The Empire of Night E-Book

Robert Olen Butler

• Herausgeber: No Exit Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Serie: A Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thriller
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 586

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

A Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thriller It is 1915, and "Kit" Cobb is working undercover in a castle on the Kent coast owned by a suspected British government mole, Sir Albert Stockman. Kit is working with his mother, the beautiful and mercurial spy, Isabel Cobb, who also happens to be a world-famous stage actress. Isabel's offstage role is to keep tabs on Stockman, while Kit tries to figure out his agenda. Following his mother and her escort from the relative safety of Britain into the lion's den of Berlin, Kit must remain in character, even under the very nose of the Kaiser.

Leseprobe

THE EMPIRE OF NIGHT

A Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thriller

In the first two books of his acclaimed Christopher Marlowe Cobb series,The Hot CountryandThe Star of Istanbul, Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Olen Butler captured the hearts of historical crime fiction fans with the artfulness of his World War I settings and his charismatic leading man, a Chicago journalist recruited by American intelligence.

InThe Empire of Night, it is 1915, and President Woodrow Wilson is still assessing the war’s threat to the United States. After proving himself during theLusitaniamission, Kit is now a full-blown spy, working undercover in a castle on the Kentish coast owned by a suspected British government mole named Sir Albert Stockman. And Kit is again thrown together with a female spy—his own mother, the beautiful and mercurial Isabel Cobb, who also happens to be a world-famous stage actress. Starring in a touring production ofHamlet, Isabel’s offstage role is to keep tabs on the supposed mole, an ardent fan of hers, while Kit tries to figure out Stockman’s secret agenda. Following his mother and her escort from the relative safety of Britain into the lion’s den of Berlin, Kit must remain in character, even under the very nose of the Kaiser.

PRAISE FOR ROBERT BUTLER

PRAISE FORTHE EMPIRE OF NIGHT

‘Mr. Butler does a terrific job of depicting both the journalist’s facility for teasing information from his subjects and the spy’s incessant fear of being discovered. There’s something almost magical about the way the author re-creates this 1915 milieu...’ –The Wall Street Journal

PRAISE FORTHE STAR OF ISTANBUL

‘Zestful, thrilling . . . a ripping good yarn’ –Wall Street Journal

‘Anoutstanding work of historical fiction’ –Huntington News

‘The Star of Istanbulhas it all: history galore, exotic foreign settings, a world-weary yet engaging protagonist, villains in abundance and a romance worthy of Bogart and Bergman’ –BookPage

‘Double and triple crosses merge like lanes in a traffic roundabout, and . . . the novel commingles character-driven historical fiction with melodrama and swashbuckling action. Somehow . . . it all works; on one level, Butler is playing with genre conventions in an almost mad-scientist manner, but at the same time, he holds the reader transfixed, like a kid at a Saturday matinee’ –Booklist(starred review)

‘Butler impresses with his exceptional attention to historical detail, particularly aboard theLusitania’ –Publishers Weekly

‘Butler is an excellent observer of interior psychological detail . . . and his fine description of the Lusitania’s demise shows he can write action-packed scenes as well. . . . It’s a pleasure to watch Cobb clear away layer upon layer of scheming and disguises to expose some ugly truths about humanity’ –Kirkus Reviews

‘WhileThe Star of Istanbulmeets the genre requirements for action and plotting, the precision and lyricism of Butler’s language, his incisive observations, his psychologically complex characters, and his understanding of the past lift this novel well into a genre of its own’ –Arts Fuse

‘Butler’s grasp of history is excellent. . . . You will enjoy every new twist and turn in this spy game’ –Arab Voice

‘[Butler’s] description of the aftermath of the attack on theLusitaniawill leave you withyour heart in your mouth. . . Yet another remarkable work from an author who continues, at this advanced stage of his career, to surpass himself’ – Bookreporter

‘Butler’s description of the sinking of the Lusitania is exceptional . . . In Cobb, Butler has created an appealing hero’ –Readers Unbound

‘An exciting thriller with plenty of action, romance, and danger. . .Fans of historical spy fiction will enjoy this fast-paced journey through a world at war’ –Library Journal

PRAISE FORTHE HOT COUNTRY

‘The Hot Countrydraws on many elements of the traditional adventure yarn, including disguises, fist fights and foot races, double agents and alluring young women who may be honey traps or spies... though in prose that has been written with serious attention... this first report makes you want to read on into the war correspondent’s second edition.’ –Guardian

‘combines a fast-moving plot with characters of a complexity that is not always found in such fiction’ –Sunday Times

‘a genuine and exhilarating success’ –Times Literary Supplement

‘a historical thriller of admirable depth and intelligence’ –BBC History Magazine

‘Exciting story...The Hot Countryis a thinking person’s historical thriller, the kind of exotic adventure that, in better days, would have been filmed by Sam Peckinpah’ –Washington Post

‘high-spirited adventure.... great writing’ –New York Times

‘Literate, funny, action-packed, vivid, and intriguing’ –Historical Novel Society

‘A fine stylist, Butler renders the time and place in perfect detail’ –Publishers Weekly

‘Butler writes thrilling battle scenes, cracking dialogue and evocative description, and the plot ofThe Hot Countrykeeps twisting to the very end’ –Tampa Bay Times

‘Pancho Villa, fiery senoritas, and Germans up to no good – Butler is having fun inThe Hot Countryand readers will too. An intelligent entertainment with colourful history’ –Joseph Canon

‘a spirited and beautifully told tale of adventure and intrigue in the grand old style, rich in both insight and atmosphere. Going off to war with Kit Cobb is as bracing and fun as it used to be in George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman books, or in Perez-Reverte’s Captain Alatriste novels. And the best part is that there are more to come. Saddle up’ –Dan Fesperman, Hammett award-winning author ofThe Double Game

