Robert Butler - The Empire of Night

Sir Albert and I are very sorry to leave so abruptly. The accidental death of a member of the house staff has cast a pall over our weekend, and Sir Albert has decided to accompany me to Berlin. We would be happy to see you there if you can arrange passage, perhaps through your newspaper. I am anxious that the work we have done on your story will not be wasted and that my true intentions for being in Germany at this time can be accurately represented in the American press. Please wire your arrangements to me care of the Hotel Adlon.

Best regards,

Isabel Cobb

I folded the letter and replaced it in its envelope and slipped it into my inner coat pocket, doing all this almost fastidiously, aware of the small sounds of it — the creasing of the paper, the ruffle of the mohair. I was gathering myself to think clearly, calmly.

She was safe. For now, at least. She was not implicated. I was invited. Joe Hunter was still viable. For now. Or if the “for now” was as ominous as it might be, and if she wasn’t, in fact, safe, and if Joe wasn’t either, my actions were clear just the same. I’d go to Berlin.

The boys in gray made sure we went back to our rooms after breakfast and stayed there. And it wasn’t till very late morning that one of the boys in blue knocked on my room door and invited me downstairs, luggage to follow, for my trip to the train station in Broadstairs. I carried the Gladstone myself. It was comfortably weighty, though its only heavyweight secret was my Luger. I’d kept the Mauser in the small of my back. From this point on, that would be my standard practice.

The Blue Serge led me past another of his kind who was to bring my suitcase. He led me out of the house by way of the southern door, as I’d come in, and strode ahead of me toward the Silver Ghost, which sat waiting. He opened the tonneau door. I approached and was about to enter when I had the impulse to look back up to the tower where all the action had been the night before.

The Union Jack was flying.

But the guy wires were gone.

I looked just long enough to make sure I was seeing what I thought I was seeing, and I turned and entered the tonneau without even glancing at the driver.

I sat down in the near seat.

“Your bags will be along presently,” he said.

The door clicked closed beside me.

Now I knew what was in at least a couple of those boxes in the courtyard. The whole telegraph setup. The guy wire antennas were gone. The flagpole was no doubt gutted. The wireless itself was carted off somewhere in the night. Along with every other household shred of evidence against Stockman.

They were taking no chances. Even if they’d caught Jeremy and killed him, the guy’s disappearance could trigger a search of the house. If nothing came of it, they’d set back up again. Buffington had only one shot at digging into the castle of a member of Parliament.

A short time later my suitcase ended up in the tonneau with me. Nothing and no one else. I seemed to have retained my privileged status even without Isabel Cobb’s presence.

At the curb before the front doors of the station, the driver hustled out to open my door and then around to pull my suitcase from the other side of the tonneau. I circled behind him and he offered to find me a porter. I thanked him and declined. I made a bit of a show in presenting him with a crown, a very good tip for the service he’d just done.

He hesitated. Then he took the silver coin.

“Thank you, Captain,” he said.

“And where’s the Rolls driver from yesterday?” I said, the objective of my silver gambit. “I was expecting to tip him .”

The driver looked at me a little wide-eyed with uncertainty. He’d been pressed into this job, given the unusual circumstances, and this was way outside of both his job responsibilities and his ad hoc briefing.

“Martin, I think his name is,” I said.

“He was the one in the courtyard last night,” he said.

“Oh no,” I said. “What happened?”

The driver sniffed heavily and held his breath as if he’d just been shivved.

He didn’t have the presence of mind simply to walk away. I waited, as if there weren’t the least doubt that he’d give me an answer.

“He died,” the driver said, still flailing inside.

Without giving him a chance to draw even one more breath, I said, “Did they catch the bloody bastard who did it?”

“Not yet,” he said with a ferocity that seemed very personal, that made me wonder what kind of an okay guy our Martin might have been in a bar with his buddies. “But maybe in Ramsgate.”

“You got him cornered there?” I said.

“I don’t know, Captain,” the Blue Suit said, as if I were suddenly a copper trying to squeeze him for a confession. “Thank you for the crown,” he said, and he turned and moved off.

Too bad. He probably didn’t know much more anyway. But I was left with nothing to allay my fear that Jeremy Miller was dead as a result of protecting me and my phony identity.

It wasn’t until well past midday that I reached my room at the Tavistock Hotel. The train ride back through the same Kentish countryside my mother and I had traversed twenty-four hours earlier had filled me, of course, with an even more pressing fear. For her. Miller, indeed, hadn’t been protecting my role in this present drama so much as he had hers. I was simply carrying a spear for the leading lady. And she’d been abruptly whisked away by her Othello.

So my bags were unopened on the floor of my room and my hat was still on my head and I was sitting at the desk where I’d been creating Joe Hunter for weeks and I was waiting as the telephone operator connected me to the American embassy.

After I was finally rung through to some inner embassy sanctum, a man said, “Sorry, Mr. Trask isn’t here at present.”

I left a message for him to contact me as soon as possible.

He hadn’t expected me till tomorrow, of course. I went from stuck in a room at the Stockman House to stuck in a room at the Tavistock Hotel.

The only thing that made the next few hours bearable was to lay a pack of cigarettes and an ashtray next to my Portable Number 3 and to turn back into Christopher Cobb and write the lead paragraphs of a king-beat news story about a German spy in the midst of the British Parliament.

I restricted myself to the first three pages, the number I felt confident I could burn in the metal wastebasket without burning the hotel down as well. So those three pages were created slowly, each sentence being refined and rehearsed aloud before entering the Corona and emerging from its platen and then being honed to an Alexander Popeian extreme beneath my Conklin Crescent-Filler.

At last I received a call from the embassy and an appointment on the Waterloo Bridge, and I lit my front-page story with the butt of the last cigarette in my pack and hoped I’d have a shot at it for real someday.

I stood in the dead center of Waterloo Bridge and leaned on the stone balustrade as the western sky stopped bleeding and started bruising and the lights came on along the Victoria Embankment. Trask suddenly appeared at my side.

“Cigar?” he said, lifting a very good one before me.

“Sure,” I said, and we each lit up a ninepence Vuelta Abajo and blew the smoke over the river, which was running about four storeys below us, black from coal tar and Thames mud and the onflow of night.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t bring you a chunk of my steak from Simpson’s,” he said.

“This’ll do,” I said, taking a second draw. This was some fine stogie, with a heavy body and a taste of plantain and palm, of leather and earth, but with all that gone up together in flames so that you somehow knew all those tastes were there but they made a single new thing.