The Empire of Night

45

Before the heath yielded to Potsdam we turned west. The road was accommodating and Jeremy throttled up the Torpedo and we raced on through the Brandenburg Forest, skirting the city, and we ran fast through the forest at Tucheim, and he said I should sleep, he was fine and the way was clear to him for a few hours. And though I’d had as much coffee as he and knew from other wars how to keep awake, I let myself sleep, and somewhere along the way I dreamed about drawing my Luger and shooting it into the dark. I couldn’t see a target but I knew I had to keep shooting, and the clip in the handle kept feeding 9mm Parabellum shells, endlessly, and I fired and fired, and in the darkness I never saw who I was trying to hit or if he had fallen, and so I just kept firing.

I woke at dawn as we decelerated into a street of folk-tale houses and shops, bright-painted bossage or half-timbered white stucco, and with froufrou gables and roof edges. This was the Weser Renaissance style, born along the river that gave it its name, the style of the brothers Grimm. The city was Hamelin.

We were passing from the main street onto the bridge over the Weser before Jeremy realized I was sitting upright.

“You awake?” he said.

“I am,” I said. “Are you?”

He was, but on Hamelin’s western bank we stopped at a small café with the logical but unfortunate name Der Rattenfänger, the ratcatcher, from the name of the Grimm tale based in Hamelin and translated more vapidly in English-language books as the Pied Piper. We ate our breakfast — avoiding the Wurst, just in case they were having a joke on us all — and we received ongoing glances and bows of respect from the working men who ate there with us. We were high officers in their army. And I was more. One man with a vast gray mustache rose to full attention before me and saluted. He then inclined his head toward my Iron Cross. “Hail to your bravery,” he said. I nodded in the supercilious manner of a son-of-a-bitch young secret service colonel, rehearsing the character I would need to play in Spich.

The owner tried to foot our breakfast bill but we declined, with thanks, and we stepped outside. Without having to say anything, we moved off fifty yards or so from the café where we could face the nearby upswell of mountains, the eastern edge of the Weser Uplands, and smoke a cigarette.

“About five hours to go,” Jeremy said. “As long as the dirt-road bits stay dry and the cows keep to the fields.”

“Spich has to be small,” I said. “In a small town and a tight military community, these uniforms aren’t camouflage. We’re going to stand out.”

Jeremy blew smoke toward the mountain. It was covered with a mixed-growth forest, pine and spruce, oak and hornbeam.

“So we’ll have to strut,” I said.

He looked at me.

“The colonel and the major have to be there with a purpose,” I said.

Jeremy took in a thoughtfully slow drag on his Murad.

“They’re in Spich about him,” I said.

Jeremy exhaled sharply, in agreement. “Who do you expect knows his intentions?”

“The commandant has to.”

Jeremy nodded. “And an airship commander.”

“They could be the only ones,” I said. “And I bet neither of them knows what the bomb contains.”

“I bet you’re right,” he said. “But they do know the whole thing is on the sly.”

We said no more for now. The point was to smoke and stretch our legs, and then we walked back to the car.

One last salute. A guy old enough to have fought for Moltke at Gravelotte was approaching the café. At the sight of us, he stopped and snapped us a brisk one. “Gott strafe England,” he said.

Jeremy and I answered in unison, “Er strafe es!”

And we drove off.

But at a garage on the southern outskirts of Hamelin, we topped off our gasoline tank to get us easily through to Spich, and Jeremy let me drive the Torpedo, breach of rank though it was, so he could sleep for an hour or so. She was another skin, my Mercedes, a great steel body about me and I was its heart, my own heart beating fast from the roar of the engine and the whip-grind of the chain drive and the sense of torque beneath me, the great unseen spin of things flaring out to the four wheels, hurtling us along.

I drove a stretch of the route that brought us through the center of small town after small town — Arzen and Reher and Herrentrup, Meinberg and Kohlstädt and Marienloh, Hemmern and Rüthen — and every time, I had to slow down for the narrow streets, the cobbled streets, the horse-cart and hay-wagon streets, and that was fine, for I could throttle down and shift down my Torpedo and then fire her back up again.

Jeremy got his hour of sleep and more, nearly two, and he woke and I let him have the Mercedes once again, and he was chest-puffingly pleased at the transfer of her; he was a man reunited with his mate after a trial separation during which she’d dallied with another guy. He forgave her. And he drove her fast.

It was early afternoon when we saw a wide stretch of factory smoke before us. Mülheim, with the Rhine invisible just beyond and Cologne nearby, south around a bend of the river.

We soon turned south ourselves, before Mülheim, and I said to Jeremy, “Time to start the bluff.”

