The Star of Istanbul Read Online Free

more stupid saying this a second time.
    She nodded. “So I’ve heard.” But her voice was soft-edged. Appreciative.
    â€œAll right,” I said. “I’ll confess. There was no one around. I spoke it aloud in passing in case you were worried.”
    She nodded again. Faintly. As if in thanks. She was far more subtle in this corridor than she was on the screen.
    I grew up backstage in a thousand theaters and watched my mother being a star and I knew how she sized herself for each stage she was on. Since film actresses all seemed to be playing to a vast auditorium, though their faces were ten feet tall—even the great Selene Bourgani—I was surprised she knew how to seem real in this corridor. As for my own face, I had no control at all. It was flushing hot and, I suspected, it was even turning red.
    â€œI wasn’t worried,” she said.
    â€œNo,” I said. “Of course not.”
    â€œBut thank you.”
    I nodded. Too big a nod, as if I were a hambone of a film actor.
    I collected myself and steadied my body and stood there for a long moment, and the moment went on as she stayed motionless where she was, standing in her kimono in her doorway.
    Finally she said, in what felt like a whisper but which filled my head, “Good night.”
    â€œGood night,” I said, and I turned away from Selene, who, according to my childhood Bulfinch, if not the evidence of my own eyes a few moments ago, was the Greek goddess of the moon.

3
    After I’d gone to my cabin following our release from the fog, I slept. But I was already awake at the distant sound of six bells being rung on the morning watch—7:00 A.M. by the landlubber time zone we carried along with us. The bell had hardly stopped vibrating when I heard the slip of something under the door. I needed a war; I needed the whisk of rifle rounds past my ears. Here’s how I knew: I thought it might be a note from her. It was, instead, an invitation to dine with the captain at his table that evening.
    I did not see Brauer again or Selene until the night came and I was dressed in a suitcase-wrinkled monkey suit, packed at Trask’s insistence for any secret-agent contingency, the thought of which had made me consider letting my country down to just chase the gunfire. But I packed the tux and now I tied my black tie and squared my shoulders and took the main staircase down three levels to the Saloon Deck. Indeed, I had a saloon ticket to a saloon cabin and I’d spent time very early this morning on the saloon promenade and I was, all in all, a saloon passenger, “saloon” being what the Brits sometimes called first class. But when I walked into the grand dining room, my first wish—a devout one—was that this would somehow suddenly turn into a good old American saloon, with swinging doors and spittoons. I did, however, know how to act this other role I’d been cast in.
    I took three steps into the place and stopped. It was swell, all right. The main floor of the dining room, here on D Deck, was decorated in harmony with the writing room and library I’d passed through yesterday, though in a more extravagant way: ivory-colored walls and the straight-lined simplicity of eighteenth-century neoclassicism, with Louis XVI chairs upholstered in rose-colored horsehair and with similarly roseate Brussels carpet runners and with more Corinthian columns, these rising from the oak parquet floor up through the front edge of a large open oval space where the C Deck upper dining room encircled us diners below. The columns rose on to their capital at the base of a floor-high dome, done in ivory-white and gilt and with oil paint-rendered cherubs in tableaux of the four seasons. The dome sat in the center of B Deck, the high-heavenly vault of a three-story floating cathedral of fancyman’s food.
    The place was full of tuxedoed men and gowned and bejeweled women. They milled murmuringly about, finding their