The Empire of Night: A Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thriller (14 page)

“I bet you were good,” I said.

“I once went sixteen rounds with Tommy Ryan.”

“And?”

“He was prepared to go seventeen.”

“Jeremy what?”

“Miller.”

“Did you fight in the States?”

“You bet,” he said. “For a couple of years. Philly and New York and points west.”

This made sense of a little bit of American that sometimes crept into his mix of accents and phrasing and lingo.

“Chicago?” I asked.

“Never made it there.”

I liked this guy Miller. He stirred the reporter in me. I wanted to sit him down and talk a while and do a story on an ex-boxer who gave one of the greatest middleweights of all time a run for his money and then turned into a British spy. And I’d have bet good money that his family name was once Müller.

But he and I had other work to do.

“What about our boy Martin here?” I said, nodding toward him.

“How compromised might you presently be with Stockman?” Jeremy said.

“Remains to be seen,” I said. “There’s a big crowd. He’s got his own agenda. If he didn’t go looking for me and if I wasn’t observed sneaking around, I could have innocently been out of his sight all this time.”

Jeremy nodded. He looked down at Martin. “He knows too much about both of us.” He stepped nearer to me, and his voice turned as serious as that right hand. “You need to slip back into the crowd now, and then make certain Stockman sees you. After the music ends, stay visible and be patient. I’ll divert any possible suspicion from you.”

He paused.

He was waiting for my assent. I wondered what his plan might be, particularly for himself after an effective diversion. I thought about trying to help.

He figured that out. “You defied me once, Mr. Cobb. I won’t say I was not grateful. But we have to be professional now.”

He gave me only the briefest moment of silence to respond before saying, “We have no time for this.”

“I understand,” I said. I did.

Jeremy tucked his pistol away and moved past me to Martin. He bent and grabbed the Hun by the coat and shirt and lifted the man half off the ground, twisted him around, and flung him down again as if he were a gunnysack of lettuce greens.

I stepped to the door and opened it.

“Mr. Cobb,” Jeremy said.

I turned.

“Kit,” I said.

“Kit,” he said. “I’m grateful.”

“As am I,” I said.

And I was into the stairwell and circling downward.

14

I made it all the way into the Great Hall without seeing anyone. I wouldn’t chance crossing the courtyard. I needed to give the appearance that I’d been on the grounds throughout Isabel Cobb’s concert. I would trust that Sir Albert had delegated any suspicions to Martin and the boys and was keeping his own attention on his actress and his acting.

I crossed to the library, which remained dark. I slipped in and went to the casement and opened it gently. I looked out. This eastern lawn seemed empty. Jeremy had somehow kept himself hidden here. But he’d had inside information.

I climbed out and pulled the window to.

I strolled now. Casually. I went to the stone wall at the cliff’s edge. I followed it north, and the only Gray Suits that gradually became visible were far away, guarding the north entryways to the house. A distant passerby was nothing they would automatically care about.

I followed the curve of the wall past the service wing, past the high-tea tent, and walked toward the music.

The marquee was lit inside by electrical light, the seats packed and the place ringed by standees. Mother had begun her encores. The orchestra was playing a song she could overact to her hammy heart’s content. “Some of These Days.” It was ridiculous, accompanied by strings and a salon-tempoed piano. Her acting talent was being challenged, no doubt, so as to hide her murderous feelings toward her accompanists.

I could see now, above the heads, the back of the pianist and his upright in front of him. Not Mother, who would be at the center of the stage.

But I began to hear her voice.

Not the words quite yet but her voice, floating out of the tent on a cloying cloud of strings and trying to keep its honky-tonk edge.

The torches were blazing still.

The standees were a welcome sight. The crowd was large and disorganized at the edges. Stockman surely was in the middle of all that. From his limited vantage point he might be willing to believe I’d been around all this time.

My mother’s voice clarified now, as she moved into the chorus. She sang, “Some of these days, you’ll miss me, honey.”

I hesitated in the dark, just outside the torchlight.

“Some of these days, you’ll feel so lonely.”

I looked along the tent line in both directions. No Gray Suits.

“You’re gonna miss my huggin’. You’re gonna miss my kissin’.”

I moved past the torches now and approached the backs of the standees who were even with the stage.

“You’re gonna miss me, honey, when I’m far away.”

I peeked between the heads and there, in a front row center folding chair, sat Stockman, his face lifted to Mama.

I didn’t even have to shift around to see her. I knew she was singing straight to him.

I backed off, beyond the torches, and I waited for the show to come to a close, not really listening to the music, my mother’s voice familiar in the way that a twenty-year-old memory that hadn’t come up for about nineteen years would be familiar. Jeremy came and went in my head. He was a pro. He was doing what he knew best to do in the way he wanted to do it. I didn’t have to think for him, didn’t have to save him. Stockman wanted to come into my head, wanted to rehearse my imminent encounter with him, but if I started scripting myself for Stockman, I’d end up
sounding
scripted, sounding like a liar. I needed to improvise. As if with Mama and me on a train. I stood and waited and now the crowd was applauding and some of the standees were starting to peel off.

I slipped forward, took a standing place at the edge of the tent but a few rows behind Stockman.

Mother was bowing.

I thought:
If they keep applauding, she’ll keep singing.

But Stockman stood up as he clapped. She saw him. She recognized her cue to ring down the curtain. I saw her hands flip down a little. She’d been on the verge of raising them to stop the applause and cue the orchestra and keep on going. But she knew this was Sir Albert’s show.

