That he didn’t meant Horst had remembered in time that he was talking to someone who was a Mexican revolutionary who wanted to throw the gringos out and have a social revolution too, and allied by blood and politics to Irish nationalists. It did show a certain elephantine tact on his part. Even an intelligence operative probably wasn’t bare-faced enough to pretend that the Reich had any interest in promoting national independence for weak countries except as a tool of war policy, the way it had used the Ottomans to proclaim an Islamic holy war against the European colonial empires. Except in Germany’s own empire, of course.
The Turks must be very trusting sorts.
The area outside the hangar was still a chaos of new construction that would eventually be the aerial equivalent of a major train station, piles of brick and girders and half-liquid soil and half-made pavements and holes full of water and a web of scaffolding and cranes. It smelled of coal-smoke and dirty brackish harbor water and the peculiar scent of glutinous much-used European mud dredged from canals that had received everything you could think of from a great city for generations beyond count. Horst set his homburg on his head, whistled sharply, and flagged a motor taxi—a French-made Renault, boxy and black with an almost comical little ten-horsepower engine under a miniature bull-nosed hood—and the driver sprang out to put their suitcases in the compartment.
Something caught her eye, and she stretched and yawned again, looking behind her casually for an instant. Two men, reading newspapers, ordinary middle-class suits with narrow ties and turnover shirt collars and bowler hats . . . who put the newspapers down simultaneously and moved forward behind someone else.
“Horst, don’t look around, but there are two men by the entrance who are following . . . not us, but that fellow who looks like a professor from Leipzig. They’re not Dutch, I think, or German.”
Horst cursed quietly under his breath—German was a good language for that—and used the window of the cab as a partial mirror.
“You’re right,” he said tightly. “They’re French—you won’t see a Dutchman with a mustache like that, and one of them is dark as an Italian. Schluss mit lustig! Playtime’s over!”
That was exactly what she’d thought, but Elisa Carmody wouldn’t be equipped to make that sort of snap judgment of the rather subtle differences between Europeans. Horst went on:
“And that means they will be following us too; he’s heading to the same hotel. And he is a professor, but from the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft.”
The ears of her mind pricked at the name. That was an institution in Berlin that served as a central government-sponsored clearinghouse and funding source for pure and applied scientific research in conjunction with universities and corporate labs, founded in 1911 and now working at forced draft on Germany’s war effort including dozens of secret projects. Several of them had given the Entente very nasty shocks indeed, and had impressed her own service, like the poison-gas shells that had rained down on the British at Ypres, and the long-range submarines that could recharge their batteries while below the surface through extensible tubes.
Uncle Teddy had imitated the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft with the American National Advanced Research Projects Institute during the reforms of the famous first Hundred Days after his 1912 victory—a lot of Progressive intellectuals were German-educated and admirers of the German theory of the state and German methods. Only Teddy’s Institute was larger and had more money and a more impressive headquarters in Washington; he’d said himself more than once that like most Americans he just liked things big. Then the Kaiser had pouted and replied in kind with a further avalanche of money to his Institute.
Wilhelm had hated Theodore Roosevelt since he made Germany back down in the Venezuela crisis of 1902 with a blunt threat of war. And he’d had a serious case of Teddy envy for years, since the American president was all the things he wanted to be but wasn’t, starting with being a real soldier who’d charged to victory at the head of his troops and working on from there through great reformer to frontier adventurer and amateur scientist of real distinction. It had gotten much worse since Teddy’s triumphant return to power. Wilhelm was known to grind his teeth at the mention of the Roosevelt name and to have launched a secret project to find out if the Roosevelts had any German noble or royal blood in their backgrounds. He’d proven to his own satisfaction that they were descendants of the Van Rosevelts who’d been made lords of Oud-Vossemeer by William III, Duke of Bavaria, back in the late Middle Ages.
How Uncle Teddy laughed at that!
“Ah. I thought the Professor was the other strong possibility; you, him, and then the Westphalian Hog. And I couldn’t imagine either of them being code-named Imperial Sword.”
“They haven’t spotted us,” Horst said, with a slight snort of Uradel nobleman’s agreement at her choice of nickname for the obese businessman. “But it is crucial that . . . that the academic person makes it safely back to the Fatherland.”
Aha, Luz thought. There were two agents. And the Herr Professor is less likely to attract the eye than Horst, especially with Horst around to attract the eye. I may have underestimated Colonel Nicolai . . . but the French, if that’s what they are, have made him . . .
Made was the term of art for penetrating a false identity.
. . . and not us. Of course, they might well have had previous experience with him. Scientists are very important in this war. It’ll be a pity if I have to put a stop to any agents of our prospective French ally, but our operations take priority . . . for us.
“If it’s the Deuxième Bureau de l’État-major général they’ll wait until night,” Horst said. “As a gesture to the Dutch. But they’re not going to let a target escape to keep the cheese-eaters happy.”
Luz kept herself from nodding agreement by an effort of will; her cover identity wouldn’t be as familiar with the workings of European espionage and counterespionage organizations as she was. The Second Bureau of the French General Staff was notoriously proactive when operating abroad, as much so as the Black Chamber and much more so than the chronically underfunded British secret service, whose head had been reduced to traveling around Germany just before the war with a false mustache plastered to his lip.
