The Empire of Night: A Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thriller

by Robert Olen Butler

  We sat on the veranda after dinner, Jeremy and I. The night had come and the horizon before us burned brightly from the munitions factories on the eastern bank of the Havel. He said, “She will drink Kirschwasser now until she can no longer pour it. And then she will sleep very soundly.”

  I thought to say something about his mother and my mother. But I said nothing.

  I offered him a cigarette, from the pack he’d given me. He took one with a nod. We lit up and he said, “From the way we reckon it, this thing could go quickly, down there.”

  “If the weather is right.”

  “I’ll make us a pot of coffee,” he said. “Then we need to steal an automobile.”

  “Do you have one in mind?”

  “I do,” he said. “A few minutes’ walk from here is the house of the longtime commandant of Spandau Prison. Colonel Walther von Küchler. He’s shot more than a few chaps in our trade. He keeps a staff car. A good one.”

  I understood.

  Jeremy took a drag on his cigarette.

  And he added, in a voice that rasped away any sense of offhandedness, “He’s also known in a few houses in the neighborhood as Kuschelbär.”

  Snuggle Bear.

  That this colonel had executed some of the boys in our own trade was plenty of leavening for our little project. For Jeremy to add the man’s exploits with the local women made me suspect I’d been wrong about his mother. Maybe I didn’t have to look so deep for the familial chemistry I sensed he and I shared.

  “Did you bring your lock-picking tools?” he asked.

  “I did.”

  “Good,” he said.

  So when we were jittery with coffee and Jeremy’s mother was kayoed from Kirschwasser and it was past midnight and the neighborhood was sleeping, he and I dressed up in our German uniforms—the peaked field cap Jeremy’s boys got for me was a fine one, with red crown piping and a skull badge between the cockades—and with my Luger strapped to my waist and with our Gladstone bags in hand, we stepped out of his house.

  Two guys with a common uniform have some kind of electrical charge between them. It might be low-wattage at times, but it’s always there. The circuitry of an army. Of a police force. Of a baseball team, for that matter. This sudden thing between Jeremy and me made us stop just across the threshold and look at each other.

  A dark energy was coursing in us. From our being Allied spies in disguise together, of course. But our uniforms also made us German army officers. So inevitably the German army crackled in us as well. That was a strange part of the personal bond forged by a uniform. You can be bound by blood. But also by skin.

  And since we were military men, our eyes fell to the pips on our shoulders.

  I was a colonel. He was a major.

  Jeremy shot me a salute. With a wink.

  I returned them both.

  Then I introduced myself. “Colonel Klaus von Wolfinger.” I offered my hand.

  He thought for moment, finding a name for himself, and he grasped my hand. “Major Johann Ecker.”

  We shook.

  We walked off briskly, heading north on Hohenzollern. A few minutes later we turned west on Pionier-Strasse, which was sheltered, even from the pervasive glow of the factories, by a dense run of plane trees. Almost immediately, across from a drill ground, Jeremy stopped us. He looked around. We were alone in this part of the street, and we slipped quickly up the lawn of a darkened, two-storey, half-timbered and gabled house.

  We cut around the side and into the back yard, where we found a good automobile indeed parked near the door. As with most of the German staff cars, it was a civilian vehicle appropriated for military use. Dressed up in feldgrau camouflage was a late model Mercedes 37/95 double phaeton touring car, its cloth top unfurled into its secured place. This model was often called the “Torpedo” from the distinctive V-thrust of the radiator, which was echoed by the shape of the headlamps tucked inside the front fenders.

  I found myself treading lightly now, as I approached. As befitted the most powerful production automobile ever built. Ah yes. Let us steal this fine thing. Especially from the spy-killing commandant of Spandau Prison.

  Jeremy was a couple of steps ahead of me. I drew near and stopped. He peered in, put his bag into the back seat, leaning for a moment to open it and emerging with a leather portfolio case.

  He lifted it so I would take note, and he stepped to the front passenger side and placed the case in there.

  “We’ll need your flashlight for the maps,” he said.

