I picked up my cup of coffee and drank from it. Thick and bitter and no longer hot. It was clear to me that Jeremy had to sit with Albert till my part with the Zeppelin was done.
That decided, I ate my lunch.
And soon thereafter Jeremy returned.
He presented my bag to me with both hands.
I took it into my lap and opened the weather flap.
Wedged inside was a dark blue tin that once held Stollwerck Chocolade. It nearly filled the dispatch case.
Jeremy sat in the chair Dettmer had occupied, nearer to me, and he drew it nearer still.
He said, in almost a whisper, “You’re free, of course, to admire my handiwork in private, but I’d strongly recommend you let it be. I’ve packed it all tightly in cotton wool.”
In answer I closed the flap and set the case gently on the floor.
Perhaps it wasn’t answer enough. He added, “The connection from the clock to the device is delicate.”
“I understand,” I said.
“I wish we didn’t have to trust it,” he said.
“We have no choice,” I said.
We let that be for a moment.
He remained near; we could still talk low; the bar was empty. I said, “We need to speak of what’s next.”
“Stockman,” he said.
“Stockman.”
Jeremy said at once, “It would be difficult to kill him this afternoon.”
“I entirely agree,” I said.
“You have a thought?”
“I do. As soon as the bell rings on the London raid, we go to the hotel, take the room, and you hold Stockman at gunpoint till I return.”
He’d been listening to all this with his ear turned my way, his eyes averted. Now he looked at me. There was a grim fixedness about him.
I figured I knew why. “The Stollwerck Chocolade part is a one-man job anyway,” I said.
He nodded. The grimness loosened. Then he had a sudden thought. He said, “You’re putting the actress in the center of things.”
That was true.
I said, “Can you think of another way?”
He tried for a moment, though I was sure he’d already been working at the Stockman solution for a while. “I can’t,” he said. “But I’m not the one who has problems with her.”
“She’ll know enough just to sit and look terrified,” I said. “She’ll be fine at that. She can act.”
Did I believe myself? I had no choice.
Jeremy rose. He said, “Bring your lock tools.”
He was right, of course. But a very dark shadow passed through my head. I would have to slip unbidden and unwanted into a hotel room that held my mother and one of her men.
Jeremy went away to sleep, and I ordered a beer.
Merely one long beer.
Dettmer’s limit.
When I lifted it, I paused as if to touch steins with the major.
54
Over the next few hours I looked at my watch a dozen times.
My twenty-one-jewel, railroad-grade Waltham.
I had time to admire the watch.
The minutes went slowly.
At last it was three o’clock but no call came and then five more minutes went by without a call and then at last, at ten minutes past three, I heard the ring of a telephone from the direction of the kitchen.
I stood up.
I waited.
The innkeeper appeared at the doorway.
As soon as we made eye contact, she turned and disappeared.
I put the strap of the dispatch case with the ticking bomb over my head and onto my shoulder and cupped my hand beneath the case and pressed it against my hip. And I followed.
She was standing in the doorway to a small office immediately before the entrance to the kitchen. She stepped aside.
I went in and took up the telephone and put the receiver to my ear. I said, “Wolfinger.”
“Colonel.” It was Ziegler. “We have good weather.”
“Thank you,” I said. “Allow me to deliver the news to the English gentleman.”
“As you wish, sir.”
We rang off.
And I stood before Jeremy’s door and I knocked and the door opened only moments later.
He was putting on his peaked cap.
We went out of the Boar’s Head and into the Torpedo and we drove to the Hotel Alten-Forst.
We parked the car and I left the bomb on the floor of the tonneau and we strode through the lobby of the hotel and into the elevator and we arrived at the second floor.
And things slowed down.
The flower-wrought-iron door clanged open. The elevator boy spoke some chirpy words that I did not hear. Jeremy and I stepped onto the long Turkish runner carpet. We turned toward Room 200.
We moved off. One long stride and another, and then together we knew to slow down, to walk softly, one short soft step and then another, and I would not let myself remember anything, creeping toward my mother’s hotel door. Not remember, not anticipate. I focused on the details at hand. Had I told Jeremy along the way that I’d drive the Torpedo to the air base? Or had I only intended to tell him, running the words in my mind as I approached his room at the inn but forgetting to say them? No. I said them as we got into the Torpedo in the side yard of the Boar’s Head. I’d said that I’d take the car.
My mind thrashed on to find some other preoccupation. But now we slowed even more in our walk to Room 200. We trod more quietly still. And the door before us loomed large, squeezing everything else out of my head.
And we stood before it.
Jeremy gently drew his Luger. I gently drew my lock-picking tools.
We looked at each other. We were both ready.
One of us needed to listen at the door.
Not me.
I nodded for him to do it.
Jeremy turned his head and brought his ear near to the door. His face was angled toward me.
He listened.
Then he smiled a small, wry smile.
And so it took all the will I could muster to open my leather pouch of tools and work the pick and the torque wrench gently into the lock. I manipulated the pins one at a time, choosing silence over maximum speed, though I was plenty fast, happy to focus unthinkingly on this task of the fingertips.
But the distraction of professional concentration vanished with the click of the lock and my withdrawal of the tools and my reflexive step back from the door, my body ready to run away. Jeremy pushed in front of me and wrenched the knob and threw the door open and rushed in.
We dared not fail at this. I had no choice. I followed him, not pausing to put the lock tools away but dropping them on the floor, drawing my Luger. He’d turned sharply to the left and was lunging through the bedroom door and my mother screamed — in her authentic, unperformed voice — and though my legs were leaden and my chest was clamping shut I also pressed through the doorway as well, even as Jeremy, inside, cried “Halt!” and then again “Stop!”
I took my place beside him and let myself see.
The bed was strewn with rose petals.
Whose idea was that?
Stockman had halted. He was standing beside the bed and was squaring around, his hands rising, showing us his palms. Showing us more, perhaps, if I’d looked closely, which I did not, but at least he was not naked. He was wearing his union suit. His body did, however, register on me as athletic in the tight throat-to-ankle cling of his underwear.
And I had no choice now.
I turned my face to my mother.
I released a breath I had not known I was holding. Nothing utterly private was visible on her either, though barely so — she wore a peach silk and lace chemise and matching corset with black stockings gartered at its hem — did we interrupt them just before or just after? — and in spite of her scream, she was now arranged in an alertly sitting, arm-braced, chest-forward pose worthy of a cigarette card. Her eyes, however, were wide in Shock and Terror, wide enough to play to the back row of the Duke of York’s.