“I’d say so,” she said.
We were speaking very low now, and it was safe, but she kept up the pretense a little longer. She said, “When I last saw my son, he had stitches in his cheek in that very place.”
“Did he indeed,” I said. “I got this from my college days in Heidelberg.”
“You went to Heidelberg, did you? You never mentioned this.”
“I revealed it only tonight, to Sir Albert,” I said.
“I’m sure he was impressed,” she said.
“He’s having coffee himself at the moment,” I said. “We can chat for a few minutes if you like.”
She began to sit on the chair to my left but glanced again at my scar and circled the table to sit on my right so as not to see it. I settled into my center chair and we leaned toward each other.
I could smell the orange blossom and violet of her Guerlain perfume. And the familiar musk of my mother herself, from her dozen hours on the stage, which the French scent was intended to cover. And the licorice bite of her Sen-Sen, covering the whiskey, which she always took in true moderation after a long day of rehearsing but for which she always felt guilty.
She looked with seeming casualness around her. So did I. As I’d thought, no one was near enough to have heard a syllable of this. And we were clear of the vaulted ceiling, so the acoustics remained local.
We could speak privately like this.
“He drinks too much,” she said, gently.
“For which I am grateful,” I said.
“It must make you look like a real pal sometimes,” she said. There was a cat-tongue rasp to her tone, as if I were being a hypocrite, taking advantage of him.
I leaned closer. “Do you remember why we’re risking our necks?” I said.
She sighed.
“What the hell is that sigh all about?” I said.
“You’re right, is what it’s about.”
I never could quite figure out how she was able to switch me from irritation to guilt in the time it takes for an electric light bulb to go from dark to bright.
“How was rehearsal?” I asked, trying to soothe things.
“This is terrible, wearying work,” she said. “A never-ending assault on your mind and heart.”
It was never like that when she was still perceived to be a leading lady. I didn’t say this. “Two casts at once, in two languages,” I said.
She looked at me. “Not the theater, child.”
She’d flipped on another light. She meant the spy work.
“You got into this all on your own,” I said.
“I’m not blaming you.”
“You didn’t have to fall in love with him,” I said.
She turned her face from me, as if she were hiding something.
“Are those real tears or fake?” I said.
She plucked a handkerchief out of her lizard skin bag and dabbed at her eyes. “Both,” she said.
“Look,” I said. “I’m sorry this has gotten complicated.”
“I need to go,” she said.
“Have you gone through his things?”
She turned her face sharply to me. “It hasn’t gotten that far,” she said.
I wasn’t sure what distinction she was drawing.
“I don’t have a key,” she said.
“I’m not prying,” I said.
“I know you have to ask.”
“I’m asking if you can do this, given your feelings.”
“I’m gathering as much information as I can.”
“I appreciate that.”
“I can do this,” she said.
She was no Hamlet.
She said, “How was your adventure at the docks?”
I had to make a decision now about my mother and this role she’d taken on. The more she knew, the more she could inadvertently reveal, especially to a man she had feelings for. But the less she knew, the less she might recognize as useful information. I stalled for thinking time by leaning forward and topping off my coffee cup from the Adlon Oblige pot.
Her feelings for men. They came and they went. Readily. How deeply could this Albert possibly be touching her?
“Coffee?” I asked.
“Yes, dear,” she said.
I filled the second cup as well.
She knew what was at stake for her and for me and even for the country she wanted to serve.
She took up her cup and sipped. As did I.
She was a smart woman. Trask trusted her with Stockman. I could use her help.
So I told her most everything that had happened on this day.
Among the omissions: I didn’t tell her about the cadaver act at the Kabarett. She didn’t need more ideas on how to reinvent herself.
When I’d finished, she said, “I should go now. I have things to listen for.”
She rose.
I rose with her. “Just be careful about asking leading questions,” I said.
“I understand,” she said.
