“I didn’t realize this till recently,” I said. “She sings.”
“She’s singing tonight,” Stockman said.
“Sorry. I haven’t been working the story for very long.”
Stockman stirred in his seat. Sipped. Looked out to the late afternoon sky, which was brightening.
He did indeed want to know about her men, I thought.
I drained my Armagnac. I wished I had another. I’d slug it down quick. But for what we needed to accomplish, my mother and I, Stockman had to stay interested, and this opportunity would not last.
I lowered my voice. “Man to man?” I said.
“Yes,” he said, keeping his eyes out the bay window.
“From what I can gather she has no. . affiliations.”
He turned his eyes to me. Me, who had become his mother’s pimp. In service to their country.
His look was man to man. He was grateful for the news.
Then he glanced away, toward the library door, responding to a cue that I had missed.
I looked too.
Martin was standing there, changed from his chauffeur livery into a two-piece gray suit.
“I’m afraid it’s time to attend to my beloved constituents,” Stockman said.
He rose. I began to rise as well, but he stopped me with the flash of his right palm. “Enjoy the books,” he said.
I sat back down.
“Help yourself to the brandy,” he said, and he turned abruptly and strode across the library floor. He reached the door and paused, speaking a few words to Martin, whose eyes slid briefly to mine as he listened.
Either I’d passed all my tests, as I’d thought, and he was telling his tough guy I was okay, or I was dead wrong and he was issuing a warning. Or a nasty instruction.
But as Stockman pushed past, Martin lingered for one small moment and looked to me, seeing that I’d been watching, and he gave me a slight nod. I nodded back.
I figured I might be all right for the time being.
Then Martin vanished and I was alone in the library.
I stayed where I was. A thing had lingered in my head, from the words unspoken. The matter of the unprepared Brits. Night before last I’d sat in a reading chair next to Trask’s in Buffington’s bomb shelter and we’d gotten around to our own unpreparedness. The United States had a hundred thousand troops and about that number of National Guardsmen. The Germans alone had two million in uniform, well trained. And Wilson was still twisted around trying to find his backbone, even with a hundred and twenty-eight dead Americans on the Lusitania. He’d issued no call to arms, instead offering tardy, mealy-mouthed, diplomatic pipsqueaking.
After we’d fallen for a time into a brandy-begot, brooding silence, Trask had leaned to me and said, “He won’t do this on his own, you know.”
He meant Wilson. I nodded.
“These machines are getting better,” he said.
He meant the Zeppelins. I nodded.
“All of them.”
Airplanes too. The tanks. The artillery.
“The nasty stuff as well,” he said.
The gas.
“I know what you mean,” I said.
“We are important,” he said. “You and I, and Buffington’s boys too. They understand. That’s why we’re helping out, you and I.”
I thought I knew what he meant. But I leaned closer. “Explain that,” I said.
“Easy,” he said. “We are driving the. . what? The cart?”
“The cart,” I said.
“No,” he said. “Too humble. The train.”
“The train,” I said.
“No,” he said. “That’s got a track heading in a certain direction already. I wish that were so.”
“The bus?”
“Sure,” Trask said. “The bus. A sixty-horsepower bus and we know the route. You see?”
I did. “The secret service is driving,” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “The secret service. We’ll find out the real stuff about who’s our friends and who’s our enemies and we’ll make it so clear that even Woodrow Damn Wilson will have to do what’s right.”
I sat back in my chair. My glass was empty. I understood.
I rose now from the reading chair in the library of Stockman House and moved toward the drink table. But when I arrived, I put the empty glass next to the bottle of Armagnac. I looked to the library door. It was empty. I was alone. I put my hand on the latch of the casement and I turned it. But I left the window closed. My mother was singing tonight. Everyone would be watching, including her would-be lover. I now had a quiet way back into the house.
8
The salon orchestra began to play. “Songe d’Automne,” a sad little waltz.
Did Stockman arrange this song deliberately, having his covert joke on us all?
Surely not. Only those of us in first class knew what had been on the musical program in the grand dining room on the Lusitania’s last voyage. I’d heard the song myself. I’d heard it again in Istanbul. This time I froze at the library window. It was a popular tune for these little strings-and-piano salon orchestras. But the song had found me twice since the torpedo, and that felt a little excessive, as if it were a Siren singing from the bottom of the North Atlantic, wanting to take another crack at me.
I stepped away from the window.
The Stockman House event was starting. I needed to be visible. I hoped to catch Isabel Cobb for some reportage. And perhaps some private words in a cloaking crowd of constituents.
I crossed the library and entered the Great Hall. The Brits by the fireplace had vanished. At the far end I passed through an arched doorway beneath a music gallery and into the courtyard entrance hall. The yard itself lay before me, shadowed from the reemergent sunlight, and I recognized Martin, even from the rear, even wearing a gray trilby. He was standing just outside. I’d get a better reading on my status shortly.
I straightened in a reflex of stage nerves. I wanted to feel the reassurance of the Mauser lying solidly against the small of my back. It was there. I certainly did not want to use it tonight.
I stepped through the door.
Beyond Martin was another tough guy, watching the far end of the courtyard. He was also in a gray suit and trilby. A serge suit just like Martin’s. They were in uniform, these two. Stockman’s little army. Martin heard me, turned to me.
He nodded again.
I figured a guy like Martin wouldn’t make the show of another nod to a guy he was supposed to be keeping a suspicious eye on. He’d be playing it close.
“It’s clearing up,” I said.
Martin grunted. But it was a grunt of agreement.
I moved on by him and across the fieldstone courtyard and onto the verge of the castle’s wide, western green. It held three of the big, blue-and-white, open-sided canvas tents that the Brits called marquees. The nearest was off to the right, next to the service wing of the castle, and it bustled with bodies setting up the high-tea food service for the public. The marquee directly ahead of me, due west, about a hundred yards away, was the source of the waltz, the salon musicians dimly visible at the far end, on an elevated platform. To the left was the third tent, set with folding chairs, and flowing past it was the vanguard of the public, now unleashed upon the grounds, some peeling off to sit, some moving on toward the music, others veering away to prime places on the grass and beginning to spread blankets.
I was glad for the hubbub. Martin and all the other Gray Suits would be the watchers tonight, stationed out here, keeping an eye on the unsorted public wandering the grounds. They’d have their hands full. Stockman would be working his constituents, with Isabel Cobb on his arm. I needed to be patient. And careful. But I figured I’d have a chance to look around inside. For only a limited amount of time, however. I needed to think this out. To make a plan.