“Lord Stockman,” I said.
“Mr. Hunter,” he said. “I am delighted to meet you.”
He lifted his chin just a little. I was wrong about his eyes. I stopped indulging my impulse to see him, in every detail, by the light of our suspicions. This wasn’t a feature story for the Sunday edition. That newswriter reflex was bad for my present line of work. His eyes weren’t feldgrau. They were grayer than that.
He said, “I get the newspapers from the United States. We are all very attentive, as you may know, to your country’s attitudes. I’ve read you with great interest.”
The locution he used was not uncommon. But he paused, as if to let that soak in. That he’d been reading me. Not just my stories. But I got the strong sense he meant more.
“I hope I didn’t cause you any offense,” I said.
He lowered his chin and gave me a careful look. “Why would you think that?”
“You are English. Perhaps the stories I write are too willing, from an Englishman’s point of view, to understand the German side of things.”
Stockman gave me a slow, nodding smile. He said, “Perhaps I am trying to understand your President’s reluctance to become more involved.”
I let my Mr. Hunter show his nerves at all this, looking briefly away from Stockman in a deferential shrug. “Just so,” I said. “That’s my concern on your behalf. If he no longer heard the voice of those Americans who favor Germany, he might be more willing to help you.”
I was back to Stockman’s eyes and he was focused intently on me, assessing me. He smiled. “Don’t worry about that. You are a welcome guest in my home.”
“You’re too kind,” I said.
“Besides, I understand you are doing a story on the estimable Isabel Cobb.”
“Indeed,” I said.
“You see? I don’t hold her appearance in Berlin against her,” Stockman said, and he initiated a gentle, socially reassuring laugh. The estimable Isabel Cobb and I joined in.
When the laugh faded into a comfortable silence between us, he said. “I remain interested in your views. We can speak later.”
“I look forward to it,” I said.
“You are invited for the weekend, of course.”
Without giving me even a moment’s chance to reply to this, Stockman did an about-face and quickstepped to Isabel. Without a look at me, she tucked her hand into the crook of his offered arm and the two maundered off toward the house. I followed.
7
This brief passage toward the castle door surprised me in the claw-scrabble of unease it started up in my chest. We entered the castle through a reception hall with twin suits of armor flanking the door, helmets closed, occupied by a couple more of his tough guys for all I knew. Stockman stopped Isabel and half turned to me and said, “Martin will show you the way.” His driver loomed up beside me and extended an arm toward the inner door and swept it to the right. I went where I was told, while my mother and her leading man swept out to the left.
I heard her voice and footfalls fading into stone-echoes behind me, and I realized this was what my unease was all about, my mother and me separating in this place. If Stockman and his boys were what we suspected they were, she could well be in over her head. Alone here, I could be too. I always figured I could handle anything. I wasn’t so sure about her.
But it was all very polite. Even Martin was polite, in a silent way. Nonchalant even. If he was a hired tough guy, I had no sense he was under orders to intimidate me or even to keep a special eye on me. He led me along a corridor hung with fox-hunt Aubussons, and ahead was a massive stone staircase, which we were approaching from its great, gray, triangular wedge of a side. As we reached it and began to turn, Martin flipped a forefinger toward an open doorway at the base of the steps. “Billiards,” he said. “You can play.”
His English — these four words were, I suddenly realized, the first I’d heard of it — was not British in accent, was oddly not accented at all but clipped and precise. I thought: a carefully trained German.
We’d made the turn now and the staircase was simply a wall face beside me, but my mind went up these steps. The castle was complex in its layout and I knew I had to simplify what I took in, what I memorized of the layout, or I’d get lost. This staircase seemed worth noting. I reckoned that it ascended within the five-storey parapeted tower.
Martin said, “The stairs lead into the private family wing of the house. I am sorry that guests are invited no farther than the billiards.”
His seeming to read my mind was vaguely unsettling, but his treating me like a regular, well-intentioned guest was vaguely reassuring. If I were an ill-intentioned guest his comment would only be an invitation to snoop. As, indeed, I was and it was.
We passed through the Great Hall, its abrupt three-storey lift to a vast hammer-beam roof giving it something of the same heady kick of a big-league church. But Martin was talking again and I focused on him. “That’s the library,” he said, motioning to a door in the east wall. “The billiards and the books. These are for you to enjoy until we collect you at about five. You may dress casually tonight, as the public will be here for festivities and we will be serving high tea alfresco.”
“Are there other guests for the weekend?” I asked.
“A dozen,” he said. “Many are here now. You’ll have competition.”
I assumed he meant at billiards.
At the far end of the Great Hall we entered the arched colonnade of a screens passage and turned left into a staircase. We climbed to the second-floor bachelor corridor of the castle, laid out over the kitchen and pantries.
When we reached my room Martin opened the door and stepped back for me, as if in deference. He even pulled his hat off, showing a spiky crop of wheat-chaff tan hair. He was consciously playing a role. As I passed him, I played my part in his little scene, giving him a nod of gratitude-to-a-servant, but catching and holding for a moment those eyes, which were as opaquely gray as the Strait of Dover.
The room had a narrow set of mullioned windows and was furnished with the simple straight lines of the Arts and Crafts movement: bedstead, wardrobe, hard leather-seated chair, small break-front writing desk.
I sat in the chair and I waited for the cringing man from the station. He and the bags were coming by a separate vehicle. The Rolls was not a touring model and didn’t have an elegant way of transporting a great deal of luggage. But I figured Stockman might have arranged that so as to do a quick check of the contents. Certainly enough time was passing.
At last the luggage man arrived, and I took my bags at the doorway and closed him out at once and I laid them — a leather valise and a Gladstone — on the bed. I opened the valise and lifted out books and a toilet case and a notepad. But for this weekend these were mostly just filler to cover the false bottom I was now prying out of the valise.
Stockman’s boys might have searched, but they didn’t find my Mauser pocket automatic, a rock-hard bantamweight of a pistol with a.32 caliber punch. I pulled it out of the false-bottomed depth of my valise. It was tucked inside a left-hander’s leather holster with the flap cut off, so I could wear it in the small of my back and draw it with my right hand.
I laid the holster on the bed, and I freshened up in cold water in my small bathroom and changed my suit from sack to brown mohair, with a fresh shirt and tie.
I slipped the Mauser and its holster onto my belt and centered it in place.