“I say you deserve better, is all,” said darling Albert.
She patted him some more. “I’ve dealt with this all my professional life.”
Stockman’s voice mellowed a little. “How difficult for you.”
He turned to me now. He was, of course, trying to make a case for himself. As her exclusive lover. Perhaps even as her husband. I was his foil. I was the jury. I was the impartial public in obvious, silent agreement with him. He said, “This is widely overlooked by lovers of the theater, the terrible sacrifice a great actress must endure for her art. That she must inevitably surround herself with actors and directors and other men of that world, unprincipled men, emotionally tumultuous and unreliable men, morally weak men.”
I could see her jaw clench at this, great actress though she was. Her hand stopped patting, but it stayed on his forearm.
Man oh man, was he ever trying to make a case. He even started to swerve back to Einstein.
“And these revered scientists. These outsiders.”
He paused dramatically.
She must have said something admiring about scientists along the way.
He said, “This Einstein has a wife and two children. They were with him when he came to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, and he drove them away. She fled to Zurich because he began an affair with his own cousin in Berlin. This cousin was no doubt the reason he returned to his despised Germany. Not his vaunted research.”
He paused to present us a moue of pained disapproval. Even Stockman could not miss the blanching of Mother’s face. He just didn’t have a clue what was behind it.
“I’m sorry to mention these scandalous things,” he said. “But there are many men of this sort in the world who can be very attractive to women. I just believe in a different way of living.”
As different as Stockman felt himself to be from the men of the theatrical world, he was, however, their kin. By something stronger than blood. By an instinct for self-performance. Little did he know. And little did he know that it was perhaps the deepest hook he had in my mother.
I could sense her gathering her actor’s strength now. She said, “This is why I’ve come so quickly and strongly to rely on you, my darling.”
He put his hand on hers. “I know,” he said.
She grew urgent. “Must you leave me next week?”
“We’ve spoken of this,” he said, lowering his voice a little. This was something he didn’t want to discuss in front of me.
Mother was playing her own, woman’s version of Albert’s earlier strategy. A man used the public setting to display his plumaged worthiness. The woman reopened a private argument with her man. I was foil. I was jury.
Of course, Mother was also doing her job. She was giving me information.
He’d told her he was going away.
This was, I assumed, the Mit der Hand trip.
“I know we’ve spoken,” she said. “But you have only reminded me now, with your characteristic eloquence—oh how I would miss that too, for even a few days, your lovely words—you have reminded me how bereft I will be.”
“You must rehearse,” he said.
“Opening night is still two weeks off. I can take a few days.”
“It’s strictly business.”
“I won’t interfere,” she said.
“I’m not sure how long I’ll be needed.”
“But at least I could come for a few days.”
“There are complications I cannot speak of.”
“I will happily stay out of your way, in any nearby hotel you wish. Just come to me at night.” She put her head on his shoulder.
He glanced my way, lifted his eyebrows to me.
I smiled a comradely smile.
He rolled his eyes.
Women.
He and I understood about that.
“I might be out until very very late,” he said.
“I will rest.”
“And your days will be empty as well.”
She lifted her head. She made a show of trying to think of a solution. She came up with one and brightened. “You have spoken so warmly of Mr. Hunter. Perhaps we can bring him. During the day he can finish our story for the American papers. And he and I might even find a chance to discuss my memoir.”
Stockman did not reply to this. His lover’s head returned to his shoulder.
He looked at me.
I leaned forward and poured two fingers of rye into his glass.
I offered it to him and he took it with his free hand, in exchange giving me a muted reprise of the comradely smile.
He drank it down, not in a quick shot but in a steady, uninterrupted draft.
I took the empty glass from him and put it on the table.
He gently extricated his right arm without letting her raise her head and he put it around her shoulders. She snuggled in. “We’ll discuss this later,” he said.
She lifted her face to him.
If I were not sitting across from them, they no doubt would have kissed at this juncture. As it was, they goo-goo-eyed each other long enough that I was forced to look away and concentrate on my Fatima for a drag and blow.
I hoped she hadn’t overplayed her hand. In spite of my encouraging Sam Thompson to help out, Albert would confront all this soberly in the morning.
They’d begun to murmur things to each other.
I thought, hopefully, about Albert Einstein’s love for Shakespeare. I figured there might be a way to approach him.
I checked out the loving couple, and Stockman was withdrawing his arm. He’d suddenly turned downright shoulder-rollingly, tie-straighteningly furtive. He seemed finally aware of the public setting. Maybe he wasn’t all that akin to theater people after all. Maybe it was just the power of my mother. The spell she put on any man.
He reached for the bottle and began to pour.
My mother sat herself up straight. She arranged the bodice of her dress. She looked at me. Calm she was, or she was simply portraying that. Confidently in Control.
Okay. She’d pressed all this forward. I’d come a long way with Albert myself. I thought I, too, could push him a little. Carefully.
