The Poison Tide (2 page)

‘Can we be clear?’ he said stiffly. ‘You work for Military Intelligence and you want me to work for you – this
special programme
?’ Nadolny smiled but said nothing, so Dilger continued. ‘I’m sorry, Count, I have no experience, nor do I wish to.’

‘You served in the Balkans – I’ve read your paper on battlefield infections. I’m not a scientist but—’

‘Very fine, very fine,’ Troester cut in. ‘Many valuable insights, and . . .’

‘You see,’ the Count said firmly, raising his hand with its stamp of authority, ‘praise from the professor. You’re a specialist in tissue cultures . . .’

‘There are scores of doctors in the Empire who know more, and I really . . .’ Dilger hesitated. The Count’s sharp little brown eyes didn’t leave his face for a second, turning, turning the signet ring between thumb and forefinger. ‘There are doctors who know more than me,’ he added lamely.

‘Young men like your nephew, Peter, are giving their lives for the Fatherland. It’s important at such times that all of us do what we can.’

‘Yes, yes, but this is a matter of conscience too.’

The professor coughed, removed his pince-nez and began to polish the lenses with his handkerchief. Voices in the outer office filled the silence at the table and, from the street, the distant jangling of an ambulance’s bell.

‘Cigarette? They’re Russian.’ Nadolny reached inside his morning coat. ‘No?’

‘It isn’t very patriotic to smoke Russian tobacco, Count,’ Troester observed with a tense little laugh.

Nadolny ignored him. ‘You must understand, this war is like no other, Doctor,’ he said with quiet emphasis. ‘The choice is either victory or destruction. Victory will be secured by those who prove the fittest – an old struggle but in a new, unforgiving age.’ He paused to draw reflectively on his cigarette. He reminded Dilger of a patient fencer, feinting, parrying, probing for a perfect hit. ‘Germany will win only if each and every one of us dedicates ourselves to victory,’ he resumed. ‘We must bend our thoughts to this task. If necessary, think the unthinkable. Everyone is a combatant. Everyone. But we bring different skills. Perhaps there are better scientists in the Empire, better doctors than you, but this is your duty . . .’

‘I’m clear about my duty, Count. It is to heal.’

‘Your duty, Doctor, is to the Fatherland, your family – to Peter.’ There was a new firmness in Nadolny’s voice. ‘There is no one better suited to this task.’

‘I don’t understand – there are others . . .’ He was angry at the Count’s presumption. ‘Why is it
my
duty? Why me?’

They let him go with a promise that he would speak with them again. His sister’s house in Charlottenburg was dark but for the candle of remembrance burning at a first-floor window. Something wet touched his face as he was collecting himself on the step. The first snow of winter. Lazy flakes were falling on his clothing, expiring in the dark wool, from something into nothing. Christmas Eve tomorrow.

The colonel’s old batman answered the door, took Dilger’s hat and coat and, with bowed head, informed him that the mistress had retired to her chamber. Colonel Lamey was still at the Front. A stuttering fire in the drawing room had barely taken the edge off the chill. The burgundy curtains were closed and had been for days, the room harshly lit by new electric wall sconces. In Dilger’s absence, his sister had stopped the large mantel clock. The silence was complete. Through the prism of grief the house was taking on a subtle new aspect, sad memories clinging to familiar objects like a film of dust. A few months before, his nephew Peter had perched on the couch by the fire with a glass of champagne.

‘A toast to victory!’ the colonel had said, his hand on his son’s shoulder. Cheers for the young soldier, good-humoured teasing, tears on the cheeks of his mother, Elizabeth.

The parcel with Peter’s personal effects was lying on an occasional table between the windows. Elizabeth was refusing to touch it. With small, light steps lest he make a noise that she would deem in the madness of grief to be disrespectful, he walked to the table, picked up the parcel and tore it open. Peter’s service revolver, a pipe and tobacco pouch, some leather gloves, his green silk scarf – a present from his mother – and some mud-stained letters and photographs. One of the photographs had been taken on the farm of Dilger’s father in Virginia. Peter had an arm about Anton’s shoulders, his head thrown back in laughter. Like brothers. Dilger’s gaze drifted to the pier glass above the table. They had the same high forehead and long face, and the strong Dilger jaw with the curious dimple in the chin. He picked up Peter’s scarf and pressed it to his face. There was still a trace of his sister’s perfume. What would my father, the old cavalryman, have thought? he wondered. He would have been proud of his grandson, Peter. What would he have wished of his son? The course Dilger had plotted to this point in his life had been easy. But his family’s grief, this Count – Nadolny – he had been snatched up in the confusing current of the times, inclination, duty, conscience pulling him to different shores.