ROBERT OLEN BUTLER

Robert Olen Butleris the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of sixteen novels, six story collections and a book on the creative process,From Where You Dream. A recipient of both a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction and a National Endowment for the Arts grant, he also won the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. He has twice won a National Magazine Award in Fiction and has received two Pushcart Prizes. In 2013 he won the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Literature. He teaches creative writing at Florida State University.

robertolenbutler.com

ALSO BY ROBERT OLEN BUTLER

The Alleys of Eden

Sun Dogs

Countrymen of Bones

On Distant Ground

Wabash

The Deuce

A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

They Whisper

Tabloid Dreams

The Deep Green Sea

Mr. Spaceman

Fair Warning

Had a Good Time

From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction

(Janet Burroway, Editor)

Severance

Intercourse

Hell

Weegee Stories

A Small Hotel

The Hot Country

The Star of Istanbul

For Kelly

who hears every word

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

1

I know a stage-door Johnny when I see one, and I know a tough guy. This was no Johnny. I had my reasons not to look at the facade of the Duke of York’s and perhaps that’s how I came to notice him down the alleyway on the south side of the theater. The midsummer’s late sunlight was almost gone and the play-going crowd was hubbubbing at the front doors, and here was this lurker in the shadows, around the corner, on the way to where only the company of actors was supposed to go. He’d crammed a bouncer’s body into a three-piece serge and his trilby hat was pulled down and tipped forward.

I gave off pretty much the same impression, I realized, but I wouldn’t want to see somebody like me down this alley either. He was turned sideways and looking in my direction, probably thinking similar thoughts.

There was nothing to do about it. Sniffing around on the sly for my government while still trying to more or less sniff the same way for my newspaper had made me excessively suspicious of my fellow man. I would have been a busy guy indeed if I’d tried to deal with every mug who put me on edge.

The trilby and I stared at each other for a long moment, and then he broke the gaze and slid away down the alley, fading into the shadows. I shrugged him off and figured it was time to go to my seat. Which meant I had to face the wired sign thrusting out over the Duke of York’s portico. In my coat pocket was a ticket for the front row of the stalls, so I had to deal with this.

I turned.

The theater event of the decade, for a limited run only, was ringed in electric lights: Isabel Cobb is Hamlet.

My fifty-six-year-old mother.

When this ticket showed up on a bellhop tray at my hotel without a note, it took me by surprise. As close as I’d been to the theater all my life, I’d been unaware that the theatrical event of the decade was about to happen in London, much less that it involved my mother. I hadn’t heard from or about her for fifteen months. A couple of years ago she retired from the legitimate theater, refusing to carry on in a profession that no longer let her pretend she was a twenty-year-old beauty. She was still pretty much a beauty. But she wasn’t Juliet anymore. Or even Kate in Shrew, which an audience in Memphis finally, infamously, made clear enough to her, summer before last.

There would be no older-woman roles for her, by god. She would rather leave it all behind. But here was a clever way around that problem. She was playing the most famous man in the history of the stage. A young man, even.

Under the portico now, I found myself on the edge of a gaggle of shirtwaisted women, talking low among themselves, a few with a bit of purple, green, and white ribbon pinned near the heart. Suffragettes, their focus shifted by the war. Instead of marching and chaining themselves to railings, they were starting to drive trams and buses and work in factories. Some of these women near me even gave off a whiff of sulfur from a munitions plant, their hands and faces beginning to turn faintly yellow from the chemicals.

As we pressed together through the doors and into the foyer, my mother’s name floated ardently out of these voices. Their new exemplar. She was to be a man. To be and not to be, of course. But tonight a man.

I sat on the right end of the first row, very near to her as she came downstage, alone and soliloquizing, wishing that her too too sullied flesh would melt, thaw, and resolve itself into dew. I was trying hard to relinquish myself to the illusion of the stage, trying to forget who, in life, this was before me.

To my surprise, this was not difficult. Isabel Cobb was indeed a man. She was a small and slim Prince Hamlet, her hair cut shoulder length and died dark blond and worn loose and wavy, as a young man of the time might, being hatless in distracted grief, and though my mind knew how tightly my mother was wrapped inside her black doublet and though I recognized her voice, which was always low and a little husky even as a woman, and though I recognized those vast, dark eyes as the maternal origin of my own, she convinced me.

And I wondered: did she convince herself? Perhaps. I heard no tang of irony in her voice as she, being a man, a son, railed against a mother’s hasty sexuality. And though this Hamlet before me was believably his own man, he and his qualms reminded me of my mother. Not that I shared the prince’s vehemence. But as he rolled the word “frailty” in his mouth like an overripe grape and then named it “woman,” stirring the suffragettes in the crowd to a titter, I stopped seeing the play. I lifted my eyes from Hamlet’s indictment of his mother and looked up, far up into the fly galleries—uniquely visible to the residents of the front row—and to the catwalk there, its pin rail wrapped with thick hemp ropes. The catwalk was empty and my mind lifted much farther than the flies: I stood outside a room at the Gilsey House in New York. Though it could have been a room in any of a hundred hotels or boarding-houses around the corner from a hundred theaters in a hundred cities on the headliner circuit, where one of the great stars of the American stage and her son lived while she worked. The star was my mother, and she was my father too, my Gertrude and King Hamlet both, though my actual father was no king, was not even a ghost, was an unknown to me, to this very day. But what son needed a father with a mother who could convincingly become anyone?

This flash of memory, me standing in the hushed and carpeted hallway of New York’s Gilsey House, could have been any from a multitude of memories of my childhood or adolescence in any of those other hotels, but in the front row of the Duke of York’s it was the Gilsey and I’d just turned thirteen and my cheek was still damp from her kiss and she expected me, as always, to understand that she was about to shut the door in my face and send me away—it had been thus for as long as I could remember—I was much younger than this when I’d first been cooingly sent away from her door—and at the Gilsey House her leading man had pitched in, had given me a wink and a nod and a Good lad, and her play—what was it? a Clyde Fitch, perhaps—had run a tryout month in Boston where I’d been bid a similar affectionate adieu in the hallway outside a room in the Hotel Touraine with a different leading man, and I liked this Boston guy okay, and I thought he and I would have this understanding for as long as the play ran, which everyone hoped would be at least a year in New York. But the producer canned him before the play left Beantown, and this guy at the Gilsey was a new wink and a new nod. My mother always seemed to have a hasty hankering for her leading men. And I always seemed to be seeing them off together at a hotel door and then turning and walking away. Having quickly learned not to linger, not to listen.

