Robert Butler - The Empire of Night

He and I were relying on the unthinkableness, in the heart of the Fatherland, that two Germans who looked and sounded like ranking officers of the Deutsches Heer could be anything but what they seemed. We all had the same blood. Even the three million socialists. So surely these two splendidly portrayed German officers were legit. Consequently, the more dramatic our public strut, the better.

So we stopped at the side of the road, surrounded by cabbage fields, and we lowered the cloth top on the Mercedes. Let the Spich locals and the air base army men know that two high officers from Berlin had come to town. Let those boys start to talk; let them start bluffing themselves.

The main street of Spich ran about a quarter mile along the highway, which had lately turned east-west. We slowed to a crawl and made our way through, the houses and shops bright with whitewash and scarlet geraniums in window boxes. We turned local heads, all right — at cobbler and grocer, at butcher and inn — and the military heads turned, as well, a couple of enlisted men wearing undress uniforms, who snapped to at once when they saw us. They saluted. I returned the salute casually.

At the eastern end of the main street we approached a town square with a four-spout fountain in the middle and a cobbled market area and a tidy three-storey, dark wood and white stucco Rathaus , the town hall. As we circled the fountain, a staff car passed us, heading in the other direction — a camouflaged Horch phaeton — and I exchanged a very precise salute with what seemed to be another colonel, out and about in his Pickelhaube .

“I wonder if that was our man,” Jeremy said.

“I hope it was,” I said.

We’d reached Spich’s eastern-most cross street, Wald-Strasse. A sign urged us to turn left for the Hotel Alten-Forst. We did, and ahead was a great wall of pines, the southern edge of the Alten Forest, and notched into the trees was a clearing where the hotel sat, a white-stuccoed, hip-roofed building with two unequal wings joined in an L, the long wing at the rear, parallel with the line of trees. I twisted around to look down Wald-Strasse. South was flatland as far as I could see. The airship base was in that direction.

I turned back toward the forest.

Jeremy had slowed to a near stop.

Though we had not discussed it, I stated the obvious. “We’re not checking in there.”

I could not chance encountering Albert.

“Just reconnoitering,” Jeremy said.

“Even if they come straight here, we’ve got a good six hours on them,” I said.

Jeremy accelerated a little, and we approached the hotel, entering a circular driveway that curved around a tightly manicured lawn with a flower clock in reds and pinks and yellows, how time passed in a town where every window was studded with geraniums.

As the driveway bent back to run in front of the hotel, with the option of turning into its courtyard, we both focused on the settings of tables in a small, canopied Biergarten . We rolled on past and completed the circuit, and we headed back south.

Jeremy had noticed an inn on Wald-Strasse just north of the town square. The Boar’s Head. It had two upper stories above the street-level bar. We’d passed it as I’d been looking south. We stopped there and parked our Mercedes off the street in a side yard.

We entered the ground-floor saloon. In the thick afternoon dimness that pressed against our eyes and seemed the same in drinking joints the world over, a young man, who was no doubt on the cusp of conscription, was wiping the long zinc bar. He took one look at us, threw his rag aside, stood up straight, and faced us. His Adam’s apple bounced a couple of times. He was thinking to salute but was feeling unqualified and inadequate for the job. So instead, he turned sharply on his heel and beat it through a door at the back of the place.

A woman emerged. The young man’s mother, I supposed. She was wiping her hands, working kitchen and front-of-the-bar both, and I would’ve bet her husband, the boy’s father and boss of the inn, was off in the trenches already. She’d be running this place completely alone in a year or so, with husband and son in uniform, and she’d be waking in a sweat night after night, sure she’d lost them both.

Jeremy was speaking with her, as my subordinate, asking about rooms. She had only a single lodger on the second floor and the two other rooms were free there. Jeremy was about to engage them, but I intervened.

“And the third floor, madam?” I said.

She looked at me as if I’d leaped from the shadows.

“It is a longer climb, Colonel,” she said. Herr Oberst . She was flustered, as intimidated by rank as was her husband in a trench in France.

“Is anyone booked there?” I said.

“No, Colonel. It is empty.”

“How many rooms?”

“Three,” she said.

“We will rent them all,” I said. “And absolute privacy with them.”

“Yes sir,” she said.

The entrance was from the back garden of the inn. Jeremy and I climbed a tightly winding staircase and emerged in a musty corridor. He carried his Gladstone and also the canvas bag with the makings of our bomb.

Climbing, Jeremy asked, “Three rooms?”

“Our being at the inn instead of the hotel is suspicious,” I said. “Renting the floor explains we did it for privacy. Any rumors about that would even be useful.”

“ Der Bluff ,” he said.

“ Der große Bluff ,” I said.

The big bluff had begun.

Before I left him at his door I asked for the dispatch case I’d requested.

“I’ll bring it to you,” he said.

I moved off.

My room was high-ceilinged near the door but it followed the steep pitch of the roof so that I had to crouch to actually look out my window.

A man with too heavy a coat for the August afternoon was passing slowly by on the far side of the street. The coat was patched at the shoulder. His shoes were scuffed badly enough for me to notice the fact from this distance. As willfully costumed-up as all this seemed, he did not turn his face from the fountain square toward which he was headed, nor did he miss a step till he was gone from my sight.

A light knock at the door.

I opened it to Jeremy.

He handed me a russet leather vertical bag with a shoulder strap and a buckle fastener at the bottom of the weather flap.

“They will never see me without it,” I said.

He nodded.

If and when the time came to do something with our bomb, I would carry it while appearing to be only what I’d always been.

“That little beer garden at the hotel,” he said.

“I noticed it.”

“In three hours?”

“Good.”

We would rest. Then we would sit and nurse a few beers and wait to watch Stockman and my mother arrive. We had to know his vehicle. I had to know their room.

“Mufti or military?” Jeremy said.

“Military. Did Stockman ever lay eyes on you?”

“He did. A couple of times. But he’d catch me out only close up. In uniform, tucked away in the beer garden, we should be all right.”

So we each slept our three hours and then we settled in at a table under the Biergarten canopy at the Hotel Alten-Forst. We ate, we drank, slowly, and the sky darkened and the electric lights came on in the hotel. We were sitting across from each other, Jeremy with the driveway before him, I with my back to anyone arriving at the hotel and able to turn my face away at his nod.

The nod came a couple of hours into our wait.

I angled my face past Jeremy’s right shoulder, rendering myself unidentifiable to a passerby, but I moved my eyes sharply back toward his, watched him watching them. He tracked them past, and then he nodded at me again.