The Star of Istanbul (32 page)

52

As soon as I sat back in my seat, I felt the intense gaze of Lucine's father even before I fully saw it.

I turned to him, engaged the look, as Lucine was saying to me, “You already know this is my father. I've only had a brief time to explain our situation to him. Just since he and I got into the taxi.”

“You're not Brauer,” the man said.

“I'm not.”

“You saved my daughter and you know too much and you're trustworthy.”

“I did and I do and I am,” I said.

And I waited for either Lucine or her father to carry things forward. Had this man just learned that her daughter shot a man to death? Or was that to come?

He turned to her. The intensity of his gaze had not diminished. “And so?” he said.

She had not told him.

This was a Lucine I had not seen before. Oddly, the illusion of her as a young man, barely out of adolescence, grew strong. She was a boy standing before a father, trying to confess a terrible thing, but a thing that directly touched on the boy's nascent manhood. And yet I believed the feelings I saw to be entirely hers, entirely Lucine Bedrosian's: the breathless thrum about her; her hand, faintly quaking, reaching for her father's without her taking her eyes from his. He was not aware of the gesture until she touched his wrist. He put his other hand over hers, also without moving his eyes away, but the intensity of his gaze faltered for a moment.

She said, “I killed him.” This was soft and it was breathless but then I watched her rise up from herself, watched the actress in her assert itself, and she clarified her statement: “I had no choice but to kill him.” And the voice was different and she had changed. She had returned to the Selene Bourgani I had known.

The father did not turn his face away, did not shift his eyes from her. I wondered if he too had heard a thing in her that he had not heard in a long time, that he had even forgotten was in her. If so, he also saw that thing vanish once more.

He showed nothing to me. Or to her. He simply kept his eyes on her.

She said, “He knew what we were going to do. He was a threat.”

She said this quite convincingly.

Her father seemed, in his steady, neutral gaze, to be at least reconciled to, and maybe even satisfied with, maybe even admiring of what his daughter had done.

And as I watched this moment of silence passing calmly between them, the image returned: a father and a son, the father pleased with his boy who had just showed him he could be a man.

Then another obvious question came upon me: Did he know her intentions with Enver Pasha?

The moment between them ended with the father squeezing his daughter's hand. And Lucine moved her own from beneath her father's and squeezed his in return, but as a mood changer, as an encouragement. She simultaneously nodded toward me, saying, “I believe this man can play a plausible Walter Brauer. He is the son of Isabel Cobb.”

The father's eyebrows jumped.

He squared around to look at me. Then he took a deep breath, his barrel chest rising, and he let go of my eyes, lifting his face and turning it slightly to the side. A beseeching furrow came upon his brow, and in a mellifluous baritone he began to speak what I now knew to be Armenian, the sounds rolling and plashing like breakers on an ocean's shore. There was no mistaking that he was or had once been an actor. It ran in the family.

His voice rose and fell and rose in wrenching emotion and then abruptly stopped. He fell out of character and returned his eyes to mine. “Do you know what I have said?” he asked, his English bent by his native inflection but bent intermittently by London as well.

“I do not,” I said.

“To be or not to be,” he said. “That is the question. Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune . . .”

And here his daughter chimed in and they finished in unison: “. . . or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing, end them.”

He put his arm around her shoulders and gave her a little squeeze, and he let go just before her own hand fully rose to brush his away.

She angled her head toward her father, and she said to me, rather flatly, “I'm told he was a wonderful Hamlet.”

He spread his hands before him, “Alas, only in my native language.”

“This is the great Armenian theatrical star of Transcaucasia, Arshak Bedrosian,” she said. I could not decide if she was sincere about his greatness or sarcastic, and so I decided she was both.

The father offered his hand to me at the belated mention of his name—which I grasped—but even as we shook, he continued his muted argument with his daughter, “I was with the Armenian Theater in Tiflis.”

“My mother and I,” Lucine said, “were three hundred and fifty miles away.”

“On the bank of the Tigris. Where my wife had family ties and the only performers were donkeys cavorting for the moon.”

“I never saw his Hamlet,” Lucine said, and a faint but unmistakable wistfulness had slipped into her voice.

“You were merely a child,” Arshak said, though he did not look at Lucine, keeping his eyes on mine. “And I did bring you to Tiflis.”

“For a very brief time,” she said.

“Do you know the greatest Hamlet I ever saw?” he said to me.

“Do you see how his mind works?” Lucine said.

