21
The sun was just vanishing when my taxi slipped along the lilac hedges of Hanover Square and stopped before a flat-roofed, brick town house half the width but just as tall as my hotel. It was a private residence but without apparent servants and without a clear owner, at least on this Sunday night, the door being answered by one of the other women from my mother’s dressing room, the one wide enough to be the cellist in that string quartet of suffragettes. She recognized me at once and led me up a single flight to the parlor and I was introduced at the door as Mr. Christopher Cobb to a dozen or so of Millicent’s colleagues, about half of whom had also invited men. Most of these guys struck me as dandies, though I didn’t look at them very closely, simply registering among them more than one frock coat, apricot tie, waistcoat the color of the Hanover Square hedges in bloom. The women murmured at me sweetly. The men displayed indifference.
Millicent presented herself before me.
“I’m sorry I’m a little late,” I said.
“I remember using the phrase ‘or thereabout’ with the time,” she said.
“So you did.”
“I will feed you now,” she said.
And she led me to a table set for high tea and I grazed a bit. Between the cucumber sandwiches and the dandies in the room I felt as if I’d been cast in an Oscar Wilde play.
Which made me appreciate Millicent Gibbs all the more intensely. She and I drank a pretty good red wine off in the corner. The men kept their distance, and the suffragettes made solitary, hope-I’m-not-intruding pilgrimages over to us to chat briefly, mostly about how they felt nothing short of adoration for my mother.
When the air raid whistle blew in the street, the room upswelled in conversation and bustle like a theater crowd responding to the call to seats at the end of an intermission. “To the basement,” a woman’s voice cried out, and the group made for the parlor door.
I had no real interest in joining them and merely shifted my weight in our standing position, but Millicent’s hand went straight to my forearm to keep me where I was. She had her own plan.
When everyone was out of sight and clattering down the stairs toward the cellar, Millicent took my hand and we left the parlor and approached the staircase. But she and I climbed upward.
Two flights more, in darkness. By my count this was the top floor, but she led me around the banister and toward the back of the house and onto a narrower staircase leading up still farther.
She had not spoken a word. She had not let go of my hand. We reached a small vestibule and she released her hold on me and opened the door.
We stepped out onto the roof.
She closed the door behind us and stood beside me, our arms touching, and she said, “I’ve been longing to do this. Your mother is intrepid. I know you must be as well.”
The warden’s whistle was still piping somewhere along the street.
And now the six-pounders began to pop off in futility, out east.
I felt a shudder run through her. My first thought was that she was afraid.
But before I could raise my arm to put around her and before I let the obvious thing back into my head—she couldn’t be afraid because she’d deliberately brought us up here—she said, “Come this way,” and she took my hand again. The rush in her voice and the firmness of her hand both spoke not of fear but of some sort of dark exhilaration.
We neared the front parapet of the roof and she stopped us. “Here,” she said and she knelt, pulling at my hand, bringing me down beside her, and she let go of me and lunged forward. My knees were resting on a soft thing. I put a hand down. A blanket. My eyes were seeing enough now, adjusting in the dark. A searchlight flashed overhead and away. I could see Millicent there, stretched out on her back on the blanket, looking up into the sky.
“Please lie beside me,” she said.
I did, placing myself so our bodies touched from shoulder to foot. She did not ease away. Indeed, she gently pressed her shoulder and her hip a little closer. But I sensed this wasn’t about sex. Not at the moment, at least.
I was right.
“Do you think they will pass over us?” she said, and she slipped her hand into mine, our fingers intertwining, our bundled hands coming to rest upon our joined hips.
“Do you think they will drop a bomb on us?” I replied.
It was the cue for us to turn our faces and look at each other in the dark, on this open roof, beneath a London sky, on a Zeppelin night.
This we did. And as soon as our eyes met, we laughed.
We turned our faces skyward again and we did not speak. We waited. We listened. The six-pounders soon stopped. I had lately been quite near a Zepp or two on a rooftop. I wasn’t looking forward to another. But I was quite happy to be tagging along in Millicent Gibbs’s journey to an intrepid self.
