The Empire of Night: A Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thriller

by Robert Olen Butler

  I had my Luger. For a quick, tight cluster of shots high up in one of the bags above me.

  I had matches.

  I needed something to burn slow and low.

  I didn’t know if my gasp made me clutch the tin box tight against me or if clutching it made me gasp. But I knew there was something inside. Sweetly, it was a thing Erich Müller never thought to render useless.

  Cotton wool.

  Cotton wool burned slow. Especially compacted tightly.

  Of course, the first stroke of a match might ignite the fumes that already scented the air.

  Or the contrary problem might assert itself. Cotton wool could burn itself out.

  It was all timing. Timing. And I had no idea what the timing might be.

  But the ticking in my watch pocket was the only time that counted now and it was reminding me that I needed to act.

  I struck out forward along the walkway, moving as fast as I could into the dark with the beam of tungsten before me.

  I had to get back to Dettmer and ask permission to stay aboard. He would surely let me fly with them tonight. After all, he’d been prepared for an Englishman to do so. Instead, he’d have a chance to impress the Foreign Office.

  He’d want me to watch the takeoff of his airship with him. But I needed to get off his bridge and go to work as soon as possible afterward. For my larger aspiration in this mission, vivid, unmanageable word had to get out. The ball of fire should be seen at Spich, at least distantly. The Zepp and its phosgene had to fall on German soil.

  I’d pull the trigger on the LZ 78 soon after takeoff. But long enough after to put jumpable distance between that hatch and the ground.

  And then there was the scene from limbo being played out at the Hotel Alten-Forst.

  I stopped abruptly, even though I needed to rush. This was a complication that only now reminded me of itself.

  Who was Jeremy? What was his intention? He was sitting in Room 200 with a pistol on Stockman and my mother. Or at least he was when I left him. The two men could have been working together. Or they had lately begun to do so. They certainly had the same immediate objective: the gas bombing of London.

  But I knew the truth wasn’t simple.

  And whatever it was made no difference to my actions in the next half hour or so.

  I moved on.

  Another hole of light in the floor was growing bright up ahead.

  And then I was down the ladder and through the roof of the command gondola.

  I landed and found Major Dettmer handing off his clipboard to his executive officer. The cast on the bridge was a little different now. The navigator and the telegraph lieutenant were off to their posts. The helmsman was at the rudder wheel and a junior officer was at the elevator control.

  The executive officer crossed before me, caught a glimpse of me, and paused to salute.

  “No saluting,” I said. I would put them at their oblivious ease around me. “I am a fly on the wall.”

  But I realized I’d just translated an American idiom into German. It sounded odd in my mouth even as I spoke it. “As they say in America,” I quickly added.

  The executive officer laughed.

  “The place is full of flies,” I said.

  He laughed again and Dettmer did too, having drawn near.

  “They are all rubes in America, I think,” Dettmer said. Not an exact equivalent of “rube” in German, but close enough.

  The executive officer continued on his way and I turned to face Dettmer. “Major,” I said, “may I ask a favor? Not only for myself personally, though it would certainly be that as well, but as a favor to the Foreign Office. We have removed the English amateur from your midst. Please allow me to take his place. Berlin has telegraphed me to ask for a firsthand report on the work the airships do. Particularly, of course, on the night when you deliver this important package.”

  As I expected, Dettmer snapped to. He would have saluted, but I lifted my own palm quickly to stop him. He stayed his hand and said, “Of course, sir. I’d be honored.”

  I offered him my own hand to shake, and he took it with warmth.

  Behind me the executive officer shouted an order to someone below. “Prepare airship march.”

  I said, “I will freely explore the ship in flight, if I may have your permission. I want to experience everything. Your Lieutenant Schmidt gave me an excellent tour. And your Lieutenant Kreyder wishes to share more of his important procedures with me.”

