Robert Butler - The Empire of Night

“I promise not to argue with her about the Kaiser,” I said.

“You’d lose anyway,” he said.

“What do you know about the town of Spich?” I said.

He glanced at me and then back to the street ahead. “It’s a major army Zeppelin base.”

Of course.

I told him about Isabel Cobb’s note.

He glanced my way again. But he made no immediate remark.

He was thinking.

I was thinking. If Stockman was taking Mother along to share his triumph, then the choice of hotel was significant. It was in tiny Spich, not urbane Cologne. It was the hotel nearest the Zeppelin’s ascent on the heroic day. She was going to be part of that. But the other witnesses — be they press or just a few influential people, including the greatest actress and most fascinating paramour in the world — these witnesses would hardly be present at the start of a secret military mission. The successful return would be another matter. And in that event, Stockman’s standing as a hero would be greatly diminished if he was simply one of the crowd, cheering. Strategic advice and technological creativity and a place in the bedazzled crowd were not quite the stuff of statues in the Tiergarten. Not for the leading man. I bet he’d talked his way onto the Zepp for this thing. He was planning to step down from the gondola triumphant.

I looked at Jeremy. He sensed it. He looked at me.

“He’s going up with the gas bag,” I said.

It took him only one breath of thought. “Of course.”

We kept quiet now as we drove through the linden forests of the Tiergarten, emerged on the broad central boulevard of Charlottenburg, and then passed into the villa colony of Westend. A few minutes later, with the northern sky striated in stack smoke from the arms factories and the western sky rimmed with the conifers of the Spandauer Stadtforst, we crossed the Charlottenburg Bridge into the narrow streets of Spandau city-center.

Jeremy’s family was or had been well-to-do. His mother lived on Hohenzollern-Strasse in a stretch of very nice, scaled-down villas. Her two-storey house was stucco-finished with the window moldings cut into the rough stone in the German classic style. The place sat on an acre or a little more, thick with pine and birch. A beaten-gravel drive curved behind the house where we now parked the Ford.

Jeremy’s mother emerged onto a flagstone veranda to greet us.

He stepped in front of me and bent to her and they hugged. Then he moved aside and she extended her hand and we shook. She was small and as sinewy-solid as corded wire. She had the grip of a retired bantamweight who once could throw a hell of a right cross.

“Welcome to our home, Herr Hunter,” she said, her German formal in person as well, leaving no trillable r untrilled.

We went in and sat in her immaculate parlor, Jeremy and I on side-by-side matching wing chairs covered in unpadded leather and she on a plank chair before us with a cut-out heart floating behind her head. I imagined that she addressed her two sons on matters of motherly importance in this very setting. Her husband hung over the fireplace. I presumed it to be him. He was clean-shaven, a state far rarer in an earlier era, and I figured I could see his eyes in Jeremy’s, though by this pose they would be the son’s eyes only as he danced into the center of the ring ready to do some damage. And this guy’s mouth was compressed hard, even as he sat for a portrait. A hard mouth and a harder gaze, such that it led me to recall: Jeremy’s only allusion to his father was a reference to his mother as a widow.

The mother rose now and moved to a vast ebonized walnut buffet whose upper panel was laid with marquetry hunting scenes of leaping horses and fleeing elk. From the buffet she served us tea and buttered bread and we sat and ate and she spoke ardently about the price of the butter — two mark fifty a pound — and feared it would soon go to three mark . She took care to blame the British and the French.

And later she fed us a dinner of boiled beef with horse radish sauce and Spätzle in her dining room on a heavy wood table with a vast, spotless linen cloth that demanded every bite I took be an act of desperate carefulness.

As we ate, she asked me a little about the articles I wrote in America on Germany’s virtues, but mostly she monologued, though with each bite of dinner she fell primly silent until her mouth was empty. Jeremy and I kept our own mouths closed while she chewed, digesting with our food each of her just completed segments of thought on such things as British iniquity and international ignorance and Wilhelmian inspiration and Bismarckian virtue, the breadth and depth of the latter winning, for the first chancellor of a unified Germany, a place at Martin Luther’s right hand in heaven.

All this transpired with still another portrait of her husband looking down on us, this time standing with hunting rifle in hand and a brace of dead rabbits beside him and a look on his face that suggested he was, here in the dining room, as disapproving of the rabbits as he was of his sons in the parlor.

This I figured I knew: Jeremy’s mother was a woman who not only acknowledged her son’s father but enshrined him, lived with him openly every day in every room. A woman who was never touched by any man but him. A woman who played only one role forever. Nevertheless, in spite of our obvious differences in father and mother, Jeremy and I had been catalyzed into who we were by heat and pressure from a single unifying principle that would elude even Albert Einstein.

We sat on the veranda after dinner, Jeremy and I. The night had come and the horizon before us burned brightly from the munitions factories on the eastern bank of the Havel. He said, “She will drink Kirschwasser now until she can no longer pour it. And then she will sleep very soundly.”

I thought to say something about his mother and my mother. But I said nothing.

I offered him a cigarette, from the pack he’d given me. He took one with a nod. We lit up and he said, “From the way we reckon it, this thing could go quickly, down there.”

“If the weather is right.”

“I’ll make us a pot of coffee,” he said. “Then we need to steal an automobile.”

“Do you have one in mind?”

“I do,” he said. “A few minutes’ walk from here is the house of the longtime commandant of Spandau Prison. Colonel Walther von Küchler. He’s shot more than a few chaps in our trade. He keeps a staff car. A good one.”

I understood.

Jeremy took a drag on his cigarette.

And he added, in a voice that rasped away any sense of offhandedness, “He’s also known in a few houses in the neighborhood as Kuschelbär .”

Snuggle Bear.

That this colonel had executed some of the boys in our own trade was plenty of leavening for our little project. For Jeremy to add the man’s exploits with the local women made me suspect I’d been wrong about his mother. Maybe I didn’t have to look so deep for the familial chemistry I sensed he and I shared.

“Did you bring your lock-picking tools?” he asked.

“I did.”

“Good,” he said.

So when we were jittery with coffee and Jeremy’s mother was kayoed from Kirschwasser and it was past midnight and the neighborhood was sleeping, he and I dressed up in our German uniforms — the peaked field cap Jeremy’s boys got for me was a fine one, with red crown piping and a skull badge between the cockades — and with my Luger strapped to my waist and with our Gladstone bags in hand, we stepped out of his house.

Two guys with a common uniform have some kind of electrical charge between them. It might be low-wattage at times, but it’s always there. The circuitry of an army. Of a police force. Of a baseball team, for that matter. This sudden thing between Jeremy and me made us stop just across the threshold and look at each other.