The Empire of Night: A Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thriller

by Robert Olen Butler

  “The office is the most secure spot on this floor.”

  He nodded and finished with a gag job using a couple of oil rags, and we strode across the warehouse floor to the office.

  Not only were the lights on, the guard had left the door standing open. He had easy access to the office. It wasn’t promising as a place to stash Stockman’s precious boxes.

  I stepped in first. Jeremy lingered just outside.

  A desk.

  File drawers.

  A safe. But it was half the size of even one of the boxes we were interested in.

  A work table with ledger books. A small bookcase.

  Nothing.

  I wasn’t surprised.

  I stepped out. “Not secure at all, really,” I said.

  We both thought for a moment in silence.

  “The boxes aren’t that big, really,” Jeremy said. “They could be anywhere in the building.

  “How special are they?” I said.

  A rhetorical question.

  Jeremy nodded and I said the thing we were both thinking. “We should find this man Reinauer’s office.”

  At the end of a corridor on the third floor was a mahogany door and a brass plate: Heinrich Reinauer, Geschäftsführer.

  Our man, the managing director.

  “Shall I assume you can deal with this?” Jeremy said, in that cultured British tone he sometimes put on.

  “You shall,” I said. I handed him the flashlight.

  He illuminated a friend of mine from the Great Fraternal Order of Tumbler Locks, of which I was an honorary member. I took out my tools and raked this one quickly and I opened the door for Jeremy as if I were his butler, finding myself very pleased to have shown him my own good right hand.

  He grunted admiringly.

  We went in and closed the door behind us.

  Jeremy immediately switched off the flashlight.

  Pitch black.

  “Good drapes,” I said.

  He lit the flashlight and found the electric light key next to the door.

  Reinauer’s corner office, secreted away in a bland brick warehouse building at a come-lately urban river dock, was paneled in oak with glass-doored bookshelves and an oil portrait of himself hung behind a West Wing–size desk. Each of its four windows was draped in a black single panel with a massive gold Imperial Eagle in the center sinking its claws into the planet earth. All befitting a Geschäftsführer.

  But the most striking feature of Heinrich Reinauer’s office was the pair of steel-band-strapped wooden boxes sitting in the middle of the floor. Once again I was struck by their size and shape. They were standing with their long side upright. I half expected each of them to contain a three-drawer filing cabinet, the drawers filled with every German secret known to Albert Stockman.

  Jeremy and I approached them, however, as gingerly as if we expected them to contain ticking time bombs. We stood side by side before them, silently, without moving, for one beat and then another.

  In the center of each of the facing panels was a shipping label. The two labels were set at slightly different angles and showed fragments of previous labels beneath.

  Jeremy and I each moved to a box and knelt before it.

  The label was an Umladungsformular. A transshipment form. The new address was written by hand.

  Jeremy read his aloud. “FVFB. Kalk. MDH.”

  I read mine. “Krupp. Essen.”

  30

  We looked at each other.

  We didn’t need to speak.

  Krupp, of course, meant steel. The House of Krupp was what Lord Kitchener and the Brits desperately needed, a homegrown industrialist producing more artillery shells than the rest of the world combined.

  Jeremy squared himself to the box, crouched, put his arms around it, and lifted.

  Only six or eight inches.

  He put the box down again.

  He nodded at me to do the same.

  I did.

  The box went up very heavy, but it didn’t feel like a three-drawer cabinet full of files. Not nearly heavy enough. And the distribution of the weight didn’t feel right. And, of course, there was the matter of its destination.

  I put the box down.

  I said, “So either Sir Albert is getting Krupp into the milk can business or Krupp is getting Sir Al into the artillery business.”

  We took a step back.

  Then Jeremy had a thought. He crossed to the box before me, crouched, and lifted that one as well.

  He put it down, nodding, and stepped back. “The same weight.”

  “A couple of shells,” I said.

  “Likely,” Jeremy said. “Empty ones.”

  “Then they’re a special design. Stockman, the idea man.”

  Jeremy nodded.

  We both turned our eyes to the box going to FVFB. Or to MDH.

  “Where’s Kalk?” I said.

  “Near Cologne.”

  The question now hung in the air between us: what was our next move? Which pushed a question on stage that had been lurking in the wings. I said, “My man said the Brits were sending me some help. What did your people say?”

  “I was the help.”

  For a moment I wondered how Trask had negotiated his way into our running this British show.

  Then Jeremy said, “I’m to help the two of you.”

  Mother was how. Her crucial access to Stockman was what Trask brought to the table.

  But I said, “As far as I’m concerned, you and I are simply in this together.”

  Jeremy gave me a single, sharp nod.

  I said, “For the record then. We want to figure out the full extent of what Stockman is up to and stop him. Agreed?”

  “Agreed.”

  We both looked at the boxes.

  “They’re nailed and steel-banded,” I said. “Can we look inside and then restore them so Reinauer won’t notice?”

  It was a rhetorical question.

  We stared at them some more.

  “We open them, that’s all we’re going to get,” I said.

  “I think we have a good notion what’s in there,” he said.

