This assessment ran quickly in me as I shrank into the shadows of the tonneau and he passed by across the street. I slid to the streetside door, was ready to follow him, but as my hand went to the handle, he turned in at a doorway to a three-story brick tenement fifty yards or so down Coleman.
I opened the door and stepped out.
I moved into the middle of the street and looked for a number on the building. Over the lintel, a dingy 22.
I watched the facade, looking every few moments to the corner of New Gravel.
Soon a light came on in a second-floor window. I noted its position. I stepped back to the taxi and told my driver to be ready for the resumption of our little parade.
I entered the tonneau and leaned forward to watch out the front window.
The ’08 Unic rolled into view from before the pub and crossed our line of sight, heading south on New Gravel Lane. A few moments later, Brauer’s Napier passed by in pursuit. We followed.
I was aware at once that something was going on. Not with our three-character melodrama. Out to the east. In the sky. I thought it was lightning. I didn’t think any further about that, as I was preoccupied with the first clues of an alternate biography for Vitagraph’s Most Mysterious Woman in the World. But we didn’t drive very far before the lightning yielded a clap of distant thunder. But it seemed to be thunder only if you’d already distractedly assumed you’d seen lightning. Part of me instantly recognized the punch-thump of an exploding shell. My taxi stopped abruptly, and a few moments later my driver leaned across the front seat to try to see something in the eastern sky.
I slid across and looked. Three narrow columns of white light were separately, restlessly sweeping the sky. Searchlights.
The speaking tube jingled and I took it up. “Zeppelins, sir,” my driver said. “Raiding the East India Docks, I’d say. The two taxis have stopped before us and will not be entering the Wapping High Street — nor will aught else — till this be finished.”
I thanked him and looked again at the sky. The searchlights still had not found the airships, but they were drawing nearer each other.
I stepped out of the taxi on the left side, into the street.
The near warehouses were low and scattered, south of the Shadwell Basin, and then there was a clear view across the meander of the Thames and into the distant light flecks of Dog Island, which held the West India, Millwall, and South Docks. The stars were blotted out, but the ceiling was pretty high, plenty high enough for the German dirigibles to drop their bombs. At the distant edge of my view — at the East India Docks, as my man had reckoned — a column of flame had flared up.
Now the tip of one searchlight, nearer in, was suddenly clipped downward and clotted at the end by a bright tubular object. The air defense boys had found a Zeppelin. The other two searchlights whisked to that vicinity as well, one of them quickly finding a second airship, which closely trailed the first, and the third light rushed on behind, to continue the search.
As interested as I was in the air assault, I lowered my face and looked to the south. A mere fifty yards ahead, against the darkness, Selene Bourgani had stepped from her taxi and become an even more deeply dark shape, immobile, elegantly erect, facing the raid. I tried to see her figure there in the night by the reality of what she was planning to do. In this moment she was a sentinel for the German airships, a monument to their assault on the Fatherland’s enemy. I still had trouble getting this to make sense. I may have discovered her own living father, but she was still the Most Mysterious Woman in the World. What was she doing with these people?
And another dark shape passed before me, this side of Selene. Brauer had also stepped from his taxi, his face lifting to the eastern sky.
I looked too.
The searchlights had all converged on the two Zeppelins and I could hear the distant report of three- and four-inch guns, the far off rattle of machine guns. The Brits were using what they had — utterly unsuited for firing upward at airships — to stop what now began: a flash of quick-climbing, flaring light beneath the Zeppelins, and a fragment of a moment later the brittle thump of a bomb, and then the flare and thump again, and again. We were near enough to all this that with each bomb we instinctively braced ourselves for a frontal blow from the concussion, but instead a blow surprised us from behind: a quick aggression of air that rushed against us and then onward to fill the vacuum created by the updraft of explosives from above.
And their salvos spent, the Zeppelins came toward us, the lights tracking them, the great glistening white hulls drifting to us and above us as if we were on the floor of the sea and these were the dead and bloated bodies of sunken ships, this one above me now the Lusitania itself, torpedoed and glowing in its ghostly afterlife and come to reclaim those who had escaped, to take the three of us away with it.
But that impression flared brightly in my head and vanished instantly.
This was, in fact, the fiercely deployed German war machine passing overhead. And I was well aware that the man and woman standing near me in the dark were in its service.
30
Istanbul was not where I had expected to end up when the secret service boys finally let me take a crack at this war. They hadn’t either. And deep into that eventful Monday in London, after I’d made sure Selene returned to her hotel and I was heading back to the Arundel, I finally took time to wonder if, in fact, that’s where they would have me go. For all I knew, they already had some other sneak-and-snoop Johnnie in Istanbul, someone who’d get the chance to take his own crack at Selene Bourgani. But either way, him or me, Metcalf was arriving tomorrow and the German team was leaving the next day, and I needed him and his minions to work on a few things right away. Even if it wasn’t for my benefit.
So I asked my man and his taxi to stay with me for a while longer, at which he gave me a slow nod yes and a touch to the brim of his cap even before we’d talked about money.
I dashed up to my room and was happy to actually put some words together on my Corona, banging out a report and a list of queries for Metcalf, covering everything from Selene’s German movie director-lover to the man I strongly suspected was her father, from the flag on the bar wall to the smell of spirit gum, from a square beard at the head of a table to a dead Hun in a doorway. And I told him that if I was going forward, I needed a pistol. And — a thing I almost forgot — I let him know I’d changed hotels.
Then I was off again through the night, back along the Strand, past Charing Cross just south of Metzger & Strauss, Booksellers, across the street from which there’d been a bit of an incident earlier this evening. And the Strand turned into the Mall and the Mall led us to the front gates of Buckingham Palace and we circled good King George V, perhaps just as he was having his man adjust the shoulders of his pajamas.
We ended up on the southwest side of the palace gardens, in Westminster, at Number 4 Grosvenor Gardens, at the north end of a long, attached block of grand Second Empire town houses, five stories high with slate pavilion roofs and tall mansards. The houses were three bays wide and each had the same front porch — there were a dozen or more such, arrayed down the street — with squared granite columns holding up garlands of stone flowers.
Somewhere between my hotel and these stone flowers, I’d also given a brief thought to my killing a man tonight. To my having to kill a man. This thought came shortly after we’d circled Buckingham Palace and I had actually given a few moments of brain time to the King’s pajamas. Ironically. But still. I’d killed a guy tonight and I hadn’t really expected to, given all the little pitter-pat of sneaking and snooping that my recent secret service work had entailed. Now I’d found it necessary to act more like a soldier in the field than a spy. But maybe I didn’t understand the spy stuff yet. Or maybe I was supposed to have finessed that confrontation somehow. But I couldn’t see how. And I’d done this before, killed a man. And even as I was thinking this, as we’d rolled to a stop in front of the embassy and I took in the architectural details as I always did, I knew that I was about to forget the dead Hun, pretty much for good.