‘Anton, what are you doing?’

His sister Elizabeth was watching him from the door.

‘Thinking of Father. I opened this . . .’ and he showed her the scarf. She looked at him, wide eyes ringed with shadow, then turned her face to the side and he could see that she was on the point of breaking. He moved quickly to her and held her shaking shoulder and she took the scarf from him. ‘Anton, what will become of me . . . how can I . . . oh God, why . . .’

As she sobbed against his chest he asked himself again: ‘Why me?’ But he knew the answer: ‘Because you are an American.’ The Count had slipped from German to speak the words very precisely in English, leaning forward with his gaze fixed on Dilger’s face, elbow on the table, right hand balled in a fist. ‘You are a German and American doctor, but we need you to be an American.’

A
SPLINTER OF WINTER
sun was forcing its way through the curtains on to the wall at an angle that suggested to Wolff he should rouse himself at once.

‘Are you awake, Mrs Curtis?’

Drunk, in a hurry, they’d fallen apart with no thought to the morning. Violet’s face was lost behind a tousled curtain of hair. There was lipstick on the sheet she had pulled to her chin and she’d chipped her nail varnish. Wolff reached a cold hand to her breast, then thought better of waking her. A shave, a shallow tepid bath, sweeping back his dark-brown hair, a splash of discreet cologne. From his dressing-room wardrobe, a black wool suit, stiff white collar and dark-blue tie. Before the mirror, for the world to see in time, a businessman of means in his late thirties, who, to judge by his dark eyes, was burning too much midnight oil. Slipping on his coat, he was searching for his hat when Violet called to him: ‘You
are
taking me to dinner, Sebastian darling, aren’t you?’

‘I’ll try.’ Wolff wasn’t sure what he would want to do by the evening.

The cab dropped him in Trafalgar Square. He walked briskly into Northumberland Avenue and at the corner with Great Scotland Yard he stopped to light a cigarette, turning to face the way he’d come as if sheltering the guttering flame. Satisfied, he walked on into Whitehall Court. Number 2 was an eight-storey apartment block in the French renaissance style, directly behind the War Office and next to the National Liberal Club. An MP had financed the building with money swindled from those he had described on election day as ordinary hard-working families. Thousands had been left penniless to provide a brash home at the heart of government for civil servants and wealthy businessmen. Its façade of Portland stone and pitched green slate towered over the Embankment, drawing the eye of commuters crossing the river into Charing Cross Station.

In its polished hall the porter slid a register and pen across the desk to Wolff without comment.

‘You’re new.’

‘Three months, sir.’

Wolff pushed it back unsigned: ‘I’m visiting Captain Spencer. I know my way.’

The captain’s private lift was little more than the width of a man’s broad shoulders. The grille slid into place with a rattle and clunk that always reminded Wolff of earth falling on a coffin lid. Apartment 45 was a maze of passages and oddly shaped rooms beneath the eaves of the Court, so difficult to find from the stairway that few residents had any inkling it was there. Its occupant, a short, thickset naval officer, was occasionally seen crossing the entrance hall with companions or walking in the direction of Whitehall. Neighbours who tried to engage him in conversation received no more than the time of day. Only a man with a perfect understanding of the deep reserve of upper-middle-class London and its slavish attachment to the proprieties would have had the temerity to hide the Bureau in genteel Whitehall Court.

‘He’s waiting for you, Lieutenant Wolff.’ The captain’s secretary stepped away from the door to let him enter. ‘You’re late. I telephoned your apartment . . .’ A censorious frown was hovering between Miss Groves’ finely plucked eyebrows. ‘And I spoke to your . . .
friend
.’ The word fell to its ‘
end
’ as if Miss Groves had pushed it from the Tarpeian for sexual impropriety. The captain’s nice ‘gels’ cared a great deal about such things.

The naval gentleman whom the other denizens of the Court called ‘Spencer’ – Captain Mansfield Cumming – was leaning heavily on sticks in his outer office. ‘Where the hell have you been?’ He glared at Wolff through his gold-rimmed monocle. ‘You’re still a naval officer, you know? My office in five minutes.’ He turned too smartly and one of his sticks locked beneath a chair.

