The Empire of Night

39

I left the Adlon bar soon after the retiring couple, and I went out of the hotel and headed for the Baden. I worried every step of the way that I was starting to lose Stockman. But I’d needed to press things forward. I had to let this play itself out.

I rang Spandau from the lobby telephone kiosk. The mother answered instantly. “Müller.”

“Hello, Mrs. Müller,” I said. “It’s Mr. Jäger. May I speak to Erich?”

She said nothing, but the phone clunked and then Jeremy answered.

“Is your mother all right with me calling?” I asked.

“Don’t mind her,” he said “We’ve been talking about the Kaiser.”

“Is she disaffected?”

“Far from it.”

“How’s your brother doing? I meant to ask.”

“He’s presently alive and unwounded.”

We both fell silent a moment.

Then I said, “Max.”

“Max?”

“His first name. Colonel Max Bauer.”

“That will help,” he said.

“I have a thought to find the other gentleman.”

“Good.”

And we both reminded ourselves that a telephone was still a telephone, even in the lobby of a relatively safe hotel.

We bade each other good night.

I hung up and hesitated only a moment before going out of the Baden and back to the Adlon.

In the lobby, Wagner was nowhere to be seen. In my room, nothing seemed to have been reexamined.

My laundry was waiting on the foot of the bed, wrapped in brown paper and folded neatly therein and giving off the faint, fresh, broken-rock smell of Persil. I had a clean set of summer-cotton BVDs and I put them on to sleep.

I opened the door to the balcony but pulled the drapes closed.

I put my Mauser in the drawer of the night table, went to bed, and fell instantly asleep.

And I awoke abruptly in the dark to a knocking.

My bedroom door was open to the sitting room and the knock had come from in there, at the door to my suite.

It was soft.

And then it came again, a little less soft.

I rose.

I switched on my bedside lamp.

“Please,” a voice said outside. A heavy, feminine whisper.

A stage whisper.

I brisked across the floor and looked through the peep hole.

It was my mother.

I opened the door.

“Quickly,” I said.

She slipped in.

She was wearing her shirtwaist but not her scarf. All the button-to-hole matches were off by one.

“You shouldn’t be doing this,” I said.

“I didn’t know when I’d get to talk to you. No one saw me.”

“There’s a floor attendant.”

“He’s sleeping.”

“German agents on staff.”

“I’m telling you I wasn’t seen,” she said.

“I need pants,” I said.

“I’ll wait,” she said.

I left her in the dark and disappeared into the bedroom, pushing the door partly closed. I put on my pants from the wardrobe, cinched the belt tight, and took one step back into the sitting room. “Come in here, away from the door,” I said.

She entered the bedroom.

She sat at the dressing table and I sat in a side chair.

Her hands were clasped tightly in her lap, fingers intertwined. Her upper arms were drawn tightly against her.

“You dressed in the dark,” I said.

She looked down.

She looked at me. She said, “He travels to Cologne on Monday.”

“He told you the details?”

“Yes. Of course. He didn’t think I’d make that fuss in public.”

“Did that compromise his trust?”

“I don’t know for certain. I don’t think so.”

“It was worth trying,” I said. “You did well. And Monday to Cologne is very good information.”

Her hands unclasped, her arms fell away from her lap. Her tension drained instantly, completely away, a tension I’d assumed was over her secret visit to my room under the sleeping nose of Albert and all the rest of the German secret service at the Adlon. In fact, she was tense because she was afraid I’d disapprove of her handling of his declared trip. I’d applauded. So all was right in her world.

Now she had to make a swift exit.

But I did need to speak with her privately, and here she was.

“Are you sure you weren’t seen?” I said.

“It’s three in the morning,” she said.

“Mother. .”

“I know. I know. I’m sorry. But I was careful. I came up the stairs. I saw no one.”

“It’s not just strangers I’m worried about,” I said. I nodded at her skewed buttons and holes. Dressing in the dark meant one thing. “Did you come from his room?”

She didn’t answer.

“You did,” I said.

She stayed silent.

“How did you expect to get back in?”

She shrugged a so-what shrug.

I repeated the question with a tilt of my head.

“I have a key,” she said.

“You took his?”

“No. That would be risky.”

