The Empire of Night

52

Jeremy was waiting in what had become our place in the Boar’s Head bar, the marble-top table in the far corner. He’d left me my preferred chair with its back to the wall. The man noticed things.

I sat.

He nodded.

I nodded.

The innkeeper arrived beside us. Before we ordered a little early lunch, I said to her, “I will receive a phone call this afternoon around three o’clock. I will be sitting here. Please find me. I want to speak to the man personally.”

“Yes sir,” she said, with the crisp snap of ingrained obedience, which seemed to be as natural a manner for Germany’s women innkeepers as for its career army officers.

Then her face flashed into thoughtfulness and instantly into revelation. She’d just remembered something.

She looked to Jeremy. I looked with her.

He was sitting stiffly upright, playing the Foreign Office major.

“Did you find your telegram?” she asked.

He did a minute shift of his head sideways. A Cracker Jack flip book of a boxer’s feint.

She went instantly on. “I knocked, but you didn’t answer. I slipped it under your door.”

“I did find it,” Jeremy said. “Thank you.”

He glanced at me, then back to her.

Jeremy and I ordered. She went away.

He turned to me, and I didn’t have to ask.

He said, “The groups we must work with inside Germany — the Republikaner particularly — we’ve used their help for this, their resources, their bomb, and they feel invested in it. I’m obligated to stay in touch with them.”

“Do they know of the special nature of the threat?”

That minuscule feint again. As if I’d just thrown a left-hand jab. But then immediately he said, “Not at all. We keep them informed. But only as much as we want them to know. To them, we’re simply bursting balloons.”

I figured I knew why he felt like dodging when the Republikaners came up. “You not real comfortable with those boys?”

He smiled at me. “You don’t miss much,” he said.

“It’s their bomb but none of their business.”

“Precisely.”

“We okay for this?’”

“We’re okay,” he said. “And as to the pin for this particular balloon, everything is ready but the hour.”

He still needed to set the clock on the time bomb he’d been assembling while I was at the air base.

“The bomb was one of the resources provided by the Republikaner,” he said.

“Make it five minutes after five,” I said. This was guesswork. How prompt would they be? Ziegler had stressed the importance of that hour to make it to the target on schedule. These were Germans. Their trains ran precisely. All this whistled through me quickly and I said, “No. Let’s give ourselves a little more margin. The Zepps climb slowly anyway. Seven after five.”

“Seven after,” he said. “And you leave the inn at three?”

“If the weather’s right.”

“Then I have time to eat the sausages,” he said.

I began to brief him on the events at the air base, and in the midst of it a man entered the inn and headed for the bar. The innkeeper, who was wiping down the zinc top, saw him come in and she instantly took up a stein, turned to the tap behind her, and filled the vessel. She moved to the newcomer and put the stein before him, even as he was still taking off his peaked field cap and laying it on the bar.

A large, late-morning beer was this man’s routine.

Though perhaps only on flight days.

It was Major Dettmer.

He and the woman spoke together for a few moments, low, their heads angling toward each other.

I doubted he flew drunk. But he needed some fortification.

The innkeeper moved away.

I had no interest in speaking to him, seeing as I intended to kill him this afternoon.

Jeremy was watching me watching something over his shoulder.

When I brought my gaze back to him, he flipped his face very slightly to the side, keeping his eyes fixed on mine. What is it? he was asking.

In a low voice I finished telling him about Ziegler and then about Major Dettmer, ending with: “Dettmer came in while we’ve been speaking.” I slightly angled my head in the major’s direction.

I looked over Jeremy’s shoulder.

The man was heading this way.

Beyond him the innkeeper was clearing his stein from the bar.

He’d made quick work of it.

I pushed back a little from the table. Preferring to flee, but recognizing the need to make everything seem normal, I rose.

Dettmer arrived, saluted.

I returned the salute, and I formally introduced Jeremy to the major.

“I do not wish to intrude,” the major said, “but may I ask to sit with you for a few minutes?”

I could have said no. I was Colonel Klaus von Wolfinger, after all. Turning Dettmer abruptly aside would have been consistent with the character I’d created.

But if the man I was to kill felt the need to talk with someone in a bar before a mission that was plenty dangerous on its own, then it might as well be with me.

I nodded without comment at an empty third chair that placed him between the two of us.

He sat.

He put his peaked cap in his lap.

“Commander Dettmer will fly the LZ 78 this evening,” I said to Jeremy.

“God punish England,” Jeremy said to him. Gott strafe England. “May we order something for you?”

“Another beer?” I said.

Dettmer looked at me.

“You’re drinking this morning,” I said.

“Only what I allow myself on these days,” the major said.

Outwardly I offered nothing for him to read at this. No smile. No frown.

Then I realized I was deliberately trying to make him uncomfortable.

“Merely one long beer,” he said.

I was too much in character. I owed him better than that.

“We admire what you do,” I said, making my voice go as warm as I dared without drastically altering my necessary persona.

He nodded once, in thanks.

We waited for him to speak. I realized he had nothing particular in mind. He simply needed a little conversation on the day of a mission. There’d been the words with the innkeeper. The brief pose, their two heads angled toward each other, suggested a closeness between them. Perhaps even more, something only a woman could give. But there were things on his mind a woman couldn’t speak to. And the men were locals. Drunks or bores. He’d seen two of his own sitting here, and so he’d come to them.

