And as the orchestra had waltzed us to our tables last night, on this night they ragtimed us away, but with a piece just right for our gang, “The Operatic Rag,” syncopating quotations from Wagner and Bizet and Verdi. I joined the first-classers politely swelling out the forward dining room doors. I kept back a ways in the crowd, letting Brauer and Cable stay ahead of me. The after dinner smokers and socializers were all heading up three levels to A Deck to settle into the Smoking Room, if they were men, or the Lounge and Music Room, if they were women. I went up the stairs behind a cacophony of small talk, a welter of perfume, a rustling din of evening clothes, and at the top of the stairs we men separated from the women and entered our preserve, paneled in Italian walnut and filled with settings of sofas and easy chairs with the simple curves and cabriole legs of the Queen Anne style. Above us, the glass-paneled arch of the top-deck ceiling was darkened by the night.
I hung back at the Smoking Room door and watched Brauer and Cable sit down at one of the arrangements in the center of the room, with four chairs around a small, walnut writing table. The two men sat at right angles to each other, and as the other two chairs remained empty, I moved across the room toward them, making haste when they could not see me, and then arriving in their sight casually, noticing Brauer and affecting a mild and pleasant surprise.
“Dr. Brauer,” I said. “Good evening.” I looked around the room as if to note how the place was filling up. I looked back to one of the empty chairs. “May I join you?”
Parties of two in a steamship Smoking Room had to expect strangers to end up in their company. Brauer did not hesitate. He nodded me to the empty chair to his right, facing Cable, and I sat.
“Mr. Christopher Cobb,” Brauer said to his companion, though in a perfunctory tone, and then he turned to me and said, “Mr. Edward Cable,” his voice warming a little.
I reached across and offered my hand to Cable, wondering why they were here, with Brauer uncomfortable and their not being free to speak to each other in the way they surely wished. But perhaps they’d done all the business they needed to do during the day and this was to maintain their cover.
Cable accepted my hand for shaking and he had a gentle grip, the grip of a man used to turning expensive book pages very carefully.
“Mr. Cable,” I said.
“Mr. Cobb,” he said. And in just those two words his Boston Back Bay accent rolled over me as dramatically as if he were one of my mother’s leading men making an entrance, the “Mister” coasting on a schwa to a vanished “r” and the vowel of my name reshaped and drawn out like awww-ing at the sight of a Brahmin baby.
The man offered a smile as well, over the shake, a bookman’s smile for a serious customer. But he surprised me as we settled back into our chairs. “You are a foreign correspondent,” he said.
“Only if the foreigners are killing each other,” I said.
He chuckled at this.
I glanced at Brauer, wondering if he’d spoken of me. But Brauer was looking at Cable with a focus that suggested he was surprised at the man’s familiarity with my byline.
Cable said, “It’s not your writing about battle that has interested me. Your feature work is as good as anything by Richard Harding Davis.”
I looked back to Cable, caught his eyes, and searched them for irony. I didn’t see any. Too bad this guy was a German spy. I was starting to like him.
He went on, “I remember last year a story you did on a young Mexican woman who wanted to fight for the rebels. Very interesting.”
That was a good story, about a special young woman, a feature story in the midst of my little Mexican adventure, and there was nothing in it to cause any suspicion in a German agent. The whiff of danger I was presently smelling was a mistake, was just the ongoing lighting up of pipes and cigars and cigarettes all around the room going to my head. Nevertheless, this cohort of Brauer citing my story from the land that led me to my own secret work: that was a little unsettling. But I was a public person. I had plenty of followers.
“Where do you get a chance to read me so closely?” I asked.
“Boston.”
This was possible. “The Daily Leader,” I said, which was owned by Griswold and splashed all my words around prominently.
“Just so,” said Cable. “You should do a book someday.”
“I may do that,” I said.
I glanced at Brauer. He’d lit a cigarette and was draping one leg over the other at the knee and turning his body away from Cable. He blew his first drag of smoke into the air and seemed to be carefully striking a pose of indifference.
“I deal in books, mostly rare,” Cable said.
I looked back at the Brilliantined man. He was good. He was a mystery.
“What’s your final destination?” I asked.
“London.”
“Book business?”
“I’m always doing book business.”
I turned to Brauer, who was still wrenched away from the conversation. “And Dr. Brauer,” I said. “After my little confusion over your honorific, I didn’t have a chance to ask. How do you make use of your doctorate?”
There was a very brief moment of utter scorn from Brauer: he turned his eyes to me without turning his body, or even his head. But before I could glance at Cable to see if he was witnessing this attitude, to see how he was reacting, Brauer was uncrossing his leg, squaring his body and face around, and he gave me a straight answer in what sounded like a civil tone. “I’m a lecturer at King’s College London.”
I grew up backstage in hundreds of theaters across the U.S. and in more than a few other countries and I lived with people who were always in the process of memorizing, stretching their memories all the time, and I loved all the details of things, the names of things, and that carried along to my work as a newsman, remembering and naming and treasuring details, and all of this made me able to do what I was about to do for the arrogant priss who sat before me, who no doubt honored a keen memory as a sign — bogus though it was in and of itself — of intelligence: I said, “Sancte et Sapienter.” Which meant, ironically under the circumstances, “With holiness and wisdom.” Which was the motto of King’s College London, where my mother had a lover for a time while she played Kate in Shrew in the West End when I was an impressionable and absorbent thirteen.
Brauer could not hide a tiny backward head flip of surprise.
He couldn’t suspect me of being in the same secret business he was, so I figured it was good to keep him from simply dismissing me as a plebian. A little apt Latin seemed to be doing the trick. “So,” I said, looking to Cable and back to Brauer, “you boys pals from one side of the Atlantic or the other?”
Brauer’s lips disappeared in a thin, hard line.
“Neither,” Cable said.
I turned to him.
He shot Brauer a glance, but with a crooked little smile attached. I was looking at both of them as actors. Actors at the Moscow Art Theater under Stanislavsky, doing Chekhov. Working the nuances. Ignoring the balcony. And this smile was interesting. Like they’d talked over their public story about this and Cable had won but Brauer didn’t like it and this was the first time they had occasion to say this.
“We’ve only just met,” Cable said.
What I was hearing was either a lie or only a partial truth. They either knew each other already or indeed this was their first meeting, but it was planned and significant. Cable wasn’t afraid of my seeing the little smile because he liked his little ironies, liked relishing them, and he couldn’t even imagine I’d be on to them.
I took out my pack of Fatimas and offered one across the table, as I said, “Steamships are good for that.”