“Did the rest of your meeting go well at the Institute?” I asked, while reaching for my own whiskey glass.
Maybe he’d talk a little more readily about this because it offered a clear shift away from the wheedlings of his lover.
I grasped the glass and looked at him.
He lifted two more fingers of rye. I straightened and offered my glass for toasting.
He leaned to me and we touched our Sam Thompsons. “It did,” he said.
We sat back. I sipped. He took his whiskey in one quick shot.
“I hope Doctor Haber calmed down for the colonel,” I said.
There was a brief stopping in Stockman, a flicker of something. I was afraid this was about me crossing a line. I hoped it was still about Haber. Maybe Albert had to remember how I’d learned about there being another person in their meeting. A colonel, no less. Whatever it was, it seemed to pass.
“Max wouldn’t tolerate it,” Stockman said.
Max. Nothing like a good bolt of whiskey sliding down your throat to get you to speak familiarly about your pals.
But the burn of the rye cooled and he corrected himself, made things properly proper. “Colonel Bauer,” he said.
“Is he someone I should meet?” I said.
“I can’t imagine why,” Stockman said. Quickly and firmly. I was afraid suspiciously.
I’d gotten careless.
“Sorry,” I said. “I’m just increasingly frustrated, wanting to help our cause and not knowing how.”
Stockman waved this off.
But he said nothing.
I hoped it was the apology that he’d brushed aside and not the explanation.
He was staring at the bottle.
“Can I pour for you?” my mother said.
Stockman looked at her and then at me and then at her.
“No,” h
e said. “Let’s retire.”
“All right,” she said.
I waited for some look, some gesture, some word from him that could reassure me he’d not become suspicious.
But he rose and she rose and she hooked her arm in his and they turned to go.
“Good night,” I said to them both.
“Good night,” my mother said.
Stockman said nothing.
39
I left the Adlon bar soon after the retiring couple, and I went out of the hotel and headed for the Baden. I worried every step of the way that I was starting to lose Stockman. But I’d needed to press things forward. I had to let this play itself out.
I rang Spandau from the lobby telephone kiosk. The mother answered instantly. “Müller.”
“Hello, Mrs. Müller,” I said. “It’s Mr. Jäger. May I speak to Erich?”
She said nothing, but the phone clunked and then Jeremy answered.
“Is your mother all right with me calling?” I asked.
“Don’t mind her,” he said “We’ve been talking about the Kaiser.”
“Is she disaffected?”
“Far from it.”
“How’s your brother doing? I meant to ask.”
“He’s presently alive and unwounded.”
We both fell silent a moment.
Then I said, “Max.”
“Max?”
“His first name. Colonel Max Bauer.”
“That will help,” he said.
“I have a thought to find the other gentleman.”
“Good.”
And we both reminded ourselves that a telephone was still a telephone, even in the lobby of a relatively safe hotel.
We bade each other good night.
I hung up and hesitated only a moment before going out of the Baden and back to the Adlon.
In the lobby, Wagner was nowhere to be seen. In my room, nothing seemed to have been reexamined.
My laundry was waiting on the foot of the bed, wrapped in brown paper and folded neatly therein and giving off the faint, fresh, broken-rock smell of Persil. I had a clean set of summer-cotton BVDs and I put them on to sleep.
I opened the door to the balcony but pulled the drapes closed.
I put my Mauser in the drawer of the night table, went to bed, and fell instantly asleep.
And I awoke abruptly in the dark to a knocking.
My bedroom door was open to the sitting room and the knock had come from in there, at the door to my suite.
It was soft.
And then it came again, a little less soft.
I rose.
I switched on my bedside lamp.
“Please,” a voice said outside. A heavy, feminine whisper.
A stage whisper.
I brisked across the floor and looked through the peep hole.
It was my mother.
I opened the door.
“Quickly,” I said.
She slipped in.
She was wearing her shirtwaist but not her scarf. All the button-to-hole matches were off by one.
“You shouldn’t be doing this,” I said.
“I didn’t know when I’d get to talk to you. No one saw me.”
“There’s a floor attendant.”
“He’s sleeping.”
“German agents on staff.”
“I’m telling you I wasn’t seen,” she said.
“I need pants,” I said.
“I’ll wait,” she said.
I left her in the dark and disappeared into the bedroom, pushing the door partly closed. I put on my pants from the wardrobe, cinched the belt tight, and took one step back into the sitting room. “Come in here, away from the door,” I said.
She entered the bedroom.
She sat at the dressing table and I sat in a side chair.
Her hands were clasped tightly in her lap, fingers intertwined. Her upper arms were drawn tightly against her.
“You dressed in the dark,” I said.
She looked down.
She looked at me. She said, “He travels to Cologne on Monday.”
“He told you the details?”
“Yes. Of course. He didn’t think I’d make that fuss in public.”
“Did that compromise his trust?”
“I don’t know for certain. I don’t think so.”
