The Empire of Night: A Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thriller

by Robert Olen Butler

  My mind thrashed on to find some other preoccupation. But now we slowed even more in our walk to Room 200. We trod more quietly still. And the door before us loomed large, squeezing everything else out of my head.

  And we stood before it.

  Jeremy gently drew his Luger. I gently drew my lock-picking tools.

  We looked at each other. We were both ready.

  One of us needed to listen at the door.

  Not me.

  I nodded for him to do it.

  Jeremy turned his head and brought his ear near to the door. His face was angled toward me.

  He listened.

  Then he smiled a small, wry smile.

  And so it took all the will I could muster to open my leather pouch of tools and work the pick and the torque wrench gently into the lock. I manipulated the pins one at a time, choosing silence over maximum speed, though I was plenty fast, happy to focus unthinkingly on this task of the fingertips.

  But the distraction of professional concentration vanished with the click of the lock and my withdrawal of the tools and my reflexive step back from the door, my body ready to run away. Jeremy pushed in front of me and wrenched the knob and threw the door open and rushed in.

  We dared not fail at this. I had no choice. I followed him, not pausing to put the lock tools away but dropping them on the floor, drawing my Luger. He’d turned sharply to the left and was lunging through the bedroom door and my mother screamed—in her authentic, unperformed voice—and though my legs were leaden and my chest was clamping shut I also pressed through the doorway as well, even as Jeremy, inside, cried “Halt!” and then again “Stop!”

  I took my place beside him and let myself see.

  The bed was strewn with rose petals.

  Whose idea was that?

  Stockman had halted. He was standing beside the bed and was squaring around, his hands rising, showing us his palms. Showing us more, perhaps, if I’d looked closely, which I did not, but at least he was not naked. He was wearing his union suit. His body did, however, register on me as athletic in the tight throat-to-ankle cling of his underwear.

  And I had no choice now.

  I turned my face to my mother.

  I released a breath I had not known I was holding. Nothing utterly private was visible on her either, though barely so—she wore a peach silk and lace chemise and matching corset with black stockings gartered at its hem—did we interrupt them just before or just after?—and in spite of her scream, she was now arranged in an alertly sitting, arm-braced, chest-forward pose worthy of a cigarette card. Her eyes, however, were wide in Shock and Terror, wide enough to play to the back row of the Duke of York’s.

  Was this what I’d feared all those years?

  This scene?

  This pose?

  It was no more than what I’d imagined whenever I tried to imagine it as mundane.

  At some other specific moment in the half hour just past or in the half hour to have come, perhaps it would have been different for me. Worse for me. But this was how it finally had happened.

  We stared at each other, my mother and I. She glanced away for the briefest moment—to check out Stockman—and then she looked back to me and let the Shock and Terror mask fall from her face.

  And this face was naked.

  This was perhaps the most utterly private part of her body, this face.

  I wanted to turn away from it but it held me.

  This face was weary.

  This face was old.

  This face was mortal.

  This was the face of a woman who would hold very tightly to a man of skills and looks whose love she had lately won, having feared never to find such a man again.

  Having sorted through a lifetime of such men.

  And she held all the more tightly to this one because he was also a man of great means, a man of significant power, a strewer of roses.

  He was, however, also an aspiring mass killer.

  I was done looking at her.

  I turned my attention back to Stockman, whose own eyes were wide as well. Legitimately so. His new pal Josef Jäger was holding one of two pistols that were presently pointed at him. And Jäger was in a new guise.

  Everyone was very quiet for a few beats, all of us taking in the scene.

  I said, speaking English, “You can put your hands down, Sir Albert, and join Madam Cobb on the bed. Chastely, however, at this opposite edge.”

  I flipped the Luger in the direction I wanted him to go and he obeyed without a word.

  As he adjusted and arranged himself, I said, without taking my eyes from his face, “And you, Madam Cobb, can relinquish your fetching pose and relax at your end of the rose garden.”

  I could see her movement in my periphery.

  She complied.

  “Allow me to introduce myself,” I said. “I am Colonel Klaus von Wolfinger of the Auswärtiges Amt.” I hesitated for a moment, having used the German phrase, as if I were in the process of remembering there was a non-German speaker in the room. I did not look at her, however. Not a glance. I said, “That’s the Foreign Office, Madam Cobb. I am willing to think you are an innocent outsider in all of this. Naturally so. You have some other function in Sir Albert’s life. But for now I am sorry we must insist you be subject to certain restrictions along with him.”

  Through my little speech, Albert and I were focused on each other. His eyes were subtly dynamic, however, with tiny narrowings and widenings and brightenings and darkenings as he listened to me, as he absorbed my new manner, assessed my surprising appearance, reread all my words and actions since we’d met. He was having trouble with all this.

  My mother said, “I’m sure there has been some terrible mistake. With regards to Sir Albert as well as me.”

  I turned my face to her.

  And for a second time I found her to be blank. As blank as when I’d told her about Albert and the poison gas.

  I said, “Forgive me, Madam Cobb. You are used to a starring role. But I’m afraid you have no lines in this scene.”