All this ran quickly and hotly and stupidly in me from the front row of the Duke of York’s, so it took me a moment to realize what I was looking at. The guy from the alley was on the catwalk. Once I focused on him, I could picture the last few moments. He’d eased out slow to a place at the rail. And now he squared around to look down to the stage where Hamlet was finishing his soliloquy, bidding his heart to break, and this guy had a real intense interest in this Hamlet, who was my mother.

I had a real intense interest in him. I concentrated on his face as he watched Hamlet greet Ophelia with feigned madness. I wanted to read his eyes, but they were a little too far away, and I wasn’t looking straight into them. But the stillness of him, the casual privilege of his pose, made them seem hard, as insolently hard as his stare from the alleyway. Shakespeare and Isabel Cobb faded into a buzz in my head as I focused on this man and on my instinct that he was up to no good.

And then he turned his attention to me, casually, as if he’d known I was there all long.

We had a second extended face-off.

I was right about his eyes. They seemed dead, these eyes. As dead as a bullet casing.

He returned his gaze to my mother.

I was tempted to slip from my seat—right that moment, with Hamlet tormenting the girl he loved—and go through the stage access door into the wings and find my way up to the flies.

And then do what?

Cool off now, I told myself. For weeks I’d been sitting in a London hotel room preparing for the next assignment. Necessarily so. But I’d been idle for too long. This guy reminded me what my body had been trained for and primed for. Which, however, certainly hadn’t been to cause a public ruckus over some lug because I didn’t like his looks or his sneaking around.

I lowered my face. I concentrated on Hamlet advising his girl to be off to a nunnery and then making a flourish of an exit. A few moments later, with Ophelia still boohooing about her boyfriend’s madness, I looked up once more into the flies.

He was gone.

I let it go.

At the first intermission, after Hamlet vowed to catch the conscience of the king, I went out of the theater and down to the side alley and smoked a cigarette there, watching the shadows, waiting for a tough guy in a trilby. Nothing doing.

Back in the theater, through to the next curtain, I kept a frequent but fleeting eye on the flies. No sign of him, and now Hamlet was swearing that his thoughts be bloody or be nothing worth. At the beginning of the act I’d have embraced that recommendation. As the curtain came down for the second intermission, I’d finally been able to drift in the other direction. So I went out and smoked another Fatima and kept my back to the suffragette chatter nearby on the sidewalk and thought about how my mother was indeed Hamlet, as it said rimmed in electric light above my head, and she was a good one, neatly balancing the classic introspective inaction with the strength to kill.

Inside the theater once more, she held my undivided attention through to the prince’s last words—the rest is silence—and in the script there is but a single word of stage direction: Dies. For most actors who have taken on Hamlet, the rest is not silence. The rattling or sighing or moaning or gasping are considered by the usual tribe of actors to be the sweet dessert to a long night of emoting. I feared for my mother now, in spite of the surprising subtlety of her performance so far, feared for her excesses. And she surprised me once more by dying with simply an exquisite lifting of the face to the spotlight and a closing of the eyes and, thereby, an ineffably rendered release of spirit.

I admired her performance, but I did not like to witness this, in much the same way as I did not like her closing a hotel room door upon me. I felt she had left me forever. And with her death upon my mind—for it was hers as well as Hamlet’s that I was thrumming to—I lifted my own face once more, to the flies.

And there he was. He was watching once again at the railing, and as my mother played at death he leaned toward her and his jacket gaped briefly and showed a holstered pistol on his left side. I wished ardently that I was carrying my own.

From the early days of my reporting career I got close to a fair number of criminals. Tough guys, all of them. Tempered-steel tough. But I’d heard a number of them talk about their mothers, think about their mothers, and inevitably these tough guys turned into simpering idiots of a variety of sorts, from weak to reckless.

So it was that even as I wished I had my own pistol with me I was grateful I didn’t. I felt trigger-itchy at that moment and it was possible my hand would have drawn my Mauser and would have pushed the safety button and would have waited for the slightest movement of this lug’s right hand toward his pistol, with the wrong kind of look on his face, and I would have shot him. Maybe not aiming to kill. Maybe just to disable that right arm.

Without this option, however, I clearly understood that shooting him would have been the wrong thing to do. At least till his pistol was out and coming to bear on her. And then I would have simply killed him.

2

As it was, he didn’t do anything but watch for the last few moments of the play. Then the curtain fell, and when it rose and the calls began, he was gone for good.

The audience clapped loudly and the rest of the cast came and bowed and lined up on the sides and they joined the applause as my mother appeared. She bounded downstage center and the women in shirtwaists and suffragette ribbons all stood up and cried, “Bravo! Bravo!” and my mother bowed deeply to them as a man and then she straightened and flounced her hair and she curtsied as a woman. The suffragettes cried, “Brava! Brava!”

All the while, the rest of the viewers were applauding loudly, some of them rising to their feet as well. As did I. My mother did not look my way.

A boy brought roses from the wings.

I’d seen bigger ovations for my mother, but the few actresses who’d done Hamlet before had been pilloried in the press and heckled from the cheap seats. I hadn’t read her reviews, but I heard not a single rude sound from this audience, and that seemed a triumph to me.

I lingered to let the crowd murmur its way out of the auditorium after Mother had finally stopped taking bows and the house lights had come on. Then I crossed before the front row. But instead of going left, up the aisle to the exit doors, I went to the right, up the steps and through the stage access door and into the wings with its smells of greasepaint and sweat and dust burning on the electric stage lights. The actors had all vanished, and squaring around before me was a lanky man in shirt sleeves and bow tie. The stage manager, I assumed.

