The Empire of Night

25

I slept and woke and slept and woke again, working Stockman’s curtain line over and over in my head. I assumed this had been his response to my leading comment about the Zepp attacks missing something. He’d initially been quite professional and had clammed up. Maybe he and I singing together about the joy of the German Empire had made it personal. The thought that followed his fleeting smile kept working in him, and he finally said a little something. I’d gotten a glimpse at his mission, though it was as fleeting as the smile.

Too fleeting. So the problem with the Zeppelins he’d been studying was that their attacks were too isolated? True enough. Smart enough. But everyone in London knew to fear the day when the attacks were carried out by thirty airships at a time instead of two, when the fires and crumbling buildings would appear all over the city instead of in a few isolated neighborhoods. The Germans simply had to build more of these machines. Which they presumably were gearing up to do.

This was a big idea but an obvious one. I couldn’t figure why it would require their secret ally in the British Parliament to come to Berlin. The trip certainly wasn’t about being with my mother. Whatever he felt for her, that was a useful ruse. He’d discovered that the British secret service was sniffing around, but his boys scrubbed down the castle overnight just fine. He didn’t have to take off in the middle of the night. Indeed, it would have been swell for him if the authorities had stormed in and found him reading a book in the library of a house that didn’t hold a single shred of the evidence they sought against him. Perhaps he would have waited another day to depart if Jeremy hadn’t shown up, but it had already been planned. He was here for something crucial. This wasn’t about building more Zepps faster.

My mind gave out somewhere near dawn.

I woke for good a couple of hours later and headed for the Lessing Theater.

It sat in massive isolation on an odd wedge of land, pressing up against the Stadtbahn railway viaduct on one side and looking out onto the River Spree on the other. It resembled a cathedral more than a theater, with twin, flat-topped towers and a central dome. Fronting the building was a portico with four sets of double columns and four more sets above, holding a gabled roof.

I passed through the portico and into the lobby. It was dim and cool inside, for a late morning in August, and I was immediately stopped by a vaguely uniformed old man stationed on a chair. The mention of my name drew an instant nod toward the doors directly ahead of me.

I crossed the lobby floor and went up a short flight of stairs and stood before the center door into the auditorium. My hand hesitated at the handle, as I heard a familiar voice projecting not just to the back row but beyond.

I opened the door very gently and only far enough to slip through and step sideways into the shadow of the aisle behind the last row of the orchestra seats. The house lights were off but failed to shroud the auditorium’s golden rococo flourishes on its proscenium and on the facings of the side balconies and loge boxes. The stage was uniformly bright from the electric utility lights. Downstage center was my mother.

She was to-being and not-to-being. A few rows before me, a man with broad shoulders was standing with his head angled backward sharply, as if looking into the dark above. Concentrating. Herr Regisseur, no doubt. The director. The estimable Victor Barnowsky, the rival of Max Reinhardt and the creative director of the Lessing, who was personally guiding the acclaimed Isabel Cobb’s Shakespearean adventure in Bard-loving Berlin.

My mother was dressed for rehearsal in knickers and a white shirt. She rolled to the end of her soliloquy, and as soon as she heard the fair Ophelia approach, Barnowsky lowered his head and said in good English, but with a heavy German accent, “Sweet prince, may I stop you now, bitte?”

My mother gracefully fell from character, moved the few steps to the very edge of the stage, and bowed toward her director. “Of course, mein Regisseur,” she said.

Barnowsky bowed in return.

A blond actress in shirtwaist and skirt — the fair Ophelia, no doubt — who had appeared upstage, quietly withdrew.

Barnowsky said, “If, please, we may hear this speech in your German. Our German cast will join you tomorrow, but I was hoping to listen just a little. Yes?”

Mother bowed once more, returned to her place, lifted her face, closed her eyes, took a deep breath as she slid back into her Hamlet — her Schlegel-voiced Hamlet — opened her eyes again, and began: “Sein oder Nichtsein; das ist hier die Frage.”

Barnowsky watched her for a few lines more and then lifted his face once again to the theatrical heavens, simply to listen.

She was good. The only significant German she knew were the lines in plays. But she could mimic anything. Anyone. Any feeling. Any nuance of any feeling. No matter what the words were. I knew the language well enough now to hear and think and feel in German, and she was very good. And I was struck by this: in the German language, Hamlet’s infamous hesitation to kill his murderous uncle was even harder to swallow.

