The Empire of Night: A Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thriller (24 page)

When the dark came, I’d have to pay another visit—a more intimate visit—to Number 11 Schlesische-Strasse.

But first I had a rendezvous of my own. At the
Kabarett
called Zum Grauen Köter.

28

The Gray Dog. South of the Stettiner train station on Borsig-Strasse, it was twenty yards down a side alleyway, in the cellar of a
Braten und Bier
joint. A perfect place for a Zeppelin blackout party.

My brass eagle boutonnière in place—my actual face restored as well, with cocoa butter and Castile soap—I descended into too much smoke and noise, in a room that would fit on the stage of the Duke of York’s and was jammed with tables and Berliners. Some rooms demand you read their bouquet like a wine, and this one was beer and roast meat and sweat and mustard and tobacco and lavender perfume and even a waft of femaleness, coming, I guessed, from the line of half a dozen kicking chorines in negligees who had to work hard not to fall off at each end of the tiny stage.

A pianist banged away in the far dark corner and the girls were singing about a lusty husband dancing around a rose bush with his wife. The headwaiter in a tux took a look at my lapel and guided me to a small back row table and sat me down, pressing the second chair tight into place. The girls kicked high and belted out an untranslatable “
KlingklanggloriBusch
.” They were loud and shrill in the way chorus girls often seemed to think was alluring but they were competing with a few dozen ongoing conversations in the room.

A girl came to my table in a tux and asked what I was drinking. I had work to do later tonight, so I ordered what the Berliners called a
kühle Blonde
, a cool fair maiden, a wheat beer that Germans used for sobering up. The girl gave me a sly look as if to ask what I’d been doing the last few days. She brought the
Weissbier
in a pint-sized stone bottle and poured the contents into a massive, half-gallon-size glass goblet, which the pint of beer
nevertheless filled to overflowing with an inordinate amount of foam.

I paused to watch it froth away and I became abruptly aware of a presence beside me. Before I could look up, a man’s voice said in German, “That is Monday beer. No authentic man should drink wheat beer on a Thursday.”

I knew the voice.

I lifted my face to look into the boxer’s mug that belonged to Jeremy Miller.

I was very glad to see him alive, but I repressed the urge to jump up and clap him on the shoulder.

“What if I had a bad Wednesday night?” I said.

“Then you should stay away from a place like this,” he said. “Too much smoke and noise.”

I nodded him to the other chair.

He sat.

The girl in the tux came up and bent to Jeremy and took his order, which I didn’t hear.

We leaned near each other and spoke in English, audible to each other but walled in by the noise of the
Gray Dog.

“How’d you get away on Friday?” I asked.

“Briefly I joined the search for myself,” he said.

“Your blue suit,” I said.

“My blue suit. There were several lately hired Blue Suits that evening. I had a convincing reference.”

“Are you sure?” I said. “I thought perhaps they’d let you in on purpose to trap you.”

“The thought did occur.”

“And?”

“It still occurs.”

Jeremy’s drink arrived. A stone bottle and a glass goblet. He was drinking light too.

“We’re a couple of fine dudes,” I said, nodding at his wheat beer.

“I look forward to someone reading us wrong and picking a fight,” he said.

The girl finished pouring and slipped away.

“How do we toast with these?” I said, thinking of the awkward shape and size of the glass.

“It’s hardly a toasting sort of drink,” he said. “Perhaps to recuperation.”

I looked at my own glass. “There seems to be no safe alternative to two hands,” I said.

“You are correct,” he said.

So we agreed together, on the occasion of this fortunate reunion, to accept a milder meaning for two-fisted drinking.

We sipped through the foam and it was light and it tasted more of banana than of malted wheat; I presumed from the yeast.

“The headwaiter seemed to know you were coming,” I said, thinking of his meaningful glance at my buttonhole adornment resulting in what seemed to be the only available table in the place and then his securing the second chair.

“We have friends here and there.”

“Pro-Brits in Germany?”

“Ask me again when we are alone,” he said.

“We have an opportunity for that tonight,” I said.

“Good,” he said. “Does it involve our friend?”

“Our baronet. Yes.”

We sipped again at our cure for a hangover as the chorus kicked its last kick and its girls fluttered away through a side door off left. While the crowd still applauded, the emcee bounced onto the stage in monocle and tux.

As soon as he was squared around to them, the applause died and most of the conversations died and the emcee cried, “
Gott strafe England!
”

God punish England.

And the crowd roared back, “
Er strafe es!
”

May he punish it.

I’d heard this already several times in the street. It seemed universal in this town. No doubt in the country. Part quotidian mutual greeting, part liturgical call and response.

The emcee seamlessly rolled on into his introduction. He was sorry, he said, but the next scheduled singer had died last night from a broken heart. The crowd let out a moan, but it was instant and exaggerated and as the emcee went on in faux eulogy, the curtain at the back of the stage, which to the eye seemed flush against the wall, opened in the center and a woman in cadaverous whiteface and a tight black dress emerged.

The crowd made a collective sound once more, part horrified gasp, part incipient laugh.

Jeremy leaned toward me. “You mentioned an opportunity?”

The crowd was laughing outright now.

I leaned toward Jeremy. It was well past sunset outside. “I did.”

