The Empire of Night: A Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thriller

by Robert Olen Butler

  I said, “I find myself thinking about the Zeppelins. How they might end this war quickly.”

  Stockman leaned back deeper into his chair. His mouth tightened, its line vanishing beneath his mustache.

  I thought: He’s withdrawing now, for my mentioning this. But then the alternative: He’s thinking of his own mission somehow.

  With his mouth still tight, he made one small nod.

  And I knew my second thought was right. My mission in Germany was entirely about whatever was in his head at that very moment.

  I said, “They are beautiful and terrifying but something still seems missing. The English close their curtains and go to the basements and have polite conversation.”

  Stockman made a short, sharp smile that came and went so quickly that I could consider it only after it was gone.

  And now the young German officers cried out as one for another round of beer. Politely. Vier Biere, bitte. They laughed at their harmony.

  Stockman swung his face toward them, showing his chiseled profile, watching them in his periphery. Or watching me.

  I had to back off.

  Stockman looked my way again.

  He lifted his stein, pausing it before him, pushing it ever so slightly in my direction. He was saying it was time to take a drink and change the subject.

  I lifted my own beer in exactly the same way, saying, Okay. Saying, Of course. And we quaffed.

  When our steins were down, Stockman squared his shoulders a little and said, “Madam Cobb is resting from her journey.”

  He said this in English. On this subject we would speak English.

  “She asked that I instruct you to visit her rehearsal at the Lessing Theater tomorrow morning,” he said.

  I worked hard to understand his suddenly flat tone. Perhaps he was still suspicious of my arm around Isabel Cobb. But if that were truly a serious thing between us, surely this whole conversation would not have gone as it had so far.

  He paused. But he had the air of a churning mind. Maybe he had to get a certain number of quaffs in him to stir all that back up.

  Then he said, “She had an unsettling moment on Friday.”

  He was focused on the scene I feared was still working in him, though his lead suggested a different concern from mine.

  “She nearly fainted,” I said, glad to gently reinforce my excuse for touching her.

  “She has died a thousand times on stage,” Stockman said, “but she has seen very little of that in real life.”

  I heard my mother’s words in this. She’d been working on him.

  “This was particularly difficult,” he said.

  I nodded. I kept my mouth shut.

  Stockman looked me in the eyes. I did not see suspicion. I saw him standing before his constituents, needing to act.

  “Martin was a brave man,” he said, with an unmistakable tear-stifling tremor in his voice. He paused. It sounded convincing. He was a good actor.

  I caught myself. He could be acting, but he could have legitimate feelings. In this present job of mine—in my job as a reporter, as well—I had to stay alert to the complexity of the human mind and heart. You tell yourself that your subject or your enemy is unremittingly bad, and you will fail. More than fail—you’ll compromise the value of what you’re doing, of who you are.

  “Too brave sometimes,” Stockman said. There it was again in his voice, the snag at the man’s braveness, the breathy slide to finish the sentence.

  He looked away. He took a moment.

  He didn’t have to put on real feelings for me about a hired thug, not in this situation, not in any situation. He wasn’t acting.

  “He fell from the tower,” Stockman said, composing himself with a statement of the obvious.

  It was he who had initiated this further explanation of the death to me. That was Stockman the spy. I’d gotten near to his secret self a few moments ago, touching on the Zeppelins, and it prompted him to forestall any suspicion about the other big event from Friday. But he was sorry now he’d brought it up. He really couldn’t explain it anyway.

  “He’d become careless,” he said, with a soft but clear thump of finality.

  I could let the silence drag on to put the pressure on him to explain it further. But I knew the answer anyway. I said, “I’m very sorry about your man.”

  We took another drink. Stockman said, “But it’s put Madam Cobb in a state.”

  “It’s good she has her work,” I said, finishing the sentence in my head: nailing you.

  “I suppose,” Stockman said.

