The Empire of Night: A Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thriller

by Robert Olen Butler

  I looked at her.

  Perhaps.

  As I watched her—they too bent near each other—Stockman said, “Not that I criticize him. He has earned this privilege.”

  The captain said something and the woman smiled softly. She lifted her right hand and brought it to his cheek and gently began to trace his Schmiss with the tip of her forefinger.

  “She is his fiancée,” I said. I looked back to Albert. His face was blank. He wasn’t used to being contradicted; I feared I was overplaying our growing rapport. I angled my head for him to look. “The gesture.”

  He looked.

  She was still moving her fingertip over her captain’s scar.

  Stockman chuckled softly, and he and I turned to each other, still leaning near. “You’re right,” he said. “But he will never have a moment of peace when he is apart from her. For fear her tenderness may stray.”

  I thought: Like you with my mother.

  I nodded in agreement.

  And then he surprised me. He lowered his voice still more. “Nor will she,” he said.

  Briefly I thought he was still talking about sex. But he said, “So many good men will die.”

  We took up our drinks. We sat back. This time I was the sipper and he immediately took the shot.

  I knew if I was to justify those two boxes remaining in Reinauer’s office, I’d have to get closer still to Albert. I’d never do that if I started thinking out each move. As he lowered his whiskey glass after his emotional bolt, I understood all this. And so I stopped thinking. Which allowed me to say, “Can I tell you a secret?”

  Stockman leaned forward again. Rather abruptly. “Of course,” he said.

  I leaned in slowly.

  I said, “I too have a Schmiss.”

  His eyes moved slowly, deliberately, to my bearded left cheek and then returned to mine.

  “I think I told you I grew up in America,” I said, leading us back to German. “My father made sure that I spoke the mother tongue. I was not allowed to say even a single English word in our house. And he wanted me to have an education. I also wanted that, but I dreamed of the University of Michigan. My father had other plans. He insisted I go home to university.”

  I paused very briefly, to let the home sink in. Stockman said, “He is a good man, your father.”

  “So I came to realize,” I said. “In 1902, when I was eighteen, I packed a bag and I came to Heidelberg and they welcomed me and they disciplined me and they allowed me into their inner circle and I took up a saber and I earned my badge of honor.”

  He glanced at the place of my presently invisible scar.

  I’d said my piece.

  He looked at me closely for a long moment, reassessing me one more time. Then he said, “I must ask you why is this a secret. Why do you cover up this mark?”

  I said, “For the same reason it is necessary to write newspaper stories for the people of America to explain the real Germany. This is something not in their blood.”

  “I understand,” Stockman said.

  He leaned back. He palmed the ends of the chair arms. “But you are in Germany now,” he said.

  “I am.”

  “Josef,” he said. “Would you do a favor for me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you go upstairs to your room, right now, and shave off your beard?”

  This took me by surprise. But the reflex feeling I would have had even a few minutes ago did not occur. I did not for a moment hear this as the calling of a suspected bluff. He was mellow, avuncular even, in his manner and tone. He was encouraging me to come even closer to him.

  “I will,” I said.

  “Good,” he said. “You must wear this scar with pride. It is a rare thing. It is a precious thing.”

  “I shed my German blood for it,” I said.

  He smiled.

  32

  I stood before my mirror. The last thing he said as I’d risen to go was that he would wait, that he was looking forward to speaking this evening with Josef Wilhelm Jäger.

  I found my hand severely steady as I worked the lather into my beard, as if I were about to pull a trigger. This was a badger-hair shaving brush, not a .32 caliber Mauser, but my body had invoked my conditioned response to a spy’s stage nerves. It had been bad enough this past spring, confronting the scar for the first time since the wound had healed and I’d let my beard cover it up. Now this second revelation was odd indeed: I was fully asserting my cover identity to a German spy by showing him my actual face, which was, however, forever altered by the first German spy I’d ever confronted. And rubbing the cream into my cheeks summoned up my mother from this morning, her hands rubbing color into this beard, turning me into my battered doppelgänger to disguise me from the very man who was now waiting downstairs to see my naked face. Which would convince him utterly that I was someone I was not.

  I’d had no idea spy work would be as unsettling as this.

  I stropped the razor and I cut and I cut and I was clean and I was scarred and I was Josef Wilhelm Jäger.

  I went back downstairs.

  I expected that Stockman had continued to drink. I half expected this whole shaving event to have been in vain, that he would have reached his limit, that he would have forgotten even sending me upstairs.

  He was sitting very still when I approached and he heard me and turned. The level of rye in the bottle had receded no farther since I’d left, and a cup of coffee was sitting before him on the table.

  He rose.

  He extended his hand to me. He spoke, of course, in German. “Herr Jäger, I am Albert Stockman.”

  He had shaved himself as well, by offering his first name without the title. Given who he was, it was an odd and unsettling thing for me to feel—as I now briefly did—a twist of barroom affection for this guy.

  But I held off from using “Albert” to his face, though I’d thought it a number of times already, in disrespect. “Herr Stockman,” I said. “May I ask a question?”