I clucked at this.

“I have one of my own,” she said.

Of course.

“This whole complication is dangerous for us,” I said.

“‘O time, thou must untangle this, not I,’” she said. “‘It is too hard a knot for me to untie.’”

Whenever she began to speak with lines from her favorite roles — this one Viola from Twelfth Night—I knew the topic would drag on. But this conversation was not worth the clock tick of risk. I needed to say the critical thing quickly.

“Look,” I said. “This guy Albert Einstein may have some crucial information. He’s a Shakespeare fan. He may be an Isabel Cobb fan as well. Your man Barnowsky may know him. I need for you to see Einstein and I need to go with you and we need to do this as soon as possible. Before your Albert heads for Cologne.”

I was just trying to keep the Alberts straight. Mostly. But she played the phrase big, to tweak my nosiness. “My Albert hates that man,” she said. “If he found out. .”

“He won’t. You won’t let that happen. It’s worth the risk.”

She looked down again.

She started to unbutton her blouse.

“Look away,” she said. “I need to fix this.”

I rose and turned my back on her. I walked to the bed and I sat down on the edge, very near the night table.

“He has a dinner tomorrow night,” she said. “At the Ministry of War. He’s talking that openly to me.”

“He didn’t want you on his arm?”

She didn’t reply.

I had to be careful how I spoke of him.

She cursed low. About the buttons.

I rephrased. “You’re not going?”

“I tried,” she said. “Boys only. You should come to the theater around seven. I’ll see about the other Albert.”

And from the dark at the far of end of the sitting room came four swift, hard knocks at the door.

I jumped up.

The following silence rang in the room. Only briefly.

Another two knocks. And Stockman’s voice. “Josef.”

I turned to Mother, who had succeeded merely in totally unbuttoning her shirtwaist, exposing a lacy vest brassiere.

She was wide-eyed. Her hands had fallen straight down at her sides.

I put my forefinger to my lips.

I looked in the direction of the door.

Two more knocks, louder still. “Josef,” he said, in English. “I’m sorry, but I must come in.”

I thought of the Mauser.

I turned to the night stand.

No acceptable solution presented itself in the maelstrom of my brain that involved my pistol and this hotel room at the Adlon in the middle of the night. I figured it would be best not to have that option.

“Sir Albert?” I called. “Is that you?”

“Yes.”

“Give me a moment.”

I looked at Mother.

She was standing now. I wondered if she’d played this scene before in one of those theatrical tour hotels.

She blew me a kiss, with a death mask face.

I breathed deep and stepped through the bedroom door, closing it behind me.

I turned to the desk, found the table lamp, and switched it on.

I moved to the suite door.

I looked through the peep hole and reared back. He was standing very near.

His hands were not in sight. But if he was holding a weapon, surely he’d have stepped back a little so he could at least raise his arm in preparation.

I opened the door.

Stockman had dressed in haste and only partially: his black evening suit trousers with a braid stripe; his white shirt, properly buttoned, but no collar.

At his side, fisted in his left hand, was Mother’s apricot scarf.

I’d already observed that Albert was right-handed. To carry this in his off-hand was a conscious act. Was he keeping his pistol hand free?

“May I come in, old man?” he said.

A very friendly phrasing and tone for a presumptuous request at this hour.

Stockman felt very dangerous to me.

But the slightest hesitation would only make him more suspicious.

I stepped back instantly, opening the door wide.

“Of course,” I said.

He stepped in.

I watched his eyes. He rapidly checked every corner of the room. His gaze lingered for a beat on the closed bedroom door.

I shut the suite door behind him.

“Drink?” I said. “The Adlon attendant has kept the side table nicely stocked.”

“No thanks,” he said.

We were standing in the middle of the floor.

“Would you like to sit?” I motioned to the divan and the chair.

“I’m sorry to bother you like this,” he said, still in English.

I nodded at his left hand. “Isn’t that the scarf Madam Cobb was wearing tonight? Is she all right?”

His eyes had fixed on the bedroom door again. At my voice, he looked at me.

“I don’t know,” he said. “May I step into your bathroom?”

It was the one place where she could hide outside of the bedroom.

“Of course.”

