The Empire of Night: A Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thriller

by Robert Olen Butler

  Ziegler launched a beseeching hand into the airspace above the desk. “I have only responded to orders.”

  I nodded.

  He said, “Transmitted to me under the seal of the General Staff.”

  “I accept your innocently obedient role in this, Colonel. Otherwise, I would not be speaking to you like this. I am enlisting your help.”

  He withdrew his hand. Restacked both of them. He straightened as if sitting for a portrait. He was ready for further obedience. He was trained for this.

  I said, “General Falkenhayn was himself unaware of the details of this mission. Though I do not suggest treason.”

  Colonel Ziegler braced himself.

  “The Kaiser has certainly been unaware of the mission about to depart from Spich.”

  I could hear Ziegler’s breath catch in his chest.

  I said, “Though the officers in our High Command all yearn for victory over our enemies—and England is certainly the most heinous of these enemies—there is much dissension as to methods and targets. You are surely aware of this.”

  He nodded.

  “This is very difficult for loyal and obedient officers in the field,” I said. “Men such as yourself.”

  “I serve the Kaiser,” Ziegler said.

  “Just so,” I said. “And we all serve our shared blood. The blood of the German race.”

  “Germany above all,” he intoned. Deutschland über alles.

  I gave him a paternal smile.

  And then I made it vanish instantly. “This Englishman,” I said.

  The colonel’s eyes narrowed a little. Yes, this Englishman.

  “I do not suggest treason,” I said. “The man is of German forebears. Though he is a prominent man in the English government, he works secretly for our cause.”

  I let this sit for a brief moment in Ziegler.

  “Nevertheless,” I said. “His blood is not purely ours. Do you understand?”

  He did. He nodded.

  “Should not our trust for a special mission be pure?”

  One more beat to let the rhetorical question answer itself in his mind.

  “He must not fly, this Englishman,” I said. “Do you understand?”

  “Yes sir,” Ziegler said in his heel-clicking voice. “And this special bomb?”

  I flickered now. I’d made a snap decision back in Berlin, in Reinauer’s office. I’d compounded that decision later. To let this go forward. To sabotage Stockman’s intentions in the riskier way, with the mission launched, so as to draw full, failed, discredited attention to it at the highest levels of the government. With the Kaiser himself. Otherwise I would only briefly delay things. I still believed that.

  But the terrible moment I’d arranged was now upon me. The moment when I myself would order a poison gas attack on London.

  “The bomb and its mission will go forward,” I said.

  50

  “What would you have me do about the Englishman?” Colonel Ziegler asked.

  I had two tasks now. Planting the bomb was one. But first I had to get Stockman out of the way. I briefly considered using Ziegler to accomplish this. But the crucial thing was to keep Berlin ignorant. Short of having the commandant arrest Stockman and prevent him from any outside communication, I had to expect Bauer would quickly become involved in any change of plans.

  “I will take care of that, Colonel,” I said. “In due time. Meanwhile, you can serve the Kaiser and our country by speaking to no one about any of this. No one.”

  “Of course.”

  “I may even allow the Englishman to proceed for a time in ignorance of our suspicions.” I paused, leaned forward in my chair. And I added, “So we may be sure there are no matters of treason involved. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes sir,” he said.

  “If there are, then we must determine how far the crimes extend. Both up the chain of command and down.”

  “Yes sir,” he said, his voice gone tight. It was best to let him continue to worry about his own behavior.

  Which he began at once to defend by going on the offensive, good officer that he was. He said, “May I say, Colonel, that I am relieved this man will not fly with our brave crew?”

  “Yes, Colonel, you may say that.”

  “We choose to carry no parachutes, even though our airship has fixed launching hooks for the latest Paulus model. But each chute weighs fifteen kilos. We carry more bombs instead. And the men scorn even the temptation. If they cannot save their ship, they prefer to perish with it. But this man insisted on having a parachute.”