“I'm talking strictly professionally,” he said, arguing directly with her again. “To a man who knows the theater.”

“This is the true reason he stayed in Tiflis,” she said.

“To a man who knows what makes a great actress.”

Lucine looked away from both of us, out the side window of the taxi.

I was watching all this in a sort of trance that these two were inducing in me. The scene they'd played together about the killing had segued into this quite different little drama with remarkable ease, with the two of them in instinctive cahoots even if this playlet was entitled “A Daughter's Lament for Fatherly Betrayals.”

“The greatest Hamlet of all,” Arshak said, “was a woman.” He paused and lifted his chin. I glanced at Lucine, who had closed her eyes. “Siranush,” he said grandly.

“His mistress,” Lucine said.

“The greatest actress of the Armenian stage.”

“I saw her perform only once,” she said.

“The greatest of
any
stage,” he said.

“She did not move me.”

Arshak leaned in my direction. “Your mother is the exception, of course. I have heard how splendid she is. Has she ever played Hamlet?”

“She never has,” I said.

I turned my face to Lucine, on stage even now as a man, her eyes tracking the street, perhaps inwardly soliloquizing about her failed parent. And she said to her father, “You fell for her britches.”

“A lie,” Arshak said. “It was her talent.”

And I said to him in my head:
She's got you nailed. Didn't your daughter just prove her own britches to you? Didn't you fall for that? Isn't that why you were so quickly okay with what she did?

Arshak drew back again into his seat. A moment went by. His daughter had stirred something in him.

I watched Lucine as she watched the street, and I listened to the silence coming from Arshak Bedrosian. And then he said, quite softly but clearly, “I hope she is still in Tiflis. They will kill her otherwise.”

At this, Lucine turned once more to her father. I did too. He started a bit, at the attention. He looked to his daughter.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “What is this talk we are making? We have lost our way.”

“Yes,” she said, though the inflection of criticism in her voice
seemed directed inward, an acceptance of shared blame.

Arshak said, “'Tis nobler to take arms against a sea of troubles.”

And they both looked at me.

They'd changed the play yet again.

I sought refuge out the window. I had not been keeping track of where we were going, though we were following the Bosporus north. A minaret flashed by and for a moment the water was visible beyond the mosque. Then it vanished with a run of trees and then a high stone wall that kept going on and on and contained within it, I suspected, the grounds of the Palace of Dolmabahçe.

Arshak began speaking Armenian.

I looked at him, thinking he and Lucine were saying things they didn't want me to hear.

But he was talking into the taxi's communication tube. The driver was Armenian. Of course he was. One of theirs.

I looked over my shoulder into the driver's compartment. He could have been the model for the character Lucine was playing. He was small and very young, a teenager still.

When I turned back to Arshak, he lifted his chin toward the driver. “They tell me his father was murdered a few weeks ago.”

“Seems a tough kid,” I said.

“This is what's left of his old man,” he said, laying both his hands on the seat. Then, after a beat: “Which leads me to a request. May we have a little of your time to speak?”

“We already seem to be on the way.”

“There's a safe place,” Arshak said.

“We can speak,” I said.

“Among some friends you'll find unlikely,” he said.

“What your daughter has begun and I've gotten caught up in means nothing is safe.”

He shrugged. “Of course. To be Armenian in the Ottoman Empire also means nothing is safe. But at least perhaps for the next hour we won't die. We do not intend to catch you up. Just to explain.”

“I'm not afraid for myself.”

Arshak laughed softly. “This much I could sense about you already.”

Whatever he had to explain to me, I wanted it to be the straight dope. I figured—as I would if I were here getting an inside news story—that I needed to establish my savvy. I said, “When the two of you met at the Block and Tackle last week, you seemed estranged at first.”

He turned sharply to Lucine.

“I didn't know,” she said.

He turned sharply to me.

More or less the effect I'd hoped for. I'd cast them in my own little drama.

I stayed placid.

He smiled. He knew what was going on.

He shrugged. “Well, yes. I am her father. I did not like what she was planning.”

“And you understand that to be what?”

“I'm not at liberty to say.”

“Do you know she will try to kill Enver Pasha?”

Neither of them flinched.

So he did know. So the news of her killing Brauer had gone down easy because this man had already reconciled himself to his daughter taking lives. Brauer was a warm-up.

Only one point needed clarification. I said, with some heat, “You didn't like what
she
was planning? Wasn't this a request from the Armenian underground? An assignment?” I heard myself. It sounded as if I knew the answer to those questions was
Yes, this was an assignment
and I was furious about it in a personal way.

