Robert Butler - The Empire of Night

I drew near enough and she was bored enough that the movement drew her eyes. I stopped. She turned to Stockman and leaned to him and whispered a few words, in the midst of which he glanced my way. He nodded assent to her — making a pucker-mouthed, veiled-eye show of how of course it was all right — and she rose and came to me.

“Mr. Hunter,” she said.

“Madam Cobb,” I said.

“I’m sorry to have neglected you this evening,” she said. “You could use some impressions for your story.”

“Just a few,” I said. “Before you perform tonight.”

We said all this in our best stage whisper. Stockman heard it, though he was looking at the still-rambling speaker.

Isabel took me by the arm and guided me away, out of earshot of both the tables and the line of Gray Suits. We turned our bodies, however, toward Stockman. Nothing to hide.

I would take notes during every word she spoke. Scribble.

I said, “I have a pretty good hunch where to look in the house.”

“He’s nervous about something,” she said. “He and his cohorts.”

“About us?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. I don’t think so. He doesn’t try to hide it. The demeanor of it.”

“The public?”

“He talks offhandedly about them . No. The public’s been here before. This he doesn’t talk about. Not around me.”

“Be that as it may. .” I began.

“Do what you have to do,” she said.

She was right about my gist. “. . Tonight is likely my only chance,” I finished.

“Where?”

“The tower.”

“Doesn’t surprise me.”

“You see it?”

“Only the staircase,” she said. “I didn’t climb it, but I had a chance to look up and down.”

“A guard?”

“Not that I saw. I think our man’s comfortable in the house.”

“Keep the show going tonight for as long as you can,” I said.

“You know me when I sing,” she said. “Keep applauding, I’ll keep encoring.”

“Keep encoring even if they don’t applaud,” I said.

She did a stagey spine stiffening. “You just do your job. I’ll do mine,” she said.

Night came without a moon and without stars as well, a high cloud cover sweeping in from the North Sea. The grounds fell dark. Stockman ordered standing torches lit, and he worked the spectators as this went on, sensing a trepidation in each newly lit set of faces and then encouraging them loudly. “These infernal machines will not darken our land!” he cried. He spoke to their fear of the Zeppelins, their hesitation to violate the local blackout. “Let us defy them tonight!” he cried. He repeated this appeal again and again, up close to them, to those who watched each torch flare into defiance. He was the British hero standing up to the Huns. He was with them, palpable in their midst. Whoever was within earshot of one of Stockman’s miniature outbursts of patriotic oratory listened, rapt, and then cheered. And the word was circulated, as well, that a special surprise entertainment was imminent in the central marquee. His constituents, who’d dispersed for high tea, began to coalesce into a crowd and move toward the music tent to turn into an audience for Isabel Cobb.

I used this movement of many bodies from all parts of the ground to casually make my own way toward the eastern side of the house, where news of the entertainment had recently arrived. The lawn here was mostly empty now, only a few young couples left, tearing themselves away from the cliff edge to go to the show.

I drifted toward the house and stood for a time in the grass, watching the last of the lovers disappear around the corner. I looked all around now, peering hard into the darkness, seeing no one. And so I was also invisible.

I moved to the casement in the library bay window. I pressed at the sash. It opened. I climbed inside, pulled the sash closed, and stepped at once into the deeper darkness before me.

I stopped. I stood still for a moment to listen. In this room it was quiet enough for the silence to buzz faintly in my ears. My eyes were adjusting. A vague mitigation of the blackness came from outside, from the seepage of starlight through the clouds, from the nearby outglow of torchlight on the other side of the house. I could discern the door to the library. It was closed.

I moved to the door and opened it gently. I looked out. The Great Hall was empty and it was dim, lit only by the glow of the lanterns through the high west windows and by electric light spilling from the kitchen wing through the screens passage. I approached the wall beneath the music gallery, put my back to it, and eased along to the edge of the archway. I peeked into the courtyard entrance hall.

It was empty. The only person in sight had his back to me ten yards or so into the courtyard, beyond the open front doors. One of the Gray Suits. From his stature it could have been Martin.

The crowd outside cheered and clapped and fell silent.

No music yet.

I imagined Stockman making a little speech. He’d probably just mentioned the great Isabel Cobb.

I passed silently and quickly through the hall.

I drew my pistol and my flashlight and started up the wide, stone staircase, making myself take the steps one at a time with a soft, careful stride, holding back my impulse to rush, flashing my light onto each floor at the last moment of approach, pistol ready.

But there were no guards. Not at the second floor, not the third, not the fourth. Each floor was the same: immediately before me a carved oak door with a warded lock, a long corridor to the right along the wing, a blank wall a room’s length to my left.

Now I was at the foot of the staircase to the fifth floor — the top of the house proper — and then I reached its landing. If my suspicion was correct about the tower, Stockman’s office could very well be at the top of these last few steps, where it could easily wire up to the antenna. If a Gray Suit remained in the house, he’d be here.

I took the turn, and I could see nothing but pitch darkness at the top. I crept up, holding pistol and flashlight at the ready.

Distant now as if it were a memory, I heard another upswell of applause and hurrahing as the salon orchestra struck up the introductory bars of “Keep the Home Fires Burning.” Mother was about to sing.

A clock started ticking in my head. I had to be back in the midst of the crowd before she took her last bow.

With the next step and now one more, I was ready for the light and I switched it on and shined it straight in front of me as I rushed the last few steps.

There was no guard.

And this time, no doorway before me either.

I scanned the light to the left.

There was the door, a couple of paces down the way.

This was the room directly beneath the tower. Before I moved to it, I shined the light way off to my right, down the long, empty corridor, and then back very near me, expecting the staircase to continue into the tower.

It did not.

Instead, where the staircase had turned on the floors below, here a stag’s head hung on a wall over a vase sitting on a pedestal. There was no staircase going up.

So this door to my left was very likely Stockman’s office. Which provided my best chance to learn something useful in this vast house with my limited time.

I moved down the hall and confronted the door. Like the ones below, it was oak. But it was not carved. A new door. A good sign. And it held a modern lock. Pin and tumbler. My favorite.

I holstered my Mauser, put myself before the lock, switched off the flashlight, and took out my packet of tools. A torque wrench and a pick. Though strictly speaking I no longer picked most locks. I raked them. I located the keyhole in the dark and bent to it and I slipped in the wrench, turned it gently to the right, worked the pick in all the way to the rear of the keyway. I levered the inner tip. Up went the back pin. And then I raked carefully but quickly along the other pins, pushing them into their columns. I felt most of them yield on the first pass. It was all feel now. No thinking. All about the fingertips. I delicately increased the wrench pressure and raked again. And the lock yielded. The door opened.