  I thought how this was Stockman, all right. He admired my Schmiss. He wanted to fight the war against England somehow. But his satisfaction was to have me shave and so to share the honor vicariously. And his fight was to sneak in and dose them with poison. Of course he’d figure out how to save his own skin.

  “Just so,” I said. “He is English.” That was for Ziegler’s consumption, but in my head: Just so. This is the man my mother loves. Another professional pretender. “Tell me, Colonel, what arrangement did you make with him last night? For his flight.”

  “We are ready each day,” Ziegler said. “We await our final weather information. This comes to us by telegraph at about three o’clock each afternoon. If the weather seems favorable, I will contact him at his hotel.”

  Even as I improvised along now, new challenges were presenting themselves. The weather. As far as I knew, the weather today looked good for the mission. But I had no idea what it was in England, which was the crucial question. And the weather could quickly change, could stop the mission. If I eliminated Stockman and then the flight was suddenly canceled, his fate would quickly come to light—surely before the next opportunity for the mission to fly—and my only chance to expose the poison gas strategy in a bad light to Berlin would be lost.

  Ziegler said, “We must be in the air by five to arrive in London at the target hour.”

  Another problem. Whenever I’d visualized planting the bomb on the Zeppelin, my mind had seen it as nighttime. But of course it couldn’t be night. The flight to London was upward of five hours. I had to do my work in broad daylight.

  Ziegler and I sat for a moment, fretting in parallel, showing none of it to each other.

  “Will you load the bombs at three?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “But I presume the mission could be canceled in those last two hours.”

  “Yes sir. If the weather changes abruptly. We’d be advised of that.”

  So much could go wrong in all of this already. I didn’t want to be forced to destroy the Zeppelin on the ground. I didn’t know how far the phosgene would reach or how quickly from the larger explosion. Far enough and quick enough to be nasty. Far enough and quick enough, perhaps, to be inescapable. But if I’d already eliminated Albert and the weather changed and the Zepp didn’t fly, I would have no choice.

  First things first.

  I had to be sure of access to him.

  “Are you picking him up when it’s time?” I asked.

  “I am to telephone him. He wished to make his own way here.”

  I thought: He’s bringing her to see him off.

  I set that thought aside.

  “You will telephone me first at the Boar’s Head Inn,” I said.

  “Of course.”

  “There is no instrument in my room,” I said. “You will make sure the innkeeper finds me. Leave no message. You must hear my voice.”

  “Yes sir.” Colonel Ziegler punched each word.

  I sat back in my chair.

  I fixed my gaze firmly on him. I let him work all this over in his mind for a few moments under my steady scrutiny.

  Then I said, “Perhaps it’s not too early, Colonel.”

  His face muddled up. The gears ground in his head.

  I gave him a faint smile. “To have that drink.”

  He fairly leapt from his chair. “Sergeant Götz,” he boomed, happy to be back in command.

  The d
oor banged open behind me. “Sir!”

  “Schnapps,” the colonel said.

  And so the colonel and I drank together for a time.

  He grew intensely nostalgic and even sentimental about the military action he’d seen, regretting having missed, because of his age, most of the wars of unification; cherishing the bit he had finally experienced as a freshly minted, nineteen-year-old lieutenant at the Siege of Paris; doing his most ardent fighting later on, in the African colonies. I listened quietly and he talked volubly and when I felt we’d secured our bond of uniform and rank and shared secret mission, I asked to see a little of the base.

  He was eager to comply.

  We stepped out of the administrative building.

  “Our airship is only lately delivered,” Ziegler said. “The LZ 78. Modeled after the navy’s newest.”

  And he led me first through a door in the freight-train-long row of contiguous lean-tos at the base of the near wall of the hangar—where maintenance supplies were kept and the ordnance and flying supplies were staged for the missions—and then through a sliding door into the hangar and into the presence of the Zeppelin itself, its long bullet-body darkly glowing from the massive bank of yellow-tinted windows in the ceiling.

