The Empire of Night: A Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thriller (15 page)

“Quite so,” he said.

We were approaching torchlight and he and I exchanged a glance that lingered an extra beat, and another, as if we had an understanding.

Beneath my feet the grass abruptly became macadam as we entered the drive in front of the courtyard.

I turned my face to the house.

I’d done what I needed to do. I figured I was square with Sir Albert.

Jeremy didn’t know that.

The macadam turned to fieldstone and we took our first steps into the courtyard and my gaze was ahead but my attention was on my thoughts, and so it came into my sight simply as movement, quick movement from above, off to the right, a mass plummeting downward and then the heavy thud of it, the thud and cracking, and my mother let out a sharp bark of a scream and I looked now directly at what had fallen and I saw a body hunched into the ground as if it had been trying desperately to dig into the earth but had failed terribly and was resting now, the head twisted sharply away, however, its neck snapped. The body wore a gray suit and was hatless and its hair was spiky and yellow in the electric light. It was Martin, of course.

Martin, Stockman’s head tough guy, dead now, but by a hand that was other than mine. That diversion of suspicion was what Jeremy had just given me. Martin was a dead man as soon as he’d seen Jeremy’s face and heard my voice.

Stockman turned around at once to the rest of the weekend guests, who’d bunched up close behind. “Stay away,” he commanded and then he strode off toward the body.

Two Gray Suits were hustling from the house in his direction.

As Joseph W. Hunter it was better for me to hang back. I was just a guest.

And Isabel Cobb needed me now.

I stepped to her.

Her bundle of roses was lying at her feet.

I put my arm around her shoulders. She was trembling.

“What have we gotten into?” my mother whispered to me.

16

For a few moments we just stood like that. Neither Joe Hunter nor I knew what to say to Isabel Cobb.

She trembled on.

Finally I whispered, “It’s all just melodrama. You’ve played this a thousand times.”

“Don’t be a fool,” she said.

She was right.

“Okay,” I said. “It’s life. But we’re acting in it. We can do this.”

She nodded.

She lifted her face. But not to me.

I felt a shudder pass through her.

And her trembling stopped, as if the curtain had just risen and she was on.

I followed her gaze.

Stockman was heading this way. He was looking at me as if through rifle sights, me standing with my right shoulder tucked behind her left and my arm enveloping her, pulling her close. I was very lucky that I’d not actually taken her into my arms, even in the chaste way I would have, as any son might have when his mother was suddenly terrified. This tableau was bad enough, as far as Stockman was concerned, as far as his intended woman and this snoopy journalist were concerned.

Mother knew the look. She broke away from me at once, rushed forward to meet Stockman, whose body paused for her, whose arms opened for her, even as his severe gaze remained on me.

She threw herself into his arms with a flurry of words.

“Oh Albert, what’s happened to that poor man? Is he dead? And where did you go? It’s a good thing Mr. Hunter was nearby. He held me up when I was about to faint. I was swooning away.”

She looked back to me from Stockman’s chest. “I’m sorry to have frightened you like that, Mr. Hunter. Thank you.”

She was a pro. She was convincing.

She laid her head on his chest again. “Can you take me away from this now, Albert?”

His gaze upon me went more or less neutral just before he looked down at Mother. “Of course, my dear.”

For good measure, she wobbled suddenly at the knees, threatened to slide from his arms.

Stockman held her closer, held her up. “Be strong,” he said. “My people will take care of this. We can go in now.”

“Yes,” she said. “Please.” She pulled away from him just enough to put her arm in his and begin to turn him.

He gave me one more look. Grudging. I’d touched his woman, even if it was innocently. But he seemed ready to overlook this.

I nodded at him.

He did not return the nod, but he looked away as if I were not an issue.

That was good enough.

The two of them moved off toward the door into the house, Mother clinging to Stockman’s arm, her head against his shoulder.

A Gray Suit instantly filled the space where they had stood. “Please come with me,” he said to all of us weekend guests. “Stay together and follow me quickly.”

We complied, and he and another of his cohorts, who met us in the Great Hall, hustled us to the north end of the house and up the stairs, one of them leading us solitary denizens into the bachelor wing and the other taking the couples up to the next floor.

Our hallway was lit with electric bulbs on sconces. The Gray Suit made sure we all went into our rooms and closed the doors, telling us, as we disappeared, to be sure to turn the lock after us.

I did.

I waited in the dark.

I paced.

I waited, and then I softly undid the lock and eased the door open.

I looked out into the still-lit hallway.

“Please,” a voice said sternly. “We must insist. It’s for your own safety.”

I withdrew instantly.

I was stuck.

But it was just as well. My own instincts needed to be reined in now. I had nothing to do but wait until the morning and hope for a few private moments with my mother. And hope that Jeremy Miller had made good use of Martin’s gray suit and was rushing safely through the woods or along the shore by now.

I went to my casement window and undid the latch and pushed it open.

I listened. The action was likely to be on the far side of the house.

The clatter of feet. The sound of struggle. These things would never carry as far as this room. Not through a window looking north.

I lay down on the bed.

One thing would carry, however, and about ten minutes later I thought I heard this thing: the pop of small arms fire. Once, twice. Perhaps a pistol or pistols. The sound was very distant. Perhaps Jeremy Miller had just been shot dead. Or he’d just shot his last pursuer dead. Or everyone had been shooting at shadows. Or perhaps an automobile had simply backfired on the road to Ramsgate.

