“And you understand that to be what?”
“I’m not at liberty to say.”
“Do you know she will try to kill Enver Pasha?”
Neither of them flinched.
So he did know. So the news of her killing Brauer had gone down easy because this man had already reconciled himself to his daughter taking lives. Brauer was a warm-up.
Only one point needed clarification. I said, with some heat, “You didn’t like what she was planning? Wasn’t this a request from the Armenian underground? An assignment?” I heard myself. It sounded as if I knew the answer to those questions was Yes, this was an assignment and I was furious about it in a personal way.
Though she said, “No. It was entirely my idea,” and I believed this and it didn’t surprise me.
As much in control of my own performance as I thought I was, I must have revealed something I was unaware of, because Arshak narrowed his gaze on me and then turned slowly to his daughter and looked at her. Something flashed into her face that she no doubt showed as a little girl when she was caught stealing a cookie or kicking the cat.
He looked back to me.
He was her father. He knew exactly what his daughter and I had been doing.
I watched for a flicker of jealousy.
“She fell for your britches,” he said, with a little smile directed at her.
“It was my talent,” I said.
“We’ll see about that,” he said.
I looked at Lucine and back to her father. I’d readily followed her this morning to the quay and into a taxi, but I had to slow down now. I understood that she needed me to deliver her to Enver Pasha. But my stake in this — my country’s stake — was no longer a flow of high-level inside information. Hansen had figured that might be of interest to Trask and the boys stateside. But taking a hand in the assassination of the leader of the Ottoman Empire was a whole other thing. Even if it could stay covert.
“I have to be clear,” I said. “I agreed to help a German spy in return for the same intelligence she gave them. I didn’t agree to help her kill Enver Pasha.”
“That’s why we want to talk,” Arshak said.
Talk? Perhaps. But when I leaned back in my seat, I was reassured by the heavy nuzzle of my Mauser.
53
But the talk — or whatever else they had in mind — was deferred. We rode in silence now as the taxi entered the outlying village of Ortakiöi and we turned at the green-domed mosque on the bank of the Bosporus and headed inland, up the hill and into the densely populated Jewish quarter. The taxi dropped us at the mouth of a narrow street and we walked into its compressed air, which was full of the stench of sewage and the din of street voices, speaking mostly Ladino, the special mix of Hebrew and Spanish that the Sephardim carried with them into exile from Iberia.
We passed between the rows of wooden buildings. Most of them followed the Turkish form of overhanging, corbeled stories, but we climbed on and finally approached a break in the attached houses, near the top of the hill. Here was a longer, flat-fronted, three-story building, with several entrances along it and with a street or an alley on each side, an architectural descendant of the yahudihane that filled this de facto Jewish ghetto a couple of centuries ago.
We turned in at the center of the three entrances to the yahudihane, its doorpost affixed with a mezuzah, its metal casing rubbed bright from the faithful passing through this door.
And inside, the sound from outside grew dim, and the stench faded with the smell of coffee and tobacco. The large central room of this coffeehouse could have been found in the coffeehouses in any part of Pera or Stamboul or Galata, with its divans and tapestry rugs and small tables for the coffee trays. The clientele, however, was special. The clearest sign was the group of half a dozen men sipping coffee together near the door. They were the most ardent Sephardim in their gaberdines and long beards. As for the rest of the men in the room, though they were dressed in Western suits and jackets like the coffee-shop Turks, the inner edge of their coats or vests showed the woolen fringe of their prayer shawls. Many of them wore skullcaps, the yarmulke, with their secular clothes, at least in this select company, and no doubt their shorter beards were managed by scissors and clippers only.
Among the suited, close-clipped contingent was the owner of the coffee shop, who greeted Arshak now with a Merhabah and then accepted his hand for a warm handshake. And immediately behind him was another man, a man with a boxer’s build at the age when a boxer starts to think about retiring. He wore a dark gray fez that didn’t taper to the top.
The owner stepped aside for him and he came forward to embrace Arshak, and the two men spoke quickly, intensely, in Armenian. Lucine and I stood waiting, and the owner, apart from us but watching us closely, waited too.
Then Arshak and the other man stopped and Arshak turned to us full of blustery goodwill. “Fine,” he said. “Fine. Let’s have some coffee.” He was acting.
The Jew led the four of us through the room and out a back door into the courtyard, paved in field stone with a solitary fig tree growing in an earthen plot at the center. We sat at a horseshoe of iron benches: Arshak by himself on the bench at the apex, I on one of the sides, Lucine and the other man across from me, these two sitting at opposite ends of their bench. I sensed nothing between them.
The owner lingered briefly and bowed himself away and a young man in shirtsleeves, with yarmulke and ear locks, immediately whisked in with a low table, and another followed him with water pipes, and a third with coffee on trays.
In all of this, Lucine played the boy and kept her mouth shut.
After the young Jews left us and we were settled, Arshak said to me, “This is Tigran.”
Tigran nodded at me while Arshak spoke to him in Armenian again, perhaps to explain my unexpected presence in their plans.
When Arshak finished, Tigran stood and stepped toward me and I stood too and we met in the middle and shook hands. He said something in Armenian.
Arshak translated, even as Tigran continued the handshake: “He said he appreciates your sympathy for our people in this dark time.”
I said to Arshak, “Tell him with a grip like his, I’m glad we are on the same side.”
Arshak laughed and translated and Tigran laughed and through Arshak complimented me on my own grip. And that was it with Tigran. He sat back down and more or less vanished. I’d seen this happen many times before, covering wars abroad. He and I were a couple of guys who might have gone on to talk about a lot of things in common, but instead we might as well have been a couple of fig trees in a field because of the one thing we didn’t have in common. Words.
Then Arshak picked up his cup and saucer, and we all followed his lead and we took a sip of coffee, holding both saucer and cup, Turkish style.
Things suddenly felt oddly relaxed, given the situation. We seemed to be waiting for something.
I thought to keep my mouth shut and let them make the next move, even if it was in the conversation. But I said to Arshak, nodding toward the front of the coffee shop, “I don’t find their friendship so unlikely.” I knew enough about the situation to see past the classic schism of Christianity and Judaism.
“Then you know what binds us,” Arshak said.
“Persecution.”
“Good,” he said. “I thought I’d have to explain that first. Ours is not so well known as theirs.”
“You share the Turks,” I said.
He grew expansive. “That’s an odd thing,” he said. “The Turks despise the Jews in the street, face to face. But formally, by government attitude and even decree, they’ve made them safe. The Muslims and the Jews share the Old Testament more directly, and I think that makes the Jews tolerable to them in the abstract. The Armenians, however. We’re Christians. And worse, we are stained with the sin of having been a thriving nation in this land long before Turkey and the Ottoman Empire even existed, and by the fact that centuries ago the Turks stole everything from us. People and nations are the same: we preserve a special hatred for those we’ve already abused.”