The Empire of Night

28

The Gray Dog. South of the Stettiner train station on Borsig-Strasse, it was twenty yards down a side alleyway, in the cellar of a Braten und Bier joint. A perfect place for a Zeppelin blackout party.

My brass eagle boutonnière in place — my actual face restored as well, with cocoa butter and Castile soap — I descended into too much smoke and noise, in a room that would fit on the stage of the Duke of York’s and was jammed with tables and Berliners. Some rooms demand you read their bouquet like a wine, and this one was beer and roast meat and sweat and mustard and tobacco and lavender perfume and even a waft of femaleness, coming, I guessed, from the line of half a dozen kicking chorines in negligees who had to work hard not to fall off at each end of the tiny stage.

A pianist banged away in the far dark corner and the girls were singing about a lusty husband dancing around a rose bush with his wife. The headwaiter in a tux took a look at my lapel and guided me to a small back row table and sat me down, pressing the second chair tight into place. The girls kicked high and belted out an untranslatable “KlingklanggloriBusch.” They were loud and shrill in the way chorus girls often seemed to think was alluring but they were competing with a few dozen ongoing conversations in the room.

A girl came to my table in a tux and asked what I was drinking. I had work to do later tonight, so I ordered what the Berliners called a kühle Blonde, a cool fair maiden, a wheat beer that Germans used for sobering up. The girl gave me a sly look as if to ask what I’d been doing the last few days. She brought the Weissbier in a pint-sized stone bottle and poured the contents into a massive, half-gallon-size glass goblet, which the pint of beer nevertheless filled to overflowing with an inordinate amount of foam.

I paused to watch it froth away and I became abruptly aware of a presence beside me. Before I could look up, a man’s voice said in German, “That is Monday beer. No authentic man should drink wheat beer on a Thursday.”

I knew the voice.

I lifted my face to look into the boxer’s mug that belonged to Jeremy Miller.

I was very glad to see him alive, but I repressed the urge to jump up and clap him on the shoulder.

“What if I had a bad Wednesday night?” I said.

“Then you should stay away from a place like this,” he said. “Too much smoke and noise.”

I nodded him to the other chair.

He sat.

The girl in the tux came up and bent to Jeremy and took his order, which I didn’t hear.

We leaned near each other and spoke in English, audible to each other but walled in by the noise of the Gray Dog.

“How’d you get away on Friday?” I asked.

“Briefly I joined the search for myself,” he said.

“Your blue suit,” I said.

“My blue suit. There were several lately hired Blue Suits that evening. I had a convincing reference.”

“Are you sure?” I said. “I thought perhaps they’d let you in on purpose to trap you.”

“The thought did occur.”

“And?”

“It still occurs.”

Jeremy’s drink arrived. A stone bottle and a glass goblet. He was drinking light too.

“We’re a couple of fine dudes,” I said, nodding at his wheat beer.

“I look forward to someone reading us wrong and picking a fight,” he said.

The girl finished pouring and slipped away.

“How do we toast with these?” I said, thinking of the awkward shape and size of the glass.

“It’s hardly a toasting sort of drink,” he said. “Perhaps to recuperation.”

I looked at my own glass. “There seems to be no safe alternative to two hands,” I said.

“You are correct,” he said.

So we agreed together, on the occasion of this fortunate reunion, to accept a milder meaning for two-fisted drinking.

We sipped through the foam and it was light and it tasted more of banana than of malted wheat; I presumed from the yeast.

“The headwaiter seemed to know you were coming,” I said, thinking of his meaningful glance at my buttonhole adornment resulting in what seemed to be the only available table in the place and then his securing the second chair.

“We have friends here and there.”

“Pro-Brits in Germany?”

“Ask me again when we are alone,” he said.

“We have an opportunity for that tonight,” I said.

“Good,” he said. “Does it involve our friend?”

“Our baronet. Yes.”

We sipped again at our cure for a hangover as the chorus kicked its last kick and its girls fluttered away through a side door off left. While the crowd still applauded, the emcee bounced onto the stage in monocle and tux.

As soon as he was squared around to them, the applause died and most of the conversations died and the emcee cried, “Gott strafe England!”

God punish England.

And the crowd roared back, “Er strafe es!”

May he punish it.

I’d heard this already several times in the street. It seemed universal in this town. No doubt in the country. Part quotidian mutual greeting, part liturgical call and response.

The emcee seamlessly rolled on into his introduction. He was sorry, he said, but the next scheduled singer had died last night from a broken heart. The crowd let out a moan, but it was instant and exaggerated and as the emcee went on in faux eulogy, the curtain at the back of the stage, which to the eye seemed flush against the wall, opened in the center and a woman in cadaverous whiteface and a tight black dress emerged.

The crowd made a collective sound once more, part horrified gasp, part incipient laugh.

Jeremy leaned toward me. “You mentioned an opportunity?”

The crowd was laughing outright now.

I leaned toward Jeremy. It was well past sunset outside. “I did.”