29

We emerged from the Gray Dog without any further word until Jeremy pointed south on Borsig-Strasse with his chin and we walked off in that direction.

“I have a motor car,” he said.

“Glad to hear it,” I said.

A few steps later I said, “You don’t strike me as a cabaret type of guy.”

“I didn’t choose,” he said. “You were right about our having friends in the place. The orderly minds at the Foreign Office see the threat there from Bohemians, not foreign agents.”

“Hide in plain sight.”

“There was a time,” Jeremy said, “when the woman in black would have sung her death-by-boredom from the idiot speeches of a parody Kaiser. A
Quassel-Wilhelm
.”

The constructed German word meant a “gibberish-Wilhelm.”

“Now,” he said, “the censors only have to worry about keeping the girls’ private parts hidden.”

The political satire period of the
Kabarett
ended more than a decade ago.

“Were you a cabaret type of guy back then?”

“Back then I was already a British pub type of guy.”

“We are alone now,” I said. “I asked you inside about the pro-Brits.”

Instantly, flatly, he said, “There are no pro-Brits in Germany.”

We went another couple of steps, with me waiting for him to elaborate.

He stopped.

But he simply said, “This is it.” He nodded to a Model T tourer, its canvas top latched in place, sitting at the curb. Henry Ford, quietly conquering the world.

Jeremy made no move to get in. He lifted his face a little, looking away from me briefly, finding words. “Not in the way ‘pro-Brit’ sounds,” he said. “Those who would help us here are not disloyal. They are not working
for
the British. They are working
against
the gibbering Kaiser and the world-conquering
Pickelhauben.
”

He identified the German military leaders by their ridiculous, polished-leather, brass and silver-trimmed, spiked helmet—the
Pickelhaube
—that sat up over the ears, protecting very little except the feelings of inadequacy of the officers beneath them.

“Is that you as well?” I said. “Aren’t you pro-Brit?”

The question lifted him up by the chest just a little. It had taken him by surprise.

“I
am
a Brit,” he said.

“Born?”

“No,” he said. “But naturalized.”

“Do you have people in Germany?”

“I boxed as an Englishman. Every professional fight.”

“Then you are English,” I said.

“My mother lives in Spandau,” he said. “For her, the Kaiser can do no wrong.”

He was speaking softly now. Making no move to his Ford. “My brother, who has lived with our mother—she is a widow—my brother is now an artillery lieutenant. His mind is fiercely opposed to the gibbering Kaiser and the world-conquering
Pickelhauben.
But he thinks there is no other way to be a loyal German.”

We thought about this, both of us, for a few moments.

I said, “Didn’t you have to become an Englishman to truly fight the Kaiser and his generals?”

He did not hear me. We had each come to a thought. I had merely spoken mine first. Breaking his own separate silence, he now said, “In spite of our past, we are capable of a republic.”

I heard the
we
. I did not challenge him on it. I didn’t have to. I trusted this man. In spite of his blood.

“Where do we go from here?” he said.

I was not sure which
we
he meant.

“The East Harbor,” I said.

“In our American car, imported through London,” he said. “Pre-war. It’s had a few years of hard use, but it will be loyal to us.”

He circled to the driver’s side, reached in to the coil box, and switched the battery into its chattery readiness.

“I’ll crank,” I said, heading for the front of the Ford.

At the steering wheel levers, he retarded the spark and advanced the gas just a little. I bent below the radiator and clutched the crank with my left hand, carefully tucking my thumb alongside my fingers. I gave the crank of this worldwide symbol of American industry a sharp tug, and it rattled into life.

On the way to Reinauer’s, I briefed Jeremy on my afternoon. We crossed the Spree and approached the East Harbor on Schlesische-Strasse, passing under the Oberbaum Bridge.

“Slow now,” I said, and we rolled by the front of Number 11. I saw no lights.

I directed Jeremy around the block and we approached on Cuvry-Strasse, from the south.

We parked and shut down in front of the building at the edge of Reinauer’s delivery lot. We could see the left-hand loading dock from where we sat.

There were no lights at the back either.

I said, “I’m guessing he’s got a man inside.”

“Probably,” Jeremy said. “Tonight at least.”

“But if he’s in there, I’d rather confront him on our terms.”

“Agreed.”

“I’ll be right back,” I said. I opened the door. “A little reconnaissance.”

I closed the door and beat it softly across the macadam toward the loading dock. The air smelled of grain and diesel and creosote.

I pulled my tungsten flashlight and went softly up the side steps. I cupped the beam end with my other hand and shined it low, though I was very aware now of my Mauser and of any sound from inside, just in case. I shined the beam all around the dock surface, starting where I watched the two mugs smoking this afternoon. The stack of pallets was gone and so were any butts they might have dropped.

I moved along past the big steel-slat rolling entrance, and as I neared the access door at the end of the dock I started scanning the light in front of me.

I found what I was looking for. I crouched to a couple of cigarette butts. Flattened but unscuffed. Unswept.

I beat it back to the Ford.

“We need your good right hand,” I said.

So we set up to wait with Jeremy at one side of the door and me just down the steps at the other side, my Mauser drawn, in case things went wrong somehow. His fist was our first choice. Which he got a chance to use pretty quick. I was looking off the other way when the door clicked and its hinges chirped and then there was a little choked what-the-hell sound and the crack of bone and a major thud.