Robert Butler - The Empire of Night

I shook Evert’s heavily callused hand. He smelled of graphite grease. He held his lamp low and his face was in deep night shadow. But his eyes were even darker than the shadow, were startlingly visible. “ Ein herzliches Dankeschön ,” he said, bowing a little at the waist. He gave me heartfelt thanks, though he didn’t elaborate. But I could surmise. He was working for a different sort of Germany. Jeremy was still very much a German in the eyes of men like this one, was furthering that cause. As, therefore, was I.

Evert turned to Jeremy now and said, still in our shared mother tongue, “I’ll get your device. Do you need the lamp?”

Jeremy looked at me. “Do you have your flashlight at hand?”

“Yes,” I said.

“See your own way,” Jeremy said to Evert, nodding at his lamp. The man moved off toward the garage.

“Over here,” Jeremy said.

I switched on the flashlight and followed him.

He’d stopped the Mercedes with its back end even with an upright gasoline pump.

I shined the light first on the pump, which Jeremy cranked, and then on its hose as he inserted the nozzle into the Torpedo’s gas tank, which sat low beneath the rear-deck luggage rack.

As we topped off the tank, Evert arrived carrying a closed canvas bag. Jeremy looked up from his hose and they exchanged a nod and Evert put the bag into the back seat of the car.

The makings of our bomb, I assumed.

And now Evert had returned and Jeremy was replacing the gas pump hose. Evert kneeled at the back of the Mercedes and was working with a tool at the license plate. Off it came. And he was putting another in its place. The one removed and the one affixed were both prefixed with MK. Militärkraftwagen . Military vehicles.

At last we were ready.

Evert thanked me again. He said, “I would have expected no less from a German reared in America.”

“Of course,” I said.

“We will create a true republic in our country,” he said. “Soon.”

In response I pumped his hand a bit more vigorously and bowed a little at the waist, as he had initially done, and we broke off and I got into the fastest staff car in the world and we hit the road again. As we pushed south from Spandau into the deep dark of the heath country, I thought how the mission ahead of me was as vague and difficult as Evert’s. And I wondered if the right thing wasn’t to clarify the goal as Jeremy had done tonight and simply put a bullet in Sir Albert Stockman’s brain.

Before the heath yielded to Potsdam we turned west. The road was accommodating and Jeremy throttled up the Torpedo and we raced on through the Brandenburg Forest, skirting the city, and we ran fast through the forest at Tucheim, and he said I should sleep, he was fine and the way was clear to him for a few hours. And though I’d had as much coffee as he and knew from other wars how to keep awake, I let myself sleep, and somewhere along the way I dreamed about drawing my Luger and shooting it into the dark. I couldn’t see a target but I knew I had to keep shooting, and the clip in the handle kept feeding 9mm Parabellum shells, endlessly, and I fired and fired, and in the darkness I never saw who I was trying to hit or if he had fallen, and so I just kept firing.

I woke at dawn as we decelerated into a street of folk-tale houses and shops, bright-painted bossage or half-timbered white stucco, and with froufrou gables and roof edges. This was the Weser Renaissance style, born along the river that gave it its name, the style of the brothers Grimm. The city was Hamelin.

We were passing from the main street onto the bridge over the Weser before Jeremy realized I was sitting upright.

“You awake?” he said.

“I am,” I said. “Are you?”

He was, but on Hamelin’s western bank we stopped at a small café with the logical but unfortunate name Der Rattenfänger , the ratcatcher, from the name of the Grimm tale based in Hamelin and translated more vapidly in English-language books as the Pied Piper. We ate our breakfast — avoiding the Wurst , just in case they were having a joke on us all — and we received ongoing glances and bows of respect from the working men who ate there with us. We were high officers in their army. And I was more. One man with a vast gray mustache rose to full attention before me and saluted. He then inclined his head toward my Iron Cross. “Hail to your bravery,” he said. I nodded in the supercilious manner of a son-of-a-bitch young secret service colonel, rehearsing the character I would need to play in Spich.

The owner tried to foot our breakfast bill but we declined, with thanks, and we stepped outside. Without having to say anything, we moved off fifty yards or so from the café where we could face the nearby upswell of mountains, the eastern edge of the Weser Uplands, and smoke a cigarette.

“About five hours to go,” Jeremy said. “As long as the dirt-road bits stay dry and the cows keep to the fields.”

“Spich has to be small,” I said. “In a small town and a tight military community, these uniforms aren’t camouflage. We’re going to stand out.”

Jeremy blew smoke toward the mountain. It was covered with a mixed-growth forest, pine and spruce, oak and hornbeam.

“So we’ll have to strut,” I said.

He looked at me.

“The colonel and the major have to be there with a purpose,” I said.

Jeremy took in a thoughtfully slow drag on his Murad.

“They’re in Spich about him ,” I said.

Jeremy exhaled sharply, in agreement. “Who do you expect knows his intentions?”

“The commandant has to.”

Jeremy nodded. “And an airship commander.”

“They could be the only ones,” I said. “And I bet neither of them knows what the bomb contains.”

“I bet you’re right,” he said. “But they do know the whole thing is on the sly.”

We said no more for now. The point was to smoke and stretch our legs, and then we walked back to the car.

One last salute. A guy old enough to have fought for Moltke at Gravelotte was approaching the café. At the sight of us, he stopped and snapped us a brisk one. “ Gott strafe England ,” he said.

Jeremy and I answered in unison, “ Er strafe es! ”

And we drove off.

But at a garage on the southern outskirts of Hamelin, we topped off our gasoline tank to get us easily through to Spich, and Jeremy let me drive the Torpedo, breach of rank though it was, so he could sleep for an hour or so. She was another skin, my Mercedes, a great steel body about me and I was its heart, my own heart beating fast from the roar of the engine and the whip-grind of the chain drive and the sense of torque beneath me, the great unseen spin of things flaring out to the four wheels, hurtling us along.

I drove a stretch of the route that brought us through the center of small town after small town — Arzen and Reher and Herrentrup, Meinberg and Kohlstädt and Marienloh, Hemmern and Rüthen — and every time, I had to slow down for the narrow streets, the cobbled streets, the horse-cart and hay-wagon streets, and that was fine, for I could throttle down and shift down my Torpedo and then fire her back up again.

Jeremy got his hour of sleep and more, nearly two, and he woke and I let him have the Mercedes once again, and he was chest-puffingly pleased at the transfer of her; he was a man reunited with his mate after a trial separation during which she’d dallied with another guy. He forgave her. And he drove her fast.

It was early afternoon when we saw a wide stretch of factory smoke before us. Mülheim, with the Rhine invisible just beyond and Cologne nearby, south around a bend of the river.

We soon turned south ourselves, before Mülheim, and I said to Jeremy, “Time to start the bluff.”