  “Of course.”

  “Was your name once Stockmar?”

  He threw back his head and laughed, and when he was done, he cuffed me on the shoulder. “You are a shrewd man, Herr Jäger. You are correct. It was done before I was born, however.”

  “That makes no difference,” I said. “In your blood, you are still a Stockmar.”

  He laughed again and nodded me to my chair.

  When I sat, I motioned for the bartender to come. He did, briskly.

  I said to him, “I’ll have what he’s having.”

  “Coffee?” the bartender said.

  “Coffee,” I said.

  The man vanished.

  I faced Stockman now, as the truly revealed Josef Wilhelm Jäger.

  His eyes moved to my scar and lingered. “Please?” he said, lifting his hand, waving it as if turning the page of a book.

  I turned my face to the right, fully showing the Schmiss.

  I felt grindingly uncomfortable, but I understood my job would be made easier by all this. Nevertheless, the examination, though probably brief, felt endless. I focused on the thought that it was a good thing I would never know my own father. At our first meeting I’d be subjected to this same ordeal. Here, let me take a look at you, my son. To hell with that.

  Then Stockman said, “Thank you.”

  I faced him once more.

  “You did not pack it with horsehair?” he asked.

  The dueling sword of the friendly, prearranged duels, the straight-bladed Korbschläger, had a blade as fine as my straight razor and did not bruise when cutting. Some duelists packed their cuts with horsehair to irritate them and keep them agape as they healed so as to create a more prominent scar. Mine was plenty striking on its own.

  “I did not,” I said. “That would be a lie and a sacrilege.”

  “Good,” he said. “It’s interesting how those of us who have grown up in exile sometimes have a purer sense of these things.”

  “Perhaps this war will refocus a
ll Germans,” I said.

  “I greatly envy you, bearing this mark,” he said. “I was in a different circumstance, of course, going off to university. My father had complex commitments. His son could go nowhere but to Oxford.”

  He paused. I had the impulse to keep improvising onward. I even thought to say: A true German soul bears this mark invisibly from birth. But even without thinking it out, I knew I was on the verge of going too far, of turning this into melodrama.

  So I simply nodded sympathetically and was glad to find the bartender suddenly beside us, giving us pause, presenting my cup of coffee and topping off Stockman’s from a carafe.

  After the bartender had vanished again, Albert said, “Of course, it is the same with the British as the Americans. There is so much they do not understand.”

  I sipped at the coffee, hot and bitter, and I remained plausibly silent. Let Albert follow his own internal path.

  He lifted his coffee, cup and saucer together, and looked at it steaming before him, and he said, “I’m afraid the British will never understand.”

  He sipped. But his voice had already turned hot and bitter.

  “Not by reason, they won’t,” he said. “Not in a civilized way. They are waging this war against us by using their navy to starve Germany slowly to death, every man and woman and child. That is the act of terror. And they do it with their damnable outward restraint, as if its incremental effects civilize it. But they are not rational. They are cold-blooded, which is a different thing. Civilization cannot exist without passion.”

  He’d placed the cup back onto the saucer, but kept them both suspended before him. The cup was chittering lightly.

  His hand had begun to tremble.

  He seemed aware of it. He looked at the cup.

  And the sound abruptly stopped.

  He returned his eyes to mine and said, “I still have hopes that the Americans will come to understand.”

  “It’s why I write,” I said.

  “I admire that,” he said.

  We drank our coffee for a time. Stockman seemed to turn inward. But whatever he was aware of in himself, I was apparently the point of reference. He would sip and think and look at me and look away and then do it all again.

  Finally he said, “I am meeting a German scientist tomorrow who has created a process that will eliminate famine from the face of the earth. He did this six years ago. You do not know his name. I have read essentially every issue of your most important newspaper, The New York Times, for the past decade. His name has never appeared. Not once. Nor his discovery.”

  Stockman paused. Inside my head I’d paused several sentences ago. This guy had a way of veering off and surprising the hell out of me. He seemed to want me to comment now.

  “What is his name?” I asked.

  “Fritz Haber.”

  I had always read very widely. I possessed a very good memory. But Stockman was right.

  “I have never heard his name,” I said.

  “You see?”

  “What is this process?”

  “He can convert the inaccessible nitrogen in the atmosphere into ammonia, which contains extractable, usable nitrogen. Do you know what this means?”

  I knew some science. The air was mostly nitrogen. But I’d never heard of anyone figuring out how to use it.

  “Perhaps,” I said. “But tell me.”

  Stockman said, “Nitrogen is in everything we eat. Meat, bread, anything with protein. The nitrogen comes from the soil, through the crops. The wheat, the corn. The rye you and I have drunk together. But there is only so much nitrogen. The earth can be sucked dry. Fertile land can become exhausted from use, and it is the nitrogen that vanishes. Before the Haber Process, the only way for man to create large quantities of nitrogen to put back into the soil was by using the nitrogen in saltpeter. No one has saltpeter but the country of Chile, and even there, the supplies are finite. But you can make fertilizer from nitrogen-bearing ammonia, and if you can turn the air into ammonia, you have an infinite amount of fertilizer. The world has nearly two thousand million people. This is nearly twice as many people as a hundred years ago. It will not take another hundred years to double again. Already millions starve. But Germany will never starve. America need never starve. No one need starve. A German will feed them all. Fritz Haber will feed them all forever.”