‘Damn it!’

Wolff stepped forward to help. ‘No, damn it, man, I can manage,’ he said, jerking it free. ‘And bring us some coffee, Miss Groves. Lieutenant Wolff looks as if he could do with some.’

He stomped slowly towards his office, hunched like a grizzly bear.

‘He’s doing very well,’ whispered Miss Groves reverentially. Pinned in the wreckage of a car, it was rumoured he had hacked off his own foot with a penknife in order to crawl to his dying son. ‘It’s only been three months. Flinty, isn’t he?’

‘He loves his work.’

The captain was breathing heavily when Wolff entered, his face a little sallow, elbows resting on a copy of
The Times
. With a curt nod he indicated the chair on the opposite side of his desk. It was a large airy office, simply decorated with naval charts and a picture of French villagers before a Prussian firing squad. He had placed some of the mechanical gadgets he enjoyed tinkering with at idle moments on a table beneath the window. The largest piece of furniture in the room was a huge steel Dartmouth-green safe where he kept his ‘eyes only’ files. Two of these were on the desk in front of Wolff.

‘Have you seen this?’ Cumming tapped the newspaper with his forefinger. ‘For some extraordinary reason, they launched their first air raid on your part of the world. Killed a boy in King’s Lynn.’

‘Yes, my mother thought she heard the Zeppelin; it passed over her farm.’

‘Quite a coincidence – I mean, after your visit to the factory at Friedrichshafen. That was a fine piece of work.’

Wolff didn’t reply.

‘No one took the damn things seriously until they read your report,’ Cumming continued. ‘The PS at the War Office reminded me of that the other day; wanted to know how you’d managed it. Told him to mind his own bloody business.’

Get to the point, for goodness’ sake, thought Wolff. He’d been one of C’s scallywags for almost as long as there’d been a Bureau, so they could dispense with the customary overture. The captain didn’t play it well anyway, too soapy, too obvious.

‘It was the reason I was able to get you back from Turkey, of course. That was a bad business.’ Cumming shook his head sympathetically. ‘But it’s been a while now, hasn’t it? Nine months?’

‘Something like that.’

‘Do you think you’re ready now?’

‘Ready for what, sir?’

‘It’s the Irish, you see. Or should I say the Irish problem . . .’ He was interrupted by a knock at the door and Miss Groves entered with the tray. They sat in silence as she poured the coffee, Cumming polishing his monocle with a handkerchief. It was his favourite prop. It made him look villainous, like a spymaster in a shilling shocker. Without it he was the sort of stout, elderly military gentleman you passed in the street without a second glance: mid fifties, with thin white hair, a Punch-like chin, a small mouth and keen grey eyes. They had liked and respected each other once. Cumming had described him as ‘a born spy’ and he’d meant it as a compliment. There’d been disagreements, difficult times, but Wolff had trusted him in almost all things. In rather too much, as it turned out. Manipulative and as unscrupulous as Genghis Khan, he had reflected in the leisure of his Turkish prison cell, unfettered by personal loyalty, just as he was required to be by the custom and professional practice of his role. The door closed behind Miss Groves.

‘What do you know about Roger Casement?’

Wolff shrugged. ‘No more than I read in the papers. Champion of native rights in Africa and elsewhere, celebrated servant of the Crown turned Irish rebel—’

‘Traitor,’ interrupted Cumming. ‘He was in America, now he’s in Germany. Gave our fellows the slip. New papers, new face – he shaved his beard . . .’ He reached for his cup, cradling it in large calloused sailor’s hands. ‘There’s no doubt about what he wants, of course. Guns and men. Force Irish independence at the point of a German bayonet, and succeed or fail, they know that civil unrest at home would draw men from the fighting in France . . .’

‘. . . and set a poor example to the rest of the Empire?’

C put down his cup deliberately. ‘Do you believe that, or is it the cynicism you effect as one of your clever disguises?’

‘Merely an observation, sir.’

‘Do you have views on Ireland?’

‘I’m not very interested in politics.’

He nodded approvingly. ‘It’s enough to be a patriot. We’re at war.’

‘As you say, sir.’

‘Which is why I hope you’ll agree to my proposition.’

‘You haven’t made one yet, sir.’