She turned, but she paused and turned back. She touched my arm. “Thank you,” she said. “For trusting me.”
“Even when you’re in love.” I said it as a declaration. In fact, I said it to try it out, to try to hear if it was true.
She said, “Love only makes me stupid in one way. My mind is always untouched.”
And with this, she whisked away as if she were making an entrance into a swank hotel through a revolving door.
34
I sat where I was.
I thought of what my mother had said, about Albert’s drinking helping me to befriend him. He was a common figure in a profession that was still figuring itself out for the twentieth century. He was officially in the employ of the German Foreign Office, certainly. Secretly so. He was powerful, clearly. But he seemed an amateur at heart. The Huns hadn’t sufficiently accounted for people like my mother and me being able to get this close to a man like him. That was good for us. But I realized his amateurism made him less logical, less predictable, more dangerous in his work.
It had been a long day.
I stopped thinking.
I had two places to sleep.
It was too late to call Jeremy’s mother’s house.
I chose the Adlon.
I rose, crossed through the reception lounge, and neared the desk on the way to the staircase behind it. The steps led to the mezzanine and the hotel elevator.
Just before passing beneath it, I glanced up to the mezzanine.
Grasping the ironwork balustrade there, standing upright with his arms straight, his eyes fixed on me, was Herr Wagner.
I did not hesitate but nodded at him and went up. It was time to try to deal with him.
I emerged on the mezzanine landing. He had already turned around to confront me.
I was well aware that I was showing him my third face in two days. But I made sure he got a good look at the scar on my cheek as I approached. He was working hard at maintaining the opacity of his own face.
“Good evening, Herr Wagner,” I said.
He nodded. I was no doubt a unique challenge for him. From the intensity of his gaze, from the faint, incipient shaping of his mouth, which waxed and waned and waxed again, I knew he was struggling to find words to say.
I was concerned, however, that if he failed to find any words for me, he’d decide to leave the task for some boys in a back room at the Foreign Ministry.
“I am sorry to keep confusing you,” I said.
He stiffened a little. “Sir?”
“Do you know what I’m doing here?”
He stiffened some more. “Doing?”
I could only play the cards in my hand. I said, “You are no doubt aware that a special and powerful friend of Germany, Baron Albert Stockman, is staying at the Adlon. And that he is accompanied by the great American actress, Madam Isabel Cobb.”
I paused. Wagner was keeping his face blank and his mouth shut. I waited him out.
Finally he said, “I am aware of them.”
“
I daresay you know that Baron Stockman arranged for me to stay at your lovely hotel. I am here to write a major story for the American newspapers on Madam Cobb’s performance of Hamlet. As part of the story, I am—in my ignorance of these matters—experiencing some aspects of the life of an actor. Putting on makeup, for instance. Changing a face to become a character for the stage. Do you understand?”
“I’m not sure, Herr Hunter.”
“The face that puzzled you yesterday afternoon. It was not mine. It was makeup that Madam Cobb herself put upon me so that I might experience, for a few hours, what the actor experiences. Being inside another person’s skin. I regret making you an unwitting part of our little experiment.”
Wagner struggled to take all this in.
His eyes moved sharply now to my scar.
I said, “The Schmiss, however, earned in Heidelberg, is real. I write for American newspapers. I am technically an American citizen. But I am, in fact, German.”
His eyes remained on the scar.
“Would you like to touch it?” I said.
He flinched his eyes away from my cheek. “No sir,” he said.
“To verify its reality. Go ahead,” I said.
“No thank you, sir,” he said, growing as uncomfortable as I’d intended.
“The experimenting is over, Herr Wagner. I will cause you no more confusion.”
He summoned the power of his formality. He straightened. He clicked his heels. He said not a word. He moved past me and down the steps.
This might all have gone well.
This might only have bred distrust in him, and therefore, as well, in the men he worked for.
I could only hope my own work would go swiftly in Berlin.