  I sat in silence with that abrupt, vast, visceral feeling that a reporter gets when he picks up on a story that nobody has reported.

  About the feeding of millions, now and into the future, of course. But the thing Stockman wasn’t saying was that nitrogen was also essential in making explosives. Nitrogen created from the air meant killing millions as well.

  The Allies controlled all of Chile’s saltpeter.

  How much did our government and the European Allies’ governments know about this?

  “This was six years ago?” I asked.

  “Yes, when he demonstrated the process.”

  “And they’re doing this now on an industrial scale?”

  “Twenty-five tons of ammonia a day. For two years already.”

  I wanted to ask where. But I flipped the crank on my reporter’s instincts and they started up instantly. I knew this was a fragile moment. An inappropriate, pointed question could shut Stockman down.

  The links forward from where his mind had started were clear, from his having hopes that America will come to understand Germany, to his admiring my journalism in pursuit of that very aim, to his abruptly waxing rhapsodic about German nitrogen someday feeding a hungry world. He had it in his head to arrange for me to do a story. A grand one. The one with a humanistic face. I needed to be careful.

  “If only America knew,” I said.

  “Perhaps that can be arranged,” he said.

  “I’d do the story full justice,” I said.

  “Have you seen Baron Mumm von Schwarzenstein at the Foreign Office?”

  I had that phony letter from the baron who controlled the press, courtesy of the American-occupied German embassy in London. I had to assume whatever Stockman might have in mind would run afoul of the bureaucracy. It was still unclear to me how much high-ranking, maverick authority Albert actually had. Or how naive he might be about the ways of the German publicity machine. I had to ask a delicate question.

  I created a warm little insider laugh. “Do you know the baron well?”

  “Not at all,” he said.

  I tried not to show my rush of relief. “I’ve had my obligatory Kirschwasser with him from his crystal decanter,” I said, improvising the details. “And all is well.”

  “Good,” he said. “Meet me here in the bar at two tomorrow afternoon,” he said. “Wait for me if I am late.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “And now,” he said, “I must take a pot of coffee to my rooms to await Hamlet’s entrance.”

  I had nothing to say to that.

  I rose and offered my hand.

  He rose and took it.

  He inclined his head toward my scar. “This is who you are,” he said.

  33

  I told Stockman I wanted to finish my coffee before I left and he bade me good night and consulted with the bartender—I presumed about having his pot of coffee delivered—then he walked across the floor, pretty steadily for all the drinking he must have done tonight, and he vanished into the lobby.

  I gave him a couple of minutes to negotiate the elevator, and I emerged into the grand reception lounge of the Adlon ground floor. I stepped clear of the overhanging mezzanine, held aloft by square columns of yellow sienna marble, and I moved into the center of the lounge, with its frescoed ceiling vaulting high above me.

  I carefully checked the scattering of people in the lobby. No eyes turning to me. No Herr Wagner.

  To my left now was the reception desk, and there were empty settings of overstuffed chairs before it, but I moved on to the nearest chair and table of the Palm Court at the south end of the reception lounge. I sat in the center of three
chairs closely arced around a small round table. I faced north across the central floor with a clear view of the stairs from the Unter den Linden doors. I ordered a pot of coffee. And, just in case, two cups.

  The coffee was still warm when Mother swirled through the revolving door. She was surely tired after a long day of rehearsal, but she could do nothing other than make a dynamic entrance into such a public space as this. I knew that she would instantly, though covertly, assess her effect on her impromptu audience. I rose from my chair and began to applaud in broad, smooth undulations, though making no sound whatsoever. She was still fifty yards away and the sound was irrelevant anyway.

  She saw me.

  She fell out of the Grande Dame role and strode my way. To a viewer she was simply another woman walking across an open space. But I knew that this throttling back on her stage star aura meant she was all business.

  She arrived.

  “I’m having coffee,” I said. “Would you like some?”

  “Good evening to you as well, my darling Christopher,” she said.

  She used my real name but she spoke it low. When she wanted to be all business with me, she had to be the one who initiated it. Thus her umbrage at the missed niceties of greeting.

  “Good evening, Madam Cobb,” I said, also low. “Who are you thinking of, may I ask? I am still your humble and eager scribe, Joseph Hunter.”

  She stiffened. I realized she’d been unaware of the name she’d used.

  And now I stiffened a little from the same twist of fear she’d just experienced. Her lapse had not been heard, much less understood. But she was capable of forgetting like this in a crucial moment, a crucial circumstance.

  “I’m so sorry, Mr. Hunter,” she said. “What did I call you?”

  “Christopher.”

  She laughed lightly.

  “Well, you see,” she said. “That’s my son’s name. He’s been much on my mind lately.”

  “You may have good reason not to recognize me.”