Still empty.
The door clicked behind me and I followed Selene to the end of the corridor and we turned left into the vestibule. She opened the portal to the promenade and stepped outside. Framed darkly in the doorway, she spoke from there. “We are alone,” she said.
I moved forward and squeezed through and I was abruptly buffeted by the wind of our twenty-two knot run. The deck quaked under my feet and the urgency of all this rushed suddenly upon me.
I crossed the promenade quickly — one step and another and another — and I was at the railing. I set my feet squarely beneath me and I lifted Brauer higher, up to the top rail, and I rested him on it for a moment, my arms dilating with ease at the release of his weight, happy now just to balance him there.
We were on the first-class promenade. Below was another promenade on the second-class deck.
“Selene,” I said.
She came at once to my side. “Yes?”
“Lean out to see if there’s anyone at the railing beneath us.”
She put her hand on her hair as if she were keeping a hat from flying off in the wind. She bent over the railing and looked down.
She straightened again. She stuffed the bloodstained towel into Brauer’s jacket. Smart. If she tried to throw it away on its own, it could fly back onto the deck below.
“Get rid of him,” she said.
I moved my arms from beneath Brauer and quickly put my hands on him, one at the shoulder and one at the hip, and I pushed hard.
He leapt out and then away to our left as if caught in the wind, and I leaned forward, watched him falling rearward toward the face of the sea, his arms flaring open, and he splashed into our wake and lifted on a wave, and the Mecklenburg rushed on, leaving Walter Brauer in the darkness behind us.
36
So we straightened at the railing and turned our backs to it and stood there a moment looking like a couple who’d simply had a nice meal in the dining saloon and now had come out for a breath of air, a long-married couple who could stand beside each other on the deck of a ship on a night that was full of bright stars — I happened to notice this as I’d turned away from the sea — and not say a thing and not quite touch and seem entirely comfortable with that. As if everything important had already been said long ago.
Then we left the promenade — it would have been hard to say which of us initiated this; perhaps we’d both done it at the same moment, spontaneously — and I held the deck door open for Selene and I followed her to her cabin and she held that door open for me. I stepped in and stopped in the center of her floor and she closed the door and crossed past me. We still had that air of taking each other for granted after long familiarity.
She sat on a woven-reed bergère chair that faced the bed and I sat on the edge of the bed directly opposite her, and now the language of our bodies said that we intended to have a conversation on a topic we both anticipated. But in fact we remained silent for a long while.
I imagined that she was trying to figure out how much to lie to me and what sort of lies might be convincing and, indeed, if it made any difference if she were convincing or not.
But it did matter, of course. She needed to be very convincing. She’d just killed the Germans’ agent who was playing an integral part in their larger plan; this was all improvised; they hadn’t sent her out here to do that. She’d just torpedoed her own steamship and here I was again apparently ready to help her swim away. I’d already saved her sweet stern once tonight.
I had my own personal figuring out to do. My own calibrating of lies. Certainly I knew a great many things she did not realize I knew and I had to decide what to continue to keep to myself, what to let out to her, what to lie about. Now that I’d dumped Brauer I was committed to keeping her mission going for my own benefit.
So we sat.
The ship’s turbines hummed. The room swayed. Both rather distantly, however.
And we sat. And there was a moment when she looked carefully at the bandage on my left cheek.
I wondered if she was trying to place it, if she’d had some brief, peripheral glimpse of it in the bar.
But she studied it only briefly and I saw nothing behind her eyes. She was good at masking things, but I figured I’d see at least a little something in her if she realized I’d followed her to the rendezvous with her father.
And we sat.
And I had time to wonder what had happened to her pistol. It was no longer visible. She had no pockets. My eyes moved to the smoking table beside her chair. In its center lay a small, black, snakeskin bag with a silver frame. I’d already hypothesized its use. She must have discreetly taken that with her to the promenade deck and put the pistol away.
I moved my eyes back to her and she was watching me closely.
Somebody needed to speak.
But we both stayed silent a few moments more.
Finally she said, “Thank you.”
“Don’t mention it.”
She hesitated. As if what would follow were spontaneous. But she had a plan now. She said, “You killed a man.”
Another neat shot, her ambiguity. She could be talking about our conversation on the Lusitania; when she asked if I’d ever killed, I said yes. Or she could be talking about the Hun on St. Martin’s Lane. She could even be talking about me taking the fall for Brauer. I had more apparent reason to kill him than she did. She was letting me choose how to take this. Which would suggest a direction for her lies.
“So did you,” I said.
“He was trying to rape me,” she said, as if I’d believed it the first time.
“I’ve never killed a man who wasn’t trying to kill me,” I said.
“Then we are both innocent souls,” she said.
I gave that a moment of silence.
Then I said, “That’s something I haven’t seen yet in the filmic art.”
I expected to have to explain the comment. But without a hesitation she said, “Irony?”
Which was one of the reasons I was still enchanted with her, this quick, telling thrust of her mind. And, under the present circumstances, one of the reasons I was more than a little afraid of her.
“Irony,” I said.
She smiled. Like here we were communicating so effectively.
I smiled the same smile. I said, “Tell me what you think the present irony is.”
This she did hesitate about. I was letting her choose.
But after a few moments, she decided to smile again, a small, sweet — and yes, ironic — smile. She said, “That we should be innocent, though we have killed.”
If we had actually decided, as it was beginning to seem, that we would banter now instead of getting down to serious lies and revelations, I would have contradicted her by saying, No, the irony is that you say we are innocent souls when we are not.
But I wasn’t ready to banter.
“The irony,” I said, “is that Walter Brauer was a homosexual.”
What flickered in her face may have been the first spontaneous expression of off screen emotion I’d ever seen in her. No simple label for it existed; she couldn’t make it larger than life if she tried.
But she’d be back in full control of herself any moment now. I pressed my advantage. “So why did you really kill him?”
“Who are you?” she said.
“Who are you?”
“Did you kill that man on St. Martin’s Lane Monday night?”
“You mean the guy they would’ve sent after you when they found out you murdered Brauer?”
She flickered again. But only very briefly. “Murder? What makes you think you know anything about it?”
“That’s how they’d see it.”
“Or anything about them?”