And I began to smell something.
There was just a whiff of it. It slid into me and then out again and I concentrated and there it was again. Maybe my recent stint in Escoffier’s joint had heightened my sense of smell, made me oversensitive in an often faintly fetid world. This had a whiff of way-too-fancy cookery. No. Not fancy food. Old food, rotten food. No. Not that but with a little taint of that maybe. But something more, something vaguely familiar, which made me interested.
I reached the first-class reception area, between the cabins and the smoking room. I stepped across to the smoker, and the place was empty but for a couple of gents in a far corner with their cigars diminished to butts and starting to doze. The air was permanently thick with the scent of old tobacco, and this other smell was hiding here. Masked now. I could still pick it up if I concentrated.
The nearly empty smoking room reminded me of something I’d noticed waiting for Selene and Brauer to board: the ship was only sparsely booked. I stepped back out into the reception hall and looked across to the staircase leading to the second-class deck below. I moved to it.
The smell I’d been following wafted more clearly up the steps. I entered the smell, descended into it, and it began to identify itself: sweat and grime and female smells; urinal smells and sick child smells and unchanged-clothes smells; long-on-the-road and living-in-communal-tent smells. I stopped on the landing. I didn’t need to go farther. I knew this smell from the wars I’d covered. It was the smell of refugees. Nine months into the war, going east from England, the Mecklenburg and its sister ships carried rarefied travelers in the direction of the war. Going west, the ships still occasionally carried a sanctioned mass of those who’d fled the Germans from Antwerp and Flanders, from Liège and Luxemburg, and who were still trying to find a final refuge.
I ascended the steps again.
The most recent westward passage of the Mecklenburg must have been a passage of the dispossessed. It would take some time at sea to exorcise the scent of these ghosts.
I needed air myself.
I turned toward the starboard side.
I was fully conscious that I did so. I would look carefully before entering the promenade. Surely Selene and Brauer were sleeping. It felt as if everyone was sleeping on this ship but me. It was all right simply to walk past her window, I thought.
I opened the door onto the deck.
I eased out, looking aft.
The promenade was empty. The windows in the last two cabins were lit. Selene’s and Brauer’s.
All the other windows were dark.
I should have stepped back in.
But it was time to snoop.
I crept aft.
And up ahead I began to hear their voices.
They were muffled. The windows were closed. But I heard them. Shouting.
I quickened my step.
They would be distracted. I would crouch beneath their windows and listen.
A few more steps; the voices were becoming clearer; then they abruptly stopped.
I strode on, expecting them to resume. The silence persisted.
And then I heard a muffled pop.
It was small caliber. But it was a gun.
I bolted the final few yards. The bastard had shot Selene. He’d confronted her about the bar near the London Docks. He’d discovered something. He’d shot her.
The first window now. No caution. I looked in. Brauer’s cabin. The electric light was burning. But it was empty. Of course. He’d sought her out in her own cabin to confront her.
The next window. I stepped to it.
Inside, Selene Bourgani was standing in the center of the floor, back to the door, but with her face angled downward. She held the pistol in her hand waist high, pointed slightly upward and slightly to her right. A small black purse was open in her other hand. I could well imagine she had not moved anything but her face in the few moments since she’d shot Walter Brauer.
He was lying on the floor on his back, and he wasn’t moving either.
She must have plugged him straight in the heart.
35
Selene lifted her face and looked me in the eyes. If this were the movie version of what she’d done, I would have expected her to act out a major emotion. Choose one: shock, horror, fear, rage, guilt, relief. Choose a couple of those. And they would have been bigger than life. But she showed none of that. Her beautiful face — and it was very beautiful indeed, for her having just shot a man — merely subtly acknowledged me, showed that she knew me. Was that the faintest nod she had just given me? The title card might well have read: Oh, it’s you. Are you off to Holland as well?
I left the window. I entered at the aft portal and approached her door. I knocked. I expected to have to knock a few times. I was only just now getting my brain to start to work. I was afraid that the cabin doors would begin opening down the way, that people would be right behind me when I finally got her to open up.
But apparently no one was stirring. And many of the cabins were empty. I knocked again. More softly.
The door opened.
“Come in, Mr. Cobb,” she said.
I did.
She closed the door behind me.
I took a step toward Brauer’s body.
He was wearing his coat but he had no waistcoat, and his white shirt had a tight, red, silver-half-dollar-sized circle just beneath the sternum.
“I believe you know Mr. Brauer,” Selene said.
Only now — with me seeing Selene’s handiwork from her point of view and hearing her voice immediately behind me, and with the smell of hot metal and gunpowder lingering in the room like the smell of recent sex — did it occur to me that she’d just killed one man who she thought was helping her and that she had before her another man who she figured was out to stop her and was a killer himself. And she had a pistol in her hand.
“I do know him,” I said. “Can’t say I like him very much.”
I was relieved that Selene slid up beside me.
We both were looking down at Walter Brauer.
In my periphery I could see the pistol still in her hand.
I glanced at it.
Her gun hand was not quite as composed as the rest of her. It was holding the weapon as if it expected Brauer to suddenly spring up and it would have to finish the job. And maybe it was starting to tremble a very little bit, this hand.
The pistol was a Colt 1908 Vest Pocket model. I liked a small and unobtrusive pistol, if you knew how to apply it. I was carrying one myself on this trip, though it was — stupidly — packed in my bag in my cabin. That snub-barreled Colt, though, looked excessively small and I glanced at the more or less instantly dead man and it struck me that Selene knew how to apply her tiny pistol excessively well. And I suddenly thought I might not yet be out of the woods.
She was continuing to study Brauer and I turned back to him too.
So I took as a premise, for the sake of argument, that she wouldn’t use that pistol on me, at least for now. What then? What was my next move? She’d just shot a guy to death. He was clearly unarmed.
She interrupted my train of thought.
“He tried to rape me,” she said.
Okay. She was offering an explanation, so I figured she probably wasn’t going to shoot me, at least not right away. But I knew Mr. Brauer better than she realized, so I also knew she was lying. She wasn’t his type.
Not that this was a point to argue with her.
The quick and simple question was: If my government wants to stop this woman’s secret mission, why not just turn her over to the authorities for shooting an unarmed man?
This was all going through me not as reasoning, however, but as a crackle of emotion. These were the issues but I could smell that complicated lavender and hay and musk thing she put on herself and I could visualize the naked parts of her where she would touch on that scent with her fingertip. And I felt Metcalf’s hot little mandate slide down my throat like birdsong fat: my government not only sanctioned me to kill; this was the guy they wanted dead. I thought: How do I blow the whistle on a dame I’m still crazy about for doing my own dirty work?