Read The Empire of Night: A Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thriller Online
Authors: Robert Olen Butler
The Empire of Night: A Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thriller (52 page)
I had no possible move other than this.
He nudged my head with the muzzle of his pistol.
“Toss it away to the right,” he said.
I flicked my wrist as little as I could and still seem to comply. My Luger fell heavily to the floor.
The steel vanished from the back of my head.
“Don’t move,” he said.
I didn’t.
I heard the bolt slide into place at the door.
“Turn around,” he said.
I did.
He looked clear-eyed but beat-up. A welt as fat as a three-hour cigar emerged from his hairline and fell across his right temple. His pistol hand was steady. He was holding a Webley break-top revolver. He and his German blood carried a very British weapon. I chose not to comment on this. That I even
thought
to comment was inappropriate under the circumstances. But he had the drop on me, and though I was toying with ironies on the jittery surface of my mind, I was thrashing around for serious options in the core of me as well. The ironies kept me a little detached. Calmed me. One of the ironies: in spite of the beating and the hog-tying, he still looked very much like my mother’s chisel-faced leading man.
“Who are you really?” he said.
There were certainly some ironies surrounding that question.
“The man who blew up your poison gas bomb over German soil,” I said. “Along with the LZ 78 and the rest of its payload.”
The pistol wavered a little.
I said, “Weren’t you conscious for the blast? It was a good three or four miles away but it rattled your windows.”
I realized I was provoking him. But I had no choice.
I said, “It was unfortunate to poison some Westphalian cows and lose a Zeppelin, but I had to stop you from disgracing our Fatherland and embarrassing our Kaiser. The measure was extreme, but he had to learn about you and Bauer waging your own little war. You are traitors to the Kaiser and to the Fatherland.”
Somewhat to my surprise, the pistol grew steady again.
Stockman said, “That’s all irrelevant now. I don’t give a bloody damn about the bomb or about the Kaiser. Not anymore. I know what’s important here.”
I had no idea where his mind had just leaped.
He said, “I know what’s important after all these years. And you are the man who would blow it up.”
I waited for more.
“Do you want to confess?” he said.
I said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You think I haven’t suspected from the start?” He glanced quickly over my shoulder. “I’m sorry, my darling,” he said. From the angle and height of his glance, Mother had apparently risen from her chair and had moved off a little to her right.
“I’m sorry I haven’t discussed this with you, my darling,” he said. “But that’s because I don’t blame you. Not at all. It’s this man. It’s
his
fault. He would destroy us.”
And now his eyes fixed on mine.
He said, “You are Isabel’s lover. It makes sense of all the little things. You are her lover even still.”
He seemed to want to say more, but words failed him. He pushed his pistol forward a little. It was holding steadily upon the center of my chest.
A heart shot.
Into a heart I heard thumping heavily in my ears.
The Webley was a double-action. I hadn’t heard the cocking yet. But I knew it was coming.
Any second.
And my mother said, from behind me, “My darling Albert.”
Stockman shifted his eyes.
The pistol stayed where it was.
His eyes went a little wide.
His brow furrowed.
And he began to move his shooting hand, the pistol shifting slightly to his left, in Mother’s direction, moving even as his eyes had moved, even as they widened and his hand was moving faster now, the pistol was moving and I started to move as well, to my left, I thought to turn away from the line of fire and lunge and grab his arm and lift it, I visualized this even as I began to move and I was twisting away and his pistol hand was moving and we were both of us nowhere near to the place where we wanted to be and the room rang loud and the center of Albert’s forehead blossomed instantly as red and as full-petaled as a rose and he flew back and his pistol jerked upward and he flew and he fell and the room rang and then it stopped. Then all was quiet.
I straightened.
Stockman lay dead on his back.
I turned.
My mother had my Mauser pocket automatic in her right hand, which was cradled in her left, the pistol still aimed, still wisping.
She looked at me.
Nothing showed in her face. Nothing.
She lowered the pistol. She squared around. She stepped to me and she reached out and took my right hand and lifted it between us. She laid the Mauser in my palm, and she looked me in the eyes.
“There,” she said. “I hope you’re happy.”
65
On the way out of the Hotel Alten-Forst I put two bullets from my Mauser automatic pocket pistol into the mahogany front desk, scaring the hell out of the clerk, whose account would help convince any inquiring minds that a mysteriously untraceable German military officer was responsible for the killing in Room 200. The famous actress Isabel Cobb would be found tied up tightly on the bed, the love of her life dead in the next room. I received no reports, but I had no doubt that everyone who witnessed her performance on that terrible night was deeply moved.
In the following weeks Isabel Cobb went on to a great triumph performing as Hamlet in two languages in Berlin, though I had to learn this from the American newspapers. The London newspapers, in the summer of 1915, were disinclined to report on the night life of Berlin.
They did report, however, on the mysterious disappearance of Sir Albert Stockman, a distinguished member of Parliament, who was thought lost in the Strait of Dover on a night when U-boats were known to be in the area. He was rumored to have armed his personal yacht with a deck gun and used the vessel to lure the submarines to the surface and engage them in battle. The country mourned the presumed death of a true English hero.
A month later, a Zeppelin dropped a dozen bombs in the theater district. The second of them fell on Wellington Street in front of the Lyceum Theatre, where a number of theatergoers were buying oranges and pastries and sweets from street vendors during intermission. Seventeen people were killed, twenty-one were badly injured. That bomb contained no poison gas. None of the bombs did, though several of them were perfectly placed for the purpose.
The first bomb had fallen before the Gaiety Theatre in The Strand, where an American musical comedy was playing by the name of
Tonight’s the Night.
Needless to say, as I tied my mother up, there were a few questions I thought to ask. Like what was in her head when she untied Albert. Was it blind love? Did she think the two of them could just run away from all this? Did she shoot him only when it was clear he was about to kill her son? Or did she let him go expressly to arrange our little climax? She would certainly see it as a far better scene for Isabel Cobb to play. But we spoke not a word. Even up to the moment of my closing the door of Room 200 behind me. Not a word. Sometimes, between a mother and a son, there were things you just didn’t want to know.
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