The Empire of Night: A Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thriller (16 page)

The Blue Serge led me past another of his kind who was to bring my suitcase. He led me out of the house by way of the southern door, as I’d come in, and strode ahead of me toward the Silver Ghost, which sat waiting. He opened the tonneau door. I approached and was about to enter when I had the impulse to look back up to the tower where all the action had been the night before.

The Union Jack was flying.

But the guy wires were gone.

I looked just long enough to make sure I was seeing what I thought I was seeing, and I turned and entered the tonneau without even glancing at the driver.

I sat down in the near seat.

“Your bags will be along presently,” he said.

The door clicked closed beside me.

Now I knew what was in at least a couple of those boxes in the courtyard. The whole telegraph setup. The guy wire antennas were gone. The flagpole was no doubt gutted. The wireless itself was carted off somewhere in the night. Along with every other household shred of evidence against Stockman.

They were taking no chances. Even if they’d caught Jeremy and killed him, the guy’s disappearance could trigger a search of the house. If nothing came of it, they’d set back up again. Buffington had only one shot at digging into the castle of a member of Parliament.

A short time later my suitcase ended up in the tonneau with me. Nothing and no one else. I seemed to have retained my privileged status even without Isabel Cobb’s presence.

At the curb before the front doors of the station, the driver hustled out to open my door and then around to pull my suitcase from the other side of the tonneau. I circled behind him and he offered to find me a porter. I thanked him and declined. I made a bit of a show in presenting him with a crown, a very good tip for the service he’d just done.

He hesitated. Then he took the silver coin.

“Thank you, Captain,” he said.

“And where’s the Rolls driver from yesterday?” I said, the objective of my silver gambit. “I was expecting to tip
him
.”

The driver looked at me a little wide-eyed with uncertainty. He’d been pressed into this job, given the unusual circumstances, and this was way outside of both his job responsibilities and his ad hoc briefing.

“Martin, I think his name is,” I said.

“He was the one in the courtyard last night,” he said.

“Oh no,” I said. “What happened?”

The driver sniffed heavily and held his breath as if he’d just been shivved.

He didn’t have the presence of mind simply to walk away. I waited, as if there weren’t the least doubt that he’d give me an answer.

“He died,” the driver said, still flailing inside.

Without giving him a chance to draw even one more breath, I said, “Did they catch the bloody bastard who did it?”

“Not yet,” he said with a ferocity that seemed very personal, that made me wonder what kind of an okay guy our Martin might have been in a bar with his buddies. “But maybe in Ramsgate.”

“You got him cornered there?” I said.

“I don’t know, Captain,” the Blue Suit said, as if I were suddenly a copper trying to squeeze him for a confession. “Thank you for the crown,” he said, and he turned and moved off.

Too bad. He probably didn’t know much more anyway. But I was left with nothing to allay my fear that Jeremy Miller was dead as a result of protecting me and my phony identity.

It wasn’t until well past midday that I reached my room at the Tavistock Hotel. The train ride back through the same Kentish countryside my mother and I had traversed twenty-four hours earlier had filled me, of course, with an even more pressing fear. For her. Miller, indeed, hadn’t been protecting my role in this present drama so much as he had hers. I was simply carrying a spear for the leading lady. And she’d been abruptly whisked away by her Othello.

So my bags were unopened on the floor of my room and my hat was still on my head and I was sitting at the desk where I’d been creating Joe Hunter for weeks and I was waiting as the telephone operator connected me to the American embassy.

After I was finally rung through to some inner embassy sanctum, a man said, “Sorry, Mr. Trask isn’t here at present.”

I left a message for him to contact me as soon as possible.

He hadn’t expected me till tomorrow, of course. I went from stuck in a room at the Stockman House to stuck in a room at the Tavistock Hotel.

The only thing that made the next few hours bearable was to lay a pack of cigarettes and an ashtray next to my Portable Number 3 and to turn back into Christopher Cobb and write the lead paragraphs of a king-beat news story about a German spy in the midst of the British Parliament.

I restricted myself to the first three pages, the number I felt confident I could burn in the metal wastebasket without burning the hotel down as well. So those three pages were created slowly, each sentence being refined and rehearsed aloud before entering the Corona and emerging from its platen and then being honed to an Alexander Popeian extreme beneath my Conklin Crescent-Filler.

At last I received a call from the embassy and an appointment on the Waterloo Bridge, and I lit my front-page story with the butt of the last cigarette in my pack and hoped I’d have a shot at it for real someday.

19

I stood in the dead center of Waterloo Bridge and leaned on the stone balustrade as the western sky stopped bleeding and started bruising and the lights came on along the Victoria Embankment. Trask suddenly appeared at my side.

“Cigar?” he said, lifting a very good one before me.

“Sure,” I said, and we each lit up a ninepence Vuelta Abajo and blew the smoke over the river, which was running about four storeys below us, black from coal tar and Thames mud and the onflow of night.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t bring you a chunk of my steak from Simpson’s,” he said.

“This’ll do,” I said, taking a second draw. This was some fine stogie, with a heavy body and a taste of plantain and palm, of leather and earth, but with all that gone up together in flames so that you somehow knew all those tastes were there but they made a single new thing.

“I ate dinner tonight with your old friend Metcalf,” he said.

I’d had quite a feed with my old friend Metcalf, my embassy contact who sent me off to Istanbul back in May. He took me to Escoffier’s eatery at the Carlton Hotel. “Did you understand everything he told you about the food?” I asked.

“I don’t care to know that much about a cut of beef,” he said.