“How do you keep warm up there?” I asked.

He laughed softly. I understood what he was about to go through. At the Zepp’s operating altitude two miles above England, it would be a Chicago-winter fifteen below even in August. And it would be a slashing cold, with the head wind beating into the command gondola.

He spoke happily for a time about their woolen underwear and their leather overalls and their fur overcoats and the sheep’s wool lining in their leather gloves. And their scarves and their goggles and the ineffectualness of all that.

He was happy to speak as if these were the things that brought him to his morning ritual of a beer and conversation on the days he flew.

He moved from goggles to dreams, however. A seamless transition. “I often freeze in my dreams,” he said. “I can wake in a midsummer sweat in my rooms in Spich and continue to shiver from the cold in my dreams. In my dreams I have forgotten my overcoat or my gloves and I pay dearly for that.”

Dettmer paused. He turned his head toward the bar, as if thinking he should have another beer.

But he looked back to me.

He said, “Or the opposite. I am on fire. We all have these dreams, you know. The day is soon coming when their planes can climb fast enough to catch us. Or when they create an incendiary shell that can reach us, and the first one to touch our airship’s skin will turn us into a fireball. We will have a brief time to decide then, each of us. We carry no parachutes, you understand. And so my men and I have each made a decision. Some of us will leap and some of us will stay. Some will die falling to earth and some will die consumed by fire in the heavens.”

Dettmer stopped speaking. His eyes moved to mine and then to the Iron Cross pinned to my chest. He smiled a faint smile at me. He figured I understood. He figured men could talk like this to each other if they each understood.

I did understand.

I wished it were for the reasons he assumed.

I wished I were fighting this war in a way that earned this moment between us.

Instead, I was barely able to remain seated in the chair.

But I stayed.

The innkeeper’s boy arrived. He put the plates of sausage and kraut before us.

“Perhaps some food?” Jeremy said to Dettmer.

“Thanks,” he said. “I have to go now to prepare.”

Having remained in Dettmer’s presence, I’d come back to my own obedience, my own place in this war that wasn’t quite yet an American war. But things were being done in the world that should not be done. And as an American I was dealing with that.

Dettmer, at least, had established preparations to make. A clear and specific path to the completion of his mission, however arduous or frightful that might be. I was still improvising.

So I said to him, “What are the preparations to fly your airship?”

He was glad to come back from his dreams and to focus on the routine.

“I will put my men to work,” he said. “The chief engineer, the helmsmen, the radioman, the gunners, the bombing officer, the sailmaker. The engines are to be examined, the elevator and rudder controls tested, also the telegraph and the Maxims. The bombs must be loaded precisely. The gas cells must be checked for leaks.”

“When do you board?” I asked. “When are all the checks completed and you go to your stations?”

“We board in the hangar,” he said. “The final taking on of gas and ballast and ordnance is a delicate thing. The balance of lift and load. That is part of the preparation. Our very body weight must be accounted for. Only the watch officer remains outside to oversee the ground crew at the launching.”

The timing seemed terribly off.

My physical presence on the airship during preparations, which I’d blithely assumed to be possible, would throw off the weight adjustments. I would have no access to the interior. But there was nowhere outside to effectively place the bomb. Nor the opportunity to do it, in plain sight.

I’d trusted too much on my ability to improvise.

“I must go now,” Dettmer said.

He rose.

I rose too.

He started to salute.

Instead, I offered my hand to him.

We shook.

He held my hand for a moment, even after I’d stopped the shaking. “Thank you, sir,” he said.

My mind thrashed.

Dettmer turned to walk away.

And then I thought of the ground crew and their supervision.

“Major,” I said.

He turned back.

“Does the watch officer fly with you?”

“Yes, of course.”

“How do you account for his weight in your preparation?”

“He is the last to come on board, once the ship is outside the hangar. Till then we have a man with us to take his place.”

My mind settled.

“May I have the honor of sharing the last hour before your launch? Perhaps I could take the place of your watch officer’s substitute.”

Dettmer straightened instantly to attention. Of course.

But he had a practical matter first.

He broke from his uprightness to give me a once-over.

Apparently I was close enough in size. He stood at attention again and snapped me a salute. “It would be our honor, sir.”

Perhaps it was the sudden impression I had of myself as a fraud that prompted the question that came then to my mind. A fraud especially to this man before me. Perhaps the question was prompted by the way I dealt with that, thinking I was no fraud at all, that I was no more a fraud than any actor in any role, that my role in this drama was crucial, that I had lives in London to save and I had no alternative. Perhaps this most important reality led me back into the character of Colonel Klaus von Wolfinger and it was he who prompted me to ask the question. Or maybe it was my true self — the newspaper reporter looking for the arresting personal detail in a story of life and death — maybe it was Christopher Cobb the reporter, who could be as hardened as any secret service officer when necessary, who prompted the question. Whatever or whoever it was, to my shame, I finished with Major Dettmer by asking, “If the day comes that you dream about, which are you? Earth or sky?”

He did not hesitate. “I am afraid of fire,” he said. “I will jump.”