  I was glad to have Jeremy along for this. I kept thinking aloud with him. “How clever can that design be? Is looking at it worth putting these guys drastically on their guard?”

  The silence of Reinauer’s office hissed softly around us.

  And then I finally put two and two together. I said, “Not an artillery shell at all.”

  I’d forgotten it until this moment, but I’d dreamed last night, in my mahogany bed at the Adlon, about the great whirring beasts passing over me in the night, as if I were sleeping on the ocean floor and these were vast creatures of the deep.

  “The Zepps,” I said. “He’s about the Zepps and he’s dealing with Krupp. Those are aerial bomb designs.”

  Jeremy looked at the boxes as if to confirm this and then back at me.

  “No doubt improved,” he said.

  I asked the big question. “How badly do we need the design?”

  We quietly consulted the boxes again.

  They weren’t talking.

  “Essen is Krupp’s main foundry, isn’t it?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “This is where they’d turn out a million of these.”

  “It is.”

  “So what’s in Kalk?” I said.

  “That’s our more interesting question.”

  “I think I was getting pretty close to Stockman last night at the Adlon bar,” I said.

  I considered that for a moment. My reporter self had indeed caught a whiff of something. Things were roiling in Albert.

  I said, “I can’t shake the feeling he’s up to more.”

  Jeremy and I let my hunch hang between us for a moment.

  I nodded at the boxes. “The first dud they drop and our bosses have this much. You and I grab these now, Stockman still has his designs, and we can do no more.”

  “Then shall we let this be?” he said.

/>   This needed no answer. Together we turned and crossed the room. He switched off the lights, and I reset the lock on the door.

  On the way to the main warehouse floor we devised a little ruse for the guard, who could have recovered his mind by now.

  And so Jeremy and I ransacked the shipping office, arguing in German about which of us stupidly suggested the money would be in something other than an actual safe.

  I’d earlier noticed some cases of what looked like a pretty damn good bock and we stole one of those, for appearances sake, and we argued some more—out of the hog-tied guard’s line of sight—with me insisting on searching him for cash so we’d at least leave here with a little ready money and with Jeremy talking me out of it, saying this guy was just here doing his job and his aching jaw was enough trouble for him for one night.

  Then we beat it out the loading dock door and back to the Ford with our case of beer.

  We stopped at the curb a block before the hotel. From the wide median, the streetlights were shining through a scrim of linden trees.

  “How do we meet again?” I said.

  “You still have a room at the Baden?”

  “I do.”

  “I can leave a message there for you,” he said.

  “And if I need to get you?”

  There was an odd hesitation in him, which I wished I could read. But it was dark inside the Ford and he turned his face away. Whatever it was passed quickly.

  “For the next few days you can reach me at this telephone.” He reached quickly inside his coat. If he were anyone else I’d be drawing my Mauser.

  His hand emerged with a piece of paper, which I took from him.

  “They listen in on the phones at the Adlon,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “The lobby of the Baden has a telephone kiosk. You can call from there. Say as little as possible.”

  “Let’s decide on a place that need never be mentioned.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Make it the Hindenburg statue in the Tiergarten.”

  “But we speak of beer.”

  “Or brat, depending on the time of day.”

  “One other thing,” I said. “I don’t know who you are.”

  “A pretty good middleweight who once upon a time almost beat Tommy Ryan.”

  I’d meant around Berlin. On the phone. This answer came quick and dry. His German sense of humor. Or his German Angst. Or both.

  But he played neither, giving the line only a brief beat before appending, “I am Bruno Obrecht. A Swiss businessman.”

  I started to get out of the still idly quaking Model T.

  He put a hand on my arm. “But not for the next two days.”

  I sat back down.

  “I am Erich,” he said. “Erich Müller.”

  “Was that your birth name?”

  “It was.”

  I stepped out of the T, and he said, “You want a couple of our bocks for your room?”

  “Take them all,” I said.

  He pinched the brim of his hat to say good-bye and drove off.

  I looked at the paper in the streetlight. His telephone number. Spandau 4739.

  He was going home to his mother.

  31

  I stood for a moment on the street. An El train was softly clacking through the median lindens. I considered this roll of the dice, the opportunity we’d just left behind. Perhaps the content of the two boxes was all I’d come to Berlin to find. What we felt certain was in there could be everything there was to know about the sotto voce declaration I’d finessed from Stockman last night. If the bombs the Zepps were dropping could somehow be improved, made more accurate, more effective, the airship attacks might become far more than isolated, neighborhood disruptions. They might bring the war-changing terror to London that many people on both sides felt was possible from these machines. The Brits deserved to know the details of what they were up against as soon as possible. They needed to start making their own.

  So why weren’t those two boxes on their way to the American embassy right now?

  Instead, I’d stolen some beer.

  “Shit,” I said.

  No. “Shit” was what was in my head, certainly. But what I said aloud there on the Unter den Linden, what rang in the silence following the passing of the El, was Scheiße.

  I was thinking in German and maybe I was just a little too close to this place right now.

  However.

  The British had no aerial attack of their own. They’d see plenty of this design long before they’d have their own airship. Surely it was better for now to keep the Germans confident about their security inside the Fatherland.

