The Empire of Night: A Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thriller (34 page)

“Yes, you can,” he said.

I turned. I stepped from the room.

The drink table was against the wall just to the side of the bedroom door. I put my hand to the bottle of Scotch. I did not take the top off. I turned my hand and grasped it by its neck. A weapon.

But almost at once I heard Stockman’s footsteps approaching from inside the bedroom.

I let go of the bottle and he emerged and passed on across the floor.

I glanced over my shoulder.

He was collapsing into the scroll-armed chair.

I poured two sizable shots of whiskey and crossed to him.

He took one with a murmured thanks.

I sat on the divan.

We did not toast. He shot his down. I sipped only a very little bit of mine.

“She’s in her room,” he said.

I waited for more.

“She must be in her room,” he said.

“I’m sure she’s safe,” I said.

“She left my bed,” he said. “We can speak as men together, you and I, can we not?”

“Of course,” I said. Now I shot my whiskey down, and before he could say any more I rose and moved toward the side table. I needed a refill.

“For me too,” he said.

I awaited Albert’s men-together talk in much the same mood as his when he approached the balcony a few moments ago. I had to throw the drapes back but I really did not want to find what was on the other side.

I picked up the bottle of whiskey, a fine old Dundee, though it could have been a Chicago-saloon, two-bits-a-shot, squirrel whiskey for all either of us cared at that moment.

I returned to Stockman and poured us some more and I sat down.

My only revenge was that she was probably in the next room listening to every word.

“I woke,” he said. “We had been man and woman together, you understand.”

I understood. I pushed him along. I said, “She was gone?”

“She was.”

I glanced across the floor to the apricot-colored pile of silk.

I had an inspiration.

“If she were going to another man, she would have taken her lovely scarf,” I said.

He looked over his shoulder and then back at me. Then back at the scarf. Then he looked me in the eyes as if he’d suddenly realized it was
me
he was in love with.

“Josef,” he said, in a commensurate tone of voice. “You are
right
, my friend.”

I realized how tightly coiled a metal spring there’d been in my chest, because it now suddenly eased. I didn’t have to hear his man-talk so he could convince himself he was still okay in bed with my mother.

“Of course,” I said.

“Thank you.”

“It was simply evident,” I said.

“She is in her room. But she must be angry with me.”

“Which is why she did not answer when you knocked.”

“Exactly,” he said. He looked at the drink in his hand, which he’d not yet touched. He took about a third of it now, as if it were his own choice and not a physical necessity.

“Yes,” he said. “She must think she has cause to be angry.”

He lifted his shoulders and let them fall as if to say,
What can you do?

“You heard the issue tonight,” he said. “I have to go south for a while. I don’t know for how long exactly. A few days. A week. She has her play, after all.”

I took a good bolt of my whiskey. Maybe half of it. Not from choice but from necessity. So I wouldn’t choke on the irony of having to now say the things I needed to say. “But she has something more important to her than
Hamlet
.”

His drunken brow furrowed in puzzlement. The dope.

“She has you,” I said.

I wanted to keep on drinking while he figured this out. But I was already feeling a little too warm in the face, a little too reconciled with the stuff that had to come out of my mouth.

I looked for a place to put my glass down.

I may even have remarked at this point at the inappropriate absence of a table near this chair and divan.

If I did, the remark was lost on Stockman, whose face was crimped in thought.

I placed the glass on the floor.

All right
, I thought.
Say it.
“She’s a woman in love. When she told you she couldn’t bear to be away from you, she meant it. She aches. You understand, Albert? She aches, my brother. For you.”

I’d raised my voice for this whole proclamation. Grandly. So she could clearly hear that I knew what I knew.

I’d stopped drinking in time to manage the important things. I was coherent. I knew I’d remember everything we said. I was in control of my words and focused on their hidden rhetorical intent. Perhaps, though, the theatrical flourishes had a bit of a life of their own.

“She aches to be with you,” I said. “And if there is any sense in her that this is an important trip you are making, that only causes her to ache more urgently. She wants to be there with you. Beside you. Don’t you see?”

His face was uncrimping now.

“You are a lucky man,” I said.

He nodded faintly.

“Chancellor Otto von Bismarck was a great leader,” he said.

Ah, Albert
, I thought.
This is your response to my invocation of Isabel Cobb’s love? What the hell does she see in you?

“Perhaps the greatest of all German statesmen,” he said.

But what the hell did she see in any of them?

I was glad he was speaking nothing but English. I wanted Mother to hear him clearly.

“There would be no Germany, in all its present glory, if it weren’t for him,” he said.

I was tempted to pick up the drink from the floor, but I did not.

“He is the quintessential figure of diplomatic moderation and balance. And those qualities were often useful. But he had to learn a lesson from an American general. Did you know that?”

“I did not,” I said.

“The great Union general from your Civil War, Philip Sheridan, dined with Chancellor Bismarck during the Prussian war with France. The critical last war that united us as a people. Sheridan said at table that the proper strategy of war consists not only in telling blows against the army of the enemy, but to cause the enemy’s civilians—and I am quoting Sheridan now—‘to cause so much suffering that they must long for peace and force their government to demand it. The people must be left nothing but their eyes to weep with.’”

At this he paused to drink. A natural pause for a man whose drinking was driven by a darkness in him that needed management, or encouragement.

