The Empire of Night: A Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thriller

by Robert Olen Butler

  With the door closed and with the blackout drape opened to reveal the light of an advanced morning and with the parcel laid flat on the bed, I tore away the paper and found a tuxedo.

  The note pinned to the paper gave an address in Knightsbridge and the present date and a time. No name.

  I took in a quick breath, aware how similar the reflex seemed to the anticipation of the Zepps a few hours ago. But with a different feeling altogether. The last time that I’d been sent off on a serious assignment, it began with a tuxedo. My waiting, I figured, was over.

  4

  That night, after the late-coming summer dark, gussied up and still fiddling with my white bow tie in the back of one of the ubiquitous French-made London taxis, I thought about a guy named James Metcalf, my contact from the embassy in May who dispatched me a tux and took me to dinner at the Carlton Hotel to give me a train ticket to Turkey and a license to kill. I expected him to be waiting for me in Knightsbridge.

  The taxi drove to the end of Basil Street, just south of Hyde Park, where Basil Mansions stretched a full block long, a continuous row of posh, red-brick, Queen Anne revival mansion flats with half-octagonal, Portland-stone bay windows. The mansions flatironed at the angled intersection of Pavilion Road, and the northernmost door I’d been brought to led into a massive wedge of a very fancy multistoried flat, four floors from basement on up, joined by a circular staircase.

  A manservant in tails answered the door and he bowed to me and he said, with lugubrious upper-class overprecision, “Good evening, sir. May I announce you?” Which was just his way of saying, Who the hell are you?

  I gave him my name. The Cobb one.

  “Of course, Mr. Cobb,” he said. He had the acceptable list in his head.

  “This way, sir,” he said, and he led me across the marble foyer and up one circular flight to the second floor, the central feature of which was a large, oak-paneled drawing room. The furniture was all done in the heavy, dark Jacobean style. Oak wainscot chairs mostly hugged the walls; overstuffed, out-of-period wingbacks and a matching couch sat before a walk-in fireplace; and a couple of major, fat-legged trestle tables lined up in the center of the room, one with a side of beef and a guy in chef’s whites, the other with drinks and a bartender. But among all this was plenty of stand-around room.

  There were a dozen of us, or a few more. All men, all done up in evening wear, arranged in little broods of two or three just out of earshot of each other. I smelled government.

  The butler stopped and so did I, just behind his right shoulder. “Lord Buffington will be here momentarily, sir,” he said.

  Indeed, from near the beef, a large, fleshy man who seemed no less large and fleshy for his perfectly bespoke evening clothes, a man who once might well have been the primary bully among Charterhouse upperclassmen, broke away from his group and moved toward me.

  “Mister Christopher Cobb, your lordship,” the manservant said, stepping out of the way.

  “Cobb,” the man said, presenting a large hand and a firm grip that I was lucky to get good enough hold on to return effectively. “I’m Gabriel Buffington.”

  “Lord Buffington.”

  He’d given me his casual name, but he nodded to acknowledge that I’d done the right thing in returning his title to him.

  And now a man emerged from behind Gabe Buffington. A man I recognized. But it wasn’t James Metcalf. It was my other James, the guy who came to Chicago and persuaded my publisher to let him hire me away for the government while remaining ostensibly at work for the Post-Express. James Polk Trask. Woodrow Wilson’s right-hand secret service man.

  Trask appeared around Buffington like a half-back running the ball behind Gabe the Grappler’s block.

  I sidestepped to take him on. “Trask,” I said.

  “Cobb,” he said.

  We shook hands.

  “Lord Buffington is our host,” Trask said at once, turning his face around to look at the Brit.

  Buffington nodded two little smiles, one for each of us.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  Buffington said, “The windows are secured, the food and the drink are plentiful, we have a splendid space belowground. Let the wretched Huns do their worst.” Having made this declaration, the lord nodded once more, firmly, for both of us, and he moved off.

