“I’ve been horseback riding,” I said. “I’m not presentable.”
He stopped.
“Can I have a few minutes?” I said.
He gave me a once-over look. “Time is more important to the Pasha,” Ströder said. And then he smiled a little, flipping his chin slightly upward. “The Turks are not so scrupulous as we Germans in those matters.”
“Do we need to get the woman?” I said.
He did not answer at once. He was reading me. The news was bad, I realized.
And he said, “We have taken her along already.”
“Very well,” I said. “At least may I wash the horse off my hands?”
He hesitated.
I nodded to the bathroom.
He nodded assent.
I stepped into the bathroom, switched on the light, stood at the basin, looked at my own face, the bandage gray from the ride, and I lowered my face to the basin. I let my hands do their task on their own. I had to think.
My mind was inclined to thrash now, but I held my thoughts steady. The Germans didn’t simply come and shoot me. Perhaps the question of the man known at the Pera Palace as Walter Brauer was still open. Perhaps my knowing the password was still carrying me. Brauer’s body was decomposing in the North Sea. If Der Wolf saw me at the quay and recognized me as Cobb, perhaps he still hadn’t placed me at the Pera Palace posing as Brauer.
And perhaps, as well, Lucine had indeed arranged to do this thing on her own. With an insistent offer of her body, an expressed aversion to Brauer, she could have arranged to be taken personally and immediately to Enver Pasha. She didn’t need her father and me to be meddling with this, trying to save her. An actress is a fallen woman, she’d said. Perhaps she was shooting the leader of the Ottoman Empire to death even as I rolled the bar of soap around and around in my palms. Perhaps she was herself being shot to death in this next moment, even as I placed the soap on the side of the basin and rubbed up the lather on my hands.
I was having a bad feeling about this whole thing now.
I had to assume they either knew or seriously suspected who I was.
If the Germans did know who I was, the fact remained: they didn’t simply kill me, right here and now. Why the pretense?
And I understood. I’d been thinking in the old ways. The battlefield ways. They wanted to interrogate me before killing me. And it might suit them to begin the interrogation without tipping their hand. Perhaps even, for a time, to speak to me as if I were getting away with all this. And, of course, they feared me. They too knew I had the knack. They’d wait until I was in a much more controlled space before getting rough.
I could dry my hands, pull my Mauser and shoot Colonel Ströder to death.
I’d save myself but that would surely doom Lucine. I had to hope — and it would make sense — that they were taking me to the same place they were holding her. I had to let Ströder play this out so I could find out where that was.
All right.
I dried my hands and stepped from the bathroom.
Ströder was there, his field cap on his head. He had been watching me from the shadows, the bedroom light extinguished.
“I’m ready,” I said.
“Good,” he said.
I took a step toward the door.
He stopped me with a lifted hand.
“I’m sorry, Herr Brauer, but I must check for a weapon. Enver Pasha requires it.”
I unbuttoned my coat, spread my arms.
For the possibility of his hands going around behind me, I readied my right leg, ever so slightly angling my knee toward his crotch.
He began to pat me down, his hands slipping inside my coat and traveling down my sides. The Mauser in the very center of my back wasn’t even five inches wide. In my Chicago police beat days, I’d only ever heard of one man, a genteel grifter, who carried a weapon in the small of his back. I’d never known a military man to do this.
Ströder was feeling into my coat pockets.
I was ready to have it out with him hand to hand. But I still didn’t know where Lucine was.
He pulled in closer to me.
I heard him stop his breath.
His arms went around me and he touched my back pockets, his two palms falling upon my backside. Gingerly.
It occurred to me I might still be Brauer to him and Brauer might actually have a reputation. Or Ströder had a reputation of his own.
Before he could lift or turn his hands I said, sweetly, coyly, “Careful there, Colonel.”
His hands whipped off me and he stepped back.
“We shall go,” he said.
The Mauser was still mine.
Ströder led me out the door and along the passageway and down in the elevator and across the salon and the lobby and through the front doors.
A closed-cabin Mercedes Torpedo sat at the curb, as gray as Ströder’s uniform, its whole radiator arrowing forward into a point. The driver was a burly Hun in an enlisted man’s uniform and a peakless field cap. As we emerged from the hotel he snapped to attention, saluted the colonel, and stepped to the back door and opened it.
Ströder led the way the few steps across the narrow sidewalk and he plunged on inside, which I was glad to see. The car was pointed north, to my right, and so following the colonel into the backseat, I would be traveling with him to my left and my shooting hand unencumbered and out of his sight.
I went in.
The driver slammed the door behind me.
The interior was pretty tight. But okay to maneuver.
The driver bounced heavily behind the wheel and shut his door firmly. There was no partition. The car smelled of leather and gun oil and garlic: the seats, their weapons, their breath.
None of us spoke.
We immediately went down the hill but then turned north and crawled for a while through the commencing nightlife of the Grand Rue de Péra, all three of us being, I sensed, from our eyes kept forward and our faces grimly set, sincerely of a single mind about this much at least: how ignorant and vapid were the bankers and diplomats and merchants and bureaucrats and ship captains and Western tourists and all their women who were dining and theatergoing and drinking and dancing while a war was going on from the Black Sea to the Irish Sea, from the North Sea to the Red Sea. And while three men were passing by, one or more of whom likely would be dead before the night was done.
57
We made our way toward the Bosporus, following the Grand Rue through the traffic circle at Taksim and then, just before the Palace of Dolmabahçe, we joined the road along the European shore. We turned north toward Ortakiöi and almost immediately we were running past the palace wall, the very ground I’d covered this morning with Arshak and Lucine.
I was itchy to do something. We were heading to her now. I was convinced she was in serious trouble. And I would be too, as soon as Enver Pasha took a look at me. I wanted badly to slip my hand into my coat and to the small of my back and get this started. But I had to wait. The Huns had to show me where she was.
Ströder lit a Turkish cigarette.
I watched out the window.
We passed through Ortakiöi, the dome and minarets of the big mosque at the quay barely visible in the gathering night. Outside of Pera on the hill, Istanbul was a dark city at night. A very dark city. Except for the handful of motorcars and their headlights, I caught only glimpses now of isolated candles and kerosene lamps: through a house window, before a sidewalk coffee shop, inside a café.
Then all at once the off-road light changed; the fleeting bursts were brighter, steadier. These were electric lights in upper-floor windows behind privacy walls as we entered the long run of waterside yalis, the villas of the wealthy that stretched on up the Bosporus a dozen more miles to Büyükdere and the edge of the Belgrad Forest. Enver Pasha had a yali along here. Of course. The roadside was lit now, a flash of electric lamp light rushed into our windows and away and then another and then darkness and then another.