  Not even that could stir up a reaction in her eyes, or around her mouth, or with her nostrils, or upon her skin. Nothing flickered or twitched or flared or stretched.

  So perhaps even the blankness was an act.

  It made no difference.

  I looked back to Stockman.

  His eyes grew steady. He found his voice. He said, “If you are who you say you are, you must put your weapons away at once, you must accord Madam Cobb and me the dignity of our privacy, and you must instantly call your superiors. Ask them to contact Colonel Max Hermann Bauer of the General Staff. He will put you straight.”

  Though the words themselves were measured enough, he had mustered his full umbrage and toughness for these instructions. He paused now for them to have their effect.

  I smiled faintly at him and made my own words sound sickly sweet in tone. “Surely, Sir Albert, you are not under the illusion that Colonel Bauer received higher authorization for your little escapade. Even as we speak, he is also being detained.”

  Stockman had no answer for this. Once again his mind began to grind behind restless eyes.

  I said, “Did you really think you could poison the ancestral home of the Kaiser’s English mother and grandmother and expect him to approve, even after the fact? It is a matter of blood, Sir Albert.”

  I gave that line a moment of silence to play in his head.

  Then I invoked his own invented word from our first discussion of blood. “Der Überglaube,” I said. The overarching belief.

  And his restless eyes grew still.

  Had he just capitulated?

  It was his own argument. Albert knew the risk he’d taken. Like the manly university swordsman he admired and wished he’d been, he seemed to stand straight and lower his saber and accept the wound. That odd respect I’d occasionally felt for him nibbled at me for a moment.

  Only for a moment.

  “I will leave you now,” I said. “Sir Albert, I th
ink you know Major Ecker. He worked for you briefly.”

  Stockman finally took his eyes off me. He turned his face to Jeremy. He looked at him closely for the first time since we burst in. He recognized him. “You were the one,” he said, the killing tone of his voice reminding me that Stockman had actually wept for his man Martin. He glared at Jeremy, though he seemed to address me: “So does the officer corps of our Foreign Office tolerate a common murderer?”

  “That’s quite enough, Albert,” I said. “The Foreign Office is more concerned with uncommon murderers.”

  Stockman shifted his glare to me.

  But he said nothing.

  “Make yourself comfortable, Baronet,” I said. “Major Ecker will sit with you, and he is authorized by the highest Foreign Office authorities to shoot you dead if he deems it necessary.”

  Stockman sniffed and turned his face away.

  He understood.

  I looked at my mother for the last time in this scene. “I do not mean to alarm you, Madam Cobb. And surely it will be unnecessary. But he has the same authorization regarding you.”

  She straightened a little in the torso and played a defiant heroine worthy of her Duchess of Malfi: “He may shoot me if he chooses, but I will follow Sir Albert to the end.”

  I had no idea what part act, what part truth was in this declaration. I doubted that even she knew.

  I made no reply.

  I turned my back on her.

  Jeremy and I exchanged a nod and I passed into the sitting room. I gathered up my lock-picking tools and I put them in my pocket and then I was striding down the hall, wrenching my mind away from the fact that there was one more confrontation to come with Albert Stockman and his lover.

  55

  I leaned into the Torpedo and lifted the dispatch case from the floor of the tonneau. I stepped out, holding it close. I opened the passenger door and laid it gently on the seat.

  Inside the case was the ticking of the clock, but I could not hear it. The ticking was muffled into silence by the cotton wool and the tin.

  I looked at my Waltham.

  It was five minutes to four.

  The matter of Stockman and my mother had taken too much time.

  I started the engine and drove away fast.

  At the air base I was tempted, because of the time, to drive up to the place where the colonel’s driver had parked this morning. But if something went wrong, if the bomb went off with the Zepp still on the ground—by a delayed takeoff perhaps—I wanted the car in a place away, a place I could run to and not have to throttle and spark and crank while phosgene rolled immediately over me.

  So I stopped in a stand of birch trees near the entrance to the air base grounds, just off the road to Uckendorf. There was no security out here and the camouflaged Torpedo was inconspicuous among the trees.

  I hung the bag over my shoulder and walked away from the Torpedo, taking my watch out to see the time and hearing it tick—the Waltham had a loud tick, muffled by my watch pocket but audible in the open air—and I thought of the ticking in the bag, and it was five minutes past four o’clock.

  I hustled on, wanting to jog the half mile to the hangar area, but slowing myself to a brisk walk for the sake of the bomb under my arm, its delicate wired connections. I reached the administrative building in a little less than ten minutes.

  Ziegler was in his outer office, on his feet, and he spun to me, strode to me at once. “Good,” he said. “Come.”

  I followed him out of the administrative building and into the hangar through the same side door we’d used this morning.

  LZ 78 loomed instantly above me. And against me, its gray vastness feeling like a palpable weight upon my eyes, my face, my chest. It staggered me, made me work hard to steady myself on my feet. It made the thing hanging from my shoulder feel dangerous only to myself.

  “The commander is forward,” Ziegler said.

