The Star of Istanbul (36 page)

And I wondered if the next man I killed would be the leader of the Ottoman Empire.

I was treading very lightly, my Winchester raised before me.

But not lightly enough.

Near the top of the stairs another uniformed guard appeared. He was raising his rifle.

He saw my peaked hat and my epaulets and my tunic first and only a brief moment later did he see the Winchester, which clicked and hissed and blew him backward to thump against the wall and down to the floor and I was on the top step, and the dim hallway was empty to the left and to the right. I looked back to the left again, and down the way was a splash of light from an open door.

The house was quiet, so this click and hiss and thump might have been heard. I bent and laid the Winchester quietly on the floor and I drew the Luger, flipped off the safety, and I strode forward to the light and pressed against the wall beside the door and then looked quickly in. I pulled quickly back.

And what I'd seen made me say in German, “I'm Colonel Vogel from the embassy. Don't shoot. You're in danger from an American agent who is on the grounds.”

I thought to holster the Luger, but I didn't. I kept it behind my right thigh and I stepped into the doorway.

Across the room, behind a desk, framed by open doors onto a second-floor veranda, stood Enver Pasha.

He was not lowering his pistol.

I gently let him see my pistol.

“Your Excellency,” I said. “I have been tracking this man. Colonel Ströder, who asked me to come with him, has deployed your guards to search.”

I kept my eyes fixed on his but I let my face move slightly to the right so he could see the scar.

I watched his eyes flit to it. He was working hard to figure me out.

And I was still studying him. Swarthy. Black Kaiser Wilhelm mustache. He was thinner in the face than I remembered in the news photos, though by no means did I have a clear image of him in my mind. I thought:
He's gaunt from stress in this war; he could be twitchy with that pistol.

“This man Cobb could appear at any moment,” I said. “He may have come in from the water.”

I flipped my chin to the windows behind him.

He did not turn. But his head flinched just a little to the side and the muzzle of his own Luger dipped ever so slightly.

“I'm going to raise my pistol now,” I said, while doing it.

He refreshed his own aim abruptly but I now had a chest-shot zeroed on him. And he had a chest-shot zeroed on me. The Luger P08 has a two-stage trigger. I had taken up the bit of slack and moved to the second stage and I was sure Enver Pasha had too.

Neither of us dared to shoot.

Besides, I didn't want to shoot him. Not yet. Gunshots still might imperil Lucine, if she was in the house. Which I was beginning to question.

I had to find her before anything else.

“Your Excellency,” I said. “I'm very sorry to have raised my weapon. But I had to give your own hand pause. Shall we lower our arms now? I'm Colonel Gerhard Vogel. I am here at your service. This man Cobb is dangerous and we are afraid he is very near.”

He did not move his pistol from his aim.

“Sergeant Schmidt,” he said loudly.

“Your Excellency,” I said. “We have been operating quietly for obvious reasons. Your excellent Sergeant Schmidt came downstairs at our small sounds. He is now helping to find Cobb. I'm here to protect you.”

He did not move his pistol.

I did not move mine.

We looked at each other hard.

“Colonel Vogel,” Enver Pasha said, “please step closer.”

I did. Carefully. One small step. Another. Not letting my Luger waver at all. A third step and I stopped. We were no more than ten feet from each other.

We studied each other's face.

“I don't know a Colonel Gerhard Vogel,” Enver Pasha said. His German was excellent.

Now that I'd heard a couple of full sentences from him, something odd was clicking in my head.

The tenor of his voice.

And there was something in his eyes.

Something familiar.

And then I felt like an idiot.

If Lucine was still in this house—and I was beginning again to think she was—and if they'd wanted to lure Christopher Cobb here to interrogate him and kill him, then Enver Pasha was not standing before me.

Der Wolf
was.

He wanted to play the Pasha for me for a while. He liked dressing up, this guy.

Which was the familiar thing I'd sensed a few moments ago.

