As of two weeks ago the Turks had begun fighting on their own Eastern Front. The Brits and French had landed on the Gallipoli peninsula with the intention of taking Istanbul and opening a supply route into the Black Sea for the Russians. Hell, everyone figured the Triple Entente had already agreed to let Constantinople turn into Tsargrad. This was a particularly important time for the Huns to get the inside scoop on what their ally was planning to do and how.
But there was another possibility. Squarebeard mentioned an approach to a pasha, a member of the Turkish ruling elite. Maybe Selene’s real work would be for the Turks themselves. Perhaps the Germans were providing Selene for an Ottoman mission. What would the Turks want that they’d need a female Greek-American film star to do the job? For that matter, of what particular use would such a woman be to the Germans? What covert skills did she possess to make her uniquely useful?
Only one answer came to mind. But my feelings were too raw about Selene Bourgani to go any further with that.
So I closed the throttle and let my thoughts sputter out. I found myself looking sightlessly at the passing street. I turned my face to the forward windows of the taxi, and looming before us was the massively becolumned Great West Door of the Christopher Wrenassainced St. Paul’s Cathedral.
We veered to the right and around the cathedral and still we followed Brauer and Selene. Down Cannon Street we went and past its eponymous train station and soon we were approaching the castle within a castle within a castle of the Tower of London, the spaced, rising stacks of ancient stone seeming to fill the dark of the night ahead. This too we circled, and immediately we were skirting the northern edge of the St. Katharine Docks, the ships invisible behind the high brick facades of the warehouses joined in a long unbroken row.
Then we angled up onto St. George Street and the only hint of the vast London Docks lying beyond the immediate rows of commercial buildings was the proliferation among the storefronts of ship chandlers, with their windows hung in deck lights and signal lanterns and with their barrels of tar and pitch and rosin huddling dimly inside. And, as well, the clothiers’ windows were showing peacoats and slickers instead of sack suits and frocks.
And now we turned off St. George into a street of brick warehouses on both sides, which loomed six stories above us in canyon cliff face, and the darkness of the night deepened around us. New Gravel Lane. This was on the way to nowhere. And when we got free of the warehouses and into a run of sack makers and rope merchants and pubs, I expected what soon came: my driver hailed me over the speaking tube and said, “They will be stopping up ahead.”
I leaned forward to the front tonneau window, and I could see before us Brauer’s taxi pulling abruptly to the curb.
“Go on,” I told my driver.
We passed Brauer and fifty yards farther along we approached Selene’s Unic, which had stopped before a pub on a corner.
“Take the right turn,” I said to my driver.
He did. Onto Coleman Street. He knew to go slow. I let him roll twenty or so yards farther and I told him to pull over.
I removed the arm sling, which had been hanging loose for the ride, and put it on the seat. I considered the cane but left it behind as well. I stripped off my jacket and plucked off my hat and I jumped out of the taxi on the driver’s side and stepped forward to him.
He looked at me. Ready to do whatever I needed. “You’re a good man,” I said. “I’d take you to battle with me any day of the week.”
He nodded at me once, and his mouth tightened and pursed ever so slightly. The smile of a man with the qualities I was appreciating at that moment.
“Can I borrow your cap?” I said.
He was wearing the perfect thing: a good, well cared for but well traveled, working-class cloth cap with a soft, flat one-piece crown.
He did not hesitate. He grabbed it off and handed it to me.
I gave him the same nod and the same smile he’d lately given me.
I put his cap on my head — it was a pretty good fit — and I walked back toward the corner, no longer lame and arm-slung, ready to rely on my workingman’s cap and a shirt that was new but unchanged since Queenstown and a beardless face dominated by an already London-dingy bandage. And rely on my showing up in a place that no one would expect me to be. It was worth the risk.
I approached the Block & Tackle, Spirit Merchant, which had a large bright window looking onto Coleman Street, with the brick facade above it painted: Walkers Warrington and Burton Ales.
I slowed and looked in at the window. Selene was standing before a table. I shrank back a bit, as she was looking in my direction. She had lifted her veil and she could have seen me watching her if she’d only shifted her eyes. She was just beyond the right shoulder of a man whose back was to me. He was standing in front of a chair pushed away from the table, apparently having just risen for her. He was holding himself stiffly upright.
It was clear she’d come to see this guy.
Her eyes stayed fixed on him. For all her screen-actress largeness, I had to look closely to read her. Which was part of what I read, of course. Her face was as stiff in its inexpressiveness as the man’s posture.
I dared not watch from this angle any longer.
I moved along the sidewalk, heading for the front door, keeping my eyes on these two all the while.
Her hands were clasped before her. She was still wearing that clinging, black, high-fashion dress with the chinchilla wrists. She seemed more than ever to be dressed for a state of mourning, though from all I knew, she was merely dressed for a state of film-star vampish mystery.
Her face was vanishing as I moved, and his face was emerging. I was in no one’s line of sight so I stopped to study him, even as these two seemed to be studying each other. His face gave me a dark undertow of a thought about what this stiff and untouching and, from what I could see, silent confrontation might be about. He was a good-looking guy but in an odd mix of ways: exaggerated features of a sort, a prominent nose, large eyes, a wide mouth, but for their size somehow delicate still, and his skin was dusky but not quite swarthy-masculine, a Mediterranean or Slavic, cut by some whiter blood. His dark hair was starting to streak with gray and his face was starting to jowl up a bit around the chin. A leading man type gone a little to seed. He wore a three-piece suit and he looked comfortable in it, though he was broad in the shoulders and the suit was cheap and she had come to him, after all, in a scruffy bar on the docks, clearly his turf. And the thing that ran in me from the way they looked at each other — knowing but estranged, wanting to touch but not wanting to touch — was that this was still another man that the vamp Selene Bourgani had taken to bed for a while and then booted out the door.
And this made me think again how she likely would conduct her espionage work in Istanbul. The logic of her doing it that way. The ease of it, for her.
So I kept on jittering around on the sidewalk outside the bar, compulsively trying to read this guy’s face, trying to imagine where the hell she met him, trying to throw a brick and scare off that nasty little rutting street tom of a Manx who was presently trying to claw his way out of the center of my chest.
The guy’s lips moved now, but not a lot, and he motioned to the chair across the table from him, and they both sat.
I slipped away, went around the corner, pulling my cap low over my eyes, glancing up the street on this side to Brauer’s taxi, which was still sitting there, beyond Selene’s, which was also still sitting there. At least she expected to leave this guy’s company tonight. Which didn’t mean anything, really, about what they might do in the meantime, somewhere nearby in private, if they could warm this present chill between them.