  And I still had a reporter’s niggling hunch.

  I instantly questioned even that. Maybe that hunch was simply the feature writer in me. Stockman intrigued me. I wanted to get into his head. I had one foot in already. But maybe the only hard news he had in there was still sitting in Reinauer’s office.

  I tried to shake all this off.

  I made myself walk. I let the blandly neoclassic, granite ashlar face of the Education Ministry scour my mind clean.

  Spinning in the Adlon’s front door I left the doubts behind. I had no choice but to play my hunches now. And I played one more.

  I turned to the left and stepped into the doorway of the bar. In the far corner, drinking alone in an evening suit, was Sir Albert Stockman. He was sitting where he’d sat last night, his back to the rest of the bar.

  I began to cross the floor, and he turned in his chair. It was an odd moment; I felt, chillingly, that he somehow sensed my approach. But he was actually seeking the bartender’s attention. I drew near and now he did see me and he instantly rose, turning to face me. He said, in German, “Please. Yes. Come sit.”

  We shook hands.

  I sat in the chair where I’d sat last night.

  Stockman motioned to the bartender and sat down as well.

  On the table before him was an empty whiskey glass.

  Stockman saw me looking at it.

  He said, in English, “They have a splendid American rye. Not to the taste of most Germans. They don’t drink whiskey. But I have acquired some British tastes. I wanted this tonight.”

  The glass was empty, but now that Stockman was sitting and speaking, an afterwhiff of spirits floated past me. He’d been drinking for a while.

  Last night’s bartender appeared.

  “Don’t feel obligated,” Stockman said.

  “Not at all,” I said. “I’ll drink American with you.”

  “The bottle, Hans,” Stockman said to the bartender, who nodded with a click of his heels and did a smart about-face.

  Stockman instantly asked, “Were you with Madam Cobb?”

  I still found it difficult to trust how I stood with him. I had a quick pulse of worry. This morning she had made me up into another man so that I could spy on Sir Albert. But he’d delivered the message himself, that I was to see her. Then why was he asking?

  “This morning,” I said. “At the theater.”

  “So. Yes. She and I had dinner tonight.” He was speaking German again. “An early dinner before she returned to the theater. Were you at the rehearsal?”

  “Not this evening,” I said. “They are very busy. Working late. She has two casts to deal with, you realize. One German-speaking.”

  “I know,” he said. “It wearies her.”

  Hans the bartender appeared beside us.

  He put a glass in front of me and poured two amber fingers of rye in mine and two in Stockman’s glass.

  He put the bottle down between us.

  A Pennsylvania whiskey. Sam Thompson Old Monongahela Pure Rye, with an etching of Sam’s riverside distillery in Pittsburgh.

  Stockman and I touched glasses.

  “To the hardworking Isabel Cobb,” I said.

  “To Isabel,” he said, putting as much into her name as my mother had put into her eyes about him. He was in love.

  At that, I took the bolt of
rye gladly, took it in full, relishing the burn down the throat, like a Pennsylvania summer noonday sun. And it bit with the spiciness of a pure rye, this particular one mixing cloves and pumpkin and cracked pepper.

  When I lowered my glass and my face, I found Stockman looking at me. He’d sipped his. He was smiling a little half smile at me. “Were you ever a soldier, Mr. Hunter?”

  “Can you call me Josef?” I said.

  He cocked his head.

  I said, “When I was brought as a child to America my name was Josef Wilhelm Jäger.”

  He smiled. “Of course,” he said. “Josef.”

  “Never a soldier,” I said.

  “And if you’d stayed?” he asked.

  “In Germany?”

  “Yes.”

  “Perhaps not for the sake of the colonies. But for this war, I would have been in a trench in France by now. There is no doubt.”

  He nodded.

  “With joy,” I said, picking up on his observation from last night.

  He lifted his glass to me and shot the rest of his rye.

  He put three fingers in each of our two glasses.

  I’d take this one slow.

  We both lifted our glasses.

  No toast this time. We were just two guys doing some serious drinking together. I liked that.

  I sipped.

  Off to my left, there was movement. I let the rye slide down my throat and I casually looked.

  A German officer and a woman were arranging themselves at a table. His field gray tunic had a high turnover collar, and his shoulder boards were cornflower blue with two pips. A cavalry captain. I saw him in left profile. His cheek was imprinted with the crescent scar of his university fencing days. A Schmiss.

  The scar caught my eye and held my gaze for longer than I’d intended. I could see, in my periphery, Stockman turning to look as well.

  The woman was a peach, wearing a green silk and organdy evening gown with a high waist that lifted up and presented her ample bosom as if on an invisible platter. She was in the process of stripping off long, white kid gloves.

  I looked at Stockman and he was still watching the couple. Then he turned back to me. He leaned across the table and flipped his chin to have me bend near.

  “Nicht Gesellschaftsfähig,” he said. He caught himself. For this observation, he hadn’t meant to speak German. He shot the couple a quick glance. They only had eyes and ears for each other. He returned to me and said it again in English, speaking even more softly, translating the euphemism literally. “Not fit for society.”