We strained to hear the hammer of the Maybachs. I would tell her about these fine engines if she would like. But all we heard were the distant blackout whistlings. A brief spatter of small arms fire. A siren somewhere. And then a long, persistent silence, underscored by the silent scan of a searchlight and another, showing, however, only clouds.
At last the lights stopped and so did the sounds.
She said, “They are elsewhere, I suppose.”
“Or perhaps they did not come tonight,” I said.
She sighed.
“It makes no difference,” I said. “Your courage is the same.”
“Thank you,” she said. “But I wanted more.”
This seemed another cue. Even if she hadn’t consciously intended it.
I turned to her on my side.
She looked at me.
I kissed her.
And we began.
She was strong and she did not mind my being strong and somewhere in the midst of the clutch and crash and cling I began to realize something that made me wish the Zepps had come and that they had been enough for her. I pushed the thing from my mind, but when this woman and I were done and lying side by side again and looking at the dark sky above, I could not help but think: Mother carefully chose this woman for me and arranged this very act, her being dead and her having that dark and ironic and utterly tormenting sense of drama that made her the actress and the mother that she was.
I kept my mouth shut.
But Millicent went straight there: “She said I’d like you.”
I was ready to bolt.
“And I do,” Millicent said.
22
I did bolt. Politely. She was not terribly disappointed, being strong. My mother was still very much alive and had miscalculated this whole thing. Or perhaps she hadn’t. Perhaps she was even now amused at the thought that her posthumous message had been delivered and had thus set in motion this very sort of playlet for two. She’d relish the irony, given her own two-hander at the Hotel Adlon.
But my playlet had ended its run. I was glad for that, glad to focus now simply on risking my life for my country as a spy in Germany. The irony with that being I had to wait to hear from my mother to actually get started.
Word came early the next day. She was happy to receive my telegram and Sir Albert was absolutely insistent that he put me in the Adlon near the two of them. Still working on my performance, she said. Every other night it is in German.
I vowed never again to engage her in innuendo. But I knew the vow was futile.
I met with Trask one last time, at the A.B.C. café on Duncannon Street just opposite Charing Cross Station. It was a tea and pastry shop mostly (the A.B.C. once having been the Aerated Bread Company) but it was a guy’s place, for all that, with severe dark wood tables and chairs, a checker-tiled floor fit for a bar, mirrors on the wall, and a roomful of men.
Trask and I ordered coffee, however, to the faint distaste of the waiter.
We drank, we spoke of its mediocrity as coffee but of its superiority, even still, to yet another cup of tea. At least we were among men drinking tea. Trask made this last point; I had not, out of deference to Millicent Gi
bbs.
Then Trask and I leaned toward each other and lowered our voices to only what was necessary, though the conversational welter at tea-time that surrounded us was plenty of ground cover for our conversation. Our business was brief.
“Our English friends will give you some help over there, in case you need it,” Trask said.
“You’ve spoken to them, I take it.”
“I have.”
He took a folded piece of paper out of his pocket and passed it to me. “This is where and when.”
It read: Thursday night. Nine o’clock. Zum Grau Köter. South of the Stettiner train station on Borsig-Strasse. “Too much smoke and noise.”
The place was called the Gray Dog. The “help” would identify himself by speaking of the smoke and noise.
I looked at Trask.
“It’s a cabaret,” he said.
“One of their people inside Germany?”
“Yes.”
“We don’t have anyone inside?”
“That would be you.”
“How will he know me?”
Trask’s hand came low across the table once more.
He put an object in my palm, small but with a little weight. I opened my hand and glanced just before I dropped the thing into a side coat pocket.
A brass Reichsadler, the Imperial Eagle, with a blunt-ended pin attached to the back.
“Your boutonnière,” he said.
“Any other news from the Brits?” I said.
“Nothing.”
“Did you ask?”
“I did.” Trask nodded at the piece of paper in my hand.
