Robert Butler - The Empire of Night

“I’m not blaming you.”

“You didn’t have to fall in love with him,” I said.

She turned her face from me, as if she were hiding something.

“Are those real tears or fake?” I said.

She plucked a handkerchief out of her lizard skin bag and dabbed at her eyes. “Both,” she said.

“Look,” I said. “I’m sorry this has gotten complicated.”

“I need to go,” she said.

“Have you gone through his things?”

She turned her face sharply to me. “It hasn’t gotten that far,” she said.

I wasn’t sure what distinction she was drawing.

“I don’t have a key,” she said.

“I’m not prying,” I said.

“I know you have to ask.”

“I’m asking if you can do this, given your feelings.”

“I’m gathering as much information as I can.”

“I appreciate that.”

“I can do this,” she said.

She was no Hamlet.

She said, “How was your adventure at the docks?”

I had to make a decision now about my mother and this role she’d taken on. The more she knew, the more she could inadvertently reveal, especially to a man she had feelings for. But the less she knew, the less she might recognize as useful information. I stalled for thinking time by leaning forward and topping off my coffee cup from the Adlon Oblige pot.

Her feelings for men. They came and they went. Readily. How deeply could this Albert possibly be touching her?

“Coffee?” I asked.

“Yes, dear,” she said.

I filled the second cup as well.

She knew what was at stake for her and for me and even for the country she wanted to serve.

She took up her cup and sipped. As did I.

She was a smart woman. Trask trusted her with Stockman. I could use her help.

So I told her most everything that had happened on this day.

Among the omissions: I didn’t tell her about the cadaver act at the Kabarett . She didn’t need more ideas on how to reinvent herself.

When I’d finished, she said, “I should go now. I have things to listen for.”

She rose.

I rose with her. “Just be careful about asking leading questions,” I said.

“I understand,” she said.

She turned, but she paused and turned back. She touched my arm. “Thank you,” she said. “For trusting me.”

“Even when you’re in love.” I said it as a declaration. In fact, I said it to try it out, to try to hear if it was true.

She said, “Love only makes me stupid in one way. My mind is always untouched.”

And with this, she whisked away as if she were making an entrance into a swank hotel through a revolving door.

I sat where I was.

I thought of what my mother had said, about Albert’s drinking helping me to befriend him. He was a common figure in a profession that was still figuring itself out for the twentieth century. He was officially in the employ of the German Foreign Office, certainly. Secretly so. He was powerful, clearly. But he seemed an amateur at heart. The Huns hadn’t sufficiently accounted for people like my mother and me being able to get this close to a man like him. That was good for us. But I realized his amateurism made him less logical, less predictable, more dangerous in his work.

It had been a long day.

I stopped thinking.

I had two places to sleep.

It was too late to call Jeremy’s mother’s house.

I chose the Adlon.

I rose, crossed through the reception lounge, and neared the desk on the way to the staircase behind it. The steps led to the mezzanine and the hotel elevator.

Just before passing beneath it, I glanced up to the mezzanine.

Grasping the ironwork balustrade there, standing upright with his arms straight, his eyes fixed on me, was Herr Wagner.

I did not hesitate but nodded at him and went up. It was time to try to deal with him.

I emerged on the mezzanine landing. He had already turned around to confront me.

I was well aware that I was showing him my third face in two days. But I made sure he got a good look at the scar on my cheek as I approached. He was working hard at maintaining the opacity of his own face.

“Good evening, Herr Wagner,” I said.

He nodded. I was no doubt a unique challenge for him. From the intensity of his gaze, from the faint, incipient shaping of his mouth, which waxed and waned and waxed again, I knew he was struggling to find words to say.

I was concerned, however, that if he failed to find any words for me, he’d decide to leave the task for some boys in a back room at the Foreign Ministry.

“I am sorry to keep confusing you,” I said.

He stiffened a little. “Sir?”

“Do you know what I’m doing here?”

He stiffened some more. “Doing?”

I could only play the cards in my hand. I said, “You are no doubt aware that a special and powerful friend of Germany, Baron Albert Stockman, is staying at the Adlon. And that he is accompanied by the great American actress, Madam Isabel Cobb.”

I paused. Wagner was keeping his face blank and his mouth shut. I waited him out.

Finally he said, “I am aware of them.”

“I daresay you know that Baron Stockman arranged for me to stay at your lovely hotel. I am here to write a major story for the American newspapers on Madam Cobb’s performance of Hamlet. As part of the story, I am — in my ignorance of these matters — experiencing some aspects of the life of an actor. Putting on makeup, for instance. Changing a face to become a character for the stage. Do you understand?”

“I’m not sure, Herr Hunter.”

“The face that puzzled you yesterday afternoon. It was not mine. It was makeup that Madam Cobb herself put upon me so that I might experience, for a few hours, what the actor experiences. Being inside another person’s skin. I regret making you an unwitting part of our little experiment.”

Wagner struggled to take all this in.

His eyes moved sharply now to my scar.

I said, “The Schmiss , however, earned in Heidelberg, is real. I write for American newspapers. I am technically an American citizen. But I am, in fact, German.”

His eyes remained on the scar.

“Would you like to touch it?” I said.

He flinched his eyes away from my cheek. “No sir,” he said.

“To verify its reality. Go ahead,” I said.

“No thank you, sir,” he said, growing as uncomfortable as I’d intended.

“The experimenting is over, Herr Wagner. I will cause you no more confusion.”

He summoned the power of his formality. He straightened. He clicked his heels. He said not a word. He moved past me and down the steps.

This might all have gone well.

This might only have bred distrust in him, and therefore, as well, in the men he worked for.

I could only hope my own work would go swiftly in Berlin.

I waited and watched Wagner shortly emerge from beneath the mezzanine, stepping smartly, his backbone flagpoled into his butt, his chin lifted.

I thought, A goddamn Hun.

The elevator door opened on the fourth floor, and I padded along the dense Ushak hall carpet to my room.

Huns, I thought. It was a little too easy for me to use the epithet. It was just a word. But I had to make sure it didn’t induce a reflex feeling about the Germans, as well, or I could miss their equivalents of Mother and me. Or Jeremy. Stockman was no simple Hun.

And twenty minutes later, with my balcony door open to the upspill of street light and to a wisp of a night breeze, with the linen top sheet draped over my bare feet, the Huns lingered with me. The irony, of course, was that Kaiser Willie himself stuck the label on his people. As I drifted off to sleep, the quote — suppressed in the German press at the time, but lately resurrected among the Allies — rattled around in my head, words he spoke fifteen years ago to his troops heading off to China to crush the Boxer Rebellion. Prisoners will not be taken. Whoever falls into your hands will be put to death. Just as a thousand years ago the Huns, under their King Attila, found a glory that shines even today, may you exalt the name “German” so that no one in China will dare to look askance at a German again.