I returned to Selene’s door and bent to the lock and did my work. The tumblers fell into place and I turned the knob and pushed.
The door opened a few inches and abruptly resisted. A slide-chain lock was securely in its groove. Selene was inside the room.
She was not visible and so neither was I. I took a quiet half step farther to the side just in case.
Even as I did, her voice floated out to me. “Please,” she said. “No service.”
She took me for the maid with a pass key.
I pulled the door to.
I figured I would let this be, for now. She would either stonewall me further or lie some more. It would be better for the time being for me simply to be watchful of her. The problem of who would knock on my door and what might then need to be done could make this Armenian question moot anyway.
Moments later I slid my own chain lock into its metal groove. I took off my jacket and tie. The jacket smelled strongly of tunbeki. I thought to work on a news story. The Zeppelins already having yielded some actual hard news, I hadn’t yet figured out what other printable stories I might glean from my secret life of the past week. I could curbstone a good feature with the best of them, and it was in my mind to do so. But then I abruptly recognized this as an old reflex that was dangerously wrongheaded under the circumstances. The typewriter and the story coming out of it would be hard to explain to my Enver contact.
So instead I pulled Lagarde’s Deutsche Schriften from my bag, opened the drapes to the morning light from my balcony, went to the bed, removed my holster, and unsheathed my Mauser. I put the holster out of sight and I lay down, propping myself up with both pillows. I placed the Mauser on the bed beside me at precisely the place where my shooting hand would land at the first sound from outside my door.
In the meantime, I would read in German. Lunatic German, but it was all I could do at this point to anticipate my becoming Walter Brauer. The book would be for the man who didn’t know Walter. The pistol would be for the man who did.
I laid the book in my lap. I put my palm on its cover and I did give Selene and the Armenians one thought: If she was already doing a double — working for the Germans but actually passing on Enver’s plans to the Armenians — then of course she would still be lying to me, at least by omission. In this business you told as little as you strictly had to.
It was time to open Lagarde. He was known as an Orientalist and religious scholar. These “German writings” were his first plunge into political thought. Perhaps Walter saw some of himself in Lagarde.
I opened the book.
On the title page someone had written an inscription with a flexible-nibbed pen. The words were mostly English and the hand had an ornate, über-Spencerian style: Mein Schnüffel, this is a first of a seminal — yes, a seminal — work. Read it closely.
So Walter — the Orientalist, the Islam scholar — received this book as a gift. If his work for the Germans was a political act, then this would have been a logical book for one of his German handlers to have given him.
The German word at the beginning puzzled me. I didn’t know it, though it sounded vaguely familiar. It was a nickname perhaps. Probably so. The Mein suggested a nickname. And the pure sound of Schnüffel suggested a nickname as well, in an almost childish way. I could hear a German parent call a child a Schnüffel; I could hear a young man use the word with his girlfriend.
This last thought made me think of Walter Brauer and what I knew him to be. And the little joke in the inscription suddenly came clear. Yes. A seminal work.
This was a gift from a male admirer.
I passed my hand over the words.
A man like Walter, in that covert culture: perhaps he’d had many lovers. Did such men treat each other the way normal men often treated women? No doubt. They were still men. And if they could not be openly legitimate in the world, then perhaps they accepted as their lot the fugitive physical connection that other men aspired to with easy girls before finding a virgin to settle down.
And yet. Passing my hand over these words, I saw Walter returning to his bachelor flat at number 70 Jermyn Street having just barely saved his own life from the sinking of a great steamship, a calamity that had taken the life of his lover. Perhaps a significant, enduring lover, the breakup on board trivial and deeply regretted now. And perhaps that lover had once given him a book and Walter felt driven to carry that book with him to Istanbul.
Yes. Cable the book dealer from Boston. I saw now the words “a first of a seminal. . work.” It sounded a bit awkward except if you heard it as professional shorthand: “a first” meant “a first edition.” A first edition of a seminal work.
I’d wondered if that assignation with the late Cable had been prearranged. It had. Walter and this bookseller had known each other for a long time, had been connected for a long time. Walter was grieving more than I’d realized.
I could portray this man.
I understood him.
And I also felt stricken that I’d had to unceremoniously dump his body over the side of a ship into the North Sea in the middle of the night. There’d been no alternative. But I was sorry for Walter. Sorry for his friend Edward. I thought: Too bad they could not have come to rest in the same sea.
And a heavy knock came at my door.
45
My hand was on the Mauser. I rose and quickly put on my suit coat and placed the pistol in the right-hand flap pocket, tucking the flap inside. As I crossed to the door, I thought to touch the bandage on my left cheek. It was secure. I could never show my Schmiss as Brauer.
I slid the chain lock from its track and let it fall. I opened the door.
He was not Turkish.
That was good.
What struck me was this: he could have been Hansen’s colleague at the embassy. He could have been Hansen’s cousin from Topeka. He had the same sack suit and the same dirty gold hair and, from the first moment on, he had the same steady look of a professional in a trade that he didn’t want to talk about.
But he spoke to me in German. “Good morning,” he said.
“Good morning,” I said in my best German.
He nodded.
And he waited.
But it took me only a brief moment to realize what for. “Gutenberg,” I said. The password from the coded Nuttall instructions.
He smiled. “Mr. Brauer,” he said.
I brought an empty hand from my Mauser pocket, with the option of a quick return.
He took my hand and pumped it as if the last time he’d been to this well it was dry. “Colonel Martin Ströder,” he said.
He didn’t look old enough to be a colonel, though I didn’t doubt him. He started young, was well connected, had some special, dirty talent.
He knew Brauer’s name—my name — and I replied only with a nod.
He said, “Your room would be good for speaking. Perhaps the balcony.”
I stepped to the side.
He came in and closed the door himself and slipped the security chain into place.
With seeming casualness I put my hand back in my pocket.
In the process of his turning around from the door, he gave the room a quick, efficient once-over.
This was either a precautionary reflex or a preparation for a bad intention. I slipped my hand around the grip and put my thumb on the safety.
He smiled at me. “They have put you in a nice place,” he said.
“I am sure it is for the sake of the woman,” I said.
He nodded an ain’t-it-the-truth little nod.