So we stopped at the side of the road, surrounded by cabbage fields, and we lowered the cloth top on the Mercedes. Let the Spich locals and the air base army men know that two high officers from Berlin had come to town. Let those boys start to talk; let them start bluffing themselves.
The main street of Spich ran about a quarter mile along the highway, which had lately turned east-west. We slowed to a crawl and made our way through, the houses and shops bright with whitewash and scarlet geraniums in window boxes. We turned local heads, all right—at cobbler and grocer, at butcher and inn—and the military heads turned, as well, a couple of enlisted men wearing undress uniforms, who snapped to at once when they saw us. They saluted. I returned the salute casually.
At the eastern end of the main street we approached a town square with a four-spout fountain in the middle and a cobbled market area and a tidy three-storey, dark wood and white stucco Rathaus, the town hall. As we circled the fountain, a staff car passed us, heading in the other direction—a camouflaged Horch phaeton—and I exchanged a very precise salute with what seemed to be another colonel, out and about in his Pickelhaube.
“I wonder if that was our man,” Jeremy said.
“I hope it was,” I said.
We’d reached Spich’s eastern-most cross street, Wald-Strasse. A sign urged us to turn left for the Hotel Alten-Forst. We did, and ahead was a great wall of pines, the southern edge of the Alten Forest, and notched into the trees was a clearing where the hotel sat, a white-stuccoed, hip-roofed building with two unequal wings joined in an L, the long wing at the rear, parallel with the line of trees. I twisted around to look down Wald-Strasse. South was flatland as far as I could see. The airship base was in that direction.
I turned back toward the forest.
Jeremy had slowed to a near stop.
Though we had not discussed it, I stated the obvious. “We’re not checking in there.”
I could not chance encountering Albert.
“Just reconnoitering,” Jeremy said.
“Even if they come straight here, we’ve got a good six hours on them,” I said.
Jeremy accelerated a little, and we approached the hotel, entering a circular driveway that curved around a tightly manicured lawn with a flower clock in reds and pinks and yellows, how time passed in a town where every window was studded with geraniums.
As the driveway bent back to run in front of the hotel, with the option of turning into its courtyard, we both focused on the settings of tables in a small, canopied Biergarten. We rolled on past and completed the circuit, and we headed back south.
Jeremy had noticed an inn on Wald-Strasse just north of the town square. The Boar’s Head. It had two upper stories above the street-level bar. We’d passed it as I’d been looking south. We stopped there and parked our Mercedes off the street in a side yard.
We entered the ground-floor saloon. In the thick afternoon dimness that pressed against our eyes and seemed the same in drinking joints the world over, a young man, who was no doubt on the cusp of conscription, was wiping the long zinc bar. He took one look at us, threw his rag aside, stood up straight, and faced us. His Adam’s apple bounced a couple of times. He was thinking to salute but was feeling unqualified and inadequate for the job. So instead, he turned sharply on his heel and beat it through a door at the back of the place.
A woman emerged. The young man’s mother, I supposed. She was wiping her hands, working kitchen and front-of-the-bar both, and I would’ve bet her husband, the boy’s father and boss of the inn, was off in the trenches already. She’d be running this place completely alone in a year or so, with husband and son in uniform, and she’d be waking in a sweat night after night, sure she’d lost them both.
Jeremy was speaking with her, as my subordinate, asking about rooms. She had only a single lodger on the second floor and the two other rooms were free there. Jeremy was about to engage them, but I intervened.
“And the third floor, madam?” I said.
She looked at me as if I’d leaped from the shadows.
“It is a longer climb, Colonel,” she said. Herr Oberst. She was flustered, as intimidated by rank as was her husband in a trench in France.
“Is anyone booked there?” I said.
“No, Colonel. It is empty.”
“How many rooms?”
“Three,” she said.
“We will rent them all,” I said. “And absolute privacy with them.”
“Yes sir,” she said.
The entrance was from the back garden of the inn. Jeremy and I climbed a tightly winding staircase and emerged in a musty corridor. He carried his Gladstone and also the canvas bag with the makings of our bomb.
Climbing, Jeremy asked, “Three rooms?”
“Our being at the inn instead of the hotel is suspicious,” I said. “Renting the floor explains we did it for privacy. Any rumors about that would even be useful.”
“Der Bluff,” he said.
“Der große Bluff,” I said.
The big bluff had begun.
46
Before I left him at his door I asked for the dispatch case I’d requested.
“I’ll bring it to you,” he said.
I moved off.
My room was high-ceilinged near the door but it followed the steep pitch of the roof so that I had to crouch to actually look out my window.
A man with too heavy a coat for the August afternoon was passing slowly by on the far side of the street. The coat was patched at the shoulder. His shoes were scuffed badly enough for me to notice the fact from this distance. As willfully costumed-up as all this seemed, he did not turn his face from the fountain square toward which he was headed, nor did he miss a step till he was gone from my sight.
A light knock at the door.
I opened it to Jeremy.