This was Squarebeard from the bookstore in London.

But I'd seen Squarebeard only from a distance. Now that I was close to him, his familiarity took an odd turn.

“Mr. Cobb, is it?” he said.

Our pistols both held very steady.

I didn't answer.

And he said, in English, a flat midwestern English, “How simple things would be if it weren't for the automatic reaction of the body's flexor muscles.”

The words, the pedantry of them, were fitting into that familiar something. As was the sound of his voice.

He said, “It would then merely be a matter of who squeezes the trigger first. But alas, my bullet would reach you in what? Perhaps nine one-thousandths of a second, causing the eight flexor muscles in your forearm instantly to act on their own. Your bullet would reach me with a similar alacrity and we would both be dead.”

And things were suddenly clear.

“So it wasn't simply personal after all, between you and Brauer,” I said.

He smiled. “I meant what I said about admiring your work.”

This he spoke in a Boston Back Bay accent.

This was Walter's shipboard lover.

This was Edward Cable.

He resumed the Midwest accent, which was, perhaps, his own. “I'd dramatically strip off my mustache for you now, Mr. Cobb, as if we were in one of Miss Bourgani's movies. But I'm afraid I'd abrade myself. I'll take it off properly when you're dead. Besides, I'd look a fright with my white upper lip in the midst of all this Turkish-tainted skin.”

I stripped off mine.

It did hurt but I felt I had to make the point.

Given the fastidious lift of his right brow, the point seemed lost on him.

He was a different breed of cat.

“I'd hoped we might talk,” he said.

“Is that why you're in costume?”

“I thought it would be interesting to hear your approach to the Pasha. I'm quite intrigued at America's involvement in all this.”

“I think you mostly like dressing up.”

Cable—if indeed that was his name—unfurled a smile that was part irony, part taffeta. “What else do we really have in this world but the small pleasures of a chosen and portrayed self?” he said. “The current of history runs far too deep. You and your Armenian friends and even the Enver Pasha. And yes, even I, as an individual. We are all ultimately helpless. We're all being borne along on the surface of things, moving our arms and our legs, giving the appearance of volition, but our course is set. Miss Bourgani will not stop the slaughter of her people. You will not preserve your country from this war. The Ottoman Empire will soon dissolve.”

He paused. He seemed to have finished his point.

“And the German Empire?” I said.

“Ah,” he said. “
That
is the deep-running current.”

He was right, of course, about the flexor muscles. Still, I was tempted.

I think he saw it in my eyes.

He smiled again. No taffeta.

“I'm a good judge of people,” he said, and he had resumed speaking German. “You're not a man who would sacrifice your own life simply to take mine.”

“But as you pointed out,” I said, shifting to German with him. “We neither of us count for that much.”

“Except to ourselves,” he said. “Don't mistake me. I admire you for that. And I will freely admit that I share the same attitude. But you understand why I can be so frank with you.”

“Because you expect to win this standoff,” I said.

We each glanced at the unwavering Luger muzzle of the other.

“Of course,” he said.

“I have to ask,” I said. “Have you been drawing this out in the expectation that one of your downstairs boys will appear behind me?”

“The thought had crossed my mind,” he said.

“Given the silence of my arrival.”

“I suppose there are alternate explanations for that.”

“There's one,” I said. “They're all dead.”

He took this in without showing anything on his face.

“Well then,” he said, “it's time to change the balance of power.”

And in a voice pitched to the back row of the upper balcony, he called out, “Captain, if you please.”

There was movement off to my left but nearer to Cable. A door was opening in the side wall.

I glanced.

Lucine emerged first, though a
feldgrau
arm was angled over her chest from left clavicle to right hip and she was dressed in a white nainsook chemise; attached to the uniformed arm was a bareheaded
Kapitän
with golden hair, and in his right hand he was holding the third Luger in the room, muzzled up against the same soft spot on Lucine that I'd threatened on Ströder, between the temple and the ear.

