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

off our look and kept on toward the cliff.
    Stockman had been keeping a watchful eye on this woman he was interested in.
    The first flash in me was that this guy was an immediate danger. He knew who I was.
    I neared the stone fence at the cliff’s edge.
    I stopped a few yards short, expecting he might be following me. I didn’t want to put the cliff in play if there was a struggle.
    I turned.
    No one was near.
    I looked to the tent. He was blocked from my sight by his two colleagues depositing the next table in front of him. Here were two able-bodied boys carrying one table at a time from a pile fifty feet away. Stockman’s privates lacked a certain sharpness and motivation. Which threw an odd light on the lug. This same guy setting up folding tables had been entrusted to slip in quietly backstage, armed, and keep an eye on Isabel Cobb. Had he fallen out of favor?
    And it occurred to me: my special fear of him now was based on my having been at the theater in my own persona. But he didn’t know that. He didn’t know Cobb from Hunter from some other guy who just happened to see a play and give him some dirty looks. Maybe this would be okay.
    The other two Blue Suits headed back to the pile of tables. My man was unfolding legs and not looking my way.
    Okay.
    I turned and moved to the stone fence.
    The cliffs separated here at the shore and curved inland, the beach running into a narrow valley. Along the path to my right, out in front of the east wing of the house, the cliffs were high and sheer, heading down to Ramsgate.
    I looked over my shoulder. The lug was standing behind a table he’d just set up. He was leaning there, looking out at me.
    I turned fully around to him. I thought to take out a cigarette and light it, but the wind had brisked up a bit and I was afraid I’d have trouble with the match, which would, of course, ruin the effect. So I just leaned and stared back. And then I took a page out of Sir Martin the Gray Suit’s book of etiquette. I gave the guy a nod.
    He returned it.
    I had no idea what it all meant.
    But I figured I was free to stroll along, which I did, casually, like a house guest out sightseeing, following the curve of the fence and watching the waves on the Strait of Dover. What a swell day. What a swell castle. What a swell host. What a swell guest I was. I wanted to see if there’d likely be any problem sneaking in tonight through the window I’d unlatched.
    I looked back. I was out of sight of everyone in the tents. I looked at the castle. This eastern wall held three massive bay windows. The library was behind the central one, directly before me. No doors anywhere on this side the house. No need for a Gray Suit to stand guard. All very reassuring. The flag flapped and drew my eyes up to it high on the tower to my left.
    I turned and looked out east toward Belgium, seventy miles away beyond the horizon. Occupied Belgium. Ravaged and brutalized Belgium. Stockman’s true countrymen—I was thinking of him definitively this way, guilty now until proven innocent—Stockman’s boys in feldgrau , were in control over there. If he was working importantly on their behalf, how did they communicate?
    The last German agent I’d dealt with, in my recent adventure on the Lusitania and beyond, relied on telegrams. That and his Nuttall handy one-volume encyclopedia .
    The wind gusted up and the flag whopped behind and above me.
    I turned one more time and looked at St. George’s Cross laid over St. Andrew’s Cross in our own red, white, and blue. And I looked at its pole lifting the flag to a point as high above the sea as a Chicago skyscraper. And I looked at those guy wires. And I realized what they’d been reminding me of without it reaching my conscious mind, the kind of thing that would have come to me only if I’d been in the white, metaphorizing heat of writing a story about this place. The guy wires held the flagpole steady on the tower of Stockman House as if it were the telegraph mast