I lowered my voice to match hers. “Yes?”
“I don’t want to be alone,” she said.
I had the impulse to reach across the table and take her hand. But I did not. I said, “All right.”
In Berlin we changed trains. We walked together on the platform beneath the vast, steel-trussed vault of the train shed at Friedrichstraße Station. As we approached the first-class coaches, Selene slipped her arm inside mine.
And so, as the train still sat in the station, with the scuffle of feet through the coach passageway, with the hiss of steam and the gabble of voices outside the window, with my bags stowed and my tie straightened, when a sharp, clear rap came to my sleeping compartment door, I crossed the floor a little breathlessly and slid the door open expecting Selene.
A thick-necked man in civilian gray filled the doorway, gray also in eyes and in thickly upstanding hair and in walrus mustache. I took an instinctive step backward. Again, my pistol was in a bag.
But I was Brauer.
Indeed, the man asked, “Herr Brauer?”
“Jawohl,” I said, my mind shifting to this language that needed to be part of my reflex self now.
He said, “Welcome, if briefly, to Berlin.” His German was clipped and precise and emotionless.
“Thank you,” I said. “Come in.”
He did, closing the door behind him.
I had no idea who he was. I was having a delayed surge of gratitude that he had no idea who I was either. I was beginning to rely on Brauer’s not being recognizable. But was I supposed to expect this guy?
The large gray man was before me again, offering a hand, which I took. “I am Kaspar Horst,” he said, “from the Foreign Ministry. I wish I had some schnapps for us to drink, but the train will soon depart and I have to leave you to do your work.”
“Please,” I said, motioning him to the bench seat along one wall. We sat beside each other.
“She is nearby?” he asked.
“The next compartment,” I said.
He lowered his voice drastically. “She is stable, this woman?”
“Sufficient for our purpose,” I said.
“Good.” He glanced at my left cheek. I had to repress the impulse of my hand to leap there, to make sure the bandage was in place. As long as I was Brauer, the Schmiss made me a liar. “You are hurt?” Horst asked.
I said, “You are aware, surely, that I had to save my own life on the Lusitania, when our efficient U-boat corps sank it?”
“Ach so,” he said, flaring his hands. “Who could have anticipated that? That would have been very bad. Very sadly ironic.”
“We were lucky to escape,” I said.
“The Wolf will follow you,” Horst said.
He paused and I worked to keep calm. He’d changed the subject abruptly. And Der Wolf was somebody he clearly expected me to know. I wondered if it was a reference to me, to Christopher Cobb.
The moment of silence was probably not long but it seemed at the time to go on and on. Then Horst said, “He is afraid this man Cobb will cause more trouble.”
I nodded. “Even in Istanbul?”
“That’s his fear. The Wolf will come to you soon.”
“Good,” I said. Bad, I thought. Very bad.
He rose. This was why Kaspar Horst had been sent to me at the Friedrichstraße Station. To alert me to Der Wolf coming to help.
Shit.
I rose with him. “I have return tickets. .”
“He’ll find you first,” Horst said. “Needless to say, you will take any future direction straight from him.”
Horst offered his hand. I shook it. “Thank you for the help,” I said, using my anxiety to play grateful enthusiasm. The lie of good acting.
“The Emperor is counting on all of us,” he said.
41
This was the vaunted Berlin-to-Baghdad Express, the great umbilical of Germany’s nascent Asian empire, though it still had big gaps beyond Aleppo and we ourselves would have to leave it in Budapest and head for the Romanian coast and a steamship down the Black Sea to avoid Servia. But immediately before us were twenty hours to Budapest, and Selene and I spent most of it on her narrow bed, even after there was not a drop of anything left in either of us to give or to receive or to exude, and yet we stayed in that bed and we smoked and we slept and, now and then, we tried some more with our bodies, tried to give and to take, and we were fine when that didn’t go much of anywhere, laughing at it even, like an old couple who had sweet intentions and patience with each other because of some good, larger feeling they shared, but we said very little, not like lovers at all in many ways, not like that old couple either, in this respect, though we should have been intensely curious about each other — I should have been about her, professionally at least — but sealed as we were in a room in a coach on a train that surged and slowed and stopped and surged and slowed and surged again, its whistle as distant and as mournfully vowel rich as the cry of a rutting cat, we put away any questions or issues that came from outside this shuttered window, this shuttered door.
We did dress, twice, once to eat another meal in the dining car with the landscape dark outside, and once scrambling into our clothes when the passport officials boarded the train at Teschen, on the Hungarian frontier, and they knocked on our door only to quickly click their heels and bow their way back out again in response to our German documents, two youngish men with immaculate Hungarian officer uniforms and large mustaches. Selene and I both noticed them exchanging a knowing little smile over these two lovers as they slid our door closed, which we laughed about much harder than it warranted, which revived our bodies a bit for one more tumbling and soft pounding before a good six hours of deep sleep wrapped in each other’s arms.
And then we were in Budapest.
And immediately before us were twenty-four hours to the Romanian port city of Constanţa.
We did not have to say more than a dozen words between us for us to decide that I would go to my own cabin now and close the door and we would not see each other again until we arrived on the shore of the Black Sea.
Which was what we did, across the Hungarian plains and over the pine-quilted Carpathian Mountains and all along the wheat and corn fields of Romania, a landscape that could easily have been Illinois except for the water-buffalo-powered plows.
And then we were on the SS Dacia, a 3,200-ton mail steamer of the Romanian State Railways doing the Black Sea run to Istanbul with 120 first-class cabins and two special cabins built to accommodate the women of a Turkish harem.
And we ended up once again in each other’s arms, this time in my cabin. In the first hour we made love, and it felt as if it was the last time Selene and I would ever make love, though that had become a routine feeling for me, an inevitable part of the act: from our almost tender commencing kiss, to her threat on my life if I didn’t keep going, to her final scream, to the cigarette afterward, to a voice in my head going I bet this is the last.
But on the Dacia, upon the Black Sea, there was a new coda to our jazz suite: we segued immediately into a close embrace burrowed deep beneath the sheet and blanket. And Selene wept.
Wept and trembled.
Silently for a while, and then she said, “I’m afraid.”
“It’s all right,” I said.
“This is the only time you’ll ever hear me say that,” she said.
“It’s natural.”
“I won’t feel it again either,” she said.