She could feel quivering tension in the arms that gripped her, and heard a single whisper:
“Talk later!”
The girl turned to Nicolai and said in her slow German: “It is of a complete certainty the Miss Elisa Carmody, Colonel. She older of course is, but the face the same remains and the eyes remain, and the little nick below her right ear, that remains also to be.”
Which nick Luz had gotten two years ago, from a rock fragment peened off by a bullet from a sniper, and hadn’t really noticed until later. It was embarrassing; a spy didn’t want identifying marks, contrary to popular fiction, which was full of one-eyed, scar-faced agents with limps, missing ears, or dramatic stripes in their hair, but it was also something that could only have been seen at very close range. The girl was improvising, but fortunately Horst hadn’t noticed the mark and so she hadn’t supplied him a story which would contradict the little detail.
She’d probably have given the truth, just modified to fit her cover—it was much simpler to keep track of things that way. Al mentiroso le conviene ser memorioso, as the old saying went: A liar needed a good memory.
There was a palpable relaxation in the room as they all sat, and Horst was hiding a smile behind the ramrod machine stiffness he could put on.
“Fräulein Elisa Carmody, of the Mexican National Revolutionary Party; Fräulein Keera Whelan, our liaison with the Clann na nGael,” Nicolai said, as the two women shook hands briefly in the double-handed clasp ladies often used.
Calluses, Luz thought. Strong fingers. Did some work with her hands, but not just laboring—something with fine tools, artisan’s work. And a few burn marks. One from acid. People who handle laboratory equipment get those. And she’s still tense, but less so. She knows I’m not Carmody, and that makes her feel much better.
Clann na nGael meant the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and did probably mean Boston.
The name would be spelled Ciara, Luz thought.
Though pronounced with a sharp k at the beginning and a long vowel, Keera. She couldn’t remember anyone of that name in the briefing papers, which had said the IRB operation had been thoroughly pulverized by the Federal Bureau of Security after the Dublin thing, when the embarrassment with the British became more important than not offending a constituency that mostly voted Democratic anyway. Luz tended to think the FBS was a bit pedestrian and unimaginative, and apparently the Brotherhood had been almost absolutely smashed. Which, as the saying went, was not the same thing as absolutely completely smashed.
Still, an almost absolute smashing might account for why they were using a woman who might or might not be old enough to vote. And who also just happened to have once seen the woman Luz was pretending to be, but that sort of thing happened more often than you might think. Generally speaking, people weren’t more than ten degrees removed from anyone else in the same country, and if you added a common interest like revolutionary politics it became more likely still.
And she was willing to lie truth out of creation about it, thus saving me from probable torture and certain death. And look how she flushes! I am once again glad that I inherited Mima’s complexion, not Papá’s, so that isn’t such a problem for me.
Ciara Whelan’s face was lightly freckled across her snub nose, and otherwise pale as milk, and right now there were spots of near-crimson on her cheeks and her ears glowed. Luz’s father had been what they called black Irish, black of hair and dark-eyed and relatively swarthy by the standards of that damp misty island full of extremely pink people. The natural olive of her skin and control of her breathing was keeping Luz from going corpse-pale at the sudden brush with death and the lurching emptiness in her stomach. She didn’t flush with the giddy-nauseous rush of relief either. Luz didn’t think Colonel Nicolai’s eyes missed much normally.
I don’t show every passing emotion like a book written in blood below glass, and I don’t burn and peel with a little sun.
Nicolai tapped a set of papers on his desk. “I have read your report on your return from America with interest, Captain von Dückler,” he said. “Most stirring. A pity we cannot release it to the popular press; the Fatherland is in need of heroes, but until after the war . . . probably long after the war . . . they will have to make do with the Stoßtruppen and the pilots of the fighting scouts. Like this new one, your relative the, ah, Red Baron.”
“A very distant relative, Colonel.” Horst tucked his head. “A certain degree of . . . flamboyance could not be avoided, sir,” he added apologetically, and then with perfect sincerity: “That I have served the Fatherland is reward enough. Fame is nothing.”
