The Empire of Night

49

The captain was leaning against the commandant’s camouflaged Horch phaeton when I emerged from the inn with my Iron Cross on my chest, my dispatch case over my shoulder, and my Luger on my hip. He snapped to attention at my approach.

He made a move to open the front passenger door. I recalled his commandant sitting in that position when we passed yesterday on the main street. But I was an arrogant son of a bitch named Klaus von Wolfinger, a secret service colonel from the Foreign Office in Berlin, so I narrowed my eyes at him. He instantly recognized his mistake. He slammed the passenger door shut and opened the rear door in the tonneau. He would be made to act the proper chauffeur for me.

“Sorry, sir,” he said.

I gave him a minute nod and climbed in.

The door clicked gently shut behind me.

We drove in silence down Wald-Strasse, across the railroad tracks, and out into the barley fields on the road to Uckendorf. Less than a mile later we turned onto a two-lane macadam leading into the air base, a thousand acres of flat, cleared, fallow farmland stripped empty for airship landing and maneuvering, but with a cluster of structures a half mile ahead, the centerpiece being a Zeppelin hangar, growing larger by the moment, clearly outsized, massive. Measureable now: longer than the greatest Atlantic steamship and twenty storeys high.

We drew near. End on, the hangar was an octagon cut off at the knees and with a slight pitch to its upper edge, the squared-off frontal outline of an airship. The doors were shut. Along each flank sat wide, low, corrugated steel buildings. Storehouses and barracks. A telegraph station. And an administrative building, where we now parked.

As I stepped from the automobile and into the shadow of the hangar, its vastness seized my chest and lifted me. Like I once felt walking State Street in my Chicago, passing beneath the Heyworth Building and the Mandel Brothers Building, Marshal Field and the Masonic Temple.

The air base administrative building was steel and plain but it was smaller than the other buildings and had a brick chimney in the side wall. We went in. Two enlisted men at desks in an outer office leaped to their feet, shooting off salutes that the captain and I returned, and we went down a narrow corridor and straight into the main room of the place.

From behind a large, quartered-oak desk rose the commandant, a full colonel like me, but having arrived at the rank at a more traditional pace. He was perhaps sixty. He was clean-shaven except for a sword-blade gray Wilhelm mustache.

I waited for the office door to click shut behind me, and I stepped to the front of the colonel’s desk, stopping between two oak chairs that were arranged to face him. He and I straightened and shared a simultaneous salute. I’d watched him take note of my Iron Cross as I approached. He did not have one or was not displaying it.

And then, as our saluting hands fell, we both glimpsed something that we now subtly displayed to each other, by very slightly and very briefly turning our faces to the right.

We each had a Schmiss.

This was good.

I offered my hand. “I am Colonel Klaus von Wolfinger,” I said.

He offered his. “Colonel Franz von Ziegler,” he said. “Commandant of His Imperial and Royal Majesty’s Airship Station at Spich.”

We shook.

Ziegler said, “Colonel, you have a fine medal there.”

My hand moved to my chest beneath the Iron Cross. “Thank you,” I said.

He smiled. “Of course that. But I meant your scar.”

I returned the smile, though faintly. “And you, sir.”

His was particularly wide, as broad as my thumb.

He figured he knew how to read my look. He said, “I drank foolishly long and much upon that night and inflamed it.”

He was a purist. And he was solicitous of my goodwill. He did not want me to think he’d exaggerated the wound with horsehair.

“Mine was badly mended,” I said.

We flashed a quick, comradely smile at each other.

“Bonn,” he said, identifying his university.

“Heidelberg,” I said. “Borussia?” I asked. The university fencers all were members of clubs, each school having a variety of these, differentiated in a de facto caste system by occupation or wealth or nobility of blood line. Borussia was Kaiser Wilhelm’s club in his Bonn university days, the most elite in the country.

“You honor me by the question,” the colonel said. “But no. Guestphalia.”

“Also splendid,” I said.

“And you?”

“Rhenania,” I said.

“Excellent,” he said.

We paused now for a beat.

This thing was forever shared.

He ended the pause with a deep intake of breath and a straightening. “I took the liberty of approaching you,” he said. “If you are here for some purpose that is none of my business, I apologize.”

“Not at all, Colonel,” I said.

“It is early,” he said. “But the occasion warrants. May I offer you something to drink?”

“It is early,” I said.

“Coffee then?”

“No thank you.”

He made a very small but abrupt lift of the chin, as if he’d been righteously rebuked. I was all business. He was a man who respected that, who was just that sort of man himself, and he regretted giving any other impression.

“Would you care to sit?” He lifted his hand only very slightly to indicate the chairs.

I sat in one. He sat. I opened my dispatch case and removed my letter of introduction from the foreign minister.

“My purpose here is very much your business,” I said, extending the letter toward him.

He took it from me with a face gone grimly tight.

He opened it. He began to read.

The German foreign minister himself was vouching for me.

“Minister Jaglow’s introduction is general,” I said, “because the specifics are for your ears only.”

Ziegler took a short, quick breath at this.

He read on. He finished. He looked at me. “I’d thought you might be Foreign Office,” he said, softly.

