The Empire of Night: A Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thriller (8 page)

I was back to Stockman’s eyes and he was focused intently on me, assessing me. He smiled. “Don’t worry about that. You are a welcome guest in my home.”

“You’re too kind,” I said.

“Besides, I understand you are doing a story on the estimable Isabel Cobb.”

“Indeed,” I said.

“You see? I don’t hold her appearance in Berlin against her,” Stockman said, and he initiated a gentle, socially reassuring laugh. The estimable Isabel Cobb and I joined in.

When the laugh faded into a comfortable silence between us, he said. “I remain interested in your views. We can speak later.”

“I look forward to it,” I said.

“You are invited for the weekend, of course.”

Without giving me even a moment’s chance to reply to this, Stockman did an about-face and quickstepped to Isabel. Without a look at me, she tucked her hand into the crook of his offered arm and the two maundered off toward the house. I followed.

7

This brief passage toward the castle door surprised me in the claw-scrabble of unease it started up in my chest. We entered the castle through a reception hall with twin suits of armor flanking the door, helmets closed, occupied by a couple more of his tough guys for all I knew. Stockman stopped Isabel and half turned to me and said, “Martin will show you the way.” His driver loomed up beside me and extended an arm toward the inner door and swept it to the right. I went where I was told, while my mother and her leading man swept out to the left.

I heard her voice and footfalls fading into stone-echoes behind me, and I realized this was what my unease was all about, my mother and me separating in this place. If Stockman and his boys were what we suspected they were, she could well be in over her head. Alone here, I could be too. I always figured I could handle anything. I wasn’t so sure about her.

But it was all very polite. Even Martin was polite, in a silent way. Nonchalant even. If he was a hired tough guy, I had no sense he was under orders to intimidate me or even to keep a special eye on me. He led me along a corridor hung with fox-hunt Aubussons, and ahead was a massive stone staircase, which we were approaching from its great, gray, triangular wedge of a side. As we reached it and began to turn, Martin flipped a forefinger toward an open doorway at the base of the steps. “Billiards,” he said. “You can play.”

His English—these four words were, I suddenly realized, the first I’d heard of it—was not British in accent, was oddly not accented at all but clipped and precise. I thought:
a carefully trained German.

We’d made the turn now and the staircase was simply a wall face beside me, but my mind went up these steps. The castle was complex in its layout and I knew I had to simplify what I took in, what I memorized of the layout, or I’d get lost. This staircase seemed worth noting. I reckoned that it ascended within the five-storey parapeted tower.

Martin said, “The stairs lead into the private family wing of the house. I am sorry that guests are invited no farther than the billiards.”

His seeming to read my mind was vaguely unsettling, but his treating me like a regular, well-intentioned guest was vaguely reassuring. If I were an ill-intentioned guest his comment would only be an invitation to snoop. As, indeed, I was and it was.

We passed through the Great Hall, its abrupt three-storey lift to a vast hammer-beam roof giving it something of the same heady kick of a big-league church. But Martin was talking again and I focused on him. “That’s the library,” he said, motioning to a door in the east wall. “The billiards and the books. These are for you to enjoy until we collect you at about five. You may dress casually tonight, as the public will be here for festivities and we will be serving high tea alfresco.”

“Are there other guests for the weekend?” I asked.

“A dozen,” he said. “Many are here now. You’ll have competition.”

I assumed he meant at billiards.

At the far end of the Great Hall we entered the arched colonnade of a screens passage and turned left into a staircase. We climbed to the second-floor bachelor corridor of the castle, laid out over the kitchen and pantries.

When we reached my room Martin opened the door and stepped back for me, as if in deference. He even pulled his hat off, showing a spiky crop of wheat-chaff tan hair. He was consciously playing a role. As I passed him, I played my part in his little scene, giving him a nod of gratitude-to-a-servant, but catching and holding for a moment those eyes, which were as opaquely gray as the Strait of Dover.

The room had a narrow set of mullioned windows and was furnished with the simple straight lines of the Arts and Crafts movement: bedstead, wardrobe, hard leather-seated chair, small break-front writing desk.

I sat in the chair and I waited for the cringing man from the station. He and the bags were coming by a separate vehicle. The Rolls was not a touring model and didn’t have an elegant way of transporting a great deal of luggage. But I figured Stockman might have arranged that so as to do a quick check of the contents. Certainly enough time was passing.

At last the luggage man arrived, and I took my bags at the doorway and closed him out at once and I laid them—a leather valise and a Gladstone—on the bed. I opened the valise and lifted out books and a toilet case and a notepad. But for this weekend these were mostly just filler to cover the false bottom I was now prying out of the valise.

Stockman’s boys might have searched, but they didn’t find my Mauser pocket automatic, a rock-hard bantamweight of a pistol with a .32 caliber punch. I pulled it out of the false-bottomed depth of my valise. It was tucked inside a left-hander’s leather holster with the flap cut off, so I could wear it in the small of my back and draw it with my right hand.

I laid the holster on the bed, and I freshened up in cold water in my small bathroom and changed my suit from sack to brown mohair, with a fresh shirt and tie.

I slipped the Mauser and its holster onto my belt and centered it in place.

They didn’t find my leather pouch of lock-picking tools either. This I put into my inner coat pocket. Or my six-inch tungsten flashlight, which I snugged into my side pocket. Or my Luger, which I left in the comparable false bottom of the Gladstone.

I sat down on the edge of my bed and retied my shoes.

What sounded distantly like a small salon orchestra had arrived, out on the green, and was tuning up.

I was ready to begin.

I wasn’t interested in books or billiards. I wanted to look around. I’d carry my notebook and keep only Joseph W. Hunter notes in it, as if the grounds of the castle was local color in the Kent part of my feature story on Isabel Cobb.

