Robert Butler - The Empire of Night

I looked out into the courtyard.

Albert’s broad, tweeded back. My mother’s darkly besilked body, her arm hooked in his. She seemed small. Very small. Had she always been this small? She could fill a stage. She seemed enormous on a stage. But tonight, as she pressed her body close to this man as they maundered toward the hotel doors, toward their room together, she seemed impossibly small.

I should have told her in Berlin. About the poison gas. I should have told her exactly what sort of man this was.

“I’ll watch the check-in,” Jeremy said, rising.

I rose too, swinging around to see the vehicles.

Two Opel touring cars, their tops up.

“They were in the lead car,” Jeremy said. “He was driving. Just the two of them. But the car behind is with them.”

Even in the night, in the spill of the electric light, I could see the lead car’s deep red color. Dark-uniformed bellmen were pulling suitcases — mostly my mother’s — out of the vehicle.

The Opel behind was in camouflage. A burly man in feldgrau , wearing a peakless field cap, was taking up a place to stand as a barrier to the tonneau door.

“We know what’s in the back,” I said.

“They didn’t have time for Bayer. The thing is still empty.”

“Watch the wall of keys,” I said, turning my head a little bit toward him.

He slipped away to get me a room number.

I sat down in his chair, facing the automobiles.

The bellmen finished stacking a baggage trolley. One of them wheeled it up the courtyard while the other went to the red Opel, cranked it, and drove it off, heading for the parking area beside the hotel.

The guy in uniform guarding the camouflaged Opel remained at parade rest. Motionless. Waiting. Waiting for Stockman. Albert was going back out tonight.

You could bet he’d be heading for the poison gasworks in Kalk.

I looked out east, into the night sky.

The air was still. The sky was full of high overcast. The moon was down. Flying weather. The Zeppelin wouldn’t go tonight, not this late. But if this weather held, if it was the same across the channel, then soon.

A few minutes later, Jeremy arrived.

The mug in field gray was still standing guard, and Jeremy gave him a last look before turning his back to the driveway and sitting in the chair I’d occupied for the past few hours.

I leaned a little across the table. I said, low, “Our man is gassing up tonight.”

Jeremy nodded. He switched our steins, retrieving his own. Both of them still held some recently drawn beer.

He took a draft.

I didn’t.

Jeremy said, “Notwithstanding all the reasoning we’ve done, as much as we trust it, I should go watch a piece or two fit into place.”

He would follow to Kalk.

“Careful,” I said.

“I’ll wait ahead of them. Near Bayer. And then near the air base. Won’t try to go the distance.”

He rose.

There was one more thing. I figured he’d forgotten.

But before I could ask, he said, “Room 200.”

Not even ten minutes later Stockman strode past, and the guard snapped to attention at the sight of him. As Albert approached, the man opened the passenger door. He stepped back as if to wait, but Albert waved him on to start and drive the car. Albert stepped in and closed the door, but before he settled, he gave a single, focused glance into the darkness of the back seat.

They drove away.

A grinding took up in my chest. I was anxious to do this next thing. I was grateful for the chance, the only one I could expect to have in Spich. But I feared this. For reasons I would have been hard pressed to fully specify. It was enough to say it was about her.

I drained the rest of my beer.

Warm and flat.

I rose.

I put money down and I walked into the courtyard and through the hotel doors and into a lobby of chestnut paneling and mounted elk horns. Inside, I walked as if I knew something secret and damning about every turning head and they had better realize it and keep to themselves. The heads turned quickly away.

The Alten-Forst had an elevator and I stepped in. The operator snapped to, a boy who would likely be inducted alongside the innkeeper’s son sometime next spring.

I stepped off on the second floor and went down the dim corridor to the door at the end. Room 200.

I was in character now. I was the American spy Christopher Marlowe Cobb playing the German spy Klaus von Wolfinger. I would maintain that role-within-a-role for the next few minutes, if I possibly could, focusing just on those two layers and not the full set, not little Kit Cobb, Isabel Cobb’s forever-young son, playing Christopher Cobb the war correspondent playing that American spy playing that German spy. That was the grinding in me. Those four gears. Meshing now. Slipping now. Binding now.

I lifted my hand.

I knocked at the door. Sharply.

It yielded instantly, swinging a little away from its jamb.

It had been ajar.

I drew my Luger.

I pushed through the door and into the sitting room of a suite full of carved oak and leather furniture draped and stacked and strewn and be-vased with roses, dozens and dozens of roses, the place reeking of nostril-flaring sweetness, and in the midst of it Mother was rising up from a chair, still in her deep-purple silk evening dress, her head bare, her hair undone and tumbling down. And her hands were flying up and she was choking back a cry and she was wide-eyed from seeing, in this first burst of the sight of me, only my uniform and my pistol.

I stopped, lowering and holstering the Luger and whipping off my hat and saying, “Mother, it’s me.”

Her hands fell, her face twisted away. She slumped back into the chair.

I moved to her.

“Mother,” I said. “I’m sorry. The door. I thought something was wrong.”

I could see now that her face was wet, her eyes were red from weeping.

“It’s all right,” I said.

I kneeled before her, took her hand. The tears had long preceded my entry, I realized.

“What is it?” I said.

She was breathing heavily. She took her hand away from mine, pressed it to her throat.

She struggled to control her breath.

“I’m sorry I frightened you,” I said.

She waved this away.

I stayed bent to one knee. I waited. She snubbed a long breath into her body. She let it out as if it were smoke from a cigarette.

She lowered her face. Took another slow breath.

She lifted her face once more.

None of this felt like an act. The tears were real. They’d been shed alone.

“It’s all right,” she said. “I should have known it would be you. . That uniform.”

“I had no choice,” I said.

She waved me silent once again.

Tears were still brimming from her eyes.

They catalyzed in me.

I stood up.

“What has he done?” I said, my tone going hard, going nearly fierce.

She pressed back a little in the chair. Snorted softly, as if in scorn.

She wasn’t answering.

She wasn’t looking at me.

“What?” I barked.

She lifted her face to me, lifted her hand, swept it to the side, indicating the room, the flowers. “He has done all of this .”

They were joyful tears. They were tears of goddamn love.

I backed a step off.

Two steps.

I made sure my Luger was seated properly in its holster. I thought of the suite door. I looked. I’d left it partly open. I turned and moved to it.

“Are you going?” she said.

I reached the door, simply closed it, as I had intended.

I stared at the closed door, putting space between myself and my mother, as I had also intended.

“You’ve always been like this,” she said. A rebuke.