The Empire of Night: A Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thriller (36 page)

But I had to ask the right questions.

And I thought of the box in the export office.

“Has he spoken of bombs?” I said.

Einstein hesitated. He thought.

“Not artillery,” I said. “Something that a Zeppelin might deliver.”

He straightened abruptly. “More chemistry,” he said. “Those infernal machines filled with a chemist’s gas.”

“Did he say anything?”

“Not that I can recall.”

“In the light of Doctor Haber’s philosophy of war, would an aerial bomb be an advance?”

He thought for a moment. “I am no military man.”

“Just the science of it.”

“Of course,” he said. “The same wind sufficient to carry the poisonous gas across a battlefield also blows the gas quickly away. A bomb would greatly reduce the force of a necessary wind to a level just sufficient to stir things about.”

“Would such a bomb need a special design? Would any bomb do?”

Einstein puffed briefly at his pipe, considering this, his brightness returning a bit, I presumed in the pure scientific puzzle of it. “Not any bomb,” he said. “Certainly not. The perfect bomb would perhaps be something of a challenge. As I understand it, phosgene and similar gases boil at relatively low atmospheric temperatures, below the present summer temperature, for instance. So they will be transformed from the liquid inside the bomb to the killing gas immediately upon exposure to the air. However, there is the matter of the bursting charge. This would have to be carefully managed so that the shell will burst open but not, as well, consume the gas too quickly at the point of impact, which would greatly reduce the footprint of toxicity. And also so that the shell will not bury its striking end in the ground, trapping much of the liquid there unvaporized. The bomb maker would have to be very clever.”

He paused, hearing his own implicit admiration. He clarified: “That is to say
despicably
clever.”

“What would Doctor Haber see as the right conditions for an attack?”

In spite of the moment of self-awareness, Einstein leaned forward, bright again. “It would be at night, with cloud cover, to minimize the daylight-warmed ground from creating upward currents of air. These would otherwise quickly dissipate the gas.”

I too found myself on the edge of my chair. I sat back.

I felt I had heard enough.

But Einstein added, “And of course the best target would be a large city. A nighttime crowd. The streets of a city would further temper the upward currents, and the buildings would tunnel any movement of air to its victims. The gas would linger to kill.”

At this, my mind asked to shut down. His mind seemed to rear back from itself, abruptly alarmed at its own cleverness in working out this attack as a hypothetical.

He said, softly, “You see how we are all vulnerable.”

41

Einstein and I made our good-byes and I rose and he rose and we shook hands. I offered to find Madam Cobb and I urged him to wait, as I knew where to locate her in the theater. He thanked me and sat down and I stepped out of the dressing room and softly clicked the door closed behind me.

I turned to head along the corridor to the auditorium.

Mother was standing a few paces away, alone, leaning against the wall and smoking a cigarette. She looked at me and hastily dropped the cigarette to the floor and tapped it out with the toe of her shoe.

I approached her.

We spoke low.

“It’s been a long time since I’ve seen you smoke,” I said.

“It’s been a long time since you’ve seen me frightened.”

“Are you?”

“Yes.”

She said no more than that in answer to what she would usually take to be a juicy theatrical cue line. I believed her.

“What is it?” I said.

“I’m going with him.”

“Stockman?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“Monday morning. Early. He asked me to go with the most tender of entreaties. Albert the vulnerable, the tortured, the needy. Then he swore me to secrecy with a whispered vehemence that scared the living bejabbers out of me.”

I didn’t respond at once. I tried to figure out how much I should tell her, in her present state, of my own recent fright. For
fright
it was quickly becoming. My mind had only just begun to work out all the implications of what Einstein had told me. Stockman was heading south to somehow expedite an aerial poison gas attack. And thinking this far now, I thought to add
against London
.

“He’s not going to invite you,” Mother said.

“He told you that?”

“Yes. I’m to play the
Grande Dame
to Victor
and
to you. The story is that I’m going away alone for a few days to a spa. I must. I’m not telling you where.”

“Will Barnowsky tolerate that?”

“I’m ill. I need to go away for a time. He’ll tolerate it. We’re still two weeks from opening. I’m doing swell, my son. Swell. Let a stand-in rehearse with these locals. I can be ill for days and still play Hamlet in my sleep. In two languages? Not a problem for Isabel Cobb. You know I can do anything on a stage. Anything I want. My mind. My will. My heart. My mind. Did I mention my mind? It can do anything.”

Abruptly she stopped speaking.

She heard herself. “What the hell was that little monologue all about?” she said. “That doesn’t sound good.”

“You’ll be fine,” I said. “The third act has begun in our play. That’s all.”

“Yes, my darling. Yes. You’re right.”

I reached under my coat and into the small of my back and I drew my pocket Mauser from its holster. I brought it out before her. Too quickly. She drew a sharp, lifting, stiffening breath and reared back.

“I want you to take this,” I said.

“Is it necessary?”

“You tell me. It’s to calm your fear.”

She looked at it.

“Do you know how to use it?” I asked.

“Don’t you remember my Lydia Justice in
A Woman Wronged
?”

I didn’t. “Do you know how many plays I’ve seen you in?”

“Well, I learned to shoot for Lydia. And though on stage they were blanks, they were precisely shot.”

“Fine.” I offered the pistol.

She waved it away. “Do you actually think I could kill him?”

