“Leave your lights on,” I said.
He did.
And we waited, the three of us, with me sitting as still as these two, as if the pistols were pointed at me.
I figured Arshak was waiting for some sign from the car. But I couldn’t step out or these two would do something stupid, especially the driver.
I could have asked for his weapon. But I had control of his empty hands. I didn’t want to invite him to put a pistol in one of them, especially in this dim light and out of my sight.
So we waited some more. It felt like a long time, though it couldn’t have been. But I knew the longer it went on, the more likely it was that one of these guys would try something stupid.
Finally the driver’s door of the Unic opened. It stayed open for a moment and then Arshak appeared and drew back at once.
I was a lot braver when I was acting from my gut and quickly. This sitting was starting to get me steamed at Arshak. But he was only an actor, after all. He was used to being brave on a stage with fake whiskers. It was tougher to play the role you needed to play in the real dark by a real road along the goddamn Bosporus. So I wasn’t upset. I was simply firm in thinking to this Armenian ham: Jump out of your trench and charge.
And he did.
He suddenly burst from the Unic with his pistol drawn and he hustled into our headlights and up to the driver’s window.
“We’re all taking it easy here,” I said to him, having to will myself back to English. This whole incident was strictly German in my mind.
He looked in.
“Point your pistol at the driver and watch his hands,” I said. “He’s still armed.”
And Arshak popped the muzzle of a Colt 1889 onto the driver’s left temple hard enough that the guy’s head jerked and his hands flew up.
“Hands!” I shouted.
They flew back down to the wheel.
I felt Ströder stir.
I kept my Luger pointed at the driver but twisted my torso and face to the colonel, tracking the little flinch of his head with the muzzle of the Mauser. Keeping him zeroed.
These kinds of things — small reflex twitches — could too easily escalate, take on a life of their own, get out of control.
“Settle down,” I said to the colonel, flipping back to German. And then to Arshak in English, “Keep the driver covered.”
“Got it,” he said.
I opened my back door.
I swung the Luger to the left and aimed it at Ströder’s chest. I eased the Mauser off his head.
“Careful now,” I said to him. “Let me see your hands.”
He held them up, framing his face.
“If one drops, you die,” I said and I backed out onto the running board. “Follow me.”
He did.
I put Ströder with his hands on the hood of the car, near the front passenger-side door, his legs stretched far out behind him and spread wide, leaving him on the verge of falling down. Then I opened that front door, and while Arshak kept his Colt on the driver’s head from the other side, I reached in and relieved the man of his Luger.
Now we had two German soldiers — allies of the Turks and abettors of the massacre of the Armenians — pressed side by side against the hood of the car, the headlights starting to dim as they drew down the battery, Lucine sitting a mile up the road in mortal danger and me convinced that our only chance to get her out alive was to slip in silently, which meant going back to the Pera Palace before making a move. And time was ticking by.
My Mauser was tucked away again in its holster but my Luger was raised and pointing at the back of Ströder’s head. I looked at Arshak and he was looking at me. His own new Luger was pointed at the back of the driver’s head.
Here we were, Arshak and I: two men; two Lugers; two enemies who would do anything they could to reverse this situation; the opportunity of vengeance by proxy for the death of the innocents in the well; the shortness of time and the urgency of our mission; the sloppiness of any alternate plan. And a tidy, obvious solution before us. My trigger finger was prickling to do this.
But Arshak and I continued to look at each other.
“It’s what they would do to us,” he said.
“Exactly,” I said.
A few accelerating pulse beats of silence later, I understood how I felt about that. I said, “You figure you’ve got tow-ropes in the back of that taxi?”
“Unics do get stuck,” he said.
And it was decided.
58
Funny how this kind of thing sometimes works. We didn’t kill our captive Huns, and as a direct result — while Arshak was off getting the ropes and I stared at the field-gray colonel blending into the shadows — my plan refined itself. I had Ströder remove his uniform, and after Arshak — who had learned some things in his working time at the London Docks — did some fancy knots on our two boys, I turned myself into a German army colonel.
The uniform fit pretty well. The hat was a bit small, but it squeezed on okay. The Luger in its holster and a magazine pouch were strapped to my waist. And just as the Mercedes headlights died, I carefully stripped off the gauze bandage from my left cheek.
“You’re pretty frightening in that costume,” Arshak said as I approached him.
I turned my face so he could see the scar in the starlight.
“Mother of God,” he said. “Is that makeup?”
“No.”
“Where’d you get it?”
“Long story,” I said. “Let’s go.”
“The battery went dead.”
“We’ll catch a taxi,” I said.
And I quickly explained where we had to go, what we had to do. To his credit, the ham took direction pretty well and we were off in the Unic.
We parked around the corner from the hotel, beside the iron fence along the public gardens. Arshak and I gave a wordless nod to each other and I got out and walked back down the street and approached the hotel. I ran an iron rod up my back and played my role, returning the salute of a major emerging from the front hotel doors, and I passed into the lobby and kept my eyes forward, looking at no one, walking briskly.
I approached the elevator, which had just arrived at the ground floor. The wooden and glass doors of the car opened and a man in a suit took the couple of steps to the outer cast-iron gate and pushed it open. I drew near.
It was the colonel from down the hall, the guy in uniform and Pickelhaube that Lucine and I followed into the hotel upon our arrival.
He took another step and still I wasn’t registering on him and now we were about to pass and he focused on my face and then on my epaulet pips and then on my scar and then on my face — all in very rapid succession. And he stopped. The officers I’d encountered so far were of lesser rank. This guy was my equal and it was his business to know other full colonels in town. Maybe he thought he knew them all.
I brazened on by him with a little nod — he was in mufti, after all, and if he didn’t know me, I didn’t know him. I took another step beyond him and was about to pass through the art nouveau proscenium that led to the elevator carriage.
And the colonel said, “Colonel?”
I stopped and I turned and I said to the colonel, “Colonel.”
I figured he had a strong hunch I wasn’t a colonel.
I could see in his eyes that indeed he did think he knew all the colonels.
Maybe he was even in the process of placing my face as the man who’d followed him into the hotel thirty-six hours ago. He’d seemed to look past or through me in my couple of encounters with him, but he might simply have been cagily observant.
I kept my eyes on him but turned my face slightly to the right, thoughtfully, as if I were trying to figure out where I knew him from. In the process, I reminded him of the Schmiss he’d noticed a few moments ago.