  And the four young German voices that had harmonized to call for a beer, the voices of these newly minted officers about to go to war, took up together once more, singing. “Heil dir im Siegerkranz, Herrscher des Vaterlands.” The beginning of the anthem for the German Empire. “Hail to thee in victor’s crown, Ruler of the Fatherland.”

  Stockman did not turn to them. He closed his eyes.

  The enlisted men’s voices at the train station had rung to the rafters. These officers sang softly, thoughtfully, as if to a child, or to a fiancée. Even the next lines. Heil, Kaiser, dir. “Hail, Emperor, to you.”

  Stockman, of course, had himself sung this very tune on Friday night in the wake of the Zeppelins. “God Save the King.” But this time the song’s lyrics flowed with pure German blood. His eyes still closed, Stockman began to sing. “Fühl in des Thrones Glanz . . .” “Feel the throne’s great glow . . .”

  Other voices from throughout the bar also began to sing. “. . . Die hohe Wonne ganz.” “Fully the highest joy.”

  Stockman opened his eyes, and he rose from his chair.

  I rose too. I was in character. I was Josef Wilhelm Jäger. And yes I sang, my body suddenly prickling into gooseflesh. “Liebling des Volks zu sein.” “To be the people’s beloved one.”

  The bar was filled with voices now, rising together in blood and empire. “Heil, Kaiser, dir!”

  And when we had done, the bar fell into a ringing silence. The silence held for a moment and a moment more and still another moment, and then bodies began to rustle and settle.

  Voices resumed, low and murmuring.

  A glass clinked from the bar.

  Stockman sat down.

  I sat down.

  My chest was still swelled with the Zeppgas of a Bloodbonding.

  I was far from home. The further irony struck me hard now: the precious melody for both Brits and Germans was also the melody for “My Country ’Tis of Thee.” Sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing.

  As the sole American sitting in a German hotel bar, I came to this thought with no gooseflesh, no urge to sing. I’d already sung tonight. You can call it blood. You can call it nationhood or empire or Fatherland or family. All of it was, at its heart, the terrible, deep, human yearning for an identity. You find it by being part of something larger. Even an impromptu gathering of voices in a bar.

  “You must be tired,” Stockman said.

  “Yes.”

  “As am I.”

  We’d sung together. There was no more to say tonight.

  We rose.

  I reached into my pocket for my wallet and he waved away the gesture.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  I circled the table and he stepped from behind it to face me.

  We shook hands.

  But before I could move away, he put his hand on my arm. He leaned near me. He smelled of Joppenbier, as no doubt did I. He said, in German, “They bring only isolated neighborhood disruptions. Commonplace, soon enough.”

  25

  I slept and woke and slept and woke again, working Stockman’s curtain line over and over in my head. I assumed this had been his response to my leading comment about the Zepp attacks missing something. He’d initially been quite professional and had clammed up. Maybe he and I singing together about the joy of the German Empire had made it personal. The thought that followed his fleeting smile kept working in him, and he finally said a little something. I’d gotten a
glimpse at his mission, though it was as fleeting as the smile.

  Too fleeting. So the problem with the Zeppelins he’d been studying was that their attacks were too isolated? True enough. Smart enough. But everyone in London knew to fear the day when the attacks were carried out by thirty airships at a time instead of two, when the fires and crumbling buildings would appear all over the city instead of in a few isolated neighborhoods. The Germans simply had to build more of these machines. Which they presumably were gearing up to do.

  This was a big idea but an obvious one. I couldn’t figure why it would require their secret ally in the British Parliament to come to Berlin. The trip certainly wasn’t about being with my mother. Whatever he felt for her, that was a useful ruse. He’d discovered that the British secret service was sniffing around, but his boys scrubbed down the castle overnight just fine. He didn’t have to take off in the middle of the night. Indeed, it would have been swell for him if the authorities had stormed in and found him reading a book in the library of a house that didn’t hold a single shred of the evidence they sought against him. Perhaps he would have waited another day to depart if Jeremy hadn’t shown up, but it had already been planned. He was here for something crucial. This wasn’t about building more Zepps faster.