  “As you wish, Colonel,” Dettmer said. “As you wish. You’ll forgive me if I am preoccupied for the next hour or so.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  Dettmer’s eyes shifted over my left shoulder.

  I looked.

  His executive officer was crossing back our way.

  “Captain,” Dettmer said to him. “The colonel will fly with us tonight. At weigh off, release the extra ballast. And bring the extra cold gear. Only the takeoff necessities for now.”

  “Yes sir,” the captain said, slipping away.

  Dettmer looked back to me. “We’d brought these things for the other man. The overalls and the fur coat and the felt overshoes and so forth, the extreme cold weather things, these can wait until we are at a higher altitude. Your flying jacket will immediately make you one of us.”

  He laughed at this thought.

  Courteous words from Wolfinger came to my mind. A comradely laugh even formed in my throat, ready to employ. I could make myself say or do none of it.

  I was getting too close to these boys once again.

  Dettmer paid no attention to my unresponsiveness.

  He said, “The woolen underclothes you should take time now to put on. To sweat with the rest of us.”

  He laughed again, a softer one, this one while searching my face, suddenly afraid he was getting too familiar.

  I could manage nothing but blankness for him.

  He cut off his laugh.

  This was Klaus von Wolfinger’s likely response anyway. So be it.

  The executive officer arrived with two contrasting articles of clothing folded one on top of the other, one rough-ribbed wool and one soft-cured leather.

  Dettmer said, “You will need to put on the woolen underclothes at once, Colonel. There is privacy in the keel. In the crew space aft.”

  I was glad to have a chance to get away to myself.

  I began to reach for the clothes.

  Dettmer intervened. He said, “But first, please allow me.” He took the leather flying jacket from the captain.

  He held it up and spread it open for me.

  He said, “You’ll need to remove your pistol, Colonel.”

  I hesitated. As myself, and as Wolfinger.

  Dettmer picked up on the hesitation. He said, quite respectfully, almost gently, “For the jacket. Of course you will retain your weapon. Though we ourselves carry none, for safety’s sake.”

  “I promise not to discharge it, Major,” I said.

  He nodded to me.

  I undid my pistol belt and laid it at my feet with the dispatch case.

  “Thank you, sir,” he said.

  The air was cleared.

  He lifted the coat a little.

  This was a ritual I dreaded now. The bond of a uniform. The bond of personality, of camaraderie. I dared not bond with these men.

  I had to focus.

  These men were the enemy tonight.

  They were the instruments of mass murder.

  I made myself smile. I turned my back to him. I slipped the dispatch case off my shoulder and laid it on the floor at my feet.

  Dettmer put the jacket on me.

  I felt it like a second skin.

  That was the danger.

  And my mother slipped into my head. The mother she had always been, training her son the way she always had. In and around theaters. This was not a skin upon me. It was a costume. I was playing a role. I was an actor. I was a spy.

  I shot my cuffs.

  I began to butt
on the jacket. With each button, a flourish of the hand.

  I did not even need to turn to Dettmer for this. The gesture was for me. Working on my character.

  My qualms were quickly dissipating.

  I stopped buttoning about halfway.

  Dettmer said, “There. You are now senior officer on the LZ 78.”

  I turned to him. I doled out one more faint smile. The smile of a superior officer pleased with his inferior for recognizing the appropriate protocol in an unusual circumstance.

  He saluted. He held it.

  I saluted him.

  “You notice that the fit of your jacket is good,” Dettmer said.

  It was, indeed. Nearly perfect. “I do,” I said.

  “We’d heard that the Englishman was a larger man.”

  Albert was certainly larger than me. I had a flash of that first sight of him outside his castle, towering over my mother, leaning down to buss her on the cheek.

  Even more dangerous than to think on these Germans at this moment was to think on my mother.

  “We did not expect the jacket to fit him so well,” Dettmer said.

  He let that settle in for a moment.

  They’d arranged for him never to be one of them. His uniform would not fit.