I’d even asked myself the same question not too long ago. The last ten minutes had given me my answer, I realized. I thought again to tell her about the gas. But after that one brief, clear-headed admission of her fear, she’d been thrashing around to deal with it in every way but honest. These much higher stakes might only frighten her more, and she could inadvertently betray herself to Stockman. She needed to know, but not now.

“You may not approve,” she said. “You may not believe me. He may have terrible flaws. But I love him.”

I clamped my mouth tightly shut and looked away.

She read the gesture. Partially. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll stop him. I know I have to stop him from whatever it is we’re all worried about. I’ll bring him down. But that’s all I can do. There is no possible circumstance where I’d shoot him to death.”

I said, “People other than Stockman could be a danger to you.”

I offered my Mauser once more.

She looked at it.

“Believe me,” I said, quite softly. “There are things we can’t anticipate.”

She took a deep breath.

She took the pistol from my hand.

She held it like she knew what to do with it. Like she was the wronged Lydia Justice six nights and two matinees a week.

42

Jeremy was waiting for me outside the Hotel Baden. He was a shadow and a flaring red tip of a cigarette and a plume of streetlight-gathering smoke from under a linden tree in the median. I saw him at once as I got out of the taxi.

I went to him.

“What are you smoking?” I said.

“Murads,” he said.

“Close enough,” I said. “I’m out.”

He gave me one and a light.

“I have a feeling you know something,” Jeremy said.

“You develop that intuition in the ring?”

“Doubt if it’s intuition. You’re telegraphing your punch.”

“They call it the lead in my other line of work,” I said. “Sir Albert Stockman, a member of the British Parliament, is masterminding a nighttime Zeppelin attack on London, employing a bomb of his own design filled with a deadly gas called phosgene. It will target civilians with the purpose of heralding enough terror to force a quick end of the war in favor of Germany.”

That was the lead of our story.

I let it sit in him for a moment.

He took a deep drag on his Murad.

“It’s all pieced together and circumstantial,” I said. “But that’s the business we’re in. I’d bet my bankroll on it.”

“I believe you’d win,” Jeremy said.

“We have every reason to assume the attack will take place next week. And Stockman will try to put his own personal stamp on it somehow. He sees himself as a great German hero in the making.”

“With the help of Colonel Max Hermann Bauer,” Jeremy said. “What I’ve been told about
him
fits the puzzle. Last month Bauer was appointed chief of Section One in the German Department of the General Staff. His main task is to identify and test new weapons and tactics. Even before the official posting, he was the man who got Haber’s gas to the front lines at Ypres.”

“So he’s being instrumental again.”

“Bauer’s also a political maverick,” Jeremy said. “Despises both General Falkenhayn and Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg.”

“Then why did Falkenhayn promote him?”

“He probably figures shunting Bauer to new weapons keeps him on the fringe. So Bauer would be keen to counterpunch.”

Jeremy let me finish the thought. “With a surprise strike by a new weapon that could win the war.”

“Just so.”

“He’d need a powerful buddy to get a Zepp to do his bidding.”

“Erich Ludendorff would do,” Jeremy said. “Bauer got his weapons credentials in artillery. He had a hand in the general’s big-gun victory at Liège after the rest of the German command ate crow for two weeks at the start of the war. He and General Ludendorff are known to be very close.”

“Our Albert would be drawn to a maverick,” I said. “He was sharply critical of the Kaiser this morning.”

“Most of the German high command is critical of the Kaiser.”

“Willie’s soft on the Brits.”

Jeremy nodded. “Notwithstanding, he’s duly tough after the fact. He never dreamed his U-boats would catch a target like the
Lusitania
. No one really did. But he was keenly vigorous in defense of its sinking.”

“So Bauer and Stockman figure they can safely act on their own, as long as they pull it off.”

“If you listen to Germans argue with each other,” Jeremy said, “no one is ever wrong about anything. Collectively too. If the poison gas bomb goes off and England effectively suffers, then the High Command certainly was right all along. Every one of them, from the Kaiser on down.”

“This makes sense of the tower at Stockman House,” I said. “The wind studies. They were thinking about poison gas in British streets.”

“My other bit fits as well,” Jeremy said. “I decided FVFB had to be comparable to Krupp. I just couldn’t sort things out in my head from the companies I knew. So I consulted the Berlin Stock Exchange. Farbenfabriken Vormals Friedrich Bayer. Pharmaceuticals. Dyes. Chemicals.”

“I think we know what they make in Kalk,” I said.

“Did Madam Cobb persuade Stockman to let her go along?”

“I persuaded him on her behalf, I think.”

“And you?”

“Not invited.”

“We need to invite ourselves,” Jeremy said.

At this, we smoked for a few moments.

Across the street was the hotel where another identity awaited me behind the baseboards of a wardrobe. Colonel Klaus von Wolfinger. I’d already shaved for him.

“Time to bluff,” I said.

“This is good advice.”

“It was yours.”

“I am never wrong,” he said.

“Since you’re so German, can your people fit you out as an officer? We’re talking about getting very close to an army base.”

“Yes.”

“Trask has me set up as a colonel attached to the Foreign Office,” I said. “Secret service.”

“Your uniform complete?”

“The only officer headgear I could pack was a crusher,” I said. “Can you get me a peaked field cap?”

“Size, if I have a choice?”

“Seven, British,” I said.