E-Book, Englisch, Band 3, 384 Seiten
Butler The Star of Istanbul
1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-1-84344-568-5
Verlag: No Exit Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
E-Book, Englisch, Band 3, 384 Seiten
Reihe: A Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thriller
ISBN: 978-1-84344-568-5
Verlag: No Exit Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Robert Olen Butler is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, and sixteen other novels including Hell, A Small Hotel, Perfume River, and the Christopher Marlowe Cobb series. He is also the author of six short story collections and a book on the creative process, From Where You Dream. He has twice won a National Magazine Award in Fiction and received the 2013 F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Literature. He teaches creative writing at Florida State University.
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2
I woke somewhere in the dark early hours of what would be our first full day at sea, woke to the sounding of the Lusitania’s forward triple-chime whistle. I dozed off, but a few minutes later the whistle sounded once more, a harmonized choir of basso baritones crying out in the night. My mind began to work, and I knew I would remain sleepless for a long while. My initial thinking was pleasantly desirous: I wondered if she was awake in her bed as well, just around the corner, waiting for the whistle to blow again, quaking very faintly from the distant, vibrant working of our turbines. I found myself afraid I would never have a chance to speak to her beyond a passing hello.
I should have been thinking about Walter Brauer. What he was doing. What might have been in his mind on deck yesterday morning. And then I grew afraid that I was ill-suited for the work my country had asked me to do.
I was rushing across the North Atlantic to war, but with an intention I’d never had before. I needed to sort out what I was doing, give myself a pep talk. I was a reporter. A war correspondent. I knew how to look for news, for the truth. It had always been my job to snoop around, and because I knew how to do that well, in Mexico I’d happened upon news of deep importance to Washington. Private importance. So now the process was inverted. Now the snooping would be for Washington and I would just happen upon stories for the Post-Express. I wanted to do this. I had seen too much of the savage impulses of men, impulses that we ultimately could not deal with as individuals. I was lucky to be an American. We Americans were also men and could foul things up pretty badly, but our declared ideal was to find a way to make it possible to stop the savagery. To govern without savagery. To live with other governments without savagery. To live with ourselves without savagery. It is what we believe. And so I remained Christopher Cobb, reporter, even as I began to play a more important role in the world. But I was used to finding things out by following the acts of men that are clear to see, out in the open, with their immediate goals readily understandable. This work I was doing now was different.
The Lusitania’s whistle sounded again.
Now my mind was all shadow and fog.
For all this thinking, I didn’t feel very peppy.
I rose and put on my pants and shoes and overcoat, intending to get some air on deck. I stepped out of my cabin and went to the right and then turned left into the portside corridor. Bourgani’s direction, not Brauer’s. There were two staterooms en suite along here, but I remembered the deck plan from when I booked my passage. Only the aft suite had its own bath. She would surely be in that one. I approached the door, treading softly. A20 and A22. I stopped. I listened. But all I heard was my heart thudding in my ear like the engine of our ship deep below. This was foolish. I moved on and through the door and out onto the A Deck promenade.
I could barely make out the lifeboat hanging a few paces before me. The ship was wrapped in a gray felt fog. But I stepped away from the door, turned aft, walked into the murk. It was as if the inside of my own head had billowed out to surround me. Inside the fog, I found James P. Trask, the President’s man in charge of covert service, talking to me again.
We met a week ago in Washington, at the massive, limestone and terra-cotta Raleigh Hotel on Twelfth and Pennsylvania. The after-dinner trade was waning and we began at the mahogany bar but soon carried our Gin Rickeys to a far corner table to speak in private. No one was nearby. High above us, from the center of the roof, a searchlight was lighting up the Washington Monument half a mile to our southwest.
Trask lifted his drink and I did likewise. Each glass held half of the same lime. We touched glasses and took a good swallow. Trask said, “These were invented back in ’83 at Shoomaker’s, around the corner from all you newspaper boys on Fourteenth. By old Colonel Joe Rickey. He owned the bar but he was also a professional glad-hander and arm-twister. Inventing this, he almost redeemed his whole tribe of lobbyists.”
“To Colonel Joe,” I said, lifting my glass again.
“Colonel Joe,” Trask said. We drank, and he said, “I’d have taken you there but it’s still full of reporters.”
