The Empire of Night

43

When I got back to the Adlon, there was a note waiting for me, in a sealed hotel envelope slipped under the door. My mother had simply written Hotel Alten-Forst. Spich. Its brevity, its mode of delivery, the risks and suspicions of yesterday early morning, her place now, near the center of Stockman’s plans, my exclusion from those plans: all this meant I should not—dared not — see her again before the time of my rendezvous with Jeremy.

Would I have tried to talk her out of all this? I wished I’d told her about the poison gas. But maybe it was better she didn’t know. She was committed to her role. The most dangerous thing for her now would be to try to withdraw from him. Still. As a woman, would she continue to love a known terrorist? As a son, how could there be even a match-spark of doubt about the answer to that? But there was.

Spich.

I’d brought my Gladstone to the Adlon. I gathered the things I needed for travel and packed them. I stepped off the elevator and paused at the mezzanine balustrade and looked for Herr Wagner.

He’d kept his distance since I’d confronted him in this very spot, but I didn’t want the Gladstone to set off any alarms in his head. He was standing just beyond the reception lounge, in front of the Palm Court. He was watching someone cross the lobby. I followed his gaze to a small man, dressed in a dark, three-piece suit. A Far East Asian. Wagner openly observed the man as he marched with clear and oblivious purpose into the Palm Court. Wagner turned as if to follow.

I beat it quick down the stairway but emerged cautiously from behind the reception desk. Wagner was indeed following the Asian man, out the doors to the Goethe Garden. I strode away in the other direction, across the lobby and the vestibule platform, and then I was spinning through the revolving door onto Unter den Linden, feeling happier with each step to be leaving the Adlon behind.

I returned to the Hotel Baden and stopped inside the front door and asked the Hausmeister where Spich was. He touched the tip of his nose in thought and then led me to the front desk and a book of maps.

Kalk was just across the Rhine from Cologne; Spich was just nine miles farther south.

When I stepped into Jeremy’s Ford in front of the hotel the next evening, Spich was still nagging at me in vague familiarity.

As soon as I’d closed the door, Jeremy throttled up the T and we drove off, and he said, “I didn’t mean to be mysterious last night. I’m taking you to my mother’s house in Spandau.”

“I promise not to argue with her about the Kaiser,” I said.

“You’d lose anyway,” he said.

“What do you know about the town of Spich?” I said.

He glanced at me and then back to the street ahead. “It’s a major army Zeppelin base.”

Of course.

I told him about Isabel Cobb’s note.

He glanced my way again. But he made no immediate remark.

He was thinking.

I was thinking. If Stockman was taking Mother along to share his triumph, then the choice of hotel was significant. It was in tiny Spich, not urbane Cologne. It was the hotel nearest the Zeppelin’s ascent on the heroic day. She was going to be part of that. But the other witnesses — be they press or just a few influential people, including the greatest actress and most fascinating paramour in the world — these witnesses would hardly be present at the start of a secret military mission. The successful return would be another matter. And in that event, Stockman’s standing as a hero would be greatly diminished if he was simply one of the crowd, cheering. Strategic advice and technological creativity and a place in the bedazzled crowd were not quite the stuff of statues in the Tiergarten. Not for the leading man. I bet he’d talked his way onto the Zepp for this thing. He was planning to step down from the gondola triumphant.

I looked at Jeremy. He sensed it. He looked at me.

“He’s going up with the gas bag,” I said.

It took him only one breath of thought. “Of course.”

We kept quiet now as we drove through the linden forests of the Tiergarten, emerged on the broad central boulevard of Charlottenburg, and then passed into the villa colony of Westend. A few minutes later, with the northern sky striated in stack smoke from the arms factories and the western sky rimmed with the conifers of the Spandauer Stadtforst, we crossed the Charlottenburg Bridge into the narrow streets of Spandau city-center.

Jeremy’s family was or had been well-to-do. His mother lived on Hohenzollern-Strasse in a stretch of very nice, scaled-down villas. Her two-storey house was stucco-finished with the window moldings cut into the rough stone in the German classic style. The place sat on an acre or a little more, thick with pine and birch. A beaten-gravel drive curved behind the house where we now parked the Ford.

Jeremy’s mother emerged onto a flagstone veranda to greet us.

He stepped in front of me and bent to her and they hugged. Then he moved aside and she extended her hand and we shook. She was small and as sinewy-solid as corded wire. She had the grip of a retired bantamweight who once could throw a hell of a right cross.

“Welcome to our home, Herr Hunter,” she said, her German formal in person as well, leaving no trillable r untrilled.

We went in and sat in her immaculate parlor, Jeremy and I on side-by-side matching wing chairs covered in unpadded leather and she on a plank chair before us with a cut-out heart floating behind her head. I imagined that she addressed her two sons on matters of motherly importance in this very setting. Her husband hung over the fireplace. I presumed it to be him. He was clean-shaven, a state far rarer in an earlier era, and I figured I could see his eyes in Jeremy’s, though by this pose they would be the son’s eyes only as he danced into the center of the ring ready to do some damage. And this guy’s mouth was compressed hard, even as he sat for a portrait. A hard mouth and a harder gaze, such that it led me to recall: Jeremy’s only allusion to his father was a reference to his mother as a widow.

The mother rose now and moved to a vast ebonized walnut buffet whose upper panel was laid with marquetry hunting scenes of leaping horses and fleeing elk. From the buffet she served us tea and buttered bread and we sat and ate and she spoke ardently about the price of the butter — two mark fifty a pound — and feared it would soon go to three mark. She took care to blame the British and the French.

