I gave the lieutenant time to distance himself from me along the walkway.
I switched the flashlight on, and I headed forward. My destination was the mushroom garden of fuel tanks feeding the engine at the rear of the command gondola.
But moving through the dark I could not stop thinking about these good Germans all around me.
And I thought of my own good German. Jeremy Miller. No. Erich Müller. Müller was the German. I was lucky to have him on my side.
My side. But I was American. And I was killing the men on this airship in defense of England. For Jeremy. Who was not a German, in reality. Jeremy the Englishman, he said. Jeremy the Brit.
I heard his own words: There are no pro-Brits in Germany. The Germans in this country who were his allies, and therefore my allies, those Germans might wish to defeat the Kaiser and his generals and their way of governing; they might wish for a better Germany, a democratic Germany, a bona fide republic. But they were not pro-Brit.
And there was Jeremy’s mother. His own mother. She loved her Kaiser, who took them to war against the Brits. The Kaiser who hailed the sinking of their great passenger ship in the North Atlantic. Who justified a thousand dead civilian Brits. She was certainly not pro-Brit. Not like her son.
And I saw that little echo of his boxer’s move in my mind. The head feint.
What was the punch his old reflex made him dodge? A question from the innkeeper. Did he find the telegram she’d slipped under his door.
Sure, he said. And to me: These were the groups we worked with inside Germany. The Republikaner. We were obligated to stay in touch with them.
I remembered his back turning away with the Republikan at the garage where we fueled up the Torpedo. Their intense conversation. Backs turned.
We were obligated to them?
Having to provide a little easily censored information to a tractable collaborator would elicit a shrug. Not a feint. It was the question itself, spoken in my presence, that elicited the feint.
And he’d slipped one other punch.
Did they know the special nature of Albert’s bomb? I’d asked.
And he did his little head feint to me. Not at all, he’d said.
I stopped now.
I switched off my flashlight.
I stood in the dark.
He’d gone out of his way to make sure I didn’t open the bomb.
He gave me good reasons.
But he said it and he knew I understood those good reasons and yet he said it again by stressing its delicacy, and again, by regretting our need to trust the device at all.
The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
I knelt down on the walkway.
I would be careful. Just in case I was presently being a fool, I would handle my box of chocolates carefully and look carefully. But I would look.
I could not hold the light and do what I had to do, at least for the first part. I needed both hands.
I remained in the dark.
I pressed the lieutenant’s flashlight into my tunic pocket next to my own.
I pulled the strap over my head and set the dispatch case easily, easily down before me. I opened the weather flap. I put my hands inside and pulled at the tin box. It did not yield.
I turned the case sideways and held it gently between my knees.
I squeezed the case just a little and pulled at the tin and it rose slightly and I squeezed a little harder and pulled and again and again, and doing this inch by inch I finally was holding the bomb invisibly in the dark before me.
I rotated it so that it was level.
I grasped it tightly with my right hand.
With my left hand I moved the dispatch case from between my knees and placed it to the side.
I dipped into my tunic pocket and withdrew one of the flashlights. My own, I thought.
I switched it on and held its beam on the tin box. Stollwerck Chocolade.
I used the light to guide the box to the planking of the walkway before me.
I could work with one hand now.
I put my thumb in the small lip at the center of the lid. I lifted. The lid rose. It was hinged on the opposite side and I opened it all the way back and let it go.
The white beam from the tungsten bulb showed a faint yellow tinge upon the white of the cotton wool.
He had indeed packed it tightly. I had to be very careful now. If he was, in fact, the Jeremy Miller I’d come to rely on, I had to take heed of his warning. I did not want to disturb the bomb.
I needed two hands again.
The hinges were holding the top of the tin box parallel with the floor. I laid my flashlight there, its beam shining back toward me.
I hesitated now.
And listened.
I could hear a clear ticking from within the box.
All right.
I leaned forward, turned my head to listen at the surface.
The ticking was coming from the left side.
I sat back up.
I looked at the dense surface of purified raw cotton. I tried to visualize the arrangement within. The stick of dynamite would be nearly as long as the longest dimension of the box. The clock was small. A travel clock. I figured the dynamite was laid in close to one of the long sides.
The safest way not to disturb the connection from explosive to clock was not to pull the packed fibers apart. I’d go in at the very edge and try to lift up the covering layer as a unit.
The stick of dynamite could be laid out at either edge. I chose the bottom edge, as it now sat before me.
I ran four fingers gently in, pressing against the side wall of the box. And then I touched the curve of the dynamite stick.
I backed my hand up a bit, found the lower edge of cotton wool, ran my fingers underneath. And I pulled.
The top layer of cotton wool began to rise up, mostly as a unit. I brought my other hand into play, gathering and recompressing and lifting back the clinging batches of wool fibers.
And then the business contents of the tin box were exposed.
Darkly, at the moment.
The lifted layer of cotton wool was blocking the beam of light.
I held up the cotton wool with one hand now, as if it were a second lid.
I took up the flashlight with my other hand and shined it into the tin box.
The clock was there. Ticking away. The stick of dynamite was there.
The wires from clock to dynamite were missing.
The two objects lay in the tin box utterly separate.
I flipped the flashlight beam toward the bottom edge of the layer of cotton wool, my mind lunging forward to figure out how to reattach the wires, how to make this work.
But there were no wires. No wires at all.
I flipped the beam back to the dynamite.
The blasting cap was also missing.
Jeremy’s exact words about the bomb slithered through me: I wish we didn’t have to trust it.
After the bomb I planted failed to explode and the Zeppelin flew on successfully to London, he wanted me to blame the device.
But it was him. Erich Müller.
57
I sat back on my heels.
I wanted to figure him out.
But I didn’t have time.
I was down to my last fifteen minutes or so before I’d have to get off the Zepp.
I had no bomb.
I thought: I’m sitting inside one. I was surrounded by two million cubic feet of explosively flammable hydrogen.
But how could I both detonate it and escape it? Especially since the explosion would also instantly release a tempest of poison gas.