Robert Butler - The Empire of Night

“I’d be more inclined to believe you,” I said, “if you’d take the pistol off the center of my gut.”

“I’m terribly sorry,” he said, and the barrel end vanished at once in a twisting of his body and a ruffling of his suit coat.

“You seem to be doing well,” he said.

“Did you know about the tower?”

“No sir. I just followed you through the window.”

“Bloody hell,” I said. “If you don’t mind my borrowing a phrase.”

“Please,” he said.

“Another case of stupid. I wasn’t even aware,” I said.

“Not at all. I had the advantage of knowing exactly who you are and what you’re up to.”

“Which I need to resume,” I said.

“Of course. But I had to let you know who I am and that I’m at your service.”

“And who are you?”

“Sorry,” he said. “Jeremy.”

“Kit,” I said and we shook hands.

“Unless you have a specific task for me,” Jeremy said, “I think I’d do better to linger downstairs. If someone is to get caught at this, it should be me. You need to keep your identity intact.”

“But no getting caught,” I said.

“I’ll do my best.”

Jeremy half turned to go and then had a thought. He stopped and squared around to me again. “I am obliged to stress, however. If things do get rough, you are to take the opportunity to endeavor a quiet retreat. On no account intervene on my behalf.”

I didn’t like that thought. If we were on the same team, I was reluctant to duck out on him.

“This is imperative,” he said.

I knew I’d be saying the same thing in his place. “All right,” I said.

And he was gone. As quietly as he’d followed me.

I was left with a tower above me and no staircase to get there.

I returned to the doorway of Stockman’s office. I put my heel at the door frame and paced off the five yards. I kept my foot on the spot and took note of where it was: directly across from the left-hand banister.

I paced on, doing the stride I knew to equal about a yard. Seven more to the door of the next room. A little over twenty feet.

I expected this door to give itself away with a pin and tumbler lock. I was wrong. The room had one of the carved oak doors with a simpler warded lock. I drew out my tools. I had half a dozen skeleton keys. On the second try I had the right one. The locking bolt gave way and I opened the door.

I stood beneath the lintel while I shined my flashlight toward this room’s left-hand wall, which should have been shared with Stockman’s office. Then I leaned back and looked down to the banister opposite that western wall in the office. I didn’t need any more measurements. I stepped inside this room, closed the door. The wall before me should have been twenty feet away. It was maybe half that. Against it, left of center, was a massive wardrobe of plain, squared oak built flush to the floor and taller than a man, its only ornamentation being large, beaten-iron hinges and drawer pulls. Of its wide facade — a good twelve feet — the two outer sections were drawers and half-cabinets.

The major center section was a pair of doors. Their small ward lock yielded quickly and I opened them to a thick atmosphere of cedar and moth-balls. Inside, the space was wide enough and tall enough to hang the longest ball gown, but in spite of the smells to protect clothes in storage, it was empty. I had little doubt what was next. The back of the wardrobe was hung with a black cloth.

I stepped in. The cloth split in the middle into a pair of drapes that ran easily open on metal hooks along a heavy curtain rod.

And they revealed the doorway to the tower. This was unconventional castle architecture. Sir Albert’s granddad had been either paranoid or up to something covert himself. The door was what I’d expected for the room. It was like the one on Stockman’s office, and with the same sort of lock. Made by the same locksmith, I figured, for it felt familiar to my fingertips and the pin tumblers all jumped at my first bidding.

I opened the door inward to blackness. I closed the wardrobe behind me, and I stepped into chilled air smelling of damp stone and of all the spores that grow in the dark. I ran the drapes together and shut the door. I shined my light onto a metal staircase commencing immediately to my left and circling its way upward.

I climbed.

About ten feet I reckoned, and I came to another metal platform. The staircase continued up, to the roof of the tower, no doubt, but I stood before a rough-hewn wooden door. No more picking. This one had no lock. No knob either. Just a latch, which I lifted.

And now I stood in the upper room of the Stockman House tower and searched with my flashlight, keeping it angled low to prevent its being visible from outside, straining my eyes to see into the dim edge of spill from its beam.

On the eastern wall, directly before me, was a single, centered, cruciform loophole, which was used in a functioning castle for safe viewing and medieval sniper fire, the shape to accommodate a crossbow, not the Christian God.

I knew all four walls had loopholes because I’d seen them from the outside, but only the one in the eastern wall was visible now in full. The west-facing loophole was in the well of the circular staircase. The other two, in this room, were each shuttered by a wooden door on hinges and a hook and eye. The shutter for the eastern loophole was open.

The shutters were probably a Stockman renovation, so he could work up here at night and not show it. The electric lighting was certainly his doing. A stand-up lamp stood in the center of the floor beside a library table big enough to lay out the corpse of even the tall Sir Albert.

The wireless telegraph setup was certainly his doing.

There it was, as expected, a jumble of condensers and transformers, tuning coil and induction coil, ammeter and helix, antenna switch and spark discharger. And at the uncluttered front edge of the table were the two things the jumble served: the transmission key and the head phones.

This was where Sir Albert Stockman transmitted and received coded messages with his bosses in Germany and his underlings wherever they were lurking.

In considering the wireless, the object that had led me here, I’d taken some steps toward it at an angle past the library table. I knew there were other objects of interest on the tabletop, and I turned my beam to them now.

A stack of books on the near end.

That much I’d seen out of the corner of my eye and I expected more. There was a stray volume near the center, but the table was otherwise clear.

I stepped to the wireless table, hoping to find a notebook or a scrap of paper with a message. There was nothing. The key block was even squared up to the edge of the table; the headset’s wire was neatly coiled.

I knew Al, understood his ways. I needed to be careful to leave everything precisely as it now was. And this thought made me visualize his next visit here, which reminded me of the clock ticking in my head.

I clenched off the next breath.

I could not hear the orchestra. Had they finished? Had Stockman shut this thing down quick?

But I was, after all, in a flint tower six storeys above and five hundred feet away from that plinky little sextet and that middle-aged voice. Still, all I could hear was the accelerating beat of my heart and the heavy hiss of the silence in Stockman’s aerie.

I moved to the northern loophole and opened the wooden shutter. I leaned in, as if to fire an arrow, and turned my ear to the opening.

And yes. The sound of strings faintly drifted this high and slipped in through the slit in the stone. I could not hear her voice, but she was out there singing. At the moment, about how long a way it was to Tipperary.