Robert Butler: The Empire of Night

Trask took us off to a corner of the room and we sat on a couple of high-backed, carved walnut chairs facing, at right angles, into the room. We were able to watch for anyone approaching, no doubt Trask’s intent. We would speak low.

“What’s this get-together all about?” I asked.

Trask gave a tiny snort through a whistley sinus. I looked toward him at this commonplace noise he’d made. It didn’t go with his eyes. It didn’t go with him, this peep of human frailty.

He said, “This is a high-class version of a thing you’re starting to find all over London. A blackout club.”

“The Zepps,” I said.

He nodded. “All you need is a basement and some nervous friends.”

“Are these guys nervous?”

“From the air attacks, a few. But mostly from their long neglect of homeland defense and the task of correcting that. They’d all gotten complacent about their island fortress. Their vaunted navy can’t do anything about airships. Churchill warned them before he got canned. He foresaw a major air war. I suspect he’ll turn out to be correct. Unfortunately, Winnie didn’t know crumpets about sea war and land war.”

Trask was referring to Gallipoli. Churchill had authored the disaster in the Dardanelles, which wasn’t over yet. “I got pretty close to all that,” I said.

“Right,” Trask said. “Which reminds me. Good work in Istanbul.”

I grunted.

Yesterday’s bullets.

“That compliment wasn’t as incidental as it sounded,” Trask said, as if he were a sensitive guy, not wanting to offend. His eyes hadn’t moved from me, hadn’t flickered through any of this. Not even when he added, “Not incidental at all.”

I practiced on my own dead stare.

Trask said, “Sorry to reward you by hitching you to a post in London for so long.”

I didn’t even grunt at this.

Trask knew how to justify it. He said, “Your Mr. Hunter has been getting some nice response in various places.”

“Good for him.”

“Now we’re trying to do our British friends — the good ones — a special favor.”

This declaration was the kind of rhetorical setup Trask liked to execute before taking a sip or a drag of whatever was in his hand. A Rickey in Washington when he sent me off on the Lusitania , a Fatima when he asked to enlist me in his covert tribe. And yes, a Rickey again now. I sipped too, waiting.

“They’ve got a traitor inside somewhere,” he said.

“Inside the government?”

“They think so, given what they suspect is getting through to Berlin.”

“Will I be involved with this?”

Trask shrugged. He looked off into the room. “We have someone on it at the moment. Looking into a suspect.”

He said no more.

I took a pretty good hit on the gin and lime. Old Joe Rickey and his Washington bartender friend had a real inspiration, simple though it was.

“We’re still feeling our way along,” Trask finally added. “It might be a good time to introduce Mr. Hunter.”

“Here?”

“I have a slightly different crowd in mind.” He leaned toward me, lowered his voice even further. “Do you know how many of the most powerful men in this country have German blood in their veins? It goes back two hundred years. George the first, King of Great Britain and Ireland, previously Georg Ludwig, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg, the only eligible heir of the dead Queen Anne. He didn’t even speak English. This was Queen Victoria’s great-great-grandfather, mind you, progenitor of three British kings before her. And who did Victoria up and marry? Another Hun, Albert, of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, who thus named the present royal house. For Christ’s sake, the Kaiser himself is Victoria’s grandson. There’s been a powerful lot of German-blooded begatting over those two hundred years, which has now produced, beneath the Brits’ virulently anti-German surface, a small but strategic shit pot of conflicting interests at a very high level.”

“Your suspect is one of the begotten?” I said.

Trask nodded. He glanced into the room and back to me. He bent near. “A baronet by the discreetly adjusted surname of Stockman. Given-named after Victoria’s German prince. Sir Albert Stockman. He’s the great-nephew of Christian Friedrich Stockmar, a German-born physician who became the personal doctor for Prince Leopold of. . where else?. . Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. Great-Uncle Chris was sent by Leopold to a marriageable Victoria to vouch for his own nephew Albert. Stockmar vouched well, and after the marriage he stayed on as the young couple’s personal adviser. So Victoria took good care of this guy’s extended family, including the baronetcy of our Sir Al.”

“Why don’t the Brits just grab him and interrogate him?”

“It’s all suspicion at this point,” he said. “And the operative phrase was ‘very high level.’ Sir Albert was beloved-by-blood by the Great Queen herself, which counts in this country. And though a baronetcy doesn’t quite rank the House of Lords, he got himself elected as a member of Parliament. Which, if he’s dirty, tells you something about his guile.”

From outside, very near, a whistle sounded, shriller, simpler than the bobbies’ whistles. An air raid constable. This the Brits were well prepared for. Guys in uniforms with whistles. The conversations instantly stopped in the drawing room. All the faces turned in the direction of the sound — the southern wall and the street beyond.

I looked at Trask. He looked at me. “Here come their cousins in a balloon,” I said.

Trask snorted.

I snorted.

But we both rose and moved with all the other white ties and dinner jackets into the circular staircase, going along in a quite orderly fashion, quite calmly, even as the sound of the Hotchkiss six-pounders began to pop pathetically in the distance.

We descended to the ground floor and then we circled on down, into the basement, and we emerged into a large, open space. At one end sat wine in barrels and more wine in bottles in racks, and on half a dozen of the barrels, candles burned in silver candelabra. Against the far wall were more racks, of a different sort, layered with Buffington’s guns. In the center of the open space a billiard table was disappearing even now under a white cloth cast over its surface by still another liveried man.

Beyond the vanishing billiard green were three, round dining tables already draped in white and each set with half a dozen dinner places and lit, as well, by candles. Beyond them was an opening to a corridor in deep shadow, leading into the recesses of the basement floor. On one side of the doorway was a piano with a lit stand-up lamp. On the other side was a wall of books, two-shilling editions, books for a man to actually read. For that purpose he had a couple of overstuffed Morris chairs with another stand-up lamp between them, this one dark. The basement — at least on this side of that corridor — was Buffington’s guy’s retreat.

We all now vaguely drifted in the direction of the set tables until Buffington’s voice boomed from behind us. “Gentlemen, the food and the drink will soon follow, and there will be more of both. But first a word.”

We stopped drifting. We began to turn toward our host.

He was drawn up to full height, hands behind him, framed against the final swoop of the staircase. He watched us turning to him. He approved. He waited. He encouraged us as we gathered our attention to him by addressing us once more. “Gentlemen.” Firmly he said it, though the tone of his voice had mellowed up as well, become comradely, almost affectionate.

When at last he had the full and silent attention of every man before him, he said, one more time, “Gentlemen.” This time he rolled the word out as if he were asking us to consider its full meaning. Which no doubt he was, for he went on, “They come now, showing their true and savage selves. They come in the night, sneaking in, dangling beneath gas bags to throw bombs on our homes and schools, on our women and our children. And a few months ago they unleashed poison gas upon our troops at Ypres, violating what civilized men from time immemorial have understood to be fields of honor. This is no longer a war of nation against nation. It is a war of civilization against a new barbarism. We fight to preserve the entire world from a second dark age.”