These two sidled into the room and ended up—with Cable saying “That's good”—freestanding an arm's length from the edge of the desk. I could keep both my Luger and one eye focused on Cable—he knew I would not relinquish that relationship—but I could also clearly see Lucine's peril.

The Hun with the gun to her head was showing only his right shoulder and arm, his right side, his right leg; the corresponding left side of him was pressed against her from behind, his arm across her breasts.

She seemed impossibly small and impossibly fragile in every way but her eyes. Her vast eyes were burning hotly at me and, indeed, if it weren't for a German officer, a German spy, and two extra Lugers, I could have fancied from this look that she'd just stepped into the room to have rough sex with me.

“Selene,” I said. “Have they hurt you?”

She said, “Besides throwing a coat around me and making me leave the hotel in my least interesting chemise, no.”

“You might imagine from that,” Cable said, “what a fruitlessly amusing time we've had in our conversations so far, Miss Bourgani and I. That will change quite dramatically now.”

I said to her, “Do you know who this man is?”

“Not who I expected,” she said.

“He's the man Brauer was with on the
Lusitania,
” I said, glancing at her.

I saw her eyes cut sharply toward him.

But Cable wasn't taking his eyes off me.

I said, “One wouldn't expect the fussy little bookseller from Boston to be capable of saving himself from a sinking ship.”

“Who knows?” Cable said. “He could have had a boyhood near a lake.”

“But a wolf, on the other hand,” I said.

Cable narrowed his gaze at this.

And I said in German, “The wolf is a good swimmer, I think.”

He smiled at my knowing about
Der Wolf.

He answered in German: “The wolf is quite a powerful swimmer, with strong, tight-muscled legs.”

This he said with a complex little smirk. At his forcing an image of his body upon me, no doubt.

I have at times a freely associating mind, particularly when I am thrashing inside for a course of action.

And so I was led to a thought about what to do.

Even as Cable said, once again in English, “I'm getting tired of all this. The simplest thing would have been for me to shoot you dead as soon as you appeared in the doorway. But regrettably your own costume caused me too many moments of doubt. The dueling scar was a nice touch. Very realistic.”

“This still feels like a standoff,” I said.

“I think there was something very personal between you and Selene Bourgani,” Cable said.

And I wondered:
Did he know Brauer was dead?
He might suspect it. But he could not know for sure. And he certainly didn't know how.

The thought I had was still working its way along, but it would help if I could get Cable to split his attention.

I moved my gaze to Lucine and she was instantly focused on me and then I quickly cut my eyes to Cable and back to her before returning slowly and fully to him.

“If she dies, so do you,” I said.

“Then by reflex it would be all three of us,” he said in English. “What an idiotic waste that would be. I am an admirer of the captain here, but what a shame if he were the only one of us left standing.”

“I
bet
you're an admirer of the captain,” Lucine said.

Cable ignored her. “I don't particularly care one way or the other about her. If you put your pistol down, I can arrange for her to walk away before you and I have a detailed chat. From which there would even be a possible safe exit for you as well.”

Did he think I'd believe that?

“Selene,” I said. “Our Mr. Cable may suspect something unpleasant has happened to Walter, but he can't know for sure.”

“Oh, he asked,” Lucine said. “I wouldn't give him the time of day.”

Cable was staying calm. The gun was steady. His face was placid. But I could see his chest rise and hold and fall. He was trying to control his breathing.

“He's dead and decomposing in the North Sea,” Lucine said.

He flinched ever so slightly at this.

She knew what I needed. If Cable really thought I would do anything to keep a bullet out of Lucine's brain—and he was right—he felt safe from me as long as the
Kapitän
had a gun to her head.

“And you disgusting bastard, Cobb,” Lucine hissed. “What you let Brauer do to you to try to save his life.”

Cable was breathing faster. His chest was moving; he was trying not to let it move his shoulders, move his hand. “Now that is certainly a lie,” he said.