The Poison Tide (13 page)

They talked a little longer of the need for great care, of the timetable and final preparations, and the professor wanted to know who else Dilger would call upon to help carry out the operation in America. But that, the Count informed him with smooth assurance, was not his business.

A
N EXCITED BELLBOY
stopped Wolff in the corridor with the first news, and the old Baron who haunted the lobby accosted him with more a few minutes later. At Reception, an American woman from the International Peace League was trying to make sense of the front page of the
Zeitung
. ‘Yesterday, the 7th of May. A passenger liner from New York, the
Lusitania
,’ the assistant manager explained to her in fractured English. There was great loss of life, a thousand people or more, some of them Americans. ‘Regret, madam,’ he said, ‘sunk by one of our German submarines.’ He didn’t sound in the least sorry.

‘A catastrophe,’ Casement declared at lunch a few hours later, ‘can you imagine? Our enemies will be having a field day in the American papers – the influential ones are all for the British.’

Acres of newsprint would be devoted to the ordeal of the families on board, heart-wrenching stories of separation and loss, pictures of dead mothers and small children.

‘They’ll tar our cause, tar me with a German brush,’ he complained. ‘It was a mistake to come here.’

He was a picture of misery, self-pitying, diminished, fallen. For God’s sake, thought Wolff, you’re supposed to be a threat to our great British Empire: be a man. He was surprised that Casement’s weakness irritated him so. Then it occurred to him that was precisely what a true friend should say: ‘Stop feeling sorry for yourself, Roger.’

Casement lifted his eyes from his plate.

‘It’s a hard street, remember?’ Wolff continued. ‘It was you who said so. Don’t you have the stomach for it any more?’

‘I . . . of course . . .’ Casement was shocked.

‘Pull yourself together, man. Your people are relying on you. You’ve known difficult times before.’

‘Yes, I have,’ he snapped, dumping his napkin on the table. ‘Yes, and I don’t need to be told by you.’

He was angry now, pulling at his beard like an Irish Elijah. They glared across the table at each other. Have I gone too far? Wolff wondered. Before he could throw an olive branch, Casement’s expression softened and he looked away.

‘It’s so easy to lose oneself here, isn’t it?’ he observed.

Wolff smiled sympathetically.

‘. . . you know, lose any sense of perspective.’ He gave an embarrassed little cough. ‘I’ve hardly given a thought to those passengers. First, air raids on towns, then this barbarity at sea. Poison gas. There don’t seem to be boundaries any more.’

‘Were there ever any?’ asked Wolff.

‘But in this modern age it’s worse. I suppose all any of us can do is follow . . . well, follow what our consciences instruct us to be our duty.’ He paused and smiled at Wolff. ‘You were right, Jan, to remind me of mine.’

De Witt cared for his good name. Those few impatient words convinced Casement that a companion he wouldn’t have given the time of day to in Dublin was the best sort of friend, who was prepared to tell him what he didn’t want to hear. A few minutes later, he confided that he was visiting a prisoner-of-war camp in the morning and asked Wolff to accompany him. ‘There’s so much a man like you could do for our cause,’ he said. Wolff reminded him that it wasn’t his cause. ‘For me, then,’ he replied with a shy smile, like an old lover.

No doubt history would remember the
Lusitania
as a tragedy but Wolff couldn’t help musing that the confusion of waves left by the sinking ship presented him with an opportunity to escape. It was two days since his last meeting with Christensen and he was still sitting on the intelligence. He’d coded the Falkenhayn minute into another business report at once and buried it in a thick file, and that was as far as it had gone. No one in Whitehall was going to shower him with praise for proof that the enemy was promising rifles for a rising, but a network of saboteurs in America and a list of the British interests it was going to target was worth an official handshake or two. ‘First class, first class, Wolff, good fellow,’ C would say, bouncing in his chair.

Only, Wolff was very reluctant to send the report. The security police followed him everywhere. The instant it left his hand it would be picked up and delivered to their cryptographers. The Bureau’s man, Bywater, had given him the name of a courier he’d used before the war, an odd-job man at a hostel in the Moabit district. But Wolff didn’t like the look of the place. Just an uneasy feeling, but a feeling was quite enough. You’re behind the lines, he told himself, sometimes it isn’t possible to deliver – he felt guilty nonetheless. The hope that his new best friend was going to fill in the missing pieces at the prisoner-of-war camp made it possible to rest a little easier with his coded report still ‘on file’. Finish the job and escape, he told himself, that’s the answer.