As soon as he looked away and began his first step past me, I focused on the pockets of his trousers. Left front and then, as he crossed the floor, both back pockets.

He vanished into the bathroom.

The prime pocket, right front, had eluded me for the moment.

Water began to run in the basin.

It would be quickly obvious that she wasn’t in there.

After only a few seconds the water shut off again. He’d made a cursory attempt to hide his suspicion. But his patience had quickly run out.

He emerged from the bathroom. One step and he stopped.

He looked at the scarf in his hand. An anguished little gesture.

If he was not still actively drunk, his head was surely pounding with the afterclap of rye.

I had to believe, from the look of his right front pocket, that he was indeed armed with a small pistol.

He drew near me.

I knew he would have to search the bedroom.

I had two thoughts. If I let him initiate the search, he might draw the pistol first. And whatever my mother was planning for this situation, she was ready by now.

“Sir Albert,” I said, very gently. “My friend. You will not insult me if you’d like to look in my bedroom.”

His eyes focused on mine but in that restless way of darting back and forth, back and forth, from one eye to the other.

“Yes,” he said. “Thank you for understanding, Josef.”

It had been the right thing to say.

He moved past me.

I turned.

In my periphery something caught my eye on the floor, where he’d been standing. He’d dropped the scarf.

Stockman wanted both hands.

He opened the bedroom door. The light was still on.

He stepped in and I followed, as quietly as I could.

He went first to the wardrobe. I stopped in the doorway.

He twisted the handle and opened the wardrobe door. Slowly now. He was using his right hand, his pistol hand. Good. It would mean a few moments of delay for him to be able to shoot.

I took another small step toward him, determined not to seem threatening, ready to lunge at him.

The door was swinging wide.

No rustling in the wardrobe.

No words.

He closed the wardrobe door and turned.

We looked at each other.

I offered him a gentle smile. “Whatever you need to do,” I said.

He turned away from me. Looked across the room.

I followed his eyes.

The drapes at the balcony door.

He knew. I knew. The other likely place.

He moved past me once more.

I edged my way toward the night table and the Mauser.

He reached the drapes, hesitated.

The temptation in my fingertips was to ease the drawer open. But the room was quiet. The sound would make him turn and what he would see could be understood in only one way.

I stayed put. If he stepped out and there were sounds, I could have the Mauser pretty quick anyway.

He put his hand to the drape. Still he hesitated. He loved her. He did not want this to be true. But he loved her. So the possibility of this was roaring in his head.

He wrenched the drapes aside.

The door was open.

He stepped out.

He vanished to the right.

There were no sounds.

He crossed by the open window and vanished to the left.

Nothing.

He appeared in the doorway.

Even across the room I could sense the quaking in him.

My own mind was roaring now. There was only one other possible place. But could she even fit under the bed? I did not let my eyes go there. I knew that the sheets and the light quilt were untucked and hung low. I thought I even remembered a dust ruffle down to the floor.

Would Stockman go so far as to get down on his hands and knees to make sure about this last possible place?

He stepped into the room.

He stopped.

I tried to read his body. There was an aura of release about him: his shoulders had gone slack; his hands, which were prepared moments ago even to kill, hung limp at his sides.

“Can I get you that drink now?” I said. Very softly.

He hesitated.

Surely he wanted to believe what his hands and his shoulders already believed.

My last gesture of innocent confidence would be to step out of the bedroom before him. If he did energize his hands in a final burst of suspicion and he got down on his knees after I left, there would be sounds at the discovery — Mother would surely engage him — and only then would he come after me. I could maybe get back into the room in time to prevent his weapon coming into play.

“Yes, you can,” he said.

I turned. I stepped from the room.

The drink table was against the wall just to the side of the bedroom door. I put my hand to the bottle of Scotch. I did not take the top off. I turned my hand and grasped it by its neck. A weapon.

But almost at once I heard Stockman’s footsteps approaching from inside the bedroom.

I let go of the bottle and he emerged and passed on across the floor.

I glanced over my shoulder.

He was collapsing into the scroll-armed chair.

I poured two sizable shots of whiskey and crossed to him.

He took one with a murmured thanks.

I sat on the divan.

We did not toast. He shot his down. I sipped only a very little bit of mine.

