The Empire of Night: A Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thriller (27 page)

“That makes no difference,” I said. “In your blood, you are still a Stockmar.”

He laughed again and nodded me to my chair.

When I sat, I motioned for the bartender to come. He did, briskly.

I said to him, “I’ll have what he’s having.”

“Coffee?” the bartender said.

“Coffee,” I said.

The man vanished.

I faced Stockman now, as the truly revealed Josef Wilhelm Jäger.

His eyes moved to my scar and lingered. “Please?” he said, lifting his hand, waving it as if turning the page of a book.

I turned my face to the right, fully showing the
Schmiss.

I felt grindingly uncomfortable, but I understood my job would be made easier by all this. Nevertheless, the examination, though probably brief, felt endless. I focused on the thought that it was a good thing I would never know my own father. At our first meeting I’d be subjected to this same ordeal.
Here, let me take a look at you, my son.
To hell with that.

Then Stockman said, “Thank you.”

I faced him once more.

“You did not pack it with horsehair?” he asked.

The dueling sword of the friendly, prearranged duels, the straight-bladed
Korbschläger
, had a blade as fine as my straight razor and did not bruise when cutting. Some duelists packed their cuts with horsehair to irritate them and keep them agape as they healed so as to create a more prominent scar. Mine was plenty striking on its own.

“I did
not
,” I said. “That would be a lie and a sacrilege.”

“Good,” he said. “It’s interesting how those of us who have grown up in exile sometimes have a purer sense of these things.”

“Perhaps this war will refocus all Germans,” I said.

“I greatly envy you, bearing this mark,” he said. “I was in a different circumstance, of course, going off to university. My father had complex commitments. His son could go nowhere but to Oxford.”

He paused. I had the impulse to keep improvising onward. I even thought to say:
A true German soul bears this mark invisibly from birth
. But even without thinking it out, I knew I was on the verge of going too far, of turning this into melodrama.

So I simply nodded sympathetically and was glad to find the bartender suddenly beside us, giving us pause, presenting my cup of coffee and topping off Stockman’s from a carafe.

After the bartender had vanished again, Albert said, “Of course, it is the same with the British as the Americans. There is so much they do not understand.”

I sipped at the coffee, hot and bitter, and I remained plausibly silent. Let Albert follow his own internal path.

He lifted his coffee, cup and saucer together, and looked at it steaming before him, and he said, “I’m afraid the British will
never
understand.”

He sipped. But his voice had already turned hot and bitter.

“Not by reason, they won’t,” he said. “Not in a civilized way. They are waging this war against us by using their navy to starve Germany slowly to death, every man and woman and child.
That
is the act of terror. And they do it with their damnable outward restraint, as if its incremental effects civilize it. But they are not rational. They are cold-blooded, which is a different thing. Civilization cannot exist without passion.”

He’d placed the cup back onto the saucer, but kept them both suspended before him. The cup was chittering lightly.

His hand had begun to tremble.

He seemed aware of it. He looked at the cup.

And the sound abruptly stopped.

He returned his eyes to mine and said, “I still have hopes that the Americans will come to understand.”

“It’s why I write,” I said.

“I admire that,” he said.

We drank our coffee for a time. Stockman seemed to turn inward. But whatever he was aware of in himself, I was apparently the point of reference. He would sip and think and look at me and look away and then do it all again.

Finally he said, “I am meeting a German scientist tomorrow who has created a process that will eliminate famine from the face of the earth. He did this six years ago. You do not know his name. I have read essentially every issue of your most important newspaper,
The New York Times
,
for the past decade. His name has never appeared. Not once. Nor his discovery.”

Stockman paused. Inside my head I’d paused several sentences ago. This guy had a way of veering off and surprising the hell out of me. He seemed to want me to comment now.

“What is his name?” I asked.

“Fritz Haber.”

I had always read very widely. I possessed a very good memory. But Stockman was right.

“I have never heard his name,” I said.

“You see?”

“What is this process?”

“He can convert the inaccessible nitrogen in the atmosphere into ammonia, which contains extractable, usable nitrogen. Do you know what this means?”

I knew some science. The air was mostly nitrogen. But I’d never heard of anyone figuring out how to use it.

“Perhaps,” I said. “But tell me.”

Stockman said, “Nitrogen is in everything we eat. Meat, bread, anything with protein. The nitrogen comes from the soil, through the crops. The wheat, the corn. The rye you and I have drunk together. But there is only so much nitrogen. The earth can be sucked dry. Fertile land can become exhausted from use, and it is the nitrogen that vanishes. Before the Haber Process, the only way for man to create large quantities of nitrogen to put back into the soil was by using the nitrogen in saltpeter. No one has saltpeter but the country of Chile, and even there, the supplies are finite. But you can make fertilizer from nitrogen-bearing ammonia, and if you can turn the air into ammonia, you have an infinite amount of fertilizer. The world has nearly two thousand million people. This is nearly twice as many people as a hundred years ago. It will not take another hundred years to double again. Already millions starve. But Germany will never starve. America need never starve. No one need starve. A
German
will feed them all. Fritz Haber will feed them all forever.”

I sat in silence with that abrupt, vast, visceral feeling that a reporter gets when he picks up on a story that nobody has reported.

About the feeding of millions, now and into the future, of course. But the thing Stockman wasn’t saying was that nitrogen was also essential in making explosives. Nitrogen created from the air meant
killing
millions as well.

