Not that any of this mattered to me.
Not that I actually could rely on anything I was thinking on this subject, stupid as I could be about women. I realized I’d better be grateful the Germans hadn’t targeted me with this woman.
I stopped for a moment at the front door of the pub, and I lit a cigarette so I could casually glance across the street.
Brauer was there. Also jittering around, under an electric lamppost, smoking his own cigarette, no doubt trying to decide if and when he should come closer and take a look. He was probably not in a position — nor did he have reasons — to distrust her, but he was feeling very uneasy, with her being his responsibility and wildly out of control.
She was sitting with her back to the door. I stepped in.
The guy she was with could have looked up and noticed me, but he didn’t. They were leaning a bit toward each other now, across the table, and they were talking.
I was standing still and I didn’t want to make my interest in these two obvious, so I looked around and found that the dozen or so men scattered about were, most of them, looking at me. They all had an off-the-same-boat look, all from a crew hired from the same bunch of locals somewhere, maybe in Tangier or Port Said, with a dark intensity of face and features. Maybe they had the same origins as the guy with Selene, though without the mix of some other peoples in them.
I was starting to think the bar did indeed have an ethnic core to it. At that point, I just didn’t know what it was.
I myself clearly wasn’t part of the core. The dark sets of eyes in the bar were still lingering on me. I nodded at a few. I was just a guy from a ship in his going-ashore clothes out to get a drink.
After I’d openly acknowledged enough of these stares, these guys all finally looked away.
To the right was a long, stand-up bar with a wall of bottles and a wide central mirror. I moved past Selene and her man. She was speaking low. It wasn’t English. The words I heard were often throaty, sometimes almost Greek, sometimes almost a Semitic language. It was neither, I felt certain. Well, maybe Greek. That was Selene’s movie-magazine story, after all. Maybe everyone in this bar was Greek. But I’d known a few Greeks along the way, covering Chicago First Ward politics. And this didn’t quite sound Greek to me.
The man was listening intently, one hand now on the tabletop. He’d be reaching across soon to give her wrist a pat or her elbow a squeeze.
I moved a couple of small steps past them, planning a sight line by way of the mirror. I bellied up to the zinc bar and hunched over, anchoring my elbows. I turned my head a little to the right and there they were in reflection. I could see her face. I could see the side of his head. He hadn’t reached out to her yet, though that hand was still lying on the tabletop. She’d finished talking. Over my shoulder I could pick out his voice, a richly deep voice, those throaty sounds floating across to me, strings of h’s tracking after consonants.
“Drink?” Another voice, with the same throatiness in its accented English.
I straightened.
The bartender was one of the boys from the core. Dark in skin and hair and eyes. A commanding nose.
I had to keep my voice low. Few words. I motioned toward the taps. “Burton,” I said.
The bartender nodded but didn’t go.
He let his eyes travel down me, from my face to the center of my chest and onward, quite deliberately, till they stopped, and he angled his head a little. “You okay?” he said.
I looked.
There was a splash of blood on my white shirt, around my lower abdomen, just above the belt line. From my work in St. Martin’s Lane. I’d been carrying the Hun’s blood around on me ever since.
29
I flipped some fingers at the bottom of the bandage on my left cheek. The gesture led me to put on a light Italian accent for my English, still keeping the volume low, all to further mask me from Selene’s nearby ear.
“They make the bandages not so good anymore,” I said.
At once I figured this was a mistake. Although they still hadn’t entered the war, the Italians were part of the Triple Alliance.
But the barman looked me in the eye and gave me a nod — a guy’s nod, like he knew about fights with sharp objects — and he stepped away to draw me an ale.
Selene and her older man were still trading low words in their mystery language, and my eyes briefly followed the bartender. But I stopped at the cleared space around the cash box beneath the mirror.
Attached to the wall, low, just over the tin box, was an image of a flag, not much larger than a postcard. It was divided into three equal vertical stripes: red, green, blue. This wasn’t Greek. It wasn’t any flag I recognized.
I glanced into the mirror.
Selene was the one who was making the move. Her hand was groping out over the table now, falling upon the man’s wrist. He put his own hand over hers and they talked on in the language, I suspected, of red, green, and blue. I looked at the beer that was just now landing in front of me. It was pale.
I took a drink.
Too much hops, as far as I was concerned.
I had blood on my shirt and a beer I didn’t like in front of me. I was obviously out of place in this bar in the presence of a woman who I didn’t want to recognize me, and I wasn’t understanding anything she and her man were saying anyway.
It was time to wait outside.
I didn’t want to cause a stir on my departure, however, so I downed the bitter Burton ale in three swallows, wiped my mouth, put some money on the bar, and eased away. I passed the now intertwined hands, and I gave the man one last, reflexive glance. He had a long straight nose and my mind photographed it and I briefly registered her own famous profile as I went by, but I did not let my mind linger on her, and Selene and her man were behind me and I approached the door. I lowered my face for Brauer and went out the door and around the corner and up to my taxi.
I stopped by the driver’s side of the vehicle and he was sitting there behind the wheel, not off having a quick beer in another pub, not even lounging in the street, but behind the wheel. A good man. He turned his face to me as I approached and I took his cap off my head and fitted it on his. He let me.
“Thanks,” I said. “Turn us around and bring us close to the corner.”
He nodded.
Only when I was climbing into the tonneau, when he thought I wasn’t looking, did he adjust his cap to suit him.
And we waited.
Perhaps fifteen minutes went by and I held myself in suspension.
I didn’t want to, but finally I looked again in my mind at Selene’s profile. I didn’t want to, but something was nagging at me, something from my eyes, not my reason.
Then it struck me: her man’s thin, straight nose, the precise curve where bridge and brow met, the angle of the forehead. I’d registered this same profile in person more than a week ago. And it was Selene. From the first time I saw her in person, as she was suffering the questions of the reporters on the deck of the Lusitania. This was familial similarity. This was her father.
And as if on cue, he came around the corner.
He was striding briskly. He and his daughter had been in a preexisting state of estrangement in their first moments together in the pub. A long and hard estrangement, for them to have been separated by an ocean and then to have taken up with each other like that from the start, looking like wounded old lovers. And yet they came to entwine their hands. They came to some reconciliation. But now she was off to Istanbul — had she told him where she was going, what she was doing? — and so this was a hard parting for him. He was striding away from her firmly, as a man would, to control his feelings and maintain his manhood.