Robert Butler - The Empire of Night

I stared at this for a moment.

Heinrich Reinauer, Industrial Importer. An address in the East Harbor district.

Mother said, “He spoke German. That was all I could get.”

I lifted my face. I didn’t say anything as I shifted my gears. She was trying to make clear to me that she’d been a diligent spy, in spite of her feelings for our quarry.

I hesitated another moment.

She said, “He wrote that down and I had a chance to see it. Then I wrote it for you later. I didn’t touch the note he made to himself.”

“Spoke where?” I said. “To whom?”

“I don’t know to whom. On the phone. He received a call late last night.”

She didn’t have to add “in the hotel room.” His room or her room or their room. He received a call late. She was there. She was still there even later, when he stepped away, giving her the opportunity to read what he wrote.

Did he think he was in love with her, as well?

“I need to get as close to this meeting as I can,” I said.

“You’ve come to the right place,” she said. “Sit here.” She pointed to the wooden chair next to hers.

I knew how to do this for myself, more or less, but it had been a long time and she was very good at it.

I rose. I sat.

She motioned and I turned the chair to face her.

The table and the mirror were a good seven feet long, the mirror rimmed in electric bulbs. She reached behind her to the far end of the table and pulled her makeup case in front of her. It was the shape of a miniature steamer trunk, the sealskin rubbed and scuffed and stained by thousands of nights at the theater. The case was an object of wonder from my childhood.

I needed this done. It was her case, her art. I could not refuse. How old was I when she first opened this case for me and made me up into some other child? I could not remember. I could not refuse. I waited with delight and with dread.

She lifted the lid and squared her chair around to me. With the tip of a forefinger she tilted my head to one side and then to the other, lifted my chin, lowered it. “We should do as little as we can get away with,” she said.

“I agree.”

“You may have a near encounter. We have to balance naturalness with a large enough adjustment he won’t find you familiar.”

“The meeting is near the docks.”

She hummed a soft assent.

“You could use a different nose,” she said. “Wash up.”

She nodded me to the sink at the far side of the room. I took off my tie and my shirt. I washed with Castile soap. The water was warm. I dried.

When I returned and sat, she was bending into her case, looking hard at her choices. Her grease sticks were new and bought in London, with the English theater system of numbering.

While she pondered, I faced the mirror and rubbed on a thin coat of cold cream to my face and neck. When I was ready and facing her again, she’d made her choices. Using her left palm as a palette, she stroked down a large amount of Number 3, a skin color slightly darker than medium. Then she took up a stick of Number 13, reddish brown, and she began to incrementally blend and blend and blend it into her hand, darkening the Number 3.

“We’ll give you some extended sun,” she said. “It’s August on the docks.”

And she put her right hand to my face and began to apply my new skin, her fingertips working at my forehead, my cheeks, my chin, my eyes, my throat.

I thought: I should have put on my own stage face. But the makeup has to be done well. I need to remember what she’s doing, in case it needs doing again. For now, though, there’s limited time and a lot at stake. She needs to do it.

I clung to the necessity of it.

I hid in thoughts , in that chattery, abstract voice that you can talk with on the surface of your mind.

But the straight thing was: I didn’t like her touch. Not this much of it. Boys have to come to that, at some point, where they stop their mothers from grooming them, dressing them, fussing over them, remaking them. And they have to stick to it. At some point it’s all or nothing: I am what she wants me to be, or I am me.

I tried not to flinch.

I expected her to be talkative. She said nothing. I was grateful for that.

I thought about the Chicago Cubs.

Then she was rubbing mascaro into my beard, cutting its blackness with auburn, making it the color of certain black cats if you see them up close in the bright sunlight. This was done with a small toothbrush, for which I was also grateful.

She’d left my nose for last, which she’d been thoughtfully glancing at since the beginning. Now she built me a broken one with paste. She said her first words through all of this. “I’m giving you the nose of a boxer,” she said. “You wanted to be a boxer once, when you were thirteen and skinny.”

I didn’t reply.

She said no more.

She finished with the nose paste and blended it with my new skin tone, and she put a light coating of powder over everything she’d touched.

She sat back. She nodded at the mirror.

I turned. She’d made me into someone else. A half brother she birthed in some dressing room somewhere along the circuit before I was born and she gave it away. He’d boxed some but not well. Maybe he’d just brawled in bars. Not surprising.

I turned back to her. “Thanks,” I said.

She nodded.

And then she said, “Look. You’re a big boy. You know the score. However things turn out, I figure I had to do this.” I knew at once she was talking about Albert. She said, “I’m either doing it for love or I’m doing it for my country.”

Mother didn’t expect that half brother of mine to have straightened himself out. She was ready to go off to the costume room for some stevedore’s clothes. I thanked her for the offer and for the new face and I wished her well for her rehearsal, but I returned to the hotel, figuring to change into a two-piece blue-gray flannel suit Trask’s boys had given me with the label of a Berlin tailor. Stockman hadn’t seen Joe Hunter in this one. And it befit the way my brother had gotten on in the world, in spite of the knocks that gave him his nose. In the taxi back to the Adlon I settled into this character I’d become. What was his name? What was my name for the next few hours? Isaac. The hardworking stagehand and his wife knew whose baby he was, of course, receiving him straight from her hand. They called him Izzy, thinking of his mother by blood.

I slipped into the Adlon lobby, keeping my face down, and I went up to my floor and approached my room. It was early afternoon. The floor was quiet. Most everyone was out doing what they were visiting Berlin to do. I unlocked my door and pushed through.

A man was standing in the center of the sitting room.

He was my Cassius of the lobby, the lean and hungry, hollow-cheeked, staring man. He was facing the door, his hands folded before him just below his rib cage, as if he’d been waiting for me, though my actual impression of him was that only moments before I confronted him he’d sprung into this posture at my imminent entry.

I had no doubt he was discreetly searching my room. He was probably attuned to just such interruptions and had assumed this position at the first faint whisper of my approach along the corridor.

I made this rapid assessment in a comfortable, self-assured frame of mind, which vanished instantly when I realized I was standing before this guy with another man’s face.

Hollow-Cheeks had even tilted his head a little as he contemplated this vaguely familiar but unexpected visage before him.

I had too many factors to think out — what should I say about my nose, if anything? could he see it was fake? what was this guy’s frame of mind in being here? routine because of my connection to Stockman? staunchly suspicious, that being the attitude of the Foreign Office operatives at the Adlon no matter who the guest? — so many factors to think about that to hesitate long enough to think effectively would itself make me seem guilty of something. I recognized all this in the briefest of moments and I chose to wing it.