  I put my bag into the back seat and retrieved the light.

  “But first, let me in at the back door,” he said.

  He was looking up to the darkened windows on the second floor.

  Before I could reply, he added, “We don’t want him to wake up.”

  We didn’t. One way or another.

  I did not clear up the ambiguity of his exact intentions, however.

  I would find out soon enough.

  I put the flashlight in my pocket, took my tools from the Gladstone bag, and led him to the back door, which had a tumbler lock. I opened the door.

  He stepped past me, saying, “No need for us both.”

  Which seemed to me to clear up the ambiguity. Jeremy would arrange for Snuggle Bear never to wake up.

  44

  I stood in the yard, smoking a cigarette.

  Jeremy was gone longer than I’d expected him to be. Long enough that I began to think about going in after him. But the house was quiet and dark, and I trusted Jeremy’s skill at this. I wondered if he was having some preliminary conversation with the man, a necessary explanation of why it was keenly appropriate for Jeremy to be the guy who ended his life. I would do likewise, I figured, if I had his particular combination of motives and this opportunity.

  Then there was movement at the back door. I straightened and took a step in that direction.

  The shadow striding across the yard was Jeremy.

  He arrived before me.

  From the starlight and the glow to the east I could see him just well enough to read his state. At least roughly. He gave off a quietude, almost an inertness. He did not seem like a man who’d just killed another man. Anything but. Which made me all the more certain he’d done that very thing.

  “I brought you something,” he said.

  He held out his hand and I received a palm-sized, cast-iron object. Flat with a pinback. I drew it up, away from the shadows of our bodies, and I could see the German Iron Cross, first class. The flare-tipped Maltese upright and crossbar were edged with silver.

  “You deserve a better bluff than a phony lapel pin,” he said.

  I pinned it high up on my chest.

  “The major drives the colonel,” he said, and he circled the car to the right-hand driver’s seat. I headed to the crank while he flipped the ignition switch. It took only a small, sweet pull to start up the immense engine, ninety-five horses worth.

  When I slid into the passenger’s seat, Jeremy said, “Someday, we’ll need your lock-picking tools to steal an automobile.” He reached outside the cabin—the gate change shifter was mounted to the car’s body at the running board, just inside the upright spare tire—and he notched us into gear and we rolled away, the Mercedes’ chain-drive grinding softly, deep inside its corridor of oil.

  We doubled back down Hohenzollern-Strasse. I recognized his mother’s house up ahead. It approached, it drifted past, he did not move his eyes from the road before us.

  I took out my flashlight and thumbed the slide button. I opened the portfolio. It contained a sheaf of maps. I recognized them. They were part of the KDR 100, the Karte des Deutschen Reiches, the finely detailed set of large-scale maps of Germany done up over the past three decades for the General Staff.

  “Our route to Cologne,” Jeremy said.

  I took out the first two we’d need. Map 268, Spandau, the thousand square kilometers of Germany in which Spandau was the major city. And Map 293, Potsdam.

  We turned sou
th on Wilhelm-Strasse and Jeremy throttled up and we surged ahead into the night. On an accommodating road, the Torpedo could do seventy miles per hour, could do a hundred with its chassis stripped down. Germany was fast asleep and dark, but shortly there were arc lights ahead and we flashed past a straight, cobbled road leading to a brick wall and twin, loopholed towers flanking a massive door that was as pale and jaundiced as a face from solitary. The main gate of Spandau Prison.

  Then we were in the dark again, with just our headlamps before us. I thought we were on our way, but a few minutes down the road Jeremy slowed abruptly.

  I looked to him.

  “The last of our preparations,” he said.

  He pulled off the road and we rolled over gravel past a low wooden house with a kerosene lamp burning in the window. There’d been no hesitation, no searching to find our way here. Jeremy knew the place.

  Our headlamps lit up a wide-mouthed garage. From within, the radiators and darkened headlamps of half a dozen vehicles stared out at us. A man in overalls emerged from the depth of the garage into our light. He’d been waiting.

