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Authors: Robert Olen Butler
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role. As I passed him, I played my part in his little scene, giving him a nod of gratitude-to-a-servant, but catching and holding for a moment those eyes, which were as opaquely gray as the Strait of Dover.
The room had a narrow set of mullioned windows and was furnished with the simple straight lines of the Arts and Crafts movement: bedstead, wardrobe, hard leather-seated chair, small break-front writing desk.
I sat in the chair and I waited for the cringing man from the station. He and the bags were coming by a separate vehicle. The Rolls was not a touring model and didn’t have an elegant way of transporting a great deal of luggage. But I figured Stockman might have arranged that so as to do a quick check of the contents. Certainly enough time was passing.
At last the luggage man arrived, and I took my bags at the doorway and closed him out at once and I laid them—a leather valise and a Gladstone—on the bed. I opened the valise and lifted out books and a toilet case and a notepad. But for this weekend these were mostly just filler to cover the false bottom I was now prying out of the valise.
Stockman’s boys might have searched, but they didn’t find my Mauser pocket automatic, a rock-hard bantamweight of a pistol with a .32 caliber punch. I pulled it out of the false-bottomed depth of my valise. It was tucked inside a left-hander’s leather holster with the flap cut off, so I could wear it in the small of my back and draw it with my right hand.
I laid the holster on the bed, and I freshened up in cold water in my small bathroom and changed my suit from sack to brown mohair, with a fresh shirt and tie.
I slipped the Mauser and its holster onto my belt and centered it in place.
They didn’t find my leather pouch of lock-picking tools either. This I put into my inner coat pocket. Or my six-inch tungsten flashlight, which I snugged into my side pocket. Or my Luger, which I left in the comparable false bottom of the Gladstone.
I sat down on the edge of my bed and retied my shoes.
What sounded distantly like a small salon orchestra had arrived, out on the green, and was tuning up.
I was ready to begin.
I wasn’t interested in books or billiards. I wanted to look around. I’d carry my notebook and keep only Joseph W. Hunter notes in it, as if the grounds of the castle was local color in the Kent part of my feature story on Isabel Cobb.
I stepped out of my room and closed the door quietly behind me. The corridor was empty. I went along it and down the stairs and emerged in the screens passage. A scullery maid in white uniform and mobcap brushed past me with her face cast down and a quiet “Pardon, sir.”
I emerged into the Great Hall.
Though the windows here were limited to the west wall and looked into the courtyard, the place felt bright, for it was faced in white granite. The floor was covered by a single Persian rug large enough to define the foundation of a Sears ready-made bungalow. In its dense weave, hunters on horses leapt and gazelles fled.
A young Queen Victoria—the Stockmar family’s benefactress—was on horseback, as well, rendered massively in oils above the white ashlar walk-in fireplace. Beyond her was the doorway into the library. I was sanctioned to go there. Books and billiards. The things I needed to really learn about Stockman were in the unsanctioned places, but it was daylight and Stockman House was preparing to receive the public and Albert’s men would be prowling around, so for now I had to interpret what I could from the things I could access. A library was as good a place to start as any.
I set out across the Persian hunting ground, thinking of books. Early in my previous assignment I’d discovered at least a temporary Rosetta stone for one of the Germans’ methods of secret communication: a book called The Nuttall Encyclopaedia of Universal Information , the placement of whose words were the basis for numbered codes. Not that Al’s Nuttall would be kept on the
The room had a narrow set of mullioned windows and was furnished with the simple straight lines of the Arts and Crafts movement: bedstead, wardrobe, hard leather-seated chair, small break-front writing desk.
I sat in the chair and I waited for the cringing man from the station. He and the bags were coming by a separate vehicle. The Rolls was not a touring model and didn’t have an elegant way of transporting a great deal of luggage. But I figured Stockman might have arranged that so as to do a quick check of the contents. Certainly enough time was passing.
At last the luggage man arrived, and I took my bags at the doorway and closed him out at once and I laid them—a leather valise and a Gladstone—on the bed. I opened the valise and lifted out books and a toilet case and a notepad. But for this weekend these were mostly just filler to cover the false bottom I was now prying out of the valise.
Stockman’s boys might have searched, but they didn’t find my Mauser pocket automatic, a rock-hard bantamweight of a pistol with a .32 caliber punch. I pulled it out of the false-bottomed depth of my valise. It was tucked inside a left-hander’s leather holster with the flap cut off, so I could wear it in the small of my back and draw it with my right hand.
I laid the holster on the bed, and I freshened up in cold water in my small bathroom and changed my suit from sack to brown mohair, with a fresh shirt and tie.
I slipped the Mauser and its holster onto my belt and centered it in place.
They didn’t find my leather pouch of lock-picking tools either. This I put into my inner coat pocket. Or my six-inch tungsten flashlight, which I snugged into my side pocket. Or my Luger, which I left in the comparable false bottom of the Gladstone.
I sat down on the edge of my bed and retied my shoes.
What sounded distantly like a small salon orchestra had arrived, out on the green, and was tuning up.
I was ready to begin.
I wasn’t interested in books or billiards. I wanted to look around. I’d carry my notebook and keep only Joseph W. Hunter notes in it, as if the grounds of the castle was local color in the Kent part of my feature story on Isabel Cobb.
I stepped out of my room and closed the door quietly behind me. The corridor was empty. I went along it and down the stairs and emerged in the screens passage. A scullery maid in white uniform and mobcap brushed past me with her face cast down and a quiet “Pardon, sir.”
I emerged into the Great Hall.
Though the windows here were limited to the west wall and looked into the courtyard, the place felt bright, for it was faced in white granite. The floor was covered by a single Persian rug large enough to define the foundation of a Sears ready-made bungalow. In its dense weave, hunters on horses leapt and gazelles fled.
A young Queen Victoria—the Stockmar family’s benefactress—was on horseback, as well, rendered massively in oils above the white ashlar walk-in fireplace. Beyond her was the doorway into the library. I was sanctioned to go there. Books and billiards. The things I needed to really learn about Stockman were in the unsanctioned places, but it was daylight and Stockman House was preparing to receive the public and Albert’s men would be prowling around, so for now I had to interpret what I could from the things I could access. A library was as good a place to start as any.
I set out across the Persian hunting ground, thinking of books. Early in my previous assignment I’d discovered at least a temporary Rosetta stone for one of the Germans’ methods of secret communication: a book called The Nuttall Encyclopaedia of Universal Information , the placement of whose words were the basis for numbered codes. Not that Al’s Nuttall would be kept on the
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