The Empire of Night: A Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thriller

by Robert Olen Butler

  I didn’t like that thought. If we were on the same team, I was reluctant to duck out on him.

  “This is imperative,” he said.

  I knew I’d be saying the same thing in his place. “All right,” I said.

  And he was gone. As quietly as he’d followed me.

  I was left with a tower above me and no staircase to get there.

  I returned to the doorway of Stockman’s office. I put my heel at the door frame and paced off the five yards. I kept my foot on the spot and took note of where it was: directly across from the left-hand banister.

  I paced on, doing the stride I knew to equal about a yard. Seven more to the door of the next room. A little over twenty feet.

  I expected this door to give itself away with a pin and tumbler lock. I was wrong. The room had one of the carved oak doors with a simpler warded lock. I drew out my tools. I had half a dozen skeleton keys. On the second try I had the right one. The locking bolt gave way and I opened the door.

  I stood beneath the lintel while I shined my flashlight toward this room’s left-hand wall, which should have been shared with Stockman’s office. Then I leaned back and looked down to the banister opposite that western wall in the office. I didn’t need any more measurements. I stepped inside this room, closed the door. The wall before me should have been twenty feet away. It was maybe half that. Against it, left of center, was a massive wardrobe of plain, squared oak built flush to the floor and taller than a man, its only ornamentation being large, beaten-iron hinges and drawer pulls. Of its wide facade—a good twelve feet—the two outer sections were drawers and half-cabinets.

  The major center section was a pair of doors. Their small ward lock yielded quickly and I opened them to a thick atmosphere of cedar and moth-balls. Inside, the space was wide enough and tall enough to hang the longest ball gown, but in spite of the smells to protect clothes in storage, it was empty. I had little doubt what was next. The back of the wardrobe was hung with a black cloth.

  I stepped in. The cloth split in the middle into a pair of drapes that ran easily open on metal hooks along a heavy curtain rod.

  And they revealed the doorway to the tower. This was unconventional castle architecture. Sir Albert’s granddad had been either paranoid or up to something covert himself. The door was what I’d expected for the room. It was like the one on Stockman’s office, and with the same sort of lock. Made by the same locksmith, I figured, for it felt familiar to my fingertips and the pin tumblers all jumped at my first bidding.

  I opened the door inward to blackness. I closed the wardrobe behind me, and I stepped into chilled air smelling of damp stone and of all the spores that grow in the dark. I ran the drapes together and shut the door. I shined my light onto a metal staircase commencing immediately to my left and circling its way upward.

  I climbed.

  About ten feet I reckoned, and I came to another metal platform. The staircase continued up, to the roof of the tower, no doubt, but I stood before a rough-hewn wooden door. No more picking. This one had no lock. No knob either. Just a latch, which I lifted.

  And now I stood in the upper room of the Stockman House tower and searched with my flashlight, keeping it angled low to prevent its being visible from outside, straining my eyes to see into the dim edge of spill from its beam.

  On the eastern wall, directly before me, was a single, centered, cruciform loophole, which was used in a functioning castle for safe viewing and medieval sniper fire, the shape to accommodate a crossbow, not the Christian God.

  I knew all four walls had loopholes because I’d seen them from the outside, but only the one in the eastern wall was visible now in full. The west-facing loophole was in the well of the circular staircase. The other two, in this room, were each shuttered by a wooden door on hinges and a hook and eye. The shutter for the eastern loophole was open.

  The shutters were probably a Stockman renovation, so he could work up here at night and not show it. The electric lighting was certainly his doing. A stand-up lamp stood in the center of the floor beside a library table big enough to lay out the corpse of even the tall Sir Albert.

  The wireless telegraph setup was certainly his doing.

  There it was, as expected, a jumble of condensers and transformers, tuning coil and induction coil, ammeter and helix, antenna switch and spark discharger. And at the uncluttered front edge of the table were the two things the jumble served: the transmission key and the head phones.

