Black Chamber

by S. M. Stirling

  Horst asked some keenly specific questions; she supplied a few anecdotes that were convincing because they were true, with her simply reversing the viewpoints. The only problem was that most of the ones she’d been involved in ended with all the revolucionarios dead or kneeling with their hands on their heads as a preliminary to a new career turning large rocks into small rocks while helping to build Mexico’s first good road network.

  He nodded, and for a wonder he didn’t act as if tactics were beyond a woman’s comprehension without using spelling blocks and crayons and very simple words. When he spoke, it was soberly:

  “This is valuable intelligence. We have used motorized fighting vehicles and troops carried in motor lorries in cooperation with aircraft on the Eastern Front, against Russia and Rumania—there is more space there on the great open steppes than on the Western Front. In the West, the French and English have a division for every few kilometers and so do we, both locked in place by barbed wire and machine guns with interlocking fields of fire while the artillery hammers without ceasing—that has gone on since our first attack stalled on the Marne in 1914, though we came so close to Paris . . . The eastern steppes are rather like your Mexican deserts and plains in that respect. The Chief of the General Staff and the First Quartermaster-General understand the possibilities in the East.”

  That referred to the duo of von Hindenburg and Ludendorff, who’d been running the German Army—and Germany, whatever the Kaiser or the politicians thought—since von Falkenhayn stood too close to a stray howitzer shell at the opening of the Verdun offensive back in February and left nothing to be found but his feet, still in his jackboots. Before then they’d been the hammers of the Russians, lords of Ober Ost and commanders on the Eastern Front. And Colonel Nicolai of Abteilung IIIb was their man.

  Horst smiled: “Even horse cavalry can be useful in the East, though the men fight on foot more often than not even if they ride to battle. But we have little rubber and much less petroleum to spare than the Yankees . . . though that may change soon, Gott sei Dank.”

  Aha, Luz thought, sipping at her tea; she’d known about Germany’s shortages, but not any hope of bettering them. That’s interesting, isn’t it? If true and not just whistling in the dark. Everybody boasts, but Germans make it an art form.

  “You haven’t told me precisely what we’re doing next,” she said. “It’s getting to the time where I need to know if I’m not to be a burden.”

  Horst thought for a moment, then nodded. “Yes. You are no ordinary . . . agent.”

  Ordinary woman, Luz thought without much heat. Meaning I’m not featherbrained or hysterical. Thank you so much for making a special exception for me, Horst. I remember Rebecca Grunstein at college with metaphorical smoke coming out of her ears and going literally beet-red once when someone told her she was hardly like a Jew at all. You could see her thinking: So, that’s a compliment?

  The basic attitude to her sex was common enough in America, despite Uncle Teddy’s well-known liking for spunky girls who shot lions and rode their horses like maenads across hill and dale. It was much stronger among central Europeans, particularly the landed nobility. Horst was actually much more flexible than she’d anticipated, but then by Junker standards he was an eccentric and an iconoclast.

  “We must go from here to the Fatherland,” Horst said. “To a Schloss in the eastern marches . . .”

  Luz clapped her hands together and made a round-eyed expression of innocent-imbecilic delight, as much to hide the slight stab at the knowledge that soon she would be wholly in enemy territory and in constant danger of death by torture as for the devilment of the thing. But the devilment was tempting enough:

  “Horst, darling! You mean you want to take me home to Silesia and introduce me to your mother and father!”

  Stark horror greeted that statement. Then she dissolved in laughter and put a hand on his. “I’m sorry . . . very sorry, Horst, but the expression on your face . . . oh, Madre de Dios . . . if you could only have seen yourself . . .”

  The German glared at her for an instant, then laughed unwillingly himself and ducked his head in the seated equivalent of a heel-click.

  “Was I so transparent? I am sorry if I offended.”

  “Transparent as glass, sweetie—I took you by surprise. No, really, Horst: You are a magnificent specimen of Germanic manhood and intelligent as well—”

  If rather boring in bed, though with instruction that might change.

  “—and I have enjoyed our time together and look forward to working with you, but even if it were possible, which it is not, I wouldn’t marry you for all the potatoes in Silesia. And if I remember my geography lessons, there are a lot of potatoes in Silesia.”

  “Sugar beets,” Horst said dryly. “My family’s estate is mostly in sugar beets, and we have a refinery and distillery. But I take your point, Elisa.”

  She nodded. “I have my own country, my own cause, and my own plans for my life . . . in the unlikely event I live much longer. I’m not a silly girl who swoons over a handsome face.”

  Horst looked miffed for a moment—it really was a bit deflating to be told your noble blood and cleft chin and youthful stamina were disposable—and then made a gesture that was half a salute. He was probably slightly relieved too, which had been her intention. Besides the sheer artistic pleasure of deceiving someone by telling them the precise truth.

  “I have never encountered a woman like you, Elisa,” he said. “You are a true warrior, in your way. I shall regret our parting.”

