“Yes, my darling. Yes. You’re right.”
I reached under my coat and into the small of my back and I drew my pocket Mauser from its holster. I brought it out before her. Too quickly. She drew a sharp, lifting, stiffening breath and reared back.
“I want you to take this,” I said.
“Is it necessary?”
“You tell me. It’s to calm your fear.”
She looked at it.
“Do you know how to use it?” I asked.
“Don’t you remember my Lydia Justice in A Woman Wronged?”
I didn’t. “Do you know how many plays I’ve seen you in?”
“Well, I learned to shoot for Lydia. And though on stage they were blanks, they were precisely shot.”
“Fine.” I offered the pistol.
She waved it away. “Do you actually think I could kill him?”
I’d even asked myself the same question not too long ago. The last ten minutes had given me my answer, I realized. I thought again to tell her about the gas. But after that one brief, clear-headed admission of her fear, she’d been thrashing around to deal with it in every way but honest. These much higher stakes might only frighten her more, and she could inadvertently betray herself to Stockman. She needed to know, but not now.
“You may not approve,” she said. “You may not believe me. He may have terrible flaws. But I love him.”
I clamped my mouth tightly shut and looked away.
She read the gesture. Partially. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll stop him. I know I have to stop him from whatever it is we’re all worried about. I’ll bring him down. But that’s all I can do. There is no possible circumstance where I’d shoot him to death.”
I said, “People other than Stockman could be a danger to you.”
I offered my Mauser once more.
She looked at it.
“Believe me,” I said, quite softly. “There are things we can’t anticipate.”
She took a deep breath.
She took the pistol from my hand.
She held it like she knew what to do with it. Like she was the wronged Lydia Justice six nights and two matinees a week.
42
Jeremy was waiting for me outside the Hotel Baden. He was a shadow and a flaring red tip of a cigarette and a plume of streetlight-gathering smoke from under a linden tree in the median. I saw him at once as I got out of the taxi.
I went to him.
“What are you smoking?” I said.
“Murads,” he said.
“Close enough,” I said. “I’m out.”
He gave me one and a light.
“I have a feeling you know something,” Jeremy said.
“You develop that intuition in the ring?”
“Doubt if it’s intuition. You’re telegraphing your punch.”
“They call it the lead in my other line of work,” I said. “Sir Albert Stockman, a member of the British Parliament, is masterminding a nighttime Zeppelin attack on London, employing a bomb of his own design filled with a deadly gas called phosgene. It will target civilians with the purpose of heralding enough terror to force a quick end of the war in favor of Germany.”
That was the lead of our story.
I let it sit in him for a moment.
He took a deep drag on his Murad.
“It’s all pieced together and circumstantial,” I said. “But that’s the business we’re in. I’d bet my bankroll on it.”
“I believe you’d win,” Jeremy said.
“We have every reason to assume the attack will take place next week. And Stockman will try to put his own personal stamp on it somehow. He sees himself as a great German hero in the making.”
“With the help of Colonel Max Hermann Bauer,” Jeremy said. “What I’ve been told about him fits the puzzle. Last month Bauer was appointed chief of Section One in the German Department of the General Staff. His main task is to identify and test new weapons and tactics. Even before the official posting, he was the man who got Haber’s gas to the front lines at Ypres.”
“So he’s being instrumental again.”
“Bauer’s also a political maverick,” Jeremy said. “Despises both General Falkenhayn and Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg.”
“Then why did Falkenhayn promote him?”
“He probably figures shunting Bauer to new weapons keeps him on the fringe. So Bauer would be keen to counterpunch.”
Jeremy let me finish the thought. “With a surprise strike by a new weapon that could win the war.”
“Just so.”
“He’d need a powerful buddy to get a Zepp to do his bidding.”
“Erich Ludendorff would do,” Jeremy said. “Bauer got his weapons credentials in artillery. He had a hand in the general’s big-gun victory at Liège after the rest of the German command ate crow for two weeks at the start of the war. He and General Ludendorff are known to be very close.”