But she would pull off that actor’s challenge too, I had no doubt.

She ached and agonized and yearned on until at last she said, “Still. Die reizende Ophelia. Nymphe, schließ in dein Gebet all meine Sünden ein.”

She fell silent.

Barnowsky began to clap. Slowly, heavily, and then faster and faster. My mother became my mother and she beamed from the stage. She bowed. She curtsied. She put her hand on her heart.

“Excellent,” Barnowsky said. “Now let us have an interval to rest and to eat.”

My mother slipped offstage right. Barnowsky moved to the stage-right aisle and started down it. I figured he would surely lead me to her. I stepped through the center entrance to the orchestra and hustled along to follow him. From an opening just this side of the orchestra loge, my mother emerged. She and the director embraced in the way famous directors and famous actresses who were not sleeping together but felt a legitimate warmth for each other during the lifetime of a production typically did.

I slowed. I was watching them in profile, though my mother was turned slightly toward me. She would see me soon enough. I stopped only a few feet away.

The embrace ended.

As Barnowsky was saying, “You are everything in this great adventure that I imagined and still more,” her eyes flitted briefly to me and then back to her director.

“As are you, mein Liebling,” she said.

And now she made a little bit of a show at noticing me.

“Ah, Victor, may I introduce you to my chronicler,” she said.

He was turning to me.

“The man I mentioned to you,” she said.

I stepped forward, extending my hand to him.

He took it strongly.

Barnowsky had a square face and heavy eyebrows and seemed on the surface to be a roughhouser, reminding me of Ike Bloom’s boys from the First Ward. I liked this about him, seeing as he was also one of Gorky’s boys and Strindberg’s boys and Shakespeare’s boys.

“Joseph Hunter,” I said.

“I am Victor Barnowsky,” he said. “Welcome to the Lessing Theater.”

“I don’t mean to intrude on your lunch,” I said.

“Not at all,” he said. “I have matters to attend.”

My mother said, “I told Victor you and I needed to catch up. Your deadline approaches.”

Barnowsky turned to his Hamlet. He clicked his heels and bowed.

Mother led me in silence back the way she’d come, past the wings staircase and along a corridor to her dressing room.

There were two places at the makeup table and mirror. She sat at one of them and motioned me to an overstuffed chair next to a lacquer dressing screen inlaid with mother-of-pearl cherry trees and geisha girls.

Her first words were abruptly in medias res, either from her flair for the dramatic or from a gathering fright at what we were doing; I could not tell which. “I had no choice,” she said. “He woke me and said to pack and we steamed away into the night.”

“I got your note that morning,” I said.

“Good.”

“Are you okay?”

She sat rigidly erect and clapped her hand onto her chest. “Okay? I wish my flesh were too too solid to melt and thaw or drown or be shot or however you spies deal with each other.”

Flair, not fright.

“You sound okay to me,” I said.

“I sound terrified,” she said.

“We need to talk straight,” I said.

Something seemed to let go in her. Her uprightness in the chair eased abruptly. She looked down. She looked back up. “Of course,” she said. “Forgive me for actually enjoying all this.”

“Are you?”

“Yes.” This came out softly. Almost tenderly. Self-reflectively.

I was afraid I knew why.

Before I could ask about Sir Albert, she slipped into what I took to be another place in her mind: “What happened to that man in the courtyard?”

“The dead man?”

“Of course the dead man.”

She had no need to know about Jeremy.

“He fell from the tower,” I said.

“How, for heaven’s sake?”

For a moment I found myself in the same fix Stockman had been in with me on this subject. How to explain it without explaining it. But of course, invoking him was my solution.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I asked Stockman the same thing and all he’d say was that the man was careless.”

She nodded. She looked away from me. Something had come over her I couldn’t identify.

I said, “He was a tough guy in Sir Al’s employ.”

Then it struck me.

I did know what was going on in her.

I said, “Did you ask Stockman about it when you were alone?”

Mother looked back to me.

“Yes,” she said.

What a life I’d lived with this woman. No wonder we couldn’t say anything to each other straight. If it was about anything of importance, I could not hear even a single word from her without trying to read its subtext, hear the persona behind it, figure out if that was really her or somebody she’d simply decided to portray, figure out if there was ever a difference between those two things. Yes, she’d just said. And my first reading, my first hearing, my first figuring all told me that she was in love.

