The Empire of Night: A Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thriller

by Robert Olen Butler

  “Impossible,” she said.

  Her blankness shifted ever so slightly with this. How? Around the eyes. Just the eyes. Something there. They seized the blankness and slammed it into my face like a brick.

  “I’m telling you the truth,” I said.

  “It’s not possible,” she said, each word enunciated like a boxing jab.

  “Doctor Einstein told me.”

  “He doesn’t even know my Albert.”

  “He knows Fritz Haber,” I said. “At the Institute. He knows Haber better than anyone. Haber is the German father of poison gas. He and your Albert are working together in this.”

  I tried hard to read her face for some trace, some flicker, something, anything, to suggest she was at least opening to the possibility that this was true. I saw nothing.

  “Has he spoken of London?” I asked.

  She looked at me as if I’d not said a word.

  I advanced the spark in my voice. “Has he spoken of London?”

  “He loves London,” she said, her face suddenly flashing alive. “Of course he speaks of London.” She was going to seize on this sort of question as if it were the basis of my beliefs about him, typical of my flimsy thinking. “He loves the city. Loves the theater.”

  My breath caught.

  “He fell in love with me in a London theater,” she said.

  “Has he lately spoken of the London theater?”

  “You’re not listening,” she said.

  “The theater district?” I said.

  She leaned forward and slapped me across the face.

  “You’re not listening,” she said.

  I rose.

  Of course. What they called “Theatreland” in London was still robustly defiant of the Zepps, the Huns, all of it. The streets would be full of people leaving shows at the prime striking hour. And there would be the spill of plenty of light.

  I said, “Sometime soon. Perhaps tomorrow night, if the wind and sky are right, your Albert will bomb the theatergoers of London with poison gas.”

  She jumped up.

  I retreated a step.

  “Go away now,” she cried. “Go away.”

  I turned my back to her.

  “I can’t do this anymore,” she said.

  I moved away, toward the door.

  “I won’t go on,” she cried after me.

  I approached the door.

  “You’re a liar, Christopher Cobb,” she said.

  I put my hand to the doorknob.

  “You lie like a jealous lover,” she cried.

  And I was out the door and careening down yet another hotel corridor.

  48

  I walked to the Boar’s Head and went in the front door and straight to an empty table in a far corner, sitting with my back to the wall. Not that I wanted to entertain the admiring glances of the half-drunks in the room. Jeremy would surely look in here for me when he returned from Kalk and I wanted to make sure he saw me. I avoided eye contact with the men in the bar and kept my left hand on the tabletop for a time, simply flicking it upward, from my still-planted wrist, to show my palm when anyone started to approach. A subtle gesture, really, given the context and the warm intentions of the inebriates. But I needed to do it only twice, and both times it worked instantly. The whole roomful, being German and quick to follow orders from on high, shortly understood and kept away. For this, I felt a warm feeling for these guys. An admiration even.

  So I kept my stein awash in a nice black Köstritzer for an hour or more—the time sliding away after the boys in the bar learned to keep their distance—and then Jeremy was before me. He sat. Our innkeeper appeared almost instantly. Jeremy simply nodded toward my drink and she went away and shortly returned with the same for him.

  We touched steins. He drafted long, and I drank not at all now but returned the stein to the table when he put his down.

  “They met him at the gates of Bayer,” he said. “Near midnight, but men in suits. They all went in. He drove out an hour later. Big event. Big, special, secret event.”

  He took another drink.

  “Then to the air base,” he said. “Then to the hotel. The drivers and the truck went away. Probably back to Berlin.”

  We sat in silence for a time.

  Jeremy finally asked, “Did you speak to our actress?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  I knew there to be only a few swallows of my Köstritzer left, and I finished them.

  After that, I stayed silent long enough for him to prompt me.

  “Anything?” he asked.

  “Perhaps his target is Theatreland.”

  Jeremy humphed a that-makes-sense humph.

  “I don’t think we can count on her from this point forward,” I said.

  Jeremy fixed his eyes on mine and twitched his head a little to the side.

  He wanted me to explain. I thought to say, She’s sweet on him.

  But that would have only led to more difficult explanations. Beginning with: Don’t worry. I cannot imagine her working against us.

  Which, I now realized, I couldn’t entirely vouch for.

  Instead I said, “I can’t see her in any plan we might make from here on.”

  Jeremy shook his head faintly no, disputing my assessment. “Your man and mine in London think highly of her.”

  Hell. It even occurred to me to say, She’s my goddamn mother. I should know what we can and can not count on from her.

  But I said, “I’ve got a bad feeling about her.”

  “She seemed a tough bird.”

  “She’s too much an amateur. Trust me on this.”

  Jeremy flipped his head a little. “Have it your way,” he said.

  Another of my mother’s theatrical triumphs. Impressing tough guy Erich Müller.

  I would have it my way.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  And so we drank a bit more together, Jeremy and I, almost entirely in silence, and then we went up the back stairs to our rooms and we slept.