It was a shock to find his interrogator waiting for him in the hotel lobby the following morning.

‘I’m to escort you to the camp today,’ Maguerre said with a wry smile. ‘We’ll have the journey to discuss a few matters’. He didn’t waste time on pleasantries. ‘You keep giving my men the slip, Herr de Witt,’ he observed the moment the motor car pulled away.

‘I don’t like being followed.’

‘Do you have something to hide?’

‘Oh, I expect so.’ Wolff reached into his jacket. ‘Cigarette?’

Maguerre dismissed the offer with a flourish. ‘Cronje doesn’t like you, Herr de Witt. He says you can’t be trusted.’

‘Look, I don’t want someone breathing down my neck every minute of the day,’ Wolff explained irritably. ‘It wasn’t difficult to lose your men, so I did. Understand? You’d probably do the same.’

Maguerre stared at him intently. Was he satisfied? It was impossible to say. He began to talk about the Boer rebellion. Was Herr de Witt following the papers? It had fizzled like a damp firework and now it was over. ‘You don’t seem very surprised,’ he remarked. Wolff said it had ended just as he’d expected it to.

‘If that’s true, why did you go to so much trouble?’

‘For the money,’ he said casually.

‘Money?’

‘Yes.’

‘But you told me you hated the English.’ Maguerre frowned. ‘And Sir Roger says . . .’

‘I do hate the English.’

‘And Cronje – you told him the rifles were paid for by friends who wanted the same as you.’

‘They were. They paid me too.’

‘You made a profit?’

‘Naturally.’

Maguerre began to chuckle, then to laugh out loud, and he slapped the leather seat between them so hard that the driver slammed his foot on the brake.

‘But why didn’t you tell us it was for the money?’ he enquired when the car was moving again.

Wolff shrugged. ‘“My enemy’s enemy is my friend,” you said to me, and it’s true.’

Maguerre evidently remembered because his tone became a little warmer.

‘Sir Roger says you’re kindred spirits, that you share his high ideals. He thinks you’ll help him.’

Wolff didn’t reply, but drew on his cigarette and turned to gaze out of the window. They were crossing the bridge into Spandau, the citadel to his right, and in a few minutes they’d be in open country.

‘What is your opinion of Sir Roger?’ Maguerre asked carefully.

‘Do I respect him, do you mean? Yes. And I share some of those high ideals, but . . .’

‘Yes?’

‘Well, I’ve told you before, I’m a businessman.’

‘An engineer or a gun runner?’

Wolff looked at him steadily but said nothing.

‘Are you prepared to help him?’

‘He doesn’t need my help.’

Maguerre leant forward and tapped the driver on the shoulder. ‘Slow down, would you. No need to hurry.’

‘Look, what do you want, Lieutenant?’

‘All in good time.’ He paused and scratched his nose thoughtfully. ‘And his man, Christensen, what do you think of him?’

Just his name made Wolff tense. ‘I don’t know him really.’

‘Why would you? Ah, we’re almost there.’

They were approaching a checkpoint in the perimeter of a military training zone. It wasn’t the sort of place foreigners were invited to visit, even in peacetime, but Wolff had heard that the open heathland to the north-west of the city was used as a proving ground by the Army. The car stopped at the barrier and Maguerre got out to speak to a stout-looking reserve officer. Through the open door, Wolff could hear a blackbird trilling in the stand of birches behind the guard post. The sun was blinding through the windscreen, bleaching the red leather seat, almost too hot to touch, and for a few seconds Wolff closed his eyes to soak in its warmth.

‘A perfect spring day,’ said Maguerre as he slipped back on to the seat beside him. The car pulled away, but was forced to slow again minutes later while a work gang of prisoners broke step and cleared the road. They weren’t much to look at, Russians for the most part, a few British and French, uniforms dusty and torn; some had lost their boots and were wearing clogs.

‘I hope none of them are Irish,’ Wolff remarked laconically.

The irony was lost on Maguerre who assured him that the Irish had been separated from the rest.

‘And you, Herr de Witt, when will you be returning to America?’ he enquired archly.

‘Soon, I hope. In the next week.’

‘I see.’

They drove in silence through a collection of large red-brick barracks buildings to another checkpoint where they were directed to the gate of the Döberitz camp. It was much larger than Wolff had expected and he said so. Ten thousand prisoners, Maguerre informed him, other ranks only. It reminded Wolff of a Klondike mining town he’d visited years before, on shore leave from his first ship: behind the ten-foot wire fence, one-storey wooden shacks as far he could see, and not a blade of grass. Icy in winter, oppressively hot in summer.

