Free The Star of Istanbul by Robert Olen Butler

hidden.
    I thumbed the densely set, two-columned pages and found no markings, nothing placed in the leaves.
    On a personal impulse I turned to a listing under “C.”And I read: Cobb, Isabel, a celebrated American actress, born in St. Louis, Missouri; appeared in London in 1885 and 1897; represented, among other characters, Juliet, Rosalind, Kate, and Lady Macbeth. b. 1859.
    My mother’s entry was five lines long. I turned to the entry on “Islam.” That major religion, one of Brauer’s lecture topics, was dealt with in nine lines, terse to the point of vapidity.
    Brauer was intellectually arrogant. He found me and my work beneath him, even as it rated the captain’s table, a thing that quite literally stopped him in his tracks in the dining room the other night. He would find Nuttall contemptible.
    And the reason he was traveling with it was instantly clear to me, thanks to my months with Trask’s own lecturers. It was a code book. The exact same volume was in the possession of Brauer’s handler, wherever he might be posted; it was no doubt sitting, as well, on a desk in the Auswärtiges Amt , Wilhelmstraße 76, Berlin, the German Foreign Office. Perhaps the book was even in the possession of other German secret agents. Some, perhaps, with different cover stories, different useful skills, might even have lain in bed at night in their rented flats in London or Edinburgh or Liverpool or Southampton and browsed the book, might even have hidden the book proudly in plain sight.
    Not Brauer. This book tweaked his lifted nose. But he had to use it to decode the instructions he got from the boys in Berlin. They’d telegraph him blocks of numbers referencing page and column and line and word in the book. An unbreakable code, without knowing what the shared book was. Books like this went through various editions; I checked the copyright page. 1909. This would be useful to Trask. We would know the Huns by their Nuttall s. Perhaps even read their secret messages.
    I put the book back in its place and the dressing gown on top of it. Silk seemed out of character for Brauer. Maybe this was a gift for a woman. You wouldn’t think it to talk with him. But you wouldn’t think in private he’d suddenly dress like a dude.
    I closed the drawer and thought about the process: he’d get a telegram; the telegram consisted of blocks of numbers; he’d follow the numerical instructions to find each word in Nuttall; he’d write the words down. Perhaps he’d even received a message on the Lusitania . For war security, passengers couldn’t send telegrams, but we could receive them.
    I looked back to the desk.
    I stepped to it and opened the drawer and removed the notebook. Whenever he’d received his last message—on the ship or before he sailed—it was decoded into this notebook. I opened the cover and carefully tore out the top sheet. The paper was pretty thin and the Mongol was a hard No. 2, perhaps requiring enough pressure that it would make an indent on the page below. The tear went cleanly. Its absence would not be noticed. I had hopes.
    Then I gave every piece of furniture in the suite the treatment, looking behind and beneath, and with the commode I drew the drawers out as far as possible and checked their undersides as well.
    The sitting room had given me all that it could.
    I had one more room to go.
    I stepped through the darkened bedroom doorway. I have a pretty keen sense of smell, and in the dark, without the distraction of my primary sense, it was even keener. I could not place the faint smell but something was in the air. My first thought: saltwater mildew from the first-class bathroom in the far wall.
    I turned the electrical key and the place lit up. I looked toward that far wall. On the left, the door into the bathroom was closed; I myself stood in the mirror directly before me, hanging over the dresser; and on the right, built as a wedged corner