The Empire of Night

54

Over the next few hours I looked at my watch a dozen times.

My twenty-one-jewel, railroad-grade Waltham.

I had time to admire the watch.

The minutes went slowly.

At last it was three o’clock but no call came and then five more minutes went by without a call and then at last, at ten minutes past three, I heard the ring of a telephone from the direction of the kitchen.

I stood up.

I waited.

The innkeeper appeared at the doorway.

As soon as we made eye contact, she turned and disappeared.

I put the strap of the dispatch case with the ticking bomb over my head and onto my shoulder and cupped my hand beneath the case and pressed it against my hip. And I followed.

She was standing in the doorway to a small office immediately before the entrance to the kitchen. She stepped aside.

I went in and took up the telephone and put the receiver to my ear. I said, “Wolfinger.”

“Colonel.” It was Ziegler. “We have good weather.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Allow me to deliver the news to the English gentleman.”

“As you wish, sir.”

We rang off.

And I stood before Jeremy’s door and I knocked and the door opened only moments later.

He was putting on his peaked cap.

We went out of the Boar’s Head and into the Torpedo and we drove to the Hotel Alten-Forst.

We parked the car and I left the bomb on the floor of the tonneau and we strode through the lobby of the hotel and into the elevator and we arrived at the second floor.

And things slowed down.

The flower-wrought-iron door clanged open. The elevator boy spoke some chirpy words that I did not hear. Jeremy and I stepped onto the long Turkish runner carpet. We turned toward Room 200.

We moved off. One long stride and another, and then together we knew to slow down, to walk softly, one short soft step and then another, and I would not let myself remember anything, creeping toward my mother’s hotel door. Not remember, not anticipate. I focused on the details at hand. Had I told Jeremy along the way that I’d drive the Torpedo to the air base? Or had I only intended to tell him, running the words in my mind as I approached his room at the inn but forgetting to say them? No. I said them as we got into the Torpedo in the side yard of the Boar’s Head. I’d said that I’d take the car.

My mind thrashed on to find some other preoccupation. But now we slowed even more in our walk to Room 200. We trod more quietly still. And the door before us loomed large, squeezing everything else out of my head.

And we stood before it.

Jeremy gently drew his Luger. I gently drew my lock-picking tools.

We looked at each other. We were both ready.

One of us needed to listen at the door.

Not me.

I nodded for him to do it.

Jeremy turned his head and brought his ear near to the door. His face was angled toward me.

He listened.

Then he smiled a small, wry smile.

And so it took all the will I could muster to open my leather pouch of tools and work the pick and the torque wrench gently into the lock. I manipulated the pins one at a time, choosing silence over maximum speed, though I was plenty fast, happy to focus unthinkingly on this task of the fingertips.

But the distraction of professional concentration vanished with the click of the lock and my withdrawal of the tools and my reflexive step back from the door, my body ready to run away. Jeremy pushed in front of me and wrenched the knob and threw the door open and rushed in.

We dared not fail at this. I had no choice. I followed him, not pausing to put the lock tools away but dropping them on the floor, drawing my Luger. He’d turned sharply to the left and was lunging through the bedroom door and my mother screamed — in her authentic, unperformed voice — and though my legs were leaden and my chest was clamping shut I also pressed through the doorway as well, even as Jeremy, inside, cried “Halt!” and then again “Stop!”

I took my place beside him and let myself see.

The bed was strewn with rose petals.

Whose idea was that?

Stockman had halted. He was standing beside the bed and was squaring around, his hands rising, showing us his palms. Showing us more, perhaps, if I’d looked closely, which I did not, but at least he was not naked. He was wearing his union suit. His body did, however, register on me as athletic in the tight throat-to-ankle cling of his underwear.

And I had no choice now.

I turned my face to my mother.

I released a breath I had not known I was holding. Nothing utterly private was visible on her either, though barely so — she wore a peach silk and lace chemise and matching corset with black stockings gartered at its hem — did we interrupt them just before or just after? — and in spite of her scream, she was now arranged in an alertly sitting, arm-braced, chest-forward pose worthy of a cigarette card. Her eyes, however, were wide in Shock and Terror, wide enough to play to the back row of the Duke of York’s.

Was this what I’d feared all those years?

This scene?

This pose?

It was no more than what I’d imagined whenever I tried to imagine it as mundane.

At some other specific moment in the half hour just past or in the half hour to have come, perhaps it would have been different for me. Worse for me. But this was how it finally had happened.

We stared at each other, my mother and I. She glanced away for the briefest moment — to check out Stockman — and then she looked back to me and let the Shock and Terror mask fall from her face.

And this face was naked.

This was perhaps the most utterly private part of her body, this face.

I wanted to turn away from it but it held me.

This face was weary.

This face was old.

This face was mortal.

This was the face of a woman who would hold very tightly to a man of skills and looks whose love she had lately won, having feared never to find such a man again.

Having sorted through a lifetime of such men.

