea.

Which was what we did, across the Hungarian plains and over the pine-quilted Carpathian Mountains and all along the wheat and corn fields of Romania, a landscape that could easily have been Illinois except for the water-buffalo-powered plows.

And then we were on the SS
Dacia,
a 3,200-ton mail steamer of the Romanian State Railways doing the Black Sea run to Istanbul with 120 first-class cabins and two special cabins built to accommodate the women of a Turkish harem.

And we ended up once again in each other's arms, this time in my cabin. In the first hour we made love, and it felt as if it was the last time Selene and I would ever make love, though that had become a routine feeling for me, an inevitable part of the act: from our almost tender commencing kiss, to her threat on my life if I didn't keep going, to her final scream, to the cigarette afterward, to a voice in my head going
I bet this is the last
.

But on the
Dacia,
upon the Black Sea, there was a new coda to our jazz suite: we segued immediately into a close embrace burrowed deep beneath the sheet and blanket. And Selene wept.

Wept and trembled.

Silently for a while, and then she said, “I'm afraid.”

“It's all right,” I said.

“This is the only time you'll ever hear me say that,” she said.

“It's natural.”

“I won't
feel
it again either,” she said.

“You can.”

The ship pitched a little and she flinched.

“Is it about the ship?” I said.

“Partly.”

I said, “This is the first ship you and I have been on that's not threatened by submarines.”

“Maybe that's why I'm free to be afraid.”

I could understand this. Some of the best soldiers I knew felt their fear after the battle, not during it.

“That comes with being able to loosen your hold on your courage,” I said.

She held me more tightly.

Partly
the ship, she'd said. I understood this as well. I myself was starting to feel a rat-toothed gnawing in my chest, in my throat.

Der Wolf
was on his way. I was to meet someone at the Pera Palace who expected me to be Walter Brauer and therefore expected me to be an expert on Islam and to speak Turkish, skills Metcalf had failed to include in my leather portfolio. Just for a starter.

The sun had set outside our cabin window. When it rose again we would arrive in Istanbul and the curtain would go up on our final act.

42

We came down the Bosporus, which was narrow enough to look like a river and which, therefore, for a boy who knew rivers mostly by knowing the muddy Mississippi, looked shockingly blue. And Istanbul appeared on its hills as a bit of a shock as well. It mounted from the blue water draped with a good deal of tree-dense green, its stitching of Western buildings white in the lately risen sun and its profusion of mosque domes and minarets a pleasant geometric spangling in the broad sweep of the city.

As we drew near, though, previously overlooked swaths of brown in the tableau were clearer and more pervasive. These were the intense runs of dingy wooden houses along what we would soon learn were the city's winding, labyrinthine streets, narrow and filthy and foul, fully purged only by the periodical burning down of whole neighborhoods of these houses, which would spring back up, instantly dingy and combustible once more.

And as we eased up to the quay at Galata, the minarets now seemed to me as profuse in Istanbul as smokestacks in Pittsburgh. And as definitive: they were the big business of this place. I took all this in—the impressions of this approach and arrival and mooring—while standing next to Selene at the railing of the
Dacia
, and just as I was beginning to revise my own first-vision impressions of this town, I felt her shudder. I wished she'd shuddered at the thought of Enver Pasha, but I guessed this city on top of all that was what finally got to her. At least to a shuddering extent.

When Selene and I stepped off the disembarkation launch into the Place Karakeuï, we discovered a man in full chauffeur livery standing beside a 1908 model Unic taxi, holding a sign for the Pera Palace. And so we found ourselves sitting shoulder to shoulder in the tonneau of the same model taxi that carried Selene before me to the London Docks. I did not speak to her of this little irony.

By my reckoning we had an option to go straight up the hill from the Galata Bridge, but we turned west and followed one of the limited number of main streets—though the Unic still bounced and groaned and swayed severely on the cobbles—and then we climbed the hill the back way to the European enclave of Pera, avoiding the twisted, narrow, rubble-cluttered streets for the sake of the hotel's well-to-do Western guests. We passed through the shadow of the 14th century Galata Tower, which rose fifteen stories from the hillside, once a military structure but now a fire-watch station, with a high, Gothic gallery of round arches and on top of that a stack of three, diminishing flat-roofed cupolas.

Then we turned into the street the locals called Meşrutiyet Caddesi, but known within Pera itself as the Rue des Petits-Champs. The street cars were electric, the shops were elegant and mostly French, the cafés had tables on the sidewalk, and all the storefronts already had their awnings unfurled against the day's sun, vast, rippling, white-cloth hangings looking like the backsides of Berber tents. The local men in business suits were indistinguishable in style from the men on Chicago's State Street except they each wore a red fez.

And in the midst of all this, there was a rolling of metal wheels and the crackle of electricity bearing a reminder of the war: a tram passed us full of the vacant faces and bandage-swaddled arms and foreheads of wounded men being transferred, Turks up from Gallipoli.

I pressed toward the window to watch them pass and then looked forward to an abrupt contrast. Up ahead was the Pera Palace, the extreme version of this whole mission's neoclassical motif, the style seeming more aridly aloof after seeing the boys from the battlefield. The hotel looked like a mostly unaltered stone box, registering on the eye about like a Jack Daniel's shipping crate, but without the juice.

Just before it, we turned into a narrow, cobbled side street, traversing the short side of the hotel, and then turned again and stopped before the main entrance.

Selene and I stepped down from the cab, and a couple of young fezes in long, brass-buttoned, pigeon-gray uniforms rushed forward to deal with our bags. I put a hand lightly under Selene's elbow to guide her the few paces across the sidewalk. But I caught a movement in my periphery to the right and I looked that way as a German officer, who had just stepped from a taxi behind us, took a stride in our direction.