  This was where Sir Albert Stockman transmitted and received coded messages with his bosses in Germany and his underlings wherever they were lurking.

  In considering the wireless, the object that had led me here, I’d taken some steps toward it at an angle past the library table. I knew there were other objects of interest on the tabletop, and I turned my beam to them now.

  A stack of books on the near end.

  That much I’d seen out of the corner of my eye and I expected more. There was a stray volume near the center, but the table was otherwise clear.

  I stepped to the wireless table, hoping to find a notebook or a scrap of paper with a message. There was nothing. The key block was even squared up to the edge of the table; the headset’s wire was neatly coiled.

  I knew Al, understood his ways. I needed to be careful to leave everything precisely as it now was. And this thought made me visualize his next visit here, which reminded me of the clock ticking in my head.

  I clenched off the next breath.

  I could not hear the orchestra. Had they finished? Had Stockman shut this thing down quick?

  But I was, after all, in a flint tower six storeys above and five hundred feet away from that plinky little sextet and that middle-aged voice. Still, all I could hear was the accelerating beat of my heart and the heavy hiss of the silence in Stockman’s aerie.

  I moved to the northern loophole and opened the wooden shutter. I leaned in, as if to fire an arrow, and turned my ear to the opening.

  And yes. The sound of strings faintly drifted this high and slipped in through the slit in the stone. I could not hear her voice, but she was out there singing. At the moment, about how long a way it was to Tipperary.

  I closed the shutter, strode to the eastern loophole, and closed its shutter as well. I returned to the table in the center of the room. I switched on the reading lamp, extinguished my flashlight, stuffed it into my pocket, sat on a bent-wood chair.

  I put my hand to the stack of books, which also had been squared up to the edge of the table.

  I took up each, one by one, thumbed them, looking for marks. All that they yielded were their titles.

  The System of British Weather of the British Islands.

  The Weather of the British Coasts.

  The Fourth Report on Wind Structure published by the Authority of the Meteorological Council.

  Surface Wind Structure Analysis. This one from His Majesty’s Advisory Committee for Aeronautics.

  And another big seller from the Brits’ meteorological boys: The Beaufort Scale of Wind-Force, Being a Report of the Director of the Meteorological Office upon an Inquiry into the Relation Between the Estimates of Wind-Force According to Admiral Beaufort’s Scale and the Velocities Recorded by Anemometers Belonging to the Office.

  I restacked the books precisely.

  And then, the one stray book near the center of the table: The Britannica Year-Book 1913. Not stray, really. Simply separate, for it too had been placed with a squared-up kind of precision.

  This book I understood at once. It was the present code book for the Germans.

  I carefully noted its position, its orientation, and I pulled it before me. Not much larger than a novel, dusky green, twelve hundred onion-skin thin pages. I opened it and thumbed for hand notes. No words. But occasionally the first two or three or last two or three letters of a word were underlined in pencil. On page 27, about the Balkan War: ag was underlined in against; ste in step; ity in inability. The Germans’ numbered codes—indicating page and line and w
ord—probably had a way to indicate whole words, but they could also spell out words in a pinch or a rush. I tried to fit these underlinings together, forward and backward, just to make sure, but my suspicion was soon confirmed: they were simply highlighted here for quick use.

  I put the book back exactly where it had been and, unaware I was even doing it, I stretched out my left leg. I heard a soft clatter onto the floor. I got up, circled the table.

  Several pieces of wide, heavy paper, rolled together, were lying on their side near where they’d no doubt been sitting on end, beneath the table. I picked them up, spread them carefully in the light on the tabletop.

  They were three contiguous ordnance survey maps, tracking the Thames River from the Isle of Thanet, County Kent, to London.

  No marks.

  Precious little else here.

  I rolled the maps together once more and placed them standing on the floor beneath the table where I reckoned they’d been.

  I returned to the chair, set it in its previous place, put my hands on the top of its cane back, and leaned a little against it.

