The Empire of Night: A Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thriller (5 page)

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.”

We all certainly were happy to take that attitude, but no one moved. Not even Buffington. We waited for the next one. This moment and the next. The Germans were still working on aerial warfare. So far the raids were widely spaced and had come with one or two airships following a single, ongoing path across the city and flying away. This bomb was very near and from the direction of the earlier, distant blasts; the next would either be farther away along the flight path or it would be right on top of us.

We waited.

“Shall we sit?” Buffington’s voice had diminished a little. This was a question now, not a defiant suggestion.

And there was a stroke of sound. More distant. Barely felt in Buffington’s cellar.

“Bloody hell,” someone said nearby, very low, to himself.

We heard no more until we were sitting with four others at the far table. Trask and I were beside each other and I could look, if I wished, between two steel-gray, slick-maned Brits across from me and down the darkened corridor leading to the rest of the basement floor. We heard one more bomb before the food, like a distant stroke of thunder, someone else’s storm.

And then we ate. Our companions introduced themselves but did not declare their work, nor did they ask ours, which made me suspect they were Foreign Office types, secret service no doubt, at least some of them. Their talk was casual but it was bluntly critical about Britain’s progress so far in the war. About the disastrous four-week gap between the sea attack and the land attack in Gallipoli, about the severe shortage of artillery shells, about the hasty training of a million new troops, about the U-boat threat and the Zeppelin threat and the sudden vulnerability of sacred British soil after centuries of comfortable insularity.

Trask and I said little.

When the four began to lean toward each other and debate the need to dissolve the government and form a new one, I leaned too, toward Trask, and said, low, “Are all these guys in your line of work?”

Trask nodded. “In varying degrees.”

The four men stopped talking abruptly.

I thought at first that they’d overheard us, trained as they perhaps were. But their faces had turned not to us but to a point higher up and beyond Trask’s far shoulder.

I looked, and Buffington had arrived and he put his hand on the shoulder of a stout man with a crooked cravat sitting next to Trask. The man needed no word. He nodded and rose and moved off and Buffington sat down.

He said to the other three, “Sorry, gentlemen. Continue.”

And they did, with one of them saying Kitchener—who was the secretary of state for war and who all three agreed was responsible for the shortage of artillery shells—had to resign no matter what they did with Asquith.

Buffington drew Trask toward him. I leaned along as well and neither of them made the slightest gesture to suggest I was not invited.

Buffington said, “Stockman’s throwing a weekend house party.”

“Your man?” Trask said.

Buffington said, “In the vicinity.”

Trask nodded. And then he made the tiniest intentional movement of his head, so tiny that I instantly doubted my perception, figured I was an example of how you can overtrain a secret service agent. The movement, I thought, was this very slight turn in my direction—since I’d drawn near, behind Trask’s right shoulder—as if it was a subtle gesture to Buffington, reminding him of my presence. “Is she ready?” he said.

What did all that have to do with me?

I sat back in my chair.

My eyes moved across the table and between the two steel-gray heads, who had sat back as well, now that they’d agreed to throw out Asquith and Kitchener and all the rest of them.

I looked into the darkness of the corridor.

And the darkness moved.

That was the first impression, lasting only a brief moment. The darkness shifted, swelled, and then points of light began to clarify into a face, hands, and a piano started playing the instrumental introduction to a song—and I recognized it, the intro to “Keep the Home Fires Burning”—and the face emerging from the shadows of the corridor, heading this way, became clear, and now I recognized it as well, even as I had a sense of movement to my left, Buffington no doubt standing up to address us all. He said, “Gentlemen, in the interests of preserving civilization as we wait out this latest barbarous attack, I give you the great Isabel Cobb.”

My mother emerged fully into the room, dressed in black, and she stopped, framed in the doorway, as the men at our table wrenched around, turned their chairs, applauded, and cried out “Hear! Hear!”

The introduction was over and Mother shot the piano player a brief glance as he fumbled a bit with the transition to the verse. I glanced with her, and it was the stout man Buffington had replaced at the table. This was a select and secretive group; Isabel Cobb’s accompanist was drawn from one of our own number. He wasn’t terrible at this, however, and he found his way into the verse and Mother looked back to us and began to sing.

I heard her voice, but for a few moments, as far as I knew, she could have been singing a soliloquy from
Hamlet
, as I grappled with my surprise at her presence here. And then she was inserting that phony ache into her voice that she was so good at. Phony mostly to my ear, of course; fans loved it. But, indeed, she drew even me in with it now as she sang:

“Let no tears add to their hardships

As the soldiers pass along,

And although your heart is breaking,

Make it sing this cheery song.”

