The Empire of Night: A Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thriller

by Robert Olen Butler

  I thrashed about for something to say but nothing was coming to mind.

  Then she said, still softly, “Is he an actor, do you suppose?”

  Worse yet. She asked this as if she feared it. Her feelings for him were real, not put on out of a sense of drama.

  I asked myself the same question. Last night seemed to offer a clear answer. But I was reluctant to admit it.

  “Some sort of actor?” she said, pressing the question gently.

  I didn’t speak.

  “I know what you sometimes think of me,” she said. “But you said we should talk straight.”

  I did.

  I saw something in her eyes that I’d seen often before about some man or other. But did I really? How do eyes say these things? There seem to be so few variables in eyes. I’d seen this supplicating look, this longing look, this I-need-you-to-believe-me-and-approve look, this I-need-you-to-look-the-other-way look. And in that lifelong, complex, recurring look I also could usually see her own recognition that those feelings I was seeing were, in her heart of hearts, put on. But this look now, in her dressing room at the Lessing Theater in Berlin in a time of war, though it showed all those old familiar things, also showed what seemed to be a new thing.

  I would not label it.

  Should I talk straight?

  “He’s acting to his constituents,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “He’s acting to Parliament and to his government. He’s acting when he says he is loyal to Britain.”

  “Yes.”

  She waited for more.

  She knew and I knew and she knew I knew that she was asking this in another sense.

  Should I talk straight?

  “No,” I said. “I don’t think he’s an actor.”

  Tears filled her eyes.

  We sat before each other like this for a long moment.

  “One more bad guy,” she whispered.

  I certainly didn’t expect her to leap to this. I didn’t remember if I’d ever accused her. Of course I must have. It wasn’t just leading men she had a weakness for. It was the bad ones. The drunken ones. The abusive ones. Or so it always had seemed to me.

  She tried to shrug. “Of a different sort.”

  She turned to her mirror. She picked up a makeup towel and dabbed at her eyes.

  She looked at me in the mirror.

  “I’m an American,” she said.

  “I know you are.”

  “I’m a loyal American,” she said.

  “I know,” I said.

  She turned around to face me again. “But this isn’t America’s fight yet,” she said. “Is it?”

  I didn’t say anything to that. Not for the moment.

  She was mulling it over.

  Then I offered, “That’s what you and I are trying to help our country figure out.”

  That didn’t exactly sound straight, even as I said it. Not fully. But it wasn’t untrue.

  We still didn’t know what Stockman was up to, exactly. What he believed about country, about blood, about loyalty: these were just beliefs. He lived in a democracy. Mother and I lived in a democracy. We were working on behalf of a democratic society. In a democracy you can have any goddamn belief you want. When does having an idea make you an enemy?

  But his beliefs were apparently in service to a country that was at war with a democracy.

  What the hell was Stockman up to? With Germany. With my mother.

  “What are you saying?” I asked her.

  “I don’t know what I’m saying. Except he wept for that dead man in the courtyard and I felt something for him. He is a hard man. I’ve seen that too. But he is equally a soft man. A vulnerable man. Do you know what that does to me?”

  “You can back off from straight talk now,” I said.

  She stopped.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “But this is all very difficult in ways I never expected.”

  “Then the best thing is to figure out exactly what he’s doing here,” I said.

  One moment of silence passed between us, our eyes on each other, our circumstance settling in.

  Then she said, “Yes.”

  This one was not soft.

  She said, “He’s meeting someone at four o’clock this afternoon. I wrote down what I know.”

  She dipped into the pocket of her knickers and handed me a piece of note paper with the Adlon crest. It read: 11 Schlesische-Strasse, Osthafen, Heinrich Reinauer Gewerblicher Einführer, 4 pm.

  I stared at this for a moment.

  Heinrich Reinauer, Industrial Importer. An address in the East Harbor district.

  Mother said, “He spoke German. That was all I could get.”

  I lifted my face. I didn’t say anything as I shifted my gears. She was trying to make clear to me that she’d been a diligent spy, in spite of her feelings for our quarry.

  I hesitated another moment.

  She said, “He wrote that down and I had a chance to see it. Then I wrote it for you later. I didn’t touch the note he made to himself.”

  “Spoke where?” I said. “To whom?”

  “I don’t know to whom. On the phone. He received a call late last night.”

  She didn’t have to add “in the hotel room.” His room or her room or their room. He received a call late. She was there. She was still there even later, when he stepped away, giving her the opportunity to read what he wrote.

  Did he think he was in love with her, as well?

  “I need to get as close to this meeting as I can,” I said.

  “You’ve come to the right place,” she said. “Sit here.” She pointed to the wooden chair next to hers.

  I knew how to do this for myself, more or less, but it had been a long time and she was very good at it.

  I rose. I sat.

  She motioned and I turned the chair to face her.

  The table and the mirror were a good seven feet long, the mirror rimmed in electric bulbs. She reached behind her to the far end of the table and pulled her makeup case in front of her. It was the shape of a miniature steamer trunk, the sealskin rubbed and scuffed and stained by thousands of nights at the theater. The case was an object of wonder from my childhood.