  Trask watched Buffington. “He’s one of the good ones.” He turned those blackout-dark, empty-seeming eyes back to me. He waited, as if it was obvious that I was supposed to say something. Since he’d come to recruit me, I’d seen those eyes in other people in his business. Our business. I figured he expected me to acquire the knack of putting on these show-nothing eyes, just as I’d acquired the knack for planting an enemy in the ground. A couple of moments of silence had already passed between us since he’d declared Buffington a good one.

  I said, “As in ‘one of the few good ones’ or ‘stay close to the good ones because the bad ones are very bad.’”

  Trask smiled. Very faintly. “Both,” he said. “You want a drink?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’ve taught the Brits to make a Gin Rickey, at least here in Buffington’s joint.”

  It was the only drink invented by a Washington lobbyist. “That may be a violation of our neutrality,” I said.

  “Too bad,” Trask said, and he led me to the drink table and another of Buffington’s servants in tails. This one, however, was armed with cocktail shaker, ice shaver, lemon squeezer, long-handled spoons and toddy sticks, a jigger, and a couple of fine, small knives. He used one of the latter to cut us a lime, the halves of which ended up in our two glasses of Beefeater.

  Trask took us off to a corner of the room and we sat on a couple of high-backed, carved walnut chairs facing, at right angles, into the room. We were able to watch for anyone approaching, no doubt Trask’s intent. We would speak low.

  “What’s this get-together all about?” I asked.

  Trask gave a tiny snort through a whistley sinus. I looked toward him at this commonplace noise he’d made. It didn’t go with his eyes. It didn’t go with him, this peep of human frailty.

  He said, “This is a high-class version of a thing you’re starting to find all over London. A blackout club.”

  “The Zepps,” I said.

  He nodded. “All you need is a basement and some nervous friends.”

  “Are these guys nervous?”

  “From the air attacks, a few. But mostly from their long neglect of homeland defense and the task of correcting that. They’d all gotten complacent about their island fortress. Their vaunted navy can’t do anything about airships. Churchill warned them before he got canned. He foresaw a major air war. I suspect he’ll turn out to be correct. Unfortunately, Winnie didn’t know crumpets about sea war and land war.”

  Trask was referring to Gallipoli. Churchill had authored the disaster in the Dardanelles, which wasn’t over yet. “I got pretty close to all that,” I said.

  “Right,” Trask said. “Which reminds me. Good work in Istanbul.”

  I grunted.

  Yesterday’s bullets.

  “That compliment wasn’t as incidental as it sounded,” Trask said, as if he were a sensitive guy, not wanting to offend. His eyes hadn’t moved from me, hadn’t flickered through any of this. Not even when he added, “Not incidental at all.”

  I practiced on my own dead stare.

  Trask said, “Sorry to reward you by hitching you to a post in London for so long.”

  I didn’t even grunt at this.

  Trask knew how to justify it. He said, “Your Mr. Hunter has been getting some nice response in various places.”

  “Good for him.”

  “Now we’re trying to do our British friends—the good ones—a special favor.”

  This declaration was the kind of rhetorical setup Trask liked to execute before taking a sip or a drag of whatever was in his hand. A Rickey in Washington when he sent me off on the Lusitania, a Fatima when he asked to enlist me in his covert tribe. And yes
, a Rickey again now. I sipped too, waiting.

  “They’ve got a traitor inside somewhere,” he said.

  “Inside the government?”

  “They think so, given what they suspect is getting through to Berlin.”

  “Will I be involved with this?”

  Trask shrugged. He looked off into the room. “We have someone on it at the moment. Looking into a suspect.”

  He said no more.

  I took a pretty good hit on the gin and lime. Old Joe Rickey and his Washington bartender friend had a real inspiration, simple though it was.

  “We’re still feeling our way along,” Trask finally added. “It might be a good time to introduce Mr. Hunter.”

  “Here?”

