The Empire of Night: A Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thriller

by Robert Olen Butler

  I figured I knew why he felt like dodging when the Republikaners came up. “You not real comfortable with those boys?”

  He smiled at me. “You don’t miss much,” he said.

  “It’s their bomb but none of their business.”

  “Precisely.”

  “We okay for this?’”

  “We’re okay,” he said. “And as to the pin for this particular balloon, everything is ready but the hour.”

  He still needed to set the clock on the time bomb he’d been assembling while I was at the air base.

  “The bomb was one of the resources provided by the Republikaner,” he said.

  “Make it five minutes after five,” I said. This was guesswork. How prompt would they be? Ziegler had stressed the importance of that hour to make it to the target on schedule. These were Germans. Their trains ran precisely. All this whistled through me quickly and I said, “No. Let’s give ourselves a little more margin. The Zepps climb slowly anyway. Seven after five.”

  “Seven after,” he said. “And you leave the inn at three?”

  “If the weather’s right.”

  “Then I have time to eat the sausages,” he said.

  I began to brief him on the events at the air base, and in the midst of it a man entered the inn and headed for the bar. The innkeeper, who was wiping down the zinc top, saw him come in and she instantly took up a stein, turned to the tap behind her, and filled the vessel. She moved to the newcomer and put the stein before him, even as he was still taking off his peaked field cap and laying it on the bar.

  A large, late-morning beer was this man’s routine.

  Though perhaps only on flight days.

  It was Major Dettmer.

  He and the woman spoke together for a few moments, low, their heads angling toward each other.

  I doubted he flew drunk. But he needed some fortification.

  The innkeeper moved away.

  I had no interest in speaking to him, seeing as I intended to kill him this afternoon.

  Jeremy was watching me watching something over his shoulder.

  When I brought my gaze back to him, he flipped his face very slightly to the side, keeping his eyes fixed on mine. What is it? he was asking.

  In a low voice I finished telling him about Ziegler and then about Major Dettmer, ending with: “Dettmer came in while we’ve been speaking.” I slightly angled my head in the major’s direction.

  I looked over Jeremy’s shoulder.

  The man was heading this way.

  Beyond him the innkeeper was clearing his stein from the bar.

  He’d made quick work of it.

  I pushed back a little from the table. Preferring to flee, but recognizing the need to make everything seem normal, I rose.

  Dettmer arrived, saluted.

  I returned the salute, and I formally introduced Jeremy to the major.

  “I do not wish to intrude,” the major said, “but may I ask to sit with you for a few minutes?”

  I could have said no. I was Colonel Klaus von Wolfinger, after all. Turning Dettmer abruptly aside would have been consistent with the character I’d created.

  But if the man I was to kill felt the need to talk with someone in a bar before a mission that was plenty dangerous on its own, then it might as well be with me.

  I nodded without comment at an empty third chair that placed him between the two of us.

  He sat.

  He put his peaked cap in his lap.

  “Commander Dettmer will fly the LZ 78 this evening,” I said to Jeremy.

  “God punish England,” Jeremy said to him. Gott strafe England. “May we order something for you?”

  “Another beer?” I said.

  Dettmer looked at me.

  “You’re drinking this morning,” I said.

  “Only what I allow myself on these days,” the major said.

  Outwardly I offered nothing for him to read at this. No smile. No frown.

  Then I realized I was deliberately trying to make him uncomfortable.

  “Merely one long beer,” he said.

  I was too much in character. I owed him better than that.

  “We admire what you do,” I said, making my voice go as warm as I dared without drastically altering my necessary persona.

  He nodded once, in thanks.

  We waited for him to speak. I realized he had nothing particular in mind. He simply needed a little conversation on the day of a mission. There’d been the words with the innkeeper. The brief pose, their two heads angled toward each other, suggested a closeness between them. Perhaps even more, something only a woman could give. But there were things on his mind a woman couldn’t speak to. And the men were locals. Drunks or bores. He’d seen two of his own sitting here, and so he’d come to them.

  “How do you keep warm up there?” I asked.

  He laughed softly. I understood what he was about to go through. At the Zepp’s operating altitude two miles above England, it would be a Chicago-winter fifteen below even in August. And it would be a slashing cold, with the head wind beating into the command gondola.

  He spoke happily for a time about their woolen underwear and their leather overalls and their fur overcoats and the sheep’s wool lining in their leather gloves. And their scarves and their goggles and the ineffectualness of all that.

  He was happy to speak as if these were the things that brought him to his morning ritual of a beer and conversation on the days he flew.

  He moved from goggles to dreams, however. A seamless transition. “I often freeze in my dreams,” he said. “I can wake in a midsummer sweat in my rooms in Spich and continue to shiver from the cold in my dreams. In my dreams I have forgotten my overcoat or my gloves and I pay dearly for that.”

  Dettmer paused. He turned his head toward the bar, as if thinking he should have another beer.

  But he looked back to me.