“She’s in her room,” he said.

I waited for more.

“She must be in her room,” he said.

“I’m sure she’s safe,” I said.

“She left my bed,” he said. “We can speak as men together, you and I, can we not?”

“Of course,” I said. Now I shot my whiskey down, and before he could say any more I rose and moved toward the side table. I needed a refill.

“For me too,” he said.

I awaited Albert’s men-together talk in much the same mood as his when he approached the balcony a few moments ago. I had to throw the drapes back but I really did not want to find what was on the other side.

I picked up the bottle of whiskey, a fine old Dundee, though it could have been a Chicago-saloon, two-bits-a-shot, squirrel whiskey for all either of us cared at that moment.

I returned to Stockman and poured us some more and I sat down.

My only revenge was that she was probably in the next room listening to every word.

“I woke,” he said. “We had been man and woman together, you understand.”

I understood. I pushed him along. I said, “She was gone?”

“She was.”

I glanced across the floor to the apricot-colored pile of silk.

I had an inspiration.

“If she were going to another man, she would have taken her lovely scarf,” I said.

He looked over his shoulder and then back at me. Then back at the scarf. Then he looked me in the eyes as if he’d suddenly realized it was me he was in love with.

“Josef,” he said, in a commensurate tone of voice. “You are right, my friend.”

I realized how tightly coiled a metal spring there’d been in my chest, because it now suddenly eased. I didn’t have to hear his man-talk so he could convince himself he was still okay in bed with my mother.

“Of course,” I said.

“Thank you.”

“It was simply evident,” I said.

“She is in her room. But she must be angry with me.”

“Which is why she did not answer when you knocked.”

“Exactly,” he said. He looked at the drink in his hand, which he’d not yet touched. He took about a third of it now, as if it were his own choice and not a physical necessity.

“Yes,” he said. “She must think she has cause to be angry.”

He lifted his shoulders and let them fall as if to say, What can you do?

“You heard the issue tonight,” he said. “I have to go south for a while. I don’t know for how long exactly. A few days. A week. She has her play, after all.”

I took a good bolt of my whiskey. Maybe half of it. Not from choice but from necessity. So I wouldn’t choke on the irony of having to now say the things I needed to say. “But she has something more important to her than Hamlet.”

His drunken brow furrowed in puzzlement. The dope.

“She has you,” I said.

I wanted to keep on drinking while he figured this out. But I was already feeling a little too warm in the face, a little too reconciled with the stuff that had to come out of my mouth.

I looked for a place to put my glass down.

I may even have remarked at this point at the inappropriate absence of a table near this chair and divan.

If I did, the remark was lost on Stockman, whose face was crimped in thought.

I placed the glass on the floor.

All right, I thought. Say it. “She’s a woman in love. When she told you she couldn’t bear to be away from you, she meant it. She aches. You understand, Albert? She aches, my brother. For you.”

I’d raised my voice for this whole proclamation. Grandly. So she could clearly hear that I knew what I knew.

I’d stopped drinking in time to manage the important things. I was coherent. I knew I’d remember everything we said. I was in control of my words and focused on their hidden rhetorical intent. Perhaps, though, the theatrical flourishes had a bit of a life of their own.

“She aches to be with you,” I said. “And if there is any sense in her that this is an important trip you are making, that only causes her to ache more urgently. She wants to be there with you. Beside you. Don’t you see?”

His face was uncrimping now.

“You are a lucky man,” I said.

He nodded faintly.

“Chancellor Otto von Bismarck was a great leader,” he said.

Ah, Albert, I thought. This is your response to my invocation of Isabel Cobb’s love? What the hell does she see in you?

“Perhaps the greatest of all German statesmen,” he said.

But what the hell did she see in any of them?

I was glad he was speaking nothing but English. I wanted Mother to hear him clearly.

“There would be no Germany, in all its present glory, if it weren’t for him,” he said.

I was tempted to pick up the drink from the floor, but I did not.

“He is the quintessential figure of diplomatic moderation and balance. And those qualities were often useful. But he had to learn a lesson from an American general. Did you know that?”

“I did not,” I said.

