Robert Butler - The Empire of Night

Applause rose up to me from a gathering of passersby.

When I came down, Jeremy met me at the bottom of the scaffold. He clicked his heels and bowed.

Then we walked away, past the southern edge of the Reichstags-Gebäude, the Hall of the Imperial Parliament, the legislators inside as ornamental as the building’s Italian Renaissance flourishes. We left the Tiergarten and found a café along the Spree and we had our beer and brat and I told him about the scar and my late drink with Stockman and the upcoming interview.

“Have you heard of this guy Haber?” I asked.

“Fertilizer?”

“You have. How?”

Jeremy shrugged. “The German newspapers. It’s been a while. He’s respected. They try to make him a bit of a hero, but fertilizer doesn’t play a big part in the German mythos.”

“So this afternoon Sir Al wants me to mythologize manure for the Americans.”

“German manure.”

“The critical thing is the conversation those two boys will have after they kick me out of the room.”

“Bombs starve without nitrates too,” Jeremy said. “If Stockman’s working on big-scale bombing from Zepps, Haber’s process is critical.”

True enough. But things still didn’t quite add up, a thought I voiced with a “However” that I let stand on its own for a moment. And then I said the thing I couldn’t get straight: “Haber’s active role in nitrates for bombs is long since done with. Why the personal meeting?”

Jeremy nodded. “So how do we listen in?”

Over the rest of lunch, he and I failed to come up with a plan for that. All we could conclude was that more improvisation would be called for.

He did stop me, however, as I turned to leave him outside the café. “Remember this about us,” he said.

He heard himself. Us.

“About the Germans ,” he said. “They are difficult to fool. But they are often easy to bluff.”

I took the elevator to the lobby of the Adlon a few minutes before four o’clock and emerged next to the front desk. I expected to meet Stockman in the bar, but he was talking to the frock coat at reception. He saw me out of the corner of his eye and glanced my way to wave me over with a little tilt of the head. As I approached, he was giving instructions for the envelope he was holding nose-high between his face and the clerk’s. Both men’s hands were still on it. Stockman hadn’t let go yet, a gesture of emphasis to accompany his wishes.

“I want this delivered to Madam Isabel Cobb at the Lessing Theater. Personally. By hand.” He paused dramatically after the “Personally.” And even, briefly, after each word to follow. No mistakes. Persönlich. Mit der Hand.

“Absolutely,” the clerk said, clicking his heels and bowing.

Stockman released the envelope to him.

“You may rely on the Adlon, Baron Stockman,” the man said, still speaking to the English baronet in German.

The meeting time with Haber must have altered his dinner plans with my mother.

I’d trained myself as a reporter to take in every detail with a fresh eye and ear. Trask and his boys had only sharpened that. But sometimes it took a few details to pile up for me to finally notice. What I’d just witnessed had to do with a delivery. A delivery of something important. And it had to do with the mode of delivery. Stockman’s emphasis clanged again in my head. And again. Mit. Der. Hand. And then I got it. MDH. The box to Kalk, near Cologne, the box to FVFB, was to be delivered personally. With the hand.

Stockman was clicking back at the frock coat. Of course he’d trust the Adlon. Now he turned to me and offered his hand. I shook it. And I wondered: Mit dieser Hand ? With this hand? Given his obvious connection to the device in the box, I figured it was likely that the answer was yes. Stockman himself was going to deliver the Zepp bomb to Kalk.

We were soon in a taxi and heading toward Dahlem, a villa colony eight miles southwest of the city center. It was also the home of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society for the Advancement of Science. Four years ago Willie lent his name and gave big money to do a grander Berlin version of the Institut Pasteur in Paris. Instead of just biology and medicine, Willie’s little Gesellschaft was hiring the big dogs — the German ones — to set up separate institutes in all the major sciences, where they could do what they damn well pleased without having to teach students or answer to bureaucrats or politicians or other government operatives. I figured maybe that last principle was getting a little shaky now that Germany was at war, which maybe was why Stockman was having this meeting.

The Tiergarten had barely vanished from the back window of our Daimler taxi when Stockman squared around toward me a little in the seat and said, “There are a few things we should talk about.” He said this in English, the first English we’d spoken in quite a while, I realized. Though the driver’s compartment was separate from the tonneau and the engine noise was loud, the partition window was partly open for the summer heat.

I shifted in my seat to match his angle toward me.

He said, “I am accepting Madam Cobb’s faith in you. But I will be frank. From our conversations I can fully understand that faith.”

He paused. Sober, he had nothing of the sentimental, the vulnerable about him. So I understood that this restrained pause and these somewhat indirect words were significant in Stockman’s unintoxicated range of emotional expression.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Your story with him must regard his process only as a benefit to humanity.”

I heard the command and so I filled the brief silence that followed: “But not to include the benefits to humanity of our quickly ending the war.”

He laughed. “You understand my full meaning.”

“That’s my job,” I said. Indeed. I repressed that thought, however, a reflex sense of irony being a dangerous trait for a spy.

But he heard it the way he needed to. “If only all journalists had that gift,” he said.

“I understand your intended meaning,” I gently corrected. Surely he didn’t want even a trusted journalist to know his full meaning.

He got it. He laughed again. “So if he volunteers anything else. .”

“I will treat him as I do you,” I said. “Nothing will ever appear in print that would embarrass him or Germany or will reveal anything that will aid Germany’s enemies.”

“I have already given him that assurance,” Stockman said. “Now, a few incidental but problematic things, as you might naturally be inclined innocently to make small talk or to enhance the human elements of your story.”

“As indeed I may,” I said.

“Little more than three months ago, Doctor Haber’s wife took his army-issued revolver into their garden and shot herself to death.”

He said this flatly.

He said no more for a moment.

“So no questions about his family,” I said.

“Best not.”

The Daimler shifted gears and so did Stockman. He said, “Doctor Haber is a Heidelberg man, like yourself. And like yourself he bears a scar on his cheek. But I understand it is not a scar of honor. Forgive me. As the bearer of a true Schmiss , you no doubt would have recognized it for what it is. But I thought I should mention it.”

“Yes, thank you,” I said.

“He is a Jew,” Stockman said.

He let me absorb that for a moment. The haters of Jews — often those who have leaned close and revealed this sotto voce — assumed the following moment of quiet was filled with an agreement on the subject that needed no further expression.

But Stockman said this as uprightly and flatly as he’d spoken of the suicide of Haber’s wife. I kept my manner and face as neutral as his. I hoped he’d show more of himself now. A man who, in his ignorance, showed his prejudice, about whatever sort of subject, was a man who gave power to others. He showed the way his mind tended to stop working, his sensibility tended to shut out the real world. That was always useful, to a reporter or to a spy.