“Certainly it could not be avoided after the French identified the Herr Privatdozent,” Nicolai agreed. “Probably the English on the zeppelin were merely acting opportunistically; typical amateurism. I would like to go over certain details.”
They seemed mostly to be concerned with Luz, or more precisely Elisa Carmody. Horst confirmed the written report he’d telegraphed ahead; von Bülow added a little on the bits he’d seen himself. The actions did seem a little . . .
Dramatic, Luz thought.
Ciara Whelan was staring at her, with eyes going wider and wider as the catalog of beating large Indian rumāl-wielders into submission, identifying French agents, pursuits and ambushes and rearguards and high-speed chases by pistol-wielding enemies on motorcycles went on.
I really didn’t have any choice, though. If I hadn’t given it everything I had, we’d all have died. ¡Por Dios! Most importantly, I would have died!
Horst left out the naughty bits, but Luz thought that Nicolai had probably deduced that anyway. The head of Abteilung IIIb brought out a cigarette in a holder, looked at her for a nod of permission—but not Ciara Whelan, she noticed—and lit it.
“So, Captain von Dückler, you judge this . . . gracious miss to be capable?” he said, exhaling smoke.
Bulgarian tobacco, or possibly Turkish, but very high quality, Luz thought absently.
“Very capable. Frankly . . . astonishingly so, sir. I would not have believed that a woman could do any of it, if I had not seen it with my own eyes. I must reconsider certain assumptions.”
“I also,” von Bülow said. “Furthermore she has an excellent education, and a good if unorthodox grasp of our German culture.”
Which was nice of him, though Kultur actually meant something subtly different and much more all-encompassing than the English cognate.
“Yes. I bow to your direct experience. She is very good; in fact, a little implausibly good. For a member of a revolutionary group. Not, perhaps, for a trained international spy of the new type, now that intelligence work is no longer simply a matter of blackmail of homosexual staff officers or slipping a few marks to seedy Balkan adventurers and grandes horizontals and the doorman at a foreign embassy. Yet now we have a direct confirmation of her identity, which is . . . most reassuring. She will be useful in the Boston operation, since she is known there; the other agent may not be up to the needs of the matter.”
Luz smiled very slightly and inclined her head. “Those of us who have survived the Black Chamber are often very good, very lucky, or both, Herr Oberst.”
Or just hid in a cave and didn’t come out, she thought.
“Indeed.” He turned back to Horst. “You would say then that she is strong-willed? Not squeamish?”
Horst actually chuckled. “No, Colonel. Quite the contrary. Very strong-willed; not bloodthirsty, at least not to those other than the occupiers of her country, but with a true soldierly ruthlessness when necessary.”
“Good. You will all attend the demonstration, then. Of the, ah, Breath of Loki.”
A slight grimace of distaste, either at the thing itself or more likely at the name, which to Luz bore von Bülow’s mental fingerprints. His type of romantic pan-German nationalist often insisted on plucking terminology out of Wagner or the myths the composer had drawn upon, as
if they were spiritually bellowing at some Rhenish dragon or brooding on a misty rock in a forest all the time. Nicolai didn’t strike her as that sort of sentimentalist.
The intelligence officer went on: “Then there will be a conference with the Chief of the Great General Staff and the quartermaster-general, at which you and the Herr Privatdozent will be present and required to summarize your observations. You will understand that this plan, far along as it is, must still be given final operational approval at the very highest level before we move.”
“The very highest, Colonel?” Horst murmured.
The three Germans looked at each other. Nicolai cleared his throat and said rather formally:
“It has not been thought advisable to bother the All-Highest with . . . tedious operational details.”
Meaning, the Kaiser is an idiot who’s the creature of whoever talked to him last, and his generals don’t tell him anything if they can avoid it, Luz thought, her mind working smoothly once more. Amazing how quickly one can recover from the shadow of the Death Angel’s wings.