I waited and watched Wagner shortly emerge from beneath the mezzanine, stepping smartly, his backbone flagpoled into his butt, his chin lifted.
I thought, A goddamn Hun.
The elevator door opened on the fourth floor, and I padded along the dense Ushak hall carpet to my room.
Huns, I thought. It was a little too easy for me to use the epithet. It was just a word. But I had to make sure it didn’t induce a reflex feeling about the Germans, as well, or I could miss their equivalents of Mother and me. Or Jeremy. Stockman was no simple Hun.
And twenty minutes later, with my balcony door open to the upspill of street light and to a wisp of a night breeze, with the linen top sheet draped over my bare feet, the Huns lingered with me. The irony, of course, was that Kaiser Willie himself stuck the label on his people. As I drifted off to sleep, the quote—suppressed in the German press at the time, but lately resurrected among the Allies—rattled around in my head, words he spoke fifteen years ago to his troops heading off to China to crush the Boxer Rebellion. Prisoners will not be taken. Whoever falls into your hands will be put to death. Just as a thousand years ago the Huns, under their King Attila, found a glory that shines even today, may you exalt the name “German” so that no one in China will dare to look askance at a German again.
Which was just fine as an American spy’s lullaby, a drifting away on a reminder of why I was here, doing what I was doing.
I woke to light and automobile horns from beyond the balcony. An hour later, braced with its good coffee and fresh eggs, I went out of the Adlon and headed for the Baden, walking briskly, though I immediately turned off Unter den Linden onto Wilhelm-Strasse and then turned again onto Behren-Strasse. I stopped immediately in front of the National Bank and lit a cigarette, waiting to see if anyone came around the corner following me. No one did. I went on east and made my way back to Unter den Linden and the Hotel Baden.
And finally I stood in an enclosed wood and glass telephone kiosk in the Baden’s lobby. I asked the hotel operator to put me through to Spandau, number 4739.
A woman answered the phone. “Müller,” she said.
His mother. “Mrs. Müller,” I said. “May I speak with . . .” I hesitated very briefly. I had three of him to choose from. “. . . Erich?”
“Who is it calling?” she said.
“Josef Wilhelm Jäger,” I said.
“Please wait, Mr. Jäger.” She spoke German very formally, with every r carefully trilled.
The phone clunked, onto a tabletop no doubt, as the line stayed open.
After a few moments Jeremy’s voice said, “Josef. Good morning.”
“Good morning, Erich.”
“I’m sorry I am in Berlin only briefly,” he said. For his mother’s consumption, I figured.
“We should have lunch,” I said.
“What time?”
“To meet, let’s say eleven o’clock.”
“Good,” he said.
And he hung up.
I stepped from the booth.
I went to my room at the Baden and found the fragment of a matchstick, which I’d left wedged, unseen, halfway up in the jamb of the door, still wedged there.
I lay down for an hour, resting better than I had all night at the Adlon.
At about ten o’clock I walked the three hundred yards back to the Kaiser’s favorite hotel. For the hell of it, I gave my room a careful look. Wagner or his boys had done a pretty slick job with their search. But the last item I checked showed their hand. My portable combination tool had been laid back into my latched toilet bag a hundred and eighty degrees off. The two ends were reversed. I wondered when this had been done. Sometime before or sometime after my confrontation with Wagner on the mezzanine? Was this a bit of clumsiness on his part? Or was Wagner sending me a little message that he was still watching?
Either way, I’d done all I could, and I would continue to be mindful that I was surrounded by some of Willie’s best Huns, who’d reserved a place against a wall at Spandau for guys like me.
Ten minutes later a note in a hotel envelope skiffed its way along the carpet and into the room at the bottom of my door.
Before picking it up I opened the door and looked right and then left and I saw a flash of Egyptian blue turning the corner at the end of the corridor. An Adlon page boy.
I closed the door and opened the envelope.
Stockman worked fast.