“You have that in your head now?”
“I do.”
He extended his hand and I gave the paper to him. He stuffed it into his inside pocket. “Now,” he said. “What was the word?”
I told him the details of the telegram from Isabel, and I asked, “Should I take Stockman up on the offer of the Adlon?”
“You will have no secrets in your room,” he said. “The place is an anthill of German spies.”
“To refuse him on this . . .”
“You can’t,” Trask said. “Perhaps it’ll be useful for you, as well, as long as you can keep your act going.”
“I can do that.”
“You need to deal with your extras,” Trask said, meaning my weapons, my alternate credentials.
“I told them I’d stay at a boarding-house. Unnamed.”
Trask instantly knew what I was driving at. “Good,” he said.
“I take it the Baden is safe?”
“Relatively. The clientele is assumed to be of little interest. The German operation along the Unter den Linden is high-level stuff.”
“I’ll check in at the Baden before the Adlon,” I said.
“Tonight I’ll send round a tool or two,” he said. “The base of a wardrobe is pretty useful. Just in case.”
I nodded.
I kept silent for a moment and he shifted needlessly in his seat, as if there was a touchy thing he needed to say but he hadn’t figured out how to work it in smoothly.
He said, “Unfortunately we don’t presently have an equivalent of Metcalf in Berlin. But if and when you need to leave the country abruptly, make your way to the embassy and invoke my name. They can take care of you.”
“All right,” I said.
Trask and I looked at each other for a moment. I figured we’d said all that we had to say. But just as I thought to lean back in my chair and finish my coffee, Trask gave me a final thought for my trip. “It’s come to this now,” he said. “If they think you’re a spy and you can’t get to our boys at the embassy on your own, they’ll assume you’re a Brit, take you to Spandau Prison, and shoot you the next morning.”
23
I left Trask and checked out of the hotel and caught the train from Charing Cross to Folkestone, the night boat to Vlissingen, and a Dutch train to the German frontier. The first test of my Joseph William Hunter credentials came in a wooden customs hall in Bentheim.
My passport was being scrutinized before a Kaiser Wilhelm mustache. The owner of the mustache was an apparent Bratwurst and lager fiend of serious proportions, which no doubt was why this infantry captain was in a customs hall and not a trench on the Western Front. He was settled behind a heavy wooden table, and half a dozen times he glanced from the face in his hand to the face standing before him.
He knew I spoke German, from the few words we’d exchanged so far.
I was prepared as a next step to present a fine forgery of a letter of passage and endorsement full of high praise for the bearer, Joseph W. Hunter, from seine Exzellenz Baron Alfons Mumm von Schwarzenstein, the Foreign Office minister who manipulated propaganda abroad by manipulating journalists from neutral countries. But before I had the chance, the mustache rose, not a preferred task of the body it was attached to, and the captain moved off and disappeared through a door at the end of the hall.
I did have my Mauser beneath my coat, but with German travelers all around and armed guards on the platform outside, I did not see a good outcome from a breakdown of my credentials.
The captain returned and did not sit. He was breathing heavily. My passport was not visible.
Now he caught his breath.
“Herr Hunter,” he said, smiling a little. Kaiser mustaches sometimes made it tough to read a smile. He was being either friendly or sardonic. “I think that has not always been your name,” he said in German.
If he had Cobb in his head as an alternative, things would shortly get hot. He had not immediately brought anyone back with him, but maybe he was waiting for a couple of boys from the platform to make their way through the crowd.
I played the other alternative. “You are shrewd, Captain,” I said in my own best German. “I was born Josef Wilhelm Jäger.”
He nodded, keeping that little smile. “I suspected so,” he said.
Then he dipped into his breast pocket and removed my passport. He handed it to me. “Welcome home,” he said.
After a whispered word from my new German pal, the baggage inspectors gave my suitcase and Gladstone only a perfunctory look and I left the hall and boarded the train to Berlin. I suspected the Kapitän’s question about my name was indeed a shrewd guess. Clearer to me was that Joseph W. Hunter was on an approved list in a back room in Bentheim, and that only could have been arranged by Stockman.