  We made a sharp right turn, passing an open-topped automobile stripped of tires and windshield and sitting on stone blocks. We stopped. Jeremy switched off the engine.

  “Another good German,” he said.

  We got out.

  I lingered by my door while Jeremy circled the car and strode to greet the man in overalls, who was carrying an acetylene lamp.

  They shook hands and they turned their backs on me and leaned close to each other, speaking low.

  I knew to stay where I was.

  They had some intense, private matter between them.

  I thought for a moment of the covert group Jeremy drew on, worked with, in Germany, wondered at the role he played for them, wondered how he explained his Britishness.

  But they clearly trusted him. He clearly knew how to use them.

  Then he and the man in overalls turned my way and I stepped to them.

  He was Evert. Jeremy said just his first name. And he said, of me, simply, “Christopher.”

  I shook Evert’s heavily callused hand. He smelled of graphite grease. He held his lamp low and his face was in deep night shadow. But his eyes were even darker than the shadow, were startlingly visible. “Ein herzliches Dankeschön,” he said, bowing a little at the waist. He gave me heartfelt thanks, though he didn’t elaborate. But I could surmise. He was working for a different sort of Germany. Jeremy was still very much a German in the eyes of men like this one, was furthering that cause. As, therefore, was I.

  Evert turned to Jeremy now and said, still in our shared mother tongue, “I’ll get your device. Do you need the lamp?”

  Jeremy looked at me. “Do you have your flashlight at hand?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “See your own way,” Jeremy said to Evert, nodding at his lamp. The man moved off toward the garage.

  “Over here,” Jeremy said.

  I switched on the flashlight and followed him.

  He’d stopped the Mercedes with its back end even with an upright gasoline pump.

  I shined the light first on the pump, which Jeremy cranked, and then on its hose as he inserted the nozzle into the Torpedo’s gas tank, which sat low beneath the rear-deck luggage rack.

  As we topped off the tank, Evert arrived carrying a closed canvas bag. Jeremy looked up from his hose and they exchanged a nod and Evert put the bag into the back seat of the car.

  The makings of our bomb, I assumed.

  And now Evert had returned and Jeremy was replacing the gas pump hose. Evert kneeled at the back of the Mercedes and was working with a tool at the license plate. Off it came. And he was putting another in its place. The one removed and the one affixed were both prefixed with MK. Militärkraftwagen. Military vehicles.

  At last we were ready.

  Evert thanked me again. He said, “I would have expected no less from a German reared in America.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “We will create a true republic in our country,” he said. “Soon.”

  In response I pumped his hand a bit more vigorously and bowed a little at the waist, as he had initially done, and we broke off and I got into the fastest staff car in the world and we hit the road again. As we pushed south from Spandau into the deep dark of the heath country, I thought how the mission ahead of me was as vague and difficult as Evert’s. And I wondered if the right thing wasn’t to clarify the goal as Jeremy had done tonight and simply put a bullet in Sir Albert Stockman’s brain.

  45

  Before the heath yielded to Potsdam we turned west. The road was accommodating and Jeremy throttled up the Torpedo and we raced on through the Brandenburg Forest, skirting the city, and we ran fast through the forest at Tucheim, and he said I should sleep, he was fine and the way was clear to him for a few hours. And though I’d had as much coffee as he and knew from other wars how to keep awake, I let myself sleep, and somewhere along the way I dreamed about drawing my Luger and shooting it into the dark. I couldn’t see a target but I knew I had to keep shooting, and the clip in the handle kept feeding 9mm Parabellum shells, endlessly, and I fired and fired, and in the darkness I never saw who I was trying to hit or if he had fallen, and so I just kept firing.

  I woke at dawn as we decelerated into a street of folk-tale houses and shops, bright-painted bossage or half-timbered white stucco, and with froufrou gables and roof edges. This was the Weser Renaissance style, born along the river that gave it its name, the style of the brothers Grimm. The city was Hamelin.

  We were passing from the main street onto the bridge over the Weser before Jeremy realized I was sitting upright.

