The Empire of Night

47

Not even ten minutes later Stockman strode past, and the guard snapped to attention at the sight of him. As Albert approached, the man opened the passenger door. He stepped back as if to wait, but Albert waved him on to start and drive the car. Albert stepped in and closed the door, but before he settled, he gave a single, focused glance into the darkness of the back seat.

They drove away.

A grinding took up in my chest. I was anxious to do this next thing. I was grateful for the chance, the only one I could expect to have in Spich. But I feared this. For reasons I would have been hard pressed to fully specify. It was enough to say it was about her.

I drained the rest of my beer.

Warm and flat.

I rose.

I put money down and I walked into the courtyard and through the hotel doors and into a lobby of chestnut paneling and mounted elk horns. Inside, I walked as if I knew something secret and damning about every turning head and they had better realize it and keep to themselves. The heads turned quickly away.

The Alten-Forst had an elevator and I stepped in. The operator snapped to, a boy who would likely be inducted alongside the innkeeper’s son sometime next spring.

I stepped off on the second floor and went down the dim corridor to the door at the end. Room 200.

I was in character now. I was the American spy Christopher Marlowe Cobb playing the German spy Klaus von Wolfinger. I would maintain that role-within-a-role for the next few minutes, if I possibly could, focusing just on those two layers and not the full set, not little Kit Cobb, Isabel Cobb’s forever-young son, playing Christopher Cobb the war correspondent playing that American spy playing that German spy. That was the grinding in me. Those four gears. Meshing now. Slipping now. Binding now.

I lifted my hand.

I knocked at the door. Sharply.

It yielded instantly, swinging a little away from its jamb.

It had been ajar.

I drew my Luger.

I pushed through the door and into the sitting room of a suite full of carved oak and leather furniture draped and stacked and strewn and be-vased with roses, dozens and dozens of roses, the place reeking of nostril-flaring sweetness, and in the midst of it Mother was rising up from a chair, still in her deep-purple silk evening dress, her head bare, her hair undone and tumbling down. And her hands were flying up and she was choking back a cry and she was wide-eyed from seeing, in this first burst of the sight of me, only my uniform and my pistol.

I stopped, lowering and holstering the Luger and whipping off my hat and saying, “Mother, it’s me.”

Her hands fell, her face twisted away. She slumped back into the chair.

I moved to her.

“Mother,” I said. “I’m sorry. The door. I thought something was wrong.”

I could see now that her face was wet, her eyes were red from weeping.

“It’s all right,” I said.

I kneeled before her, took her hand. The tears had long preceded my entry, I realized.

“What is it?” I said.

She was breathing heavily. She took her hand away from mine, pressed it to her throat.

She struggled to control her breath.

“I’m sorry I frightened you,” I said.

She waved this away.

I stayed bent to one knee. I waited. She snubbed a long breath into her body. She let it out as if it were smoke from a cigarette.

She lowered her face. Took another slow breath.

She lifted her face once more.

None of this felt like an act. The tears were real. They’d been shed alone.

“It’s all right,” she said. “I should have known it would be you. . That uniform.”

“I had no choice,” I said.

She waved me silent once again.

Tears were still brimming from her eyes.

They catalyzed in me.

I stood up.

“What has he done?” I said, my tone going hard, going nearly fierce.

She pressed back a little in the chair. Snorted softly, as if in scorn.

She wasn’t answering.

She wasn’t looking at me.

“What?” I barked.

She lifted her face to me, lifted her hand, swept it to the side, indicating the room, the flowers. “He has done all of this.”

They were joyful tears. They were tears of goddamn love.

I backed a step off.

Two steps.

I made sure my Luger was seated properly in its holster. I thought of the suite door. I looked. I’d left it partly open. I turned and moved to it.

“Are you going?” she said.

I reached the door, simply closed it, as I had intended.

I stared at the closed door, putting space between myself and my mother, as I had also intended.

“You’ve always been like this,” she said. A rebuke.

I turned now to her, taking it slow, deliberately taking it slow. I would not alarm her. Not by my actions.

“I love roses,” she said. “Do you even know how much I love roses?”

