Robert Butler - The Empire of Night

I’d had no idea spy work would be as unsettling as this.

I stropped the razor and I cut and I cut and I was clean and I was scarred and I was Josef Wilhelm Jäger.

I went back downstairs.

I expected that Stockman had continued to drink. I half expected this whole shaving event to have been in vain, that he would have reached his limit, that he would have forgotten even sending me upstairs.

He was sitting very still when I approached and he heard me and turned. The level of rye in the bottle had receded no farther since I’d left, and a cup of coffee was sitting before him on the table.

He rose.

He extended his hand to me. He spoke, of course, in German. “Herr Jäger, I am Albert Stockman.”

He had shaved himself as well, by offering his first name without the title. Given who he was, it was an odd and unsettling thing for me to feel — as I now briefly did — a twist of barroom affection for this guy.

But I held off from using “Albert” to his face, though I’d thought it a number of times already, in disrespect. “Herr Stockman,” I said. “May I ask a question?”

“Of course.”

“Was your name once Stockmar?”

He threw back his head and laughed, and when he was done, he cuffed me on the shoulder. “You are a shrewd man, Herr Jäger. You are correct. It was done before I was born, however.”

“That makes no difference,” I said. “In your blood, you are still a Stockmar.”

He laughed again and nodded me to my chair.

When I sat, I motioned for the bartender to come. He did, briskly.

I said to him, “I’ll have what he’s having.”

“Coffee?” the bartender said.

“Coffee,” I said.

The man vanished.

I faced Stockman now, as the truly revealed Josef Wilhelm Jäger.

His eyes moved to my scar and lingered. “Please?” he said, lifting his hand, waving it as if turning the page of a book.

I turned my face to the right, fully showing the Schmiss.

I felt grindingly uncomfortable, but I understood my job would be made easier by all this. Nevertheless, the examination, though probably brief, felt endless. I focused on the thought that it was a good thing I would never know my own father. At our first meeting I’d be subjected to this same ordeal. Here, let me take a look at you, my son. To hell with that.

Then Stockman said, “Thank you.”

I faced him once more.

“You did not pack it with horsehair?” he asked.

The dueling sword of the friendly, prearranged duels, the straight-bladed Korbschläger , had a blade as fine as my straight razor and did not bruise when cutting. Some duelists packed their cuts with horsehair to irritate them and keep them agape as they healed so as to create a more prominent scar. Mine was plenty striking on its own.

“I did not ,” I said. “That would be a lie and a sacrilege.”

“Good,” he said. “It’s interesting how those of us who have grown up in exile sometimes have a purer sense of these things.”

“Perhaps this war will refocus all Germans,” I said.

“I greatly envy you, bearing this mark,” he said. “I was in a different circumstance, of course, going off to university. My father had complex commitments. His son could go nowhere but to Oxford.”

He paused. I had the impulse to keep improvising onward. I even thought to say: A true German soul bears this mark invisibly from birth . But even without thinking it out, I knew I was on the verge of going too far, of turning this into melodrama.

So I simply nodded sympathetically and was glad to find the bartender suddenly beside us, giving us pause, presenting my cup of coffee and topping off Stockman’s from a carafe.

After the bartender had vanished again, Albert said, “Of course, it is the same with the British as the Americans. There is so much they do not understand.”

I sipped at the coffee, hot and bitter, and I remained plausibly silent. Let Albert follow his own internal path.

He lifted his coffee, cup and saucer together, and looked at it steaming before him, and he said, “I’m afraid the British will never understand.”

He sipped. But his voice had already turned hot and bitter.

“Not by reason, they won’t,” he said. “Not in a civilized way. They are waging this war against us by using their navy to starve Germany slowly to death, every man and woman and child. That is the act of terror. And they do it with their damnable outward restraint, as if its incremental effects civilize it. But they are not rational. They are cold-blooded, which is a different thing. Civilization cannot exist without passion.”

He’d placed the cup back onto the saucer, but kept them both suspended before him. The cup was chittering lightly.

His hand had begun to tremble.

He seemed aware of it. He looked at the cup.

And the sound abruptly stopped.

He returned his eyes to mine and said, “I still have hopes that the Americans will come to understand.”

“It’s why I write,” I said.

“I admire that,” he said.

We drank our coffee for a time. Stockman seemed to turn inward. But whatever he was aware of in himself, I was apparently the point of reference. He would sip and think and look at me and look away and then do it all again.

Finally he said, “I am meeting a German scientist tomorrow who has created a process that will eliminate famine from the face of the earth. He did this six years ago. You do not know his name. I have read essentially every issue of your most important newspaper, The New York Times , for the past decade. His name has never appeared. Not once. Nor his discovery.”

Stockman paused. Inside my head I’d paused several sentences ago. This guy had a way of veering off and surprising the hell out of me. He seemed to want me to comment now.

“What is his name?” I asked.

“Fritz Haber.”

I had always read very widely. I possessed a very good memory. But Stockman was right.

“I have never heard his name,” I said.

“You see?”

“What is this process?”

“He can convert the inaccessible nitrogen in the atmosphere into ammonia, which contains extractable, usable nitrogen. Do you know what this means?”

I knew some science. The air was mostly nitrogen. But I’d never heard of anyone figuring out how to use it.

“Perhaps,” I said. “But tell me.”

Stockman said, “Nitrogen is in everything we eat. Meat, bread, anything with protein. The nitrogen comes from the soil, through the crops. The wheat, the corn. The rye you and I have drunk together. But there is only so much nitrogen. The earth can be sucked dry. Fertile land can become exhausted from use, and it is the nitrogen that vanishes. Before the Haber Process, the only way for man to create large quantities of nitrogen to put back into the soil was by using the nitrogen in saltpeter. No one has saltpeter but the country of Chile, and even there, the supplies are finite. But you can make fertilizer from nitrogen-bearing ammonia, and if you can turn the air into ammonia, you have an infinite amount of fertilizer. The world has nearly two thousand million people. This is nearly twice as many people as a hundred years ago. It will not take another hundred years to double again. Already millions starve. But Germany will never starve. America need never starve. No one need starve. A German will feed them all. Fritz Haber will feed them all forever.”

I sat in silence with that abrupt, vast, visceral feeling that a reporter gets when he picks up on a story that nobody has reported.

About the feeding of millions, now and into the future, of course. But the thing Stockman wasn’t saying was that nitrogen was also essential in making explosives. Nitrogen created from the air meant killing millions as well.