The Empire of Night: A Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thriller

by Robert Olen Butler

  “This is Doctor Albert Einstein,” Mother said.

  He offered his hand with my name on his lips even before she could formally announce it. “Mr. Hunter. I am very pleased to meet you.” He spoke in English that was proper but German-accented as heavily as if by a ham actor.

  I thought I saw his eyes flick toward my saber scar. But if so, it was so quick I could not say for sure.

  Mother said, “I told the professor that you’re working on a story about the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute and you need to speak with him.”

  “I am pleased to assist you from the urging of Madam Cobb,” Einstein said. “She is pressing boldly outward our boundary of understanding. She tries to do for the immense William Shakespeare what a great physicist tries to do for the physical universe. So I comply with anything she asks.”

  He laughed that high, ringing laugh.

  Mother laughed with him. Not the bray. His overriding laugh made hers harder to read, but I looked at her and her eyes were locked on him in appreciation.

  “The story is narrower than the Institute,” I said in German. “And I ask only to more deeply understand what I already know. You and your words will not appear in any newspaper. I ask for something perhaps like one scientist objectively testing another’s work.”

  He brightened at my analogy, at my understanding of the process of scientific discovery. He laughed again. “A peer review,” he said.

  “Forgive us for speaking German, Madam Cobb,” I said.

  “Not at all,” she said. “I want you two to communicate fully.”

  “As shall you and I,” Einstein said, in English, turning to her. “Over some little food.”

  “Yes, Professor,” she said. “I look forward to learning from you.” And to me: “When you and the professor have finished, he and I will dine nearby.”

  Perhaps I showed a glint of concern in my face.

  She said, “You will recall that our previously intended companion tonight is dining at the Ministry.”

  “I do recall that,” I said.

  She rose. “I’ll leave the two of you alone so you can speak German without regret.”

  “You need not go, dear lady,” Einstein said.

  “I have to consult for a time with my director. I won’t go far.”

  Einstein took up her hand and bowed over it and kissed it.

  Mother shot me a look as if she blamed me for not regularly doing this myself.

  As her physicist rose from her hand, he said, quite ardently, “Soll ich dich einem Sommertag vergleichen?”

  And she shot me another look, this one approximately You see how they adore me? This look seemed unrelated to any apparent understanding of the words, though she was certainly correct about its intent.

  She swooped from the room and the door clicked shut.

  I said to Einstein, returning to German, as he’d just used with her, “You only asked to compare her. Are you saving the comparison itself?”

  He laughed.

  He had quoted Shakespeare’s sonnet to her. Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

  “I am afraid,” he said, “that I cannot remember the comparison. Only the request.”

  “Thou art more lovely and more temperate,” I said. Er ist wie du so lieblich nicht und lind.

  “I am indebted to you,” Einstein said. “I shall finish the verse over dinner. Do you think she will understand?”

  “She’ll understand, all right,” I said. “If not the words, certainly the intent.”

  He beamed and I smiled in return. I managed only a wan smile, however, as I felt once again, inevitably, inextricably—perhaps even cosmologically—drawn into my mother’s flirtations and wooings and beyond.

  Though I expected this Albert’s intent was no more than courtly flirtation.

  Einstein and I sat down on the two chairs before Isabel Cobb’s makeup mirrors.

  “May I?” he said, lifting his pipe.

  “Of course,” I said.

  He drew out a box of matches from the side pocket of his tweed jacket, and as he did, he glanced at me. Brief though it was, I was certain this time that the glance had sought out my scar.

  I knew Einstein had once abandoned Germany. I said, “My father exiled our family from this country, but he sent me back to Heidelberg for an education. When I was young and stupid,” I said.

  He smiled. “That is the state in which we all enter university,” he said.

  He tamped his tobacco with his thumb and lit the bowl and drew at it and lit again and finally was producing sufficient smoke for me to speak.

  I knew he’d exiled himself, and I knew his politics. I tapped into them at once. I said, “I am writing for a syndicate of newspapers in the United States. These are newspapers whose readers are largely German-Americans. The gentleman Madam Cobb and I just referred to is an English baron with deep roots in Germany. Very deep roots. He feels the German cause is misunderstood in my country. He feels Germany is justified in this war. More than justified. Righteous. He wants me to write a story that will help advance that theory in America.”

  Einstein had just taken in a deep draw of his tobacco, and he turned his head a little away and blew the smoke to the mirrors. He turned back to me. Slowly now. The bright energy in him was gone.

  He lowered his pipe.

  A good reporter makes every person he questions think that whatever they say will be welcomed by a sympathetic ear, will be heard as true and persuasive and wise. Not only was this easy to do with Albert Einstein, it was a great relief. I’d been working in this way far too long and unrelievedly with Albert Stockman.

  I said, “I have learned that you are someone whose sensibilities and values I might trust. Though given the people I’ve been involved with, I learned this about you indirectly, like an experiment where you cannot observe a thing directly but must infer it from its effects.”

  In spite of his sudden gravity, Einstein smiled at this.