I stepped out of my room and closed the door quietly behind me. The corridor was empty. I went along it and down the stairs and emerged in the screens passage. A scullery maid in white uniform and mobcap brushed past me with her face cast down and a quiet “Pardon, sir.”

I emerged into the Great Hall.

Though the windows here were limited to the west wall and looked into the courtyard, the place felt bright, for it was faced in white granite. The floor was covered by a single Persian rug large enough to define the foundation of a Sears ready-made bungalow. In its dense weave, hunters on horses leapt and gazelles fled.

A young Queen Victoria—the Stockmar family’s benefactress—was on horseback, as well, rendered massively in oils above the white ashlar walk-in fireplace. Beyond her was the doorway into the library. I was sanctioned to go there. Books and billiards. The things I needed to really learn about Stockman were in the unsanctioned places, but it was daylight and Stockman House was preparing to receive the public and Albert’s men would be prowling around, so for now I had to interpret what I could from the things I could access. A library was as good a place to start as any.

I set out across the Persian hunting ground, thinking of books. Early in my previous assignment I’d discovered at least a temporary Rosetta stone for one of the Germans’ methods of secret communication: a book called
The Nuttall Encyclopaedia of Universal Information
, the placement of whose words were the basis for numbered codes. Not that Al’s
Nuttall
would be kept on the library table off the Great Hall. But if they weren’t simply tony wallpaper, I was interested in his books.

I approached three Brits in summer tweeds and spats drinking tea and talking low on red-velvet Jacobean chairs before the fireplace. Middle-aged gents, all of them. Other guests for the weekend, no doubt. One glanced my way as I approached and then back to the discussion, the voices clipping phrases and extending vowels in that toffish, fixed-jawed upper-class British way. The reporter in me thought to slide into their conversation and find out what they know about Albert. But a young American, out of the blue, asking the kinds of questions I’d need to ask to make it worth my while, would only create suspicion. My real work required that I remain mostly unnoticed.

I passed them by and stepped into the library.

The place was chockablock with wainscoted shelves full of books in great, uniform runs of sets, the blues and reds and browns and greens of their spines coordinated carefully into a variegated but orderly panorama. The east wall held a twenty-foot-wide bay window looking out to the strait.

I strolled along Stockman’s books, the sets a patchwork of writers and subjects. A dozen volumes of
Illustrated World Geography
running in green into fifteen umber Sam Johnsons into twenty tan Bulwer-Lyttons into a couple dozen French Shakespeares in black and gilt. I stopped here and saw, on the shelf below, another complete Shakespeare, in English, and then next to that a twelve-volume set of the Schlegel and Tieck German translation.
Shakespeares sämtliche dramatische Werke
.

I looked more closely at the Schlegel Shakespeare. They were placed in evenly at the front edge of the shelves. All the books in the library were arranged like this. Not quite flush. There was about a quarter of an inch lip between the edge of the shelf and the spine of the book. And that quarter inch was gray with dust. I pulled one of the Schlegels out. The shelf was instantly wiped clean in a band the width of the volume in my hand. I replaced it.

I continued on, more slowly, looking at the ubiquitous layer of dust. He was not a reader. Not from this library at least. And I also kept an eye out for the German works. There weren’t many and they were scattered along. The collected Goethe. Schiller. But Stockman’s books were mostly English. Still, if he was trying to make an impression, he didn’t mind showing at least some of his Germanic origins. Not that he was reading the English-language books either. Not lately.

I finally reached the wall of stuffed shelves at the far end. I stood with my back to the rest of the room and found twenty-two volumes of a German writer I did not know. Johann Gottfried von Herder. Two of the volumes had been pulled from the shelves recently. By Sir Albert or by an invited guest. I drew one out. The end board was marbled in blue and brown and cream. I opened the cover. The volume was from 1820.
Die Vorwelt
. “The Primeval World.”

I lifted my face from the page.

Perhaps he’d made some small sound. Or, if he’d quietly drawn close, perhaps there was some kinesthetic clue, a displacement of air perhaps. Whatever it was, it registered on me so quickly and subtly that I could not trace it. But I knew someone was in the room with me.

I turned.

Stockman was only a few strides away. He stood with his arms folded over his chest, changed from his tailcoat into more relaxed day wear, a three-piece gray linen suit.

I kept the book open in my hand.

Stockman unfolded his arms and moved to me, saying, “I’m happy you’re exploring the library, Mr. Hunter.”

“It’s impressive,” I said.

He stopped just a bit beyond arm’s length away.

He glanced at the volume in my hand. “Do you read German, Mr. Hunter?”

“Pretty well,” I said. “Do you, Sir Albert?”

“I do,” he said. “How are you with the Fraktur?”

Fraktur was the broken-angled, heavy black letter typeface Germany had used for nearly four hundred years. His identifying it only by its esoteric name in the question struck me as part of what was likely to be a subtle, ongoing test of my Germanic credentials.

“I should read it more often,” I said. “I do all right, but it still strikes my eye oddly.”

He smiled. “Of course. Were your parents born in their homeland?”

“Yes. They came to the United States when I was very young.”

“My family background is German as well,” Stockman said. “As is the case with a great many Englishmen.”

“Your present royal family . . .” I began, hesitating only for a fraction of a second.

He finished my sentence. “Is Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.”

He looked at me for a moment. Though it was very brief, I felt certain it was filled with a serious, subtle, rapid assessment of me. He made a decision and said, “Some might say that a royal family by any other name would be a different royal family.”

“Would not smell as sweet,” I said, bringing his sly joke closer to the Shakespeare quote and to the political point we were quietly deciding to share.