The Star of Istanbul by Robert Olen Butler

Author:Robert Olen Butler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2013-09-26T16:00:00+00:00

30

Istanbul was not where I had expected to end up when the secret service boys finally let me take a crack at this war. They hadn’t either. And deep into that eventful Monday in London, after I’d made sure Selene returned to her hotel and I was heading back to the Arundel, I finally took time to wonder if, in fact, that’s where they would have me go. For all I knew, they already had some other sneak-and-snoop Johnnie in Istanbul, someone who’d get the chance to take his own crack at Selene Bourgani. But either way, him or me, Metcalf was arriving tomorrow and the German team was leaving the next day, and I needed him and his minions to work on a few things right away. Even if it wasn’t for my benefit.

So I asked my man and his taxi to stay with me for a while longer, at which he gave me a slow nod yes and a touch to the brim of his cap even before we’d talked about money.

I dashed up to my room and was happy to actually put some words together on my Corona, banging out a report and a list of queries for Metcalf, covering everything from Selene’s German movie director-lover to the man I strongly suspected was her father, from the flag on the bar wall to the smell of spirit gum, from a square beard at the head of a table to a dead Hun in a doorway. And I told him that if I was going forward, I needed a pistol. And—a thing I almost forgot—I let him know I’d changed hotels.

Then I was off again through the night, back along the Strand, past Charing Cross just south of Metzger & Strauss, Booksellers, across the street from which there’d been a bit of an incident earlier this evening. And the Strand turned into the Mall and the Mall led us to the front gates of Buckingham Palace and we circled good King George V, perhaps just as he was having his man adjust the shoulders of his pajamas.

We ended up on the southwest side of the palace gardens, in Westminster, at Number 4 Grosvenor Gardens, at the north end of a long, attached block of grand Second Empire town houses, five stories high with slate pavilion roofs and tall mansards. The houses were three bays wide and each had the same front porch—there were a dozen or more such, arrayed down the street—with squared granite columns holding up garlands of stone flowers.

Somewhere between my hotel and these stone flowers, I’d also given a brief thought to my killing a man tonight. To my having to kill a man. This thought came shortly after we’d circled Buckingham Palace and I had actually given a few moments of brain time to the King’s pajamas. Ironically. But still. I’d killed a guy tonight and I hadn’t really expected to, given all the little pitter-pat of sneaking and snooping that my recent secret service work had entailed.

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