“Our Albert would be drawn to a maverick,” I said. “He was sharply critical of the Kaiser this morning.”
“Most of the German high command is critical of the Kaiser.”
“Willie’s soft on the Brits.”
Jeremy nodded. “Notwithstanding, he’s duly tough after the fact. He never dreamed his U-boats would catch a target like the Lusitania. No one really did. But he was keenly vigorous in defense of its sinking.”
“So Bauer and Stockman figure they can safely act on their own, as long as they pull it off.”
“If you listen to Germans argue with each other,” Jeremy said, “no one is ever wrong about anything. Collectively too. If the poison gas bomb goes off and England effectively suffers, then the High Command certainly was right all along. Every one of them, from the Kaiser on down.”
“This makes sense of the tower at Stockman House,” I said. “The wind studies. They were thinking about poison gas in British streets.”
“My other bit fits as well,” Jeremy said. “I decided FVFB had to be comparable to Krupp. I just couldn’t sort things out in my head from the companies I knew. So I consulted the Berlin Stock Exchange. Farbenfabriken Vormals Friedrich Bayer. Pharmaceuticals. Dyes. Chemicals.”
“I think we know what they make in Kalk,” I said.
“Did Madam Cobb persuade Stockman to let her go along?”
“I persuaded him on her behalf, I think.”
“And you?”
“Not invited.”
“We need to invite ourselves,” Jeremy said.
At this, we smoked for a few moments.
Across the street was the hotel where another identity awaited me behind the baseboards of a wardrobe. Colonel Klaus von Wolfinger. I’d already shaved for him.
“Time to bluff,” I said.
“This is good advice.”
“It was yours.”
“I am never wrong,” he said.
“Since you’re so German, can your people fit you out as an officer? We’re talking about getting very close to an army base.”
“Yes.”
“Trask has me set up as a colonel attached to the Foreign Office,” I said. “Secret service.”
“Your uniform complete?”
“The only officer headgear I could pack was a crusher,” I said. “Can you get me a peaked field cap?”
“Size, if I have a choice?”
“Seven, British,” I said.
“When does Stockman leave?”
“In about thirty-six hours.”
“With that box, they have to be driving.”
“As much as I’d relish the irony,” I said, “I don’t think your Ford will pass for a German staff car.”
“I can arrange a car. But the people I draw on for support are all of them around Berlin. In Spich we’ll be on our own. Any special needs you can anticipate?”
“In other words, what’s our plan,” I said.
“In other words.”
I thought of what we knew about Albert and about Spich and about his wooden crate. What the like
lihoods were.
Jeremy said, “I suppose the argument could be made that we simply need a bullet. For Stockman.”
I shook my head no. “We let the boxes go in order to keep us in the game. And because those presumed prototypes are replaceable. The plans are somewhere. Several somewheres, I’m sure. But Albert’s replaceable too, at this point. His work is done. The Zepps and the gas and the shell design already exist. What you learned about Bauer is the thing. We need to interfere in a striking enough way to prevent the maverick attack and also openly discredit the attempt. We need to get the half-British Kaiser’s attention. The only cruelty he’ll disavow is failed cruelty.”
Jeremy nodded. “So what do you need?”
I was improvising now. Without a real plan. But from the realities I’d just voiced, there was a basic act that seemed to be called for. Indeed, I could think of no other.
I said, “I don’t know exactly how to employ it, without our knowing Spich, but I think we need a bomb of our own. A portable one.”
He thought a moment. About either what I had in mind or how to get one.
In case it was the former, I said, “If we can blow up the Zepp with Stockman’s untested shell armed, either on the ground or very shortly into the flight, we can spectacularly poison an air base inside the Fatherland. The whole maverick plan will come out and look bad.”
“I can arrange this,” Jeremy said.