James Trask was hard to read in any way that he wasn’t consciously intending. As befitted his job, I supposed. I was pretty good at reading a man. He delivered this last declaration by angling his square-jawed, man’s-man face slightly to the right and drawing out the word “reporters” like slowly pulling a piece of chewing gum off the sole of his shoe. He was clean shaven and—perhaps influenced by my new relationship to my left cheek—I found this a little deceitful in him. Trying too hard to suggest he was transparent.
He was tweaking my nose. I said, “I don’t hang around with reporters anymore.” Not true, but he knew I was lying and he knew I knew he knew I was lying, and that was the best return-tweak I could manage at the moment.
He smiled. “Don’t change your public ways for me,” he said. “To the world, you have to be Christopher Cobb.”
I did a slow, seemingly thoughtful stroke of my beard, my thumb pressing my right cheek and my fingers descending my left.
Trask knew what I was most conscious of, even before I realized it myself. It was under my hand.
“That was a fortunate little accident down in Mexico,” he said, referring to my scar.
I didn’t like him reading me. I turned the gesture into an extending of my forefinger, which I lifted and ran from my lower lip to the bottom of my chin, and which I then did once again, as if my intention all along had been simply to smooth my whiskers down. I didn’t really expect him to believe it.
“How’s your German coming along?” he asked.
“Pretty good.”
“You’ve got an ear for it, I understand.”
“I do.”
“Are you ready to work?”
“I am.”
“I’ve already informed your paper.”
My publisher—that great American mogul, Paul Maccabee Griswold—was an old-style Democrat, the sort who worshipped Grover Cleveland, and he had big political ambitions; he was only too happy to have me play this grand game for his own private political credit.
Trask took an envelope from the inside pocket of his impeccable black suit with the thin, gray stripe, the suit as snuggly, perfectly fit to his boxer’s body as the Woolworth Building’s glazed terra-cotta. Inside were the photos of Brauer. His jowly face in a formal head and shoulders pose, likely taken for a passport. A snapshot of him standing dressed in academic robes in a grassy courtyard with the arches of a Gothic colonnade behind him.
“Walter Brauer,” Trask said. “German. Technically an American citizen. Travels on our passport. But he’s been a lecturer at King’s College in London for more than a decade. One of the side benefits of our president’s pacifism is our present occupation of the German embassy in London. We’re looking after their affairs. Playing go-between. Not that my office takes our role as the Swiss too seriously. We’ve been carefully examining whatever the Huns left behind. I’m happy to say that Prince Lichnowsky and his boys made a rather hasty departure. Though I should point out we’re being careful to leave even the prince’s cigarettes in their silver case on his desk, exactly as they were last August, in the event the Germans return someday.”
“Think they’ll fall for that?” I said.
Trask winked at me.
The Lusitania’s whistle bellowed me back to the deck. I pulled up my coat collar. I’d not put on a hat and I ran my hand through my hair, which had gone damp from the fog. But the chill was okay with me. I’d spent plenty of time in hot countries these past few years. The whistle faded and then instantly sounded again, as if this were in response to something looming in our path. But what could they possibly see from the helm until it was too late? I could barely see beyond the stretch of my arm. It was all a yellow blur along an invisible deck wall. On the railing side, in a vague, somewhat more coalesced wedge of the universal gray, were an electric light and a lifeboat only a few paces away, but in this fog their identity was nothing more than informed guesswork. I swelled with that kinesthetic burn I’d always felt before the clash of men on a battlefield. The Titanic was too much with me.
I needed to focus on my assignment, which was how I managed my war nerves in Nicaragua and Macedonia and Mexico. I stood in the fog and continued drinking with Trask in the bar at the Raleigh.
“He’s an agent of the German secret service,” he said. But he didn’t go on. Instead, he drained the last of his Gin Rickey and then lifted his empty glass to me. “We should have another round of these, don’t you think?”
Trask had done this before. Even in our first meeting, he would suddenly decide, in the midst of our conversation, to throw me off balance by making me ask for what I clearly needed to know next. I should have waited him out at the Raleigh, but I wasn’t in a mood to play. At least I put it to him in a way he didn’t expect.
I said, “What does he lecture about?”
Trask let me see the fleeting dilation of surprise in his eyes. He smiled. “Oriental studies,” he said.
“Meaning?”
“He spent his childhood in Jerusalem. His father was in the export business there before he brought the family to Providence.”
“So he picked up some languages.”
“Arabic....
