The Empire of Night

30

We looked at each other.

We didn’t need to speak.

Krupp, of course, meant steel. The House of Krupp was what Lord Kitchener and the Brits desperately needed, a homegrown industrialist producing more artillery shells than the rest of the world combined.

Jeremy squared himself to the box, crouched, put his arms around it, and lifted.

Only six or eight inches.

He put the box down again.

He nodded at me to do the same.

I did.

The box went up very heavy, but it didn’t feel like a three-drawer cabinet full of files. Not nearly heavy enough. And the distribution of the weight didn’t feel right. And, of course, there was the matter of its destination.

I put the box down.

I said, “So either Sir Albert is getting Krupp into the milk can business or Krupp is getting Sir Al into the artillery business.”

We took a step back.

Then Jeremy had a thought. He crossed to the box before me, crouched, and lifted that one as well.

He put it down, nodding, and stepped back. “The same weight.”

“A couple of shells,” I said.

“Likely,” Jeremy said. “Empty ones.”

“Then they’re a special design. Stockman, the idea man.”

Jeremy nodded.

We both turned our eyes to the box going to FVFB. Or to MDH.

“Where’s Kalk?” I said.

“Near Cologne.”

The question now hung in the air between us: what was our next move? Which pushed a question on stage that had been lurking in the wings. I said, “My man said the Brits were sending me some help. What did your people say?”

“I was the help.”

For a moment I wondered how Trask had negotiated his way into our running this British show.

Then Jeremy said, “I’m to help the two of you.”

Mother was how. Her crucial access to Stockman was what Trask brought to the table.

But I said, “As far as I’m concerned, you and I are simply in this together.”

Jeremy gave me a single, sharp nod.

I said, “For the record then. We want to figure out the full extent of what Stockman is up to and stop him. Agreed?”

“Agreed.”

We both looked at the boxes.

“They’re nailed and steel-banded,” I said. “Can we look inside and then restore them so Reinauer won’t notice?”

It was a rhetorical question.

We stared at them some more.

“We open them, that’s all we’re going to get,” I said.

“I think we have a good notion what’s in there,” he said.

I was glad to have Jeremy along for this. I kept thinking aloud with him. “How clever can that design be? Is looking at it worth putting these guys drastically on their guard?”

The silence of Reinauer’s office hissed softly around us.

And then I finally put two and two together. I said, “Not an artillery shell at all.”

I’d forgotten it until this moment, but I’d dreamed last night, in my mahogany bed at the Adlon, about the great whirring beasts passing over me in the night, as if I were sleeping on the ocean floor and these were vast creatures of the deep.

“The Zepps,” I said. “He’s about the Zepps and he’s dealing with Krupp. Those are aerial bomb designs.”

Jeremy looked at the boxes as if to confirm this and then back at me.

“No doubt improved,” he said.

I asked the big question. “How badly do we need the design?”

We quietly consulted the boxes again.

They weren’t talking.

“Essen is Krupp’s main foundry, isn’t it?” I said.

“Yes.”

“This is where they’d turn out a million of these.”

“It is.”

“So what’s in Kalk?” I said.

“That’s our more interesting question.”

“I think I was getting pretty close to Stockman last night at the Adlon bar,” I said.

I considered that for a moment. My reporter self had indeed caught a whiff of something. Things were roiling in Albert.

I said, “I can’t shake the feeling he’s up to more.”

Jeremy and I let my hunch hang between us for a moment.

I nodded at the boxes. “The first dud they drop and our bosses have this much. You and I grab these now, Stockman still has his designs, and we can do no more.”

“Then shall we let this be?” he said.

This needed no answer. Together we turned and crossed the room. He switched off the lights, and I reset the lock on the door.

On the way to the main warehouse floor we devised a little ruse for the guard, who could have recovered his mind by now.

And so Jeremy and I ransacked the shipping office, arguing in German about which of us stupidly suggested the money would be in something other than an actual safe.

I’d earlier noticed some cases of what looked like a pretty damn good bock and we stole one of those, for appearances sake, and we argued some more — out of the hog-tied guard’s line of sight — with me insisting on searching him for cash so we’d at least leave here with a little ready money and with Jeremy talking me out of it, saying this guy was just here doing his job and his aching jaw was enough trouble for him for one night.

Then we beat it out the loading dock door and back to the Ford with our case of beer.

We stopped at the curb a block before the hotel. From the wide median, the streetlights were shining through a scrim of linden trees.

“How do we meet again?” I said.

“You still have a room at the Baden?”

“I do.”

“I can leave a message there for you,” he said.

“And if I need to get you?”

There was an odd hesitation in him, which I wished I could read. But it was dark inside the Ford and he turned his face away. Whatever it was passed quickly.

“For the next few days you can reach me at this telephone.” He reached quickly inside his coat. If he were anyone else I’d be drawing my Mauser.

His hand emerged with a piece of paper, which I took from him.

“They listen in on the phones at the Adlon,” he said.

“I know.”

“The lobby of the Baden has a telephone kiosk. You can call from there. Say as little as possible.”

“Let’s decide on a place that need never be mentioned.”

“Yes,” he said. “Make it the Hindenburg statue in the Tiergarten.”

“But we speak of beer.”

“Or brat, depending on the time of day.”

“One other thing,” I said. “I don’t know who you are.”

“A pretty good middleweight who once upon a time almost beat Tommy Ryan.”

I’d meant around Berlin. On the phone. This answer came quick and dry. His German sense of humor. Or his German Angst. Or both.

But he played neither, giving the line only a brief beat before appending, “I am Bruno Obrecht. A Swiss businessman.”

I started to get out of the still idly quaking Model T.

He put a hand on my arm. “But not for the next two days.”

I sat back down.

“I am Erich,” he said. “Erich Müller.”

“Was that your birth name?”

“It was.”

I stepped out of the T, and he said, “You want a couple of our bocks for your room?”

“Take them all,” I said.

He pinched the brim of his hat to say good-bye and drove off.

I looked at the paper in the streetlight. His telephone number. Spandau 4739.

He was going home to his mother.