The Star of Istanbul Read Online Free Page A

tables, drinking cocktails. I stepped farther in, alert for a center-parted, hennaed head of hair. It didn’t take me long to see Brauer. He was at one end of the massive brass-fit veneered mahogany sideboard on the forward center wall. He was alone there, leaning with his back to the sideboard as if it were a bar, but with only a waiter nearby, arranging tumblers on a tray. Brauer held a glass with what looked like a couple of fingers of whiskey—no doubt a good whiskey, in this joint. He did not seem uncomfortable in his solitude. Rather, he seemed quite content to watch the swells milling about before him.
    My assignment was too vague: What’s he up to? My reporter’s instincts had been most famously employed in figuring out the next move of bands of armed men representing governments or organized factions aspiring to become governments. I knew what they were up to from the get-off: destroy the opposing bands of armed men and seize a physical objective on the way to seizing power. I had to slide back to my earlier reporting days to figure out what to do now. I had to think of Brauer as I would a dirty Chicago politician. But with the politician there were plenty of sources to go to. Enemies. Co-conspirators. Facilitators. Victims. And the überobjective of the man I was after was always money, which made certain lines of inquiry pretty clear. With Brauer, on this ship, there was no one to go to but him. And money was unlikely to be the coal in his engine.
    So it would just be him and me. I figured my strategy was to treat him like a source for a larger story, somebody who knows something I need to know and doesn’t want to give it up, so I don’t let him know I want it. I strolled off in his direction.
    But I didn’t go straight to him. I bellied up to the sideboard as if I expected it to be the bar and he was a couple of paces to my right and I looked around like I was puzzled, like where was the bartender, like where were the taps and the bottles, like what is this useless piece of furniture, anyway. “Huh,” I said aloud, and I turned around the way he was turned, and he wasn’t looking in my direction. It was like I wasn’t even there.
    I checked out his drink a bit more closely. Certainly that was a good Scotch. He may have been an expert on Islam but I was thinking he wasn’t a convert. His tuxedo looked like it fit him pretty well and he was used to wearing it. Maybe a big cheese academician at King’s College who spent all day in his academic robes was used to monkeying up at night to drink with his fellow lecturers in a first-class British saloon where nobody ever raised his voice.
    I figured I better stop disliking this guy so actively if I wanted to get something out of him.
    â€œFrom across the room this sure looked like the bar—and a good one.” I said this aloud, keeping my eyes forward, as his were, but keeping my attention on him in my peripheral vision. I’d spoken in half a voice so that I could simply have been a guy avid for a drink talking mostly to myself.
    I saw him turn his face in my direction. I waited a beat and then looked at him. He let our eyes meet. “Sorry to bother you,” I said, “but I was admiring your whiskey and thinking you got it here.”
    He looked at his glass as if he were slightly surprised to find it in his hand. “No,” he said. “Someone will inquire shortly.”
    He had a faint wisp of a British accent, like the smell of pipe smoke in a tweed jacket. “Good,” I said and I looked away from him. I thought about his cuffs, which I’d noticed were beginning to fray. Befitting an academic who’d been in London for a decade. I thought: What’s this guy doing in first class?
    I looked his way and he was sipping his drink, still watching the first-class diners gathering in the room, ignoring me.
    From above us, in the upper dining room, the ship’s salon orchestra