Or thought she was.

Or was playing at being.

Or just trying to test me. Or torture me.

Or all of that.

“And?” I said.

“He wept.” The tone in her voice was familiar. From her two recent yeses. Soft. Not a whisper, but only a few vibrations above one. That tenderness again.

I thrashed about for something to say but nothing was coming to mind.

Then she said, still softly, “Is he an actor, do you suppose?”

Worse yet. She asked this as if she feared it. Her feelings for him were real, not put on out of a sense of drama.

I asked myself the same question. Last night seemed to offer a clear answer. But I was reluctant to admit it.

“Some sort of actor?” she said, pressing the question gently.

I didn’t speak.

“I know what you sometimes think of me,” she said. “But you said we should talk straight.”

I did.

I saw something in her eyes that I’d seen often before about some man or other. But did I really? How do eyes say these things? There seem to be so few variables in eyes. I’d seen this supplicating look, this longing look, this I-need-you-to-believe-me-and-approve look, this I-need-you-to-look-the-other-way look. And in that lifelong, complex, recurring look I also could usually see her own recognition that those feelings I was seeing were, in her heart of hearts, put on. But this look now, in her dressing room at the Lessing Theater in Berlin in a time of war, though it showed all those old familiar things, also showed what seemed to be a new thing.

I would not label it.

Should I talk straight?

“He’s acting to his constituents,” I said.

“Yes.”

“He’s acting to Parliament and to his government. He’s acting when he says he is loyal to Britain.”

“Yes.”

She waited for more.

She knew and I knew and she knew I knew that she was asking this in another sense.

Should I talk straight?

“No,” I said. “I don’t think he’s an actor.”

Tears filled her eyes.

We sat before each other like this for a long moment.

“One more bad guy,” she whispered.

I certainly didn’t expect her to leap to this. I didn’t remember if I’d ever accused her. Of course I must have. It wasn’t just leading men she had a weakness for. It was the bad ones. The drunken ones. The abusive ones. Or so it always had seemed to me.

She tried to shrug. “Of a different sort.”

She turned to her mirror. She picked up a makeup towel and dabbed at her eyes.

She looked at me in the mirror.

“I’m an American,” she said.

“I know you are.”

“I’m a loyal American,” she said.

“I know,” I said.

She turned around to face me again. “But this isn’t America’s fight yet,” she said. “Is it?”

I didn’t say anything to that. Not for the moment.

She was mulling it over.

Then I offered, “That’s what you and I are trying to help our country figure out.”

That didn’t exactly sound straight, even as I said it. Not fully. But it wasn’t untrue.

We still didn’t know what Stockman was up to, exactly. What he believed about country, about blood, about loyalty: these were just beliefs. He lived in a democracy. Mother and I lived in a democracy. We were working on behalf of a democratic society. In a democracy you can have any goddamn belief you want. When does having an idea make you an enemy?

But his beliefs were apparently in service to a country that was at war with a democracy.

What the hell was Stockman up to? With Germany. With my mother.

“What are you saying?” I asked her.

“I don’t know what I’m saying. Except he wept for that dead man in the courtyard and I felt something for him. He is a hard man. I’ve seen that too. But he is equally a soft man. A vulnerable man. Do you know what that does to me?”

“You can back off from straight talk now,” I said.

She stopped.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “But this is all very difficult in ways I never expected.”

“Then the best thing is to figure out exactly what he’s doing here,” I said.

One moment of silence passed between us, our eyes on each other, our circumstance settling in.

Then she said, “Yes.”

This one was not soft.

She said, “He’s meeting someone at four o’clock this afternoon. I wrote down what I know.”

She dipped into the pocket of her knickers and handed me a piece of note paper with the Adlon crest. It read: 11 Schlesische-Strasse, Osthafen, Heinrich Reinauer Gewerblicher Einführer, 4 pm.

I stared at this for a moment.

Heinrich Reinauer, Industrial Importer. An address in the East Harbor district.

Mother said, “He spoke German. That was all I could get.”

I lifted my face. I didn’t say anything as I shifted my gears. She was trying to make clear to me that she’d been a diligent spy, in spite of her feelings for our quarry.

