The Empire of Night

15

I kept standing where I was as the cheers faded and the applause smattered to a stop and everyone politely took their cue and shuffled away into the night, where they were no doubt watched and herded by suits both gray and blue. I kept standing and applauding, though more slowly now, softly, head angled smilingly to the side to portray the personal accolade of an insider.

Stockman had hastened back to my mother as soon as the crowd began to disperse and was no doubt praising her lavishly. He was no fool. And great actress that she was, she showed no trace of her recent — and surely still lingering — feelings.

She was the first to notice me, turning her face my way and showing, to the extent she dared, her get-me-the-hell-away-from-this-man pleasure at my presence. Her turn prompted Stockman to turn.

I lifted the mimed applause to him and nodded in deference. He gave me a noblesse oblige smile that warmed my heart for the moment. This did not strike me as the smile of a man who regarded me with newly formed suspicions.

I was wrong, however, to feel safe quite yet.

Something slithered its way out of him as the three of us walked from the marquee together, heading toward the courtyard and the house, the other weekend guests following loosely behind, the straggler constituents floating past us in the dark, bowing in quiet thanks and deference toward their host.

Stockman ignored them all.

He said to me, “I looked for you during our little interruption.”

“I’m a reporter,” I said. “I heard the engines before most everyone else and I knew what they were and I slipped into the night to see the airships and capture them in words.”

“Indeed,” he said.

“Don’t forget who you’re supposed to be writing about,” my mother said.

Stockman and I both looked to her.

He chuckled.

I said, “But of course.”

I still was not quite sure Stockman accepted my absence. A few minutes earlier I’d prepared for this. At the foot of the stage, Stockman had broken half a dozen steps away to speak to the Gray Suit with the boxer’s nose, who’d suddenly appeared. I wondered if they were speaking of Martin, and I worried, for a flash, about Jeremy, but I’d put that aside to have a quick word with my mother. I asked her for a sentence or two from his declamation to the crowd upon the arrival of the Zeppelins.

I played that card now. “I didn’t go so far away that I missed your eloquence,” I said, and I quoted him. “‘We will shake our fists at the sky and we will not run. Our courage will not be shaken.’”

Stockman looked at me. He smiled. “I’m happy you recorded that.”

“Naturally,” I said.

He was reassured about my attendance, but I recognized the tightrope he walked in public. It was possible he’d be a little apprehensive about his local attitude being portrayed abroad.

Quickly I added, “Not that I would quote you for my American readers. Your eloquence was to quell a panic, not to legitimize a foreign policy.”

“Quite so,” he said.

We were approaching torchlight and he and I exchanged a glance that lingered an extra beat, and another, as if we had an understanding.

Beneath my feet the grass abruptly became macadam as we entered the drive in front of the courtyard.

I turned my face to the house.

I’d done what I needed to do. I figured I was square with Sir Albert.

Jeremy didn’t know that.

The macadam turned to fieldstone and we took our first steps into the courtyard and my gaze was ahead but my attention was on my thoughts, and so it came into my sight simply as movement, quick movement from above, off to the right, a mass plummeting downward and then the heavy thud of it, the thud and cracking, and my mother let out a sharp bark of a scream and I looked now directly at what had fallen and I saw a body hunched into the ground as if it had been trying desperately to dig into the earth but had failed terribly and was resting now, the head twisted sharply away, however, its neck snapped. The body wore a gray suit and was hatless and its hair was spiky and yellow in the electric light. It was Martin, of course.

Martin, Stockman’s head tough guy, dead now, but by a hand that was other than mine. That diversion of suspicion was what Jeremy had just given me. Martin was a dead man as soon as he’d seen Jeremy’s face and heard my voice.

Stockman turned around at once to the rest of the weekend guests, who’d bunched up close behind. “Stay away,” he commanded and then he strode off toward the body.

Two Gray Suits were hustling from the house in his direction.

As Joseph W. Hunter it was better for me to hang back. I was just a guest.

And Isabel Cobb needed me now.

I stepped to her.

Her bundle of roses was lying at her feet.

I put my arm around her shoulders. She was trembling.

“What have we gotten into?” my mother whispered to me.