The Star of Istanbul by Robert Olen Butler Page B

put on the first thing, my shirt, I heard her move away toward the bedroom. Without a word.
    Later, after I slipped on my shoes and after I kneeled to them and tied them and rose, after I’d finished with dressing, I hesitated, thinking to go to the bedroom door, to say something to her.
    But I didn’t. A darkness like hers was spreading into my mind, like the darkness in the eyes after taking a blow to the head.
    I moved toward the corridor door.
    And then there was a rushing from behind me.
    I turned.
    I think part of me would not have been surprised if she were rushing to me with a knife that she’d plunge into my chest. But neither was I surprised when she leapt into my arms, still naked, hooking her legs around me, and she kissed me hard on the lips.
    Nor was I surprised, when I tried to move into the room with her, that she just as rapidly disentangled from me and dismounted and backed away into the darkness, saying, “I’m sorry. That was good-bye. We’re done now, Kit Cobb.”

13
    And the Lusitania steamed into its last sunrise. And we all steamed with it. I slept only a little after leaving Selene. I rose and I wrote some and I packed my things and I ate lunch, with the ship orchestra playing “The Blue Danube,” and I went down to the Purser’s Bureau in the Entrance Hall on B Deck and I retrieved the constant hidden companion of every foreign excursion of my war correspondent career: my money belt, with a stash of gold coins and with reporter credentials and a passport protected inside, for hot countries and cold, for wet countries and dry, for mountain battlefields and city back alleys.
    Then I returned to my cabin and I opened my shirt and I strapped the belt around me and fastened my clothes around it as if I were about to mount a horse and ride into actual danger, and I chuckled. I don’t chuckle. But I affected a tough-guy ironic chuckle, like a bad actor doing a melodrama hero. Like I was such a well-equipped tough guy who thrived on danger but here I was, trapped in a chuckle-worthy lesser world that booksellers and pamphlet writers and sons of tycoons and mothers with their toddlers inhabited. Here I was, simply about to go through customs in Queenstown, Ireland, and board a train for London, England, with a secret mission to sneak around and think about what college lecturers and film actresses might be up to, having lately been used up and kicked out the door by a beautiful woman. This latter probably was the main thing that prompted the phony chuckle.
    And even while I was going through this little fit of pique, like an actor in a repertory company peeved by the no-account role he’d been given to play, a U-boat captain was watching us do fifteen substandard knots in a goddamn straight line directly toward him and wondering just how lucky he was going to get.
    Pretty goddamnn lucky, as it would soon turn out.
    I stepped onto the promenade and the sky was clear and the sun was high and I felt how slow we were going right away. I walked aft, and the portside was full of people crammed at the brief stretches of open railing between lifeboats. The coast of Ireland was distantly visible out there. Some people were murmuring reassuring things about that. Others, who knew ships and their speed and their bearing, were muttering about our vulnerability. And even the ones who were made hopeful by the sight of land were unsettled by the absence of Turner’s promised Royal Navy. We were alone.
    I knew the muttering was right. I had a pretty refined nose for the whiff of war, but it was attuned to land forces, clashing armed men, so I was willing, in all fairness, to temper my instinctive assessment of officers out here on the ocean, even civilian ones, in spite of the fact that Captain Turner, from my two encounters with him and from this present sailing strategy, seemed to me a classic example of military hierarchy: a guy who was mediocre and competent at some