I was ready to explain myself to him, why I felt privileged to go through an unauthorized door and head straight to the dressing rooms, but he immediately said, “Mr. Cobb.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Would you like to see your mother?”

“I would.”

“This way.” He turned on his heel to lead me toward a door at the back wall.

I stepped up quickly to walk beside him.

“There was a man with a gun up on your fly floor,” I said. “Are you surprised?”

He stopped. He turned to me.

“A gun?” he said.

“Inside his coat.”

“Yes,” he said. “I’m surprised.”

“Do you know who he might have been?” I asked.

The stage manager hesitated at this. He was thinking in ways that I could not clearly interpret. Then he said, “Not if he was in my flies.”

“And if he hadn’t gotten that far?”

“Your mother has fans.”

This was no fan.

He turned and moved on. “Please follow me,” he said.

Something was odd here, but I didn’t push the point.

As we passed through the doorway at the back of the stage wings, I said, “How did you know me?”

“Your mother has a picture of you in her dressing room.”

This didn’t surprise me.

I followed him along a short passageway and we cut back at the next turning and entered an enclosed staircase.

Her dressing room was on the second floor. The door was ajar and emitting female laughter.

The stage manager knocked and the laughter faded.

“Prithee show thyself,” my mother called out, using the lowest Hamlet register of her voice.

More female laughter.

The stage manager leaned his head past the edge of the door to look in. “Your son,” he said.

I did not hear her reply, if she made one. Perhaps she gestured. The stage manager pulled back at once and opened the door and I stepped in.

She sat with her back to her makeup mirror, still in her costume of trunk hose and doublet, the doublet unbuttoned, however, showing a finely embroidered lace blouse beneath, straight from a Mayfair shop no doubt, her own private joke throughout the night’s portrayal of Hamlet, a secret assertion of her modern womanhood. She was flanked by four suffragettes, two on each side, their uniform dark skirts and white shirtwaists making them look like a ladies string quartet about to go off to play in a palm court at a local hotel.

I stopped a single pace into the room, my hat in my hand. My mother rose. Quite formally, even solemnly. Then she took a step forward and opened her arms. “My darling Kit,” she said.

I came to her and we hugged and she smelled of greasepaint and mothball camphor and she felt all bones and sinew inside her man’s clothes.

“Isn’t he handsome, my dears?” she said.

The women simply made little muttering sounds in response, ready for the vote but not for boldly voicing the sort of sentiments my mother was challenging them to have.

I focused on her suffragettes, as my mother resisted my incipient withdrawal from her arms, assessing them as she would have them assess me.

They were varying degrees of young—Mother had brought only the more impressionable acolytes into her closest circle—but three of them did not hold my eye even for a moment. One, though, had a strong-jawed, wide-mouthed sort of farm girl prettiness, the kind of girl you’d enjoy trying, briefly, to pry away from her horse.

Mother was letting go of me now, pushing me back to arm’s length but keeping her hands on my shoulders. “Where have you been for the past year?”

Where she had been was a more interesting question, but I politely did not ask it in front of the young women for whom she was still performing.

“Ah yes,” she said, as if just remembering. “I read your stories lately. What a fine writer you are. I taught him to write by making him read a thousand books in countless star dressing rooms on three continents.” The “him” was the only indication she’d suddenly started to talk directly to the other women, as her eyes kept fixed tightly on mine, shining that light of hers on me, making me a willing part of her present performance.

She said, elaborating on her perusal of my stories, “But Constantinople of all places,” she said. “All those poor people suffering under the Ottomans. A terrible business. Why would you ever go out there? I thought you were the great chronicler of bullets and cannon shells and men in battle dress, my darling.”

I did not have a chance to reply.

“And your ordeal on the high seas,” she said, the light changing in her eyes, giving off more heat and less illumination. “Did you get my telegram?”

“No.”

“Well, I didn’t know where to send it.”

Then you already knew I didn’t get it. But I didn’t say this.

“He was on the Lusitania,” she said.

The suffragettes clucked softly in sympathy.

“Closer to three thousand,” I said.

Her eyes narrowed. “Utter non sequitur, my darling,” she said.

“The number of books you had me read. I figured it out not long ago.”

She brightened.

“In an idle moment,” I said. And then, to the others: “She and an ever changing cast of theater people she enlisted taught me everything I knew, before I knew to teach myself.” As she had done, I did not look directly at the suffragettes, letting the pronoun suggest I was addressing them.

Mother let go of my shoulders.

She introduced me to the young women, and I smiled at them and shook their hands, their grips still limply disenfranchised, but I did not endeavor to remember any of the names. Even, though it went against my natural inclinations, the name of the pretty one. Immediately after the introductions, my mother ushered them all out of the dressing room, everyone fluttering ardent good-byes and comradely good wishes every step of the way.

Mother closed the door and leaned back against it. “Was I splendid tonight?” she asked.

The question was not rhetorical, though I knew she knew the answer. “You were,” I said.

“Yes I was,” she said.

“Does all of London realize it?” I asked.

“Much of London.”

Some of the critics surely sneered at any woman playing the role. But she seemed content, so I did not ask.

“Poor Bernhardt,” she said.

Sarah Bernhardt played Hamlet in London in ’99 to vicious reviews. Mother was inviting the comparison. “You did better?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “But I was referring to her leg. They cut it off only a few weeks ago and she gave it to a university.”

From Isabel Cobb’s Hamlet in London to Sarah Bernhardt’s losing a leg, service to my government had put me behind in my reading.

“Gangrene,” my mother said.

“So you’re doing better than the Divine Sarah in legs as well,” I said.

Mother lifted her face to the ceiling in a loud bark of a laugh. But when her face came back down, she grabbed a chaw of my cheek between her thumb and forefinger and gave it a squeeze and shake to match the laugh. “I feel bad for her,” she said.

