The Star of Istanbul (34 page)

56

It was not easy to catch a taxi from the ghetto in Ortakiöi and so Arshak led me down the hill and we took the covertly Armenian Unic to get me back to the Pera Palace as fast as possible. Arshak drove, expecting trouble, leaving the young man with his mother. But I convinced Arshak to let me off before the hotel. For now it was best that he stay in the background. We were jumping to a lot of conclusions. And if the Germans were suspicious but had missed the direct connection between Arshak and me at the quay—which was quite possible—it was best not to give them a chance to see us together. They might still be playing this out slow. I'd drop out of the Unic in a side street a block or so from the hotel. We set up a time to meet later tonight after I'd been able to make sure Lucine was safe. We'd meet at the coffeehouse of the yellow dog.

We stopped a block down the hill and a block south of the Pera Palace.

I'd ridden beside him in the front and I opened the door.

We did not shake hands at the parting. Didn't even think to. But before I could step out, he said, “I trust you.”

“Thanks,” I said.

And then, with a slightly overplayed earnestness in his voice, he said something in Armenian that either meant “May God be with you” or “Don't fuck this up.”

I simply nodded and I was out of the taxi and striding up the hill.

I entered the Pera Palace, crossing the lobby, heading for the marble steps up to the entryway of the Kubbeli Salon, keeping my eyes more or less forward but carefully noting everyone—not just forward but in my periphery as well—eliminating the locals and the uniformed Germans, though
Der Wolf
could have traded in his muttonchops for something else. But I saw no one I could take as particularly suspicious as I moved quickly into the Kubbeli and across the parquet floor.

The piano was playing ragtime and I looked at the drinkers and diners. A table near the doorway to the elevator had three German junior officers with pistols on their belts. They all three gave me a glance as I went by.

The elevator door was open and I went in and I told the operator in what was surely the new lingua franca of this hotel: “
Der fünfte Fußboden.
” He knew exactly what floor I meant. We started to rise.

There were tall, slender windows in the three walls of the elevator, side and rear. I stepped to the rear and craned my neck to focus on the fifth floor and I picked up the balustrade at once. But of course he wouldn't be cooling his heels outside my room, if he'd come for me. He'd have the key or he'd have picked the lock and he'd be inside, waiting.

I got off the elevator and I stepped quietly to the end of the passageway that led to my room. I let the elevator clank and grind its way back down to the bottom floor. I waited. I waited longer. If he were listening for me, he'd think I hadn't been the passenger this time. And while I waited, I played over the worst scenario, the one that ground inside me with the sharpest edges. The Germans were waiting for me but they'd already decided Lucine was a danger and they'd grabbed her.

It was time now. I started down the hall, treading lightly on the carpet. I reached Lucine's door and I stopped. I knocked. Softly.

There was no answer.

Behind me the elevator chains jangled into life.

I knocked again, louder, and I even put my hand into my coat to touch my lock-picking tools. I'd left them in my room.

Lucine wasn't answering.

I put my mouth near the door. “Selene,” I said, loud enough to be heard inside.

Nothing.

She wasn't there.

The elevator was rattling its way upward.

I moved on down the passageway. Quickly now. Perhaps she'd left a note for me.

I arrived at my door. I put the key in the lock. I opened the door.

At the open French windows a man was standing with his back to me, wearing a
feldgrau
German officer uniform, blending into the darkening sky beyond him. The nightstand light was on. His peaked field cap lay on the foot of the bed. I restrained my hand from going to the Mauser, even as he was turning, even as I was beginning to recognize this man.

Colonel Martin Ströder, Enver Pasha's aide-de-camp.

“Hello, Mr. Brauer,” he said. He had a Luger in a holster strapped around his waist. I didn't remember that from his first visit to me.

“Colonel,” I said, closing the door behind me.

“I have come to take you to Enver Pasha.”

He and I both kept standing where we were, he by the window, I by the door.

“I'm sorry to have kept you waiting,” I said. “I thought you told me it would be tomorrow.”

“So,” he said. “The plan has changed once more.”

I still didn't know how to deal with Enver Pasha, given that he was a friend of Brauer.

“Please come with me,” Ströder said, taking a step in my direction.