He and I were relying on the unthinkableness, in the heart of the Fatherland, that two Germans who looked and sounded like ranking officers of the Deutsches Heer could be anything but what they seemed. We all had the same blood. Even the three million socialists. So surely these two splendidly portrayed German officers were legit. Consequently, the more dramatic our public strut, the better.

So we stopped at the side of the road, surrounded by cabbage fields, and we lowered the cloth top on the Mercedes. Let the Spich locals and the air base army men know that two high officers from Berlin had come to town. Let those boys start to talk; let them start bluffing themselves.

The main street of Spich ran about a quarter mile along the highway, which had lately turned east-west. We slowed to a crawl and made our way through, the houses and shops bright with whitewash and scarlet geraniums in window boxes. We turned local heads, all right — at cobbler and grocer, at butcher and inn — and the military heads turned, as well, a couple of enlisted men wearing undress uniforms, who snapped to at once when they saw us. They saluted. I returned the salute casually.

At the eastern end of the main street we approached a town square with a four-spout fountain in the middle and a cobbled market area and a tidy three-storey, dark wood and white stucco Rathaus, the town hall. As we circled the fountain, a staff car passed us, heading in the other direction — a camouflaged Horch phaeton — and I exchanged a very precise salute with what seemed to be another colonel, out and about in his Pickelhaube.

“I wonder if that was our man,” Jeremy said.

“I hope it was,” I said.

We’d reached Spich’s eastern-most cross street, Wald-Strasse. A sign urged us to turn left for the Hotel Alten-Forst. We did, and ahead was a great wall of pines, the southern edge of the Alten Forest, and notched into the trees was a clearing where the hotel sat, a white-stuccoed, hip-roofed building with two unequal wings joined in an L, the long wing at the rear, parallel with the line of trees. I twisted around to look down Wald-Strasse. South was flatland as far as I could see. The airship base was in that direction.

I turned back toward the forest.

Jeremy had slowed to a near stop.

Though we had not discussed it, I stated the obvious. “We’re not checking in there.”

I could not chance encountering Albert.

“Just reconnoitering,” Jeremy said.

“Even if they come straight here, we’ve got a good six hours on them,” I said.

Jeremy accelerated a little, and we approached the hotel, entering a circular driveway that curved around a tightly manicured lawn with a flower clock in reds and pinks and yellows, how time passed in a town where every window was studded with geraniums.

As the driveway bent back to run in front of the hotel, with the option of turning into its courtyard, we both focused on the settings of tables in a small, canopied Biergarten. We rolled on past and completed the circuit, and we headed back south.

Jeremy had noticed an inn on Wald-Strasse just north of the town square. The Boar’s Head. It had two upper stories above the street-level bar. We’d passed it as I’d been looking south. We stopped there and parked our Mercedes off the street in a side yard.

We entered the ground-floor saloon. In the thick afternoon dimness that pressed against our eyes and seemed the same in drinking joints the world over, a young man, who was no doubt on the cusp of conscription, was wiping the long zinc bar. He took one look at us, threw his rag aside, stood up straight, and faced us. His Adam’s apple bounced a couple of times. He was thinking to salute but was feeling unqualified and inadequate for the job. So instead, he turned sharply on his heel and beat it through a door at the back of the place.

A woman emerged. The young man’s mother, I supposed. She was wiping her hands, working kitchen and front-of-the-bar both, and I would’ve bet her husband, the boy’s father and boss of the inn, was off in the trenches already. She’d be running this place completely alone in a year or so, with husband and son in uniform, and she’d be waking in a sweat night after night, sure she’d lost them both.

Jeremy was speaking with her, as my subordinate, asking about rooms. She had only a single lodger on the second floor and the two other rooms were free there. Jeremy was about to engage them, but I intervened.

“And the third floor, madam?” I said.

She looked at me as if I’d leaped from the shadows.

“It is a longer climb, Colonel,” she said. Herr Oberst. She was flustered, as intimidated by rank as was her husband in a trench in France.

“Is anyone booked there?” I said.

“No, Colonel. It is empty.”

“How many rooms?”

“Three,” she said.

“We will rent them all,” I said. “And absolute privacy with them.”

“Yes sir,” she said.

The entrance was from the back garden of the inn. Jeremy and I climbed a tightly winding staircase and emerged in a musty corridor. He carried his Gladstone and also the canvas bag with the makings of our bomb.

Climbing, Jeremy asked, “Three rooms?”

“Our being at the inn instead of the hotel is suspicious,” I said. “Renting the floor explains we did it for privacy. Any rumors about that would even be useful.”

“Der Bluff,” he said.

“Der große Bluff,” I said.

The big bluff had begun.