“And then there’s Der Wolf,” Hansen said.
“I saved him for the climax of my list of worries. You know him?”
“I’ve heard of him.”
“Yes? Out here?”
“He’s been mentioned by our counterparts in some bad business in several parts of the world.”
“What do you know about him?”
“Nothing. They know nothing. The Brits. The French. The Russians.”
“Not what he looks like?”
“Nothing,” Hansen said. “But the deeper in we get, allying ourselves to the Brits, the more interested we are on our own account. And if he’s after you. .”
Hansen completed his sentence with a shrug.
I said, “If he’s coming after Cobb, you figure he’s got to have some way to recognize me.”
Hansen nodded again, very faintly. “Maybe so,” he said. “Did Brauer have a beard?”
“No.”
“As far as your contacts here know, he could’ve grown one. You could put one on like their man Buchmann.”
“Did Metcalf come up with anything on him yet?”
“Or you can simply dispose of The Wolf,” he said, with a sly little slow-unfurling smile that made me uneasy. I figured every goddamn American embassy that had guys like this knew me now as a man with a knack.
“Buchmann,” I said, reminding him of my question.
“We don’t seem to have anything,” Hansen said.
And a thought thumped into my head. “He was in disguise,” I said.
“Evidently.”
“But he seemed important, by the way he was treated, the way he spoke.”
Hansen raised his eyebrows. He knew where I was going.
I said, “And you and the French and the Brits and the Russians are all scratching your heads because you can’t learn anything about Der Wolf.”
“I get it,” he said.
“And what I did in London was a direct affront to him. He’d handle this himself.”
“I get it,” Hansen repeated, at about half the volume.
We looked at each other.
Hansen nodded. “Like I said. Simply dispose of the big bad wolf.” This had a quite different tone in its reiteration. Somber.
We sat silently for a moment. The cloud had vanished from the vase of the water pipe. The coffee was cold.
For all my figuring, I was very uneasy about the next few days. Even the next few hours. Between the boys in Washington and a couple of major embassies, my mission right now was pretty much to wing my way forward on my own to see what might possibly develop and wait for a bad guy they didn’t know bedbugs about to show up in disguise to kill me and see if I can kill him first.
“We’re just gonna improvise this thing, aren’t we,” I said.
“That’s the business sometimes,” Hansen said.
He let me sit with that for another moment.
And the next logical thought came upon me. If it was just about me, I’d’ve been willing to continue improvising. But I figured I owed Selene Bourgani something more: “Maybe the way forward has to be improvised,” I said. “But if I don’t pull this off, if somebody realizes I’m not Brauer before I get out of Istanbul, what’s our plan of retreat?”
“If you can last through the week and start the trip back to London as Brauer, we’d give you a quiet exit somewhere along the line.”
“And if this thing blows up?”
“You can’t just run to the embassy. I hope you understand.”
“I get it. That’s what I can’t do.”
He waved off the next sentence.
But he did not give me an immediate answer. His thinking on the subject led him to lean forward, pick up his coffee, register its coldness, put it down.
I figured I better make things clear before he arrived at an answer. I said, “If I can get the woman out, I will.”
He registered what I said, but again he didn’t answer at once. I wondered if he had the authority to accede to me on the spot.
He did. He said, “The embassy has a guardship moored down the hill, at Tophane. The gunboat Scorpion. Starting tomorrow, each night from dark to dawn, I’ll have a man in a launch waiting at the foot of Tophane Iskelesi Caddesi at the west end of the dry docks. Tell him Ralph sent you.”
“Thanks.”
“Make it as clean as you can.”
“I should get back to my room.”
“There was one bit of information from London,” he said. “The flag in the bar at the London Docks.”
At which point our coffee man appeared in the doorway.
Hansen waved him away, though gently. And he did it with a few sentences of explanation in what sounded like fluent Turkish. I realized I’d been underestimating another of these secret service boys. I had to stop doing that.
He turned back to me.
He smiled again, as if he knew I’d just reassessed him. He said, “The flag was the brainchild of a priest thirty years ago. Red, green, and blue were colors of God’s rainbow for Noah, and for the people who once upon a time had their own country with Mount Ararat sitting in the middle of it.”
I knew where he was heading with this.
He said, “And now it’s the rallying flag of their twentieth-century nationalists. .”
“The Armenians,” I said.
44
I hustled back toward the hotel. The Nuttall message said first contact would be “sometime” today. Brauer would have stayed put. I had enough problems being convincing as Brauer; I didn’t want one more. But that concern set my pace, not my preoccupation. The street was a blur to me, registering only enough to navigate it, because of Armenia. I knew some of the history. The old Turks had treated the Armenians brutally. And the Young Turks orchestrated a couple of nasty slaughters themselves. If the bar in London was a meeting place for Armenians, then almost certainly the mystery language spoken there by Selene and the man I took to be her father was Armenian. Cyprus was another lie. For her to have fed me a second consecutive lie about her origins meant she thought the truth would be a problem between us, even with me being in the midst of covering up her killing of an unarmed man. And that problem was clear now. She was heading off to be Enver Pasha’s mistress for reasons she still would not fully reveal. I could see why her being Armenian would deepen that mystery. And she didn’t even know that I’d watched her meet her father in a London bar that catered to Armenian nationalists.
I could have speculated about all this. But I preferred to ask.
I hustled even more quickly off the hotel elevator and along the passageway.
I stood before her door.
I knocked.
There was no sound inside. I did not volunteer that it was me. She had no reason to think I knew more than I’d known when I left her earlier this morning. But neither did she have any further wish to speak to me. I wanted her to open the door without expecting me. No sound was coming from within.
I knocked again.
Nothing.
I put my ear to the door. I still heard no sound.
I knocked again.
As the silence persisted, I began to think she’d gone out. She had her own agenda, of course.
I moved away to my own room. I went in and pulled my packet of lock-picking tools from my bag. In the passageway again I made sure I was alone, even looking over the iron balustrade into the atrium. The elevator was out of sight and the chains and gears were silent.