  “The English gentleman is named Albert Stockman. Baron Stockman is subtle in his approach. The article, as he has conceived it, will focus entirely on the great humanitarian accomplishments of your colleague Doctor Fritz Haber. I am to write exclusively and glowingly about the Haber Process feeding the hungry of the world.”

  I paused.

  Einstein looked at his pipe, thinking, no doubt, to draw from it.

  I said, “I will never quote you, Professor. But I feel as if things are going on that I need to know, and if I don’t know them, I’ll become part of a terrible deception.”

  Einstein stared at his pipe a few moments more and then gently placed it on the makeup table, watching it all the way.

  He lifted his eyes from the pipe but did not move them to me.

  I turned my head to the mirror.

  We looked at each other there.

  He was silent still.

  We continued to look at each other, our directness an illusion, bent together by the silvered surface.

  His silence worried me. I decided to lead him a little. I said, “I realize that the same process produces explosives. Without limit.”

  The face in the mirror looked away.

  As did I.

  And so our eyes met directly.

  “Your intuition is correct, Mr. Hunter,” he said.

  He did not let go of my gaze but he searched for words. I had to be patient now. I held very still.

  “I am indebted to Professor Haber,” he said. “He brought me to the Institute. I have freedom here.”

  He stopped.

  I wanted badly to challenge any sense of loyalty he might have to Haber. Did he know how Haber spoke of him? But I waited.

  Einstein said, “Do you like an irony? At this institute that bears the Kaiser’s name, within a country and a political system and a philosophy that reserves its right to repress whatever freedoms it chooses and that nurtures a violent disdain for the fundamental freedoms of anyone not of their nation, I am nonetheless free to think about what matters most.
I suppose the deepest workings of the physical universe do not seem to them a threat.”

  He stopped once more.

  I held very still.

  And then he said, “This does not have to do with the Haber-Bosch Process. This does not have to do with explosives. All of that is a matter for the industrialists now.”

  He looked at his pipe, put his hand upon it. He said, “Fritz Haber has an excellent brain. But his nationalism is contemptible. He does not need a brain for that. The spinal cord would be sufficient.”

  His hand returned to his lap. His eyes returned to me.

  He said, “You know what happened in France in April.”

  It took me only a moment. “Ypres.”

  “Yes.”

  “The German gas attack.”

  “Chlorine gas,” he said. “A persuasive case could be made for the intrinsic moral superiority of physics over chemistry, judging them by their factors of risk, by the relative difficulty or ease of their doing terrible harm to humanity.”

  He picked up his pipe now and brought it to his mouth.

  My mind at this moment was suddenly like those Allied troops in the trench as the first pale-green cloud of chlorine gas drifted toward them across no-man’s-land. They knew this looked bad. But they had not yet been overwhelmed. They waited.

  I waited.

  He shrugged. “Ah, but no doubt physics will catch up someday. Humans will always find a way to pervert the beauty of knowledge. Our technology will soon exceed our humanity. No. I misspeak. It has done so already.”

  Einstein drew in vain on his pipe. He took it from his mouth and looked at it. And as if making this observation to the object in his hand, he said, “Fritz Haber was responsible for the beginning of modern chemical warfare. This is his science now. This is who he has become.”

  My own breath stopped. Briefly. I would put this all together later. Right now I had to focus on listening.

  Einstein removed his matches once more and relit his pipe. “Do you know his wife committed suicide?”

  “I heard.”

  “Do you know why?”

  “I do not.”

  “She was herself deeply schooled in chemistry. She attained a doctorate degree in chemistry at the University of Breslau. She knew enough to adore Fritz. And enough eventually to despise him. She took her own life shortly after that unleashing of the beast in April in France. Against her pleadings, Fritz went to Ypres to personally observe the event. He returned exhilarated, unhappy only that the fools in command failed to understand this great opportunity. That they failed to have sufficient forces to take full advantage of the inevitable break in the front lines. Fritz thinks Germany could have won the war from this single, dramatic event if the military had been bolder.”

  Einstein paused. Then he shook his head, very slowly. “For him to think like that, more brutally than the professional brutes. Oh how he and I have argued. So much so that there is nothing for it now but to be silent before him, before the madness. He proposes that making wars more monumentally cruel will shorten their duration. And he makes the proposition to me that in war, death is death. If it is by the suffering of the eyes and the lungs and the brain and the heart from chemistry, it is no different than the suffering of limbs and head and torso from metallurgy.”

  Einstein drew in a deep draft of pipe smoke, taking it even into his lungs. He let it out slowly. And he said, “Clara put a bullet in her brain to advance the theory that Fritz was wrong.”

  We let the silence sit between us for a time.

  I allowed myself to take a shallow breath or two of the toxic reality: Stockman and Haber were working together on a poison gas attack.

  Einstein was considering Clara’s theory. He said, “The isolated argument Fritz makes about the two modes of death is perhaps, in some ways, sound. Shrapnel and bullets and fire could be seen as already maximal in brutality. But he leaps to a ridiculous conclusion.”

  His next silence brought a calm draw on the pipe. He’d said all that he assumed he needed to say.

  I needed more.

  I said, “So Doctor Haber is no longer in the business of feeding the hungry. But his present business. How does it go?”