I was thinking quick and hard about the room. He wasn't explaining why he was inside. Everything incriminating was in the false bottom of the valise. But things were already decided anyway, I suspected. He hadn't even asked where I'd been.

“I've been horseback riding,” I said. “I'm not presentable.”

He stopped.

“Can I have a few minutes?” I said.

He gave me a once-over look. “Time is more important to the Pasha,” Ströder said. And then he smiled a little, flipping his chin slightly upward. “The Turks are not so scrupulous as we Germans in those matters.”

“Do we need to get the woman?” I said.

He did not answer at once. He was reading me. The news was bad, I realized.

And he said, “We have taken her along already.”

“Very well,” I said. “At least may I wash the horse off my hands?”

He hesitated.

I nodded to the bathroom.

He nodded assent.

I stepped into the bathroom, switched on the light, stood at the basin, looked at my own face, the bandage gray from the ride, and I lowered my face to the basin. I let my hands do their task on their own. I had to think.

My mind was inclined to thrash now, but I held my thoughts steady. The Germans didn't simply come and shoot me. Perhaps the question of the man known at the Pera Palace as Walter Brauer was still open. Perhaps my knowing the password was still carrying me. Brauer's body was decomposing in the North Sea. If
Der Wolf
saw me at the quay and recognized me as Cobb, perhaps he still hadn't placed me at the Pera Palace posing as Brauer.

And perhaps, as well, Lucine had indeed arranged to do this thing on her own. With an insistent offer of her body, an expressed aversion to Brauer, she could have arranged to be taken personally and immediately to Enver Pasha. She didn't need her father and me to be meddling with this, trying to save her. An actress is a fallen woman, she'd said. Perhaps she was shooting the leader of the Ottoman Empire to death even as I rolled the bar of soap around and around in my palms. Perhaps she was herself being shot to death in this next moment, even as I placed the soap on the side of the basin and rubbed up the lather on my hands.

I was having a bad feeling about this whole thing now.

I had to assume they either knew or seriously suspected who I was.

If the Germans did know who I was, the fact remained: they didn't simply kill me, right here and now. Why the pretense?

And I understood. I'd been thinking in the old ways. The battlefield ways. They wanted to interrogate me before killing me. And it might suit them to begin the interrogation without tipping their hand. Perhaps even, for a time, to speak to me as if I were getting away with all this. And, of course, they feared me. They too knew I had the knack. They'd wait until I was in a much more controlled space before getting rough.

I could dry my hands, pull my Mauser and shoot Colonel Ströder to death.

I'd save myself but that would surely doom Lucine. I had to hope—and it would make sense—that they were taking me to the same place they were holding her. I had to let Ströder play this out so I could find out where that was.

All right.

I dried my hands and stepped from the bathroom.

Ströder was there, his field cap on his head. He had been watching me from the shadows, the bedroom light extinguished.

“I'm ready,” I said.

“Good,” he said.

I took a step toward the door.

He stopped me with a lifted hand.

“I'm sorry, Herr Brauer, but I must check for a weapon. Enver Pasha requires it.”

I unbuttoned my coat, spread my arms.

For the possibility of his hands going around behind me, I readied my right leg, ever so slightly angling my knee toward his crotch.

He began to pat me down, his hands slipping inside my coat and traveling down my sides. The Mauser in the very center of my back wasn't even five inches wide. In my Chicago police beat days, I'd only ever heard of one man, a genteel grifter, who carried a weapon in the small of his back. I'd never known a military man to do this.

Ströder was feeling into my coat pockets.

I was ready to have it out with him hand to hand. But I still didn't know where Lucine was.

He pulled in closer to me.

I heard him stop his breath.

His arms went around me and he touched my back pockets, his two palms falling upon my backside. Gingerly.

It occurred to me I might still be Brauer to him and Brauer might actually have a reputation. Or Ströder had a reputation of his own.

Before he could lift or turn his hands I said, sweetly, coyly, “Careful there, Colonel.”

His hands whipped off me and he stepped back.

“We shall go,” he said.

The Mauser was still mine.

Ströder led me out the door and along the passageway and down in the elevator and across the salon and the lobby and through the front doors.