  And then Major Dettmer actually worked up the courage to give Colonel Klaus von Wolfinger a small, conspiratorial wink.

  Wolfinger chose to overlook Dettmer’s transgression. I said, with a large dose of duty and only a faint, condescending hint of faux camaraderie, “Things are as they should be.”

  58

  I pitched my airship underwear behind a fuel tank.

  I thought simply to stay here in the keel for the takeoff and on through my incendiary improvisation. But Dettmer expected me. He could conceivably do something officious if I didn’t show up for the launch, could send someone to see if I’d found my way all right in the dark.

  The walkway suddenly shifted a little beneath my feet. The airship trembled, and I felt a twinge of uplift in my chest.

  I knew we’d thrown off our hangar ballast and had lifted from our bumper blocks and outside we were surrounded by two hundred ground crewmen holding hard at the handling lines, letting us hover but reining us in, keeping us centered in the hangar doorway.

  I went forward and down the ladder and onto the bridge.

  Dettmer was at the front window of the gondola, his back to me, framed alone against the sky beyond the hangar door. The sky was off white, as if it were packed with cotton wool.

  He scanned outward and downward, from far left across to far right. And he commanded, “Airship march!”

  The executive officer, leaning from a side window, cried, “Airship march!” and the order was taken up outside to port, to bow, to starboard.

  At once, almost imperceptibly, we began to move.

  Major Dettmer looked over his shoulder.

  He saw me. I was where he’d hoped I’d be.

  “Colonel,” he said. “Please join me.”

  I stepped forward, stood beside him on his right.

  Dettmer kept his eyes ahead.

  Two wide-set guiding rails led from the hangar mouth out three hundred yards into the maneuvering field. Arrayed ahead were eight handling lines stretched forward by a hundred bent and straining feldgrau backs.

  And the movement was clearly perceptible now.

  We were floating into the daylight.

  And from all around us—front and sides—a sound rose up. Men’s voices—two hundred men’s voices—rising as one. They sang. They sang of thunderbolts and clashing swords and crashing waves. They sang loud even though they strained hard to drag this vast machine of war into the oncoming night.

  And when they began to sing the chorus, the men around me, Dettmer and the executive officer and all the others, joined in. Lieb Vaterland, magst ruhig sein! Dear Fatherland put your mind at rest. Fest steht und treu die Wacht, die Wacht am Rhein! Firm and true stands the watch, the watch on the Rhine.

  Colonel Wolfinger sang as well. He sang louder than them all. Indeed, I have a pretty good tenor and so Wolfinger even drew an admiring turn of the head from the commandant of the LZ 78. Major Dettmer smiled at this powerful officer who had graced them with his presence. And I nodded my head to Dettmer, even as I lifted my voice with all these good Germans and entreated the dear Fatherland not to worry about a thing.

  When the chorus was done, the men outside went on for another verse, though the officers on the bridge stopped singing and focused on their tasks.

  Wolfinger was ready just to keep a stoic, watchful silence. He’d been warmer to Dettmer and his men than he’d been to anyone in perhaps his whole career. And his clamming up now suited Christopher Cobb just fine. Because I wanted simply to get through the next twenty minutes and on to my business.

  Dettmer was going on and on to the colonel—to me—about guiding cars and a winch and wind headings and cloud cover and the moon and we were moving inexorably forward, and even as he spoke, I took my watch from my pocket to check the time.

  It was a Waltham.

  An American watch.

  I put it away as quickly as I could without drawing attention to it, glancing at Dettmer, who was speaking to me at that moment but looking forward. I cursed myself for all the details I had not anticipated. This one I had failed to consider long before things got tough. Though why shouldn’t a high-ranking officer in the Foreign Office have a fine American watch? It was a privilege that could readily accrue to his position. But I’d overlooked it. And that made me worry about what else I’d overlooked.