I did. But she said it as if she knew the answer was no.

I said nothing.

“He does,” she said. “I count at least five different cultivars in this room. Bon Silene, the dark pink here behind me,” she said.

I said nothing.

“And Doctor Grill. Over there,” she said, pointing with a nod of her head. “Pink tinted with copper.”

I took a step now, to cross the room, to return to her, still taking it slow.

“Exquisite,” she said.

With my second step she began to speak more rapidly.

“And Safrano. From the French for saffron. In its bud the color is the color of saffron.”

Even moving slowly I was frightening her.

“Four Season Damask,” she said. “And Veilchenblau. Can you believe it?”

I drew near.

“The nearest thing to a blue rose in this world. He found that for me. There are two dozen of those.”

I stopped before her.

She lifted her face. “How did he find it?”

I said nothing.

“Why did he find it?” She said this as if I should know the answer.

“Don’t you understand?” she said.

She seemed very small sitting there, my mother.

I crouched before her again, dropped to my knees so our eyes were level with each other.

“You must listen to me,” I said.

She drew her mouth tightly shut. She straightened at the spine.

“He is a bad man, Mother. More than what we’ve always known. Much more. Bad in ways he’s hidden from you.”

She said, very softly, “You would have said this of everyone who has loved me.”

“This is about Albert Stockman.”

“They never had a chance with you.”

“Mother, you need to listen now.”

She stopped.

“He has come here to make a Zeppelin raid,” I said.

She cut me off. “He’s restless being so passive in the defense of his people. We may not agree. .”

“Shut up now and listen.” My hand did not move, would never have moved, no matter what, but I had the impulse to slap her across the face. For her own good. She would have done as much to me.

She reared back. The words were slap enough. I had her attention.

I said, “He will drop phosgene gas on London. Poison gas. Do you understand?”

Her face had gone blank.

“This is his plan,” I said. “His.”

I’d never seen her face blank. Not just her face holding inscrutably still, making it impossible to read. Blank.

I said, “He’s even built a special shell to hold the gas, to release it in the streets of London to kill as many as he can.”

“Impossible,” she said.

Her blankness shifted ever so slightly with this. How? Around the eyes. Just the eyes. Something there. They seized the blankness and slammed it into my face like a brick.

“I’m telling you the truth,” I said.

“It’s not possible,” she said, each word enunciated like a boxing jab.

“Doctor Einstein told me.”

“He doesn’t even know my Albert.”

“He knows Fritz Haber,” I said. “At the Institute. He knows Haber better than anyone. Haber is the German father of poison gas. He and your Albert are working together in this.”

I tried hard to read her face for some trace, some flicker, something, anything, to suggest she was at least opening to the possibility that this was true. I saw nothing.

“Has he spoken of London?” I asked.

She looked at me as if I’d not said a word.

I advanced the spark in my voice. “Has he spoken of London?”

“He loves London,” she said, her face suddenly flashing alive. “Of course he speaks of London.” She was going to seize on this sort of question as if it were the basis of my beliefs about him, typical of my flimsy thinking. “He loves the city. Loves the theater.”

My breath caught.

“He fell in love with me in a London theater,” she said.

“Has he lately spoken of the London theater?”

“You’re not listening,” she said.

“The theater district?” I said.

She leaned forward and slapped me across the face.

“You’re not listening,” she said.

I rose.

Of course. What they called “Theatreland” in London was still robustly defiant of the Zepps, the Huns, all of it. The streets would be full of people leaving shows at the prime striking hour. And there would be the spill of plenty of light.

I said, “Sometime soon. Perhaps tomorrow night, if the wind and sky are right, your Albert will bomb the theatergoers of London with poison gas.”

She jumped up.

I retreated a step.

“Go away now,” she cried. “Go away.”

I turned my back to her.

“I can’t do this anymore,” she said.

I moved away, toward the door.

“I won’t go on,” she cried after me.

I approached the door.

“You’re a liar, Christopher Cobb,” she said.

I put my hand to the doorknob.

“You lie like a jealous lover,” she cried.

And I was out the door and careening down yet another hotel corridor.