The Empire of Night

42

Jeremy was waiting for me outside the Hotel Baden. He was a shadow and a flaring red tip of a cigarette and a plume of streetlight-gathering smoke from under a linden tree in the median. I saw him at once as I got out of the taxi.

I went to him.

“What are you smoking?” I said.

“Murads,” he said.

“Close enough,” I said. “I’m out.”

He gave me one and a light.

“I have a feeling you know something,” Jeremy said.

“You develop that intuition in the ring?”

“Doubt if it’s intuition. You’re telegraphing your punch.”

“They call it the lead in my other line of work,” I said. “Sir Albert Stockman, a member of the British Parliament, is masterminding a nighttime Zeppelin attack on London, employing a bomb of his own design filled with a deadly gas called phosgene. It will target civilians with the purpose of heralding enough terror to force a quick end of the war in favor of Germany.”

That was the lead of our story.

I let it sit in him for a moment.

He took a deep drag on his Murad.

“It’s all pieced together and circumstantial,” I said. “But that’s the business we’re in. I’d bet my bankroll on it.”

“I believe you’d win,” Jeremy said.

“We have every reason to assume the attack will take place next week. And Stockman will try to put his own personal stamp on it somehow. He sees himself as a great German hero in the making.”

“With the help of Colonel Max Hermann Bauer,” Jeremy said. “What I’ve been told about him fits the puzzle. Last month Bauer was appointed chief of Section One in the German Department of the General Staff. His main task is to identify and test new weapons and tactics. Even before the official posting, he was the man who got Haber’s gas to the front lines at Ypres.”

“So he’s being instrumental again.”

“Bauer’s also a political maverick,” Jeremy said. “Despises both General Falkenhayn and Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg.”

“Then why did Falkenhayn promote him?”

“He probably figures shunting Bauer to new weapons keeps him on the fringe. So Bauer would be keen to counterpunch.”

Jeremy let me finish the thought. “With a surprise strike by a new weapon that could win the war.”

“Just so.”

“He’d need a powerful buddy to get a Zepp to do his bidding.”

“Erich Ludendorff would do,” Jeremy said. “Bauer got his weapons credentials in artillery. He had a hand in the general’s big-gun victory at Liège after the rest of the German command ate crow for two weeks at the start of the war. He and General Ludendorff are known to be very close.”

“Our Albert would be drawn to a maverick,” I said. “He was sharply critical of the Kaiser this morning.”

“Most of the German high command is critical of the Kaiser.”

“Willie’s soft on the Brits.”

Jeremy nodded. “Notwithstanding, he’s duly tough after the fact. He never dreamed his U-boats would catch a target like the Lusitania. No one really did. But he was keenly vigorous in defense of its sinking.”

“So Bauer and Stockman figure they can safely act on their own, as long as they pull it off.”

“If you listen to Germans argue with each other,” Jeremy said, “no one is ever wrong about anything. Collectively too. If the poison gas bomb goes off and England effectively suffers, then the High Command certainly was right all along. Every one of them, from the Kaiser on down.”

“This makes sense of the tower at Stockman House,” I said. “The wind studies. They were thinking about poison gas in British streets.”

“My other bit fits as well,” Jeremy said. “I decided FVFB had to be comparable to Krupp. I just couldn’t sort things out in my head from the companies I knew. So I consulted the Berlin Stock Exchange. Farbenfabriken Vormals Friedrich Bayer. Pharmaceuticals. Dyes. Chemicals.”

“I think we know what they make in Kalk,” I said.

“Did Madam Cobb persuade Stockman to let her go along?”

“I persuaded him on her behalf, I think.”

“And you?”

“Not invited.”

“We need to invite ourselves,” Jeremy said.

At this, we smoked for a few moments.

Across the street was the hotel where another identity awaited me behind the baseboards of a wardrobe. Colonel Klaus von Wolfinger. I’d already shaved for him.

“Time to bluff,” I said.

“This is good advice.”

“It was yours.”

“I am never wrong,” he said.

“Since you’re so German, can your people fit you out as an officer? We’re talking about getting very close to an army base.”

“Yes.”

“Trask has me set up as a colonel attached to the Foreign Office,” I said. “Secret service.”

“Your uniform complete?”

“The only officer headgear I could pack was a crusher,” I said. “Can you get me a peaked field cap?”

“Size, if I have a choice?”

“Seven, British,” I said.

“When does Stockman leave?”

“In about thirty-six hours.”

“With that box, they have to be driving.”

“As much as I’d relish the irony,” I said, “I don’t think your Ford will pass for a German staff car.”

“I can arrange a car. But the people I draw on for support are all of them around Berlin. In Spich we’ll be on our own. Any special needs you can anticipate?”

“In other words, what’s our plan,” I said.

“In other words.”

I thought of what we knew about Albert and about Spich and about his wooden crate. What the likelihoods were.

Jeremy said, “I suppose the argument could be made that we simply need a bullet. For Stockman.”

I shook my head no. “We let the boxes go in order to keep us in the game. And because those presumed prototypes are replaceable. The plans are somewhere. Several somewheres, I’m sure. But Albert’s replaceable too, at this point. His work is done. The Zepps and the gas and the shell design already exist. What you learned about Bauer is the thing. We need to interfere in a striking enough way to prevent the maverick attack and also openly discredit the attempt. We need to get the half-British Kaiser’s attention. The only cruelty he’ll disavow is failed cruelty.”

Jeremy nodded. “So what do you need?”

I was improvising now. Without a real plan. But from the realities I’d just voiced, there was a basic act that seemed to be called for. Indeed, I could think of no other.

I said, “I don’t know exactly how to employ it, without our knowing Spich, but I think we need a bomb of our own. A portable one.”

He thought a moment. About either what I had in mind or how to get one.

In case it was the former, I said, “If we can blow up the Zepp with Stockman’s untested shell armed, either on the ground or very shortly into the flight, we can spectacularly poison an air base inside the Fatherland. The whole maverick plan will come out and look bad.”

“I can arrange this,” Jeremy said.

“And a dispatch case to fit the thing,” I said. “I’d need to carry it close.”

He dropped half his cigarette at his feet and stubbed it out. “I’ll pick you up tomorrow at six. Here at the Baden. Dress like you are now and bring what you need for the south.”

Jeremy pulled his pack of Murads from his coat pocket. He handed them to me. “In case you can’t find Turkish tobacco in the hotel.”

I took them. “Thanks.”

Maybe it was the moment of leave-taking after a serious talk that suddenly brought this to mind, but I thought of Stockman in the Adlon bar.

I said, “That drink I had with Albert the first night in Berlin. He criticized the Zeppelins for bringing only isolated disruptions. That’s what I was focusing on. But it was his other criticism that really mattered. Commonplace.”

“This is anything but that,” Jeremy said.

“Stockman is a terrorist,” I said.

And I was letting him sleep with my mother.