  The next morning we sat at the same table and the innkeeper served us eggs and Wurst and black bread and her boy served us coffee. As we ate, Jeremy and I spoke of how short the hours had become. If the weather was right, this would likely be the night.

  He said, “I’ll spend the morning in my anarchist’s workshop.”

  But before we could get to the matter of my next move, a figure appeared in the door, at first in dark silhouette backlit by the morning light on the threshold of the dim bar.

  A man in uniform.

  He hesitated there, squared around to us, and then he approached.

  Two pips on each shoulder. A captain.

  He arrived before our table, straightened smartly to attention, and saluted us.

  Jeremy’s hands happened to be free and he returned the salute, though casually.

  I was lifting my coffee cup with my right hand. The cup had been rising when he arrived, and I continued on to take a sip.

  The captain patiently held his salute.

  I lowered the cup and placed it on its saucer.

  I saluted.

  He snapped off a finish to his.

  “Colonel,” he said, bowing his head to me. “Major.” A bow to Jeremy. Then back to me: “I am sorry to have intruded on your breakfast.”

  “Not at all, Captain,” I said. “Would you like to sit?”

  “Thank you, sir, but I am simply to give you a message and wait upon you.”

  I lifted my chin a little to encourage him to proceed.

  He said, “My commanding officer, Colonel Franz von Ziegler, commandant of the airship base, has taken note of your arrival, and he sends his warmest regards. He offers his personal assistance in any way that might be useful to you.”

  “Thank you, Captain,” I said. “Perhaps I can visit with the colonel on the base at his earliest convenience.”

  “Of course, sir. If you would like to do so this morning, he has instructed me either to wait for you or to return for you.”
<
br />   “His schedule?” I asked.

  “Is flexible at any hour till noon.”

  “Return in an hour,” I said.

  “I will wait outside with the colonel’s automobile.”

  The captain straightened and clicked his heels and saluted once more.

  I returned it. He did a sharp about-face, and he strode across the barroom and out the door.

  Jeremy and I watched him go. Then we looked at each other.

  “As we’d hoped,” Jeremy said.

  “The commandant’s eager,” I said.

  “He expects to fear you.”

  49

  The captain was leaning against the commandant’s camouflaged Horch phaeton when I emerged from the inn with my Iron Cross on my chest, my dispatch case over my shoulder, and my Luger on my hip. He snapped to attention at my approach.

  He made a move to open the front passenger door. I recalled his commandant sitting in that position when we passed yesterday on the main street. But I was an arrogant son of a bitch named Klaus von Wolfinger, a secret service colonel from the Foreign Office in Berlin, so I narrowed my eyes at him. He instantly recognized his mistake. He slammed the passenger door shut and opened the rear door in the tonneau. He would be made to act the proper chauffeur for me.

  “Sorry, sir,” he said.

  I gave him a minute nod and climbed in.

  The door clicked gently shut behind me.

  We drove in silence down Wald-Strasse, across the railroad tracks, and out into the barley fields on the road to Uckendorf. Less than a mile later we turned onto a two-lane macadam leading into the air base, a thousand acres of flat, cleared, fallow farmland stripped empty for airship landing and maneuvering, but with a cluster of structures a half mile ahead, the centerpiece being a Zeppelin hangar, growing larger by the moment, clearly outsized, massive. Measureable now: longer than the greatest Atlantic steamship and twenty storeys high.

  We drew near. End on, the hangar was an octagon cut off at the knees and with a slight pitch to its upper edge, the squared-off frontal outline of an airship. The doors were shut. Along each flank sat wide, low, corrugated steel buildings. Storehouses and barracks. A telegraph station. And an administrative building, where we now parked.

  As I stepped from the automobile and into the shadow of the hangar, its vastness seized my chest and lifted me. Like I once felt walking State Street in my Chicago, passing beneath the Heyworth Building and the Mandel Brothers Building, Marshal Field and the Masonic Temple.

  The air base administrative building was steel and plain but it was smaller than the other buildings and had a brick chimney in the side wall. We went in. Two enlisted men at desks in an outer office leaped to their feet, shooting off salutes that the captain and I returned, and we went down a narrow corridor and straight into the main room of the place.

  From behind a large, quartered-oak desk rose the commandant, a full colonel like me, but having arrived at the rank at a more traditional pace. He was perhaps sixty. He was clean-shaven except for a sword-blade gray Wilhelm mustache.

  I waited for the office door to click shut behind me, and I stepped to the front of the colonel’s desk, stopping between two oak chairs that were arranged to face him. He and I straightened and shared a simultaneous salute. I’d watched him take note of my Iron Cross as I approached. He did not have one or was not displaying it.

  And then, as our saluting hands fell, we both glimpsed something that we now subtly displayed to each other, by very slightly and very briefly turning our faces to the right.

  We each had a Schmiss.

  This was good.

  I offered my hand. “I am Colonel Klaus von Wolfinger,” I said.

  He offered his. “Colonel Franz von Ziegler,” he said. “Commandant of His Imperial and Royal Majesty’s Airship Station at Spich.”

  We shook.

  Ziegler said, “Colonel, you have a fine medal there.”