The secret service pianist did all right with the transition to the chorus and Mama floated on in, more achy than ever. “Keep the home fires burning, while your hearts are yearning,” she sang and she began to work the room, gliding along the tables, singing to each stiff upper lip individually—“Though your lads are far away, they dream of home”—and bringing a tear to each eye and a stirring to each stirrable part—“There’s a silver lining, through the dark clouds shining”—and she gave me a little less eye contact than the others and a pat on the shoulder as she slid by. “Turn the dark cloud inside out, till the boys come home.”

I watched her as she moved on to Trask.

He lifted his face to her, and a son knows certain things for reasons he can’t put his finger on easily. Or the reasons seem minute and insubstantial. But Trask’s eyes and my mother’s held on each other for one pulse beat, one intake of breath, and I knew there was something between them. This particular son knowing certain things about this particular mother made me think in my usual, weary little way:
lovers.

Then he nodded, once, very faintly, with those blank eyes of his, and I felt my intuition shift. She was not sleeping with him. She was working for him.
Is she ready?
he’d said. Ready for Sir Albert Stockman’s weekend party.

She moved along, singing, “Overseas there came a pleading, help a nation in distress,” and Buffington extended his hand and she took it and she sang to him and I had the same first, fleeting hunch about him. She was working for Trask, but she was sleeping with Buffington. And then I felt like the punk kid I once was, standing outside a closed door in a theatrical boarding-house trying to will his mother to live her life in some other way. What way, I couldn’t imagine, just some other way.

But in fact I was thirty-one years old and she was fifty-six and we had long ago disentangled ourselves from our shared life. And rightly so. We wrote letters. An occasional telegram. But all of that was strictly private. As public as I had subsequently become and as she had always been, it was not really known—outside of a few of my journalist pals and the close-knit tribe of American theater people—that we were mother and son.

She let go of her host’s hand and I let go of the hunch and she moved off to the next table to urge everyone to keep the home fires burning while their hearts were yearning.

I thought of her lying to me in her dressing room. No. She hadn’t lied. It was no doubt true that she was not now working nor would she ever work again for a detective agency. But she didn’t say anything at all about working for the U.S. secret service. She’d convinced me about the Pinkertons by invoking her ego. Her ego would be thoroughly satisfied playing the role of spy for her country. Just the thing for a great actress who was furious with the theater for not overlooking her advancing age. As a spy she could still be a glamorous leading lady. And her performance had a special edge: her life could depend on it being convincing.

I turned around in my chair, shut out her voice, poked at a roasted potato.

My mother segued from the home fires into an upbeat “Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag,” and then she finished with an even more achy “There’s a Long, Long Trail.”

The music stopped, the gentlemen cheered, she left, and a rhubarb crumble arrived. In the midst of all this, Buffington rose and followed her up the circular stairway and Trask turned to me as the ramekins landed before us.

“Your mother is working for us,” he said.

“I surmised,” I said.

And though I felt the irony, given my recent bout of musty hunches, I asked the obvious question. “Is she going after Sir Albert?”

“Yes,” Trask said.

And then he added, “So are you.”

5

The next night Isabel Cobb ended her run in London as Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. She’d swept out of her basement cabaret on the night of the most recent Zeppelin attack on London and it wasn’t until Friday morning that I saw her again, when she stepped into a first-class compartment at Victoria Station for the train to Broadstairs in Kent and she sat down across from the American journalist and German apologist Joseph W. Hunter.

Trask had booked the compartment so that she and I would be alone. But she entered playing a stranger, nodding at me and then ignoring me as she settled in, arranging her handbag next to her just so, its corners squared to the edge of the upholstered bench seat. I watched this with a vaguely squirmy sense of recognition. I always did that very thing with the pages of a story as they came out of my typewriter.

She finished with her bag and then smoothed her overskirt, though it hardly needed smoothing. It was a stage gesture. She looked quite summery in a blueberry bolero jacket and straw boater with a matching ribbon and pleated bow.

She turned her face to me now, even as I was thinking how she looked pretty good, and she tightened her forehead as if I were a young man on the mash.

I refused to play along. “We have the compartment to ourselves, Mother,” I said, in a tone of
We both know this, so what are all the theatrics for?

She flared her hands in front of her. “Can’t we have a little fun, my darling? Improvisation? How long has it been since we rode a train together? We used to have so much fun.”

I shrugged and looked out of the window beside me. A conductor strode past blowing his all-aboard whistle.

“You were always a clever boy,” she said. “A talented boy.”

We rode enough trains together between theater towns to circle the earth and circle it again. For as long as I could think back, we would play roles together to pass the time. Over the years, I was everyone from a beggar boy running away from an orphanage to a dry goods commercial traveler who was Isabel Cobb’s biggest fan and overwhelmed to meet her. She once had hopes I’d follow her into the theater.

The train was moving now, and I turned back to Mother. She was watching out the window. Her face was blank. I knew the look. I’d seen it often, in stage wings just before she would make her first entrance. This blankness was all she would show of the actor’s inevitable terror of reinventing herself before a thousand strangers watching from the dark.