I didn’t tell Trask I listened to every word.

Instead, we shared a nod and we each looked at the end of our cigar at the same moment. Somehow I’d always known to do this, having learned to smoke a cigar like an actor, from actors, but I never knew why it seemed so natural, even necessary. Maybe it was just to punctuate a conversation, which is certainly what it did for Trask and me, at that moment.

“You’re back early,” he said. Though this was a declaration, he clearly was asking for the story.

You would have thought he’d get a little worked up for that question. Something had to have gone seriously awry for me to be on this bridge with him tonight. But he was languid as cigar smoke. He was a cool customer, my old friend Trask, and in our line of work that was probably good. But I wondered if maybe in this case he already knew the reason.

He waited.

I decided to let him do it his way. I told him about Jeremy and Martin, about Isabel and Stockman, their coziness and their abrupt departure. I told him about the contents of the tower room, the code books and the wind books and the maps. And the wireless. I told him about Stockman’s torches and his oratory and then the Zepps.

I’d kept my conclusions and my worries to myself in all this, just stating the facts for him, as starters.

We both seemed silently to understand that the facts part was done with.

We puffed on our Cuban cigars.

The first conclusion to draw from the facts didn’t need saying: generally speaking, Stockman was everything Trask and Buffington had suspected.

The next piece of the puzzle begged for conclusions. I handed him my mother’s note from this morning.

He slid a few feet away to the spill of electric light from one of the iron standards. He read her message and slid back again.

“The Adlon.” He said the name with a sneer in his voice, as if its significance should be clear to me.

“Yes?”

“It’s the Kaiser’s favorite,” Trask said. “Everyone of importance is put there. So the phones are tapped, and the place is crawling with agents.”

“I’m worried about her,” I said, nodding at the note still in Trask’s hand. “That was written before they sailed away. Have you heard anything more from her?”

“Not yet,” Trask said. “Even going in through Ostend, they’d still be in transit.”

“Does the Adlon suggest anything?”

“If he suspects her, it’s the best place to put her. But if he doesn’t, it’s still best for him.”

So I had to live with that worry for a while. Probably for a long while.

I went on to the second one.

“Anything about Jeremy Miller?”

Trask shook his head no. “There’s a lot the Brits didn’t say, even after we agreed to help, as you no doubt have already gathered.”

“I have,” I said.

“This is the first I’ve heard of him,” Trask said.

One more fact now. “They won’t find anything if they search Stockman’s house,” I said. “When I left, his boys had clearly dismantled the wireless. They were packing it in boxes at dawn. I’m sure they did the same with anything else incriminating.”

Trask grunted.

“The Brits probably don’t know this, if Miller’s still missing,” I said.

“They’d have to assume it either way,” Trask said. He looked at the end of his cigar again. It was burning, of course.

Worries were for civilians. I had to move on.

“Stockman seems to be about the Zeppelins,” I said.

Trask took this in and then turned around, put his back to the balustrade. He lifted his face to exhale his smoke in the direction of the streetlight.

Only a few moments passed and he took another deep drag.

Trask was a cool customer all right. But I figured he knew how to treat a good cigar. We were smoking these things too quickly. His continuous puffing was a tip-off to his agitation.

And now he seemed ready simply to watch the evening traffic crossing the bridge.

I joined him. I’ve known a lot of guys like this. The worse things got, the less they said. I gave him a long minute. Then I said, “Don’t clam up like the Brits.”

He moved his face a little in my direction without giving me his eyes. “I’m just thinking,” he said. “You’re right about the airships. But this much they say about Stockman. He’s smart. He’s a
big idea
kind of guy.”

Trask was smart too. He was already thinking what I now realized had been nagging at me all along. “Winds and weather and beacons along the Thames,” I said.

Now he turned his eyes to me.

“Those aren’t big ideas,” I said.

Trask smiled. The smile felt personal. It was maybe the first personal gesture I’d ever gotten from him. He knew we understood each other easily.

“Those are matters for a navigator, an airship commander,” he said. “At most an operations officer in Düsseldorf or Nordholz or Ghent.”

He could have named any of a dozen other Zepp bases.

“It doesn’t add up,” I said.

“We need to find Joe Hunter a hotel,” he said. “So you can answer this.” He handed my mother’s message back to me.

I put it in my pocket. We both looked at the traffic once more.

A double-decker bus rumbled past.

We didn’t have to say it. We needed to drive the bus.

20

It wasn’t until late the next afternoon that a leather portfolio and a brown paper parcel arrived by way of George, my familiar, aged bellhop. It wasn’t until I’d closed the door and placed these things on the bed that it struck me: George was in the employ of one or both of the secret service agencies I was working for. Maybe the hotel management was too.

Indeed, the portfolio that had been entrusted to George’s hand from lobby to room door contained all I needed to change hotels and then leave the country as Joseph W. Hunter. A room key at the Faulkner’s Hotel in Charing Cross. Tickets and passport for Hunter. A piece of paper with a hotel name and address in Berlin, but a handwritten note at the bottom saying, “Defer to theirs, if offered.” Letters of passage and introduction, these the cleverly wrought products of the ongoing irony of America’s occupying the German embassy at the Germans’ request and with their gratitude. We still officially represented their interests in London after they’d made a hasty departure in July of last year.

One was a letter of introduction on the letterhead of His Excellency Baron von Schwarzenstein, ostensibly by his own hand, granting the bearer official sanction to ask questions. Answers were, no doubt, optional. But at least I wouldn’t have to open Joe Hunter’s mouth to the force-feed of German propaganda.