Robert Butler: The Empire of Night

I straightened.

Stockman lay dead on his back.

I turned.

My mother had my Mauser pocket automatic in her right hand, which was cradled in her left, the pistol still aimed, still wisping.

She looked at me.

Nothing showed in her face. Nothing.

She lowered the pistol. She squared around. She stepped to me and she reached out and took my right hand and lifted it between us. She laid the Mauser in my palm, and she looked me in the eyes.

“There,” she said. “I hope you’re happy.”

On the way out of the Hotel Alten-Forst I put two bullets from my Mauser automatic pocket pistol into the mahogany front desk, scaring the hell out of the clerk, whose account would help convince any inquiring minds that a mysteriously untraceable German military officer was responsible for the killing in Room 200. The famous actress Isabel Cobb would be found tied up tightly on the bed, the love of her life dead in the next room. I received no reports, but I had no doubt that everyone who witnessed her performance on that terrible night was deeply moved.

In the following weeks Isabel Cobb went on to a great triumph performing as Hamlet in two languages in Berlin, though I had to learn this from the American newspapers. The London newspapers, in the summer of 1915, were disinclined to report on the night life of Berlin.

They did report, however, on the mysterious disappearance of Sir Albert Stockman, a distinguished member of Parliament, who was thought lost in the Strait of Dover on a night when U-boats were known to be in the area. He was rumored to have armed his personal yacht with a deck gun and used the vessel to lure the submarines to the surface and engage them in battle. The country mourned the presumed death of a true English hero.

A month later, a Zeppelin dropped a dozen bombs in the theater district. The second of them fell on Wellington Street in front of the Lyceum Theatre, where a number of theatergoers were buying oranges and pastries and sweets from street vendors during intermission. Seventeen people were killed, twenty-one were badly injured. That bomb contained no poison gas. None of the bombs did, though several of them were perfectly placed for the purpose.

The first bomb had fallen before the Gaiety Theatre in The Strand, where an American musical comedy was playing by the name of Tonight’s the Night.

Needless to say, as I tied my mother up, there were a few questions I thought to ask. Like what was in her head when she untied Albert. Was it blind love? Did she think the two of them could just run away from all this? Did she shoot him only when it was clear he was about to kill her son? Or did she let him go expressly to arrange our little climax? She would certainly see it as a far better scene for Isabel Cobb to play. But we spoke not a word. Even up to the moment of my closing the door of Room 200 behind me. Not a word. Sometimes, between a mother and a son, there were things you just didn’t want to know.