He was intimidated.

He began to fold the letter.

It was time to open the throttle on the big bluff.

“You may keep it for your files,” I said. “If you have any concerns.”

He finished folding the letter, slipped it back into the envelope, and handed it across to me. He would show no fear.

Good.

I opened the weather flap on the dispatch case once more and replaced the letter. I closed the case.

When I returned my attention to Colonel Ziegler, his hands sat one upon the other on his desktop.

His face was fixed in a stoic calmness. Placid, almost. This was his imminent-battle face, when all that could be done to prepare had been done.

“My people are not precisely clear as to what you know,” I said. “But our inquiries reveal that you are a respected and trusted officer. No doubt that is why certain parties chose you and this base.”

I paused.

I watched his calmness harden into a mask.

I said, “You and perhaps a single airship commander — and perhaps no one else — understand the unusual circumstances of the imminent mission to London.”

I hesitated only slightly to give him a chance to leap in and clarify how many others knew of the mission. He didn’t. I didn’t press it. I said, “You are taking a civilian aboard. And within your arsenal on this raid, there will be a single, special bomb. For its very existence, the civilian is responsible, which is why he has been authorized to accompany it. I suspect you do not know the exact nature of that bomb’s specialness.”

I paused again.

Ziegler’s face had not changed in the slightest.

I waited one moment more. And another.

He realized I expected something from him. The calmness collapsed into a brow-furrowed sincerity. “You are correct, sir,” he said. “I do not know why this bomb bears its privilege.”

“Good,” I said.

It wasn’t quite the word he’d expected. His eyes flickered with the temporary relief I’d intended: he’d said the right thing to disavow a conspiracy.

“I believe you,” I said. I let him feel good for a moment and then I tweaked him again. “You met with him last night.”

“Sir, he came to me as I was informed he would. I was instructed to receive the bomb from him and place it in safekeeping until its loading for the mission.”

“Perhaps you do not know the irony attending him.”

“I do not, sir.”

I said, “He is an Englishman.”

Ziegler lifted up slightly from the chest.

“You did not know,” I said. “Good.”

His eyes flexed in surprise. He understood that I’d read his reaction. He was not used to this.

And then he made a quick confession. “I knew he had an Anglicized name.”

I waved my hand, absolving him.

He nodded his head faintly in gratitude.

“The man who directed you,” I said. “I presume it was Colonel Bauer himself.”

“Yes sir,” he said. Very softly. This was softly from a man not accustomed to using that tone. “Though strictly by dispatch,” he added. “I have never met with him.”

“Colonel Ziegler, you do understand that our conversation here is strictly confidential.”

“Yes sir.”

“This is not a matter of treason,” I said.

He stiffened at the mere mention of the word.

“Not strictly speaking,” I said.

Ziegler launched a beseeching hand into the airspace above the desk. “I have only responded to orders.”

I nodded.

He said, “Transmitted to me under the seal of the General Staff.”

“I accept your innocently obedient role in this, Colonel. Otherwise, I would not be speaking to you like this. I am enlisting your help.”

He withdrew his hand. Restacked both of them. He straightened as if sitting for a portrait. He was ready for further obedience. He was trained for this.

I said, “General Falkenhayn was himself unaware of the details of this mission. Though I do not suggest treason.”

Colonel Ziegler braced himself.

“The Kaiser has certainly been unaware of the mission about to depart from Spich.”

I could hear Ziegler’s breath catch in his chest.

I said, “Though the officers in our High Command all yearn for victory over our enemies — and England is certainly the most heinous of these enemies — there is much dissension as to methods and targets. You are surely aware of this.”

He nodded.

“This is very difficult for loyal and obedient officers in the field,” I said. “Men such as yourself.”

“I serve the Kaiser,” Ziegler said.

“Just so,” I said. “And we all serve our shared blood. The blood of the German race.”

“Germany above all,” he intoned. Deutschland über alles.

I gave him a paternal smile.

And then I made it vanish instantly. “This Englishman,” I said.

The colonel’s eyes narrowed a little. Yes, this Englishman.

“I do not suggest treason,” I said. “The man is of German forebears. Though he is a prominent man in the English government, he works secretly for our cause.”

I let this sit for a brief moment in Ziegler.

“Nevertheless,” I said. “His blood is not purely ours. Do you understand?”

He did. He nodded.

“Should not our trust for a special mission be pure?”

One more beat to let the rhetorical question answer itself in his mind.

“He must not fly, this Englishman,” I said. “Do you understand?”

“Yes sir,” Ziegler said in his heel-clicking voice. “And this special bomb?”

I flickered now. I’d made a snap decision back in Berlin, in Reinauer’s office. I’d compounded that decision later. To let this go forward. To sabotage Stockman’s intentions in the riskier way, with the mission launched, so as to draw full, failed, discredited attention to it at the highest levels of the government. With the Kaiser himself. Otherwise I would only briefly delay things. I still believed that.

But the terrible moment I’d arranged was now upon me. The moment when I myself would order a poison gas attack on London.

“The bomb and its mission will go forward,” I said.