“Can you call for help?” she said. “Or get us all to a safe house?”
“No. This operation was segregated and kept hermetically sealed from the usual channels. It was managed directly by . . . from Berlin.”
“Well.” She shrugged. “We’ll just have to manage, won’t we?”
FOUR
Hotel Victoria, 7th Floor
Amsterdam
Koninkrijk der Nederlanden
(Kingdom of the Netherlands)
SEPTEMBER 5TH, 1916(B)
This is excellent, sweetie!” Luz said, savoring a forkful of the babi recap.
The delighted surprise was entirely in character since she’d simply transferred that aspect of herself to the constructed personality of her Elisa cover, and true as well. Like Elisa Carmody, Luz had been through Amsterdam before, several times on her way to and from school in Bavaria or on trips from school to absorb culture, presumably on the theory that it was the visual equivalent of blancmange. She liked the city, mainly for the art museums and the history and the stolid sensible Burger calm of the people, though she had been profoundly unimpressed with what she’d experienced of Dutch food.
Which was like German cuisine, except without the subtlety and grace, she thought. But I could have had something like this if the teachers shepherding us hadn’t been so stodgy. Who knew?
There was a covered bowl of steamed rice and six little side plates: skewers of chicken or others of shrimp, marinated in a sweet-spicy peanut sauce and covered with more after grilling; slivers of pork belly braised in its own juices and a soy reduction; hard-boiled eggs in a chili-based sauce; and several types of vegetables steamed or fried with spices and sprinkled with desiccated, grat
ed coconut and flanked by little cups of a red-chili paste.
“And it was a good idea to have it sent up to the room, too.”
He beamed across the table at her as if he’d invented the rijsttafel that was scenting the air with anise and garlic and mace and lemongrass himself, rather than Dutchmen stealing the concept and most of the ingredients from the inhabitants of their Southeast Asian empire. It had come to Amsterdam along with much else in the ample bellies of the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie’s Indiamen, making their stately six-month passages from here around the Cape to Batavia in Java and back for century on century. Having the kitchens send it up here this late had probably cost a pretty penny, but as Horst said, it was on the All-Highest’s account and enabled them to keep a closer eye on the Herr Professor, so why not?
“This is the abbreviated version,” Horst said, grinning at her and spooning up some sauce. “The full banquet can have forty dishes, besides six types of rice.”
The impassive staff had set it up in the parlor of their two-room suite. The suite had all the modern conveniences, electric lights, and an attached bath and water closet; it was done in pale yellow silk and had a rather ornate plaster ceiling, and the furniture was fussily over-decorated and carved in an old-fashioned way, though the place was only about as old as she was and had been renovated as recently as ’06. Luz and Horst had taken advantage of the bath after coupling like stoats in a rain of half-removed clothing—they both found prospective danger made them randy; she thought it a bit disturbing how much they had in common—and each standing a watch while the other caught a few hours’ sleep. They were young and fit enough that that made them refreshed rather than groggy, which was fortunate since nobody was fit enough not to lose their edge after enough time without rest.
“The Victoria gets a lot of Dutchmen going to and from their colonies,” Horst said, and added with a laugh: “And a lot of spies, these days; I’ve been here half a dozen times since the war began. They’re familiar with Herr Hans Krämer.”
They hadn’t asked for her papers when he checked her in as Frau Krämer, though she looked about as un-German as you could be unless you were a Zulu or Chinese, but . . .
“You do realize that nobody would think that’s your real name, Horst?” she said.
He stared at her, slightly offended. “I assure you the documents are perfect. And there was a Hans Krämer, who looked quite a bit like me—he was called up in 1914 as part of the Thirteenth Division—Westfälisches Jäger-Bataillon Nr. 7, in fact. He died on the Marne.”
“I’m sure there was just such a man, Horst, and that the documents are perfect. But nobody who knows anything at all about die Deutschen is ever going to mistake you for Hans-the-shopkeeper-reservist. You should really pretend to be some other German Uradel. It’s much easier to hide who you are than what you are. Or you might just manage to pass for a Swede—a Swedish nobleman, that is—if you spoke good enough Swedish. If you try to appear as what you aren’t unsuccessfully, you just draw attention to an obviously false identity.”
He looked at her quietly for a moment, then nodded. “That is a very perceptive remark,” he said quietly. “More rice? And some of the satay?”
“Thank you.”
It wouldn’t do to stuff themselves if they had serious work to do, but a rice table consisted of a large number of small dishes and he’d picked a few, and they nibbled slowly. They had split a single mug of what even Horst admitted was an excellent local beer.
The food was an exquisite mixture of textures and tastes, in a way totally new to her. She’d dined often and marvelously in San Francisco’s Chinatown in several different regional styles; you just had to pick the places well-to-do local Chinese went to, rather than the ones making Americanized versions for the gwai-lo. And her family had often gone to dinner at the home of a Japanese business acquaintance of her father’s in Santa Barbara and been delighted at the subtle combinations and the beauty of the arrangements and colors that Mrs. Taguchi and her daughters produced. But this was a tantalizing glimpse at yet another world. She strongly suspected the actual cook was from the East Indies himself.
