A Game of Spies (10 page)

Eva slipped the keys out, turned them over thoughtfully for a moment.

“I will,” Joseph said.

“Good. I wish you would.”

“Well, then, I will. I'll forget you ever asked.”

“Good.”

Eva crept toward the front door. A floorboard creaked; her breath caught in her throat. But the Wagner was still playing, the military strains drowning out everything but Joseph's voice:

“But you
did
ask, didn't you? You're always asking, it seems. Always wanting more. Sometimes I wonder, Gretl. Sometimes I wonder just what
I
get from our arrangement.”

Eva stepped outside, the keys clutched tightly in one hand. She jogged to the Volkswagen without looking back over her shoulder. Even from the street, she could hear the man's voice, still rising:

“If I've got a limit, then you're going to find it, aren't you? Never happy with what I offer. Never happy with what you've got.”

The keys fit.

She got into the car, almost bumping her head on the low roof. The VW was tiny. She tossed her case on the passenger-side seat, then started the engine.

“Why don't you ask one of your other boyfriends? You've got plenty. Oh, you may not think I know. But I know. I know more than you think, my sweetest dumpling. Maybe one of them is an easier touch than old Joseph. Maybe one of them has got a car for you. Or for your
friend.
If it
is
for your friend. You've got lots of friends, don't you? You make friends so easily.…”

Eva smiled despite herself. She immediately brushed it from her face. There was nothing amusing about what she was doing to Gretl. But she was desperate. She had no other choice.

She had left the money on the bed, at least.

“I think I've changed my mind about tonight,” Joseph was saying. “I think I'd rather go alone, than with a girl who's ready to take advantage of me every chance she gets.”

Eva hadn't driven a car for years, not since she had used her father's truck around the farm. But it was like riding a bicycle, wasn't it? Once you learned, you never forgot.

She switched on the headlamps by mistake, switched them off, then tried to pull away from the curb. The Volkswagen coughed and stalled. She reached for the keys again, twisting them. The engine rolled, caught. She aimed it into the street and drifted forward.

Gretl,
she thought.
I'm sorry.

But the smile winked back, for just a fraction of a second, before she banished it from her face for good.

WILMERSDORF

Hitler's Reichsautobahn was the world's first superhighway system, and a marvel of engineering; it had been built by members of the Labor Service without the benefit of machinery. But what the system offered in ease of travel, to Hobbs' present way of thinking, was compromised by a lack of privacy.

He left the autobahn not far outside Berlin, in favor of serpentine back roads that made the Talta jounce and rattle like a set of castanets. For nearly an hour, he was able to convince himself that he would be secure enough on these roads. During that time he passed no motorized traffic, a single bicycle, and an old woman pulling a small cart.

Then, all at once, he couldn't convince himself any longer. The Talta, of course, was an invitation to trouble. As he had been pulling away from the Gehls' house in Wilmersdorf, he had seen a black Mercedes drawing up behind him. For a panicky moment, he had believed that his time had run out—for the car belonged to the Gestapo. And the Talta, with its rear windshield missing, with the blood of the SS staining the bent fender, was as good as a beacon advertising his presence.

But the Mercedes had not followed him. Instead it had moved to the curb; two men in black suits had come out. The last thing he had seen was the men striding purposefully up the walk to the Gehls' house. So it wasn't his time that had run out, not yet. For the Gehls, however …

He didn't want to think about it.

He needed to get rid of the car. Stay focused on the moment.

But the thought of abandoning the Talta, with his leg in its current condition, was not an alluring one. Gehl had helped to remove the bullet, wash the wound, and apply bandages; but neither of them were doctors. Even the slow steady pressure of keeping his foot on the gas made his thigh throb angrily.

Bollixed it all up,
he thought.

He had to get rid of the car. Choose one of these leafy glens, hide the Talta in the foliage, and then …

… and then what?

Walk? Not on this leg; not for long.