Though she said, “No. It was entirely my idea,” and I believed this and it didn't surprise me.

As much in control of my own performance as I thought I was, I must have revealed something I was unaware of, because Arshak narrowed his gaze on me and then turned slowly to his daughter and looked at her. Something flashed into her face that she no doubt showed as a little girl when she was caught stealing a cookie or kicking the cat.

He looked back to me.

He was her father. He knew exactly what his daughter and I had been doing.

I watched for a flicker of jealousy.

“She fell for your britches,” he said, with a little smile directed at her.

“It was my talent,” I said.

“We'll see about that,” he said.

I looked at Lucine and back to her father. I'd readily followed her this morning to the quay and into a taxi, but I had to slow down now. I understood that she needed me to deliver her to Enver Pasha. But my stake in this—my country's stake—was no longer a flow of high-level inside information. Hansen had figured that might be of interest to Trask and the boys stateside. But taking a hand in the assassination of the leader of the Ottoman Empire was a whole other thing. Even if it could stay covert.

“I have to be clear,” I said. “I agreed to help a German spy in return for the same intelligence she gave them. I didn't agree to help her kill Enver Pasha.”

“That's why we want to talk,” Arshak said.

Talk? Perhaps. But when I leaned back in my seat, I was reassured by the heavy nuzzle of my Mauser.

53

But the talk—or whatever else they had in mind—was deferred. We rode in silence now as the taxi entered the outlying village of Ortakiöi and we turned at the green-domed mosque on the bank of the Bosporus and headed inland, up the hill and into the densely populated Jewish quarter. The taxi dropped us at the mouth of a narrow street and we walked into its compressed air, which was full of the stench of sewage and the din of street voices, speaking mostly Ladino, the special mix of Hebrew and Spanish that the Sephardim
carried with them into exile from Iberia.

We passed between the rows of wooden buildings. Most of them followed the Turkish form of overhanging, corbeled stories, but we climbed on and finally approached a break in the attached houses, near the top of the hill. Here was a longer, flat-fronted, three-story building, with several entrances along it and with a street or an alley on each side, an architectural descendant of the
yahudihane
that filled this de facto Jewish ghetto a couple of centuries ago.

We turned in at the center of the three entrances to the
yahudihane,
its doorpost affixed with a mezuzah
,
its metal casing rubbed bright from the faithful passing through this door.

And inside, the sound from outside grew dim, and the stench faded with the smell of coffee and tobacco. The large central room of this coffeehouse could have been found in the coffeehouses in any part of Pera or Stamboul or Galata, with its divans and tapestry rugs and small tables for the coffee trays. The clientele, however, was special. The clearest sign was the group of half a dozen men sipping coffee together near the door. They were the most ardent
Sephardim
in their gaberdines and long beards. As for the rest of the men in the room, though they were dressed in Western suits and jackets like the coffee-shop Turks, the inner edge of their coats or vests showed the woolen fringe of their prayer shawls. Many of them wore skullcaps, the yarmulke,
with their secular clothes, at least in this select company, and no doubt their shorter beards were managed by scissors and clippers only.

Among the suited, close-clipped contingent was the owner of the coffee shop, who greeted Arshak now with a
Merhabah
and then accepted his hand for a warm handshake. And immediately behind him was another man, a man with a boxer's build at the age when a boxer starts to think about retiring. He wore a dark gray fez that didn't taper to the top.

The owner stepped aside for him and he came forward to embrace Arshak, and the two men spoke quickly, intensely, in Armenian. Lucine and I stood waiting, and the owner, apart from us but watching us closely, waited too.

Then Arshak and the other man stopped and Arshak turned to us full of blustery goodwill. “Fine,” he said. “Fine. Let's have some coffee.” He was acting.

The Jew led the four of us through the room and out a back door into the courtyard, paved in field stone with a solitary fig tree growing in an earthen plot at the center.
We sat at a horseshoe of iron benches: Arshak by himself on the bench at the apex, I on one of the sides, Lucine and the other man across from me, these two sitting at opposite ends of their bench. I sensed nothing between them.

The owner lingered briefly and bowed himself away and a young man in shirtsleeves, with yarmulke and ear locks, immediately whisked in with a low table, and another followed him with water pipes, and a third with coffee on trays.

In all of this, Lucine played the boy and kept her mouth shut.

After the young Jews left us and we were settled, Arshak said to me, “This is Tigran.”