  My mind gave out somewhere near dawn.

  I woke for good a couple of hours later and headed for the Lessing Theater.

  It sat in massive isolation on an odd wedge of land, pressing up against the Stadtbahn railway viaduct on one side and looking out onto the River Spree on the other. It resembled a cathedral more than a theater, with twin, flat-topped towers and a central dome. Fronting the building was a portico with four sets of double columns and four more sets above, holding a gabled roof.

  I passed through the portico and into the lobby. It was dim and cool inside, for a late morning in August, and I was immediately stopped by a vaguely uniformed old man stationed on a chair. The mention of my name drew an instant nod toward the doors directly ahead of me.

  I crossed the lobby floor and went up a short flight of stairs and stood before the center door into the auditorium. My hand hesitated at the handle, as I heard a familiar voice projecting not just to the back row but beyond.

  I opened the door very gently and only far enough to slip through and step sideways into the shadow of the aisle behind the last row of the orchestra seats. The house lights were off but failed to shroud the auditorium’s golden rococo flourishes on its proscenium and on the facings of the side balconies and loge boxes. The stage was uniformly bright from the electric utility lights. Downstage center was my mother.

  She was to-being and not-to-being. A few rows before me, a man with broad shoulders was standing with his head angled backward sharply, as if looking into the dark above. Concentrating. Herr Regisseur, no doubt. The director. The estimable Victor Barnowsky, the rival of Max Reinhardt and the creative director of the Lessing, who was personally guiding the acclaimed Isabel Cobb’s Shakespearean adventure in Bard-loving Berlin.

  My mother was dressed for rehearsal in knickers and a white shirt. She rolled to the end of her soliloquy, and as soon as she heard the fair Ophelia approach, Barnowsky lowered his head and said in good English, but with a heavy German accent, “Sweet prince, may I stop you now, bitte?”

  My mother gracefully fell from character, moved the few steps to the very edge of the stage, and bowed toward her director. “Of course, mein Regisseur,” she said.

  Barnowsky bowed in return.

  A blond actress in shirtwaist and skirt—the fair Ophelia, no doubt—who had appeared upstage, quietly withdrew.

  Barnowsky said, “If, please, we may hear this speech in your German. Our German cast will join you tomorrow, but I was hoping to listen just a little. Yes?”

  Mother bowed once more, returned to her place, lifted her face, closed her eyes, took a deep breath as she slid back into her Hamlet—her Schlegel-voiced Hamlet—opened her eyes again, and began: “Sein oder Nichtsein; das ist hier die Frage.”

  Barnowsky watched her for a few lines more and then lifted his face once again to the theatrical heavens, simply to listen.

  She was good. The only significant German she knew were the lines in plays. But she could mimic anything. Anyone. Any feeling. Any nuance of any feeling. No matter what the words were. I knew the language well enough now to hear and think and feel in German, and she was very good. And I was struck by this: in the German language, Hamlet’s infamous hesitation to kill his murderous uncle was even harder to swallow.

  But she would pull off that actor’s challenge too, I had no doubt.

  She ached and agonized and yearned on until at last she said, “Still. Die reizende Ophelia. Nymphe, schließ in dein Gebet all meine Sünden ein.”

  She fell silent.

  Barnowsky began to clap. Slowly, heavily, and then faster and faster. My mother became my mother and she beamed from the stage. She bowed. She curtsied. She put her hand on her heart.

  “Excellent,” Barnowsky said. “Now let us have an interval to rest and to eat.”

  My mother slipped offstage right. Barnowsky moved to the stage-right aisle and started down it. I figured he would surely lead me to her. I stepped through the center entrance to the orchestra and hustled along to follow him. From an opening just this side of the orchestra loge, my mother emerged. She and the director embraced in the way famous directors and famous actresses who were not sleeping together but felt a legitimate warmth for each other during the lifetime of a production typically did.