Catch a ride? There wasn't a cover story in the world that would explain a wounded man, speaking schoolboy German, walking alone along the side of these back-country roads.

So he kept driving.

The day cooled as clouds passed in front of the sun. The breeze coming through the empty rear windshield took on an icy tinge. Presently he felt the first stirrings of an appetite. He reached for the satchel on the passenger-side seat, dug through it, and removed a hunk of bread. He ate half of it and then tucked it back into the bag. His supplies were limited; he would need to make them last.

He didn't even have a gun. He had thrown it away when it had run out of ammunition. Stupid.

He shrugged off his doubts as best as he could, and kept driving.

As the sky darkened by degrees, the doubts returned. Had Eva gotten away quickly enough? Or had he doomed her, with his sloppy contact? Nothing to be gained, of course, by thinking about it. Either she had or she hadn't.

But he couldn't help himself.

He had doomed her, of course. He had caused one hell of a scene outside her apartment. She would have needed to move like the wind to avoid arrest, after a scene like that. She had already been under observation, after all. Why observation, and not arrest? That part he couldn't figure out. Perhaps Canaris had wanted to use her as bait … as flypaper, to attract spies like Hobbs himself.

And he had also doomed the Gehls. The SS would find the radio transmitter in the attic; they would have their proof. Even at this moment, no doubt, Ernst Gehl was in the basement of Number 8 Prinz Albrecht Strasse, suffering the thumbscrews and fingernail splints of the Gestapo. Would the man tell them the location of the extraction site? If he did, then there was hardly a point in continuing. But perhaps Gehl would not tell. And what other choice was there? Giving up. Which was really no choice at all.

His depression deepened.

It was not too late. He was still free. He had passed the message to Eva. Now he could only hope that she would be able to shake her surveillance and reach Gothmund, and that he would be there to meet her.

As the sun sank lower in the sky, the choice of what to do with the Talta was taken away from him: The car ran out of petrol.

When he realized what was happening, Hobbs immediately coaxed the car off the road. He pointed it at a stand of linden and oak, twenty feet distant, and then watched apprehensively as it rolled forward. Yet another brilliant maneuver, he thought. He had become so caught up in his own thoughts that he'd neglected to pay attention to the most obvious factor of all: an empty gas tank.

Mercifully, the Talta rolled all the way into the stand of trees before failing. He pressed the brake and then sat, listening to the tick of the cooling engine.

It was time, he supposed, to take a walk.

But he didn't move. He stayed behind the wheel, looking out at the trees surrounding him. It was a better hiding place than he might have expected. From the road he would be all but invisible. Perhaps he would do better to spend the night here. They would be looking for him, once they realized that the Gehls' car was missing. But they would never suspect that he had simply pulled off the road so close to Berlin. Perhaps the search would pass him by.

Simplicity is effective.

In the morning he would cut a walking stick from one of the saplings, then head back to the road and try to catch a ride. And if anyone was trusting enough to give him one, that would be their misfortune. There was no cover story in the world, after all, that could explain him. So he would need to kill the driver—with his bare hands, he supposed—and take the car.

If
anyone was trusting enough to pull over.

The air was growing cold. The lack of a rear windshield left the interior of the car open to the weather. But he would survive.

In the morning, he thought. He would figure something out in the morning.

He ate the rest of his bread, drank some of the water, then lit a cigarette and leaned back in the seat, trying to get comfortable—and failing.

He had doomed her, with his sloppy contact. And she had been an innocent.

He finished the cigarette and closed his eyes. Sleep came in choppy waves. With the sleep, his defenses went down; and with the defenses down came the guilty memories.

Some time later, he sat up with a jolt.

Still in the Talta; still night. He had pulled himself out of sleep, he realized, with an act of will. He had been back in his East End garret, suggesting to Eva that she come onto Oldfield's payroll. It seemed that his mind was determined to make him relive the moment over and over again.