  I dragged my body away, moved my legs, followed Ziegler along the length of the ship, the upwind doors wide open now, the sky going pale white from a thin spew of clouds, a breeze funneling into the hangar and into my face.

  The breeze made me think: The Torpedo was well away from here, but it was downwind. Gas released in the launching zone would roll my way. I would have to run fast, if it came to that. I would have to start the car fast.

  But if the flight went off on time, I would surely have time to get away.

  Where exactly would LZ 78 be at seven minutes past five?

  “Colonel,” I said, “are we still on schedule for a five o’clock launch?”

  “From what I gather,” he said.

  “Good,” I said.

  All along the airship’s length there was the bustle of ground crew, in gray shirt sleeves and soft caps, unfurling the handling lines.

  The lines were slack. The hangar ballast was still on board.

  We reached the control cabin, a long, boat-shaped, enclosed gondola suspended a man’s body-length beneath the great gas-packed hull. An exposed aluminum ladder went up from the gondola and into the keel walkway.

  “Here we are,” the colonel said.

  He stopped at the foot of a rope ladder leading to the forward compartment of the gondola.

  He motioned for me to go up. “I’ll leave you here. They don’t want extra weight. They’re expecting you.”

  We snapped off a simultaneous salute to each other.

  He said, “When you’ve finished, would you care to join me at my office to watch the launch?”

  “Of course, Colonel,” I said.

  And I went up the ladder into the major’s command area.

  The place felt unfinished, with the web of aluminum braces visible overhead and along stretches of the lower walls. The focal working parts were prominent panels under the windows at the front and along the sides, holding gauges and instruments for heading and for incline, for altitude and for speed, for hydrogen pressure and for fuel level, and standing before the panels were wheels and levers for rudder and elevator and ballast.

  The place bustled with half a dozen men in leather jackets and heavy scarves doing their pre-flight checks. In the midst of them was Dettmer with a clipboard in his hand, speaking intensely with one of his officers.

  I waited.

  I was prepared to insert myself into his awareness. But I felt the need to seem casual about all this, to plausibly portray a benign observer. I had a few minutes of margin. Ideally I’d plant the bomb somewhat nearer its detonation to minimize the possibility of its being discovered in time to disarm it.

  Another officer approached the two men, and his arrival drew Dettmer’s eyes up and over to me. Immediately he excused himself and stepped my way.

  He saluted.

  “No need for that, Major,” I said. “This is your domain.”

  His chest lifted and he smiled, grateful for the sign of respect.

  I wished I could order him to use the parachute they’d put on board for Stockman, if something were to happen.

  But he was a dead man.

  All these men around me—I’d roughly parsed them as executive officer and helmsman, navigation officer and chief engineer and telegraph operator—these were all dedicated professional soldiers in obedient service to their country, and all of them were dead men if I did my obedient service to my own country and to my country’s ally. As was the watch officer a dead man, whom Dettmer now temporarily nodded off the ship to execute his duties with the ground crew. I was there to compensate for his weight.

  “How long do I have on board?” I asked.

  Dettmer looked at his clipboard. He looked at his own watch, which he drew from his tunic pocket on a dull gold chain. “Half an hour certainly. Perhaps more. We can wait till the weighing off to reboard the watch officer.”

  I said, “My official duty is to check on our special bomb. But I’d like to see some of the ship.”

  Dettmer nodded and went immediately thoughtful. I presumed he was trying to think of someone to spare as my
guide.

  “I know your men are busy,” I said. “After being led to the bomb rack for inspection, I’d need only a little orientation from someone. You wouldn’t mind my respectfully and carefully looking around on my own, would you?”

  “No sir,” he said. “Of course not.”

  He summoned one of the other officers nearby.

  He introduced Lieutenant Schmidt, his telegraph operator, a lanky young man with hollowed cheeks and calloused hands, the perfect image of a rube off a farm in southern Illinois, down where you couldn’t tell the difference between Illinois and Kentucky.

  “This way, sir,” he said.

  He stepped to the aluminum ladder in the middle of the floor and I followed.

  We climbed through the gondola roof and into the open air for a few steps, the smell of hydrogen suddenly strong around us, and then into the hull.

  We emerged on the wood slat floor of the keel walkway. It stretched the length of the airship within a tight A-frame of aluminum girders, but this end of the ship was in darkness at the moment, with only swatches of self-luminous paint defining the path. The lieutenant switched on a tungsten flashlight.

  “We won’t have light in here till we are under way,” he said. “The generator.”

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  “You would be astonished,” he said, “how carefully insulated all the electrical devices are.”

  He led on, heading aft. He shined his light here and there, identifying whatever his beam fell upon, trying to be a proper tour guide: the vast flanks of the gas cells, covered in goldbeater’s skin to prevent leaks; the wiring and the cables, for rudder controls and engine telegraph and speaking tubes; the containers for ballast, full of water laced with alcohol to keep it from freezing at ten thousand feet. He even pointed out the tools and spare parts and the rigging ropes. He loved his airship, this apparent rube of a Lieutenant Schmidt, who was not such a rube after all. He had a mechanical turn of mind.