  I needed this done. It was her case, her art. I could not refuse. How old was I when she first opened this case for me and made me up into some other child? I could not remember. I could not refuse. I waited with delight and with dread.

  She lifted the lid and squared her chair around to me. With the tip of a forefinger she tilted my head to one side and then to the other, lifted my chin, lowered it. “We should do as little as we can get away with,” she said.

  “I agree.”

  “You may have a near encounter. We have to balance naturalness with a large enough adjustment he won’t find you familiar.”

  “The meeting is near the docks.”

  She hummed a soft assent.

  “You could use a different nose,” she said. “Wash up.”

  She nodded me to the sink at the far side of the room. I took off my tie and my shirt. I washed with Castile soap. The water was warm. I dried.

  When I returned and sat, she was bending into her case, looking hard at her choices. Her grease sticks were new and bought in London, with the English theater system of numbering.

  While she pondered, I faced the mirror and rubbed on a thin coat of cold cream to my face and neck. When I was ready and facing her again, she’d made her choices. Using her left palm as a palette, she stroked down a large amount of Number 3, a skin color slightly darker than medium. Then she took up a stick of Number 13, reddish brown, and she began to incrementally blend and blend and blend it into her hand, darkening the Number 3.

  “We’ll give you some extended sun,” she said. “It’s August on the docks.”

  And she put her right hand to my face and began to apply my new skin, her fingertips working at my forehead, my cheeks, my chin, my eyes, my throat.

  I thought: I should have put on my own
stage face. But the makeup has to be done well. I need to remember what she’s doing, in case it needs doing again. For now, though, there’s limited time and a lot at stake. She needs to do it.

  I clung to the necessity of it.

  I hid in thoughts, in that chattery, abstract voice that you can talk with on the surface of your mind.

  But the straight thing was: I didn’t like her touch. Not this much of it. Boys have to come to that, at some point, where they stop their mothers from grooming them, dressing them, fussing over them, remaking them. And they have to stick to it. At some point it’s all or nothing: I am what she wants me to be, or I am me.

  I tried not to flinch.

  I expected her to be talkative. She said nothing. I was grateful for that.

  I thought about the Chicago Cubs.

  Then she was rubbing mascaro into my beard, cutting its blackness with auburn, making it the color of certain black cats if you see them up close in the bright sunlight. This was done with a small toothbrush, for which I was also grateful.

  She’d left my nose for last, which she’d been thoughtfully glancing at since the beginning. Now she built me a broken one with paste. She said her first words through all of this. “I’m giving you the nose of a boxer,” she said. “You wanted to be a boxer once, when you were thirteen and skinny.”

  I didn’t reply.

  She said no more.

  She finished with the nose paste and blended it with my new skin tone, and she put a light coating of powder over everything she’d touched.

  She sat back. She nodded at the mirror.

  I turned. She’d made me into someone else. A half brother she birthed in some dressing room somewhere along the circuit before I was born and she gave it away. He’d boxed some but not well. Maybe he’d just brawled in bars. Not surprising.

  I turned back to her. “Thanks,” I said.

  She nodded.

  And then she said, “Look. You’re a big boy. You know the score. However things turn out, I figure I had to do this.” I knew at once she was talking about Albert. She said, “I’m either doing it for love or I’m doing it for my country.”

  26

  Mother didn’t expect that half brother of mine to have straightened himself out. She was ready to go off to the costume room for some stevedore’s clothes. I thanked her for the offer and for the new face and I wished her well for her rehearsal, but I returned to the hotel, figuring to change into a two-piece blue-gray flannel suit Trask’s boys had given me with the label of a Berlin tailor. Stockman hadn’t seen Joe Hunter in this one. And it befit the way my brother had gotten on in the world, in spite of the knocks that gave him his nose. In the taxi back to the Adlon I settled into this character I’d become. What was his name? What was my name for the next few hours? Isaac. The hardworking stagehand and his wife knew whose baby he was, of course, receiving him straight from her hand. They called him Izzy, thinking of his mother by blood.

  I slipped into the Adlon lobby, keeping my face down, and I went up to my floor and approached my room. It was early afternoon. The floor was quiet. Most everyone was out doing what they were visiting Berlin to do. I unlocked my door and pushed through.

  A man was standing in the center of the sitting room.

  He was my Cassius of the lobby, the lean and hungry, hollow-cheeked, staring man. He was facing the door, his hands folded before him just below his rib cage, as if he’d been waiting for me, though my actual impression of him was that only moments before I confronted him he’d sprung into this posture at my imminent entry.

  I had no doubt he was discreetly searching my room. He was probably attuned to just such interruptions and had assumed this position at the first faint whisper of my approach along the corridor.

  I made this rapid assessment in a comfortable, self-assured frame of mind, which vanished instantly when I realized I was standing before this guy with another man’s face.

  Hollow-Cheeks had even tilted his head a little as he contemplated this vaguely familiar but unexpected visage before him.

