She didn’t speak. She looked at me and I looked at her. Then she said, “Lucine.”
I did not speak.
And she said, “My name is Lucine Bedrosian.”
“Thank you,” I said.
She did not speak.
“It’s a beautiful name,” I said.
Her eyes filled with tears. These were not sentimental tears. Her face had tightened; her jaw had clenched. I thought for a moment she was angry at me for forcing her to say her name.
But she said, “If we are ever alone again. .” And she stopped. She worked to control her voice. “In the way that we have been alone.” She was in control now. “I would like you to say that name.”
“I will,” I said.
“But never anywhere else,” she said.
I nodded. I lifted my glass and held it between us. She lifted hers and she touched mine and we drank. And I wanted the curtain to come down on that. The chapter to end. But it couldn’t.
Her glass was empty. I poured in three fingers. I did the same in mine.
I said this as gently as I could. “Did your father try to talk you out of coming here?”
There was a stopping in her.
I didn’t mean to play upon her so ruthlessly. She had no idea I’d been there.
“Briefly,” she said.
“I was at the pub on the docks in London.”
This was a moment like the moment that eventually arrived in the sex between us. After she’d held her own, after she’d worked back at me, at some moment she would let go, she would let me carry us forward.
“You were there?”
“Yes.”
She shook her head no, not to doubt what I said but to wonder at how she’d missed this.
“I was standing at the bar,” I said.
“You followed me.”
“Yes. Brauer did too. He was outside, waiting. I followed both of you.”
She’d been sitting in the way women sit, dining or drinking in public: upright, nearly at the edge of the chair. But at this, her head and her shoulders did a slow slump, stopped by her elbows landing on the arms of the chair, and she turned her face away, looking off vaguely toward the far end of the salon, where the piano was playing a Chopin nocturne.
“That’s why he came to me on the North Sea,” she said.
Mostly to herself, explaining what she never quite understood.
When she let a few moments go by without speaking, I said, “And why you shot him.”
She straightened a bit; she looked at me. “Yes,” she said. “He didn’t figure it out as completely as you did, and I guess that night at the bar he convinced himself this man was just some aging money bag who’d been keeping me. But some of the details kept working at him. And he finally came to my cabin and confronted me. He wasn’t cut out for this work. He hadn’t said anything to anyone else about his suspicions and he was stupid enough to tell me so. And he was starting to talk crazy. He was threatening to make trouble in Istanbul. What I did, it felt like self-defense. And he was going to hurt a lot more people than me.”
This all came out in a quiet rush.
Then it stopped, and she took a slug of wine like it was whiskey. When her glass was down, she looked me hard in the eyes. “You would’ve done the same,” she said.
And things began to fit together. The Armenians seemed to be, from all accounts, particularly inept at organizing and defending themselves. What good would a little bed talk from Enver Pasha do them? She wasn’t giving herself to him for that. And then there was her question on the first night she and I made love. Have you ever killed a man?
And then tonight. As if I were picking a lock, the final tumbler lifted: she’d needed to see her German movie. The climactic scene. She’d played this role once before.
“You’re going to kill him,” I said.
49
And she fled.
She rose up instantly and walked away. I wasn’t about to try to stop her. The Germans could be watching us from any of a dozen occupied tables around the salon.
Maybe that saved my life. She probably had her pistol in her little bag. Maybe she would have liked to shoot me dead there in the Kubbeli Salon for endangering her plan.
I could see how that plan would seem mortally important, once you’d committed to it. This was the manifesto of any band of nationalists whose numbers were small and whose people were unfocused and unorganized and accustomed to repression: one isolated act could change everything. And they figured this belief had been confirmed last June. An anonymous, undersized Bosnian teenager with a nationalist cause and a sandwich in his hand started the war with two bullets.
I gave her a few minutes to get to her room and then I rose and left the salon.
I was a bit unsteady on my feet. I’d had a lot to drink today. And I didn’t know what to do next. This woman who had a hold on me had a new name and a deadly mission. I didn’t give a good goddamn about Enver Pasha’s life. But I was afraid for Selene.
No.
I was afraid for Lucine.
I was afraid she and her nationalist cohorts, whoever they might be, didn’t have an adequate way out for her after the deed was done. How could they? This whole thing was full of unknowns.
I wobbled before my door.
I thought to knock on Lucine’s.
But there was nothing to be done for now.
And so I went in and I lay down on the bed, and from the darkness coming upon me, I figured I would slip at once into asleep. But there was another darkness first. I thought: She might even be in this alone. She might even be expecting to die. Another thing she said that first night we touched, that goddamn first night: An actress is a fallen woman.
And I woke to her voice.
I opened my eyes. The sun was bright through my balcony doors.
I’d dreamed her voice, I thought. And I’d forgotten already what it was she’d said.
“Kit. It’s me.” Selene’s voice. Lucine’s voice.
I sat up.
She was outside the door.
A clear but restrained knock.
“Kit,” she said. “Please.”
I got up and crossed the room. I opened the door.
Admittedly I was groggy and my head was pounding from raki and wine, but I had trouble comprehending what was before me: an undersized teenage boy dressed in shirt and trousers of dark blue duck and wearing an oversized sunrain hat. A boy gone to sea. And then the pale face was familiar, and this was Lucine’s little brother standing there. And then it was Lucine herself, as if playing some Shakespearean comedy heroine disguised as a boy. She was Viola or Julia or Rosaline, and she stepped into my room and closed the door.
She placed herself squarely before me and very near and she reached out and laid her palm in the center of my chest.
“Listen to me,” she said. “I’m sorry for the way things ended last night. You are a very smart man. A very capable man. I’m not used to feeling that unprepared.”
She took a minute breath and words were rushing to form in my mouth and she stayed them with a very soft push of that hand on my chest. “Especially about something so important,” she said.
I insisted on speaking the words that had formed: “I wish I’d thought of some better way.”
“No,” she said. “None of this is easy. Will you come with me now, please? No questions?”
Without hesitating I said, “All right.”
“I woke you up,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Make sure you’re ready.”
I seemed to be dressed except for my shoes. My Mauser was in place. I excused myself and I stepped into the bathroom and pushed the door mostly to and somehow this was not awkward with Lucine now. “Have you practiced doing this for your role?” I asked from where I stood.