He handed me a russet leather vertical bag with a shoulder strap and a buckle fastener at the bottom of the weather flap.
“They will never see me without it,” I said.
He nodded.
If and when the time came to do something with our bomb, I would carry it while appearing to be only what I’d always been.
“That little beer garden at the hotel,” he said.
“I noticed it.”
“In three hours?”
“Good.”
We would rest. Then we would sit and nurse a few beers and wait to watch Stockman and my mother arrive. We had to know his vehicle. I had to know their room.
“Mufti or military?” Jeremy said.
“Military. Did Stockman ever lay eyes on you?”
“He did. A couple of times. But he’d catch me out only close up. In uniform, tucked away in the beer garden, we should be all right.”
So we each slept our three hours and then we settled in at a table under the Biergarten canopy at the Hotel Alten-Forst. We ate, we drank, slowly, and the sky darkened and the electric lights came on in the hotel. We were sitting across from each other, Jeremy with the driveway before him, I with my back to anyone arriving at the hotel and able to turn my face away at his nod.
The nod came a couple of hours into our wait.
I angled my face past Jeremy’s right shoulder, rendering myself unidentifiable to a passerby, but I moved my eyes sharply back toward his, watched him watching them. He tracked them past, and then he nodded at me again.
I looked out into the courtyard.
Albert’s broad, tweeded back. My mother’s darkly besilked body, her arm hooked in his. She seemed small. Very small. Had she always been this small? She could fill a stage. She seemed enormous on a stage. But tonight, as she pressed her body close to this man as they maundered toward the hotel doors, toward their room together, she seemed impossibly small.
I should have told her in Berlin. About the poison gas. I should have told her exactly what sort of man this was.
“I’ll watch the check-in,” Jeremy said, rising.
I rose too, swinging around to see the vehicles.
&nbs
p; Two Opel touring cars, their tops up.
“They were in the lead car,” Jeremy said. “He was driving. Just the two of them. But the car behind is with them.”
Even in the night, in the spill of the electric light, I could see the lead car’s deep red color. Dark-uniformed bellmen were pulling suitcases—mostly my mother’s—out of the vehicle.
The Opel behind was in camouflage. A burly man in feldgrau, wearing a peakless field cap, was taking up a place to stand as a barrier to the tonneau door.
“We know what’s in the back,” I said.
“They didn’t have time for Bayer. The thing is still empty.”
“Watch the wall of keys,” I said, turning my head a little bit toward him.
He slipped away to get me a room number.
I sat down in his chair, facing the automobiles.
The bellmen finished stacking a baggage trolley. One of them wheeled it up the courtyard while the other went to the red Opel, cranked it, and drove it off, heading for the parking area beside the hotel.
The guy in uniform guarding the camouflaged Opel remained at parade rest. Motionless. Waiting. Waiting for Stockman. Albert was going back out tonight.
You could bet he’d be heading for the poison gasworks in Kalk.
I looked out east, into the night sky.
The air was still. The sky was full of high overcast. The moon was down. Flying weather. The Zeppelin wouldn’t go tonight, not this late. But if this weather held, if it was the same across the channel, then soon.
A few minutes later, Jeremy arrived.
The mug in field gray was still standing guard, and Jeremy gave him a last look before turning his back to the driveway and sitting in the chair I’d occupied for the past few hours.
I leaned a little across the table. I said, low, “Our man is gassing up tonight.”
Jeremy nodded. He switched our steins, retrieving his own. Both of them still held some recently drawn beer.
He took a draft.
I didn’t.
Jeremy said, “Notwithstanding all the reasoning we’ve done, as much as we trust it, I should go watch a piece or two fit into place.”
He would follow to Kalk.
“Careful,” I said.
“I’ll wait ahead of them. Near Bayer. And then near the air base. Won’t try to go the distance.”
He rose.
There was one more thing. I figured he’d forgotten.
But before I could ask, he said, “Room 200.”
47
Not even ten minutes later Stockman strode past, and the guard snapped to attention at the sight of him. As Albert approached, the man opened the passenger door. He stepped back as if to wait, but Albert waved him on to start and drive the car. Albert stepped in and closed the door, but before he settled, he gave a single, focused glance into the darkness of the back seat.
They drove away.
A grinding took up in my chest. I was anxious to do this next thing. I was grateful for the chance, the only one I could expect to have in Spich. But I feared this. For reasons I would have been hard pressed to fully specify. It was enough to say it was about her.
I drained the rest of my beer.
Warm and flat.
I rose.
I put money down and I walked into the courtyard and through the hotel doors and into a lobby of chestnut paneling and mounted elk horns. Inside, I walked as if I knew something secret and damning about every turning head and they had better realize it and keep to themselves. The heads turned quickly away.
The Alten-Forst had an elevator and I stepped in. The operator snapped to, a boy who would likely be inducted alongside the innkeeper’s son sometime next spring.
I stepped off on the second floor and went down the dim corridor to the door at the end. Room 200.