Kaiser Wilhelm still had the constitutional power to appoint men to the highest posts and dismiss them at his pleasure, like the chancellor and the Chief of the Great General Staff, but nobody outside Germany was sure how much actual authority he retained these days. Von Falkenhayn had been more or less his man, or vice versa, but von Falkenhayn was dead now, and von Hindenburg and Ludendorff in the ascendant—because of the victories they’d won, but also because they had a much better grasp of modern politics. They were popular with the masses, whereas Falkenhayn had been a product of the traditional court system of favorites and camarillas and Chancellor von Bethmann-Hollweg was a colorless bureaucrat. They’d be much more popular when the latest series of victories had sunk in, too, and the booty flowed in to make Germany less hungry, dark, and cold come winter. High morale produced victory . . . but you needed victories to keep high morale. Everyone had a breaking strain, even if this war had shown it was often much further away than anyone would have thought.
“The All-Highest is attached to . . . possibly outdated humanitarian scruples,” von Bülow said, as if that were some sort of mild vice. “He was . . . unhappy with the experimental raid on Paris in May when the details became public knowledge. I was not altogether sorry to leave Europe then.”
“Things are no longer as they were in May, Herr Privatdozent,” Nicolai said, contemplating the end of his cigarette. “The crown prince, I might add, was not unhappy with the May experiment, which he regarded as a suitable coda to his great victory at Verdun, and has been kept briefed on this operation, which has his enthusiastic support. Of course, he is more militarily active, as a man in his prime actually commanding forces in the field and doing so very ably.”
“Ach, so,” Horst said, with much meaning and little expression, and von Bülow nodded.
Before the war, Kronprinz Friedrich Wilhelm Viktor August Ernst of the House of Hohenzollern had been mainly noted for chasing—and catching—society women, driving fast cars, wearing fantastically extravagant uniforms running to fur busbies with silver death’s-heads attached, and in general being even more of a deranged parody of a Prussian militarist than his father. Since then he’d commanded an Army group on the Western Front; doubtless his chief of staff had done most of the actual work, but he’d shown considerable talent and had made some crucial and successful changes to the plan for the Verdun offensive in the confused period between Falkenhayn’s sudden death and the new Chief of the General Staff really settling in, particularly in driving forward positions that enabled the Germans to use their artillery to interdict French resupply of the fortress town through the narrow neck that was all that connected it with their main positions. That had led to the final chaotic collapse of the position into a pocket that was starved and battered into surrender, despite frantic attempts to break out and even more costly attempts at driving relief forces through the encircling German positions.
The crown prince had also had the usual German relationship of a royal heir to his father; they detested each other, which meant he detested his father’s favorites and favored the new team. With his status as a victorious field commander, that meant a great deal; all the Uradel and military elements who’d worried about his father damaging the prestige of the monarchy were rallying around him.
All useful intelligence, Luz thought. And Horst and von Bülow and Colonel Nicolai are all contemplating futures as members of the new, triumphant group under the benevolent rays of to-be-imperial favor, achieved by bringing glory and power to the Fatherland. Anyone who thinks monarchies don’t have politics doesn’t know much about politics or monarchies. Or hasn’t seen some of the stuff that goes on around Uncle Teddy these days, come to that. And speaking of monarchies . . .
All four of President Roosevelt’s sons were in the U.S. Army as of this spring. They were all hard-charging, able, and ambitious young men, and she knew Ted Jr. was brave to excess, and would bet his younger brothers would be too. If any of them came out of the war trailing the sort of clouds of glory their father had in Cuba and went into politics . . .
Though Alice would have a better chance at making herself empress of the world, if merit were the only consideration.
Luz shuddered mentally at the thought, even now. Alice Roosevelt Longworth was a force of nature in a very decorative package, the only one of the president’s children to inherit every scrap of his wits and willpower, and with much less of his Victorian-era scruples.
Von Bülow continued in his Germanic Sage voice, and the other two nodded agreement: “The crown prince accepts the stern necessities of modern absoluten Krieg. The days of cabinet wars with limited means for limited aims are past; this is the era of war between whole peoples, for stakes that are without limit.”