  “I have a slightly different crowd in mind.” He leaned toward me, lowered his voice even further. “Do you know how many of the most powerful men in this country have German blood in their veins? It goes back two hundred years. George the first, King of Great Britain and Ireland, previously Georg Ludwig, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg, the only eligible heir of the dead Queen Anne. He didn’t even speak English. This was Queen Victoria’s great-great-grandfather, mind you, progenitor of three British kings before her. And who did Victoria up and marry? Another Hun, Albert, of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, who thus named the present royal house. For Christ’s sake, the Kaiser himself is Victoria’s grandson. There’s been a powerful lot of German-blooded begatting over those two hundred years, which has now produced, beneath the Brits’ virulently anti-German surface, a small but strategic shit pot of conflicting interests at a very high level.”

  “Your suspect is one of the begotten?” I said.

  Trask nodded. He glanced into the room and back to me. He bent near. “A baronet by the discreetly adjusted surname of Stockman. Given-named after Victoria’s German prince. Sir Albert Stockman. He’s the great-nephew of Christian Friedrich Stockmar, a German-born physician who became the personal doctor for Prince Leopold of . . . where else? . . . Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. Great-Uncle Chris was sent by Leopold to a marriageable Victoria to vouch for his own nephew Albert. Stockmar vouched well, and after the marriage he stayed on as the young couple’s personal adviser. So Victoria took good care of this guy’s extended family, including the baronetcy of our Sir Al.”

  “Why don’t the Brits just grab him and interrogate him?”

  “It’s all suspicion at this point,” he said. “And the operative phrase was ‘very high level.’ Sir Albert was beloved-by-blood by the Great Queen herself, which counts in this country. And though a baronetcy doesn’t quite rank the House of Lords, he got himself elected as a member of Parliament. Which, if he’s dirty, tells you something about his guile.”

  From outside, very near, a whistle sounded, shriller, simpler than the bobbies’ whistles. An air raid constable. This the Brits were well prepared for. Guys in uniforms with whistles. The conversations instantly stopped in the drawing room. All the faces turned in the direction of the sound—the southern wall and the street beyond.

  I looked at Trask. He looked at me. “Here come their cousins in a balloon,” I said.

  Trask snorted.

  I snorted.

  But we both rose and moved with all the other white ties and dinner jackets into the circular staircase, going along in a quite orderly fashion, quite calmly, even as the sound of the Hotchkiss six-pounders began to pop pathetically in the distance.

  We descended to the ground floor and then we circled on down, into the basement, and we emerged into a large, open space. At one end sat wine in barrels and more wine in bottles in racks, and on half a dozen of the barrels, candles burned in silver candelabra. Against the far wall were more racks, of a different sort, layered with Buffington’s guns. In the center of the open space a billiard table was disappearing even now under a white cloth cast over its surface by still another liveried man.

  Beyond the vanishing billiard green were three, round dining tables already draped in white and each set with half a dozen dinner places and lit, as well, by candles. Beyond them was an opening to a corridor in deep shadow, leading into the recesses of the basement floor. On one side of the doorway was a piano with a lit stand-up lamp. On the other side was a wall of books, two-shilling editions, books for a man to actually read. For that purpose he had a couple of overstuffed Morris chairs with another stand-up lamp between them, this one dark. The basement—at least on this side of that corridor—was Buffington’s guy’s retreat.

  We all now vaguely drifted in the direction of the set tables until Buffington’s voice boomed from behind us. “Gentlemen, the food and the drink will soon follow, and there will be more of both. But first a word.”

  We stopped drifting. We began to turn toward our host.

  He was drawn up to full height, hands behind him, framed against the final swoop of the staircase. He watched us turning to him. He approved. He waited. He encouraged us as we gathered our attention to him by addressing us once more. “Gentlemen.” Firmly he said it, though the tone of his voice had mellowed up as well, become comradely, almost affectionate.

  When at last he had the full and silent attention of every man before him, he said, one more time, “Gentlemen.” This time he rolled the word out as if he were asking us to consider its full meaning. Which no doubt he was, for he went on, “They come now, showing their true and savage selves. They come in the night, sneaking in, dangling beneath gas bags to throw bombs on our homes and schools, on our women and our children. And a few months ago they unleashed poison gas upon our troops at Ypres, violating what civilized men from time immemorial have understood to be fields of honor. This is no longer a war of nation against nation. It is a war of civilization against a new barbarism. We fight to preserve the entire world from a second dark age.”