  He said, “Or the opposite. I am on fire. We all have these dreams, you know. The day is soon coming when their planes can climb fast enough to catch us. Or when they create an incendiary shell that can reach us, and the first one to touch our airship’s skin will turn us into a fireball. We will have a brief time to decide then, each of us. We carry no parachutes, you understand. And so my men and I have each made a decision. Some of us will leap and some of us will stay. Some will die falling to earth and some will die consumed by fire in the heavens.”

  Dettmer stopped speaking. His eyes moved to mine and then to the Iron Cross pinned to my chest. He smiled a faint smile at me. He figured I understood. He figured men could talk like this to each other if they each understood.

  I did understand.

  I wished it were for the reasons he assumed.

  I wished I were fighting this war in a way that earned this moment between us.

  Instead, I was barely able to remain seated in the chair.

  But I stayed.

  The innkeeper’s boy arrived. He put the plates of sausage and kraut before us.

  “Perhaps some food?” Jeremy said to Dettmer.

  “Thanks,” he said. “I have to go now to prepare.”

  Having remained in Dettmer’s presence, I’d come back to my own obedience, my own place in this war that wasn’t quite yet an American war. But things were being done in the world that should not be done. And as an American I was dealing with that.

  Dettmer, at least, had established preparations to make. A clear and specific path to the completion of his mission, however arduous or frightful that might be. I was still improvising.

  So I said to him, “What are the preparations to fly your airship?”

  He was glad to come back from his dreams and to focus on the routine.

  “I will put my men to work,” he said. “The chief engineer, the helmsmen, the radioman, the gunners, the bombing officer, the sailmaker. The engines are to be examined, the elevator and rudder controls tested, also the telegraph and the Maxims. The bombs must be loaded precisely. The gas cells must be
checked for leaks.”

  “When do you board?” I asked. “When are all the checks completed and you go to your stations?”

  “We board in the hangar,” he said. “The final taking on of gas and ballast and ordnance is a delicate thing. The balance of lift and load. That is part of the preparation. Our very body weight must be accounted for. Only the watch officer remains outside to oversee the ground crew at the launching.”

  The timing seemed terribly off.

  My physical presence on the airship during preparations, which I’d blithely assumed to be possible, would throw off the weight adjustments. I would have no access to the interior. But there was nowhere outside to effectively place the bomb. Nor the opportunity to do it, in plain sight.

  I’d trusted too much on my ability to improvise.

  “I must go now,” Dettmer said.

  He rose.

  I rose too.

  He started to salute.

  Instead, I offered my hand to him.

  We shook.

  He held my hand for a moment, even after I’d stopped the shaking. “Thank you, sir,” he said.

  My mind thrashed.

  Dettmer turned to walk away.

  And then I thought of the ground crew and their supervision.

  “Major,” I said.

  He turned back.

  “Does the watch officer fly with you?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “How do you account for his weight in your preparation?”

  “He is the last to come on board, once the ship is outside the hangar. Till then we have a man with us to take his place.”

  My mind settled.

  “May I have the honor of sharing the last hour before your launch? Perhaps I could take the place of your watch officer’s substitute.”

  Dettmer straightened instantly to attention. Of course.

  But he had a practical matter first.

  He broke from his uprightness to give me a once-over.

  Apparently I was close enough in size. He stood at attention again and snapped me a salute. “It would be our honor, sir.”

  Perhaps it was the sudden impression I had of myself as a fraud that prompted the question that came then to my mind. A fraud especially to this man before me. Perhaps the question was prompted by the way I dealt with that, thinking I was no fraud at all, that I was no more a fraud than any actor in any role, that my role in this drama was crucial, that I had lives in London to save and I had no alternative. Perhaps this most important reality led me back into the character of Colonel Klaus von Wolfinger and it was he who prompted me to ask the question. Or maybe it was my true self—the newspaper reporter looking for the arresting personal detail in a story of life and death—maybe it was Christopher Cobb the reporter, who could be as hardened as any secret service officer when necessary, who prompted the question. Whatever or whoever it was, to my shame, I finished with Major Dettmer by asking, “If the day comes that you dream about, which are you? Earth or sky?”

  He did not hesitate. “I am afraid of fire,” he said. “I will jump.”

  53

  Major Dettmer saluted me smartly. I saluted him. I did not watch him leave.

  Jeremy ate. I did not. We neither of us said a thing.

  Then he rose.

  “May I borrow your case?” he said.

  It was sitting on the floor at my feet. I retrieved it and handed it to him.

  We nodded at each other and he went off to activate the bomb.

  I touched the handle of my coffee cup and I let it go. I did not know my way forward. Not yet. Which was the nature of improvisation, after all, not to know the next thing to do until the present thing is done. For now, sit here. That was clear. Receive a phone call. Passive things, however. The other actors in our little drama were the ones presently at work. The plot went forward only if the weather was clear. Which it likely would be. So after the waiting, my own next move would be to make sure that Sir Albert Stockman—British parliamentarian, crypto-Hun, aspiring poisoner of London, and paramour of a world-famous actress—was prevented from arriving at the Zeppelin air base this afternoon.

  Did we need to kill him?

  Was he intrinsically dangerous?