I have a pretty high threshold of pain, but like those Chicago thugs going soft about their mothers, I felt the same at thirty-one years old about Isabel Cobb’s uninhibited mother-cheek-pinch as I did at ten: it hurt like hell.

She finally let go, and she sat down in the chair where she’d been presiding over her suffragettes. I sat in the chair at the idle makeup station next to her. Edged into the frame of her mirror was my formal portrait in a cabinet card, a thing she’d insisted I do for her six years ago upon hearing that the Post-Express was sending me off to Nicaragua on my first war assignment.

She caught me looking at it.

“I carry you with me everywhere,” she said.

I turned to her.

In spite of her being made up as a man—a melancholy man, no less—and being an age that tormented her always for what she no longer was, my mother was still beautiful, her face, in impact, all dark eyes and wide mouth, both restlessly shaping and reshaping in attentiveness to whoever was before her.

It had long pleased me to be able to make her eyes and mouth abruptly freeze. Like now. “Can you think why a tough guy with a gun would be stalking you?” I said.

But I had her for only the briefest of moments. Then, with a tilt of the head, her eyes veiled themselves like a cat showing its trust, and her mouth made a dismissive moue. “Not at all,” she said.

She sounded sincere. But she was arguably the greatest living actress of the American stage. She could sound however she liked. What I needed to figure out: had the oddness of the question itself been enough to make her pause for that brief moment or had it revealed she was now lying?

I had good reason to suspect the latter.

Last year she got involved in some undercover detective work in New Orleans while she was trying to make an escape from the theater.

“Are you still in bed with Pinkerton?” I said.

“What do you take me for?” she said. “Old man Pinkerton’s been dead for thirty years.”

She winked.

“Okay, Mother,” I said. “I usually let you get away with ending a serious conversational topic with an ambiguous theatrical gesture. Not this time. Does the wink mean you’re not sleeping with a dead man but if he were alive it would be a different matter, or does it mean you’re not sleeping with a dead man but you may still be working for his detective agency?”

This stopped her face once again.

She squared around to me, leaned forward, straightened her back, and pressed her hands onto her knees. A manly gesture. A man with more backbone than Hamlet. But I recognized it from a lifetime with this woman as a no-nonsense Isabel Cobb gesture. She said, “Listen to me, my darling. Consider my ego. Did you think I would be happy to play that role for long? Going after two-bit hoodlums for a corporation of private dicks?”

I kept my own face still. I wasn’t going to let her get away with the ambiguity of a rhetorical question.

She knew. She smiled a that’s-my-boy smile. “It was beneath me,” she said. “I am not now nor will I ever again work for the Pinkertons or any other detective agency.”

She held my eyes steadily with hers.

Okay.

“Okay,” I said.

She didn’t move.

“That leaves the man with the pistol in his coat,” I said. “He was in the flies above you.”

She didn’t flinch. Her face was placid, but she said, “That’s unsettling.”

How to read my mother? That had been a daily challenge for much of my life. It probably made me the hell of a good newspaper reporter that I was. Right now I believed what she was saying about the detective work; her reasoning acknowledged who she was behind the mask. This quiet in her also felt real. I supposed. But she was perfectly capable of playing, from her actor’s book of tricks, Placid and Calm. Playing the untrue thing was her life. If the calm were true, wouldn’t she be squeezing every flinch and flutter from a fictitious endangerment?

She said, “Maybe the theater put on some security. A woman playing a man provokes a lot of people on both sides.”

“Your stage manager said he didn’t know who he was.”

She nodded faintly. Then she shrugged. “We do only a matinee tomorrow and the run ends Thursday night.”

There wasn’t much left to say about this. It worried me. But this was my mother I was dealing with.

I let her change the subject. “Do you tour on from here?” I asked.

“Yes.”

A few moments of silence clock-ticked away as we looked at each other, as if casually.

“As Hamlet?”

“Yes,” she said. “And you? Will you be waiting in London for the German bullets and cannon shells to arrive?”

Another beat of silence and then she smiled. And she winked. She was reminding me that we’d long ago tacitly agreed not to question how we led our lives.

“I’ll be touring on,” I said.

3

I asked nothing more of her. Nor she of me. By the very early hours of the next morning, however, as I lay sleepless in bed in my rooms at the Tavistock Hotel across from Covent Garden Market, I’d become less and less convinced by her performance. Not her Hamlet. That remained swell. In temperament she’d always been something of a man—a tough guy, in fact—trapped in a leading lady body. Indeed, last night she’d played the catching of the murderous uncle at his prayers so fiercely and had so clearly kept that edge in all her character’s later delays that she’d utterly transformed Hamlet’s Wilsonian vacillation into the overriding desire to kill his uncle only when it was most likely to send him, unrepentant, to Hell. That was Mama. She knew how to draw on her toughness, play it as if that were all there was. Which was why it took me till three in the morning to begin to doubt her nonchalance about the man in the flies with the gun. Something more was going on.

But it wasn’t my affair. I was still a war correspondent. There was that. But I was also working for my country’s secret service now. Primarily now. She wasn’t the reason I was awake. I’d always figured she could take care of herself. And I was my tough-guy mother’s son. Which wasn’t to say certain things in my new profession didn’t get to me. It meant I played the essentials of my character convincingly and I did what I needed to do.

I just might not sleep for long stretches in the night.

I fidgeted mightily around on the bed. I paced about the room, smoking Fatimas. A room I’d occupied for going on ten weeks now. My own issues were about the thirteen months prior to that.

But I was tough guy enough to keep any extended replays of those scenes out of my head. From the battlefields I’d covered I’d learned the attitude I had to hold on to: the man you watched die yesterday doesn’t exist today; he fell to yesterday’s bullets and you’ve got today’s bullets to deal with. Nevertheless, sometimes it got me to brooding. Only it was in indirect ways.

Like noticing a little girl, maybe nine years old or so, from a working family, passing in James Street with a sad face.

Or a newspaper headline about a film actress—a star—formerly thought rescued but now assumed lost on the Lusitania.