Travel is broadening, even if that’s a cliché, she thought; truisms were often . . . true. How vast and varied the world is! You could spend lifetimes sampling just the food, and then there’s dance and music and art and stories.
“Ah, now I feel fit to fight tigers, much less Gabachos,” she said, patting her lips with a napkin. At his glance she explained: “Gabachos means ‘Frenchmen’ . . . but it’s not complimentary.”
“Perhaps you should dress for it?” Horst said. “Even if they are only Franzacke.”
Luz laughed, with a hard edge to it. “Bärchen, I am dressed for action.”
She was wearing her pajamas, one of several black silk outfits she had along of vaguely Chinese inspiration and as fashionable as yesterday evening, slightly loose pants and collared jackets with black cablework on the front. Luz extended an arm.
“Feel. This is tough silk, light but stronger than canvas, and there’s chamois leather on the knees and elbows. It’s street wear in China . . . I’m told their . . . what did they call them, Boxers? They wore something like this as fighting gear; that was where I got the idea, that and Chinese pajamas being fashionable. Nobody can tell the difference between this and simple nightwear.”
“The Yihequan,” Horst said, surprising her a little by knowing the name. “It means Righteous Fists; we said Boxers. My elder brother was with the expeditionary force that marched to Peking to relieve the diplomats in 1900; I was in cadet school then. Yes, I remember he took some photographs of Chinamen in costumes very much like that.”
A grin. “Mainly dead Chinamen with 7.92mm holes in them, to be sure.”
Kaiser Wilhelm had given a speech to the German troops departing for that messy little conflict, urging them to make a name for themselves in China that would rival that of Attila’s Huns for a thousand years. It had been one more example of his chronic foot-in-mouth disease and had given the Germans their modern nickname of Hun, but it was just an exaggeration of a common national trait too. They’d issued a commemorative medal for the sinking of the Mauretania showing the ship going down on one side and passengers buying tickets from a skeletal figure of Death on the other. That had had blood boiling and teeth grinding from New York to San Francisco, but Horst’s people had mostly never really understood why it had that effect, or why the British had made thousands of copies. It was an aspect of the same failings that made them such terrible spies, though some could overcome it by sheer application.
“And these slippers”—she ran the toe of one down the inside of his calf under the table—“have buckled tops and woven cord soles. Excellent traction, much better than leather.”
“Useful, as long as it doesn’t attract attention,” Horst said. He cocked his head. “Which it would. Though the ensemble gives you a certain boyish charm.”
She grinned and arched her back against the chair a little; her bosom was moderately sized, but definitely there.
“Horst, if it’s one thing I’ve never desired to be taken for—except when I was doing it as a disguise once or twice—it’s a boy.”
His brows went up. “I thought you had rather advanced opinions on the rights of women?” he said. “Surely as a girl you chafed at seeing boys able to do things you could not?”
That was perfectly true, and so was his supposition about her opinions—and it also fitted her revolutionary cover identity. Ironically enough, the most conservative people in Mexico had backed the Intervention, and had ended up with new laws imposed at the point of American bayonets, including a close copy of the Equal Rights Amendment of 1912–1913, which was far more drastic than the most radical imaginable Mexican government would have passed anytime soon. Even in America it had gone through in that pure a form only because of a complex congressional maneuver intended to derail it,
and it had horrified the hacendados and Catholic clergy when the gringo armies brought it with them . . . though there wasn’t anything they could do about it since the revolucionarios were the only alternative they had. And they wanted to kill the upper classes wholesale and take all their property, and the wilder ones burned churches on general principle.
“Yes, I did, but that doesn’t mean I ever wanted to be a boy, I just wanted to have the same opportunities,” she said, which seemed to baffle him a bit.
The telephone made its soft dinging; it was a very modern Siemens model with speaker and microphone in the same handset. Horst covered the distance in two strides.
“Ja,” he said after a moment, then gave her a grim nod as he hung up.
“A party of French gentlemen have arrived,” he said. “That little talk with the concierge was worth the money. The Frenchmen have paid extra to be on this floor.”
Flush times for the Victoria’s staff, Luz thought. They must be on half a dozen payrolls, not to mention tips.
“How many?” she said aloud, feeling a taut excitement.
“Four.” He grinned. “Ample to handle one old man.”
He crossed to the bedroom; she heard him thump his fist on the wall, and presumably pressed a wineglass to it to hear the reply. She hadn’t asked what he was doing earlier when he wrote a note and folded it and left the room for a minute; that would have been a gross breach of professional etiquette, though it was a virtual certainty he’d slipped it under the door of the Herr Professor next door. The pajama outfit she had on had a belt loop for her pistol and a pocket for the navaja that left them both concealed by the jacket. She thoughtfully slipped an extra magazine into her other pocket, one of the special nine-round ones she’d had made up by the Chamber’s armorers, and her cosh.
Black Chamber Page 8
