“What’s he doing over here?”
“That’s the question.”
“His family?”
Trask shrugged. “The ones who stayed are dead. He arrived in Washington a week ago. We always watch the Huns on Thomas Circle pretty closely, and Brauer went straight to the embassy. But somehow he slipped out again without us seeing him. We don’t know what he did here. But we do know he’s booked passage back to Britain. That gives you a week to get ready to sail. You’ve got a first-class cabin right near his. First of May. The Lusitania.”
A form loomed suddenly out of the murk, almost upon me, a man, a big man, and I jumped back and to the side, throwing myself against the deck wall, but the man did not lunge for me, he kept striding on past, too fast, given the fog, just a fool with a British accent, throwing a “Sorry, old man” over his shoulder, taking his after-midnight constitutional. Why didn’t Trask just expose Brauer to the Brits and let them handle him? Because they were like this guy, rushing in the dark. They had their own agenda. If the world is going to blow up on us, we need to know for ourselves what we’re dealing with. And Wilson still wanted to keep us out of the fighting. The way they were all digging in over there, maybe he was right. And maybe I was trained now for this work. I knew how we were supposed to think: figure it out for ourselves, keep to it to ourselves, do what we need to protect ourselves.
My beard was wet. My left cheek beneath was cold except for the curve of the impervious scar tissue. The fog had etched my Schmiss into my mind.
And now my eyesight was clearing, as if I were waking from a heavy sleep. The teak deck was rapidly appearing beneath me, before me, stretching forward into the clarifying dark; the lifeboats shaped sharply into themselves all along the way; the electric light glowed nakedly on the deck wall. We were moving faster. I could feel the subtle new vibration beneath my feet. Full ahead.
I was beginning to shiver.
I moved down the promenade to the forward door and I went in. I turned at once into the portside corridor and ran both hands over my beard and through my hair and wiped away the condensing mist on my coat and I moved forward. As I passed Selene Bourgani’s door I spoke aloud — louder perhaps than I would have if there actually were someone else in the corridor with me, which there wasn’t, but I spoke as if there were — I said, “We’re out of the fog now. Any danger is passed.”
I felt instantly stupid. I pressed on down the corridor. I thought she might be awake and worried inside. We all remembered the Titanic. And we all knew there was a war. For our ship to be bellowing through the night, blindly rushing, this could be a worrisome thing even for a woman who says she is afraid of nothing.
I passed on and I neared the turn of the corridor — I would soon be safely out of sight — but behind me I heard the opening of a cabin door, and I had no choice but to stop, which I did. I would turn. After all, this possibility was also why I’d spoken.
I turned.
She was standing just outside her door, in a beam of electric light from the wall, her hair twisted up high on her head. I took a step toward her, and another. I stopped. She hadn’t invited me, but I took this much of a liberty by reflex from the hammer thump of her beauty. Her eyes were as dark as the North Atlantic. She was wearing a crimson kimono with twin golden dragons plunging from her breasts to her knees.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I hope I didn’t disturb you.”
She looked over her shoulder, as if preparing to sneer: So where is the person you spoke to?
But she quickly turned back to me.
How the hell do I know what a woman is about to say? Perhaps she’d looked to make sure we were alone together.
“Any danger is passed,” I said, feeling even more stupid saying this a second time.
She nodded. “So I’ve heard.” But her voice was soft-edged. Appreciative.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll confess. There was no one around. I spoke it aloud in passing in case you were worried.”
She nodded again. Faintly. As if in thanks. She was far more subtle in this corridor than she was on the screen.
I grew up backstage in a thousand theaters and watched my mother being a star and I knew how she sized herself for each stage she was on. Since film actresses all seemed to be playing to a vast auditorium, though their faces were ten feet tall — even the great Selene Bourgani — I was surprised she knew how to seem real in this corridor. As for my own face, I had no control at all. It was flushing hot and, I suspected, it was even turning red.
“I wasn’t worried,” she said.
“No,” I said. “Of course not.”
“But thank you.”
I nodded. Too big a nod, as if I were a hambone of a film actor.
I collected myself and steadied my body and stood there for a long moment, and the moment went on as she stayed motionless where she was, standing in her kimono in her doorway.
Finally she said, in what felt like a whisper but which filled my head, “Good night.”
“Good night,” I said, and I turned away from Selene, who, according to my childhood Bulfinch, if not the evidence of my own eyes a few moments ago, was the Greek goddess of the moon.
3
After I’d gone to my cabin following our release from the fog, I slept. But I was already awake at the distant sound of six bells being rung on the morning watch—7:00 A.M. by the landlubber time zone we carried along with us. The bell had hardly stopped vibrating when I heard the slip of something under the door. I needed a war; I needed the whisk of rifle rounds past my ears. Here’s how I knew: I thought it might be a note from her. It was, instead, an invitation to dine with the captain at his table that evening.
I did not see Brauer again or Selene until the night came and I was dressed in a suitcase-wrinkled monkey suit, packed at Trask’s insistence for any secret-agent contingency, the thought of which had made me consider letting my country down to just chase the gunfire. But I packed the tux and now I tied my black tie and squared my shoulders and took the main staircase down three levels to the Saloon Deck. Indeed, I had a saloon ticket to a saloon cabin and I’d spent time very early this morning on the saloon promenade and I was, all in all, a saloon passenger, “saloon” being what the Brits sometimes called first class. But when I walked into the grand dining room, my first wish — a devout one — was that this would somehow suddenly turn into a good old American saloon, with swinging doors and spittoons. I did, however, know how to act this other role I’d been cast in.
I took three steps into the place and stopped. It was swell, all right. The main floor of the dining room, here on D Deck, was decorated in harmony with the writing room and library I’d passed through yesterday, though in a more extravagant way: ivory-colored walls and the straight-lined simplicity of eighteenth-century neoclassicism, with Louis XVI chairs upholstered in rose-colored horsehair and with similarly roseate Brussels carpet runners and with more Corinthian columns, these rising from the oak parquet floor up through the front edge of a large open oval space where the C Deck upper dining room encircled us diners below. The columns rose on to their capital at the base of a floor-high dome, done in ivory-white and gilt and with oil paint-rendered cherubs in tableaux of the four seasons. The dome sat in the center of B Deck, the high-heavenly vault of a three-story floating cathedral of fancyman’s food.
The place was full of tuxedoed men and gowned and bejeweled women. They milled murmuringly about, finding their tables, drinking cocktails. I stepped farther in, alert for a center-parted, hennaed head of hair. It didn’t take me long to see Brauer. He was at one end of the massive brass-fit veneered mahogany sideboard on the forward center wall. He was alone there, leaning with his back to the sideboard as if it were a bar, but with only a waiter nearby, arranging tumblers on a tray. Brauer held a glass with what looked like a couple of fingers of whiskey — no doubt a good whiskey, in this joint. He did not seem uncomfortable in his solitude. Rather, he seemed quite content to watch the swells milling about before him.