The Empire of Night: A Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thriller

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

Book: The Empire of Night: A Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thriller by Robert Olen Butler Read Free Book Online
Authors: Robert Olen Butler
the drink table. “Would you like a refill?” he asked.
    “No, thanks,” I said.
    He returned with a renewed snifter and sat.
    He drank. He said, “What do you know about Isabel Cobb?”
    I hid in a sip of my brandy. I could easily have seen this as ominous. I’d tried to finesse him into showing me signs of his allegiance to Germany in a weapons-and-havoc way. He could well be doing likewise, looking for a conspiratorial connection between me and this woman he was wooing.
    “What sort of thing?” I said.
    “I’m interested in her background. You’re writing about her. Something I might not know.”
    It was one of the Kaiser’s own precious Prussians who formulated “the best defense is a good offense.” So I said, “Since you read American newspapers, you may have seen a Cobb byline. Christopher Cobb. It’s not well known, but that’s Isabel’s son. They broke off contact more than a decade ago, as I understand it.”
    I watched Stockman’s face. It didn’t register much of anything. Old news, maybe. “I’ve heard about him,” he said. Nothing more. No follow-up question. He was simply waiting for something he didn’t know.
    Okay, I thought. Maybe it actually was my mother he was assessing now. As a potential spy. Or a potential lover.
    “I didn’t realize this till recently,” I said. “She sings.”
    “She’s singing tonight,” Stockman said.
    “Sorry. I haven’t been working the story for very long.”
    Stockman stirred in his seat. Sipped. Looked out to the late afternoon sky, which was brightening.
    He did indeed want to know about her men, I thought.
    I drained my Armagnac. I wished I had another. I’d slug it down quick. But for what we needed to accomplish, my mother and I, Stockman had to stay interested, and this opportunity would not last.
    I lowered my voice. “Man to man?” I said.
    “Yes,” he said, keeping his eyes out the bay window.
    “From what I can gather she has no . . . affiliations.”
    He turned his eyes to me. Me, who had become his mother’s pimp. In service to their country.
    His look was man to man. He was grateful for the news.
    Then he glanced away, toward the library door, responding to a cue that I had missed.
    I looked too.
    Martin was standing there, changed from his chauffeur livery into a two-piece gray suit.
    “I’m afraid it’s time to attend to my beloved constituents,” Stockman said.
    He rose. I began to rise as well, but he stopped me with the flash of his right palm. “Enjoy the books,” he said.
    I sat back down.
    “Help yourself to the brandy,” he said, and he turned abruptly and strode across the library floor. He reached the door and paused, speaking a few words to Martin, whose eyes slid briefly to mine as he listened.
    Either I’d passed all my tests, as I’d thought, and he was telling his tough guy I was okay, or I was dead wrong and he was issuing a warning. Or a nasty instruction.
    But as Stockman pushed past, Martin lingered for one small moment and looked to me, seeing that I’d been watching, and he gave me a slight nod. I nodded back.
    I figured I might be all right for the time being.
    Then Martin vanished and I was alone in the library.
    I stayed where I was. A thing had lingered in my head, from the words unspoken. The matter of the unprepared Brits. Night before last I’d sat in a reading chair next to Trask’s in Buffington’s bomb shelter and we’d gotten around to our own unpreparedness. The United States had a hundred thousand troops and about that number of National Guardsmen. The Germans alone had two million in uniform, well trained. And Wilson was still twisted around trying to find his backbone, even with a hundred and twenty-eight dead Americans on the Lusitania . He’d issued no call to arms, instead offering tardy, mealy-mouthed, diplomatic pipsqueaking.
    After we’d fallen for a time into a brandy-begot, brooding silence, Trask had leaned to me and said, “He won’t do this on his own, you

Similar Books

The Darkest Whisper

Gena Showalter

The Awful Secret

Bernard Knight

Remedy Z: Solo

Dan Yaeger

The Color of Darkness

Ruth Hatfield

Dream Called Time

S. L. Viehl

Beautiful Disaster

Kylie Adams

Baby, Oh Baby!

Robin Wells