The Empire of Night: A Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thriller (32 page)

But maybe not.

She was, indeed, quite convincing. Maybe she forgave him this attitude. She was, after all, presently in love with him.

“Herr Barnowsky is a sad, driven man,” Isabel Cobb said.

Stockman took another drag on his cigarette, turned his face sharply away from us both, and blew the smoke toward the door, apparently releasing his jealousy, for his face swung back to Isabel and he put his hand over hers. “You work very hard for your art,” he said.

“Don’t I though,” she said. She was looking into his eyes for this line, but I decided she was talking to me, telling me not to worry, she wasn’t so smitten as to lose her secret way with him.

He patted her hand again and looked at me.

“This Albert Einstein was a touchy subject for our impassioned Doctor Haber,” I said.

Stockman nodded.

I deliberately slowed down.

I took a drag on my cigarette. I blew the smoke.

My glass arrived.

“May I?” Hans the bartender said.

“Sure,” I said, and Hans poured me a couple of fingers of rye.

Only when all this was done and the bartender had disappeared did I say, “You know anything about Einstein?”

“He’s a Zionist,” Stockman said. “I believe in the sincerity of Doctor Haber’s allegiance to Germany, as far as it is possible for that to go, but this other man is a dangerous man. Made even more acutely so by his apparent genius.”

“Albert was asking Herr Barnowsky about Herr Einstein,” my mother said.

Stockman turned his face sharply to her. “Are you sure this director isn’t a Zionist?”

“Of course he’s not,” she said. “He is a citizen of Shakespeare and Ibsen and Shaw.”

“This Einstein likes his Shakespeare as well, apparently,” Stockman said. “That doesn’t prevent him from despising the land that gave him birth.”

My mother patted his hand. “Victor Barnowsky is no Zionist, my darling.”

“I say you deserve better, is all,” said darling Albert.

She patted him some more. “I’ve dealt with this all my professional life.”

Stockman’s voice mellowed a little. “How difficult for you.”

He turned to me now. He was, of course, trying to make a case for
himself
. As her exclusive lover. Perhaps even as her husband. I was his foil. I was the jury. I was the impartial public in obvious, silent agreement with him. He said, “This is widely overlooked by lovers of the theater, the terrible sacrifice a great actress must endure for her art. That she must inevitably surround herself with actors and directors and other men of that world, unprincipled men, emotionally tumultuous and unreliable men, morally weak men.”

I could see her jaw clench at this, great actress though she was. Her hand stopped patting, but it stayed on his forearm.

Man oh man, was he ever trying to make a case. He even started to swerve back to Einstein.

“And these revered scientists. These outsiders.”

He paused dramatically.

She must have said something admiring about scientists along the way.

He said, “This Einstein has a wife and two children. They were with him when he came to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, and he drove them away. She fled to Zurich because he began an affair with his own cousin in Berlin. This cousin was no doubt the reason he returned to his despised Germany. Not his vaunted research.”

He paused to present us a moue of pained disapproval. Even Stockman could not miss the blanching of Mother’s face. He just didn’t have a clue what was behind it.

“I’m sorry to mention these scandalous things,” he said. “But there are many men of this sort in the world who can be very attractive to women. I just believe in a different way of living.”

As different as Stockman felt himself to be from the men of the theatrical world, he was, however, their kin. By something stronger than blood. By an instinct for self-performance. Little did he know. And little did he know that it was perhaps the deepest hook he had in my mother.

I could sense her gathering her actor’s strength now. She said, “This is why I’ve come so quickly and strongly to rely on you, my darling.”

He put his hand on hers. “I know,” he said.

She grew urgent. “Must you leave me next week?”

“We’ve spoken of this,” he said, lowering his voice a little. This was something he
didn’t
want to discuss in front of me.

Mother was playing her own, woman’s version of Albert’s earlier strategy. A man used the public setting to display his plumaged worthiness. The woman reopened a private argument with her man. I was foil. I was jury.

Of course, Mother was also doing her job. She was giving me information.

He’d told her he was going away.

This was, I assumed, the
Mit der Hand
trip.

“I know we’ve spoken,” she said. “But you have only reminded me now, with your characteristic eloquence—oh how I would miss that too, for even a few days, your lovely words—you have reminded me how bereft I will be.”

“You must rehearse,” he said.

“Opening night is still two weeks off. I can take a few days.”

“It’s strictly business.”

“I won’t interfere,” she said.

“I’m not sure how long I’ll be needed.”

“But at least I could come for a few days.”

“There are complications I cannot speak of.”

“I will happily stay out of your way, in any nearby hotel you wish. Just come to me at night.” She put her head on his shoulder.

He glanced my way, lifted his eyebrows to me.

I smiled a comradely smile.

He rolled his eyes.

Women.

He and I understood about that.

“I might be out until very very late,” he said.

“I will rest.”

“And your days will be empty as well.”

She lifted her head. She made a show of trying to think of a solution. She came up with one and brightened. “You have spoken so warmly of Mr. Hunter. Perhaps we can bring him. During the day he can finish our story for the American papers. And he and I might even find a chance to discuss my memoir.”

Stockman did not reply to this. His lover’s head returned to his shoulder.

He looked at me.