Ten hours later, with evening coming on, the train pulled into the Bahnhof Friedrich-Strasse and I stepped out onto the platform, beneath a great, steel-trussed vault of glass, and I heard the sound of men singing. The other platform was loading a regiment of soldiers wrapped in cartridge belts and knapsacks, their rifles slung over their shoulders, their field gray uniforms blending into the twilight. Their voices rang to the high vault above them.
The tune was what struck me first. It was straight from the marquee on Stockman’s lawn, straight from his little stage show with Zeppelin accompaniment. These German soldiers were singing a melody that would chill any Brit with national pride: “God Save the King.” But the tune had its own words here; it was also used in the unofficial national anthem of the German Empire, “Heil dir im Siegerkranz.” “Hail to thee in victor’s crown.”
These boys were deep into the song already as they queued into the train carriages along the platform, heading for the Western Front. “Heilige Flamme, glüh’, Glüh’ und erlösche nie,” they sang. “Fürs Vaterland!” “Holy flame glow, glow and extinguish not, for Fatherland.”
I strode off down the platform while the boys sang on, dewy-eyed warriors, “standing valiant for one man”—Willie the Second—“gladly fighting and bleeding for throne and empire.”
I went down the stairs and out one of the vaulted south doors and into a Benz landaulette taxi. I paid the driver well to do an odd thing: go just a few blocks, let me check one bag into a hotel while he waited with my other bag—I didn’t want the Baden people to see me walk in with two bags and then out with one—and then drop
me with the second bag at a second hotel less than three hundred yards away.
The Baden had the same profile as the Faulkner’s, four storeys and six bays, with its own commercial enterprise sharing the frontage, in this case an international newsstand advertising my Chicago rival, no less, the Daily News, above the door.
I left my suitcase in the waiting taxi and checked in with the Gladstone. As soon as I was in the room I opened the bag and took out the contraband in the false bottom. Included now was a branded, compact combination tool, consisting of a handle with four screwdriver blades and a flat-edged metal end to tap a small nail.
The wooden wardrobe Trask recommended I utilize was sitting against the wall. The Baden, the Faulkner’s, the Tavistock. I suspected the Anglo-American spy boys had a hand in all these for their own select clientele. But neither could they fully trust the staff. I pried the baseboard loose on the wardrobe with the thinnest of the flat screwdriver blades, put the Luger, its holster and box of shells, and the German officer credentials and his tightly folded uniform inside. I replaced the board and tapped it in securely.
The Mauser stayed in the small of my back. A very bad thing to be caught with, but a necessary thing to perhaps keep from being caught.
The tool went with me. I’d put it into my toilet case. It was an innocent enough object in a room where nothing hidden could be found by using it.
And then I was pulling up to the front of the Adlon, a vast neoclassical box with a mansard roof of green slate. The doorman was uniformed in Prussian blue, the bellhops and page boys in lighter livery of Egyptian blue, one of the latter toting my suitcase behind me with white gloves as the former swept an arm toward the revolving door, where I spun through into the marble and gilt lobby.
My first thought was of Trask’s words. The Kaiser’s favorite hotel was crawling with agents. Just making my way to registration I noticed some serious candidates. Conversing by one of the sienna marble columns, a couple of guys with the wrong kind of tough-guy faces for their linen suits and patent leather shoes let their eyes slide my way; lounging in one of the settings of brocaded chairs in the reception area, two more broad-shouldered boys done up in tweeds gave me the quick once-over; standing isolated a few paces off the front desk, a close-shaved, hollow-cheeked, lean-and-hungry-looking Johnny wearing a dark gray three-piece and a wing collar openly stared at me. I had to stop looking at the boys who were looking at me so I wouldn’t look suspicious to them. Whoever was an agent in this joint was going to do his job and I had to do mine.
The Empire of Night: A Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thriller Page 13