“The great Union general from your Civil War, Philip Sheridan, dined with Chancellor Bismarck during the Prussian war with France. The critical last war that united us as a people. Sheridan said at table that the proper strategy of war consists not only in telling blows against the army of the enemy, but to cause the enemy’s civilians — and I am quoting Sheridan now—‘to cause so much suffering that they must long for peace and force their government to demand it. The people must be left nothing but their eyes to weep with.’”

At this he paused to drink. A natural pause for a man whose drinking was driven by a darkness in him that needed management, or encouragement.

“He had it in him, our dear father Otto,” he said. “But he needed to hear that. He dealt properly with the French from then on. He had no further qualms to shoot every prisoner, burn every village, hang every man, dispose of any civilian at all who might conspire against us. And such measures ended the war far more quickly. Won the war. Allowed us to become the people that we are.”

He paused again, looked at the empty glass. I thought to fill it, but I did not. Nor did he. He bent down and, with meticulous care, set his glass on the floor, beside the leg of his chair.

He lifted his face once more to me. “It’s ironic,” he said. “Our Kaiser himself dismissed Bismarck for failure to appreciate the call of God to create our German Empire. Wilhelm despised Bismarck’s moderation. And yet the same flaw resides in him. Particularly with regard to England. I sympathize. There is blood involved. But his grandmother the queen’s most powerful connection to all of us was her husband, and his pure blood did not actually flow in her veins. Her own Germanness, from her forefathers, was greatly diluted. Too much of England coursed in her. For our Kaiser thus to waver in his will because of his sentimental attachment to Victoria is madness. He will prolong this war. He will lose this war.”

Stockman grasped the two knobs of his chair arms, straightened his spine, lifted his chin. “It is time for heroism in our Germany, Josef. Time for a new hero.”

And the thing that was nagging at me, puzzling me, over this apparently drunken digression suddenly became clear. What leap had his mind taken from the adoring love of my mother to Otto von Bismarck and then to Kaiser Wilhelm? These men were the precursors for the new hero. The hero being Albert. The hero who needed a witness, a woman, my mother and her adoration.

I even bet that this chain of association had not yet snapped in Albert’s head.

Softly as his own voice whispering inside his own whiskey-heated brain, I said, “She needs to be with you for this.”

He lowered his heroically lifted chin and looked at me. “I should go now,” he said. “I will let her sleep.”

He rose. I rose. He was surprisingly steady on his feet. I was somewhat less so for a moment.

“Eisen und Blut,” he said, the first German he’d spoken since he entered my rooms. I recognized it from Bismarck. His most famous speech. Not by speeches and majority decisions would the great issues of the day be settled, he’d said. But by iron and blood.

It would have been a good exit line, his Eisen und Blut. But instead, Albert moved to Mother’s apricot scarf, bent, and took it up once more. He put it to his face and breathed deeply in. At this he grew unsteady, swaying a little until he lowered the scarf and blinked his way back to his purpose.

I, on the other hand, in witnessing this gesture, grew suddenly quite steady afoot and it was all I could do to restrain my right hand from fisting and knocking Stockman down.

But restrain, I did.

Indeed, I put my hand on his shoulder and said, “Don’t forget what I’ve said.”

“You are my friend,” he said. And he was gone.

After the click of the door I stood in the center of the room and did some blinking of my own.

His declaration of friendship was the first thing to blink away.

Not so easy, I found.

But I blinked.

Then there was my mother.

I turned to face the bedroom.

And she was standing in the doorway.

She was not looking at me. Rather, she was studying her hands working at the buttons of her shirtwaist. She was half buttoned and I waited.

She did up every button to the top before she lifted her face to me.

I could not read her expression. I therefore assumed it was real.

“Where were you?” I said.

“Under the bed.”

“How?”

“Barely,” she said. And she looked down and took her two hands and fluffed her lately compressed breasts.

I looked away.

“Hamlet prepared me,” she said.

I gave her a moment and looked back to her. She’d finished with her breasts. I said, “Hamlet has not prepared you for what’s next.”

“‘I will screw my courage to the sticking-place,’” she said.

“Good,” I said, though it didn’t turn out so well for Lady Macbeth.

“Victor knows all the splendid Jews in Berlin,” she said. “Especially the theater lovers. I will find this man Einstein.”