I was in character now. I was the American spy Christopher Marlowe Cobb playing the German spy Klaus von Wolfinger. I would maintain that role-within-a-role for the next few minutes, if I possibly could, focusing just on those two layers and not the full set, not little Kit Cobb, Isabel Cobb’s forever-young son, playing Christopher Cobb the war correspondent playing that American spy playing that German spy. That was the grinding in me. Those four gears. Meshing now. Slipping now. Binding now.
I lifted my hand.
I knocked at the door. Sharply.
It yielded instantly, swinging a little away from its jamb.
It had been ajar.
I drew my Luger.
I pushed through the door and into the sitting room of a suite full of carved oak and leather furniture draped and stacked and strewn and be-vased with roses, dozens and dozens of roses, the place reeking of nostril-flaring sweetness, and in the midst of it Mother was rising up from a chair, still in her deep-purple silk evening dress, her head bare, her hair undone and tumbling down. And her hands were flying up and she was choking back a cry and she was wide-eyed from seeing, in this first burst of the sight of me, only my uniform and my pistol.
I stopped, lowering and holstering the Luger and whipping off my hat and saying, “Mother, it’s me.”
Her hands fell, her face twisted away. She slumped back into the chair.
I moved to her.
“Mother,” I said. “I’m sorry. The door. I thought something was wrong.”
I could see now that her face was wet, her eyes were red from weeping.
“It’s all right,” I said.
I kneeled before her, took her hand. The tears had long preceded my entry, I realized.
“What is it?” I said.
She was breathing heavily. She took her hand away from mine, pressed it to her throat.
She struggled to control her breath.
“I’m sorry I frightened you,” I said.
She waved this away.
I stayed bent to one knee. I waited. She snubbed a long breath into her body. She let it out as if it were smoke from a cigarette.
She lowered her face. Took another slow breath.
She lifted her face once more.
None of this felt like an act. The tears were real. They’d been shed alone.
“It’s all right,” she said. “I should have known it would be you . . . That uniform.”
“I had no choice,” I said.
She waved me silent once again.
Tears were still brimming from her eyes.
They catalyzed in me.
I stood up.
“What has he done?” I said, my tone going hard, going nearly fierce.
She pressed back a little in the chair. Snorted softly, as if in scorn.
She wasn’t answering.
She wasn’t looking at me.
“What?” I barked.
She lifted her face to me, lifted her hand, swept it to the side, indicating the room, the flowers. “He has done all of this.”
They were joyful tears. They were tears of goddamn love.
I backed a step off.
Two steps.
I made sure my Luger was seated properly in its holster. I thought of the suite door. I looked. I’d left it partly open. I turned and moved to it.
“Are you going?” she said.
I reached the door, simply closed it, as I had intended.
I stared at the closed door, putting space between myself and my mother, as I had also intended.
“You’ve always been like this,” she said. A rebuke.
I turned now to her, taking it slow, deliberately taking it slow. I would not alarm her. Not by my actions.
“I love roses,” she said. “Do you even know how much I love roses?”
I did. But she said it as if she knew the answer was no.
I said nothing.
“He does,” she said. “I count at least five different cultivars in this room. Bon Silene, the dark pink here behind me,” she said.
I said nothing.
“And Doctor Grill. Over there,” she said, pointing with a nod of her head. “Pink tinted with copper.”
“Exquisite,” she said.
With my second step she began to speak more rapidly.
“And Safrano. From the French for saffron. In its bud the color is the color of saffron.”
Even moving slowly I was frightening her.
“Four Season Damask,” she said. “And Veilchenblau. Can you believe it?”
I drew near.
“The nearest thing to a blue rose in this world. He found that for me. There are two dozen of those.”
I stopped before her.
She lifted her face. “How did he find it?”
I said nothing.
“Why did he find it?” She said this as if I should know the answer.
“Don’t you understand?” she said.
She seemed very small sitting there, my mother.
I crouched before her again, dropped to my knees so our eyes were level with each other.
“You must listen to me,” I said.
She drew her mouth tightly shut. She straightened at the spine.
“He is a bad man, Mother. More than what we’ve always known. Much more. Bad in ways he’s hidden from you.”
She said, very softly, “You would have said this of everyone who has loved me.”
“This is about Albert Stockman.”
“They never had a chance with you.”
“Mother, you need to listen now.”
She stopped.
“He has come here to make a Zeppelin raid,” I said.
She cut me off. “He’s restless being so passive in the defense of his people. We may not agree . . .”
“Shut up now and listen.” My hand did not move, would never have moved, no matter what, but I had the impulse to slap her across the face. For her own good. She would have done as much to me.
She reared back. The words were slap enough. I had her attention.
I said, “He will drop phosgene gas on London. Poison gas. Do you understand?”
Her face had gone blank.
“This is his plan,” I said. “His.”
I’d never seen her face blank. Not just her face holding inscrutably still, making it impossible to read. Blank.
I said, “He’s even built a special shell to hold the gas, to release it in the streets of London to kill as many as he can.”
The Empire of Night: A Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thriller Page 28