  Had I missed something in this room? I looked around. It was bare but for the two tables. I imagined Stockman sitting in this chair alone, shut off from the world, high above the sea, in this circle of pale yellow light, in his wooden chair, reading. These books. Other books that were gone now. Deciphering telegrams from Berlin. Happy in the quiet. Fussily keeping the edges of things straight. Planning. Planning what?

  Winds and weather didn’t quite add up.

  If there was nothing more than this, I could think on these things later. I needed to go. Joe Hunter needed to be protected.

  I switched off the stand-up lamp.

  I moved to the eastern loophole, unhooked it, opened it, as it was when I arrived.

  Though it was still a very small sound, I heard it at once. Coming through the loophole from the east, from out in the strait.

  The sound of an engine.

  From over the strait, I realized.

  I could hear the distant drone of gasoline engines. I was willing to bet they were Maybachs, two-hundred horsepower each, attached in fours to Zeppelins. Stockman’s bravado at the torch lighting buzzed into my head along with them. He knew they were coming. They knew where he was. He was lighting their way into the mouth of the Thames.

  I went out of the tower room, but I did not descend. I went up the inner staircase and emerged through an upright metal door set in a stone enclosure built into the courtyard corner of the parapet. I moved toward the eastern wall, passing beneath my daylong landmark, the massive Union Jack. I looked up as I went by. The flag hung straight down, barely stirring. It was a perfect night for the Zepps. No moon, a high ceiling, the air gone almost still.

  I stood at the parapet and looked into the thin gruel of the night. I could hear the orchestra again, distantly, from up here in the open. It was directly behind me, playing “There’s a Long, Long Trail.” Mother was still working on the wartime standards. She hadn’t even begun to encore.

  She and the crowd were about to get a fright.

  I strained to hear the engines above the music. And there they were. Nearer now. The drone had become a hammering, the piston fire itself almost distinguishable. I strained to see them. And then the stars were moving and then I realized with a quick grab in my throat just how low the Zeppelins were and how near, and they were rushing this way, still only a few dollops of light, perhaps from their undercarriages, but also a vast thickening of the dark above.

  Though the Zepps would not drop a bomb on Sir Albert’s house, though we were their beacon, their allies, though we were Albert’s big show, my hands pressed hard against the stone of the parapet with a terrible realization. These vast flying machines hammering our way, invisible against the dark and carrying a ton of incendiaries, these were the ghosts of future warfare, death from the sky, death that one day could reach to every home, every parlor, every crib, in every nation on the planet. This was mankind’s fate pounding its way toward us on a moonless night.

  All these things were what my hands knew as they clung futilely to a rock.

  And now I felt a quick stirring of the air as a dark mass drew very near, its palpable invisibility pressing against my eyes, and I began to lift my face as it came, no more than a hundred yards above where I stood, and it was quick, it was over the beach and then the cliff and then I was looking up, up, and the air was thrashing, sucking the breath from me, and I was looking directly up as the sky vanished in a grimy dark and then a gondola with lit windows slid over me and the engines combusted in my head and the propellers clacked, and the Zeppelin passed over the castle and passed and passed and passed, as long as a steamship on the Atlantic, and the rear gondola drew its lights over me, and I turned to watch, and the flag was lifting a bit in the currents of the Maybachs, as if the Union Jack were actually thinking of waving for this infernal machine. But it was Stockman’s Union Jack, of course.

  And the band stopped playing abruptly and there were cries from the green and now another pounding, behind me, and I turned and a second Zeppelin was approaching, slightly to the north, and I could see the lit windows of the commander’s gondola as it passed and I could see figures moving there.

