Free The Star of Istanbul by Robert Olen Butler Page B

room and arrived before me. “Good evening, Mr. Cable,” I said.
    He nodded again.
    â€œWould you like to join me?” I asked.
    â€œThanks,” he said.
    There was a fresh shaving cut on his chin. I thought of his razor lying beside Brauer’s. Cable’s hand had been a bit unsteady tonight in using it. It was a risky thing, I thought, to keep your face bare.
    He looked behind him and backed into the chair that faced the couch. He sat down and went straight for his smokes. As he fumbled with his matches—his hands were still unsteady—a steward appeared and took our drink orders. Two whiskeys. He made his a double.
    When the steward was gone and Cable had taken a long, calming drag on his cigarette, I said, “Where’s Walter?”
    Cable had been watching his smoke and he cut his eyes to me as if I should have known better than to ask about this. That attitude instantly passed. But clearly there’d been some sort of break between the two men.
    â€œWorking,” Cable said.
    â€œWorking?”
    â€œHe has a lecture to write.”
    This sounded fishy. From his pinched tone, it sounded fishy to Cable as well.
    I said, “So you two knew each other in London, right?”
    â€œWe’ve only known each other a few days,” he said, and he was looking away, talking as much to himself as to me, thinking: I never really knew this man. He hadn’t been lying about when they met. Now it sounded as if Brauer was through with his bookseller, who no doubt possessed—he did passionately love books, after all—a romantic streak.
    I said, “An experienced teacher like him, writing a lecture shouldn’t take long.”
    Cable didn’t answer but took a drink of his whiskey. Which was itself an answer to the question I really had intended to ask. Brauer had let Cable know he’d be tied up for the rest of the trip.
    I felt a little ruthless now. Cable was just a bookseller. I didn’t need to be indirect with him. “Does he have another friend on the ship?” I asked.
    Cable looked at me. If my impertinence ended the conversation, it made no difference now. But his face went blank. This was a question he hadn’t considered.
    I had him talking to himself even as he talked to me, so I pushed it: “Have you seen him with anyone?”
    He furrowed a little at this, but he clearly hadn’t.
    â€œDid he speak of anyone on board?” I asked.
    Cable shook his head no. I was sitting, I realized, with a jilted lover. One who had trusted completely.
    I could have pushed harder. But I wasn’t all that ruthless after all. And Cable wasn’t holding anything back. He hadn’t held back from his Walter either, sadly. Once again it was easy to despise Brauer. Which was just as well.

10
    So I left Edward Cable with his whiskey and smokes and broken heart, and I sat at the desk in my stateroom with my penknife and a Blaisdell No. 624 self-sharpening pencil and the seemingly blank page from Brauer’s notebook. The Blaisdell was a clever thing invented in the last century for big-volume pencil-using offices—beloved by the copydesk at the Post-Express —but also, as it happened, perfect for my present task. Its soft, black, graphite lead was wrapped not in cedar but in a narrow, tight band of paper, the new segment of lead being freshly exposed by nicking the next in a long row of indents arranged up the barrel and then unwrapping the paper. This I did several times; in between, I scraped the accessible lead into an ashtray, finely grinding it into a soft, black, graphite powder, with no wood scraps to interfere.
    Then I laid out the notebook page and began a process of dipping my fingertip into the black powder and lightly rubbing it all across the surface of the page. The graphite turned the page dark wherever I touched, but the indentations made by Brauer recording the decoded words on the previous page gradually emerged, not