I walked to the Boar’s Head and went in the front door and straight to an empty table in a far corner, sitting with my back to the wall. Not that I wanted to entertain the admiring glances of the half-drunks in the room. Jeremy would surely look in here for me when he returned from Kalk and I wanted to make sure he saw me. I avoided eye contact with the men in the bar and kept my left hand on the tabletop for a time, simply flicking it upward, from my still-planted wrist, to show my palm when anyone started to approach. A subtle gesture, really, given the context and the warm intentions of the inebriates. But I needed to do it only twice, and both times it worked instantly. The whole roomful, being German and quick to follow orders from on high, shortly understood and kept away. For this, I felt a warm feeling for these guys. An admiration even.
So I kept my stein awash in a nice black Köstritzer for an hour or more — the time sliding away after the boys in the bar learned to keep their distance — and then Jeremy was before me. He sat. Our innkeeper appeared almost instantly. Jeremy simply nodded toward my drink and she went away and shortly returned with the same for him.
We touched steins. He drafted long, and I drank not at all now but returned the stein to the table when he put his down.
“They met him at the gates of Bayer,” he said. “Near midnight, but men in suits. They all went in. He drove out an hour later. Big event. Big, special, secret event.”
He took another drink.
“Then to the air base,” he said. “Then to the hotel. The drivers and the truck went away. Probably back to Berlin.”
We sat in silence for a time.
Jeremy finally asked, “Did you speak to our actress?”
“Yes,” I said.
I knew there to be only a few swallows of my Köstritzer left, and I finished them.
After that, I stayed silent long enough for him to prompt me.
“Anything?” he asked.
“Perhaps his target is Theatreland.”
Jeremy humphed a that-makes-sense humph.
“I don’t think we can count on her from this point forward,” I said.
Jeremy fixed his eyes on mine and twitched his head a little to the side.
He wanted me to explain. I thought to say, She’s sweet on him.
But that would have only led to more difficult explanations. Beginning with: Don’t worry. I cannot imagine her working against us.
Which, I now realized, I couldn’t entirely vouch for.
Instead I said, “I can’t see her in any plan we might make from here on.”
Jeremy shook his head faintly no, disputing my assessment. “Your man and mine in London think highly of her.”
Hell. It even occurred to me to say, She’s my goddamn mother. I should know what we can and can not count on from her.
But I said, “I’ve got a bad feeling about her.”
“She seemed a tough bird.”
“She’s too much an amateur. Trust me on this.”
Jeremy flipped his head a little. “Have it your way,” he said.
Another of my mother’s theatrical triumphs. Impressing tough guy Erich Müller.
I would have it my way.
“Thanks,” I said.
And so we drank a bit more together, Jeremy and I, almost entirely in silence, and then we went up the back stairs to our rooms and we slept.
The next morning we sat at the same table and the innkeeper served us eggs and Wurst and black bread and her boy served us coffee. As we ate, Jeremy and I spoke of how short the hours had become. If the weather was right, this would likely be the night.
He said, “I’ll spend the morning in my anarchist’s workshop.”
But before we could get to the matter of my next move, a figure appeared in the door, at first in dark silhouette backlit by the morning light on the threshold of the dim bar.
A man in uniform.
He hesitated there, squared around to us, and then he approached.
Two pips on each shoulder. A captain.
He arrived before our table, straightened smartly to attention, and saluted us.
Jeremy’s hands happened to be free and he returned the salute, though casually.
I was lifting my coffee cup with my right hand. The cup had been rising when he arrived, and I continued on to take a sip.
The captain patiently held his salute.
I lowered the cup and placed it on its saucer.
I saluted.
He snapped off a finish to his.
“Colonel,” he said, bowing his head to me. “Major.” A bow to Jeremy. Then back to me: “I am sorry to have intruded on your breakfast.”
“Not at all, Captain,” I said. “Would you like to sit?”
“Thank you, sir, but I am simply to give you a message and wait upon you.”
I lifted my chin a little to encourage him to proceed.
He said, “My commanding officer, Colonel Franz von Ziegler, commandant of the airship base, has taken note of your arrival, and he sends his warmest regards. He offers his personal assistance in any way that might be useful to you.”
“Thank you, Captain,” I said. “Perhaps I can visit with the colonel on the base at his earliest convenience.”
“Of course, sir. If you would like to do so this morning, he has instructed me either to wait for you or to return for you.”
“His schedule?” I asked.
“Is flexible at any hour till noon.”
“Return in an hour,” I said.
“I will wait outside with the colonel’s automobile.”
The captain straightened and clicked his heels and saluted once more.
I returned it. He did a sharp about-face, and he strode across the barroom and out the door.
Jeremy and I watched him go. Then we looked at each other.
“As we’d hoped,” Jeremy said.
“The commandant’s eager,” I said.
“He expects to fear you.”
49
The captain was leaning against the commandant’s camouflaged Horch phaeton when I emerged from the inn with my Iron Cross on my chest, my dispatch case over my shoulder, and my Luger on my hip. He snapped to attention at my approach.
He made a move to open the front passenger door. I recalled his commandant sitting in that position when we passed yesterday on the main street. But I was an arrogant son of a bitch named Klaus von Wolfinger, a secret service colonel from the Foreign Office in Berlin, so I narrowed my eyes at him. He instantly recognized his mistake. He slammed the passenger door shut and opened the rear door in the tonneau. He would be made to act the proper chauffeur for me.
“Sorry, sir,” he said.
I gave him a minute nod and climbed in.
The door clicked gently shut behind me.
We drove in silence down Wald-Strasse, across the railroad tracks, and out into the barley fields on the road to Uckendorf. Less than a mile later we turned onto a two-lane macadam leading into the air base, a thousand acres of flat, cleared, fallow farmland stripped empty for airship landing and maneuvering, but with a cluster of structures a half mile ahead, the centerpiece being a Zeppelin hangar, growing larger by the moment, clearly outsized, massive. Measureable now: longer than the greatest Atlantic steamship and twenty storeys high.
We drew near. End on, the hangar was an octagon cut off at the knees and with a slight pitch to its upper edge, the squared-off frontal outline of an airship. The doors were shut. Along each flank sat wide, low, corrugated steel buildings. Storehouses and barracks. A telegraph station. And an administrative building, where we now parked.
As I stepped from the automobile and into the shadow of the hangar, its vastness seized my chest and lifted me. Like I once felt walking State Street in my Chicago, passing beneath the Heyworth Building and the Mandel Brothers Building, Marshal Field and the Masonic Temple.