And she held all the more tightly to this one because he was also a man of great means, a man of significant power, a strewer of roses.

He was, however, also an aspiring mass killer.

I was done looking at her.

I turned my attention back to Stockman, whose own eyes were wide as well. Legitimately so. His new pal Josef Jäger was holding one of two pistols that were presently pointed at him. And Jäger was in a new guise.

Everyone was very quiet for a few beats, all of us taking in the scene.

I said, speaking English, “You can put your hands down, Sir Albert, and join Madam Cobb on the bed. Chastely, however, at this opposite edge.”

I flipped the Luger in the direction I wanted him to go and he obeyed without a word.

As he adjusted and arranged himself, I said, without taking my eyes from his face, “And you, Madam Cobb, can relinquish your fetching pose and relax at your end of the rose garden.”

I could see her movement in my periphery.

She complied.

“Allow me to introduce myself,” I said. “I am Colonel Klaus von Wolfinger of the Auswärtiges Amt.” I hesitated for a moment, having used the German phrase, as if I were in the process of remembering there was a non-German speaker in the room. I did not look at her, however. Not a glance. I said, “That’s the Foreign Office, Madam Cobb. I am willing to think you are an innocent outsider in all of this. Naturally so. You have some other function in Sir Albert’s life. But for now I am sorry we must insist you be subject to certain restrictions along with him.”

Through my little speech, Albert and I were focused on each other. His eyes were subtly dynamic, however, with tiny narrowings and widenings and brightenings and darkenings as he listened to me, as he absorbed my new manner, assessed my surprising appearance, reread all my words and actions since we’d met. He was having trouble with all this.

My mother said, “I’m sure there has been some terrible mistake. With regards to Sir Albert as well as me.”

I turned my face to her.

And for a second time I found her to be blank. As blank as when I’d told her about Albert and the poison gas.

I said, “Forgive me, Madam Cobb. You are used to a starring role. But I’m afraid you have no lines in this scene.”

Not even that could stir up a reaction in her eyes, or around her mouth, or with her nostrils, or upon her skin. Nothing flickered or twitched or flared or stretched.

So perhaps even the blankness was an act.

It made no difference.

I looked back to Stockman.

His eyes grew steady. He found his voice. He said, “If you are who you say you are, you must put your weapons away at once, you must accord Madam Cobb and me the dignity of our privacy, and you must instantly call your superiors. Ask them to contact Colonel Max Hermann Bauer of the General Staff. He will put you straight.”

Though the words themselves were measured enough, he had mustered his full umbrage and toughness for these instructions. He paused now for them to have their effect.

I smiled faintly at him and made my own words sound sickly sweet in tone. “Surely, Sir Albert, you are not under the illusion that Colonel Bauer received higher authorization for your little escapade. Even as we speak, he is also being detained.”

Stockman had no answer for this. Once again his mind began to grind behind restless eyes.

I said, “Did you really think you could poison the ancestral home of the Kaiser’s English mother and grandmother and expect him to approve, even after the fact? It is a matter of blood, Sir Albert.”

I gave that line a moment of silence to play in his head.

Then I invoked his own invented word from our first discussion of blood. “Der Überglaube,” I said. The overarching belief.

And his restless eyes grew still.

Had he just capitulated?

It was his own argument. Albert knew the risk he’d taken. Like the manly university swordsman he admired and wished he’d been, he seemed to stand straight and lower his saber and accept the wound. That odd respect I’d occasionally felt for him nibbled at me for a moment.

Only for a moment.

“I will leave you now,” I said. “Sir Albert, I think you know Major Ecker. He worked for you briefly.”

Stockman finally took his eyes off me. He turned his face to Jeremy. He looked at him closely for the first time since we burst in. He recognized him. “You were the one,” he said, the killing tone of his voice reminding me that Stockman had actually wept for his man Martin. He glared at Jeremy, though he seemed to address me: “So does the officer corps of our Foreign Office tolerate a common murderer?”

“That’s quite enough, Albert,” I said. “The Foreign Office is more concerned with uncommon murderers.”

Stockman shifted his glare to me.

But he said nothing.

“Make yourself comfortable, Baronet,” I said. “Major Ecker will sit with you, and he is authorized by the highest Foreign Office authorities to shoot you dead if he deems it necessary.”

Stockman sniffed and turned his face away.

He understood.

I looked at my mother for the last time in this scene. “I do not mean to alarm you, Madam Cobb. And surely it will be unnecessary. But he has the same authorization regarding you.”

She straightened a little in the torso and played a defiant heroine worthy of her Duchess of Malfi: “He may shoot me if he chooses, but I will follow Sir Albert to the end.”

I had no idea what part act, what part truth was in this declaration. I doubted that even she knew.

I made no reply.

I turned my back on her.

Jeremy and I exchanged a nod and I passed into the sitting room. I gathered up my lock-picking tools and I put them in my pocket and then I was striding down the hall, wrenching my mind away from the fact that there was one more confrontation to come with Albert Stockman and his lover.