Casement was waiting in the commandant’s office, plainly out of sorts. He was as surprised as Wolff by the travel arrangements, and angry that the Army wasn’t prepared to issue a security pass for ‘poor Adler’. A bureaucratic oversight, Maguerre assured him, too smoothly for it to be anything but a lie. Before they left the office, the charmless old aristocrat who was in charge of the camp insisted on ‘instructing’ them on how to speak to the prisoners. The English were lazy and troublesome, a dirty and ill-disciplined mob; if only they were prepared to work like the Russians. Casement tried to remind him that they were there to meet Irishmen but he didn’t recognise the distinction.

Eighty or so men in a ragtag assortment of uniforms were gathered in one of the camp canteens. Wolff recognised the cap badges of Irish regiments but also the artillery, engineers and the naval division. They got reluctantly to their feet when the commandant and his party entered the room but made no effort to fall into line. Nor did they welcome the patriot. Casement was on edge. He’d taken off his trilby and was gripping it firmly in both hands.

They were all a long way from home, he said. Was anyone from Ballymena? Oh, how he longed for the soft wind from the west on his cheek, to stride out at first light, the bright mist dissipating in the glen, scald crows cawing, the comfort of family, craic with ‘our friends’. Then he told them why he was an exile in Germany. Irishmen should only give their lives for their own country. The war against Germany wasn’t their concern, the slaughter, the waste, for what? Let England fight her own battles. They must save their strength for the rebuilding of their nation. He spoke with quiet passion; he spoke with the colour and romance of one who loves the timbre of words; he spoke of their Christian duty; he spoke in his soft, educated English accent; he spoke like a gentleman, and they listened in attentive silence but they listened without respect. Hands aggressively on hips, shuffling their feet; Wolff could see from the frowns, the sideways glances, that they thought little or nothing of the man. Regulars, they owed their duty to the uniform and when the lousy war was over they would be content to draw an army pension.

‘You’ve all heard tell of MacBride and his Irish in Africa. Mr de Witt here,’ Casement placed a hand on Wolff’s arm, ‘fought alongside MacBride. Now Irishmen like you are volunteering for a new brigade. Germany will win the war . . .’

He was interrupted by an angry murmur. Someone shouted, ‘Shame.’

‘. . . but it isn’t our war,’ continued Casement. ‘Let England fight for the extension of her Empire. What matters is that . . .’

‘Sir Rah-jer,’ drawled a sergeant at the front. He had a Belfast accent you could cut with a knife and the squashed features of a fist fighter.

‘Yes?’

‘Sir Rah-jer, Sir Rah-jer,’ he chanted. ‘Sir Rah-jer, Sir Rah-jer . . .’

Some of the others began to laugh.

‘Sir Rah-jer, Sir Rah-jer . . .’

Casement coloured. ‘Just Roger.’

The big fella smirked. ‘I wuz seein’ what it was like, you bein’ a knight an’ all. Sir Rah-jer the black traitor knight.’

‘How much are the Germans paying you?’ someone shouted from the back.

‘I’m here for my country,’ he replied with quiet dignity.

‘Bloody traitor dog, ye,’ said another.

‘Not to Ireland.’

But it was too late for reason. The gate was opening and through it bitterness poured in a yelping, howling chorus. Casement the enemy’s friend – Wolff could hear it plainly: the hard labour and short rations, the loneliness, the neglect, the careless cruelty of camp life. The big Ulsterman was full of menace, little eyes darting to and fro as he warmed to his comrades’ anger, an old pugilist anxious to please his crowd. It was going to end badly. Casement must have sensed it too. He’d given up trying to be heard. Wolff jogged his elbow: ‘Roger, we must go.’

‘I . . . yes, we must,’ he said, but he didn’t move.

It wasn’t going to be easy; his countrymen wanted to punish him. A private in the engineers pushed his shoulder, someone else spat at him.

‘Come on, Roger,’ insisted Wolff. Casement was standing in a stupor, a thread of spit clinging to his beard. ‘Come on.’ For goodness’ sake, stop playing Christ. The Ulster sergeant was sweating, biting his lip, edging closer. Then he threw his punch, with a right hand heavy enough to fell a horse but slow. Wolff managed to shove Casement aside and the big man was at full stretch. Before he could find his balance Wolff caught him with an upper cut.