  I had too many factors to think out—what should I say about my nose, if anything? could he see it was fake? what was this guy’s frame of mind in being here? routine because of my connection to Stockman? staunchly suspicious, that being the attitude of the Foreign Office operatives at the Adlon no matter who the guest?—so many factors to think about that to hesitate long enough to think effectively would itself make me seem guilty of something. I recognized all this in the briefest of moments and I chose to wing it.

  “Who are you?” I asked, faintly aggressive, in the most formal German I could muster.

  “I am with the hotel,” he said.

  “I am staying at the hotel,” I said. “In this room.”

  He hesitated a beat. He was doing the thinking now.

  But it was about my nose, my complexion. He’d seen me pass through the lobby last night. He tilted his head again, in the other direction, and looked at me carefully.

  “May I ask what brought you to the center of my sitting room floor?” I said.

  His attention snapped from my nose to my eyes. I thought I saw a flicker of uncertainty in him.

  Give him a punch, give him a pat. I stepped to him and offered my hand, making my voice go warm. “I’m Joseph Hunter.”

  He took my hand and shook it, still looking at me, still hesitating behind his eyes. Mother’s makeup was good. He was trying to accept what he was seeing before him as me, given his impression from yesterday, when he’d directly seen my face only briefly and from ten or fifteen yards away.

  I knew I’d eventually have to pay the piper if I didn’t address this issue now. Izzy’s face would vanish by tomorrow. The question was when I’d encounter this guy again.

  “I am the assistant manager,” he said.

  We ended the handshake and I gave him a quick, overt once-over, saying, “Herr . . .” and leaving it for him to fill in his name.

  “Wagner.”

  “Herr Wagner,” I said. “What can I do for you?”

  “I am here to make sure everything is correct in your room,” he said.

  He did not twinkle at the ambiguity. He kept his little joke to himself.

  I did not let him know I was in on the gag. “That is very kind of you,” I said. “Everything seemed to me to be in order.”

  He clicked his heels, but his eyes stayed fixed on my face. And then he said, “Good day, Herr Hunter.”

  I stepped aside for him and he went out of the room and closed the door softly behind him.

  27

  I did not check the room. Thanks to the Hotel Baden, I had no secrets here. I regretted showing my altered face; I could have used the chance to think a bit before reacting to Wagner. I was suddenly afraid I’d winged it into a threshing machine. I probably should have dealt immediately with the whole issue of my appearance, one way or another.

  But it was done. I changed my suit and slipped watchfully through the Adlon lobby again, more than an hour before Stockman’s appointed time. There was no sign of Herr Wagner.

  Outside, I put on a charcoal-gray, snap-visored golf cap, and I stepped into a taxi and told the driver simply to drive down Unter den Linden till I said otherwise. I watched out the back and made sure we were not being followed, and then I directed us to the address on Schlesische-Strasse.

  The street ran parallel to the Spree near the old Silesian Gate, which was now an elevated railway stop. Number 11 was a large brick building on an even larger lot at a corner, and I instructed the driver to pass it by and drop me at the next corner, at Ufer-Strasse, a hundred yards farther on.

  I stepped out of the taxi. At my back was the harbor’s train-track-laced jumble of grain elevators and package freight terminals and petroleum tanks, the whole area oddly pristine for a dock, having opened only a couple of years ago. Before me, Schlesische-Strasse emerged from the upriver shadow of the massive brick Oberbaum Bridge, which carried the elevated across the Spree.

  Th
e street was a little sleepy at this hour, only a few local boys passing through on foot. Both sides were lined with variations on Reinauer’s joint, blood-clot-red brick boxes holding trade offices and light warehousing.

  I pulled my Waltham.

  A quarter after three. Forty-five minutes to go.

  I crossed the street to approach his building from the opposite side. I had to find a way to watch the building, for now and maybe for later. And just in case, I had to find a way in.

  The frontage was all private business with simply a narrow stoop in the center going up to double slab doors. The facade’s array of windows suggested a very high ceiling on both the first and second floors, and two more standard office floors above.

  I walked past, crossed at the intersection, turned at once to the left and crossed Schlesische-Strasse, heading south, away from the river, on Cuvry-Strasse. This western side of the building had the same pattern of windows as in the front, though without a doorway. I approached its southwest corner and slowed my walk after I could tell in my periphery that I was just clear of the building.

  I stopped and pulled out a cigarette, and I twisted away to light it, before looking where I wanted, just in case I was being observed. Before me was an alleyway that ran along the back of this block of buildings. The big brick box immediately at hand had half a dozen sixty-gallon galvanized refuse cans lined up at the closer of two alley doors.

  My cigarette was lit and I casually straightened and turned around, waving the flame from my match. As if incidentally, I looked toward Number 11. The alley had ended at my feet. On the other side of the street was a large, macadamized delivery lot. It lay behind Reinauer’s building, which comprised two wide bays of loading docks, with raised concrete platforms and metal canopies.

  On the nearest platform a couple of Reinauer’s boys in overalls slouched against a stack of pallets. They were also taking this moment to light up, sharing a match.

  They hadn’t noticed me yet.

  I’d seen enough for now.

  I turned back the way I’d come, in the direction of the river, and strolled off.