I hesitated another moment.

She said, “He wrote that down and I had a chance to see it. Then I wrote it for you later. I didn’t touch the note he made to himself.”

“Spoke where?” I said. “To whom?”

“I don’t know to whom. On the phone. He received a call late last night.”

She didn’t have to add “in the hotel room.” His room or her room or their room. He received a call late. She was there. She was still there even later, when he stepped away, giving her the opportunity to read what he wrote.

Did he think he was in love with her, as well?

“I need to get as close to this meeting as I can,” I said.

“You’ve come to the right place,” she said. “Sit here.” She pointed to the wooden chair next to hers.

I knew how to do this for myself, more or less, but it had been a long time and she was very good at it.

I rose. I sat.

She motioned and I turned the chair to face her.

The table and the mirror were a good seven feet long, the mirror rimmed in electric bulbs. She reached behind her to the far end of the table and pulled her makeup case in front of her. It was the shape of a miniature steamer trunk, the sealskin rubbed and scuffed and stained by thousands of nights at the theater. The case was an object of wonder from my childhood.

I needed this done. It was her case, her art. I could not refuse. How old was I when she first opened this case for me and made me up into some other child? I could not remember. I could not refuse. I waited with delight and with dread.

She lifted the lid and squared her chair around to me. With the tip of a forefinger she tilted my head to one side and then to the other, lifted my chin, lowered it. “We should do as little as we can get away with,” she said.

“I agree.”

“You may have a near encounter. We have to balance naturalness with a large enough adjustment he won’t find you familiar.”

“The meeting is near the docks.”

She hummed a soft assent.

“You could use a different nose,” she said. “Wash up.”

She nodded me to the sink at the far side of the room. I took off my tie and my shirt. I washed with Castile soap. The water was warm. I dried.

When I returned and sat, she was bending into her case, looking hard at her choices. Her grease sticks were new and bought in London, with the English theater system of numbering.

While she pondered, I faced the mirror and rubbed on a thin coat of cold cream to my face and neck. When I was ready and facing her again, she’d made her choices. Using her left palm as a palette, she stroked down a large amount of Number 3, a skin color slightly darker than medium. Then she took up a stick of Number 13, reddish brown, and she began to incrementally blend and blend and blend it into her hand, darkening the Number 3.

“We’ll give you some extended sun,” she said. “It’s August on the docks.”

And she put her right hand to my face and began to apply my new skin, her fingertips working at my forehead, my cheeks, my chin, my eyes, my throat.

I thought: I should have put on my own stage face. But the makeup has to be done well. I need to remember what she’s doing, in case it needs doing again. For now, though, there’s limited time and a lot at stake. She needs to do it.

I clung to the necessity of it.

I hid in thoughts, in that chattery, abstract voice that you can talk with on the surface of your mind.

But the straight thing was: I didn’t like her touch. Not this much of it. Boys have to come to that, at some point, where they stop their mothers from grooming them, dressing them, fussing over them, remaking them. And they have to stick to it. At some point it’s all or nothing: I am what she wants me to be, or I am me.

I tried not to flinch.

I expected her to be talkative. She said nothing. I was grateful for that.

I thought about the Chicago Cubs.

Then she was rubbing mascaro into my beard, cutting its blackness with auburn, making it the color of certain black cats if you see them up close in the bright sunlight. This was done with a small toothbrush, for which I was also grateful.

She’d left my nose for last, which she’d been thoughtfully glancing at since the beginning. Now she built me a broken one with paste. She said her first words through all of this. “I’m giving you the nose of a boxer,” she said. “You wanted to be a boxer once, when you were thirteen and skinny.”

I didn’t reply.

She said no more.

She finished with the nose paste and blended it with my new skin tone, and she put a light coating of powder over everything she’d touched.

She sat back. She nodded at the mirror.

I turned. She’d made me into someone else. A half brother she birthed in some dressing room somewhere along the circuit before I was born and she gave it away. He’d boxed some but not well. Maybe he’d just brawled in bars. Not surprising.

I turned back to her. “Thanks,” I said.

She nodded.

And then she said, “Look. You’re a big boy. You know the score. However things turn out, I figure I had to do this.” I knew at once she was talking about Albert. She said, “I’m either doing it for love or I’m doing it for my country.”