The Empire of Night: A Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thriller (25 page)

I went up and Jeremy was already coming around to drag the guard’s body back inside. I followed.

The place was deeply shadowed, but across the main floor the guy had turned on the electric light in the windowless shipping office.

Jeremy slipped off in that direction. I closed the outside door and took a little tour. The main floor was mostly empty, but beyond a row of packing tables, my flashlight found an arrangement of wooden boxes and crates and shipping drums. All large. Bigger than Stockman’s two boxes. I was convinced this wasn’t the part of the haystack we should be looking in anyway.

I returned to Jeremy, who had the unconscious guard on his face and was binding his ankles and wrists behind him. “Not much of a bout,” I said.

“He was fighting out of his weight class,” Jeremy said.

He said it dry, so I kept my laugh and even my smile to myself. The guard was out of Jeremy’s class all right; he was a good twenty-five pounds bigger, all of it apparent muscle.

“Did you look in the shipping office?” I said.

“Just the packing tables.” He cinched the hog-tie tight.

“The office is the most secure spot on this floor.”

He nodded and finished with a gag job using a couple of oil rags, and we strode across the warehouse floor to the office.

Not only were the lights on, the guard had left the door standing open. He had easy access to the office. It wasn’t promising as a place to stash Stockman’s precious boxes.

I stepped in first. Jeremy lingered just outside.

A desk.

File drawers.

A safe. But it was half the size of even one of the boxes we were interested in.

A work table with ledger books. A small bookcase.

Nothing.

I wasn’t surprised.

I stepped out. “Not secure at all, really,” I said.

We both thought for a moment in silence.

“The boxes aren’t that big, really,” Jeremy said. “They could be anywhere in the building.

“How special are they?” I said.

A rhetorical question.

Jeremy nodded and I said the thing we were both thinking. “We should find this man Reinauer’s office.”

At the end of a corridor on the third floor was a mahogany door and a brass plate:
Heinrich Reinauer, Geschäftsführer.

Our man, the managing director.

“Shall I assume you can deal with this?” Jeremy said, in that cultured British tone he sometimes put on.

“You shall,” I said. I handed him the flashlight.

He illuminated a friend of mine from the Great Fraternal Order of Tumbler Locks, of which I was an honorary member. I took out my tools and raked this one quickly and I opened the door for Jeremy as if I were his butler, finding myself very pleased to have shown him my own good right hand.

He grunted admiringly.

We went in and closed the door behind us.

Jeremy immediately switched off the flashlight.

Pitch black.

“Good drapes,” I said.

He lit the flashlight and found the electric light key next to the door.

Reinauer’s corner office, secreted away in a bland brick warehouse building at a come-lately urban river dock, was paneled in oak with glass-doored bookshelves and an oil portrait of himself hung behind a West Wing–size desk. Each of its four windows was draped in a black single panel with a massive gold Imperial Eagle in the center sinking its claws into the planet earth. All befitting a
Geschäftsführer
.

But the most striking feature of Heinrich Reinauer’s office was the pair of steel-band-strapped wooden boxes sitting in the middle of the floor. Once again I was struck by their size and shape. They were standing with their long side upright. I half expected each of them to contain a three-drawer filing cabinet, the drawers filled with every German secret known to Albert Stockman.

Jeremy and I approached them, however, as gingerly as if we expected them to contain ticking time bombs. We stood side by side before them, silently, without moving, for one beat and then another.

In the center of each of the facing panels was a shipping label. The two labels were set at slightly different angles and showed fragments of previous labels beneath.

Jeremy and I each moved to a box and knelt before it.

The label was an
Umladungsformular.
A transshipment form. The new address was written by hand.

Jeremy read his aloud. “FVFB. Kalk. MDH.”

I read mine. “Krupp. Essen.”

30

We looked at each other.

We didn’t need to speak.

Krupp, of course, meant steel. The House of Krupp was what Lord Kitchener and the Brits desperately needed, a homegrown industrialist producing more artillery shells than the rest of the world combined.

Jeremy squared himself to the box, crouched, put his arms around it, and lifted.

Only six or eight inches.

He put the box down again.

He nodded at me to do the same.

I did.

The box went up very heavy, but it didn’t feel like a three-drawer cabinet full of files. Not nearly heavy enough. And the distribution of the weight didn’t feel right. And, of course, there was the matter of its destination.

I put the box down.

I said, “So either Sir Albert is getting Krupp into the milk can business or Krupp is getting Sir Al into the artillery business.”

We took a step back.

Then Jeremy had a thought. He crossed to the box before me, crouched, and lifted that one as well.

He put it down, nodding, and stepped back. “The same weight.”

“A couple of shells,” I said.

“Likely,” Jeremy said. “Empty ones.”

“Then they’re a special design. Stockman, the idea man.”

Jeremy nodded.

We both turned our eyes to the box going to FVFB. Or to MDH.

“Where’s Kalk?” I said.

“Near Cologne.”

The question now hung in the air between us: what was our next move? Which pushed a question on stage that had been lurking in the wings. I said, “My man said the Brits were sending me some help. What did your people say?”

“I was the help.”

For a moment I wondered how Trask had negotiated his way into our running this British show.

Then Jeremy said, “I’m to help the two of you.”