  Far more than you think you will, dear Horst, probably. And for entirely different reasons than nostalgia about the feel of my legs wrapped around your waist, she thought, and said aloud:

  “I thought it best to be honest . . . well, as honest as possible,” she said, which, oddly enough, was . . . honest.

  “Die ehrlichkeit der spione,” Horst said ruefully: the honesty of spies. “It is a drawback of intelligence work.

  “I can tell you,” he went on, “that this is a project of vast potential on which you will be fully briefed—and potentially it will give your country a real chance to throw off the Protectorate the Yankees have imposed on it. Ireland too will have a chance to strike for its freedom. Details I cannot yet provide, of course.”

  “Of course,” she said with a smile.

  You didn’t, until you absolutely had to, for the same reason soldiers didn’t get issued ammunition until they were actually going to shoot.

  “And Germany will at last have its rightful place in the sun. Our immediate problem is that the Dutch are running only a few passenger trains across the frontier. And all of them start before noon. We must spend the night here in Amsterdam. Trying for the frontier in an automobile would be entirely too risky if the enemy . . . any of six or more enemy intelligence services . . . have any hint of our presence. Autos are not nearly as common here as in America, and less so now with wartime limits on petrol.”

  “At least we may get some sleep tonight,” Luz said. “If I’m going to spend a whole night and the following day awake, I can think of more agreeable ways to do it than watching two English spies watch me with murder in their eyes.”

  Horst barked laughter. “Are there many women in Mexico like you?” he said.

  “If you mean in the Revolutionary Party, no,” Luz said. “I like to think I’m one of a kind.”

  In point of fact the ones she’d met had all been boring fanatic prigs, like their male equivalents but worse; not counting ordinary soldaderas, who were often cheerfully carefree. But then, the revolucionario women she’d met had all been trying to deceive or kill her or both, and vice versa. It did make her feel more satisfied with her work, considering that she was thwarting such a bunch of pickled puritans. The Protectorate was no paradise, but it was certainly an improvement on the Porfiriato and doubly so on the charnel house the revolucionarios and their mixture of ven
detta and theory-schooled grudges and sheer bandit lust for spoils had made of whatever parts they controlled . . . And unlike them, Plenipotentiary Henry Cabot Lodge and his people were prepared to let those who didn’t want to openly support the Intervention regime just keep their heads down and mouths shut while they got on with their lives and stayed out of politics unmolested.

  Now that vengeance wasn’t a question anymore, she really rather liked Mexico and most of its people again. Not as much as California, which she loved, but more than, say, the essence of flat, gloomy dullness that was Ohio, or even worse, Indiana, or worst of all, Illinois. Her own particular concept of eternal damnation would be an endless January in Chicago with the wind off Lake Michigan whistling down the Burnham Plan’s grand new avenues. Though a sticky summer there when the winds brought the unforgettable scent of the Union Stock Yards north was a close rival.

  And the Germans have no conception of how to handle a beaten enemy except to grab them by the throat and squeeze until the victim’s eyes pop out; witness Belgium or Serbia or what they call Ober Ost. I suspect that Mexico and Ireland would find it a jump from the frying pan into the fire in a world where Germany did have its place in the sun.

  “I hope the Englishman and his Gunga Din don’t manage to make trouble immediately,” Horst said. “They should be freeing themselves by now; it was fortunate we got them back into their own compartment without notice. I was a little surprised that they did not struggle more when we did—perhaps you had terrified them too much! You would terrify me, I can tell you, if I had my hands tied and you were scowling at me and holding that barbaric Spanish knife.”

  Luz grinned. “Don’t worry, sweetie. I dropped a few hints with the staff when I gave out the final tips.”

  “Hints?” Horst said, alarmed.

  Usually it was better not to attract any notice at all if you didn’t have to.

  “Yes, I said I’d overheard them having this terrible drunken lover’s quarrel, which ended up with them weeping in each other’s arms, battered and contrite, so they should be left alone for a tumble of reconciliation. That’ll account for the bruises, too, and any thumping and pounding as they wiggle out of the cords.”

  The German nobleman stifled a shout of Wagnerian laughter. “Oh, Elisa, you are a treasure!”

  “I thought it would make it more difficult for them to get much cooperation, or be taken seriously,” she said demurely, casting her eyes up innocently. “Technically it could get them arrested, but that’s too much to hope.”

  “And of an Englishman, it will be believed, along with tying up and bum-switching.”

  Luz nodded, carefully not mentioning the terrible scandal that had started a few years before the war when General Graf—Count—Dietrich von Hülsen-Haeseler of the Kaiser’s military cabinet had dropped dead of a heart attack in mid-dance while dressed as a ballerina and performing before the All-Highest and his cronies at a remote hunting lodge. It had spread from there in ripples of resignations, courts-martial, and suicide among various high- and well-born military men for some time. The French newspaper cartoonists had had a field day while the English-speaking world’s press had merely talked about unmentionable vices and made vague references to poor Oscar Wilde.