  I slowed. I was watching them in profile, though my mother was turned slightly toward me. She would see me soon enough. I stopped only a few feet away.

  The embrace ended.

  As Barnowsky was saying, “You are everything in this great adventure that I imagined and still more,” her eyes flitted briefly to me and then back to her director.

  “As are you, mein Liebling,” she said.

  And now she made a little bit of a show at noticing me.

  “Ah, Victor, may I introduce you to my chronicler,” she said.

  He was turning to me.

  “The man I mentioned to you,” she said.

  I stepped forward, extending my hand to him.

  He took it strongly.

  Barnowsky had a square face and heavy eyebrows and seemed on the surface to be a roughhouser, reminding me of Ike Bloom’s boys from the First Ward. I liked this about him, seeing as he was also one of Gorky’s boys and Strindberg’s boys and Shakespeare’s boys.

  “Joseph Hunter,” I said.

  “I am Victor Barnowsky,” he said. “Welcome to the Lessing Theater.”

  “I don’t mean to intrude on your lunch,” I said.

  “Not at all,” he said. “I have matters to attend.”

  My mother said, “I told Victor you and I needed to catch up. Your deadline approaches.”

  Barnowsky turned to his Hamlet. He clicked his heels and bowed.

  Mother led me in silence back the way she’d come, past the wings staircase and along a corridor to her dressing room.

  There were two places at the makeup table and mirror. She sat at one of them and motioned me to an overstuffed chair next to a lacquer dressing screen inlaid with mother-of-pearl cherry trees and geisha girls.

  Her first words were abruptly in medias res, either from her flair for the dramatic or from a gathering fright at what we were doing; I could not tell which. “I had no choice,” she said. “He woke me and said to pack and we steamed away into the night.”

  “I got your note that morning,” I said.

  “Good.”

  “Are you okay?”

  She sat rigidly erect and clapped her hand onto her chest. “Okay? I wish my flesh were too too solid to melt and thaw or drown or be shot or however you spies deal with each other.”

  Flair, not fright.

  “You sound okay to me,” I said.

  “I sound terrified,” she said.

  “We need to talk str
aight,” I said.

  Something seemed to let go in her. Her uprightness in the chair eased abruptly. She looked down. She looked back up. “Of course,” she said. “Forgive me for actually enjoying all this.”

  “Are you?”

  “Yes.” This came out softly. Almost tenderly. Self-reflectively.

  I was afraid I knew why.

  Before I could ask about Sir Albert, she slipped into what I took to be another place in her mind: “What happened to that man in the courtyard?”

  “The dead man?”

  “Of course the dead man.”

  She had no need to know about Jeremy.

  “He fell from the tower,” I said.

  “How, for heaven’s sake?”

  For a moment I found myself in the same fix Stockman had been in with me on this subject. How to explain it without explaining it. But of course, invoking him was my solution.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I asked Stockman the same thing and all he’d say was that the man was careless.”

  She nodded. She looked away from me. Something had come over her I couldn’t identify.

  I said, “He was a tough guy in Sir Al’s employ.”

  Then it struck me.

  I did know what was going on in her.

  I said, “Did you ask Stockman about it when you were alone?”

  Mother looked back to me.

  “Yes,” she said.

  What a life I’d lived with this woman. No wonder we couldn’t say anything to each other straight. If it was about anything of importance, I could not hear even a single word from her without trying to read its subtext, hear the persona behind it, figure out if that was really her or somebody she’d simply decided to portray, figure out if there was ever a difference between those two things. Yes, she’d just said. And my first reading, my first hearing, my first figuring all told me that she was in love.

  Or thought she was.

  Or was playing at being.

  Or just trying to test me. Or torture me.

  Or all of that.

  “And?” I said.

  “He wept.” The tone in her voice was familiar. From her two recent yeses. Soft. Not a whisper, but only a few vibrations above one. That tenderness again.