And as I watched, the darkness to the west cracked open from ground to clouds with a white searchlight and then with another, the two beams stiffly scanning the ceiling of clouds. I took in a quick breath. These Zeppelins were as vast as ocean liners, piston droning a mile overhead, slowing down almost to a float to aim their bombs, giving off a strange kind of elegance in their dangerousness. They were unlike anything you knew, no matter how much tough stuff you’d seen. They could set off a quick reflex of fear you didn’t quite know how to suppress.
I watched the two restless pillars of light searching, searching, and then one abruptly vanished and, moments later, the other. The darkness resumed unmitigated. It had been a false alarm.
In this part of the city the dark was not silent. Though I was high up and facing away to the north, I could hear the muffled bustling at the Covent Garden Market across from the front of the hotel. The market carts and wagons were rumbling in and unloading cabbages and cauliflowers, turnips and tomatoes, broad beans and brussels sprouts to await the greengrocers of London before dawn.
I closed the drape.
I’d been here too long.
I knew too much about this neighborhood.
I was too much like a Londoner, waiting for bombs from the night sky with nothing to do in response but keep the lights off and duck.
I went to the armoire and opened the doors and I felt my way into the bottom of my Gladstone bag. I put my hand to the Luger there, which I’d acquired on a difficult night in Istanbul. I drew it out.
I faced into the darkness of the room and held the pistol as if to fire, holding the grip with the crotch of my thumb pressed into the curve beneath the hammer, the trigger snug in the tip-joint of my forefinger, my hand part of the Luger now, an exact prolongation of its axis. Calming.
And unsettling. I’d been calmed through the other wars by typewriter keys. What had I come to? But this reservation was of the mind. My body, my beating heart were calmed by holding this pistol.
I let the thought go.
I put the Luger back into the bag and I moved to the bed and lay down and slept.
And a knock at the door awoke me. I did not know what time it was. I didn’t even know if the sun had risen, the blackout lingering in the be-draped room.
I rose. I moved to the door. There was no peephole in this aging hotel. I turned my ear to the place where a peephole should be.
“Yes?” I said.
“Mr. Cobb?”
I recognized the voice. A bellhop as old as the Tavistock.
I slid the chain lock off its metal groove and opened the door.
“Good morning, Mr. Cobb.”
“Good morning, George,” I said.
George lifted a long, paper-wrapped parcel with the hook of a clothes hanger protruding from the top. “From a gentleman,” he said.
With the door closed and with the blackout drape opened to reveal the light of an advanced morning and with the parcel laid flat on the bed, I tore away the paper and found a tuxedo.
The note pinned to the paper gave an address in Knightsbridge and the present date and a time. No name.
I took in a quick breath, aware how similar the reflex seemed to the anticipation of the Zepps a few hours ago. But with a different feeling altogether. The last time that I’d been sent off on a serious assignment, it began with a tuxedo. My waiting, I figured, was over.
4
That night, after the late-coming summer dark, gussied up and still fiddling with my white bow tie in the back of one of the ubiquitous French-made London taxis, I thought about a guy named James Metcalf, my contact from the embassy in May who dispatched me a tux and took me to dinner at the Carlton Hotel to give me a train ticket to Turkey and a license to kill. I expected him to be waiting for me in Knightsbridge.
The taxi drove to the end of Basil Street, just south of Hyde Park, where Basil Mansions stretched a full block long, a continuous row of posh, red-brick, Queen Anne revival mansion flats with half-octagonal, Portland-stone bay windows. The mansions flatironed at the angled intersection of Pavilion Road, and the northernmost door I’d been brought to led into a massive wedge of a very fancy multistoried flat, four floors from basement on up, joined by a circular staircase.
A manservant in tails answered the door and he bowed to me and he said, with lugubrious upper-class overprecision, “Good evening, sir. May I announce you?” Which was just his way of saying, Who the hell are you?
I gave him my name. The Cobb one.
“Of course, Mr. Cobb,” he said. He had the acceptable list in his head.
“This way, sir,” he said, and he led me across the marble foyer and up one circular flight to the second floor, the central feature of which was a large, oak-paneled drawing room. The furniture was all done in the heavy, dark Jacobean style. Oak wainscot chairs mostly hugged the walls; overstuffed, out-of-period wingbacks and a matching couch sat before a walk-in fireplace; and a couple of major, fat-legged trestle tables lined up in the center of the room, one with a side of beef and a guy in chef’s whites, the other with drinks and a bartender. But among all this was plenty of stand-around room.
There were a dozen of us, or a few more. All men, all done up in evening wear, arranged in little broods of two or three just out of earshot of each other. I smelled government.
The butler stopped and so did I, just behind his right shoulder. “Lord Buffington will be here momentarily, sir,” he said.
Indeed, from near the beef, a large, fleshy man who seemed no less large and fleshy for his perfectly bespoke evening clothes, a man who once might well have been the primary bully among Charterhouse upperclassmen, broke away from his group and moved toward me.
“Mister Christopher Cobb, your lordship,” the manservant said, stepping out of the way.
“Cobb,” the man said, presenting a large hand and a firm grip that I was lucky to get good enough hold on to return effectively. “I’m Gabriel Buffington.”
“Lord Buffington.”
He’d given me his casual name, but he nodded to acknowledge that I’d done the right thing in returning his title to him.
And now a man emerged from behind Gabe Buffington. A man I recognized. But it wasn’t James Metcalf. It was my other James, the guy who came to Chicago and persuaded my publisher to let him hire me away for the government while remaining ostensibly at work for the Post-Express. James Polk Trask. Woodrow Wilson’s right-hand secret service man.
Trask appeared around Buffington like a half-back running the ball behind Gabe the Grappler’s block.
I sidestepped to take him on. “Trask,” I said.
“Cobb,” he said.
We shook hands.
“Lord Buffington is our host,” Trask said at once, turning his face around to look at the Brit.
Buffington nodded two little smiles, one for each of us.
“Thanks,” I said.
Buffington said, “The windows are secured, the food and the drink are plentiful, we have a splendid space belowground. Let the wretched Huns do their worst.” Having made this declaration, the lord nodded once more, firmly, for both of us, and he moved off.
Trask watched Buffington. “He’s one of the good ones.” He turned those blackout-dark, empty-seeming eyes back to me. He waited, as if it was obvious that I was supposed to say something. Since he’d come to recruit me, I’d seen those eyes in other people in his business. Our business. I figured he expected me to acquire the knack of putting on these show-nothing eyes, just as I’d acquired the knack for planting an enemy in the ground. A couple of moments of silence had already passed between us since he’d declared Buffington a good one.