“And a dispatch case to fit the thing,” I said. “I’d need to carry it close.”
He dropped half his cigarette at his feet and stubbed it out. “I’ll pick you up tomorrow at six. Here at the Baden. Dress like you are now and bring what you need for the south.”
Jeremy pulled his pack of Murads from his coat pocket. He handed them to me. “In case you can’t find Turkish tobacco in the hotel.”
I took them. “Thanks.”
Maybe it was the moment of leave-taking after a serious talk that suddenly brought this to mind, but I thought of Stockman in the Adlon bar.
I said, “That drink I had with Albert the first night in Berlin. He criticized the Zeppelins for bringing only isolated disruptions. That’s what I was focusing on. But it was his other criticism that really mattered. Commonplace.”
“This is anything but that,” Jeremy said.
“Stockman is a terrorist,” I said.
And I was letting him sleep with my mother.
43
When I got back to the Adlon, there was a note waiting for me, in a sealed hotel envelope slipped under the door. My mother had simply written Hotel Alten-Forst. Spich. Its brevity, its mode of delivery, the risks and suspicions of yesterday early morning, her place now, near the center of Stockman’s plans, my exclusion from those plans: all this meant I should not—dared not—see her again before the time of my rendezvous with Jeremy.
Would I have tried to talk her out of all this? I wished I’d told her about the poison gas. But maybe it was better she didn’t know. She was committed to her role. The most dangerous thing for her now would be to try to withdraw from him. Still. As a woman, would she continue to love a known terrorist? As a son, how could there be even a match-spark of doubt about the answer to that? But there was.
Spich.
I’d brought my Gladstone to the Adlon. I gathered the things I needed for travel and packed them. I stepped off the elevator and paused at the mezzanine balustrade and looked for Herr Wagner.
He’d kept his distance since I’d confronted him in this very spot, but I didn’t want the Gladstone to set off any alarms in his head. He was standing just beyond the reception lounge, in front of the Palm Court. He was watching someone cross the lobby. I followed his gaze to a small man, dressed in a dark, three-piece suit. A Far East Asian. Wagner openly observed the man as he marched with clear and oblivious purpose into the Palm Court. Wagner turned as if to follow.
I beat it quick down the stairway but emerged cautiously from behind the reception desk. Wagner was indeed following the Asian man, out the doors to the Goethe Garden. I strode away in the other direction, across the lobby and the vestibule platform, and then I was spinning through the revolving door onto Unter den Linden, feeling happier with each step to be leaving the Adlon behind.
I returned to the Hotel Baden and stopped inside the front door and asked the Hausmeister where Spich was. He touched the tip of his nose in thought and then led me to the front desk and a book of maps.
Kalk was just across the Rhine from Cologne; Spich was just nine miles farther south.
When I stepped into Jeremy’s Ford in front of the hotel the next evening, Spich was still nagging at me in vague familiarity.
As soon as I’d closed the door, Jeremy throttled up the T and we drove off, and he said, “I didn’t mean to be mysterious last night. I’m taking you to my mother’s house in Spandau.”
“I promise not to argue with her about the Kaiser,” I said.
“You’d lose anyway,” he said.
“What do you know about the town of Spich?” I said.
He glanced at me and then back to the street ahead. “It’s a major army Zeppelin base.”
Of course.
I told him about Isabel Cobb’s note.
He glanced my way again. But he made no immediate remark.
He was thinking.
I was thinking. If Stockman was taking Mother along to share his triumph, then the choice of hotel was significant. It was in tiny Spich, not urbane Cologne. It was the hotel nearest the Zeppelin’s ascent on the heroic day. She was going to be part of that. But the other witnesses—be they press or just a few influential people, including the greatest actress and most fascinating paramour in the world—these witnesses would hardly be present at the start of a secret military mission. The successful return would be another matter. And in that event, Stockman’s standing as a hero would be greatly diminished if he was simply one of the crowd, cheering. Strategic advice and technological creativity and a place in the bedazzled crowd were not quite the stuff of statues in the Tiergarten. Not for the leading man. I bet he’d talked his way onto the Zepp for this thing. He was planning to step down from the gondola triumphant.