  If either Jeremy or I made it out of this alive, Stockman would never be able to return to his phony life in England. He would be known for what he was and Germany would be stuck with him. And if our plan to expose and discredit the poison gas air attack worked, his dangerous usefulness would mostly vanish.

  There were, of course, other considerations on this question, personal to me, that would fit into either pan of the balance scale. But, in fact, I did not have to decide right now. We couldn’t kill him this afternoon anyway. Not in the hotel room, certainly. Not in broad daylight in a German town. We couldn’t effectively remove him from the hotel, either living or dead.

  Then I thought: The body could stay in place. Isabel could play the role of terrified witness and grieved lover with ease. But the deed might get noisy in the doing. And word of his killing could make it to the air base before the mission and stymie things.

  I picked up my cup of coffee and drank from it. Thick and bitter and no longer hot. It was clear to me that Jeremy had to sit with Albert till my part with the Zeppelin was done.

  That decided, I ate my lunch.

  And soon thereafter Jeremy returned.

  He presented my bag to me with both hands.

  I took it into my lap and opened the weather flap.

  Wedged inside was a dark blue tin that once held Stollwerck Chocolade. It nearly filled the dispatch case.

  Jeremy sat in the chair Dettmer had occupied, nearer to me, and he drew it nearer still.

  He said, in almost a whisper, “You’re free, of course, to admire my handiwork in private, but I’d strongly recommend you let it be. I’ve packed it all tightly in cotton wool.”

  In answer I closed the flap and set the case gently on the floor.

  Perhaps it wasn’t answer enough. He added, “The connection from the clock to the device is delicate.”

  “I understand,” I said.

  “I wish we didn’t have to trust it,” he said.

  “We have no choice,” I said.

  We let that be for a moment.

  He remained near; we could still talk low; the bar was empty. I said, “We need to speak of what’s next.”

  “Stockman,” he said.

  “Stockman.”

  Jeremy said at once, “It would be difficult to kill him this afternoon.”

  “I entirely agree,” I said.

  “You have a thought?”

  “I do. As soon as the bell rings on the London raid, we go to the hotel, take the room, and you hold Stockman at gunpoint till I return.”

  He’d been listening to all this with his ear turned my way, his eyes averted. Now he looked at me. There was a grim fixedness about him.

  I figured I knew why. “The Stollwerck Chocolade part is a one-man job anyway,” I said.

  He nodded. The grimness loosened. Then he had a sudden thought. He said, “You’re putting the actress in the center of things.”

  That was true.

  I said, “Can you think of another way?”

  He tried for a moment, though I was sure he’d already been working at the Stockman solution for a while. “I can’t,” he said. “But I’m not the one who has problems with her.”

  “She’ll know enough just to sit and look terrified,” I said. “She’ll be fine at that. She can act.”

  Did I believe myself? I had no choice.

  Jeremy rose. He said, “Bring your lock tools.”

  He was right, of course. But a very dark shadow passed through my head. I would have to slip unbidden and unwanted into a hotel room that held my mother and one of her men.

  Jeremy went away to sleep, and I ordered a beer.

  Merely one long beer.

  Dettmer’s limit.

  When I lifted it, I paused as if to touch st
eins with the major.

  54

  Over the next few hours I looked at my watch a dozen times.

  My twenty-one-jewel, railroad-grade Waltham.

  I had time to admire the watch.

  The minutes went slowly.

  At last it was three o’clock but no call came and then five more minutes went by without a call and then at last, at ten minutes past three, I heard the ring of a telephone from the direction of the kitchen.

  I stood up.

  I waited.

  The innkeeper appeared at the doorway.

  As soon as we made eye contact, she turned and disappeared.

  I put the strap of the dispatch case with the ticking bomb over my head and onto my shoulder and cupped my hand beneath the case and pressed it against my hip. And I followed.

  She was standing in the doorway to a small office immediately before the entrance to the kitchen. She stepped aside.

  I went in and took up the telephone and put the receiver to my ear. I said, “Wolfinger.”

  “Colonel.” It was Ziegler. “We have good weather.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “Allow me to deliver the news to the English gentleman.”

  “As you wish, sir.”

  We rang off.

  And I stood before Jeremy’s door and I knocked and the door opened only moments later.

  He was putting on his peaked cap.

  We went out of the Boar’s Head and into the Torpedo and we drove to the Hotel Alten-Forst.

  We parked the car and I left the bomb on the floor of the tonneau and we strode through the lobby of the hotel and into the elevator and we arrived at the second floor.

  And things slowed down.

  The flower-wrought-iron door clanged open. The elevator boy spoke some chirpy words that I did not hear. Jeremy and I stepped onto the long Turkish runner carpet. We turned toward Room 200.

  We moved off. One long stride and another, and then together we knew to slow down, to walk softly, one short soft step and then another, and I would not let myself remember anything, creeping toward my mother’s hotel door. Not remember, not anticipate. I focused on the details at hand. Had I told Jeremy along the way that I’d drive the Torpedo to the air base? Or had I only intended to tell him, running the words in my mind as I approached his room at the inn but forgetting to say them? No. I said them as we got into the Torpedo in the side yard of the Boar’s Head. I’d said that I’d take the car.