“Herr Strauss,” Selene said.
Strauss said, “We deeply appreciate your assistance in this most delicate of tasks.”
She did not reply in words and I longed to watch all the physical nuances of the characters in this scene. I particularly longed to see the face of the man I’d mistaken for Strauss, the man whose voice still echoed in my head. Where had I heard it?
I assessed the shadows around me, wondered if I dared to lift my head above the boxes.
Metzger said in German, “Any sign outside?”
“I only looked for a moment, getting out of the taxi,” Strauss said, also in German. “I didn’t see Karl. But that’s the point, yes?”
Metzger grunted.
I shrank back deeper into the darkness and began to rise a bit from my crouch to look.
“Can we speak in English, gentlemen?” Selene said.
The familiar man replied, “I’m very sorry, Miss Bourgani. It’s rude of us.” His English was perfect. And his accent was American, though without any regional hint at all. Whatever “standard American speech” was, this was it. Meticulously learned.
The bright, angled slice of the office appeared before me: Brauer, seen from behind but also now from the side, sitting upright, blocking the view to the far end of the table, though I couldn’t say for sure I would’ve seen that far even if he wasn’t there.
“Sometimes we have peripheral matters to discuss and we speak in German by reflex,” the man went on.
“Is there more?” Selene said and I saw a movement just to the right of Brauer: Selene’s black-sheathed shoulder rolled into my view and then out again.
The man with the soft-timbred familiar voice ignored her. “Bitte,” he said. Then he quickly repeated in English, “Please.” And a gray-tweed-clad wrist, a delicate-fingered hand appeared in the air beyond Brauer, from the end of the table, gesturing toward an invisible chair. “Sit for a time, Mr. Strauss.”
A chair scraped.
The wrist and hand vanished.
“It will only be for a brief time, Miss Bourgani,” the invisible man said.
I crept back farther, leaned to my left, trying to catch a glimpse of him. Though the angle improved, the visible slice of the doorway shrank as well. I could see Selene’s shoulder; I could see that she had not raised the veil on her hat. She was sitting there shrouded before these men. Given the familiar man’s impulsive leveraging of his empowered status — making Strauss sit — it must have been nagging the hell out of him that Selene wouldn’t show her face clearly to him.
“Perhaps if we can have a little drink together before we go,” he said. “We humbly request this gesture of friendly feelings, dear lady.”
I thought: This guy is good. He’ll lift her veil yet.
He did not wait for her reply. He said, “Mr. Brauer. If you’d be so kind as to pour the wine.”
Brauer twisted his body in the direction of the man. This had taken him by surprise. He was being put in his place as well. He might have thought he was a high-toned university intellectual, but in this room he was the office girl being sent for coffee.
He straightened and began to push his chair back.
I quickened at this. I leaned just a little more to my left. He was about to reveal his boss.
The chair screaked on the floor, the noise consciously made worse, I suspected, by Walter daring to express his displeasure.
He rose and stepped to his left, and he was gone from my sight.
And there, at the end of the table, was the man with the square-trimmed beard who’d been reading his newspaper across the Palm Court this morning.
27
Almost at once his face swung in my direction. I ducked below the bookcase. I’d made no sound. He was probably turning to Selene.
His face was a blur now in my head from this quick glance, and there was very little that was new. The beard again dominated my impression of him. His eyebrows were bushy; that was something I’d not noticed across the Palm Court. His plastered hair with that center part was vaguely brown. But I still needed a clear and steady look at him from close up.
His attention did indeed go to Selene. He was talking trivially to her about the wine. A nice German wine.
He’d been watching me this morning. That much was clear. There were other things to consider about this man, though I felt further away than ever from recognizing his voice. I might have been wrong about that. But I had to shut down my mind for now. I was still lurking a few feet from my own little den of German spies and I needed to listen.
Playing up that soft-edged quality in his voice, Squarebeard prattled on about how they discovered the beauties of late harvest grapes in the Rheingau. “What seemed to be too old, what seemed to be rotten, turned out to be the sweetest and finest of all,” he said, and I could imagine him leaning to her, touching her wrist lightly, putting the mash on Selene Bourgani.
Then for a time there were only clinking sounds and bits of conversation about everyone getting a nice glass of late-harvest Riesling, and then a silence fell over the table.
I wanted to rise up once again to look into the room. But either Brauer was back in his chair and I’d see nothing or I’d be directly in Squarebeard’s line of sight and it would be too dangerous. I stayed where I was.
“So then,” Squarebeard said. “It is time for us soon to go, but first a toast. To Miss Bourgani and to international understanding that will help bring about a quickly achieved but eternal peace in the world.”
A beat of silence during which, no doubt, Squarebeard repressed the gagging reflex from his tripewurst of a toast, poor man. Surely he didn’t fool Selene; he could have simply toasted to the crushing victory of Germany over all her enemies and to the establishment of a vast new Germanic Empire and saved himself this discomfort. Then the glasses clinked and Metzger and Strauss, in unison, murmured “Zum Wohl.”
A longer silence fell upon the room as they drank, broken only by Metzger praising the pleasing sweetness of the wine and by a desultory murmuring of agreement.
This thing would soon end.
I had to decide what to do. They’d leave in several taxis, as they’d come. Who might linger? I’d heard some useful things but nothing of the details of what Selene was expected to do in Istanbul. I could wait for whoever remained possibly to reiterate informally some of what I’d missed.
But Squarebeard might clear out quickly and he was the one — the obvious leader of the group — I was most interested in.
He didn’t give them much drinking time. Suddenly a chair scooted and it must have been his. He said, “So we must go now.”
Glasses clinked down to the table.
Chairs began to move.
Shoes began to scuff and shuffle.
I backed away and circled around the side of the rows of boxes and I reached the rear wall. I crouched low again and moved toward the door as quickly as I could without audible footfalls.
Before I stood in full — though shadowed — sight of the office, I peeked from my crouch a last time. The bright frame of the doorway for the moment showed only a center slice of the refectory table, and then a body moved into frame, the large, laboring body of Metzger, bracing himself with his hand on the tabletop, hobbling in severe pain on his broken foot.
He was heading for the front of the shop, to show his visitors out. I did not have time to wait till the office was clear. I rose slowly and then took a brisk step to the door, eased it open, and went out into the night, carefully closing the door behind me.