“I understand she went into the water quite near the last moment,” I said. “In a life jacket. She is a very good swimmer and got clear of the ship. She was picked up by a fishing smack and ended up in the customshouse at Queenstown wearing the fishing captain’s yellow slicker and his sou’wester. She is presently in London, as of early this morning, but I don’t know where.”
Gwendolyn’s shorthanding raced at more than a hundred words a minute, nearly as fast as I spoke, and her eyes went from a jaded “what-have-you-got-for-me” to a giddy “oh-my-stars.”
I stopped speaking. Her hand stopped writing a few moments later.
She asked, rather breathlessly, “Any other details, Mr. Cobb?”
I said, “From beneath her sou’wester, tendrils of her black hair clung to the back of her long, white neck.”
Gwendolyn’s bosom rose with a sharp intake of air and caught and her eyes went almost dreamy, as if she were crazy about me and I’d just told her I loved her and had taken her into my arms.
I smiled at her. “You are made for reporting, aren’t you,” I said.
She let go of her breath and wrote her Gregg symbols with exaggerated slowness as she unfurled — just as slowly — a very sweet smile. “I have not buttered your toast in this conversation, Mr. Cobb, but I do know your reputation and it seems well earned. Thank you for these details. They are golden.”
“I know you’ll put them to good use.”
“And what can I do for you?”
Part of me wished mightily to say “Let me take you away for a drink when your paper goes to bed.” But I didn’t. I couldn’t.
“Details in return, Miss Bryce.”
She put her pencil down.
I said, “Who is Selene Bourgani’s German-director lover?”
Her head did a very faint snap at this. Not the question she expected. I let her know I could read her mind: “Not a war correspondent’s sort of question, I am well aware. But it was you on the Transcript’s staff I came to see, after all.”
She smiled again, a quick, sly one. “I’m sure, nevertheless, you’ll put my details to good use.”
“I will.”
She said, “No longer her lover, I would guess, since she’s been in the United States making movies for the past two years while he’s been in Germany turning into the Kaiser’s personal documentarian.”
My own breath caught at that. But I kept quiet.
“Kurt Fehrenbach,” Gwendolyn said. “He came out of Max Reinhardt’s troupe and did a film called Der Lilim. Very interesting. Propelling our infant art form into precocious adolescence. A work of expressionism about a modern-day daughter of Lilith. Played by Miss Bourgani. Do you know about succubi, Mr. Cobb?”
“They are quite passionate women who keep late hours,” I said.
I had already passed up a chance to flirt with Gwendolyn Bryce — rightly — but here I was doing it again, though quite archly, expecting her not even to pick up on it. But for the very reason I wanted to flirt, she picked up on it.
“I am all work, Mr. Cobb,” she said, though with a glint about her that made her declaration ironic, which was, no doubt, her own style of flirting.
This had to end.
“So they broke up,” I said.
“She came home. He went to Berlin.”
“What’s her real story?”
“The gaps? Nobody has found out. She stays mysterious, which is how she wants it. And she’s good at it. You want to know about Theda Bara? Born in Egypt to an Arab sheikh? Stuff and nonsense. She’s from Cincinnati, Ohio, and her father was a tailor. Lillian Gish, the gorgeous child? She was nineteen, not sixteen, when Griffith started her off, which is just as well because he started her off in more ways than one. But Selene Bourgani? Her romantic, humble beginnings on the island of Andros of course have no records to confirm them, and who knows where to look next.”
“So what you know about her is that no one knows anything.”
“We do know about Herr Fehrenbach. What happens on and around movie sets are things a reporter can work on. So there are some other names, if you’d like the list.”
“I wouldn’t,” I said, and I tried to sound cynically bored about that. I tried not to stir around in my chair. Both these things were difficult. One might have expected my squirminess to lead me to reconsider making that offer to Gwendolyn Bryce: You put your newspaper to bed and I’ll put you to bed. But even if I tried, I couldn’t have done that now. The image of the damp wisps of hair clinging to Selene’s neck had been tormentingly revived by the thought of her other men. And the lock I most wanted to pick later tonight was on St. Martin’s Lane.
20
I would’ve had more luck with the editor’s daughter.
At 2 A.M. on Monday morning, my leather roll of entry tools tucked in an inside pocket, I moved briskly along St. Martin’s Lane, the crowds of diners and theatergoers that nightly jammed this narrow, electric-lit street mostly dissipated, and the shops darkened. The numbers were descending and I passed a pub at the corner of New Street, number 58, and then a narrow alley of bow-windowed houses, still lit by gas, and only a few more steps ahead was number 53, and from the storefront I reckoned it to be, a piss-yellow light was dribbling into the street. I stopped. I crossed to the other side. Almost directly opposite the meeting site was the opening to Cecil Court. I stepped around the darkened pub at the corner and then edged back to lurk and watch.
Number 53 split the ground floor of a four-story brick building with number 52, a Friends Meeting House, the Quakers narrowly on the right, behind a pair of double doors, and the Germans sporting a wide storefront window to the left of their oaken door with a three-tier glass transom. They were Metzger & Strauss, Booksellers. The locus of German agents in London was a bookshop sharing a wall with a bunch of pacifists.
The light was coming from the back of the bookshop, through an inner door, and from a nearer spot of light — a desk lamp, I supposed — in the midst of the massive shadows of bookshelves. I could see no figures. But this was hardly the time for breaking and entering. Too bad. I would have liked a private preview of the evening’s meeting spot. I’d have to do it another way in a few hours, after they were open, not so private but still a preview. And that meant deciding about who I would become — who I would portray — a decision that had lately been looming anyway.
I slipped away south on St. Martin’s Lane, striding quickly, and I passed before The Duke of York’s Theatre, its neoclassic columns a trifling echo of the portico columns of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, just down at the end of the lane. Mother played a trifling comedy at the Duke of York’s in a short run after Taming of the Shrew, when I had my adolescent London adventure with her.
The ironies of the last few minutes multiplied and I fairly trotted back to the hotel, where I slept fitfully and woke to find, in my morning paper over my eggs and bacon and marmalade in the Palm Court, a Christopher Cobb byline pinned beneath a trumpet blare of a double-deck headline:
LUSITANIA HORROR
Eyewitness Account
Reginald Bryce, true to his word. I held my breath as I scanned the front page of the Daily Transcript and its jump-page spread, and I saw only stock photos of the Lusitania and of a German U-boat and a cartoon of the Kaiser thigh-deep in the ocean with blood dripping from his hands. I let go of the breath when I found no stock photos of me.
I needed now to consider a disguise for my book browsing this morning; this gave me more options. I put my paper down and picked up my coffee to think. Across the sunken floor — bright beneath the glass roof — between the potted palms, near the piano at the far side, sat a man who’d caught my eye when he’d come in a few minutes ago. He was a thin man in a gray tweed suit with a beard and Brilliantine-assaulted hair made to lie flat on either side of a center part. It was the beard that caught me now. He had a newspaper before him — not the Transcript—slightly raised but not enough to shield his face. He glanced up very briefly, directly at me from across the way, and I looked off abruptly. His beard wouldn’t change by his realizing I was studying him, but my impulse was to observe unobserved. I glanced back at him and he was reading.