The Empire of Night

44

I stood in the yard, smoking a cigarette.

Jeremy was gone longer than I’d expected him to be. Long enough that I began to think about going in after him. But the house was quiet and dark, and I trusted Jeremy’s skill at this. I wondered if he was having some preliminary conversation with the man, a necessary explanation of why it was keenly appropriate for Jeremy to be the guy who ended his life. I would do likewise, I figured, if I had his particular combination of motives and this opportunity.

Then there was movement at the back door. I straightened and took a step in that direction.

The shadow striding across the yard was Jeremy.

He arrived before me.

From the starlight and the glow to the east I could see him just well enough to read his state. At least roughly. He gave off a quietude, almost an inertness. He did not seem like a man who’d just killed another man. Anything but. Which made me all the more certain he’d done that very thing.

“I brought you something,” he said.

He held out his hand and I received a palm-sized, cast-iron object. Flat with a pinback. I drew it up, away from the shadows of our bodies, and I could see the German Iron Cross, first class. The flare-tipped Maltese upright and crossbar were edged with silver.

“You deserve a better bluff than a phony lapel pin,” he said.

I pinned it high up on my chest.

“The major drives the colonel,” he said, and he circled the car to the right-hand driver’s seat. I headed to the crank while he flipped the ignition switch. It took only a small, sweet pull to start up the immense engine, ninety-five horses worth.

When I slid into the passenger’s seat, Jeremy said, “Someday, we’ll need your lock-picking tools to steal an automobile.” He reached outside the cabin — the gate change shifter was mounted to the car’s body at the running board, just inside the upright spare tire — and he notched us into gear and we rolled away, the Mercedes’ chain-drive grinding softly, deep inside its corridor of oil.

We doubled back down Hohenzollern-Strasse. I recognized his mother’s house up ahead. It approached, it drifted past, he did not move his eyes from the road before us.

I took out my flashlight and thumbed the slide button. I opened the portfolio. It contained a sheaf of maps. I recognized them. They were part of the KDR 100, the Karte des Deutschen Reiches, the finely detailed set of large-scale maps of Germany done up over the past three decades for the General Staff.

“Our route to Cologne,” Jeremy said.

I took out the first two we’d need. Map 268, Spandau, the thousand square kilometers of Germany in which Spandau was the major city. And Map 293, Potsdam.

We turned south on Wilhelm-Strasse and Jeremy throttled up and we surged ahead into the night. On an accommodating road, the Torpedo could do seventy miles per hour, could do a hundred with its chassis stripped down. Germany was fast asleep and dark, but shortly there were arc lights ahead and we flashed past a straight, cobbled road leading to a brick wall and twin, loopholed towers flanking a massive door that was as pale and jaundiced as a face from solitary. The main gate of Spandau Prison.

Then we were in the dark again, with just our headlamps before us. I thought we were on our way, but a few minutes down the road Jeremy slowed abruptly.

I looked to him.

“The last of our preparations,” he said.

He pulled off the road and we rolled over gravel past a low wooden house with a kerosene lamp burning in the window. There’d been no hesitation, no searching to find our way here. Jeremy knew the place.

Our headlamps lit up a wide-mouthed garage. From within, the radiators and darkened headlamps of half a dozen vehicles stared out at us. A man in overalls emerged from the depth of the garage into our light. He’d been waiting.

We made a sharp right turn, passing an open-topped automobile stripped of tires and windshield and sitting on stone blocks. We stopped. Jeremy switched off the engine.

“Another good German,” he said.

We got out.

I lingered by my door while Jeremy circled the car and strode to greet the man in overalls, who was carrying an acetylene lamp.

They shook hands and they turned their backs on me and leaned close to each other, speaking low.

I knew to stay where I was.

They had some intense, private matter between them.

I thought for a moment of the covert group Jeremy drew on, worked with, in Germany, wondered at the role he played for them, wondered how he explained his Britishness.

But they clearly trusted him. He clearly knew how to use them.

Then he and the man in overalls turned my way and I stepped to them.

He was Evert. Jeremy said just his first name. And he said, of me, simply, “Christopher.”

I shook Evert’s heavily callused hand. He smelled of graphite grease. He held his lamp low and his face was in deep night shadow. But his eyes were even darker than the shadow, were startlingly visible. “Ein herzliches Dankeschön,” he said, bowing a little at the waist. He gave me heartfelt thanks, though he didn’t elaborate. But I could surmise. He was working for a different sort of Germany. Jeremy was still very much a German in the eyes of men like this one, was furthering that cause. As, therefore, was I.

Evert turned to Jeremy now and said, still in our shared mother tongue, “I’ll get your device. Do you need the lamp?”

Jeremy looked at me. “Do you have your flashlight at hand?”

“Yes,” I said.

“See your own way,” Jeremy said to Evert, nodding at his lamp. The man moved off toward the garage.

“Over here,” Jeremy said.

I switched on the flashlight and followed him.

He’d stopped the Mercedes with its back end even with an upright gasoline pump.

I shined the light first on the pump, which Jeremy cranked, and then on its hose as he inserted the nozzle into the Torpedo’s gas tank, which sat low beneath the rear-deck luggage rack.

As we topped off the tank, Evert arrived carrying a closed canvas bag. Jeremy looked up from his hose and they exchanged a nod and Evert put the bag into the back seat of the car.

The makings of our bomb, I assumed.

And now Evert had returned and Jeremy was replacing the gas pump hose. Evert kneeled at the back of the Mercedes and was working with a tool at the license plate. Off it came. And he was putting another in its place. The one removed and the one affixed were both prefixed with MK. Militärkraftwagen. Military vehicles.

At last we were ready.

Evert thanked me again. He said, “I would have expected no less from a German reared in America.”

“Of course,” I said.

“We will create a true republic in our country,” he said. “Soon.”

In response I pumped his hand a bit more vigorously and bowed a little at the waist, as he had initially done, and we broke off and I got into the fastest staff car in the world and we hit the road again. As we pushed south from Spandau into the deep dark of the heath country, I thought how the mission ahead of me was as vague and difficult as Evert’s. And I wondered if the right thing wasn’t to clarify the goal as Jeremy had done tonight and simply put a bullet in Sir Albert Stockman’s brain.