  The size of the airship staggered me even more than the hangar it sat in, as on the morning in New York a few months ago I was staggered by the Lusitania as I stood at the foot of its gangplank. These things were not simply vast, fixed objects. These things took you inside them and then raced upon the face of the sea or through the sky. This thing now before me, colossal as it was, actually flew. It was as if the Great Pyramid of Giza could suddenly lift up from the earth and soar away.

  It seemed invulnerable, this Zeppelin. Even noble, somehow, intrinsically so. Apart from the terrible intentions its owners had for it, the airship itself seemed innocent. I was sad for what I had to do. And terrified that I might not be able to do it. I was tiny in the world of this thing. The bag on my shoulder—more importantly, the single device I intended to carry in it—was tinier still.

  The air smelled of hydrogen. Even here. Even with the Zeppelin at rest. It was filled full already, its twilight-gray skin stretched taut with two million cubic feet of gas, anticipating this night. LZ 78 was ready to fly. And I had to find a way to destroy it at the very last moment.

  51

  The doors at the upwind end of the hangar were partly open, about the width of the central guiding rails. Ziegler walked us in that direction. He spoke of the ton-and-a-half bomb payload and the four latest-model Maxim guns in the gondolas. I noted heavy-duty branch valves along the floor, bespeaking the deeply buried hydrogen conduits; wheeled distribution tanks for gasoline with heavy-duty pumps and safety cocks, the fuel itself also buried underground; two-branched water hydrants every hundred feet; three dozen ventilating chimneys in the roof; signs everywhere with warnings about smoking, about matches, about sparks; the dampness beneath our feet, the floor kept constantly wet by a sprinkling system. Everywhere around us were markers of the fear of fire. Fear of the explosive flammability of hydrogen.

  “Good,” Ziegler said. “Here’s Major Dettmer.”

  We were passing the forward gondola, and ahead, standing in the center of the rails, arms akimbo, darkly silhouetted against the tall corridor of morning light at the open doors, was the commander of LZ 78.

  We approached. He turned and took a step toward us, his face suddenly rendering itself, in the light from the windows, into clean-shaven, cleft-chinned stolidity.

  He saluted us both.

  Ziegler introduced me. And he explained me: “Colonel Wolfinger represents the Foreign Office. They have interceded about the civilian.”

  Dettmer’s eyes cut instantly in my direction.

  “He won’t be flying with you,” I said.

  I patted my dispatch case, as if the written order for that was inside. I wanted the major to take note of the case so when I needed access to his airship, he would not question its presence over my shoulder.

  I paused to let Major Dettmer reply if he wished.

  He realized I was waiting.

  He said, “It was not my idea to bring him, sir.”

  I smiled at him. “I did not imagine it was.”

  “I have clear instructions about his bomb,” he said. “We do not need his presence to drop it where they wish.”

  To demonstrate my authority and validate my identity, I’d played the safest cards in my deck of deductions so far. I took a little gamble with one now.

  “They do still light their theaters at night,” I said.

  Dettmer smiled.

  I was right about the target.

  “I would like to see you off,” I said. “To see for myself that the bomb is secure,” I said.

  “Yes sir,” he said.

  “They have given you special handling instructions, I presume.”

  “They have.”

  “Have they told you why?”

  I sensed Ziegler stiffen beside me. He’d answered this question already. I was checking up on him.

  “We have speculated,” Dettmer said.

  Ziegler said, sharply, “He asked if they told you its specialness, Major. Not if you have a speculation.”

  Dettmer looked at his colonel and then back to me. “I’m sorry, sir. No, sir. They have told us only how to handle the bomb.”

  I said, “But that clearly suggests something to you, speculative though your thoughts may be.”

  He looked at his colonel once more.