  “I am no chemist,” he said. “He and I collide at the Institute and interact and he always must tell me some little thing or other. I am afraid that in his mind my listening to him co-opts me into his work. But from respect to him personally, and from futility, I simply listen. He has moved beyond chlorine gas to phosgene. Phosgene is more toxic than chlorine. And it causes less coughing and so remains unexpelled from the lungs. He is quite proud.”

  My mind worked and worked at all this, even as I kept my attention on Einstein’s words.

  But I had to ask the right questions.

  And I thought of the box in the export office.

  “Has he spoken of bombs?” I said.

  Einstein hesitated. He thought.

  “Not artillery,” I said. “Something that a Zeppelin might deliver.”

  He straightened abruptly. “More chemistry,” he said. “Those infernal machines filled with a chemist’s gas.”

  “Did he say anything?”

  “Not that I can recall.”

  “In the light of Doctor Haber’s philosophy of war, would an aerial bomb be an advance?”

  He thought for a moment. “I am no military man.”

  “Just the science of it.”

  “Of course,” he said. “The same wind sufficient to carry the poisonous gas across a battlefield also blows the gas quickly away. A bomb would greatly reduce the force of a necessary wind to a level just sufficient to stir things about.”

  “Would such a bomb need a special design? Would any bomb do?”

  Einstein puffed briefly at his pipe, considering this, his brightness returning a bit, I presumed in the pure scientific puzzle of it. “Not any bomb,” he said. “Certainly not. The perfect bomb would perhaps be something of a challenge. As I understand it, phosgene and similar gases boil at relatively low atmospheric temperatures, below the present summer temperature, for instance. So they will be transformed from the liquid inside the bomb to the killing gas immediately upon exposure to the air. However, there is the matter of the bursting charge. This would have to be carefully managed so that the shell will burst open but not, as well, consume the gas too quickly at the point of impact, which would greatly reduce the footprint of toxicity. And also so that the shell will not bury its striking end in the ground, trapping much of the liquid there unvaporized. The bomb maker would have to be very clever.”

  He paused, hearing his own implicit admiration. He clarified: “That is to say despicably clever.”

  “What would Doctor Haber see as the right conditions for an attack?”

  In spite of the moment of self-awareness, Einstein leaned forward, bright again. “It would be at night, with cloud cover, to minimize the daylight-warmed ground from creating upward currents of air. These would otherwise quickly dissipate the gas.”

  I too found myself on the edge of my chair. I sat back.

  I felt I had heard enough.

  But Einstein added, “And of course the best target would be a large city. A nighttime crowd. The streets of a city would further temper the upward currents, and the buildings would tunnel any movement of air to its victims. The gas would linger to kill.”

  At this, my mind asked to shut down. His mind seemed to rear back from itself, abruptly alarmed at its own cleverness in working out this attack as a hypothetical.

  He said, softly, “You see how we are all vulnerable.”

  41

  Einstein and I made our good-byes and I rose and he rose and we shook hands. I offered to find Madam Cobb and I urged him to wait, as I knew where to locate her in the theater. He thanked me and sat down and I stepped out of the dressing room and softly clicked the door closed behind me.

  I turned to head along the corridor to the auditorium.

  Mother was standing a few paces aw
ay, alone, leaning against the wall and smoking a cigarette. She looked at me and hastily dropped the cigarette to the floor and tapped it out with the toe of her shoe.

  I approached her.

  We spoke low.

  “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen you smoke,” I said.

  “It’s been a long time since you’ve seen me frightened.”

  “Are you?”

  “Yes.”

  She said no more than that in answer to what she would usually take to be a juicy theatrical cue line. I believed her.

  “What is it?” I said.

  “I’m going with him.”

  “Stockman?”

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “Monday morning. Early. He asked me to go with the most tender of entreaties. Albert the vulnerable, the tortured, the needy. Then he swore me to secrecy with a whispered vehemence that scared the living bejabbers out of me.”

  I didn’t respond at once. I tried to figure out how much I should tell her, in her present state, of my own recent fright. For fright it was quickly becoming. My mind had only just begun to work out all the implications of what Einstein had told me. Stockman was heading south to somehow expedite an aerial poison gas attack. And thinking this far now, I thought to add against London.

  “He’s not going to invite you,” Mother said.

  “He told you that?”

  “Yes. I’m to play the Grande Dame to Victor and to you. The story is that I’m going away alone for a few days to a spa. I must. I’m not telling you where.”

  “Will Barnowsky tolerate that?”

  “I’m ill. I need to go away for a time. He’ll tolerate it. We’re still two weeks from opening. I’m doing swell, my son. Swell. Let a stand-in rehearse with these locals. I can be ill for days and still play Hamlet in my sleep. In two languages? Not a problem for Isabel Cobb. You know I can do anything on a stage. Anything I want. My mind. My will. My heart. My mind. Did I mention my mind? It can do anything.”

  Abruptly she stopped speaking.

  She heard herself. “What the hell was that little monologue all about?” she said. “That doesn’t sound good.”

  “You’ll be fine,” I said. “The third act has begun in our play. That’s all.”