“And so,” Nicolai said, standing and taking up his peaked officer’s hat. “Now we will see the practical demonstration of the Herr Privatdozent’s inspiration.”
Horst nodded. “Many reports cross a high commander’s desk; reading them is one thing . . . but seeing something in practice, another,” he said. “Come . . . gnädiges Fräulein.”
Luz was glad Horst had enough social sense not to call her sweetie in this context, and to offer an arm to them both. But from the grim look on his face, and the way Ciara Whelan had gone paler than milk, the demonstration wasn’t going to be anything she’d be happy to see.
Absoluten Krieg meant absolute war, though the usual English translation these days was total war. It had become more and more popular to describe what the Great War and the twentieth century were doing to Europe, and to the United States, for that matter. It wasn’t an accident that the Germans had been the first ones to come up with it, though.
And people generally use either version when they’re about to do something totally, absolutely beastly.
SEVEN
Schloss Rauenstein
Kingdom of Saxony, German Reich
SEPTEMBER 12TH, 1916(B)
About a thousand men,” Luz murmured to herself—and to Ciara.
They were to one side of the group of German officers who’d disembarked on the hilltop two kilometers from the castle, and, apart from a single glance and nod from Horst, unacknowledged once they arrived. Colonel Nicolai and his two subordinates had immediately been swept near to Germany’s warlords and de facto rulers.
It’s as if we had some peculiarly virulent and female form of head lice, Luz thought. Or possibly just contagious girlyness.
It wasn’t a novelty, but it was irritating, amusing, and in this context, useful.
Whatever Ciara Whelan’s doing, thinking, and thinking of doing, I need to know and quickly. She holds my life and the mission in her hands—she could always change her mind and at the very least make them do checks that would have them lock me up and eventually break my cover. She’s an interesting case. Quick thinking, to keep Colonel Nicolai in the
dark like that. ¡Me salvé por un pelo de rana calva!
The Boston-Irish girl nodded tightly, holding each of her elbows with the opposite hand. She was wearing a sleeveless calf-length cloak-jacket with a rabbit-fur collar and slits for the arms, good quality but altered to fit her and at least six or seven years old, and of a brownish color that clashed with the blue of her skirt and jacket. Like everything else about her it virtually screamed solid lower-middle-class respectability, of the sort that didn’t go hungry but had to watch the pennies relentlessly to keep up appearances.
Luz had on a camelhair trenchcoat, a female-styled copy of what British officers wore in the actual trenches, and for a wonder sturdy and useful as well as stylish—one of life’s little nuisances was that women’s clothing, while prettier than men’s and these days sometimes more comfortable, was usually less solidly made. It was moderately coolish on the top of this hill, with a steady wind from the north and patches of cloud in that peculiarly European whitish-blue sky. She estimated that they were at nearly two thousand feet, and autumn would come early to these upland valleys. The road to this location had been good graded dirt but also something hacked out recently along an old sheep track, possibly by the very men they saw in the enclosures below.
“Mother of God, but I wish I didn’t have to see this. The animals were bad enough,” Ciara said softly, as if to herself, and in English.
American-born, Luz confirmed to herself. But first-generation, with Irish parents, and raised in a neighborhood with plenty of other immigrants in it.
“Courage,” Luz said equally quietly: something perfectly in character . . . and necessary. “What will happen, will happen; it’s not in our power to change it.”
Who does she think I am? Logically, she must think that I’m someone impersonating Elisa Carmody. And logically, that would be an American government agent; a Black Chamber operative, in other words. ¡Ay! But I certainly can’t tell for sure . . . I think she’s intelligent, too, but she’s a civilian and under terrible pressure. Not out of the woods yet there, mi corazón. But best of all, she needs me to be her hope in a desperate hour, and people see what they need to see, if you give them the slightest help. Fortunately I’m usually very good at getting people to like me, but . . .
Black Chamber Page 15
