Free The Star of Istanbul by Robert Olen Butler Page A

piece, was a marble-topped washbasin. Something caught my eye there. I moved the length of the room, aware in my periphery of the two beds arranged foot to foot, as in Selene’s suite, but keeping my eyes on what seemed the unusual detail.
    Now I stood before the washbasin. And I was right. Two men’s straight razors were neatly laid side by side. Two shaving mugs sat behind them. And in one drinking glass, two bone-handled toothbrushes leaned away from each other at the top but angled down to the bottom of the glass where their tips touched.
    I knew the smell.
    I turned. On one of the beds the covers were stripped open, the sheet exposed.
    And all the oddness I’d felt in the Smoking Room, trying to understand Edward Cable as a player in the game of German secret service, was explained. He was simply a bookseller from Boston, sharing a secret, certainly, with Walter Brauer, but not the one I was seeking to understand.

9
    After thoroughly searching the bedroom and finding nothing further of interest, I slipped out of Brauer’s suite and left him and Cable behind for a couple of hours. I ate à la carte in the Verandah Café and I strolled the promenade and I settled into the still mostly empty Smoking Room, and until the moment I pulled out my cigarettes and lit one up, I thought about other things. About my feature story and about the reporting I would do in the other role I still played—no matter where I went, I’d find stories for Christopher Cobb to cover—and I thought about the Cubs, how I’d miss hearing the scores through the summer, and about the new Chicago Federal League team and their swell new ballpark on Addison. And I thought about Selene, though I tried not to, as I was determined for the rest of the night to keep my thinking just as it would have been before I went to Mexico last year, when I was simply Christopher Cobb, war correspondent.
    But when I lit up a cigarette on the end of a couch in the Smoking Room, I let my thoughts turn once more to Brauer. Oddly, he seemed more human to me now. Not so easy to despise. I’d been around a lot of men in tough situations and I knew that these feelings existed in the world. Sometimes men even responded to the stress of battle by reaching out like that. I was ready to think that Brauer wasn’t working on board, that he was simply in transit to London, that I’d simply have to follow him to the city and continue to keep track of him there. And I did have the slip of paper in my pocket and a chance to get a little something out of it.
    But if the Lusitania were merely transportation for him, I still wondered why Brauer was in first class. The cost of his suite would’ve kept a working-class family of four in a London suburb subsisting for two years. A prohibitive extravagance for his German bosses. An impossible lot of money for a college lecturer. Perhaps Cable had lied. Given their relationship, that would’ve been possible. Perhaps they hadn’t met on board. Maybe they’d planned this rendezvous, and the moneyed Cable had sprung for Brauer’s first-class accommodations.
    Two Fatimas later, the first influx of post-dinner smokers began to arrive, and among them was Cable. I assumed Brauer was immediately behind him. But he wasn’t. At least not right away. Brauer could have stopped in the wash room, but I was picking up something in Cable’s manner that suggested he was alone. He drifted in; he looked around as if trying to decide what he would do. If he were expecting Brauer, there would be no doubt: he’d find their accustomed place and claim it before the following surge of diners took away the option. But he was hesitating; he was wondering, it seemed to me, if he should simply leave.
    Then he noticed me. He did not brighten, even in a routinely social way. But he registered my familiarity. I nodded. He nodded in return, and he hesitated some more, made a decision. He crossed the