The Empire of Night

46

Before I left him at his door I asked for the dispatch case I’d requested.

“I’ll bring it to you,” he said.

I moved off.

My room was high-ceilinged near the door but it followed the steep pitch of the roof so that I had to crouch to actually look out my window.

A man with too heavy a coat for the August afternoon was passing slowly by on the far side of the street. The coat was patched at the shoulder. His shoes were scuffed badly enough for me to notice the fact from this distance. As willfully costumed-up as all this seemed, he did not turn his face from the fountain square toward which he was headed, nor did he miss a step till he was gone from my sight.

A light knock at the door.

I opened it to Jeremy.

He handed me a russet leather vertical bag with a shoulder strap and a buckle fastener at the bottom of the weather flap.

“They will never see me without it,” I said.

He nodded.

If and when the time came to do something with our bomb, I would carry it while appearing to be only what I’d always been.

“That little beer garden at the hotel,” he said.

“I noticed it.”

“In three hours?”

“Good.”

We would rest. Then we would sit and nurse a few beers and wait to watch Stockman and my mother arrive. We had to know his vehicle. I had to know their room.

“Mufti or military?” Jeremy said.

“Military. Did Stockman ever lay eyes on you?”

“He did. A couple of times. But he’d catch me out only close up. In uniform, tucked away in the beer garden, we should be all right.”

So we each slept our three hours and then we settled in at a table under the Biergarten canopy at the Hotel Alten-Forst. We ate, we drank, slowly, and the sky darkened and the electric lights came on in the hotel. We were sitting across from each other, Jeremy with the driveway before him, I with my back to anyone arriving at the hotel and able to turn my face away at his nod.

The nod came a couple of hours into our wait.

I angled my face past Jeremy’s right shoulder, rendering myself unidentifiable to a passerby, but I moved my eyes sharply back toward his, watched him watching them. He tracked them past, and then he nodded at me again.

I looked out into the courtyard.

Albert’s broad, tweeded back. My mother’s darkly besilked body, her arm hooked in his. She seemed small. Very small. Had she always been this small? She could fill a stage. She seemed enormous on a stage. But tonight, as she pressed her body close to this man as they maundered toward the hotel doors, toward their room together, she seemed impossibly small.

I should have told her in Berlin. About the poison gas. I should have told her exactly what sort of man this was.

“I’ll watch the check-in,” Jeremy said, rising.

I rose too, swinging around to see the vehicles.

Two Opel touring cars, their tops up.

“They were in the lead car,” Jeremy said. “He was driving. Just the two of them. But the car behind is with them.”

Even in the night, in the spill of the electric light, I could see the lead car’s deep red color. Dark-uniformed bellmen were pulling suitcases — mostly my mother’s — out of the vehicle.

The Opel behind was in camouflage. A burly man in feldgrau, wearing a peakless field cap, was taking up a place to stand as a barrier to the tonneau door.

“We know what’s in the back,” I said.

“They didn’t have time for Bayer. The thing is still empty.”

“Watch the wall of keys,” I said, turning my head a little bit toward him.

He slipped away to get me a room number.

I sat down in his chair, facing the automobiles.

The bellmen finished stacking a baggage trolley. One of them wheeled it up the courtyard while the other went to the red Opel, cranked it, and drove it off, heading for the parking area beside the hotel.

The guy in uniform guarding the camouflaged Opel remained at parade rest. Motionless. Waiting. Waiting for Stockman. Albert was going back out tonight.

You could bet he’d be heading for the poison gasworks in Kalk.

I looked out east, into the night sky.

The air was still. The sky was full of high overcast. The moon was down. Flying weather. The Zeppelin wouldn’t go tonight, not this late. But if this weather held, if it was the same across the channel, then soon.

A few minutes later, Jeremy arrived.

The mug in field gray was still standing guard, and Jeremy gave him a last look before turning his back to the driveway and sitting in the chair I’d occupied for the past few hours.

I leaned a little across the table. I said, low, “Our man is gassing up tonight.”

Jeremy nodded. He switched our steins, retrieving his own. Both of them still held some recently drawn beer.

He took a draft.

I didn’t.

Jeremy said, “Notwithstanding all the reasoning we’ve done, as much as we trust it, I should go watch a piece or two fit into place.”

He would follow to Kalk.

“Careful,” I said.

“I’ll wait ahead of them. Near Bayer. And then near the air base. Won’t try to go the distance.”

He rose.

There was one more thing. I figured he’d forgotten.

But before I could ask, he said, “Room 200.”