Robert Butler - The Empire of Night

I needed to rouse myself from all this. The time was right to get downstairs as fast as I could and slip into the crowd during all the uproar.

I crossed the tower, entered the stairwell, circled downward. I caught myself rushing. I couldn’t put haste over caution. I slowed as I neared the bottom platform, made my footfalls soft. I stepped back and away as I pulled open the door from the wardrobe. Gently.

I was glad I did.

I heard voices.

I pocketed my flashlight and drew my Mauser.

Muffled still, these voices. Not moving. I drew back one side of the curtain to the inner darkness of the wardrobe. I did not trust the wooden floorboard to take my weight silently. I leaned in as far as I could, turning my ear to listen.

Martin’s voice.

Jeremy’s voice.

They were both speaking German.

The button to release the Mauser’s safety sat right beneath my thumb. I pushed it.

Joe Hunter may have to die so that Kit Cobb has a chance to live. I’ll shoot my way out.

The button and the thought happened instantly, simultaneously, before I could make out the German words being spoken.

Then there was a scuffling of feet.

The voices were closer.

Jeremy said, “You and I are on the same side.”

He’d said the same thing to me, in English. I tried to decide in which language it sounded true.

Martin didn’t seem to be buying it. “Let’s look upstairs,” he said. “Through the wardrobe. Move.”

The words and the tone made it clear he’d disarmed Jeremy and was holding a pistol in his back. If Jeremy was indeed working for the Huns, he was covert enough that Martin hadn’t been apprised. But maybe Jeremy was like me. He had this skill. He knew German. I’d tell the same lie if Albert’s henchman got the drop on me while I was trying to delay him.

I backed out of the curtain, softly slid it shut, closed the door. I went up. Quietly. Quickly. To the tower room? There was nowhere to hide in there. There was no way to take out Martin when they entered without almost certainly losing Jeremy anyway. And Jeremy said not to intervene. I’d promised not to intervene. Rightly, given his mission and mine. But I wasn’t comfortable with that either. Still, the wireless room was a losing hand.

And if Jeremy was telling the truth to Martin about working for the Germans, in the wireless room I’d have to figure that out in some very unpleasant way I could not control.

I went up farther, all the way to the telephone booth — size access enclosure on the roof. I stepped into the space beside the door and listened down the stairway well.

Footsteps on the stairs. No attempt to move quietly.

Martin didn’t seem to expect to find a cohort up here.

He wanted to check to see if anything had been disturbed in the wireless room. Signs that Jeremy had been in there.

Footsteps now on the landing below, a door opening, no sound of a door closing, a muffled shuffling of feet receding into the room, a brief murmuring of voices.

I straightened, leaned back against the stone wall.

If Jeremy was truly working for the Huns, he would’ve done something other than what he did when he’d caught me. He had his pistol in my gut. He sent me on my way. It was his confrontation with Martin that was a problem for him.

I had to assume Jeremy was Buffington’s man.

But there was nothing I could do to help downstairs.

He expected that I was escaping right now, with Martin diverted into the wireless room.

I should have been. But that choice had passed.

If the two went back down the steps from there, I could wait for a time and then slip out. I’d have to let Jeremy manage his own fate, as he’d signed up to do, as he’d insisted I let him do.

Martin clearly had the drop on Jeremy.

I realized how little I actually knew of Buffington’s operation. Or, of course, Stockman’s. Trask probably knew less than he thought, as well. Maybe Stockman had let Jeremy this far into his operation in order to trap him. His fate might already have been sealed.

In which case, Martin could be bringing him to this roof to take care of things. At least to hold him till the crowds went away.

I had no play down the stairs.

I thought of the roof.

I became aware of the wall I was leaning against.

And now voices rose through the stairwell.

“Up we go,” Martin said. In English.

Jeremy didn’t respond.

I unlatched the door to the roof, the sound masked in the clatter of their footsteps, and I stepped out and closed the door behind me. I circled around to my right and pressed my back against the outer wall of the enclosure. I laid my shooting hand against my chest, the Mauser barrel lying upon my heart.

I waited.

The Zeppelins were barely audible now, flying away up the Thames. The crowd was silent. Stockman was probably orating. I just hoped the music would resume.

Footsteps rasping now onto the stone floor of the enclosure.

I held my breath.

The door latch clacked.

I lifted my Mauser.

Over the past few minutes my eyes had grown accustomed to the dark. I turned my face to the left.

I heard the door open and close.

“Go that way,” Martin said. “No quick movements.”

And Jeremy appeared, moving off to the right at an angle heading inward onto the roof, toward the flagpole.

Now Martin followed, his right hand lifted into Jeremy’s spine. I saw the side of his face from a sharp angle to the rear.

I turned away from the wall and made one quick, soft step forward and another and I pressed the muzzle of my Mauser against Martin’s occipital bone.

“No movement at all,” I said.

He stopped.

Jeremy did not give him time to figure out the situation. He spun off from the pistol and grabbed Martin’s shooting wrist while I pushed the Mauser at the Hun’s head just for good measure. Albert’s boy wasn’t going to do anything stupid, even if he cared about his mission. He was figuring Jeremy and I would have our hands full downstairs. Which we would.

Jeremy had Martin’s pistol now and he stepped back in front of him.

I kept my Mauser where it was.

Martin still hadn’t gotten a glimpse of me, but I regretted letting him hear my voice. At least I should have spoken German. He probably knew who had the drop on him. I had to assume he did. Which was why I was supposed to have simply slipped away into the night.

Jeremy gave me a look. He shifted the pistol to his left hand, and he drew back his right leg, his body angling that way into a boxer’s stance. I knew what was next.

I pulled my pistol away.

And Jeremy threw a hell of an overhand right into Martin’s jaw.

The Hun flew back hard and was out cold even before he slammed down in front of the door.

The salon orchestra began to play.

Jeremy and I both briefly turned our faces to it.

“This will make things a little easier for you,” he said, lifting his chin toward the music.

“And for you.”

“We shall see,” he said.

He looked my way again, and I said, “Nice right hand. Were you a pro?”

He nodded a small, slow nod of regret.

“I bet you were good,” I said.

“I once went sixteen rounds with Tommy Ryan.”

“And?”

“He was prepared to go seventeen.”

“Jeremy what?”

“Miller.”

“Did you fight in the States?”

“You bet,” he said. “For a couple of years. Philly and New York and points west.”

This made sense of a little bit of American that sometimes crept into his mix of accents and phrasing and lingo.

“Chicago?” I asked.

“Never made it there.”

I liked this guy Miller. He stirred the reporter in me. I wanted to sit him down and talk a while and do a story on an ex-boxer who gave one of the greatest middleweights of all time a run for his money and then turned into a British spy. And I’d have bet good money that his family name was once Müller.