“He had it in him, our dear father Otto,” he said. “But he needed to hear that. He dealt properly with the French from then on. He had no further qualms to shoot every prisoner, burn every village, hang every man, dispose of any civilian at all who might conspire against us. And such measures ended the war far more quickly. Won the war. Allowed us to become the people that we are.”

He paused again, looked at the empty glass. I thought to fill it, but I did not. Nor did he. He bent down and, with meticulous care, set his glass on the floor, beside the leg of his chair.

He lifted his face once more to me. “It’s ironic,” he said. “Our Kaiser himself dismissed Bismarck for failure to appreciate the call of God to create our German Empire. Wilhelm despised Bismarck’s moderation. And yet the same flaw resides in him. Particularly with regard to England. I sympathize. There is blood involved. But his grandmother the queen’s most powerful connection to all of us was her husband, and his pure blood did not actually flow in her veins. Her own Germanness, from her forefathers, was greatly diluted. Too much of England coursed in her. For our Kaiser thus to waver in his will because of his sentimental attachment to Victoria is madness. He will prolong this war. He will lose this war.”

Stockman grasped the two knobs of his chair arms, straightened his spine, lifted his chin. “It is time for heroism in our Germany, Josef. Time for a new hero.”

And the thing that was nagging at me, puzzling me, over this apparently drunken digression suddenly became clear. What leap had his mind taken from the adoring love of my mother to Otto von Bismarck and then to Kaiser Wilhelm? These men were the precursors for the new hero. The hero being Albert. The hero who needed a witness, a woman, my mother and her adoration.

I even bet that this chain of association had not yet snapped in Albert’s head.

Softly as his own voice whispering inside his own whiskey-heated brain, I said, “She needs to be with you for this.”

He lowered his heroically lifted chin and looked at me. “I should go now,” he said. “I will let her sleep.”

He rose. I rose. He was surprisingly steady on his feet. I was somewhat less so for a moment.

“
Eisen und Blut
,” he said, the first German he’d spoken since he entered my rooms. I recognized it from Bismarck. His most famous speech. Not by speeches and majority decisions would the great issues of the day be settled, he’d said. But by
iron and blood
.

It would have been a good exit line, his
Eisen und Blut
. But instead, Albert moved to Mother’s apricot scarf, bent, and took it up once more. He put it to his face and breathed deeply in. At
this
he grew unsteady, swaying a little until he lowered the scarf and blinked his way back to his purpose.

I, on the other hand, in witnessing this gesture, grew suddenly quite steady afoot and it was all I could do to restrain my right hand from fisting and knocking Stockman down.

But restrain, I did.

Indeed, I put my hand on his shoulder and said, “Don’t forget what I’ve said.”

“You are my friend,” he said. And he was gone.

After the click of the door I stood in the center of the room and did some blinking of my own.

His declaration of friendship was the first thing to blink away.

Not so easy, I found.

But I blinked.

Then there was my mother.

I turned to face the bedroom.

And she was standing in the doorway.

She was not looking at me. Rather, she was studying her hands working at the buttons of her shirtwaist. She was half buttoned and I waited.

She did up every button to the top before she lifted her face to me.

I could not read her expression. I therefore assumed it was real.

“Where were you?” I said.

“Under the bed.”

“How?”

“Barely,” she said. And she looked down and took her two hands and fluffed her lately compressed breasts.

I looked away.

“Hamlet prepared me,” she said.

I gave her a moment and looked back to her. She’d finished with her breasts. I said, “Hamlet has not prepared you for what’s next.”

“‘I will screw my courage to the sticking-place,’” she said.

“Good,” I said, though it didn’t turn out so well for Lady Macbeth.

“Victor knows all the splendid Jews in Berlin,” she said. “Especially the theater lovers. I will find this man Einstein.”

40

And she did.

At six o’clock that evening I arrived at the Lessing and the old man on the chair nodded me through at once. I crossed the lobby and stepped into the back of an auditorium ringing with the sound of hammers. On stage the utility lights were lit and men in overalls were upstage center, building a wooden archway flanked by parapeted platforms. Barnowsky was no painted scenery man.

He was nowhere in sight. It was Saturday night. I figured rehearsal was finished already. I twinged in concern that she’d made no progress in finding the other Albert, but Mother had specifically said seven o’clock, and so I went along the side aisle and through the door that led past the wings staircase and down the corridor to her dressing room.

I approached the closed door. I drew near and laughter rolled into the corridor, my mother’s familiar bray—the one laugh of hers I could never quite identify as real or fake—and a man’s unfettered, alto laugh.

Was that the laugh of a man who faced down the mysteries of the physical universe? If it was and he was capable of this laugh, maybe things weren’t so bad, cosmologically.

I knocked on the door.

The laughter stopped.

I heard a murmur of my mother’s voice to her visitor, and then she called out, “Come in.”

I opened the door.

She was sitting in her makeup chair in an informal dinner gown of pale-green taffeta. She’d been waiting for a while, having already changed from her rehearsal clothes. I wondered how long the guy in the room had been here. A while, certainly. The pervasive greasepaint and cold cream smell of the room was actually beginning to yield to his pipe tobacco, a bland but insistent blend of burley and Cavendish and something vaguely nutty.