  My hand moved to my chest beneath the Iron Cross. “Thank you,” I said.

  He smiled. “Of course that. But I meant your scar.”

  I returned the smile, though faintly. “And you, sir.”

  His was particularly wide, as broad as my thumb.

  He figured he knew how to read my look. He said, “I drank foolishly long and much upon that night and inflamed it.”

  He was a purist. And he was solicitous of my goodwill. He did not want me to think he’d exaggerated the wound with horsehair.

  “Mine was badly mended,” I said.

  We flashed a quick, comradely smile at each other.

  “Bonn,” he said, identifying his university.

  “Heidelberg,” I said. “Borussia?” I asked. The university fencers all were members of clubs, each school having a variety of these, differentiated in a de facto caste system by occupation or wealth or nobility of blood line. Borussia was Kaiser Wilhelm’s club in his Bonn university days, the most elite in the country.

  “You honor me by the question,” the colonel said. “But no. Guestphalia.”

  “Also splendid,” I said.

  “And you?”

  “Rhenania,” I said.

  “Excellent,” he said.

  We paused now for a beat.

  This thing was forever shared.

  He ended the pause with a deep intake of breath and a straightening. “I took the liberty of approaching you,” he said. “If you are here for some purpose that is none of my business, I apologize.”

  “Not at all, Colonel,” I said.

  “It is early,” he said. “But the occasion warrants. May I offer you something to drink?”

  “It is early,” I said.

  “Coffee then?”

  “No thank you.”

  He made a very small but abrupt lift of the chin, as if he’d been righteously rebuked. I was all business. He was a man who respected that, who was just that sort of man himself, and he regretted giving any other impression.

  “Would you care to sit?” He lifted his hand only very slightly to indicate the chairs.

  I sat in one. He sat. I opened my dispatch case and removed my letter of introduction from the foreign minister.

  “My purpose here is very much your business,” I said, extending the letter toward him.

  He took it from me with a face gone grimly tight.

  He opened it. He began to read.

  The German foreign minister himself was vouching for me.

  “Minister Jaglow’s introduction is general,” I said, “because the specifics are for your ears only.”

  Ziegler took a short, quick breath at this.

  He read on. He finished. He looked at me. “I’d thought you might be Foreign Office,” he said, softly.

  He was intimidated.

  He began to fold the letter.

  It was time to open the throttle on the big bluff.

  “You may keep it for your files,” I said. “If you have any concerns.”

  He finished folding the letter, slipped it back into the envelope, and handed it across to me. He would show no fear.

  Good.

  I opened the weather flap on the dispatch case once more and replaced the letter. I closed the case.

  When I returned my attention to Colonel Ziegler, his hands sat one upon the other on his desktop.

  His face was fixed in a stoic calmness. Placid, almost. This was his imminent-battle face, when all that could be done to prepare had been done.

  “My people are not precisely clear as to what you know,” I said. “But our inquiries reveal that you are a respected and trusted officer. No doubt that is why certain parties chose you and this base.”

  I paused.

  I watched his calmness harden into a mask.

  I said, “You and perhaps a single airship commander—and perhaps no one else—understand the unusual circumstances of the imminent mission to London.”

  I hesitated only slightly to give him a chance to leap in and clarify how many others knew of the mission. He di
dn’t. I didn’t press it. I said, “You are taking a civilian aboard. And within your arsenal on this raid, there will be a single, special bomb. For its very existence, the civilian is responsible, which is why he has been authorized to accompany it. I suspect you do not know the exact nature of that bomb’s specialness.”

  I paused again.

  Ziegler’s face had not changed in the slightest.

  I waited one moment more. And another.

  He realized I expected something from him. The calmness collapsed into a brow-furrowed sincerity. “You are correct, sir,” he said. “I do not know why this bomb bears its privilege.”

  “Good,” I said.

  It wasn’t quite the word he’d expected. His eyes flickered with the temporary relief I’d intended: he’d said the right thing to disavow a conspiracy.

  “I believe you,” I said. I let him feel good for a moment and then I tweaked him again. “You met with him last night.”

  “Sir, he came to me as I was informed he would. I was instructed to receive the bomb from him and place it in safekeeping until its loading for the mission.”

  “Perhaps you do not know the irony attending him.”

  “I do not, sir.”

  I said, “He is an Englishman.”

  Ziegler lifted up slightly from the chest.

  “You did not know,” I said. “Good.”

  His eyes flexed in surprise. He understood that I’d read his reaction. He was not used to this.

  And then he made a quick confession. “I knew he had an Anglicized name.”

  I waved my hand, absolving him.

  He nodded his head faintly in gratitude.

  “The man who directed you,” I said. “I presume it was Colonel Bauer himself.”

  “Yes sir,” he said. Very softly. This was softly from a man not accustomed to using that tone. “Though strictly by dispatch,” he added. “I have never met with him.”

  “Colonel Ziegler, you do understand that our conversation here is strictly confidential.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “This is not a matter of treason,” I said.

  He stiffened at the mere mention of the word.

  “Not strictly speaking,” I said.