A Blue Serge had appeared at Stockman’s side and handed over a bundle of red roses. Stockman headed for the steps up to the platform.

Isabel Cobb rolled her head to project the rolling of her eyes over the applause and she flared her hands, aw-shucksing to beat the band.

Others in the audience were rising too, especially the swells in attendance, seasoned theatergoers accustomed to giving a standing ovation to a famous actress. A small handful of the other folks were starting to slip away, just on the fringes. An outer-edge chair opened up in front of me, still to the rear of where Stockman had been sitting. I stepped forward and slipped in before the chair, as if I’d been there all along.

I applauded.

Stockman presented the roses and the applause surged and Isabel Cobb did her flourishing bow to the crowd, the one with a touch of the forehead and then a rolling hand salute descending as she bent deep.

All this good feeling went on for a while. Then at last the applause waned and Stockman stepped forward, the expert emcee, and just as the clapping stopped he announced in a throbbing tenor projected effortlessly as far as the very back row, “Thank you again, one and all, for coming tonight. Before we part, I ask everyone to rise to your feet so that we might honor our king and our country.”

Stockman motioned to the orchestra—this had clearly been arranged beforehand—and they began to play “God Save the King.”

As everyone rose, Stockman strode to the front edge of the stage and began to sing loudly, guiding the lyrics to the slightly different, earliest version of the song, from 1745, having his ironic little joke on his constituents, sounding as if he were a rabid British patriot, as if he were restoring the original words to personally address King George V, as if he were singing to this present monarch leading the country in its war with Germany while in fact he was singing to George II, born in Hanover, the second German king of England.

“God save great George our king,” he sang and the crowd joined him as one vast voice.

This had not, however, been arranged beforehand with Mother.

“Long live our noble king.”

She gave Stockman one small, unveiled glance:
You bastard, whose spotlight do you think you’re stealing?

“God save the king.”

The crowd was joining in boisterously now, singing in defiance of the Huns and their gas bags.

“Send him victorious.”

The Huns’ secret gas bag smiled as he bellowed, even as his voice was absorbed into the crowd’s.

“Happy and glorious.”

Isabel Cobb was back in character, singing along, smiling all around.

“Long to reign over us.”

The orchestra was slowing the tempo. This was the big climax.

The voices filled and stretched at the tent like hydrogen in an airship: “God save the king.”

The music stopped, the voices stopped, the place light-switched into silence, and then, one beat later, flared into cheers.

Stockman lifted both his hands high above his head as if the adulation was all for him and then bloomed them outward like a chorus girl as he took a deep bow.

Perhaps no one else could read her as I could. Certainly no one was particularly aware of her at that moment. But Mama gave this guy a look that laid bare her true, undramatized desire: to put her foot in the middle of Sir Albert Stockman’s backside and launch him off the platform and into about the fourth row.

15

I kept standing where I was as the cheers faded and the applause smattered to a stop and everyone politely took their cue and shuffled away into the night, where they were no doubt watched and herded by suits both gray and blue. I kept standing and applauding, though more slowly now, softly, head angled smilingly to the side to portray the personal accolade of an insider.

Stockman had hastened back to my mother as soon as the crowd began to disperse and was no doubt praising her lavishly. He was no fool. And great actress that she was, she showed no trace of her recent—and surely still lingering—feelings.

She was the first to notice me, turning her face my way and showing, to the extent she dared, her get-me-the-hell-away-from-this-man pleasure at my presence. Her turn prompted Stockman to turn.

I lifted the mimed applause to him and nodded in deference. He gave me a noblesse oblige smile that warmed my heart for the moment. This did not strike me as the smile of a man who regarded me with newly formed suspicions.

I was wrong, however, to feel safe quite yet.

Something slithered its way out of him as the three of us walked from the marquee together, heading toward the courtyard and the house, the other weekend guests following loosely behind, the straggler constituents floating past us in the dark, bowing in quiet thanks and deference toward their host.

Stockman ignored them all.

He said to me, “I looked for you during our little interruption.”

“I’m a reporter,” I said. “I heard the engines before most everyone else and I knew what they were and I slipped into the night to see the airships and capture them in words.”

“Indeed,” he said.

“Don’t forget who you’re supposed to be writing about,” my mother said.

Stockman and I both looked to her.

He chuckled.

I said, “But of course.”

I still was not quite sure Stockman accepted my absence. A few minutes earlier I’d prepared for this. At the foot of the stage, Stockman had broken half a dozen steps away to speak to the Gray Suit with the boxer’s nose, who’d suddenly appeared. I wondered if they were speaking of Martin, and I worried, for a flash, about Jeremy, but I’d put that aside to have a quick word with my mother. I asked her for a sentence or two from his declamation to the crowd upon the arrival of the Zeppelins.

I played that card now. “I didn’t go so far away that I missed your eloquence,” I said, and I quoted him. “‘We will shake our fists at the sky and we will not run. Our courage will not be shaken.’”

Stockman looked at me. He smiled. “I’m happy you recorded that.”

“Naturally,” I said.

He was reassured about my attendance, but I recognized the tightrope he walked in public. It was possible he’d be a little apprehensive about his local attitude being portrayed abroad.

Quickly I added, “Not that I would quote you for my American readers. Your eloquence was to quell a panic, not to legitimize a foreign policy.”