A closed-cabin Mercedes Torpedo sat at the curb, as gray as Ströder's uniform, its whole radiator arrowing forward into a point. The driver was a burly Hun in an enlisted man's uniform and a peakless field cap. As we emerged from the hotel he snapped to attention, saluted the colonel, and stepped to the back door and opened it.

Ströder led the way the few steps across the narrow sidewalk and he plunged on inside, which I was glad to see. The car was pointed north, to my right, and so following the colonel into the backseat, I would be traveling with him to my left and my shooting hand unencumbered and out of his sight.

I went in.

The driver slammed the door behind me.

The interior was pretty tight. But okay to maneuver.

The driver bounced heavily behind the wheel and shut his door firmly. There was no partition. The car smelled of leather and gun oil and garlic: the seats, their weapons, their breath.

None of us spoke.

We immediately went down the hill but then turned north and crawled for a while through the commencing nightlife of the Grand Rue de Péra, all three of us being, I sensed, from our eyes kept forward and our faces grimly set, sincerely of a single mind about this much at least: how ignorant and vapid were the bankers and diplomats and merchants and bureaucrats and ship captains and Western tourists and all their women who were dining and theatergoing and drinking and dancing while a war was going on from the Black Sea to the Irish Sea, from the North Sea to the Red Sea. And while three men were passing by, one or more of whom likely would be dead before the night was done.

57

We made our way toward the Bosporus, following the Grand Rue
through the traffic circle at Taksim and then, just before the Palace of Dolmabahçe, we joined the road along the European shore. We turned north toward Ortakiöi and almost immediately we were running past the palace wall, the very ground I'd covered this morning with Arshak and Lucine.

I was itchy to do something. We were heading to her now. I was convinced she was in serious trouble. And I would be too, as soon as Enver Pasha took a look at me. I wanted badly to slip my hand into my coat and to the small of my back and get this started. But I had to wait. The Huns had to show me where she was.

Ströder lit a Turkish cigarette.

I watched out the window.

We passed through Ortakiöi, the dome and minarets of the big mosque at the quay barely visible in the gathering night. Outside of Pera on the hill, Istanbul was a dark city at night. A very dark city. Except for the handful of motorcars and their headlights, I caught only glimpses now of isolated candles and kerosene lamps: through a house window, before a sidewalk coffee shop, inside a café.

Then all at once the off-road light changed; the fleeting bursts were brighter, steadier. These were electric lights in upper-floor windows behind privacy walls as we entered the long run of waterside
yalis
, the villas of the wealthy that stretched on up the Bosporus a dozen more miles to Büyükdere and the edge of the Belgrad Forest. Enver Pasha had a
yali
along here. Of course. The roadside was lit now, a flash of electric lamp light rushed into our windows and away and then another and then darkness and then another.

I moved my head slowly, a small increment at a time, away from the window and toward Ströder. He was steadily lit at the moment from behind. He had taken off his field cap and the back of his head was bright, though his face was in shadow, and this I could discern: he was putting out a cigarette by squeezing the tip between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand.

The Hun behind the wheel made two small, simultaneous
­movements—a lean forward and a turn of his face to the right—small enough to suggest that the place he was looking for was still up ahead but he expected it soon.

I started slipping my right hand under my coat but careful not to shift my shoulders. I'd cut the flap off the holster in London and now I gently wedged it farther open and I slid my hand inside and took my Mauser into a shooting grip.

I was sure Ströder had seen no movement in me. His gaze was going forward with the driver's. I looked too. The road took a curve to the right, moved closer to the water, and then straightened, and a couple of hundred yards up ahead the street was lit bright.

Ströder leaned forward in his seat. “There it is,” he said to the driver, who began abruptly to slow down.

I started to pull the Mauser from behind my back, still making as little stir as possible. Even as the pistol came free I was planning ahead. His weapon. Surely he wore it
Geladen
, loaded. As my right hand emerged and crossed before me, while Ströder was leaning back again into his seat, I switched the Mauser to my left hand just in case. This was the pistol he had to assume would go off at the slightest move, and I needed my right hand for his Luger to easily cover the driver down the road.

The Mercedes engine whined and the gears ground heavily as we slowed and the driver shifted down. The street lights approached.