Or the arcaded portico along the front of the Tavistock, which felt, in spite of obvious differences, very much like the portales of a certain hotel in Vera Cruz.

And making all this worse was the Corona portable on my desk, which I’d paced past a hundred times already tonight and kept my eyes from seeing. This time, however, I stopped. The electric bulb above the desk, wired into the gas-jet fixtures of this sixty-year-old hotel, pissed its yellow light onto a blank sheet of paper in the roller. One more story to write under a phony name.

No. I couldn’t think of it as phony. That was the point.

I was Joseph W. Hunter speaking through my Corona now. Joseph William Hunter. Formerly Josef Wilhelm Jäger, which I was keeping quiet about. From Chicago he was publishing widely in the German-language newspapers and the German-American English-language newspapers in the U.S.A. He was a damn good writer, sentence to sentence at least, though he clearly had an agenda. He was a justifier and apologist for the home country.

No. Not he. I. I was this guy Hunter. Becoming him, at least. I was still in love with mein Vaterland and anxious that my fellow Americans understood why. I was writing about the war as if America was smart to remain out of the fray. As if we were getting the wrong dope about Germany and its goals and its intentions. We had far more in common with the Germans than we did with the Brits.

It turned my stomach but it had to be done. It was quite likely, given recent events, that Christopher Cobb was known to the German Foreign Office as a dangerous man. Journalism was what I knew best as a cover identity and Germany was still courting sympathetic American journalists. Joe Hunter would be useful.

He was in the works even before my mix-up with the Huns this past spring. I’d been creating him ever since I came out of my secret service training in February speaking damn good German, the language training aided by a lifetime of intense and varied private education in the back stages and dressing rooms of the thousand theaters of my childhood and by my mother’s gene for mimicry.

I’d lit the electric light with the reasonable intent of making good use of my sleeplessness. I had a story to cook up about a movement among Chicago school administrators who advocated more classes in German in anticipation of a new order in Europe. But I reconsidered. I was Cobb alone tonight. Only Cobb. I reached up and turned the key and extinguished the light.

I moved to the window and opened the heavy blackout drape. It was the newest thing in the room. Since January London faced the nightly possibility of a Zeppelin attack. Since May the attacks had come to the city center and were increasing in number and bomb load. The Brits still hadn’t figured out how to defend themselves. The airships could climb faster and higher than the Sopwiths and Blériots of the Royal Flying Corps, and the best the anti-aircraft ground defenses had were Hotchkiss six-pounders whose range was less than half the Zepps’ attack altitude. The city was defenseless.

My rooms were at the back of the hotel on the upper floor, the fourth. I looked along the parapets and chimneys of the rooftops stretching north on James Street, all of it barely visible, blacked out, as was the whole city in the overcast night.

And as I watched, the darkness to the west cracked open from ground to clouds with a white searchlight and then with another, the two beams stiffly scanning the ceiling of clouds. I took in a quick breath. These Zeppelins were as vast as ocean liners, piston droning a mile overhead, slowing down almost to a float to aim their bombs, giving off a strange kind of elegance in their dangerousness. They were unlike anything you knew, no matter how much tough stuff you’d seen. They could set off a quick reflex of fear you didn’t quite know how to suppress.

I watched the two restless pillars of light searching, searching, and then one abruptly vanished and, moments later, the other. The darkness resumed unmitigated. It had been a false alarm.

In this part of the city the dark was not silent. Though I was high up and facing away to the north, I could hear the muffled bustling at the Covent Garden Market across from the front of the hotel. The market carts and wagons were rumbling in and unloading cabbages and cauliflowers, turnips and tomatoes, broad beans and brussels sprouts to await the greengrocers of London before dawn.

I closed the drape.

I’d been here too long.

I knew too much about this neighborhood.

I was too much like a Londoner, waiting for bombs from the night sky with nothing to do in response but keep the lights off and duck.

I went to the armoire and opened the doors and I felt my way into the bottom of my Gladstone bag. I put my hand to the Luger there, which I’d acquired on a difficult night in Istanbul. I drew it out.

I faced into the darkness of the room and held the pistol as if to fire, holding the grip with the crotch of my thumb pressed into the curve beneath the hammer, the trigger snug in the tip-joint of my forefinger, my hand part of the Luger now, an exact prolongation of its axis. Calming.

And unsettling. I’d been calmed through the other wars by typewriter keys. What had I come to? But this reservation was of the mind. My body, my beating heart were calmed by holding this pistol.

I let the thought go.

I put the Luger back into the bag and I moved to the bed and lay down and slept.

And a knock at the door awoke me. I did not know what time it was. I didn’t even know if the sun had risen, the blackout lingering in the be-draped room.

I rose. I moved to the door. There was no peephole in this aging hotel. I turned my ear to the place where a peephole should be.

“Yes?” I said.

“Mr. Cobb?”

I recognized the voice. A bellhop as old as the Tavistock.

I slid the chain lock off its metal groove and opened the door.

“Good morning, Mr. Cobb.”

“Good morning, George,” I said.

George lifted a long, paper-wrapped parcel with the hook of a clothes hanger protruding from the top. “From a gentleman,” he said.

With the door closed and with the blackout drape opened to reveal the light of an advanced morning and with the parcel laid flat on the bed, I tore away the paper and found a tuxedo.

The note pinned to the paper gave an address in Knightsbridge and the present date and a time. No name.

I took in a quick breath, aware how similar the reflex seemed to the anticipation of the Zepps a few hours ago. But with a different feeling altogether. The last time that I’d been sent off on a serious assignment, it began with a tuxedo. My waiting, I figured, was over.

4

That night, after the late-coming summer dark, gussied up and still fiddling with my white bow tie in the back of one of the ubiquitous French-made London taxis, I thought about a guy named James Metcalf, my contact from the embassy in May who dispatched me a tux and took me to dinner at the Carlton Hotel to give me a train ticket to Turkey and a license to kill. I expected him to be waiting for me in Knightsbridge.