And later she fed us a dinner of boiled beef with horse radish sauce and Spätzle in her dining room on a heavy wood table with a vast, spotless linen cloth that demanded every bite I took be an act of desperate carefulness.

As we ate, she asked me a little about the articles I wrote in America on Germany’s virtues, but mostly she monologued, though with each bite of dinner she fell primly silent until her mouth was empty. Jeremy and I kept our own mouths closed while she chewed, digesting with our food each of her just completed segments of thought on such things as British iniquity and international ignorance and Wilhelmian inspiration and Bismarckian virtue, the breadth and depth of the latter winning, for the first chancellor of a unified Germany, a place at Martin Luther’s right hand in heaven.

All this transpired with still another portrait of her husband looking down on us, this time standing with hunting rifle in hand and a brace of dead rabbits beside him and a look on his face that suggested he was, here in the dining room, as disapproving of the rabbits as he was of his sons in the parlor.

This I figured I knew: Jeremy’s mother was a woman who not only acknowledged her son’s father but enshrined him, lived with him openly every day in every room. A woman who was never touched by any man but him. A woman who played only one role forever. Nevertheless, in spite of our obvious differences in father and mother, Jeremy and I had been catalyzed into who we were by heat and pressure from a single unifying principle that would elude even Albert Einstein.

We sat on the veranda after dinner, Jeremy and I. The night had come and the horizon before us burned brightly from the munitions factories on the eastern bank of the Havel. He said, “She will drink Kirschwasser now until she can no longer pour it. And then she will sleep very soundly.”

I thought to say something about his mother and my mother. But I said nothing.

I offered him a cigarette, from the pack he’d given me. He took one with a nod. We lit up and he said, “From the way we reckon it, this thing could go quickly, down there.”

“If the weather is right.”

“I’ll make us a pot of coffee,” he said. “Then we need to steal an automobile.”

“Do you have one in mind?”

“I do,” he said. “A few minutes’ walk from here is the house of the longtime commandant of Spandau Prison. Colonel Walther von Küchler. He’s shot more than a few chaps in our trade. He keeps a staff car. A good one.”

I understood.

Jeremy took a drag on his cigarette.

And he added, in a voice that rasped away any sense of offhandedness, “He’s also known in a few houses in the neighborhood as Kuschelbär.”

Snuggle Bear.

That this colonel had executed some of the boys in our own trade was plenty of leavening for our little project. For Jeremy to add the man’s exploits with the local women made me suspect I’d been wrong about his mother. Maybe I didn’t have to look so deep for the familial chemistry I sensed he and I shared.

“Did you bring your lock-picking tools?” he asked.

“I did.”

“Good,” he said.

So when we were jittery with coffee and Jeremy’s mother was kayoed from Kirschwasser and it was past midnight and the neighborhood was sleeping, he and I dressed up in our German uniforms — the peaked field cap Jeremy’s boys got for me was a fine one, with red crown piping and a skull badge between the cockades — and with my Luger strapped to my waist and with our Gladstone bags in hand, we stepped out of his house.

Two guys with a common uniform have some kind of electrical charge between them. It might be low-wattage at times, but it’s always there. The circuitry of an army. Of a police force. Of a baseball team, for that matter. This sudden thing between Jeremy and me made us stop just across the threshold and look at each other.

A dark energy was coursing in us. From our being Allied spies in disguise together, of course. But our uniforms also made us German army officers. So inevitably the German army crackled in us as well. That was a strange part of the personal bond forged by a uniform. You can be bound by blood. But also by skin.

And since we were military men, our eyes fell to the pips on our shoulders.

I was a colonel. He was a major.

Jeremy shot me a salute. With a wink.

I returned them both.

Then I introduced myself. “Colonel Klaus von Wolfinger.” I offered my hand.

He thought for moment, finding a name for himself, and he grasped my hand. “Major Johann Ecker.”

We shook.

We walked off briskly, heading north on Hohenzollern. A few minutes later we turned west on Pionier-Strasse, which was sheltered, even from the pervasive glow of the factories, by a dense run of plane trees. Almost immediately, across from a drill ground, Jeremy stopped us. He looked around. We were alone in this part of the street, and we slipped quickly up the lawn of a darkened, two-storey, half-timbered and gabled house.

We cut around the side and into the back yard, where we found a good automobile indeed parked near the door. As with most of the German staff cars, it was a civilian vehicle appropriated for military use. Dressed up in feldgrau camouflage was a late model Mercedes 37/95 double phaeton touring car, its cloth top unfurled into its secured place. This model was often called the “Torpedo” from the distinctive V-thrust of the radiator, which was echoed by the shape of the headlamps tucked inside the front fenders.

I found myself treading lightly now, as I approached. As befitted the most powerful production automobile ever built. Ah yes. Let us steal this fine thing. Especially from the spy-killing commandant of Spandau Prison.

Jeremy was a couple of steps ahead of me. I drew near and stopped. He peered in, put his bag into the back seat, leaning for a moment to open it and emerging with a leather portfolio case.

He lifted it so I would take note, and he stepped to the front passenger side and placed the case in there.

“We’ll need your flashlight for the maps,” he said.

I put my bag into the back seat and retrieved the light.

“But first, let me in at the back door,” he said.

He was looking up to the darkened windows on the second floor.

Before I could reply, he added, “We don’t want him to wake up.”

We didn’t. One way or another.

I did not clear up the ambiguity of his exact intentions, however.

I would find out soon enough.

I put the flashlight in my pocket, took my tools from the Gladstone bag, and led him to the back door, which had a tumbler lock. I opened the door.

He stepped past me, saying, “No need for us both.”

Which seemed to me to clear up the ambiguity. Jeremy would arrange for Snuggle Bear never to wake up.