But now there was silence.

And there was nothing to do about it.

I got up. I took off my coat and my pistol and my shoes. I would make no further concession to my confinement.

I thought to turn on the light at the writing desk.

But I did not. The dark was better for now.

I lay back down.

Like Jeremy out there in the night, I started running from my pursuers. Thoughts. I was running in my head from thoughts. Small-caliber ones, which were harder to deal with. The big things to worry about, the fundamental things, seemed easier somehow. That was why I figured I was cut out for the work I’d done over the past six years of my life. At first, I’d dodged bullets and watched men die and I wrote about that. Lately, I’d risked myself in ways that made bullets from a bunker seem reassuringly predictable. I’d learned to kill in service for my country. To kill in unpredictable ways. Dealing with that was simple and it was deep. It was merely how this roughneck planet we all lived on was put together, and so the way to cope was already imprinted in our muscles, was coursing in our veins. But this whole thing about my mother and her men, which was whining after me in my head now: that was all just niggles. Of no consequence to me. Long ago I left off needing to give a damn about how she lived her life. Which was the way it should be for any son and mother. You have to leave, and she has to let go.

So I slept.

And I woke. I didn’t know how long had passed or what had awakened me.

I rose and crossed to the window.

Before me was barely differentiated darkness. The dark of a lawn. The deeper dark of the miniature canyon of the Dumpton gap. The dark of the woods beyond.

And a sound.

I closed my eyes and listened.

This sound may have been what drew me: the distant revving of an engine. I leaned out, looked, tried to catch its direction.

To the east, toward another darkness, was the fierce bratting of a runabout engine, moving away now, diminishing. Out there, where I knew the Strait of Dover to be, I could see a cluster of lights. A larger vessel upon the water. And someone rushing toward it.

17

Shortly after dawn I tried the hallway and it was empty. I went to the steps, descended into the screens passage, and emerged in the Great Hall. It too was empty. From the courtyard I heard a hammer pounding. Nails into wood.

A Gray Suit, framed in the courtyard doorway, began to turn at my step, and beyond him I caught sight of one of the Blueboys hammering the lid shut on a wooden box about the size of a hotel room writing desk. One more of the same size sat nearby, wrapped at both ends with steel bands. Half a dozen more, the size and shape of steamer trunks, were already done. A little apart were two more of these packing boxes standing upright, each about the size of a three-drawer filing cabinet.

The Gray Suit was the guy with the boxer’s nose. He eclipsed the courtyard, putting himself square before me and close enough to try to seem intimidating. I wasn’t intimidated, but I was still Joe Hunter the benign guest, so I kept my first impulse to myself.

“Please, sir,” he said, straining to be polite when to be so wasn’t the sort of order he’d been hired to execute. “Guests are to stop in their rooms or in the dining room until transportation.”

“Transportation?”

This guy was looking at me a little more closely now.

“Sorry, sir,” he said, working even harder at his politeness mandate. “Plans have changed. You’re Mr. Hunter, are you?”

“Yes I am.”

“I am to give you this,” he said, and he dipped into his inner coat pocket and withdrew an envelope. He handed it to me. “From Sir Albert,” he said.

The envelope had my name on it. That is to say, “Joseph Hunter.” But I knew the hand. It was my mother’s.

“How changed?” I said.

“Sir?”

“The plans,” I said.

“Breakfast is served in the breakfast room. The guests will then depart.”

“And Madam Cobb? I am in her party.”

“She has departed with Sir Albert.”

The boat in the night, I assumed.

“Departed?”

“Yes sir.”

“Where to?”

I’d reached the limit of Boxernose’s authority to speak. “Breakfast is served in the breakfast room,” he said.

“Thus the name,” I said.

His brow furrowed.

“Thanks,” I said, and I turned on my heel and beat it back across the Great Hall and up to my room.

I sat at the desk with the envelope and I opened it.

I unfolded a single sheet of writing paper and there was nothing of Sir Albert here, except, of course, the certainty that he had seen, openly or covertly, every word herein. She wrote:

Dear Mr. Hunter,

Sir Albert and I are very sorry to leave so abruptly. The accidental death of a member of the house staff has cast a pall over our weekend, and Sir Albert has decided to accompany me to Berlin. We would be happy to see you there if you can arrange passage, perhaps through your newspaper. I am anxious that the work we have done on your story will not be wasted and that my true intentions for being in Germany at this time can be accurately represented in the American press. Please wire your arrangements to me care of the Hotel Adlon.

Best regards,

Isabel Cobb

I folded the letter and replaced it in its envelope and slipped it into my inner coat pocket, doing all this almost fastidiously, aware of the small sounds of it—the creasing of the paper, the ruffle of the mohair. I was gathering myself to think clearly, calmly.

She was safe. For now, at least. She was not implicated. I was invited. Joe Hunter was still viable. For now. Or if the “for now” was as ominous as it might be, and if she wasn’t, in fact, safe, and if Joe wasn’t either, my actions were clear just the same. I’d go to Berlin.

18

The boys in gray made sure we went back to our rooms after breakfast and stayed there. And it wasn’t till very late morning that one of the boys in blue knocked on my room door and invited me downstairs, luggage to follow, for my trip to the train station in Broadstairs. I carried the Gladstone myself. It was comfortably weighty, though its only heavyweight secret was my Luger. I’d kept the Mauser in the small of my back. From this point on, that would be my standard practice.