I leaned forward and poured two fingers of rye into his glass.

I offered it to him and he took it with his free hand, in exchange giving me a muted reprise of the comradely smile.

He drank it down, not in a quick shot but in a steady, uninterrupted draft.

I took the empty glass from him and put it on the table.

He gently extricated his right arm without letting her raise her head and he put it around her shoulders. She snuggled in. “We’ll discuss this later,” he said.

She lifted her face to him.

If I were not sitting across from them, they no doubt would have kissed at this juncture. As it was, they goo-goo-eyed each other long enough that I was forced to look away and concentrate on my Fatima for a drag and blow.

I hoped she hadn’t overplayed her hand. In spite of my encouraging Sam Thompson to help out, Albert would confront all this soberly in the morning.

They’d begun to murmur things to each other.

I thought, hopefully, about Albert Einstein’s love for Shakespeare. I figured there might be a way to approach him.

I checked out the loving couple, and Stockman was withdrawing his arm. He’d suddenly turned downright shoulder-rollingly, tie-straighteningly furtive. He seemed finally aware of the public setting. Maybe he wasn’t all that akin to theater people after all. Maybe it was just the power of my mother. The spell she put on any man.

He reached for the bottle and began to pour.

My mother sat herself up straight. She arranged the bodice of her dress. She looked at me.
Calm
she was, or she was simply portraying that.
Confidently in Control.

Okay. She’d pressed all this forward. I’d come a long way with Albert myself. I thought I, too, could push him a little. Carefully.

“Did the rest of your meeting go well at the Institute?” I asked, while reaching for my own whiskey glass.

Maybe he’d talk a little more readily about this because it offered a clear shift away from the wheedlings of his lover.

I grasped the glass and looked at him.

He lifted two more fingers of rye. I straightened and offered my glass for toasting.

He leaned to me and we touched our Sam Thompsons. “It did,” he said.

We sat back. I sipped. He took his whiskey in one quick shot.

“I hope Doctor Haber calmed down for the colonel,” I said.

There was a brief stopping in Stockman, a flicker of something. I was afraid this was about me crossing a line. I hoped it was still about Haber. Maybe Albert had to remember how I’d learned about there being another person in their meeting. A colonel, no less. Whatever it was, it seemed to pass.

“Max wouldn’t tolerate it,” Stockman said.

Max
. Nothing like a good bolt of whiskey sliding down your throat to get you to speak familiarly about your pals.

But the burn of the rye cooled and he corrected himself, made things properly proper. “Colonel Bauer,” he said.

“Is he someone I should meet?” I said.

“I can’t imagine why,” Stockman said. Quickly and firmly. I was afraid
suspiciously
.

I’d gotten careless.

“Sorry,” I said. “I’m just increasingly frustrated, wanting to help our cause and not knowing how.”

Stockman waved this off.

But he said nothing.

I hoped it was the apology that he’d brushed aside and not the explanation.

He was staring at the bottle.

“Can I pour for you?” my mother said.

Stockman looked at her and then at me and then at her.

“No,” he said. “Let’s retire.”

“All right,” she said.

I waited for some look, some gesture, some word from him that could reassure me he’d not become suspicious.

But he rose and she rose and she hooked her arm in his and they turned to go.

“Good night,” I said to them both.

“Good night,” my mother said.

Stockman said nothing.

39

I left the Adlon bar soon after the retiring couple, and I went out of the hotel and headed for the Baden. I worried every step of the way that I was starting to lose Stockman. But I’d needed to press things forward. I had to let this play itself out.

I rang Spandau from the lobby telephone kiosk. The mother answered instantly. “Müller.”

“Hello, Mrs. Müller,” I said. “It’s Mr. Jäger. May I speak to Erich?”

She said nothing, but the phone clunked and then Jeremy answered.

“Is your mother all right with me calling?” I asked.

“Don’t mind her,” he said “We’ve been talking about the Kaiser.”

“Is she disaffected?”

“Far from it.”

“How’s your brother doing? I meant to ask.”

“He’s presently alive and unwounded.”

We both fell silent a moment.

Then I said, “Max.”

“Max?”

“His first name. Colonel Max Bauer.”

“That will help,” he said.

“I have a thought to find the other gentleman.”

“Good.”

And we both reminded ourselves that a telephone was still a telephone, even in the lobby of a relatively safe hotel.

We bade each other good night.

I hung up and hesitated only a moment before going out of the Baden and back to the Adlon.

In the lobby, Wagner was nowhere to be seen. In my room, nothing seemed to have been reexamined.

My laundry was waiting on the foot of the bed, wrapped in brown paper and folded neatly therein and giving off the faint, fresh, broken-rock smell of Persil. I had a clean set of summer-cotton BVDs and I put them on to sleep.

I opened the door to the balcony but pulled the drapes closed.

I put my Mauser in the drawer of the night table, went to bed, and fell instantly asleep.

And I awoke abruptly in the dark to a knocking.

My bedroom door was open to the sitting room and the knock had come from in there, at the door to my suite.

It was soft.

And then it came again, a little less soft.

I rose.

I switched on my bedside lamp.

“Please,” a voice said outside. A heavy, feminine whisper.

A stage whisper.

I brisked across the floor and looked through the peep hole.