The Star of Istanbul Read Free

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.”
    â€œTo Colonel Joe,” I said, lifting my glass again.
    â€œColonel 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.
    â€œThat 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.
    â€œHow’s your German coming along?” he asked.
    â€œPretty good.”
    â€œYou’ve got an ear for it, I understand.”
    â€œI do.”
    â€œAre you ready to work?”
    â€œI am.”
    â€œI’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,