The Empire of Night

17

Shortly after dawn I tried the hallway and it was empty. I went to the steps, descended into the screens passage, and emerged in the Great Hall. It too was empty. From the courtyard I heard a hammer pounding. Nails into wood.

A Gray Suit, framed in the courtyard doorway, began to turn at my step, and beyond him I caught sight of one of the Blueboys hammering the lid shut on a wooden box about the size of a hotel room writing desk. One more of the same size sat nearby, wrapped at both ends with steel bands. Half a dozen more, the size and shape of steamer trunks, were already done. A little apart were two more of these packing boxes standing upright, each about the size of a three-drawer filing cabinet.

The Gray Suit was the guy with the boxer’s nose. He eclipsed the courtyard, putting himself square before me and close enough to try to seem intimidating. I wasn’t intimidated, but I was still Joe Hunter the benign guest, so I kept my first impulse to myself.

“Please, sir,” he said, straining to be polite when to be so wasn’t the sort of order he’d been hired to execute. “Guests are to stop in their rooms or in the dining room until transportation.”

“Transportation?”

This guy was looking at me a little more closely now.

“Sorry, sir,” he said, working even harder at his politeness mandate. “Plans have changed. You’re Mr. Hunter, are you?”

“Yes I am.”

“I am to give you this,” he said, and he dipped into his inner coat pocket and withdrew an envelope. He handed it to me. “From Sir Albert,” he said.

The envelope had my name on it. That is to say, “Joseph Hunter.” But I knew the hand. It was my mother’s.

“How changed?” I said.

“Sir?”

“The plans,” I said.

“Breakfast is served in the breakfast room. The guests will then depart.”

“And Madam Cobb? I am in her party.”

“She has departed with Sir Albert.”

The boat in the night, I assumed.

“Departed?”

“Yes sir.”

“Where to?”

I’d reached the limit of Boxernose’s authority to speak. “Breakfast is served in the breakfast room,” he said.

“Thus the name,” I said.

His brow furrowed.

“Thanks,” I said, and I turned on my heel and beat it back across the Great Hall and up to my room.

I sat at the desk with the envelope and I opened it.

I unfolded a single sheet of writing paper and there was nothing of Sir Albert here, except, of course, the certainty that he had seen, openly or covertly, every word herein. She wrote:

Dear Mr. Hunter,

Sir Albert and I are very sorry to leave so abruptly. The accidental death of a member of the house staff has cast a pall over our weekend, and Sir Albert has decided to accompany me to Berlin. We would be happy to see you there if you can arrange passage, perhaps through your newspaper. I am anxious that the work we have done on your story will not be wasted and that my true intentions for being in Germany at this time can be accurately represented in the American press. Please wire your arrangements to me care of the Hotel Adlon.

Best regards,

Isabel Cobb

I folded the letter and replaced it in its envelope and slipped it into my inner coat pocket, doing all this almost fastidiously, aware of the small sounds of it — the creasing of the paper, the ruffle of the mohair. I was gathering myself to think clearly, calmly.

She was safe. For now, at least. She was not implicated. I was invited. Joe Hunter was still viable. For now. Or if the “for now” was as ominous as it might be, and if she wasn’t, in fact, safe, and if Joe wasn’t either, my actions were clear just the same. I’d go to Berlin.