The Empire of Night: A Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thriller by Robert Olen Butler

know.”
    He meant Wilson. I nodded.
    “These machines are getting better,” he said.
    He meant the Zeppelins. I nodded.
    “All of them.”
    Airplanes too. The tanks. The artillery.
    “The nasty stuff as well,” he said.
    The gas.
    “I know what you mean,” I said.
    “We are important,” he said. “You and I, and Buffington’s boys too. They understand. That’s why we’re helping out, you and I.”
    I thought I knew what he meant. But I leaned closer. “Explain that,” I said.
    “Easy,” he said. “ We are driving the . . . what? The cart?”
    “The cart,” I said.
    “No,” he said. “Too humble. The train.”
    “The train,” I said.
    “No,” he said. “That’s got a track heading in a certain direction already. I wish that were so.”
    “The bus?”
    “Sure,” Trask said. “The bus. A sixty-horsepower bus and we know the route. You see?”
    I did. “The secret service is driving,” I said.
    “Yes,” he said. “The secret service. We’ll find out the real stuff about who’s our friends and who’s our enemies and we’ll make it so clear that even Woodrow Damn Wilson will have to do what’s right.”
    I sat back in my chair. My glass was empty. I understood.
    I rose now from the reading chair in the library of Stockman House and moved toward the drink table. But when I arrived, I put the empty glass next to the bottle of Armagnac. I looked to the library door. It was empty. I was alone. I put my hand on the latch of the casement and I turned it. But I left the window closed. My mother was singing tonight. Everyone would be watching, including her would-be lover. I now had a quiet way back into the house.

8
    The salon orchestra began to play. “Songe d’Automne,” a sad little waltz.
    Did Stockman arrange this song deliberately, having his covert joke on us all?
    Surely not. Only those of us in first class knew what had been on the musical program in the grand dining room on the Lusitania ’s last voyage. I’d heard the song myself. I’d heard it again in Istanbul. This time I froze at the library window. It was a popular tune for these little strings-and-piano salon orchestras. But the song had found me twice since the torpedo, and that felt a little excessive, as if it were a Siren singing from the bottom of the North Atlantic, wanting to take another crack at me.
    I stepped away from the window.
    The Stockman House event was starting. I needed to be visible. I hoped to catch Isabel Cobb for some reportage. And perhaps some private words in a cloaking crowd of constituents.
    I crossed the library and entered the Great Hall. The Brits by the fireplace had vanished. At the far end I passed through an arched doorway beneath a music gallery and into the courtyard entrance hall. The yard itself lay before me, shadowed from the reemergent sunlight, and I recognized Martin, even from the rear, even wearing a gray trilby. He was standing just outside. I’d get a better reading on my status shortly.
    I straightened in a reflex of stage nerves. I wanted to feel the reassurance of the Mauser lying solidly against the small of my back. It was there. I certainly did not want to use it tonight.
    I stepped through the door.
    Beyond Martin was another tough guy, watching the far end of the courtyard. He was also in a gray suit and trilby. A serge suit just like Martin’s. They were in uniform, these two. Stockman’s little army. Martin heard me, turned to me.
    He nodded again.
    I figured a guy like Martin wouldn’t make the show of another nod to a guy he was supposed to be keeping a suspicious eye on. He’d be playing it close.
    “It’s clearing up,” I said.
    Martin grunted. But it was a grunt of agreement.
    I moved on by him and across the fieldstone courtyard and onto the verge of the castle’s wide, western green. It held three of the big, blue-and-white, open-sided canvas tents that the Brits called marquees. The nearest was off to the right, next to the service wing of the