Robert Butler - The Empire of Night

“Seven after,” he said. “And you leave the inn at three?”

“If the weather’s right.”

“Then I have time to eat the sausages,” he said.

I began to brief him on the events at the air base, and in the midst of it a man entered the inn and headed for the bar. The innkeeper, who was wiping down the zinc top, saw him come in and she instantly took up a stein, turned to the tap behind her, and filled the vessel. She moved to the newcomer and put the stein before him, even as he was still taking off his peaked field cap and laying it on the bar.

A large, late-morning beer was this man’s routine.

Though perhaps only on flight days.

It was Major Dettmer.

He and the woman spoke together for a few moments, low, their heads angling toward each other.

I doubted he flew drunk. But he needed some fortification.

The innkeeper moved away.

I had no interest in speaking to him, seeing as I intended to kill him this afternoon.

Jeremy was watching me watching something over his shoulder.

When I brought my gaze back to him, he flipped his face very slightly to the side, keeping his eyes fixed on mine. What is it? he was asking.

In a low voice I finished telling him about Ziegler and then about Major Dettmer, ending with: “Dettmer came in while we’ve been speaking.” I slightly angled my head in the major’s direction.

I looked over Jeremy’s shoulder.

The man was heading this way.

Beyond him the innkeeper was clearing his stein from the bar.

He’d made quick work of it.

I pushed back a little from the table. Preferring to flee, but recognizing the need to make everything seem normal, I rose.

Dettmer arrived, saluted.

I returned the salute, and I formally introduced Jeremy to the major.

“I do not wish to intrude,” the major said, “but may I ask to sit with you for a few minutes?”

I could have said no. I was Colonel Klaus von Wolfinger, after all. Turning Dettmer abruptly aside would have been consistent with the character I’d created.

But if the man I was to kill felt the need to talk with someone in a bar before a mission that was plenty dangerous on its own, then it might as well be with me.

I nodded without comment at an empty third chair that placed him between the two of us.

He sat.

He put his peaked cap in his lap.

“Commander Dettmer will fly the LZ 78 this evening,” I said to Jeremy.

“God punish England,” Jeremy said to him. Gott strafe England . “May we order something for you?”

“Another beer?” I said.

Dettmer looked at me.

“You’re drinking this morning,” I said.

“Only what I allow myself on these days,” the major said.

Outwardly I offered nothing for him to read at this. No smile. No frown.

Then I realized I was deliberately trying to make him uncomfortable.

“Merely one long beer,” he said.

I was too much in character. I owed him better than that.

“We admire what you do,” I said, making my voice go as warm as I dared without drastically altering my necessary persona.

He nodded once, in thanks.

We waited for him to speak. I realized he had nothing particular in mind. He simply needed a little conversation on the day of a mission. There’d been the words with the innkeeper. The brief pose, their two heads angled toward each other, suggested a closeness between them. Perhaps even more, something only a woman could give. But there were things on his mind a woman couldn’t speak to. And the men were locals. Drunks or bores. He’d seen two of his own sitting here, and so he’d come to them.

“How do you keep warm up there?” I asked.

He laughed softly. I understood what he was about to go through. At the Zepp’s operating altitude two miles above England, it would be a Chicago-winter fifteen below even in August. And it would be a slashing cold, with the head wind beating into the command gondola.

He spoke happily for a time about their woolen underwear and their leather overalls and their fur overcoats and the sheep’s wool lining in their leather gloves. And their scarves and their goggles and the ineffectualness of all that.

He was happy to speak as if these were the things that brought him to his morning ritual of a beer and conversation on the days he flew.

He moved from goggles to dreams, however. A seamless transition. “I often freeze in my dreams,” he said. “I can wake in a midsummer sweat in my rooms in Spich and continue to shiver from the cold in my dreams. In my dreams I have forgotten my overcoat or my gloves and I pay dearly for that.”

Dettmer paused. He turned his head toward the bar, as if thinking he should have another beer.

But he looked back to me.

He said, “Or the opposite. I am on fire. We all have these dreams, you know. The day is soon coming when their planes can climb fast enough to catch us. Or when they create an incendiary shell that can reach us, and the first one to touch our airship’s skin will turn us into a fireball. We will have a brief time to decide then, each of us. We carry no parachutes, you understand. And so my men and I have each made a decision. Some of us will leap and some of us will stay. Some will die falling to earth and some will die consumed by fire in the heavens.”

Dettmer stopped speaking. His eyes moved to mine and then to the Iron Cross pinned to my chest. He smiled a faint smile at me. He figured I understood. He figured men could talk like this to each other if they each understood.

I did understand.

I wished it were for the reasons he assumed.

I wished I were fighting this war in a way that earned this moment between us.

Instead, I was barely able to remain seated in the chair.

But I stayed.

The innkeeper’s boy arrived. He put the plates of sausage and kraut before us.

“Perhaps some food?” Jeremy said to Dettmer.

“Thanks,” he said. “I have to go now to prepare.”

Having remained in Dettmer’s presence, I’d come back to my own obedience, my own place in this war that wasn’t quite yet an American war. But things were being done in the world that should not be done. And as an American I was dealing with that.

Dettmer, at least, had established preparations to make. A clear and specific path to the completion of his mission, however arduous or frightful that might be. I was still improvising.

So I said to him, “What are the preparations to fly your airship?”

He was glad to come back from his dreams and to focus on the routine.

“I will put my men to work,” he said. “The chief engineer, the helmsmen, the radioman, the gunners, the bombing officer, the sailmaker. The engines are to be examined, the elevator and rudder controls tested, also the telegraph and the Maxims. The bombs must be loaded precisely. The gas cells must be checked for leaks.”

“When do you board?” I asked. “When are all the checks completed and you go to your stations?”

“We board in the hangar,” he said. “The final taking on of gas and ballast and ordnance is a delicate thing. The balance of lift and load. That is part of the preparation. Our very body weight must be accounted for. Only the watch officer remains outside to oversee the ground crew at the launching.”

The timing seemed terribly off.

My physical presence on the airship during preparations, which I’d blithely assumed to be possible, would throw off the weight adjustments. I would have no access to the interior. But there was nowhere outside to effectively place the bomb. Nor the opportunity to do it, in plain sight.

I’d trusted too much on my ability to improvise.

“I must go now,” Dettmer said.

He rose.

I rose too.