  Wind structure and the system of British weather and the path to London along the Thames. This was what Sir Albert Stockman was about. These machines. And the second Zepp droned on by and the orchestra started up playing. I recognized the tune. “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” The song the newspapers all reported the Titanic’s salon orchestra played as the ship sank. Courage is an odd thing. In this case, given the actual circumstances, it could seem a foolish thing, a hysterical thing, a cheap imitation, a grimly ironic joke. Except these boys didn’t know the circumstances. They were trying to calm a crowd’s panic in the face of disaster. It was probably irritating the hell out of Stockman, whose carefully prepared, courageous oratory was being drowned out by some hired musicians stealing his thunder with a hymn.

  I needed to rouse myself from all this. The time was right to get downstairs as fast as I could and slip into the crowd during all the uproar.

  I crossed the tower, entered the stairwell, circled downward. I caught myself rushing. I couldn’t put haste over caution. I slowed as I neared the bottom platform, made my footfalls soft. I stepped back and away as I pulled open the door from the wardrobe. Gently.

  I was glad I did.

  I heard voices.

  I pocketed my flashlight and drew my Mauser.

  Muffled still, these voices. Not moving. I drew back one side of the curtain to the inner darkness of the wardrobe. I did not trust the wooden floorboard to take my weight silently. I leaned in as far as I could, turning my ear to listen.

  Martin’s voice.

  Jeremy’s voice.

  They were both speaking German.

  13

  The button to release the Mauser’s safety sat right beneath my thumb. I pushed it.

  Joe Hunter may have to die so that Kit Cobb has a chance to live. I’ll shoot my way out.

  The button and the thought happened instantly, simultaneously, before I could make out the German words being spoken.

  Then there was a scuffling of feet.

  The voices were closer.

  Jeremy said, “You and I are on the same side.”

  He’d said the same thing to me, in English. I tried to decide in which language it sounded true.

  Martin didn’t seem to be buying it. “Let’s look upstairs,” he said. “Through the wardrobe. Move.”

  The words and the tone made it clear he’d disarmed Jeremy and was holding a pistol in his back. If Jeremy was indeed working for the Huns, he was covert enough that Martin hadn’t been apprised. But maybe Jeremy was like me. He had this skill. He knew German. I’d tell the same lie if Albert’s henchman got the drop on me while I was trying to delay him.

  I backed out of the curtain, softly slid it shut, closed the door. I went up. Quietly. Quickly. To t
he tower room? There was nowhere to hide in there. There was no way to take out Martin when they entered without almost certainly losing Jeremy anyway. And Jeremy said not to intervene. I’d promised not to intervene. Rightly, given his mission and mine. But I wasn’t comfortable with that either. Still, the wireless room was a losing hand.

  And if Jeremy was telling the truth to Martin about working for the Germans, in the wireless room I’d have to figure that out in some very unpleasant way I could not control.

  I went up farther, all the way to the telephone booth–size access enclosure on the roof. I stepped into the space beside the door and listened down the stairway well.

  Footsteps on the stairs. No attempt to move quietly.

  Martin didn’t seem to expect to find a cohort up here.

  He wanted to check to see if anything had been disturbed in the wireless room. Signs that Jeremy had been in there.

  Footsteps now on the landing below, a door opening, no sound of a door closing, a muffled shuffling of feet receding into the room, a brief murmuring of voices.

  I straightened, leaned back against the stone wall.

  If Jeremy was truly working for the Huns, he would’ve done something other than what he did when he’d caught me. He had his pistol in my gut. He sent me on my way. It was his confrontation with Martin that was a problem for him.

  I had to assume Jeremy was Buffington’s man.

  But there was nothing I could do to help downstairs.

  He expected that I was escaping right now, with Martin diverted into the wireless room.

  I should have been. But that choice had passed.

  If the two went back down the steps from there, I could wait for a time and then slip out. I’d have to let Jeremy manage his own fate, as he’d signed up to do, as he’d insisted I let him do.

  Martin clearly had the drop on Jeremy.

  I realized how little I actually knew of Buffington’s operation. Or, of course, Stockman’s. Trask probably knew less than he thought, as well. Maybe Stockman had let Jeremy this far into his operation in order to trap him. His fate might already have been sealed.