  I turned to Ziegler. I let him off the hook, mercy being as intimidating an assertion of power as severity. “You quite properly answered the question that I asked, Colonel. I am now asking for your speculation.”

  Ziegler said, “We assume the bomb contains a poison gas.”

  “Do you accept a war of terror upon a civilian population, Colonel?”

  He straightened. But he was not composed. He had no idea what I expected him to say.

  “I follow orders,” he said.

  “And you, Major?” I turned to him.

  “Yes sir.”

  “Follow your instructions carefully with this device, gentlemen. We obey. We do our duty. All of us. As we must.”

  Including myself in the invocation of duty, I was reminded of the weather. How its fickleness could test that duty. Once I’d dealt with Stockman and planted the bomb, the Zeppelin had to fly.

  And then I had a thought.

  I turned to Ziegler.

  “This matter of the weather,” I said. “Once armed, this special bomb becomes even more dangerous. We should abort the mission only under extreme circumstances.”

  Ziegler did not reply.

  I looked at the major. He was standing at attention.

  The burden, the dangers, of what I was suggesting would fall on him.

  Too bad.

  And then my brain caught up with a thing I had been shunting aside, a thing I’d learned some months ago to shunt aside. I thought of the men I have killed, the men I had yet to kill, in doing my duty.

  Unless I failed in my own mission, the man standing before me would not have to brave a flight into bad weather this evening.

  He would be dead.

  He and his whole crew.

  By my dutiful hand.

  I shunted this aside again.

  I said, “This special bomb is very volatile. We do not wish to poison the air base and all of Spich.”

  “No sir,” Ziegler said, his voice thick with what sounded like misery.

  I looked at him.

  This did not resemble war as he’d known it, as he’d relished it, for his long career. Not in any way.

  I turned back to Major Dettmer. “I will not ask you to attack London if the weather is against you. But you must at least fly to the Strait of Dover or the North Sea and dispose of the thing. You must fly. Do you both understand?”

  The commander of the LZ 78 executed a very slow, very precise salute and held it.

&n
bsp; He was a good soldier.

  This was necessary work, my work here. He was such a good soldier that he would otherwise poison London from his goodness. My work was necessary. Wretchedly so.

  I looked at the colonel.

  I lifted my chin slightly.

  He snapped into a quick salute, also holding it at his temple.

  I saluted them both.

  And that was that.

  52

  Jeremy was waiting in what had become our place in the Boar’s Head bar, the marble-top table in the far corner. He’d left me my preferred chair with its back to the wall. The man noticed things.

  I sat.

  He nodded.

  I nodded.

  The innkeeper arrived beside us. Before we ordered a little early lunch, I said to her, “I will receive a phone call this afternoon around three o’clock. I will be sitting here. Please find me. I want to speak to the man personally.”

  “Yes sir,” she said, with the crisp snap of ingrained obedience, which seemed to be as natural a manner for Germany’s women innkeepers as for its career army officers.

  Then her face flashed into thoughtfulness and instantly into revelation. She’d just remembered something.

  She looked to Jeremy. I looked with her.

  He was sitting stiffly upright, playing the Foreign Office major.

  “Did you find your telegram?” she asked.

  He did a minute shift of his head sideways. A Cracker Jack flip book of a boxer’s feint.

  She went instantly on. “I knocked, but you didn’t answer. I slipped it under your door.”

  “I did find it,” Jeremy said. “Thank you.”

  He glanced at me, then back to her.

  Jeremy and I ordered. She went away.

  He turned to me, and I didn’t have to ask.

  He said, “The groups we must work with inside Germany—the Republikaner particularly—we’ve used their help for this, their resources, their bomb, and they feel invested in it. I’m obligated to stay in touch with them.”

  “Do they know of the special nature of the threat?”

  That minuscule feint again. As if I’d just thrown a left-hand jab. But then immediately he said, “Not at all. We keep them informed. But only as much as we want them to know. To them, we’re simply bursting balloons.”