The taxi drove to the end of Basil Street, just south of Hyde Park, where Basil Mansions stretched a full block long, a continuous row of posh, red-brick, Queen Anne revival mansion flats with half-­octagonal, Portland-stone bay windows. The mansions flatironed at the angled intersection of Pavilion Road, and the northernmost door I’d been brought to led into a massive wedge of a very fancy multistoried flat, four floors from basement on up, joined by a circular staircase.

A manservant in tails answered the door and he bowed to me and he said, with lugubrious upper-class overprecision, “Good evening, sir. May I announce you?” Which was just his way of saying, Who the hell are you?

I gave him my name. The Cobb one.

“Of course, Mr. Cobb,” he said. He had the acceptable list in his head.

“This way, sir,” he said, and he led me across the marble foyer and up one circular flight to the second floor, the central feature of which was a large, oak-paneled drawing room. The furniture was all done in the heavy, dark Jacobean style. Oak wainscot chairs mostly hugged the walls; overstuffed, out-of-period wingbacks and a matching couch sat before a walk-in fireplace; and a couple of major, fat-legged trestle tables lined up in the center of the room, one with a side of beef and a guy in chef’s whites, the other with drinks and a bartender. But among all this was plenty of stand-around room.

There were a dozen of us, or a few more. All men, all done up in evening wear, arranged in little broods of two or three just out of earshot of each other. I smelled government.

The butler stopped and so did I, just behind his right shoulder. “Lord Buffington will be here momentarily, sir,” he said.

Indeed, from near the beef, a large, fleshy man who seemed no less large and fleshy for his perfectly bespoke evening clothes, a man who once might well have been the primary bully among Charterhouse upperclassmen, broke away from his group and moved toward me.

“Mister Christopher Cobb, your lordship,” the manservant said, stepping out of the way.

“Cobb,” the man said, presenting a large hand and a firm grip that I was lucky to get good enough hold on to return effectively. “I’m Gabriel Buffington.”

“Lord Buffington.”

He’d given me his casual name, but he nodded to acknowledge that I’d done the right thing in returning his title to him.

And now a man emerged from behind Gabe Buffington. A man I recognized. But it wasn’t James Metcalf. It was my other James, the guy who came to Chicago and persuaded my publisher to let him hire me away for the government while remaining ostensibly at work for the Post-Express. James Polk Trask. Woodrow Wilson’s right-hand secret service man.

Trask appeared around Buffington like a half-back running the ball behind Gabe the Grappler’s block.

I sidestepped to take him on. “Trask,” I said.

“Cobb,” he said.

We shook hands.

“Lord Buffington is our host,” Trask said at once, turning his face around to look at the Brit.

Buffington nodded two little smiles, one for each of us.

“Thanks,” I said.

Buffington said, “The windows are secured, the food and the drink are plentiful, we have a splendid space belowground. Let the wretched Huns do their worst.” Having made this declaration, the lord nodded once more, firmly, for both of us, and he moved off.

Trask watched Buffington. “He’s one of the good ones.” He turned those blackout-dark, empty-seeming eyes back to me. He waited, as if it was obvious that I was supposed to say something. Since he’d come to recruit me, I’d seen those eyes in other people in his business. Our business. I figured he expected me to acquire the knack of putting on these show-nothing eyes, just as I’d acquired the knack for planting an enemy in the ground. A couple of moments of silence had already passed between us since he’d declared Buffington a good one.

I said, “As in ‘one of the few good ones’ or ‘stay close to the good ones because the bad ones are very bad.’”

Trask smiled. Very faintly. “Both,” he said. “You want a drink?”

“Sure.”

“I’ve taught the Brits to make a Gin Rickey, at least here in Buffington’s joint.”

It was the only drink invented by a Washington lobbyist. “That may be a violation of our neutrality,” I said.

“Too bad,” Trask said, and he led me to the drink table and another of Buffington’s servants in tails. This one, however, was armed with cocktail shaker, ice shaver, lemon squeezer, long-handled spoons and toddy sticks, a jigger, and a couple of fine, small knives. He used one of the latter to cut us a lime, the halves of which ended up in our two glasses of Beefeater.

Trask took us off to a corner of the room and we sat on a couple of high-backed, carved walnut chairs facing, at right angles, into the room. We were able to watch for anyone approaching, no doubt Trask’s intent. We would speak low.

“What’s this get-together all about?” I asked.

Trask gave a tiny snort through a whistley sinus. I looked toward him at this commonplace noise he’d made. It didn’t go with his eyes. It didn’t go with him, this peep of human frailty.

He said, “This is a high-class version of a thing you’re starting to find all over London. A blackout club.”

“The Zepps,” I said.

He nodded. “All you need is a basement and some nervous friends.”

“Are these guys nervous?”

“From the air attacks, a few. But mostly from their long neglect of homeland defense and the task of correcting that. They’d all gotten complacent about their island fortress. Their vaunted navy can’t do anything about airships. Churchill warned them before he got canned. He foresaw a major air war. I suspect he’ll turn out to be correct. Unfortunately, Winnie didn’t know crumpets about sea war and land war.”

Trask was referring to Gallipoli. Churchill had authored the disaster in the Dardanelles, which wasn’t over yet. “I got pretty close to all that,” I said.

“Right,” Trask said. “Which reminds me. Good work in Istanbul.”

I grunted.

Yesterday’s bullets.

“That compliment wasn’t as incidental as it sounded,” Trask said, as if he were a sensitive guy, not wanting to offend. His eyes hadn’t moved from me, hadn’t flickered through any of this. Not even when he added, “Not incidental at all.”

I practiced on my own dead stare.

Trask said, “Sorry to reward you by hitching you to a post in London for so long.”

I didn’t even grunt at this.

Trask knew how to justify it. He said, “Your Mr. Hunter has been getting some nice response in various places.”

“Good for him.”

“Now we’re trying to do our British friends—the good ones—a special favor.”

