Robert Butler - The Empire of Night

“I ate dinner tonight with your old friend Metcalf,” he said.

I’d had quite a feed with my old friend Metcalf, my embassy contact who sent me off to Istanbul back in May. He took me to Escoffier’s eatery at the Carlton Hotel. “Did you understand everything he told you about the food?” I asked.

“I don’t care to know that much about a cut of beef,” he said.

I didn’t tell Trask I listened to every word.

Instead, we shared a nod and we each looked at the end of our cigar at the same moment. Somehow I’d always known to do this, having learned to smoke a cigar like an actor, from actors, but I never knew why it seemed so natural, even necessary. Maybe it was just to punctuate a conversation, which is certainly what it did for Trask and me, at that moment.

“You’re back early,” he said. Though this was a declaration, he clearly was asking for the story.

You would have thought he’d get a little worked up for that question. Something had to have gone seriously awry for me to be on this bridge with him tonight. But he was languid as cigar smoke. He was a cool customer, my old friend Trask, and in our line of work that was probably good. But I wondered if maybe in this case he already knew the reason.

He waited.

I decided to let him do it his way. I told him about Jeremy and Martin, about Isabel and Stockman, their coziness and their abrupt departure. I told him about the contents of the tower room, the code books and the wind books and the maps. And the wireless. I told him about Stockman’s torches and his oratory and then the Zepps.

I’d kept my conclusions and my worries to myself in all this, just stating the facts for him, as starters.

We both seemed silently to understand that the facts part was done with.

We puffed on our Cuban cigars.

The first conclusion to draw from the facts didn’t need saying: generally speaking, Stockman was everything Trask and Buffington had suspected.

The next piece of the puzzle begged for conclusions. I handed him my mother’s note from this morning.

He slid a few feet away to the spill of electric light from one of the iron standards. He read her message and slid back again.

“The Adlon.” He said the name with a sneer in his voice, as if its significance should be clear to me.

“Yes?”

“It’s the Kaiser’s favorite,” Trask said. “Everyone of importance is put there. So the phones are tapped, and the place is crawling with agents.”

“I’m worried about her,” I said, nodding at the note still in Trask’s hand. “That was written before they sailed away. Have you heard anything more from her?”

“Not yet,” Trask said. “Even going in through Ostend, they’d still be in transit.”

“Does the Adlon suggest anything?”

“If he suspects her, it’s the best place to put her. But if he doesn’t, it’s still best for him.”

So I had to live with that worry for a while. Probably for a long while.

I went on to the second one.

“Anything about Jeremy Miller?”

Trask shook his head no. “There’s a lot the Brits didn’t say, even after we agreed to help, as you no doubt have already gathered.”

“I have,” I said.

“This is the first I’ve heard of him,” Trask said.

One more fact now. “They won’t find anything if they search Stockman’s house,” I said. “When I left, his boys had clearly dismantled the wireless. They were packing it in boxes at dawn. I’m sure they did the same with anything else incriminating.”

Trask grunted.

“The Brits probably don’t know this, if Miller’s still missing,” I said.

“They’d have to assume it either way,” Trask said. He looked at the end of his cigar again. It was burning, of course.

Worries were for civilians. I had to move on.

“Stockman seems to be about the Zeppelins,” I said.

Trask took this in and then turned around, put his back to the balustrade. He lifted his face to exhale his smoke in the direction of the streetlight.

Only a few moments passed and he took another deep drag.

Trask was a cool customer all right. But I figured he knew how to treat a good cigar. We were smoking these things too quickly. His continuous puffing was a tip-off to his agitation.

And now he seemed ready simply to watch the evening traffic crossing the bridge.

I joined him. I’ve known a lot of guys like this. The worse things got, the less they said. I gave him a long minute. Then I said, “Don’t clam up like the Brits.”

He moved his face a little in my direction without giving me his eyes. “I’m just thinking,” he said. “You’re right about the airships. But this much they say about Stockman. He’s smart. He’s a big idea kind of guy.”

Trask was smart too. He was already thinking what I now realized had been nagging at me all along. “Winds and weather and beacons along the Thames,” I said.

Now he turned his eyes to me.

“Those aren’t big ideas,” I said.

Trask smiled. The smile felt personal. It was maybe the first personal gesture I’d ever gotten from him. He knew we understood each other easily.

“Those are matters for a navigator, an airship commander,” he said. “At most an operations officer in Düsseldorf or Nordholz or Ghent.”

He could have named any of a dozen other Zepp bases.

“It doesn’t add up,” I said.

“We need to find Joe Hunter a hotel,” he said. “So you can answer this.” He handed my mother’s message back to me.

I put it in my pocket. We both looked at the traffic once more.

A double-decker bus rumbled past.

We didn’t have to say it. We needed to drive the bus.

It wasn’t until late the next afternoon that a leather portfolio and a brown paper parcel arrived by way of George, my familiar, aged bellhop. It wasn’t until I’d closed the door and placed these things on the bed that it struck me: George was in the employ of one or both of the secret service agencies I was working for. Maybe the hotel management was too.

Indeed, the portfolio that had been entrusted to George’s hand from lobby to room door contained all I needed to change hotels and then leave the country as Joseph W. Hunter. A room key at the Faulkner’s Hotel in Charing Cross. Tickets and passport for Hunter. A piece of paper with a hotel name and address in Berlin, but a handwritten note at the bottom saying, “Defer to theirs, if offered.” Letters of passage and introduction, these the cleverly wrought products of the ongoing irony of America’s occupying the German embassy at the Germans’ request and with their gratitude. We still officially represented their interests in London after they’d made a hasty departure in July of last year.

One was a letter of introduction on the letterhead of His Excellency Baron von Schwarzenstein, ostensibly by his own hand, granting the bearer official sanction to ask questions. Answers were, no doubt, optional. But at least I wouldn’t have to open Joe Hunter’s mouth to the force-feed of German propaganda.

And I had an alternate set of papers for a German military identity, a full colonel attached to the Auswärtiges Amt , the Foreign Office, including an authorizing letter of introduction over the apparent signature of the foreign minister himself, Gottlieb von Jagow. The colonel could be played as a spy, if need be. I also instantly knew what was in the paper parcel. This man’s uniform.

I saw my face on his passport, a picture taken without my close-cropped beard and showing the long, white scar arcing across the center of my left cheek. A perfect replica of a German university fencing scar. A Schmiss , the sign of youthful bravery and high breeding. In my case, it was an inadvertent souvenir of my work in Mexico. A useful thing that I despised. In his case, it was a result of aristocratic breeding and education. The name on the passport was Klaus von Wolfinger.