Robert Butler - The Empire of Night

Which was just fine as an American spy’s lullaby, a drifting away on a reminder of why I was here, doing what I was doing.

I woke to light and automobile horns from beyond the balcony. An hour later, braced with its good coffee and fresh eggs, I went out of the Adlon and headed for the Baden, walking briskly, though I immediately turned off Unter den Linden onto Wilhelm-Strasse and then turned again onto Behren-Strasse. I stopped immediately in front of the National Bank and lit a cigarette, waiting to see if anyone came around the corner following me. No one did. I went on east and made my way back to Unter den Linden and the Hotel Baden.

And finally I stood in an enclosed wood and glass telephone kiosk in the Baden’s lobby. I asked the hotel operator to put me through to Spandau, number 4739.

A woman answered the phone. “Müller,” she said.

His mother. “Mrs. Müller,” I said. “May I speak with. .” I hesitated very briefly. I had three of him to choose from. “. . Erich?”

“Who is it calling?” she said.

“Josef Wilhelm Jäger,” I said.

“Please wait, Mr. Jäger.” She spoke German very formally, with every r carefully trilled.

The phone clunked, onto a tabletop no doubt, as the line stayed open.

After a few moments Jeremy’s voice said, “Josef. Good morning.”

“Good morning, Erich.”

“I’m sorry I am in Berlin only briefly,” he said. For his mother’s consumption, I figured.

“We should have lunch,” I said.

“What time?”

“To meet, let’s say eleven o’clock.”

“Good,” he said.

And he hung up.

I stepped from the booth.

I went to my room at the Baden and found the fragment of a matchstick, which I’d left wedged, unseen, halfway up in the jamb of the door, still wedged there.

I lay down for an hour, resting better than I had all night at the Adlon.

At about ten o’clock I walked the three hundred yards back to the Kaiser’s favorite hotel. For the hell of it, I gave my room a careful look. Wagner or his boys had done a pretty slick job with their search. But the last item I checked showed their hand. My portable combination tool had been laid back into my latched toilet bag a hundred and eighty degrees off. The two ends were reversed. I wondered when this had been done. Sometime before or sometime after my confrontation with Wagner on the mezzanine? Was this a bit of clumsiness on his part? Or was Wagner sending me a little message that he was still watching?

Either way, I’d done all I could, and I would continue to be mindful that I was surrounded by some of Willie’s best Huns, who’d reserved a place against a wall at Spandau for guys like me.

Ten minutes later a note in a hotel envelope skiffed its way along the carpet and into the room at the bottom of my door.

Before picking it up I opened the door and looked right and then left and I saw a flash of Egyptian blue turning the corner at the end of the corridor. An Adlon page boy.

I closed the door and opened the envelope.

Stockman worked fast.

I was to meet him at four o’clock, not two. And I would go with him to see Fritz Haber at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry.

The lindens of the boulevard before the Adlon flowed like German blood into the vast forest of the Tiergarten. I entered through the Brandenburg Gate and along the Charlottenburger-Chaussée, which was lined with plane trees and marble statues of the Brandenburg-Prussian rulers, the Margraves and the Fredericks and the Joachims. All of these monarchs were dramatically outranked, however, when I turned into the Sieges-Allée.

He asserted his authority at once, though he was still two hundred yards away and though another goddess Victory floated behind and high above him on a red granite column. This was a military monarch, four storeys high, shaped from khaki oak, the massively square-faced Field Marshal Paul Ludwig Hans Anton von Beneckendorff und von Hindenburg, in great coat, leaning on his sword, and facing down this “Victory Avenue.”

I approached him.

He was a Nail Man. He was the latest in an odd German revival of an old Austrian custom of putting up a heroic wooden statue and then ceremonially driving nails into it for luck, for a blessing, for charity.

Hindenburg was brand-new, dedicated only recently and with the wooden platforms still girding him up to his waist to facilitate the first assault of nails. Berliners were asked to drive nails into their military hero for charity, the rehabilitation of East Prussia, overrun by the now expelled Russians in the first months of the war.

I began to circle him. The nails were mostly iron but with a noticeable scattering of silver-plate and very occasional spots of gold-plate. The kiosk by the front of the marble base had displayed the donation rates. Iron was one mark , silver was five, gold was a hundred. For your hundred mark you got a lapel pin, replicating the iconic German Iron Cross, done in onyx with gold-plated trim and a golden Hin the center.

I paused at Hindenburg’s backside, where he’d already been nailed a good hundred times. All in iron.

“That’s where I’d put one,” Jeremy said from behind my left shoulder.

Still pondering Hindenburg’s backside, I said, “You figure those hundred guys had that German sense of humor about it?”

“Of course,” he said.

I turned to him now. “Good morning, Erich,” I said.

Very briefly his eyes went as wide as they might have when Tommy Ryan caught him with an unexpected shot to the ribs. He recovered fast, but now he was driving a nail of a gaze into my Schmiss.

“I had no idea,” he said.

“So what’s your idea now?” I said.

“I still don’t have an idea.”

“It’s a war story I’d be happy to tell you over lunch.”

“It looks like. .”

“So they say. That’s why I’m showing it to my new German pals.” I glanced back up at the oaken Field. “You know, it just occurred to me. That Chicago journalist I once was had a pretty shrewd strategy when interviewing local dirty politicians. He always made a point to wear the lug’s buttonhole campaign pin when he wanted to finesse incriminating quotes out of him.”

Jeremy had stopped looking at the scar, but his usually stoic face was still furrow-browed with puzzlement.

“Trust me,” I said.

“Carry on,” he said, briefly dropping into English.

So we circled back around to the front of the statue. I gave the Field Marshal a last glance before taking him on with a hammer. He had a faraway look and the stiff posture of a man with hemorrhoids. But maybe it was just the hundred nails in his ass.

I asked the elderly, bristle-haired attendant for a hundred- mark golden nail. He clicked his heels and bowed, and I paid him two ten-dollar gold liberty heads from the money belt I’d worn since I’d first gone to war as a correspondent. Once newspaper money, now government.

With elaborately grateful heel clicking and bowing, he gave me a hammer and a gold-plated inch-and-a-half nail.

I clicked my heels and bowed a thanks, and Jeremy followed me to the foot of the scaffold.

He said, “The British have had their way with me, I’m afraid. My first thought was you are a fool to pay such a sum. But the German in me looks at that pin and I know what you’re doing. That says you opened your heart and gave to them in difficult times. They have warm hearts, the Germans. They will count you as one of them.”

“For that, given what we’ve got to do, twenty bucks is cheap,” I said.

And I went up the first level to stand as high as Hindenburg’s knees and the second to reach his waist. His arms were crossed loosely before him, parallel to the ground, resting on the sword, and I climbed up onto the railing of the scaffold and grabbed his left elbow and hoisted myself up and crawled into his arms and I hammered a golden nail into the center of Field Marshal Paul Ludwig Hans Anton von Beneckendorff und von Hindenburg’s chest.