Robert Butler: The Empire of Night

I kept my own face still. I wasn’t going to let her get away with the ambiguity of a rhetorical question.

She knew. She smiled a that’s-my-boy smile. “It was beneath me,” she said. “I am not now nor will I ever again work for the Pinkertons or any other detective agency.”

She held my eyes steadily with hers.

Okay.

“Okay,” I said.

She didn’t move.

“That leaves the man with the pistol in his coat,” I said. “He was in the flies above you.”

She didn’t flinch. Her face was placid, but she said, “That’s unsettling.”

How to read my mother? That had been a daily challenge for much of my life. It probably made me the hell of a good newspaper reporter that I was. Right now I believed what she was saying about the detective work; her reasoning acknowledged who she was behind the mask. This quiet in her also felt real. I supposed. But she was perfectly capable of playing, from her actor’s book of tricks, Placid and Calm. Playing the untrue thing was her life. If the calm were true, wouldn’t she be squeezing every flinch and flutter from a fictitious endangerment?

She said, “Maybe the theater put on some security. A woman playing a man provokes a lot of people on both sides.”

“Your stage manager said he didn’t know who he was.”

She nodded faintly. Then she shrugged. “We do only a matinee tomorrow and the run ends Thursday night.”

There wasn’t much left to say about this. It worried me. But this was my mother I was dealing with.

I let her change the subject. “Do you tour on from here?” I asked.

“Yes.”

A few moments of silence clock-ticked away as we looked at each other, as if casually.

“As Hamlet?”

“Yes,” she said. “And you? Will you be waiting in London for the German bullets and cannon shells to arrive?”

Another beat of silence and then she smiled. And she winked. She was reminding me that we’d long ago tacitly agreed not to question how we led our lives.

“I’ll be touring on,” I said.

I asked nothing more of her. Nor she of me. By the very early hours of the next morning, however, as I lay sleepless in bed in my rooms at the Tavistock Hotel across from Covent Garden Market, I’d become less and less convinced by her performance. Not her Hamlet. That remained swell. In temperament she’d always been something of a man — a tough guy, in fact — trapped in a leading lady body. Indeed, last night she’d played the catching of the murderous uncle at his prayers so fiercely and had so clearly kept that edge in all her character’s later delays that she’d utterly transformed Hamlet’s Wilsonian vacillation into the overriding desire to kill his uncle only when it was most likely to send him, unrepentant, to Hell. That was Mama. She knew how to draw on her toughness, play it as if that were all there was. Which was why it took me till three in the morning to begin to doubt her nonchalance about the man in the flies with the gun. Something more was going on.

But it wasn’t my affair. I was still a war correspondent. There was that. But I was also working for my country’s secret service now. Primarily now. She wasn’t the reason I was awake. I’d always figured she could take care of herself. And I was my tough-guy mother’s son. Which wasn’t to say certain things in my new profession didn’t get to me. It meant I played the essentials of my character convincingly and I did what I needed to do.

I just might not sleep for long stretches in the night.

I fidgeted mightily around on the bed. I paced about the room, smoking Fatimas. A room I’d occupied for going on ten weeks now. My own issues were about the thirteen months prior to that.

But I was tough guy enough to keep any extended replays of those scenes out of my head. From the battlefields I’d covered I’d learned the attitude I had to hold on to: the man you watched die yesterday doesn’t exist today; he fell to yesterday’s bullets and you’ve got today’s bullets to deal with. Nevertheless, sometimes it got me to brooding. Only it was in indirect ways.

Like noticing a little girl, maybe nine years old or so, from a working family, passing in James Street with a sad face.

Or a newspaper headline about a film actress — a star — formerly thought rescued but now assumed lost on the Lusitania .

Or the arcaded portico along the front of the Tavistock, which felt, in spite of obvious differences, very much like the portales of a certain hotel in Vera Cruz.

And making all this worse was the Corona portable on my desk, which I’d paced past a hundred times already tonight and kept my eyes from seeing. This time, however, I stopped. The electric bulb above the desk, wired into the gas-jet fixtures of this sixty-year-old hotel, pissed its yellow light onto a blank sheet of paper in the roller. One more story to write under a phony name.

No. I couldn’t think of it as phony. That was the point.

I was Joseph W. Hunter speaking through my Corona now. Joseph William Hunter. Formerly Josef Wilhelm Jäger, which I was keeping quiet about. From Chicago he was publishing widely in the German-language newspapers and the German-American English-language newspapers in the U.S.A. He was a damn good writer, sentence to sentence at least, though he clearly had an agenda. He was a justifier and apologist for the home country.

No. Not he. I . I was this guy Hunter. Becoming him, at least. I was still in love with mein Vaterland and anxious that my fellow Americans understood why. I was writing about the war as if America was smart to remain out of the fray. As if we were getting the wrong dope about Germany and its goals and its intentions. We had far more in common with the Germans than we did with the Brits.

It turned my stomach but it had to be done. It was quite likely, given recent events, that Christopher Cobb was known to the German Foreign Office as a dangerous man. Journalism was what I knew best as a cover identity and Germany was still courting sympathetic American journalists. Joe Hunter would be useful.

He was in the works even before my mix-up with the Huns this past spring. I’d been creating him ever since I came out of my secret service training in February speaking damn good German, the language training aided by a lifetime of intense and varied private education in the back stages and dressing rooms of the thousand theaters of my childhood and by my mother’s gene for mimicry.

I’d lit the electric light with the reasonable intent of making good use of my sleeplessness. I had a story to cook up about a movement among Chicago school administrators who advocated more classes in German in anticipation of a new order in Europe. But I reconsidered. I was Cobb alone tonight. Only Cobb. I reached up and turned the key and extinguished the light.

I moved to the window and opened the heavy blackout drape. It was the newest thing in the room. Since January London faced the nightly possibility of a Zeppelin attack. Since May the attacks had come to city center and were increasing in number and bomb load. The Brits still hadn’t figured out how to defend themselves. The airships could climb faster and higher than the Sopwiths and Bleriots of the Royal Flying Corps, and the best the anti-aircraft ground defenses had were Hotchkiss six-pounders whose range was less than half the Zepps’ attack altitude. The city was defenseless.

My rooms were at the back of the hotel on the upper floor, the fourth. I looked along the parapets and chimneys of the rooftops stretching north on James Street, all of it barely visible, blacked out, as was the whole city in the overcast night.

And as I watched, the darkness to the west cracked open from ground to clouds with a white searchlight and then with another, the two beams stiffly scanning the ceiling of clouds. I took in a quick breath. These Zeppelins were as vast as ocean liners, piston droning a mile overhead, slowing down almost to a float to aim their bombs, giving off a strange kind of elegance in their dangerousness. They were unlike anything you knew, no matter how much tough stuff you’d seen. They could set off a quick reflex of fear you didn’t quite know how to suppress.