He squirmed in the seat. One leg was asleep—the wounded leg. When he changed position, it began to tingle with pins and needles. At least he could still feel it.

He found himself looking at his own reflection in the windshield. He looked pale, unshaven, and haggard. This would be the death of him, he thought suddenly. He would never make it back to England alive.

What in the name of God was he doing here?

He had come for Eva, of course. Because he had finally grown up. A man could drift from cause to cause, and from woman to woman, for only so long. Eventually he reached a point when he was ready for more. And more, as he understood it, meant settling down. A wife. A family.

There were other reasons as well, he supposed. His nights spent with the BUF had convinced him that Fascism was a fool's cause, a crutch for the weak-minded—and a dangerous one, for there were many in the world even more weak-minded than Hobbs himself. But he could not quite convince himself that King and Country were his primary motivations in coming to Germany. Those who risked their lives for any ideology—be it Fascism, Bolshevism, or the glory of the Crown—were fooling themselves if they thought that they were acting for reasons other than personal.

So it was for Eva. This was not the first time Hobbs had found himself spending a night alone, without a proper roof; but he was determined that it would be one of the last.

Had he known when he had first seen her that she would be any different from the others? The idea was tempting—love at first sight, a comforting thought—but unfortunately it hadn't been the case. It had been just a straight recruitment to Hobbs, one in a string of similar recruitments. He had been paying a visit to his old mates in Guildford in an effort to keep up local connections; his value to Oldfield had been dependent on keeping up such old ties, on maintaining the trust of his various ne'er-do-well acquaintances. He had been sitting in the Royal Oak pub with Roland Lewis and Art Moore when he had seen the pretty redheaded girl go walking by the window—according to the barmaid, a governess for the Carmody children, who had been in England at that point for only two weeks.

He had approached her on some slim pretext that he couldn't even recall. As the months had passed, and they had evolved from acquaintances to friends to lovers, her possible value had become increasingly clear—Eva was a German, after all, and a smart one, with a passion for integrity. When her position in Guildford had ended, she had decided to stay on in London, at Hobbs' urging, for another year. Finally had come the recruitment itself, that night in his flat in the East End. But even then he hadn't realized how much he had come to care for her. It was only after she had gone …

He winced. His goddamned leg. Now the pins and needles were passing, and it was beginning to throb again.

He settled back into the seat. Dawn was still a long way away. But he couldn't stand the thought of returning to the dream, returning to the memory.

He kept his eyes open long after they'd begun to ache, staring at the whispering leaves around the car.

6

THE FINCH PUB, WHITEHALL

Arthur Deacon sat alone in a booth, staring into his pint of Guinness. An ashtray near his hand contained the butts of six cigarettes. A seventh burned between his fingers, forgotten.

He remembered the cigarette only when the ember scorched his knuckles. Then he swore, ground it out among the remains of the others, tossed his dark hair back from his forehead, and knuckled briefly at his brown eyes. He checked his watch. Only five minutes remained before his appointment with Oldfield, and he still had not made up his mind.

He lit another cigarette, tossed back his hair again—Mary was always nagging him to get it cut, but somehow he could never find the time—then returned to staring into his pint.

His reverie was broken when Margery Lewis slid into the booth across from him. Margery looked a few pounds heavier than the last time Deacon had seen her, as if the rationing had skipped her altogether. But her lipstick was as bright and tarty as ever, her face as wide and round and homely. He wondered, in that first moment, what he had ever seen in her. Then she leaned forward so he could light her cigarette; her dress scooped down in front to reveal her ample bosom, and he remembered.

“Arthur,” she said. “Look at you, so deep in thought.”

He nodded. “Margery,” he said.

“Sitting here frowning like a funeral director.” She dragged on her cigarette, exhaled around a dry smile. “I dare say marriage doesn't agree with you.”

“Bugger off,” he said pleasantly.

“I'd be glad to, love. But I might need a hand. Is that an offer?”

“You said it yourself, Margery—I'm married now.”

“Happily?”