Mother was how. Her crucial access to Stockman was what Trask brought to the table.

But I said, “As far as I’m concerned, you and I are simply in this together.”

Jeremy gave me a single, sharp nod.

I said, “For the record then. We want to figure out the full extent of what Stockman is up to and stop him. Agreed?”

“Agreed.”

We both looked at the boxes.

“They’re nailed and steel-banded,” I said. “Can we look inside and then restore them so Reinauer won’t notice?”

It was a rhetorical question.

We stared at them some more.

“We open them, that’s all we’re going to get,” I said.

“I think we have a good notion what’s in there,” he said.

I was glad to have Jeremy along for this. I kept thinking aloud with him. “How clever can that design be? Is looking at it worth putting these guys drastically on their guard?”

The silence of Reinauer’s office hissed softly around us.

And then I finally put two and two together. I said, “Not an artillery shell at all.”

I’d forgotten it until this moment, but I’d dreamed last night, in my mahogany bed at the Adlon, about the great whirring beasts passing over me in the night, as if I were sleeping on the ocean floor and these were vast creatures of the deep.

“The Zepps,” I said. “He’s about the Zepps and he’s dealing with Krupp. Those are aerial bomb designs.”

Jeremy looked at the boxes as if to confirm this and then back at me.

“No doubt improved,” he said.

I asked the big question. “How badly do we need the design?”

We quietly consulted the boxes again.

They weren’t talking.

“Essen is Krupp’s main foundry, isn’t it?” I said.

“Yes.”

“This is where they’d turn out a million of these.”

“It is.”

“So what’s in Kalk?” I said.

“That’s our more interesting question.”

“I think I was getting pretty close to Stockman last night at the Adlon bar,” I said.

I considered that for a moment. My reporter self had indeed caught a whiff of something. Things were roiling in Albert.

I said, “I can’t shake the feeling he’s up to more.”

Jeremy and I let my hunch hang between us for a moment.

I nodded at the boxes. “The first dud they drop and our bosses have this much. You and I grab these now, Stockman still has his designs, and we can do no more.”

“Then shall we let this be?” he said.

This needed no answer. Together we turned and crossed the room. He switched off the lights, and I reset the lock on the door.

On the way to the main warehouse floor we devised a little ruse for the guard, who could have recovered his mind by now.

And so Jeremy and I ransacked the shipping office, arguing in German about which of us stupidly suggested the money would be in something other than an actual safe.

I’d earlier noticed some cases of what looked like a pretty damn good bock and we stole one of those, for appearances sake, and we argued some more—out of the hog-tied guard’s line of sight—with me insisting on searching him for cash so we’d at least leave here with a little ready money and with Jeremy talking me out of it, saying this guy was just here doing his job and his aching jaw was enough trouble for him for one night.

Then we beat it out the loading dock door and back to the Ford with our case of beer.

We stopped at the curb a block before the hotel. From the wide median, the streetlights were shining through a scrim of linden trees.

“How do we meet again?” I said.

“You still have a room at the Baden?”

“I do.”

“I can leave a message there for you,” he said.

“And if I need to get
you
?”

There was an odd hesitation in him, which I wished I could read. But it was dark inside the Ford and he turned his face away. Whatever it was passed quickly.

“For the next few days you can reach me at this telephone.” He reached quickly inside his coat. If he were anyone else I’d be drawing my Mauser.

His hand emerged with a piece of paper, which I took from him.

“They listen in on the phones at the Adlon,” he said.

“I know.”

“The lobby of the Baden has a telephone kiosk. You can call from there. Say as little as possible.”

“Let’s decide on a place that need never be mentioned.”

“Yes,” he said. “Make it the Hindenburg statue in the Tiergarten.”

“But we speak of beer.”

“Or brat, depending on the time of day.”

“One other thing,” I said. “I don’t know who you are.”

“A pretty good middleweight who once upon a time almost beat Tommy Ryan.”

I’d meant around Berlin. On the phone. This answer came quick and dry. His German sense of humor. Or his German
Angst
. Or both.

But he played neither, giving the line only a brief beat before appending, “I am Bruno Obrecht. A Swiss businessman.”

I started to get out of the still idly quaking Model T.

He put a hand on my arm. “But not for the next two days.”

I sat back down.

“I am Erich,” he said. “Erich Müller.”

“Was that your birth name?”

“It was.”

I stepped out of the T, and he said, “You want a couple of our bocks for your room?”

“Take them all,” I said.

He pinched the brim of his hat to say good-bye and drove off.

I looked at the paper in the streetlight. His telephone number.
Spandau 4739
.

He was going home to his mother.

31

I stood for a moment on the street. An El train was softly clacking through the median lindens. I considered this roll of the dice, the opportunity we’d just left behind. Perhaps the content of the two boxes was all I’d come to Berlin to find. What we felt certain was in there could be everything there was to know about the sotto voce declaration I’d finessed from Stockman last night. If the bombs the Zepps were dropping could somehow be improved, made more accurate, more effective, the airship attacks might become far more than isolated, neighborhood disruptions. They might bring the war-changing terror to London that many people on both sides felt was possible from these machines. The Brits deserved to know the details of what they were up against as soon as possible. They needed to start making their own.