The Star of Istanbul by Robert Olen Butler

other or both of them wrong. But Trask had no doubt about Brauer. And these two were fast and seemingly exclusive companions three days into the voyage. Which was why Brauer was here. Trask wanted more from me than Cable’s name, but that wasn’t going to come in casual conversation.
    I wanted to read Brauer’s face once more. I’d found in the ward rooms and courthouse corridors of Chicago that the most boldly direct question sometimes actually got an answer, or at least a revealing evasion.
    So I turned back to Cable and said, “Rare books must be pretty good money, but Dr. Brauer and I are living way over our heads traveling Cunard Saloon.” I came back to Brauer and looked him straight in the eyes. “Forget hod carriers and dirt farmers. Underpaid teachers and newswriters are the ones ripe for the Bolsheviks. I got a whole syndicate footing my bill to the war. How’d you wangle first class, Doc?”
    His eyes did not shift away from mine. The pause in him was minute. He said, “It was God’s will.”

6
    This sank the conversation.
    Brauer grew even less willing to speak. Cable grew thoughtful. I understood I had to take other measures to learn anything more about these two.
    I stubbed my cigarette and excused myself and went out of the Smoking Room at the promenade door.
    The night was bright with stars.
    I walked forward a ways, in the direction of the entrance door to the stateroom corridor.
    I could take the most obvious of the next measures right now. I had a small leather roll of picks, rakes, and miniature torque wrenches and a few weeks of intensive training and rehearsal in their use. I’d pick Brauer’s cabin lock and go in.
    But I didn’t know how long the boys would linger in the Smoking Room. They weren’t having a swell experience there so far. I didn’t want Brauer walking in on me. Better to wait till the dinner hour tomorrow so I had a substantial and predictable block of time.
    A couple approached, leaning into each other and talking low, and they straightened abruptly as they saw me. I passed. They were, I was willing to bet, a shipboard romance just beginning, from their new ardor risking a public show of their feelings but not wanting anyone to actually notice. A little farther along, the canvas cover of Lifeboat 10 was in place but undone at the prow. I listened as I went by. I could hear rustlings inside. Still another couple. They’d been careful to put the tarp back into place, but of course they couldn’t refasten it from the inside. These two were young. Each of them traveling with parents or siblings, sharing their staterooms, stealing some privacy.
    I liked the nascent romances. Liked it professionally. I thought a good activity tonight would be to go to my Corona Portable Number 3—which was a swell companion who never failed to take me by the fingertips and lead me to my newswriter self—and work on the lead paragraphs of my feature story. Young love blooming, ragtime playing, and the swells of London and New York dolling up as we rushed toward the War Zone.
    I reached the aft doorway into the A Deck stateroom corridors. I stopped. Before me in the deck wall were the portholes—rectangular, with iron flower filigrees crowning them—proper windows at sea. I counted them along: one for the first small stateroom and then a gap for the vent and for, I suspected, the en suite bathroom, and then the two windows of the suite. Selene’s suite. They were lit. I stepped toward the railing and I could see that the curtains were drawn in both. She was inside. She was awake.
    I was grinding a bit now in places on my body I did not want to think about. I’d exchanged words with her. One could even consider that we’d flirted ever so slightly, ever so preliminarily. But what took no consideration at all was that she’d vanished. She’d known where to find me, if she’d been so inclined, but