I waited for her face to come back to me. For a long moment it did not. She kept her eyes on the window. Perhaps she was thinking of that same moment.
She seemed a long way from answering my question, truthfully or otherwise, and the smoke of easy sex was in the air between us. I could see through it, but that didn’t make the more difficult thing any less difficult.
What did help, in this particular moment, was the sharp nip of pain on my fingertips. The match was still burning.
I waved the flame away and tossed the match on the floor. Right where she’d planted Brauer, as a matter of fact.
I stepped back to the bed and sat down.
She turned her face. She looked faintly disappointed once again. But not for long. We were still working on the new rules of the game between us.
She said, “Who would you say is currently the most important man in the Ottoman Empire?”
She still seemed to be far from the answers I wanted. But I was willing to play along with her for now.
The answer to her question was easy. Eight years ago a mixed bag of nationalists, secularists, pluralists, and various other haters of the despot “Crimson Sultan” Abdul Hamid II got together and hatched the Young Turk Revolution, which overthrew the Sultan and tried to reinvent the Empire. Three of the Young Turks achieved pasha status and became a ruling triumvirate, but one of them was clearly running the country from the position of minister of war, and he also happened to be the primary instigator of the Ottoman alliance with Germany.
“Enver Pasha,” I said.
Selene nodded. “Enver Pasha. And it turns out movies are all the rage in Istanbul and he’s my biggest fan. Biggest as in most intense, or so I’m told. One of the biggest in the world-leader category as well. Maybe old Wilhelm is a fan too and has him beat in that department. Who knows about Woodrow Wilson.”
“From the way he conducts his foreign policy,” I said, “I don’t think you’re Wilson’s type.”
“Be that as it may,” she said. “Enver somehow conveyed his intense regard for me to the Kaiser who told Kurt who conferred with a bigwig at the Foreign Office who had his minions find me, and they had the right documents and I received some impressive telegrams from all the impressive people in that daisy chain of impressive people and they all wanted me to. .”
At this point, though she had been rolling out this tale with absolute aplomb and wry worldliness, she abruptly broke off. The crack in her voice didn’t seem scaled for a theater audience. Indeed, it seemed like something she wanted to suppress. All right: perhaps wanted to portray as something she wanted to suppress. But I was prepared to keep both possibilities on the table.
She straightened and looked away and composed herself, and she said, “They want me to do certain things. The fundamental one being to spy on him.”
She stopped talking.
I said nothing.
There was this odd sense of plummeting in me, in my chest, in my limbs. An image of the man flashed into my head. It was vague, really, derived from the grainy news photos I’d barely glanced at over the past few years. But it was clear enough to accelerate the plummet: he was merely a thin-framed swarthy little man with black, uptwirled, Kaiser mustaches, downright dudish-looking, as a matter of fact. To hell with this, I thought, I already figured this was her primary skill as a spy.
I almost said something stupid. About Turkish men still having their personal harems. About Enver maybe making room for her.
I didn’t. I was glad I didn’t.
But she seemed to read it in me. Or maybe even in herself. She abruptly shrugged and turned her face away and said, “You know, maybe you should just walk out the door. I’ll deal with the consequences.”
That wasn’t what I wanted.
“I’m already in pretty deep with you,” I said.
She gave me her face, her eyes, once more.
“How was it all supposed to happen?” I said.
“We were going to the Pera Palace Hotel. Walter Brauer was going to meet someone. I’d wait. That’s all I know.”
I didn’t say anything.
She said, “Except then Brauer would deliver the goods.”
This line was delivered cold. Okay. She was going back to the frame of mind that was letting her do these certain things she was supposed to do but which were so much against her inner nature. It seemed to me now — and I was relieved at the feeling — that Selene Bourgani was overwriting her little scene, was overplaying her little part.
“Clearly this is difficult for you,” I said, trying to keep the irony out of my voice.
“Yes,” she said. She was ready to sniffle.
“So we’re back to truth time,” I said. “Not that I’m in so deep that I don’t still need the straight dope, if you want me to hang around and help you.”
Her face did not change in the slightest.
I made sure mine didn’t either as I tried to focus on what I needed to know. I’d been a bit too eager to show off my knowledge when I’d dropped Kurt Fehrenbach into the conversation. I was an idiot showing off for a woman. I missed a logical step. I jumped in with her director-boyfriend after she asserted her allegiance only to herself and not to the Germans. Old Kurt might indeed have something on her that was the leverage to make her work with the German secret service, but the issue at hand had been why she killed Brauer. Fehrenbach’s scoop on her couldn’t be the same as Brauer’s. Fehrenbach used his to make her a spy; it already had to be okay with Berlin. Brauer’s lowdown could have been worth her killing him only if it put her in serious danger with the Huns.
I said, “I need to understand two things. If the Germans want you to seduce Enver Pasha and work him for what he knows and they don’t, why did you agree? And why did you kill an unarmed Walter Brauer? Those two answers need to make sense to me together.”
Again, nothing going on in the face before me. Outwardly. The spinning of her brain’s turbines, however, was pretty much drowning out the ship’s at that moment.
“I’ll give you an answer,” she said. “But a little truthful clarification from you first.”
I presented the blank face and the silence, which I’d been learning from her.
She didn’t care. “You think I’m a German spy,” she said. “And you’re an American spy. Correct?”
This much was obvious. “Correct,” I said.
“Your people know some things about Brauer and about me and no doubt about Metzger and Strauss, as well. Correct?”
“And about the guy with the phony beard,” I said.
There was a little loosening in her. “So you think it was phony too,” she said.
“Who was he?”
“The boss.”
“Any name?”
“They called him Herr Buchmann.”
“The ‘bookman.’ Phony beard, phony name probably.”
“Aren’t they clever?” She let the irony ooze thickly this time.
He was known to the Brits, I thought. Or making sure he never would be known to them.
I put this out of my mind. It was my own fault, bringing Squarebeard up at this point, helping her slide away from straight answers.
“My questions remain,” I said.
She waved off my prodding. “So isn’t that all we need to know? We both of us are playing the same role. You happen to be doing it for the American government. Willingly, I presume. I did hear you pledge allegiance a few minutes ago, didn’t I?”
I nodded.
“And I pledged disallegiance to Germany. I may be out for myself, but your country is mine too. And don’t ask that damn ‘why’ again. America’s fine but it’s in second place with me. Do you really need to know what my old boyfriend has on me and why I’d shoot Walter Brauer to death and why I’d have sex with a small-sized, waxy-mustached, garlicky Turk with three wives and a Napoleon obsession? Maybe I didn’t like Walter’s tie. Maybe I’m a sucker of a slut for guys with garlicky breath, especially if they’re running a whole empire. Maybe I’d have sex with Enver Pasha for free but in addition the Huns are paying me big, in real, imperial gold. What difference does it make? Why should you help me out? Because whatever the Germans want to learn on the sly from Enver Pasha, you and your boys would like to know as well. Let me work for you both. All you sons of bitches. Why don’t you and I agree to that right now and stop all the idiot questions and then have some easy sex to seal the deal?”