Robert Butler - The Empire of Night

A dark energy was coursing in us. From our being Allied spies in disguise together, of course. But our uniforms also made us German army officers. So inevitably the German army crackled in us as well. That was a strange part of the personal bond forged by a uniform. You can be bound by blood. But also by skin.

And since we were military men, our eyes fell to the pips on our shoulders.

I was a colonel. He was a major.

Jeremy shot me a salute. With a wink.

I returned them both.

Then I introduced myself. “Colonel Klaus von Wolfinger.” I offered my hand.

He thought for moment, finding a name for himself, and he grasped my hand. “Major Johann Ecker.”

We shook.

We walked off briskly, heading north on Hohenzollern. A few minutes later we turned west on Pionier-Strasse, which was sheltered, even from the pervasive glow of the factories, by a dense run of plane trees. Almost immediately, across from a drill ground, Jeremy stopped us. He looked around. We were alone in this part of the street, and we slipped quickly up the lawn of a darkened, two-storey, half-timbered and gabled house.

We cut around the side and into the back yard, where we found a good automobile indeed parked near the door. As with most of the German staff cars, it was a civilian vehicle appropriated for military use. Dressed up in feldgrau camouflage was a late model Mercedes 37/95 double phaeton touring car, its cloth top unfurled into its secured place. This model was often called the “Torpedo” from the distinctive V-thrust of the radiator, which was echoed by the shape of the headlamps tucked inside the front fenders.

I found myself treading lightly now, as I approached. As befitted the most powerful production automobile ever built. Ah yes. Let us steal this fine thing. Especially from the spy-killing commandant of Spandau Prison.

Jeremy was a couple of steps ahead of me. I drew near and stopped. He peered in, put his bag into the back seat, leaning for a moment to open it and emerging with a leather portfolio case.

He lifted it so I would take note, and he stepped to the front passenger side and placed the case in there.

“We’ll need your flashlight for the maps,” he said.

I put my bag into the back seat and retrieved the light.

“But first, let me in at the back door,” he said.

He was looking up to the darkened windows on the second floor.

Before I could reply, he added, “We don’t want him to wake up.”

We didn’t. One way or another.

I did not clear up the ambiguity of his exact intentions, however.

I would find out soon enough.

I put the flashlight in my pocket, took my tools from the Gladstone bag, and led him to the back door, which had a tumbler lock. I opened the door.

He stepped past me, saying, “No need for us both.”

Which seemed to me to clear up the ambiguity. Jeremy would arrange for Snuggle Bear never to wake up.

I stood in the yard, smoking a cigarette.

Jeremy was gone longer than I’d expected him to be. Long enough that I began to think about going in after him. But the house was quiet and dark, and I trusted Jeremy’s skill at this. I wondered if he was having some preliminary conversation with the man, a necessary explanation of why it was keenly appropriate for Jeremy to be the guy who ended his life. I would do likewise, I figured, if I had his particular combination of motives and this opportunity.

Then there was movement at the back door. I straightened and took a step in that direction.

The shadow striding across the yard was Jeremy.

He arrived before me.

From the starlight and the glow to the east I could see him just well enough to read his state. At least roughly. He gave off a quietude, almost an inertness. He did not seem like a man who’d just killed another man. Anything but. Which made me all the more certain he’d done that very thing.

“I brought you something,” he said.

He held out his hand and I received a palm-sized, cast-iron object. Flat with a pinback. I drew it up, away from the shadows of our bodies, and I could see the German Iron Cross, first class. The flare-tipped Maltese upright and crossbar were edged with silver.

“You deserve a better bluff than a phony lapel pin,” he said.

I pinned it high up on my chest.

“The major drives the colonel,” he said, and he circled the car to the right-hand driver’s seat. I headed to the crank while he flipped the ignition switch. It took only a small, sweet pull to start up the immense engine, ninety-five horses worth.

When I slid into the passenger’s seat, Jeremy said, “Someday, we’ll need your lock-picking tools to steal an automobile.” He reached outside the cabin — the gate change shifter was mounted to the car’s body at the running board, just inside the upright spare tire — and he notched us into gear and we rolled away, the Mercedes’ chain-drive grinding softly, deep inside its corridor of oil.

We doubled back down Hohenzollern-Strasse. I recognized his mother’s house up ahead. It approached, it drifted past, he did not move his eyes from the road before us.

I took out my flashlight and thumbed the slide button. I opened the portfolio. It contained a sheaf of maps. I recognized them. They were part of the KDR 100, the Karte des Deutschen Reiches , the finely detailed set of large-scale maps of Germany done up over the past three decades for the General Staff.

“Our route to Cologne,” Jeremy said.

I took out the first two we’d need. Map 268, Spandau , the thousand square kilometers of Germany in which Spandau was the major city. And Map 293, Potsdam .

We turned south on Wilhelm-Strasse and Jeremy throttled up and we surged ahead into the night. On an accommodating road, the Torpedo could do seventy miles per hour, could do a hundred with its chassis stripped down. Germany was fast asleep and dark, but shortly there were arc lights ahead and we flashed past a straight, cobbled road leading to a brick wall and twin, loopholed towers flanking a massive door that was as pale and jaundiced as a face from solitary. The main gate of Spandau Prison.

Then we were in the dark again, with just our headlamps before us. I thought we were on our way, but a few minutes down the road Jeremy slowed abruptly.

I looked to him.

“The last of our preparations,” he said.

He pulled off the road and we rolled over gravel past a low wooden house with a kerosene lamp burning in the window. There’d been no hesitation, no searching to find our way here. Jeremy knew the place.

Our headlamps lit up a wide-mouthed garage. From within, the radiators and darkened headlamps of half a dozen vehicles stared out at us. A man in overalls emerged from the depth of the garage into our light. He’d been waiting.

We made a sharp right turn, passing an open-topped automobile stripped of tires and windshield and sitting on stone blocks. We stopped. Jeremy switched off the engine.

“Another good German,” he said.

We got out.

I lingered by my door while Jeremy circled the car and strode to greet the man in overalls, who was carrying an acetylene lamp.

They shook hands and they turned their backs on me and leaned close to each other, speaking low.

I knew to stay where I was.

They had some intense, private matter between them.

I thought for a moment of the covert group Jeremy drew on, worked with, in Germany, wondered at the role he played for them, wondered how he explained his Britishness.

But they clearly trusted him. He clearly knew how to use them.

Then he and the man in overalls turned my way and I stepped to them.

He was Evert. Jeremy said just his first name. And he said, of me, simply, “Christopher.”