  “You awake?” he said.

  “I am,” I said. “Are you?”

  He was, but on Hamelin’s western bank we stopped at a small café with the logical but unfortunate name Der Rattenfänger, the ratcatcher, from the name of the Grimm tale based in Hamelin and translated more vapidly in English-language books as the Pied Piper. We ate our breakfast—avoiding the Wurst, just in case they were having a joke on us all—and we received ongoing glances and bows of respect from the working men who ate there with us. We were high officers in their army. And I was more. One man with a vast gray mustache rose to full attention before me and saluted. He then inclined his head toward my Iron Cross. “Hail to your bravery,” he said. I nodded in the supercilious manner of a son-of-a-bitch young secret service colonel, rehearsing the character I would need to play in Spich.

  The owner tried to foot our breakfast bill but we declined, with thanks, and we stepped outside. Without having to say anything, we moved off fifty yards or so from the café where we could face the nearby upswell of mountains, the eastern edge of the Weser Uplands, and smoke a cigarette.

  “About five hours to go,” Jeremy said. “As long as the dirt-road bits stay dry and the cows keep to the fields.”

  “Spich has to be small,” I said. “In a small town and a tight military community, these uniforms aren’t camouflage. We’re going to stand out.”

  Jeremy blew smoke toward the mountain. It was covered with a mixed-growth forest, pine and spruce, oak and hornbeam.

  “So we’ll have to strut,” I said.

  He looked at me.

  “The colonel and the major have to be there with a purpose,” I said.

  Jeremy took in a thoughtfully slow drag on his Murad.

  “They’re in Spich about him,” I said.

  Jeremy exhaled sharply, in agreement. “Who do you expect knows his intentions?”

  “The commandant has to.”

  Jeremy nodded. “And an airship commander.”

  “They could be the only ones,” I said. “And I bet neither of them knows what the bomb contains.”

  “I bet you’re right,” he said. “But they do know the whole thing is on the sly.”

  We said no more for now. The point was to smoke and stretch our legs, and then we walked back to the car.

/>   One last salute. A guy old enough to have fought for Moltke at Gravelotte was approaching the café. At the sight of us, he stopped and snapped us a brisk one. “Gott strafe England,” he said.

  Jeremy and I answered in unison, “Er strafe es!”

  And we drove off.

  But at a garage on the southern outskirts of Hamelin, we topped off our gasoline tank to get us easily through to Spich, and Jeremy let me drive the Torpedo, breach of rank though it was, so he could sleep for an hour or so. She was another skin, my Mercedes, a great steel body about me and I was its heart, my own heart beating fast from the roar of the engine and the whip-grind of the chain drive and the sense of torque beneath me, the great unseen spin of things flaring out to the four wheels, hurtling us along.

  I drove a stretch of the route that brought us through the center of small town after small town—Arzen and Reher and Herrentrup, Meinberg and Kohlstädt and Marienloh, Hemmern and Rüthen—and every time, I had to slow down for the narrow streets, the cobbled streets, the horse-cart and hay-wagon streets, and that was fine, for I could throttle down and shift down my Torpedo and then fire her back up again.

  Jeremy got his hour of sleep and more, nearly two, and he woke and I let him have the Mercedes once again, and he was chest-puffingly pleased at the transfer of her; he was a man reunited with his mate after a trial separation during which she’d dallied with another guy. He forgave her. And he drove her fast.

  It was early afternoon when we saw a wide stretch of factory smoke before us. Mülheim, with the Rhine invisible just beyond and Cologne nearby, south around a bend of the river.

  We soon turned south ourselves, before Mülheim, and I said to Jeremy, “Time to start the bluff.”

  He and I were relying on the unthinkableness, in the heart of the Fatherland, that two Germans who looked and sounded like ranking officers of the Deutsches Heer could be anything but what they seemed. We all had the same blood. Even the three million socialists. So surely these two splendidly portrayed German officers were legit. Consequently, the more dramatic our public strut, the better.