Tigran nodded at me while Arshak spoke to him in Armenian again, perhaps to explain my unexpected presence in their plans.

When Arshak finished, Tigran stood and stepped toward me and I stood too and we met in the middle and shook hands. He said something in Armenian.

Arshak translated, even as Tigran continued the handshake: “He said he appreciates your sympathy for our people in this dark time.”

I said to Arshak, “Tell him with a grip like his, I'm glad we are on the same side.”

Arshak laughed and translated and Tigran laughed and through Arshak complimented me on my own grip. And that was it with Tigran. He sat back down and more or less vanished. I'd seen this happen many times before, covering wars abroad. He and I were a couple of guys who might have gone on to talk about a lot of things in common, but instead we might as well have been a couple of fig trees in a field because of the one thing we didn't have in common. Words.

Then Arshak picked up his cup and saucer, and we all followed his lead and we took a sip of coffee, holding both saucer and cup, Turkish style.

Things suddenly felt oddly relaxed, given the situation. We seemed to be waiting for something.

I thought to keep my mouth shut and let them make the next move, even if it was in the conversation. But I said to Arshak, nodding toward the front of the coffee shop, “I don't find their friendship so unlikely.” I knew enough about the situation to see past the classic schism of Christianity and Judaism.

“Then you know what binds us,” Arshak said.

“Persecution.”

“Good,” he said. “I thought I'd have to explain that first. Ours is not so well known as theirs.”

“You share the Turks,” I said.

He grew expansive. “That's an odd thing,” he said. “The Turks despise the Jews in the street, face to face. But formally, by government attitude and even decree, they've made them safe. The Muslims and the Jews share the Old Testament more directly, and I think that makes the Jews tolerable to them in the abstract. The Armenians, however. We're Christians. And worse, we are stained with the sin of having been a thriving nation in this land long before Turkey and the Ottoman Empire even existed, and by the fact that centuries ago the Turks stole everything from us. People and nations are the same: we preserve a special hatred for those we've already abused.”

With this, he paused. Lucine had been watching him as if from the back row of the orchestra seats. But now she leaned a little in his direction.

“The matter at hand,” she said to him with surprising gentleness.

He nodded in acknowledgment without looking at her. He said, “Three weeks ago, three hundred of the elite Armenian thinkers and leaders in Istanbul—writers and priests, politicians and publishers, teachers and artists, all of our best minds—were arrested by the government and deported overnight from the capital. They were imprisoned beyond Angora. Those that got that far. We've been told reliably that a group of them—twenty or so, ones with voices, writers like you—were murdered on the way to Ayaş.”

“But they
all
will die,” Lucine said. “Soon.”

Her voice faltered ever so slightly. She paused. She was about to speak again when we all heard feet scuffling on the fieldstones from the direction of the courtyard door.

Two men stood there. They were suited up looking like Turks but I knew somehow they belonged. They could have been Tigran's sparring partners. One was a light heavyweight, one a welterweight. All three of them were swarthy and rough featured, of the same blood as the boys in the bar on the London Docks.

Part of me sensed trouble.

Tigran and Arshak stood up at once. Lucine looked to me and she rose. I rose with her. She stepped to me.

“I'm going back to the hotel now,” she said.

“Who are these men?” I asked.

She looked in their direction.

“They're with Tigran,” she said.

“Look me in the eyes,” I said.

She did.

They were steady. But she was an actress.

“I thought you and your father had something to explain,” I said.

“A thing has come up,” she said. “They'd like to take you a little farther.”

“Not you?”

“You can ride a horse?”

“Yes.”

“Where you will go is out of the way. I need to get back to the hotel and prepare for Enver Pasha.”

Her eyes lost their focus a little now, drifted. But not from lying. “First impressions,” she said. “This one for him has to be distractingly good.”

Arshak was beside me now. “Will you come with us?” he asked, as if I had a choice. But he was an actor.

“If I say no?” I said.

“Why would you?” he said. “You have come a very long way with us already.”

I looked at Lucine.

I had.

But as far as I'd come, I didn't yet instinctively trust her. And why would I trust her father? Or these three Armenian toughs? She could have made her own arrangement with the Pasha, letting passion overrule protocol.

My only alternative was to walk away. Or if I couldn't simply walk away, then shoot my way out. But to go on with them now seemed more or less what I'd signed up for when I said yes to the secret service of my country. This was a rough-riding charge up a hill.

I looked at Arshak. “Let's go,” I said.