“You can.”
The ship pitched a little and she flinched.
“Is it about the ship?” I said.
“Partly.”
I said, “This is the first ship you and I have been on that’s not threatened by submarines.”
“Maybe that’s why I’m free to be afraid.”
I could understand this. Some of the best soldiers I knew felt their fear after the battle, not during it.
“That comes with being able to loosen your hold on your courage,” I said.
She held me more tightly.
Partly the ship, she’d said. I understood this as well. I myself was starting to feel a rat-toothed gnawing in my chest, in my throat.
Der Wolf was on his way. I was to meet someone at the Pera Palace who expected me to be Walter Brauer and therefore expected me to be an expert on Islam and to speak Turkish, skills Metcalf had failed to include in my leather portfolio. Just for a starter.
The sun had set outside our cabin window. When it rose again we would arrive in Istanbul and the curtain would go up on our final act.
42
We came down the Bosporus, which was narrow enough to look like a river and which, therefore, for a boy who knew rivers mostly by knowing the muddy Mississippi, looked shockingly blue. And Istanbul appeared on its hills as a bit of a shock as well. It mounted from the blue water draped with a good deal of tree-dense green, its stitching of Western buildings white in the lately risen sun and its profusion of mosque domes and minarets a pleasant geometric spangling in the broad sweep of the city.
As we drew near, though, previously overlooked swaths of brown in the tableau were clearer and more pervasive. These were the intense runs of dingy wooden houses along what we would soon learn were the city’s winding, labyrinthine streets, narrow and filthy and foul, fully purged only by the periodical burning down of whole neighborhoods of these houses, which would spring back up, instantly dingy and combustible once more.
And as we eased up to the quay at Galata, the minarets now seemed to me as profuse in Istanbul as smokestacks in Pittsburgh. And as definitive: they were the big business of this place. I took all this in — the impressions of this approach and arrival and mooring — while standing next to Selene at the railing of the Dacia, and just as I was beginning to revise my own first-vision impressions of this town, I felt her shudder. I wished she’d shuddered at the thought of Enver Pasha, but I guessed this city on top of all that was what finally got to her. At least to a shuddering extent.
When Selene and I stepped off the disembarkation launch into the Place Karakeuï, we discovered a man in full chauffeur livery standing beside a 1908 model Unic taxi, holding a sign for the Pera Palace. And so we found ourselves sitting shoulder to shoulder in the tonneau of the same model taxi that carried Selene before me to the London Docks. I did not speak to her of this little irony.
By my reckoning we had an option to go straight up the hill from the Galata Bridge, but we turned west and followed one of the limited number of main streets — though the Unic still bounced and groaned and swayed severely on the cobbles — and then we climbed the hill the back way to the European enclave of Pera, avoiding the twisted, narrow, rubble-cluttered streets for the sake of the hotel’s well-to-do Western guests. We passed through the shadow of the 14th century Galata Tower, which rose fifteen stories from the hillside, once a military structure but now a fire-watch station, with a high, Gothic gallery of round arches and on top of that a stack of three, diminishing flat-roofed cupolas.
Then we turned into the street the locals called Meşrutiyet Caddesi, but known within Pera itself as the Rue des Petits-Champs. The street cars were electric, the shops were elegant and mostly French, the cafés had tables on the sidewalk, and all the storefronts already had their awnings unfurled against the day’s sun, vast, rippling, white-cloth hangings looking like the backsides of Berber tents. The local men in business suits were indistinguishable in style from the men on Chicago’s State Street except they each wore a red fez.
And in the midst of all this, there was a rolling of metal wheels and the crackle of electricity bearing a reminder of the war: a tram passed us full of the vacant faces and bandage-swaddled arms and foreheads of wounded men being transferred, Turks up from Gallipoli.
I pressed toward the window to watch them pass and then looked forward to an abrupt contrast. Up ahead was the Pera Palace, the extreme version of this whole mission’s neoclassical motif, the style seeming more aridly aloof after seeing the boys from the battlefield. The hotel looked like a mostly unaltered stone box, registering on the eye about like a Jack Daniel’s shipping crate, but without the juice.
Just before it, we turned into a narrow, cobbled side street, traversing the short side of the hotel, and then turned again and stopped before the main entrance.
Selene and I stepped down from the cab, and a couple of young fezes in long, brass-buttoned, pigeon-gray uniforms rushed forward to deal with our bags. I put a hand lightly under Selene’s elbow to guide her the few paces across the sidewalk. But I caught a movement in my periphery to the right and I looked that way as a German officer, who had just stepped from a taxi behind us, took a stride in our direction.
Selene looked too and we paused for the man, who gave us a quick, dismissive glance, easily accepting that he should go before us. His uniform was the German feldgrau—field gray, but with tones of green to blend into a battlefield — and his shoulder boards each had two pips. A full colonel. He also wore a Pickelhaube, the ridiculous, black, polished-leather spiked helmet that sat up over the ears protecting very little except the feelings of inadequacy of the officer beneath it. Did I feel Selene tense up a bit beside me? These were her guys. These were the guys I had to deal with.
The tin-pot Hun did a sharp right face in front of us and a guy was coming out of the hotel with the same beefy face but wearing a three-piece tweed suit and a matching Alpine hat. The man in the suit stiffened and paused and shot a crisp salute at the uniform, who saluted in return. The one disappeared into the hotel and the other turned to his right, heading up the Rue des Petits-Champs. The colonel was returning from a night on duty or a high-level early staff meeting, perhaps at the German embassy just up the street. The lesser officer in mufti was off duty. The Huns were dressing down to civies to keep a low public profile. Which meant privately they were working hard to control the Turkish government.
Selene and I followed the colonel into the marble entrance foyer and we checked in at the front desk, which was off to one side. I half expected further instructions to be waiting for me, but there was nothing. We went up the short staircase at the back of the foyer and stepped into the vast central space that lifted your chest like a cathedral or a major mosque. This was the grand Kubbeli Salon, with six domes floating fifty feet overhead, though secular domes, profusions of circular glass panes — the Western quarter’s architectural nod to the religious big business down the hill and across the Bosporus on the Golden Triangle of Stamboul. At the north end of the space were double doors. We passed through them and stood before a mahogany electric elevator car whose portal was an abrupt departure from all the neoclassicism: its cast-iron gate was an open-web facade of violent art nouveau curves.
The door clanged behind us. The operator opened the circuit, and we rose, the tops of the six domes soon appearing below us, becoming the faux floor of an atrium rimmed by four levels of rooms, the passageways balustraded by more art nouveau iron. We arrived at the top and we stood before her room, mine just a little farther along.