I wrenched my torso around to face Ströder and I pressed the barrel of the Mauser against his head, into the soft space just above his cheekbone, between his ear and his temple, holding my arm high at the elbow and squaring the muzzle into his head even as I reached into his holster and removed his Luger.

This was all quick, the Mauser leading the way. Ströder was smart enough to go absolutely still at its first touch.

The Mercedes engine was noisy in its deceleration. I leaned toward Ströder and said, as low as I could for him still to clearly hear me, “We must drive on by.”

We were going very slow, nearing the villa where no doubt there were armed guards that Ströder was thinking about.

I let only the briefest fraction of a second pass without him speaking and I nudged the Mauser muzzle into his head. “I will do this now,” I said.

“Drive on,” Ströder said, firmly, loudly.

The Mercedes didn't have a rearview mirror. The driver could not see the Mauser pointed at Ströder and his head bobbled a bit in the impulse to look back to us. He had his own pistol somewhere on or around him. I thumbed the Luger's safety forward into the off position, but I kept the pistol low behind the front seat for now. It would be unfortunate to have to shoot the driver in a moving car, though not as unfortunate as his shooting me.

At that moment another automobile passed us from behind, moving into the oncoming lane and going around and swinging back in front of us.

I saw all this peripherally with my main focus on the Hun behind the wheel. He didn't take his eyes off the road, settling for sliding his head sideways and angling his ear toward us. “Sir?”

I pushed with the Mauser.

“Do it now,” Ströder said. “Drive on.”

“Yessir,” our driver said.

He sped up.

And we passed into the bright light.

I let myself take a quick glance.

A stone wall. A gate and two guards in uniform. The stone wall. And we were past and into the darkness. But I could find this villa again.

Now my plan was vague.

Incapacitate these two. That much was clear enough. I was not yet prepared to go back into the villa. The first audible gunshot would make their advantage in numbers impossible to get past. And it would instantly jeopardize Lucine inside. Metcalf gave me a good weapon for a shipboard murder. My pistol-shaped Winchester with a silencer. It was the right weapon for slipping into Enver Pasha's
yali
as well. But it was in the bottom of my valise, in the bottom of the wardrobe, in my room at the Pera Palace.

So these two had to be incapacitated for a good long while. But I kept rapidly playing that possible scene over and over in my head, staging it this way and that, and I was having trouble figuring out even how to safely get these two out of the automobile, much less effectively restrain them, and the only plan that seemed to have a chance of working was to preemptively shoot them both pretty much simultaneously in the head. Which was not what I wanted to do.

In the meantime we were driving north, accelerating again, and one of these two was still armed.

“Not too fast,” I told Ströder.

And he repeated the order to the driver.

We stopped accelerating.

Ahead, just out of the range of our headlights, was the dim form of the automobile that had passed us at the villa.

We caravanned, the two of us, for maybe half a mile, and then the car ahead dropped back a little and came into the clarity of our lights.

I looked at it for the first time with my full attention.

It was a Unic taxi.

The Armenian model.

Arshak had hung around after he dropped me off and he'd followed us.

He was beginning to slow.

We slowed.

Arshak slowed even more, dropping back right in front of us.

The German driver honked his horn. He craned his neck to the left to see if the oncoming lane was clear for us to pass.

I nudged Ströder's head. “Let's stay behind this guy.”

Ströder's face was in shadow so I didn't see him cut his eyes to me, but I felt the faintest push against the Mauser's barrel as he had the reflex to turn his head to look in my direction. He'd been making his own plans about how to handle this. All that just got overturned. He hadn't figured on an accomplice.

“Stay behind that vehicle,” Ströder said loud and firm.

We were in a stretch of road either without a villa or in the owned and managed adjoining grounds of two villas. Arshak was going slower and slower.

We were going slower and slower.

Arshak was probably beginning to figure I'd gained some sort of control in the Mercedes.

The driver turned his head now, abruptly, as if to question these odd orders.

He had only a fragment of a moment to start to put things together before the muzzle of the Luger was pointed at the right eye of his half-turned face.

“Pull over,” I said, straight to the driver.