I looked at Jeremy. He sensed it. He looked at me.
“He’s going up with the gas bag,” I said.
It took him only one breath of thought. “Of course.”
We kept quiet now as we drove through the linden forests of the Tiergarten, emerged on the broad central boulevard of Charlottenburg, and then passed into the villa colony of Westend. A few minutes later, with the northern sky striated in stack smoke from the arms factories and the western sky rimmed with the conifers of the Spandauer Stadtforst, we crossed the Charlottenburg Bridge into the narrow streets of Spandau city-center.
Jeremy’s family was or had been well-to-do. His mother lived on Hohenzollern-Strasse in a stretch of very nice, scaled-down villas. Her two-storey house was stucco-finished with the window moldings cut into the rough stone in the German classic style. The place sat on an acre or a little more, thick with pine and birch. A beaten-gravel drive curved behind the house where we now parked the Ford.
Jeremy’s mother emerged onto a flagstone veranda to greet us.
He stepped in front of me and bent to her and they hugged. Then he moved aside and she extended her hand and we shook. She was small and as sinewy-solid as corded wire. She had the grip of a retired bantamweight who once could throw a hell of a right cross.
“Welcome to our home, Herr Hunter,” she said, her German formal in person as well, leaving no trillable r untrilled.
We went in and sat in her immaculate parlor, Jeremy and I on side-by-side matching wing chairs covered in unpadded leather and she on a plank chair before us with a cut-out heart floating behind her head. I imagined that she addressed her two sons on matters of motherly importance in this very setting. Her husband hung over the fireplace. I presumed it to be him. He was clean-shaven, a state far rarer in an earlier era, and I figured I could see his eyes in Jerem
y’s, though by this pose they would be the son’s eyes only as he danced into the center of the ring ready to do some damage. And this guy’s mouth was compressed hard, even as he sat for a portrait. A hard mouth and a harder gaze, such that it led me to recall: Jeremy’s only allusion to his father was a reference to his mother as a widow.
The mother rose now and moved to a vast ebonized walnut buffet whose upper panel was laid with marquetry hunting scenes of leaping horses and fleeing elk. From the buffet she served us tea and buttered bread and we sat and ate and she spoke ardently about the price of the butter—two mark fifty a pound—and feared it would soon go to three mark. She took care to blame the British and the French.
And later she fed us a dinner of boiled beef with horse radish sauce and Spätzle in her dining room on a heavy wood table with a vast, spotless linen cloth that demanded every bite I took be an act of desperate carefulness.
As we ate, she asked me a little about the articles I wrote in America on Germany’s virtues, but mostly she monologued, though with each bite of dinner she fell primly silent until her mouth was empty. Jeremy and I kept our own mouths closed while she chewed, digesting with our food each of her just completed segments of thought on such things as British iniquity and international ignorance and Wilhelmian inspiration and Bismarckian virtue, the breadth and depth of the latter winning, for the first chancellor of a unified Germany, a place at Martin Luther’s right hand in heaven.
All this transpired with still another portrait of her husband looking down on us, this time standing with hunting rifle in hand and a brace of dead rabbits beside him and a look on his face that suggested he was, here in the dining room, as disapproving of the rabbits as he was of his sons in the parlor.
This I figured I knew: Jeremy’s mother was a woman who not only acknowledged her son’s father but enshrined him, lived with him openly every day in every room. A woman who was never touched by any man but him. A woman who played only one role forever. Nevertheless, in spite of our obvious differences in father and mother, Jeremy and I had been catalyzed into who we were by heat and pressure from a single unifying principle that would elude even Albert Einstein.
The Empire of Night: A Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thriller Page 26