  And Bryn Mawr is more or less a singing grove of the higher Sapphism, starting with President Thomas and Mary Garrett. People are people the world over. It’s really absurd the way people carry on about it, she thought; there was the theology, of course, but . . . Though I must admit the thought of the Kaiser and his generals frantically trying to get the limp corpse of one of their number out of a pink tutu and back into his dress uniform and six pounds of medals is rather funny. But it wouldn’t be at all tactful to mention it to Horst.

  There were a series of echoing clanks through the fabric of the airship, a rumbling sighing sound—probably the hydrogen being pumped out of the gas cells so they could be thoroughly dried of condensate—and a flicker in the internal lights as the dirigible changed from its own power system to the exterior supply. A steward walked through playing the xylophone-like thing used to draw attention to announcements, and said:

  “Ladies and gentlemen—mesdames et messieurs—Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren—mevrouws en mijnheers—”

  The multilingual gist was follow me to disembark. She took Horst’s arm, forcing herself not to snatch her suitcase back when a steward scooped it up, and they strolled down the spiral staircase to the forward ramp, now down and locked to the platform with the ship’s first officer making polite good-byes in a Deep South gumbo accent. Everyone who could afford an airship passage was important enough to rate that sort of thing.

  She glanced up again at the huge silver-gray bulk of the dirigible and smiled to herself. The shark-fin control surfaces at the rear had the Stars and Stripes on them, the latest version with a forty-ninth star for Hawaii.

  My first air voyage. And my first airborne fight and first airborne fornication, too. I wonder . . . no, human beings are human beings; someone must have done that already. Probably decades ago in a balloon. But I may be in the first hundred!

  The stewards put their cabin baggage down beside them as the line passed the scowling Dutch customs officials checking documents—and several men in plain civilian suits whose thick necks and beady eyes and bowler hats blared detective of some sort for anyone with eyes to see. The uniformed officials examined the passports with meticulous care, sometimes calling in a plainclothesman; one even used a jeweler’s monocular on hers while two of his colleagues went through her suitcase, though they didn’t turn a hair when they leafed through the books. They probably had her classed as a loose woman anyway, since she and Horst were obviously a pair.

  It was a comfort to know that the faked products of the Black Chamber’s American documents section used the very same materials as the State Department, and it stood to reason that Horst’s forgeries were as good since they’d probably been made up at the German embassy in Washington.

  “Between your armies on the frontier and the English battleships off the coast, the Dutch must feel as if they’re between a school of sharks and a pack of wolves,” Luz observed as Horst dispatched their heavy luggage from the cargo ahead to the railway station.

  It would go out on an overnight freight and be waiting for them wherever they were going. There would be inspections here and again when entering Germany, but there wasn’t anything in them that would excite suspicion, or at least not in hers, unless the observers were far better than she expected. She managed to see part of the address he scribbled and imprint it on her mind without being obvious: Schloss Rauenstein, Königreich Sachsen.

  Those endless lessons in Kim’s Game did come in useful. The name didn’t ring an immediate bell, which wasn’t surprising since there were thousands of Schlösser in the German Empire, and the Austro-Hungarian one too for that matter, and even in Baltic Russia where the nobility were mostly of German descent.

  The term covered what the English word castle implied and more besides: everything from modest manor houses to Mad Ludwig’s fairy-tale creations, sitting on Bavarian mountaintops like spun-sugar neomedieval fantasies on a baker’s shelves. Sachsen—Saxony—meant far southeastern Germany, and at a guess it would be away from the major cities like Dresden and near the border with Austrian Bohemia. Mountains and forests, mostly . . . a very good place to hide things from Entente or American eyes. The fairy tales from those parts were heavy with werewolves, and witches in gingerbread huts eating stray children. A few days farther east and south and it was leshy and vampir.

  Horst nodded a bit complacently at the thought of the Dutch sweating about the German armies on their flat, indefensible border, his smile turning slightly . . .

  Wolfish, Luz thought. He really is a dangerous man. He’d be even more dangerous if he didn’t underestimate me—or women in general. Not alone in that, alas, but sometimes . . . quite often in fact . . . it’s
useful.

  “This country is an absurdity, anyway, a bad historical joke,” he said. “The so-called Netherlands language is just a dialect of Low German with a flag and a little play army suitable only for walloping wogs in Asia. Logically this place should be part of the Reich; the trade connections and colonies would nicely complement our present holdings.”

  “So is English a dialect of Plattdüütsch,” Luz pointed out. “With some Danish and a lot of French added. And I suppose the British Empire would nicely complement the Reich’s present holdings too.”

  “That may take a little longer than attending to the Netherlands,” Horst granted with an air of deep thought, then winked at her.

  “And Austrians are just Germans in three-quarter time?”

  He laughed outright at that. Careful, you could really like this man, she thought; he had his full share of Prussian military stiffness, but he could take it off when he wanted to . . . and he didn’t always take himself seriously, either. Don’t start liking people you may have to kill and certainly have to lie to and betray.

  She was almost sure he’d have added something on the order of the time of small states is past, this is the century of great empires next, which was a political commonplace these days what with Mackinder and his geopolitics and Heartland Theory being so popular. Uncle Teddy adored Mackinder and so did the Kaiser and his professors.