This declaration was the kind of rhetorical setup Trask liked to execute before taking a sip or a drag of whatever was in his hand. A Rickey in Washington when he sent me off on the Lusitania, a Fatima when he asked to enlist me in his covert tribe. And yes, a Rickey again now. I sipped too, waiting.

“They’ve got a traitor inside somewhere,” he said.

“Inside the government?”

“They think so, given what they suspect is getting through to Berlin.”

“Will I be involved with this?”

Trask shrugged. He looked off into the room. “We have someone on it at the moment. Looking into a suspect.”

He said no more.

I took a pretty good hit on the gin and lime. Old Joe Rickey and his Washington bartender friend had a real inspiration, simple though it was.

“We’re still feeling our way along,” Trask finally added. “It might be a good time to introduce Mr. Hunter.”

“Here?”

“I have a slightly different crowd in mind.” He leaned toward me, lowered his voice even further. “Do you know how many of the most powerful men in this country have German blood in their veins? It goes back two hundred years. George I, King of Great Britain and Ireland, previously Georg Ludwig, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg, the only eligible heir of the dead Queen Anne. He didn’t even speak English. This was Queen Victoria’s great-great-grandfather, mind you, progenitor of four British kings before her. And who did Victoria up and marry? Another Hun, Albert, of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, who thus named the present royal house. For Christ’s sake, the Kaiser himself is Victoria’s grandson. There’s been a powerful lot of German-blooded begatting over those two hundred years, which has now produced, beneath the Brits’ virulently anti-German surface, a small but strategic shit pot of conflicting interests at a very high level.”

“Your suspect is one of the begotten?” I said.

Trask nodded. He glanced into the room and back to me. He bent near. “A baronet by the discreetly adjusted surname of Stockman. Given-named after Victoria’s German prince. Sir Albert Stockman. He’s the great-nephew of Christian Friedrich Stockmar, a German-born physician who became the personal doctor for Prince Leopold of . . . where else? . . . Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. Great-Uncle Chris was sent by Leopold to a marriageable Victoria to vouch for his own nephew Albert. Stockmar vouched well, and after the marriage he stayed on as the young couple’s personal adviser. So Victoria took good care of this guy’s extended family, including the baronetcy of our Sir Al.”

“Why don’t the Brits just grab him and interrogate him?”

“It’s all suspicion at this point,” he said. “And the operative phrase was ‘very high level.’ Sir Albert was beloved-by-blood by the Great Queen herself, which counts in this country. And though a baronetcy doesn’t quite rank the House of Lords, he got himself elected as a member of Parliament. Which, if he’s dirty, tells you something about his guile.”

From outside, very near, a whistle sounded, shriller, simpler than the bobbies’ whistles. An air raid constable. This the Brits were well prepared for. Guys in uniforms with whistles. The conversations instantly stopped in the drawing room. All the faces turned in the direction of the sound—the southern wall and the street beyond.

I looked at Trask. He looked at me. “Here come their cousins in a balloon,” I said.

Trask snorted.

I snorted.

But we both rose and moved with all the other white ties and dinner jackets into the circular staircase, going along in a quite orderly fashion, quite calmly, even as the sound of the Hotchkiss six-pounders began to pop pathetically in the distance.

We descended to the ground floor and then we circled on down, into the basement, and we emerged into a large, open space. At one end sat wine in barrels and more wine in bottles in racks, and on half a dozen of the barrels, candles burned in silver candelabra. Against the far wall were more racks, of a different sort, layered with Buffington’s guns. In the center of the open space a billiard table was disappearing even now under a white cloth cast over its surface by still another liveried man.

Beyond the vanishing billiard green were three, round dining tables already draped in white and each set with half a dozen dinner places and lit, as well, by candles. Beyond them was an opening to a corridor in deep shadow, leading into the recesses of the basement floor. On one side of the doorway was a piano with a lit stand-up lamp. On the other side was a wall of books, two-shilling editions, books for a man to actually read. For that purpose he had a couple of overstuffed Morris chairs with another stand-up lamp between them, this one dark. The basement—at least on this side of that corridor—was Buffington’s guy’s retreat.

We all now vaguely drifted in the direction of the set tables until Buffington’s voice boomed from behind us. “Gentlemen, the food and the drink will soon follow, and there will be more of both. But first a word.”

We stopped drifting. We began to turn toward our host.

He was drawn up to full height, hands behind him, framed against the final swoop of the staircase. He watched us turning to him. He approved. He waited. He encouraged us as we gathered our attention to him by addressing us once more. “Gentlemen.” Firmly he said it, though the tone of his voice had mellowed up as well, become comradely, almost affectionate.

When at last he had the full and silent attention of every man before him, he said, one more time, “Gentlemen.” This time he rolled the word out as if he were asking us to consider its full meaning. Which no doubt he was, for he went on, “They come now, showing their true and savage selves. They come in the night, sneaking in, dangling beneath gas bags to throw bombs on our homes and schools, on our women and our children. And a few months ago they unleashed poison gas upon our troops at Ypres, violating what civilized men from time immemorial have understood to be fields of honor. This is no longer a war of nation against nation. It is a war of civilization against a new barbarism. We fight to preserve the entire world from a second dark age.”

As if, offstage, the sound effects man heard his cue, a bomb thumped distantly and shuddered faintly beneath our feet.

Buffington paused only for a single beat as if to let his point sink in. Before me and to the side I could see most of the men in the room, and I knew I could assume the same of the others: not one of us had flinched. And here in this London home, the bomb’s fading vibration in our feet and legs and chest supported Buffington’s point.

He said, “Gentlemen, if we fail, this dark age will be longer than the last. Those previous five centuries will seem the winking of an eye compared to this. And the new dark age will be infinitely more terrible. Mankind’s vaunted advances of manufacturing and technology can be used for good, but they can just as readily and effectively be used for evil.”

One more drub of a bomb, much closer, rattled our knees and stirred the silverware on the tables.

Buffington boomed in response, “Consider that the call to roast beef and Yorkshire pudding.”