  Perhaps Dettmer had seen me in his periphery as I read my watch. Perhaps he’d finally realized I was not responding to him. Maybe he’d finally said all that he could possibly think of to say to keep his Foreign Office observer informed and impressed. Whatever the reason, he did stop talking to me.

  And then finally we were well free of the hangar.

  And the airship was set against the wind.

  And the water ballast was released and the watch officer returned and the engines began to pound and the lines were cast off and I stood through all this simply waiting, hearing the orders but not listening to them, feeling the bustle increase around me but not moving, holding even more still, waiting now to do what I had to do.

  The floor was quaking beneath my feet.

  The engines vibrated into my legs and into my jaw and into my brain.

  Dettmer commanded engine revs and elevation angles and we were moving, we were rising, the distant tree line was beginning to sink below us, slowly. There was no necessary race forward as in an aeroplane. We crept upward.

  “Major,” I said. “I will leave you now.”

  Dettmer looked at me.

  I tried to read his face.

  I kept mine blank, inhabiting, in my actor’s brain, my character’s power, his independence, his arrogance.

  Dettmer’s face was blank as well. Rare for him, with me. But surely natural to him with others. He had his own power here. He was the commander of this ship. He was respectful of me, of the people I represented. Fearful even. Perhaps. But the self-possession and the exercise of power and independence that I was portraying to him were, in a real sense, conferred by him. Especially now that we were in the air. The captain of a ship on the sea was God. The commander of a ship in the air was no different.

  I tried to see suspicion in Dettmer.

  I could not.

  But this look between us went on for a longer moment than was comfortable.

  “With your permission,” I said, and I lowered my head to him ever so slightly.

  He said, “We each have our mission, Colonel.”

  I said, “My mission tonight is based on a surpassing respect for yours.”

  He smiled. Quickly, warmly.

  How ardently this soldier, this commander, this master of a German warship craved personal reassurance. Craved approval.

  How sad this all was.

  “My ship is your
s,” he said.

  I brought my right hand up sharply to my right temple. He straightened with a silent gasp. He was touched by my initiating this salute. He brought his own hand up and we held this for a moment, those few beats of amplified respect between two officers.

  But through this whole exchange I could not look him in the eyes.

  59

  I turned to cross the gondola, and as if the cabin knew my haste it grabbed my chest and pushed at the backs of my knees and propelled me toward the ladder. The airship was climbing, of course, and I was rushing downhill.

  Manageable still. The angle was maybe ten degrees. But I was very glad the ladder would let me face aft.

  I put my hand to the ladder and the executive officer said, “Careful, sir.”

  I nodded without looking at him.

  I climbed through the roof and out into the open air.

  I let the angle press me tightly against the rungs, but almost at once I was dragged to my right. I grasped hard at the left side rail and held on tight. I stopped climbing. For now it was sufficient not to be slung into the air.

  We were coming round a bit, perhaps adjusting to the head wind, perhaps taking a heading. But the outward pull eased now and I climbed hard and fast and I was inside the keel.

  I had to get this done long before we were at our final cruising altitude. This angle would be a constant challenge.

  The hull was still dark.

  I held tight to the handrail along the walkway and shined my flashlight forward and I moved as quickly as I dared let myself, with this constant tugging in my chest threatening to fling me headlong into the darkness.

  I passed over the gondola engine. Along this stretch of the walkway the sound of the forward Maybach, which was straining to help lift us, jackhammered in my head. It was a bit of a struggle to think in the midst of this but I knew at once I needed to do my work close to this place. The sound of my Luger plugging a gas cell would be masked here.

  I pushed on aft for now. I needed to do two things before I could get to the matter of making fire.

  There was no light up ahead. The forward hatch—my hatch—was, of course, closed. When I desperately needed for this to be open, I would not have time to open it. So I pressed on, pushing my center of balance downward, down into my legs, into my knees, pressing hard at each footstep, leaning my torso backward, holding tight to the handrail, my flashlight beam bouncing before me, lifting as far out on the path as I could throw it.