Selene looked too and we paused for the man, who gave us a quick, dismissive glance, easily accepting that he should go before us. His uniform was the German
feldgrau
—field gray, but with tones of green to blend into a battlefield—and his shoulder boards each had two pips. A full colonel. He also wore a
Pickelhaube,
the ridiculous, black, polished-leather spiked helmet that sat up over the ears protecting very little except the feelings of inadequacy of the officer beneath it. Did I feel Selene tense up a bit beside me? These were her guys. These were the guys I had to deal with.

The tin-pot Hun did a sharp right face in front of us and a guy was coming out of the hotel with the same beefy face but wearing
a three-piece tweed suit and a matching Alpine hat. The man in
the suit stiffened and paused and shot a crisp salute at the uniform, who saluted in return. The one disappeared into the hotel and the other turned to his right, heading up the Rue des Petits-Champs. The colonel was returning from a night on duty or a high-level early staff meeting, perhaps at the German embassy just up the street. The lesser officer in mufti was off duty. The Huns were dressing down to civies to keep a low public profile. Which meant privately they were working hard to control the Turkish government.

Selene and I followed the colonel into the marble entrance foyer and we checked in at the front desk, which was off to one side. I half expected further instructions to be waiting for me, but there was nothing. We went up the short staircase at the back of the foyer and stepped into the vast central space that lifted your chest like a cathedral or a major mosque. This was the grand Kubbeli Salon, with six domes floating fifty feet overhead, though secular domes, profusions of circular glass panes—the Western quarter's architectural nod to the religious big business down the hill and across the Bosporus on the Golden Triangle of Stamboul. At the north end of the space were double doors. We passed through them and stood before a mahogany electric elevator car whose portal was an abrupt departure from all the neoclassicism: its cast-iron gate was an open-web facade of violent art nouveau curves.

The door clanged behind us. The operator opened the circuit, and we rose, the tops of the six domes soon appearing below us, becoming the faux floor of an atrium rimmed by four levels of rooms, the passageways balustraded by more art nouveau iron. We arrived at the top and we stood before her room, mine just a little farther along.

Our journey from London was finally over. We were now left with the need simply to wait—helplessly to wait—for the Pasha's people, whoever they might be, to contact us.

And though I suspected it never seriously entered either of our minds to wait together, Selene felt obliged to apologize, which was a surprising thing to me, a tender, almost sentimental gesture on her part, it seemed: “I'm sorry,” she said. “I need to be alone now.”

“I understand,” I said. “But you're not facing all this alone. I'm still with you.”

This animated her eyes, very briefly, very subtly—I could not even say how it was I knew that she'd come alive behind them—and she turned from me without a touch and she opened her door and disappeared.

I stood there quietly, not walking away to my own room, not even turning, not moving in the slightest. I remained like this for a long while, long enough for the elevator to hum and jangle its way down to the ground floor and then come all the way up again. I heard the elevator door open at the center of the atrium, and that made me turn, as I expected it to be the gold-buttoned boys with our luggage. But it was the German colonel.

I straightened, my limbs surging with restrained energy: a reflex of preparation for a possible danger. Foolish, under the circumstances, though it more plausibly occurred to me, as he walked the thirty yards or so along the passageway toward me, that he might be my contact. He did not have to be a Turk, after all, my contact for this initial meeting. Indeed, I was hoping the approaching officer was the one. We'd speak German. I could be very convincing in German. A Turk would expect the Islam scholar from Britain to speak Turkish. I still didn't have a plan to finesse that.

The colonel neared. His eyes held fast on the straight line to his room, which obviously was beyond me. And since I was close to Selene's door, I was just outside of that immediate line of sight. He seemed not even to recognize my presence.

He passed.

I turned to watch him.

He went a couple of doors up the passageway and stopped and unlocked his room—still not looking my way—and he entered. The door clicked shut.

I knew to expect a large contingent of German staff officers at the Pera Palace.

Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.

I went to my room, which was two doors beyond the colonel's, near the end of the hall.

Inside, the room was harmoniously eclectic: an Uşak rug of Persian palmettes and olive vines in gold and pale red; Byzantine medallioned brocade drapes; more nouveau cast iron in the headboard; and, yes, even a bit of Louis XVI neoclassicism in a mahogany wardrobe.

I parted the drapes, opened the French windows behind them, and stepped onto a balcony. The benign feeling I'd had at first seeing the city from a distance returned, this time from above: the wooden houses showing their red tile roofs; the high, tight, almost military stands of cypress; the Bosporus slashing blue across the middle distance; and the domes and minarets catching the morning sun in Stamboul across the way.

I leaned heavily against my balcony and turned my face south and west. A hundred and thirty miles away, the estimates made it fifty thousand dead—Turk, Brit, French—and plenty more mutilated, like the boys on the tram.

And thinking about the carnage made me jump a little when a heavy rap came from inside the room.

The door.

I turned, moved through the French windows, crossed the densely soft rug, not thinking, ready to be Brauer if I could. I would insist on German with a Turk.
Deutschland über Allah
.

But as I approached the door, I noticed something lying on the carpet before it. An envelope had been slipped through the crack.

I bent to it. Picked it up.

Whoever it was didn't seem to be hanging around.

I opened the door and stepped out.

The passageway was empty in all directions.

I stepped back into the room and closed the door.

I opened the envelope. The note was handwritten in English:
Turn left outside hotel, immediate right. Third cross street is Çatmali Mektep. Coffeehouse with yellow dog.

This didn't sound like the Germans. But if it was Metcalf's man in Istanbul and he knew to leave a message for me in Walter Brauer's room, then they'd watched me arrive at the hotel. And they were expecting me to have killed him.