I was to meet him at four o’clock, not two. And I would go with him to see Fritz Haber at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry.
35
The lindens of the boulevard before the Adlon flowed like German blood into the vast forest of the Tiergarten. I entered through the Brandenburg Gate and along the Charlottenburger-Chaussée, which was lined with plane trees and marble statues of the Brandenburg-Prussian rulers, the Margraves and the Fredericks and the Joachims. All of these monarchs were dramatically outranked, however, when I turned into the Sieges-Allée.
He asserted his authority at once, though he was still two hundred yards away and though another goddess Victory floated behind and high above him on a red granite column. This was a military monarch, four storeys high, shaped from khaki oak, the massively square-faced Field Marshal Paul Ludwig Hans Anton von Beneckendorff und von Hindenburg, in great coat, leaning on his sword, and facing down this “Victory Avenue.”
I approached him.
He was a Nail Man. He was the latest in an odd German revival of an old Austrian custom of putting up a heroic wooden statue and then ceremonially driving nails into it for luck, for a blessing, for charity.
Hindenburg was brand-new, dedicated only recently and with the wooden platforms still girding him up to his waist to facilitate the first assault of nails. Berliners were asked to drive nails into their military hero for charity, the rehabilitation of East Prussia, overrun by the now expelled Russians in the first months of the war.
I began to circle him. The nails were mostly iron but with a noticeable scattering of silver-plate and very occasional spots of gold-plate. The kiosk by the front of the marble base had displayed the donation rates. Iron was one mark, silver was five, gold was a hundred. For your hundred mark you got a lapel pin, replicating the iconic German Iron Cross, done in onyx with gold-plated trim
and a golden H in the center.
I paused at Hindenburg’s backside, where he’d already been nailed a good hundred times. All in iron.
“That’s where I’d put one,” Jeremy said from behind my left shoulder.
Still pondering Hindenburg’s backside, I said, “You figure those hundred guys had that German sense of humor about it?”
“Of course,” he said.
I turned to him now. “Good morning, Erich,” I said.
Very briefly his eyes went as wide as they might have when Tommy Ryan caught him with an unexpected shot to the ribs. He recovered fast, but now he was driving a nail of a gaze into my Schmiss.
“I had no idea,” he said.
“So what’s your idea now?” I said.
“I still don’t have an idea.”
“It’s a war story I’d be happy to tell you over lunch.”
“It looks like . . .”
“So they say. That’s why I’m showing it to my new German pals.” I glanced back up at the oaken Field . “You know, it just occurred to me. That Chicago journalist I once was had a pretty shrewd strategy when interviewing local dirty politicians. He always made a point to wear the lug’s buttonhole campaign pin when he wanted to finesse incriminating quotes out of him.”
Jeremy had stopped looking at the scar, but his usually stoic face was still furrow-browed with puzzlement.
“Trust me,” I said.
“Carry on,” he said, briefly dropping into English.
So we circled back around to the front of the statue. I gave the Field Marshal a last glance before taking him on with a hammer. He had a faraway look and the stiff posture of a man with hemorrhoids. But maybe it was just the hundred nails in his ass.
I asked the elderly, bristle-haired attendant for a hundred-mark golden nail. He clicked his heels and bowed, and I paid him two ten-dollar gold liberty heads from the money belt I’d worn since I’d first gone to war as a correspondent. Once newspaper money, now government.
With elaborately grateful heel clicking and bowing, he gave me a hammer and a gold-plated inch-and-a-half nail.
I clicked my heels and bowed a thanks, and Jeremy followed me to the foot of the scaffold.
He said, “The British have had their way with me, I’m afraid. My first thought was you are a fool to pay such a sum. But the German in me looks at that pin and I know what you’re doing. That says you opened your heart and gave to them in difficult times. They have warm hearts, the Germans. They will count you as one of them.”
The Empire of Night: A Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thriller Page 20