“It was worth trying,” I said. “You did well. And Monday to Cologne is very good information.”
Her hands unclasped, her arms fell away from her lap. Her tension drained instantly, completely away, a tension I’d assumed was over her secret visit to my room under the sleeping nose of Albert and all the rest of the German secret service at the Adlon. In fact, she was tense because she was afraid I’d disapprove of her handling of his declared trip. I’d applauded. So all was right in her world.
Now she had to make a swift exit.
But I did need to speak with her privately, and here she was.
“Are you sure you weren’t seen?” I said.
“It’s three in the morning,” she said.
“Mother . . .”
“I know. I know. I’m sorry. But I was careful. I came up the stairs. I saw no one.”
“It’s not just strangers I’m worried about,” I said. I nodded at her skewed buttons and holes. Dressing in the dark meant one thing. “Did you come from his room?”
She didn’t answer.
“You did,” I said.
She stayed silent.
“How did you expect to get back in?”
She shrugged a so-what shrug.
I repeated the question with a tilt of my head.
“I have a key,” she said.
“You took his?”
“No. That would be risky.”
I clucked at this.
“I have one of my own,” she said.
Of course.
“This whole complication is dangerous for us,” I said.
“‘O time, thou must untangle this, not I,’” she said. “‘It is too hard a knot for me to untie.’”
Whenever she began to speak with lines from her favorite roles—this one Viola from Twelfth Night—I knew the topic would drag on. But this conversation was not worth the clock tick of risk. I needed to say the critical thing quickly.
“Look,” I said. “This guy Albert Einstein may have some crucial information. He’s a Shakespeare fan. He may be an Isabel Cobb fan as well. Your man Barnowsky may know him. I need for you to see Einstein and I need to go with you and we need to do this as soon as possible. Before your Albert heads for Cologne.”
I was just trying to keep the Alberts straight. Mostly. But she played the phrase big, to tweak my nosiness. “My Albert hates that man,” she said. “If he found out . . .”
“He won’t. You won’t let that happen. It’s worth the risk.”
She looked down again.
She started to unbutton her blouse.
“Look away,” she said. “I need to fix this.”
I rose and turned my back on her. I walked to the bed and I sat down on the edge, very near the night table.
“He has a dinner tomorrow night,” she said. “At the Ministry of War. He’s talking that openly to me.”
“He didn’t want you on his arm?”
She didn’t reply.
I had to be careful how I spoke of him.
She cursed low. About the buttons.
I rephrased. “You’re not going?”
“I tried,” she said. “Boys only. You should come to the theater around seven. I’ll see about the other Albert.”
And from the dark at the far of end of the sitting room came four swift, hard knocks at the door.
I jumped up.
The following silence rang in the room. Only briefly.
Another two knocks. And Stockman’s voice. “Josef.”
I turned to Mother, who had succeeded merely in totally unbuttoning her shirtwaist, exposing a lacy vest brassiere.
She was wide-eyed. Her hands had
fallen straight down at her sides.
I put my forefinger to my lips.
I looked in the direction of the door.
Two more knocks, louder still. “Josef,” he said, in English. “I’m sorry, but I must come in.”
I thought of the Mauser.
I turned to the night stand.
No acceptable solution presented itself in the maelstrom of my brain that involved my pistol and this hotel room at the Adlon in the middle of the night. I figured it would be best not to have that option.
“Sir Albert?” I called. “Is that you?”
“Yes.”
“Give me a moment.”
I looked at Mother.
She was standing now. I wondered if she’d played this scene before in one of those theatrical tour hotels.
She blew me a kiss, with a death mask face.
I breathed deep and stepped through the bedroom door, closing it behind me.
I turned to the desk, found the table lamp, and switched it on.
I moved to the suite door.
I looked through the peep hole and reared back. He was standing very near.
His hands were not in sight. But if he was holding a weapon, surely he’d have stepped back a little so he could at least raise his arm in preparation.
I opened the door.
Stockman had dressed in haste and only partially: his black evening suit trousers with a braid stripe; his white shirt, properly buttoned, but no collar.
At his side, fisted in his left hand, was Mother’s apricot scarf.
I’d already observed that Albert was right-handed. To carry this in his off-hand was a conscious act. Was he keeping his pistol hand free?
“May I come in, old man?” he said.
A very friendly phrasing and tone for a presumptuous request at this hour.
Stockman felt very dangerous to me.
But the slightest hesitation would only make him more suspicious.
I stepped back instantly, opening the door wide.
“Of course,” I said.
He stepped in.
I watched his eyes. He rapidly checked every corner of the room. His gaze lingered for a beat on the closed bedroom door.
I shut the suite door behind him.
“Drink?” I said. “The Adlon attendant has kept the side table nicely stocked.”
“No thanks,” he said.
We were standing in the middle of the floor.
“Would you like to sit?” I motioned to the divan and the chair.
The Empire of Night: A Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thriller Page 23