The Allies controlled all of Chile’s saltpeter.

How much did our government and the European Allies’ governments know about this?

“This was six years ago?” I asked.

“Yes, when he demonstrated the process.”

“And they’re doing this now on an industrial scale?”

“Twenty-five tons of ammonia a day. For two years already.”

I wanted to ask where. But I flipped the crank on my reporter’s instincts and they started up instantly. I knew this was a fragile moment. An inappropriate, pointed question could shut Stockman down.

The links forward from where his mind had started were clear, from his having hopes that America will come to understand Germany, to his admiring my journalism in pursuit of that very aim, to his abruptly waxing rhapsodic about German nitrogen someday feeding a hungry world. He had it in his head to arrange for me to do a story. A grand one. The one with a humanistic face. I needed to be careful.

“If only America knew,” I said.

“Perhaps that can be arranged,” he said.

“I’d do the story full justice,” I said.

“Have you seen Baron Mumm von Schwarzenstein at the Foreign Office?”

I had that phony letter from the baron who controlled the press, courtesy of the American-occupied German embassy in London. I had to assume whatever Stockman might have in mind would run afoul of the bureaucracy. It was still unclear to me how much high-ranking, maverick authority Albert actually had. Or how naive he might be about the ways of the German publicity machine. I had to ask a delicate question.

I created a warm little insider laugh. “Do you know the baron well?”

“Not at all,” he said.

I tried not to show my rush of relief. “I’ve had my obligatory
Kirschwasser
with him from his crystal decanter,” I said, improvising the details. “And all is well.”

“Good,” he said. “Meet me here in the bar at two tomorrow afternoon,” he said. “Wait for me if I am late.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“And now,” he said, “I must take a pot of coffee to my rooms to await Hamlet’s entrance.”

I had nothing to say to that.

I rose and offered my hand.

He rose and took it.

He inclined his head toward my scar. “This is who you are,” he said.

33

I told Stockman I wanted to finish my coffee before I left and he bade me good night and consulted with the bartender—I presumed about having his pot of coffee delivered—then he walked across the floor, pretty steadily for all the drinking he must have done tonight, and he vanished into the lobby.

I gave him a couple of minutes to negotiate the elevator, and I emerged into the grand reception lounge of the Adlon ground floor. I stepped clear of the overhanging mezzanine, held aloft by square columns of yellow sienna marble, and I moved into the center of the lounge, with its frescoed ceiling vaulting high above me.

I carefully checked the scattering of people in the lobby. No eyes turning to me. No Herr Wagner.

To my left now was the reception desk, and there were empty settings of overstuffed chairs before it, but I moved on to the nearest chair and table of the Palm Court at the south end of the reception lounge. I sat in the center of three chairs closely arced around a small round table. I faced north across the central floor with a clear view of the stairs from the Unter den Linden
doors. I ordered a pot of coffee. And, just in case, two cups.

The coffee was still warm when Mother swirled through the revolving door. She was surely tired after a long day of rehearsal, but she could do nothing other than make a dynamic entrance into such a public space as this. I knew that she would instantly, though covertly, assess her effect on her impromptu audience. I rose from my chair and began to applaud in broad, smooth undulations, though making no sound whatsoever. She was still fifty yards away and the sound was irrelevant anyway.

She saw me.

She fell out of the
Grande Dame
role and strode my way. To a viewer she was simply another woman walking across an open space. But I knew that this throttling back on her stage star aura meant she was all business.

She arrived.

“I’m having coffee,” I said. “Would you like some?”

“Good evening to you as well, my darling Christopher,” she said.

She used my real name but she spoke it low. When she wanted to be all business with me, she had to be the one who initiated it. Thus her umbrage at the missed niceties of greeting.

“Good evening, Madam Cobb,” I said, also low. “Who are you thinking of, may I ask? I am still your humble and eager scribe, Joseph Hunter.”

She stiffened. I realized she’d been unaware of the name she’d used.

And now I stiffened a little from the same twist of fear she’d just experienced. Her lapse had not been heard, much less understood. But she was capable of forgetting like this in a crucial moment, a crucial circumstance.

“I’m so sorry, Mr. Hunter,” she said. “What did I call you?”

“Christopher.”

She laughed lightly.

“Well, you see,” she said. “That’s my son’s name. He’s been much on my mind lately.”

“You may have good reason not to recognize me.”

“I’d say so,” she said.

We were speaking very low now, and it was safe, but she kept up the pretense a little longer. She said, “When I last saw my son, he had stitches in his cheek in that very place.”

“Did he indeed,” I said. “I got this from my college days in Heidelberg.”

“You went to Heidelberg, did you? You never mentioned this.”

“I revealed it only tonight, to Sir Albert,” I said.

“I’m sure he was impressed,” she said.

“He’s having coffee himself at the moment,” I said. “We can chat for a few minutes if you like.”

She began to sit on the chair to my left but glanced again at my scar and circled the table to sit on my right so as not to see it. I settled into my center chair and we leaned toward each other.

I could smell the orange blossom and violet of her Guerlain perfume. And the familiar musk of my mother herself, from her dozen hours on the stage, which the French scent was intended to cover. And the licorice bite of her Sen-Sen, covering the whiskey, which she always took in true moderation after a long day of rehearsing but for which she always felt guilty.