The Empire of Night: A Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thriller (39 page)

“About five hours to go,” Jeremy said. “As long as the dirt-road bits stay dry and the cows keep to the fields.”

“Spich has to be small,” I said. “In a small town and a tight military community, these uniforms aren’t camouflage. We’re going to stand out.”

Jeremy blew smoke toward the mountain. It was covered with a mixed-growth forest, pine and spruce, oak and hornbeam.

“So we’ll have to strut,” I said.

He looked at me.

“The colonel and the major have to be there with a purpose,” I said.

Jeremy took in a thoughtfully slow drag on his Murad.

“They’re in Spich about
him
,” I said.

Jeremy exhaled sharply, in agreement. “Who do you expect knows his intentions?”

“The commandant has to.”

Jeremy nodded. “And an airship commander.”

“They could be the only ones,” I said. “And I bet neither of them knows what the bomb contains.”

“I bet you’re right,” he said. “But they do know the whole thing is on the sly.”

We said no more for now. The point was to smoke and stretch our legs, and then we walked back to the car.

One last salute. A guy old enough to have fought for Moltke at Gravelotte was approaching the café. At the sight of us, he stopped and snapped us a brisk one. “
Gott strafe England
,” he said.

Jeremy and I answered in unison, “
Er strafe es!
”

And we drove off.

But at a garage on the southern outskirts of Hamelin, we topped off our gasoline tank to get us easily through to Spich, and Jeremy let me drive the Torpedo, breach of rank though it was, so he could sleep for an hour or so. She was another skin, my Mercedes, a great steel body about me and I was its heart, my own heart beating fast from the roar of the engine and the whip-grind of the chain drive and the sense of torque beneath me, the great unseen spin of things flaring out to the four wheels, hurtling us along.

I drove a stretch of the route that brought us through the center of small town after small town—Arzen and Reher and Herrentrup, Meinberg and Kohlstädt and Marienloh, Hemmern and Rüthen—and every time, I had to slow down for the narrow streets, the cobbled streets, the horse-cart and hay-wagon streets, and that was fine, for I could throttle down and shift down my Torpedo and then fire her back up again.

Jeremy got his hour of sleep and more, nearly two, and he woke and I let him have the Mercedes once again, and he was chest-puffingly pleased at the transfer of her; he was a man reunited with his mate after a trial separation during which she’d dallied with another guy. He forgave her. And he drove her fast.

It was early afternoon when we saw a wide stretch of factory smoke before us. Mülheim, with the Rhine invisible just beyond and Cologne nearby, south around a bend of the river.

We soon turned south ourselves, before Mülheim, and I said to Jeremy, “Time to start the bluff.”

He and I were relying on the unthinkableness, in the heart of the Fatherland, that two Germans who looked and sounded like ranking officers of the
Deutsches Heer
could be anything but what they seemed. We all had the same blood. Even the three million socialists. So surely these two splendidly portrayed German officers were legit. Consequently, the more dramatic our public strut, the better.

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.

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.