  As if, offstage, the sound effects man heard his cue, a bomb thumped distantly and shuddered faintly beneath our feet.

  Buffington paused only for a single beat as if to let his point sink in. Before me and to the side I could see most of the men in the room, and I knew I could assume the same of the others: not one of us had flinched. And here in this London home, the bomb’s fading vibration in our feet and legs and chest supported Buffington’s point.

  He said, “Gentlemen, if we fail, this dark age will be longer than the last. Those previous five centuries will seem the winking of an eye compared to this. And the new dark age will be infinitely more terrible. Mankind’s vaunted advances of manufacturing and technology can be used for good, but they can just as readily and effectively be used for evil.”

  One more drub of a bomb, much closer, rattled our knees and stirred the silverware on the tables.

  Buffington boomed in response, “Consider that the call to roast beef and Yorkshire pudding.”

  We all certainly were happy to take that attitude, but no one moved. Not even Buffington. We waited for the next one. This moment and the next. The Germans were still working on aerial warfare. So far the raids were widely spaced and had come with one or two airships following a single, ongoing path across the city and flying away. This bomb was very near and from the direction of the earlier, distant blasts; the next would either be farther away along the flight path or it would be right on top of us.

  We waited.

  “Shall we sit?” Buffington’s voice had diminished a little. This was a question now, not a defiant suggestion.

  And there was a stroke of sound. More distant. Barely felt in Buffington’s cellar.

  “Bloody hell,” someone said nearby, very low, to himself.

  We heard no more until we were sitting with four others at the far table. Trask and I were beside each other and I could look, if I wished, between two steel-gray, slick-maned Brits across from me and down the darkened corridor leading to the rest of the basement floor. We heard one more bomb before the food, like a distant stroke of thunder, someone else’s storm.

  And then we ate. Our companions introduced themselves but did not declare their work, nor did they ask
ours, which made me suspect they were Foreign Office types, secret service no doubt, at least some of them. Their talk was casual but it was bluntly critical about Britain’s progress so far in the war. About the disastrous four-week gap between the sea attack and the land attack in Gallipoli, about the severe shortage of artillery shells, about the hasty training of a million new troops, about the U-boat threat and the Zeppelin threat and the sudden vulnerability of sacred British soil after centuries of comfortable insularity.

  Trask and I said little.

  When the four began to lean toward each other and debate the need to dissolve the government and form a new one, I leaned too, toward Trask, and said, low, “Are all these guys in your line of work?”

  Trask nodded. “In varying degrees.”

  The four men stopped talking abruptly.

  I thought at first that they’d overheard us, trained as they perhaps were. But their faces had turned not to us but to a point higher up and beyond Trask’s far shoulder.

  I looked, and Buffington had arrived and he put his hand on the shoulder of a stout man with a crooked cravat sitting next to Trask. The man needed no word. He nodded and rose and moved off and Buffington sat down.

  He said to the other three, “Sorry, gentlemen. Continue.”

  And they did, with one of them saying Kitchener—who was the secretary of state for war and who all three agreed was responsible for the shortage of artillery shells—had to resign no matter what they did with Asquith.

  Buffington drew Trask toward him. I leaned along as well and neither of them made the slightest gesture to suggest I was not invited.

  Buffington said, “Stockman’s throwing a weekend house party.”

  “Your man?” Trask said.

  Buffington said, “In the vicinity.”

  Trask nodded. And then he made the tiniest intentional movement of his head, so tiny that I instantly doubted my perception, figured I was an example of how you can overtrain a secret service agent. The movement, I thought, was this very slight turn in my direction—since I’d drawn near, behind Trask’s right shoulder—as if it was a subtle gesture to Buffington, reminding him of my presence. “Is she ready?” he said.