“Sit very still, Colonel,” I said, pushing lightly at Ströder's head. “Hair trigger.” But I kept watching the driver, whose face was swinging away from me, going back to the road.

“Driver,” I said sharply. “Both hands visible on the wheel.”

Both the man's hands appeared at the top of the steering wheel.

He pulled to the side of the road.

The Unic rolled only a little farther and also pulled off.

I said to both my Germans, “It is very convenient to shoot both of you in the head now. So you need to sit very still. I will kill you at the smallest movement.”

They complied.

“Cut off your engine,” I said, and the driver moved the throttle lever on the steering wheel and the engine sputtered and went silent.

“Leave your lights on,” I said.

He did.

And we waited, the three of us, with me sitting as still as these two, as if the pistols were pointed at me.

I figured Arshak was waiting for some sign from the car. But I couldn't step out or these two would do something stupid, especially the driver.

I could have asked for his weapon. But I had control of his empty hands. I didn't want to invite him to put a pistol in one of them, especially in this dim light and out of my sight.

So we waited some more. It felt like a long time, though it couldn't have been. But I knew the longer it went on, the more likely it was that one of these guys would try something stupid.

Finally the driver's door of the Unic opened. It stayed open for a moment and then Arshak appeared and drew back at once.

I was a lot braver when I was acting from my gut and quickly. This sitting was starting to get me steamed at Arshak. But he was only an actor, after all. He was used to being brave on a stage with fake whiskers. It was tougher to play the role you needed to play in the real dark by a real road along the goddamn Bosporus. So I wasn't upset. I was simply firm in thinking to this Armenian ham:
Jump out of your trench and charge.

And he did.

He suddenly burst from the Unic with his pistol drawn and he hustled into our headlights and up to the driver's window.

“We're all taking it easy here,” I said to him, having to will myself back to English. This whole incident was strictly German in my mind.

He looked in.

“Point your pistol at the driver and watch his hands,” I said. “He's still armed.”

And Arshak popped the muzzle of a Colt 1889 onto the driver's left temple hard enough that the guy's head jerked and his hands flew up.

“Hands!” I shouted.

They flew back down to the wheel.

I felt Ströder stir.

I kept my Luger pointed at the driver but twisted my torso and face to the colonel, tracking the little flinch of his head with the muzzle of the Mauser. Keeping him zeroed.

These kinds of things—small reflex twitches—could too easily escalate, take on a life of their own, get out of control.

“Settle down,” I said to the colonel, flipping back to German. And then to Arshak in English, “Keep the driver covered.”

“Got it,” he said.

I opened my back door.

I swung the Luger to the left and aimed it at Ströder's chest. I eased the Mauser off his head.

“Careful now,” I said to him. “Let me see your hands.”

He held them up, framing his face.

“If one drops, you die,” I said and I backed out onto the running board. “Follow me.”

He did.

I put Ströder with his hands on the hood of the car, near the front passenger-side door, his legs stretched far out behind him and spread wide, leaving him on the verge of falling down. Then I opened that front door, and while Arshak kept his Colt on the driver's head from the other side, I reached in and relieved the man of his Luger.

Now we had two German soldiers—allies of the Turks and abettors of the massacre of the Armenians—pressed side by side against the hood of the car, the headlights starting to dim as they drew down the battery, Lucine sitting a mile up the road in mortal danger and me convinced that our only chance to get her out alive was to slip in silently, which meant going back to the Pera Palace before making a move. And time was ticking by.

My Mauser was tucked away again in its holster but my Luger was raised and pointing at the back of Ströder's head. I looked at Arshak and he was looking at me. His own new Luger was pointed at the back of the driver's head.

Here we were, Arshak and I: two men; two Lugers; two enemies who would do anything they could to reverse this situation; the opportunity of vengeance by proxy for the death of the innocents in the well; the shortness of time and the urgency of our mission; the sloppiness of any alternate plan. And a tidy, obvious solution before us. My trigger finger was prickling to do this.

But Arshak and I continued to look at each other.

“It's what
they
would do to
us,
” he said.

“Exactly,” I said.

A few accelerating pulse beats of silence later, I understood how I felt about that. I said, “You figure you've got tow-ropes in the back of that taxi?”

“Unics do get stuck,” he said.

And it was decided.