“I’m not sure how long I’ll be needed.”
“But at least I could come for a few days.”
“There are complications I cannot speak of.”
“I will happily stay out of your way, in any nearby hotel you wish. Just come to me at night.” She put her head on his shoulder.
He glanced my way, lifted his eyebrows to me.
I smiled a comradely smile.
He rolled his eyes.
Women.
He and I understood about that.
“I might be out until very very late,” he said.
“I will rest.”
“And your days will be empty as well.”
She lifted her head. She made a show of trying to think of a solution. She came up with one and brightened. “You have spoken so warmly of Mr. Hunter. Perhaps we can bring him. During the day he can finish our story for the American papers. And he and I might even find a chance to discuss my memoir.”
Stockman did not reply to this. His lover’s head returned to his shoulder.
He looked at me.
I leaned forward and poured two fingers of rye into his glass.
I offered it to him and he took it with his free hand, in exchange giving me a muted reprise of the comradely smile.
He drank it down, not in a quick shot but in a steady, uninterrupted draft.
I took the empty glass from him and put it on the table.
He gently extricated his right arm without letting her raise her head and he put it around her shoulders. She snuggled in. “We’ll discuss this later,” he said.
She lifted her face to him.
If I were not sitting across from them, they no doubt would have kissed at this juncture. As it was, they goo-goo-eyed each other long enough that I was forced to look away and concentrate on my Fatima for a drag and blow.
I hoped she hadn’t overplayed her hand. In spite of my encouraging Sam Thompson to help out, Albert would confront all this soberly in the morning.
They’d begun to murmur things to each other.
I thought, hopefully, about Albert Einstein’s love for Shakespeare. I figured there might be a way to approach him.
I checked out the loving couple, and Stockman was withdrawing his arm. He’d suddenly turned downright shoulder-rollingly, tie-straighteningly furtive. He seemed finally aware of the public setting. Maybe he wasn’t all that akin to theater people after all. Maybe it was just the power of my mother. The spell she put on any man.
He reached for the bottle and began to pour.
My mother sat herself up straight. She arranged the bodice of her dress. She looked at me. Calm she was, or she was simply portraying that. Confidently in Control.
Okay. She’d pressed all this forward. I’d come a long way with Albert myself. I thought I, too, could push him a little. Carefully.
“Did the rest of your meeting go well at the Institute?” I asked, while reaching for my own whiskey glass.
Maybe he’d talk a little more readily about this because it offered a clear shift away from the wheedlings of his lover.
I grasped the glass and looked at him.
He lifted two more fingers of rye. I straightened and offered my glass for toasting.
He leaned to me and we touched our Sam Thompsons. “It did,” he said.
We sat back. I sipped. He took his whiskey in one quick shot.
“I hope Doctor Haber calmed down for the colonel,” I said.
There was a brief stopping in Stockman, a flicker of something. I was afraid this was about me crossing a line. I hoped it was still about Haber. Maybe Albert had to remember how I’d learned about there being another person in their meeting. A colonel, no less. Whatever it was, it seemed to pass.
“Max wouldn’t tolerate it,” Stockman said.
Max. Nothing like a good bolt of whiskey sliding down your throat to get you to speak familiarly about your pals.
But the burn of the rye cooled and he corrected himself, made things properly proper. “Colonel Bauer,” he said.
“Is he someone I should meet?” I said.
“I can’t imagine why,” Stockman said. Quickly and firmly. I was afraid suspiciously.
I’d gotten careless.
“Sorry,” I said. “I’m just increasingly frustrated, wanting to help our cause and not knowing how.”
Stockman waved this off.
But he said nothing.
I hoped it was the apology that he’d brushed aside and not the explanation.
He was staring at the bottle.
“Can I pour for you?” my mother said.
Stockman looked at her and then at me and then at her.
“No,” he said. “Let’s retire.”
“All right,” she said.
I waited for some look, some gesture, some word from him that could reassure me he’d not become suspicious.
But he rose and she rose and she hooked her arm in his and they turned to go.
“Good night,” I said to them both.
“Good night,” my mother said.
Stockman said nothing.
39
I left the Adlon bar soon after the retiring couple, and I went out of the hotel and headed for the Baden. I worried every step of the way that I was starting to lose Stockman. But I’d needed to press things forward. I had to let this play itself out.
I rang Spandau from the lobby telephone kiosk. The mother answered instantly. “Müller.”
“Hello, Mrs. Müller,” I said. “It’s Mr. Jäger. May I speak to Erich?”
She said nothing, but the phone clunked and then Jeremy answered.
“Is your mother all right with me calling?” I asked.
“Don’t mind her,” he said “We’ve been talking about the Kaiser.”
“Is she disaffected?”
“Far from it.”
“How’s your brother doing? I meant to ask.”
“He’s presently alive and unwounded.”
We both fell silent a moment.
Then I said, “Max.”
“Max?”
“His first name. Colonel Max Bauer.”
“That will help,” he said.
“I have a thought to find the other gentleman.”
“Good.”
And we both reminded ourselves that a telephone was still a telephone, even in the lobby of a relatively safe hotel.
We bade each other good night.
I hung up and hesitated only a moment before going out of the Baden and back to the Adlon.
In the lobby, Wagner was nowhere to be seen. In my room, nothing seemed to have been reexamined.
My laundry was waiting on the foot of the bed, wrapped in brown paper and folded neatly therein and giving off the faint, fresh, broken-rock smell of Persil. I had a clean set of summer-cotton BVDs and I put them on to sleep.
I opened the door to the balcony but pulled the drapes closed.
I put my Mauser in the drawer of the night table, went to bed, and fell instantly asleep.
And I awoke abruptly in the dark to a knocking.
My bedroom door was open to the sitting room and the knock had come from in there, at the door to my suite.
It was soft.
And then it came again, a little less soft.
I rose.
I switched on my bedside lamp.
“Please,” a voice said outside. A heavy, feminine whisper.
A stage whisper.
I brisked across the floor and looked through the peep hole.
It was my mother.
I opened the door.
“Quickly,” I said.
She slipped in.
She was wearing her shirtwaist but not her scarf. All the button-to-hole matches were off by one.
“You shouldn’t be doing this,” I said.
“I didn’t know when I’d get to talk to you. No one saw me.”
“There’s a floor attendant.”
“He’s sleeping.”
“German agents on staff.”