The Poison Tide (24 page)

‘Heard of a ship called the
Beatus
?’ Wolff asked. ‘She was lost with all hands sometime around the twenty-first.’

Gaunt checked his cup a few inches from his mouth, then lowered it slowly on to the saucer. ‘Christ. They managed that? How?’

Wolff told him; some of it at least. He began by describing the strike meeting and how Rintelen was encouraging the Irish to stir up trouble in the ports. No need to worry about that one, Gaunt remarked imperiously; he was bankrolling people in the union too – they would sort out the Irish. Then Wolff told him of the
Friedrich der Grosse
,
the network of saboteurs the Germans were putting in place, and that they’d sunk a number of ships already. ‘He’s set up a company to buy what he needs and . . .’

‘Cedar Street,’ interjected Gaunt. ‘Import–export – E. V. Gibbons Inc. My people followed him there.’

‘Emile V. Gaché,’ Wolff muttered to himself.

‘What?’

‘E. V. G. Not very imaginative.’

‘My Czech fellow says his company has spent a king’s ransom buying ammunition and other things, just to stop us getting our hands on it. Doctor Albert writes the cheques.’

Wolff reached into his jacket. ‘I have an appointment with him this afternoon. Damn . . .’ He held up a damp and crumpled cigarette. ‘Would you mind?’

The naval attaché leant forward with his case. ‘I want you to find out about this network.’ He looked at Wolff earnestly, belligerently, as if to say: ‘I am the commander of this operation and don’t you forget it when you are out there on your own.’

‘How are they smuggling the detonators past the guards?’ he asked, his mind rolling at the pace of a traction engine. ‘And this Agent Delmar – London has asked again.’

‘The Admiralty?’

‘Your lot.’ Rising quickly, he walked to the window, his shoulders wriggling in his uniform jacket. Wolff watched him as he gazed into the street below, a slight twitch at his eye. Your lot are sending someone. God knows why,’ he spoke as one for whom resentment is a habit. ‘Here . . .’ Taking an envelope from his jacket he tossed it to Wolff like a petulant schoolboy. ‘Bloody nonsense.’ It fell at his feet.

Wolff gazed at it for a moment, then picked it up and slipped it in his jacket.

‘Aren’t you going to look at it?’

‘Later.’

‘Later,
sir.
I’ll tell your fellow we don’t need anyone; wasting his time. I have it all in hand,’ he said, his senior service vowels slipping a little. ‘Perhaps we will have this sewn up by the time he arrives.’

Wolff raised his head enquiringly.

‘It’s obvious, man: the filing cabinets in his cabin. It’s in there, isn’t it? – the network, Delmar . . . everything.’

Dr Albert was typical of that stratum of middle-class men who are no more than the sum of their working lives and are only able to conduct relationships with others according to the rules and practices of their chosen profession. A man of precedents and privileges whose patent for life had been drawn up in a law faculty somewhere thirty years before. Pinched and dry, with bad skin and a scrappy grey moustache, he looked as if he had reached middle age without finding either just cause to laugh or demonstrative evidence for love.

He wanted no more involvement with de Witt than was necessary for the conclusion of a ‘satisfactory arrangement’ and was a little vexed to find that he was dealing with the sort of man who usually commanded his respect. ‘Most of Mr Gaché’s associates are . . . well, they are not educated men, Mr de Witt,’ he explained.

They were sitting in an office on the first floor of the Hamburg America building on Broadway, panelled like the stern cabin of a German clipper. ‘I have drawn this up on behalf of my client,’ he said, taking a file from a drawer and pushing it across the desk to Wolff.

It was the draft of a formal contract of employment with the company E. V. Gibbons Inc. ‘You are an engineer? Shall I say for “consultancy services”?’ He picked up his pen to make amendments. ‘Is something wrong?’

Wolff was smiling with amusement at the absurdity of a contract to commit acts of sabotage.

Dr Albert shook the knot of his tie irritably. ‘An initial period of three months?’

‘Is there any danger of you taking me to court for breach of contract?’

‘No, it isn’t likely,’ he replied slowly. ‘I expect my client would seek another form of redress.’ He examined his nails for a moment to allow Wolff time to consider the tenor of this observation. ‘Most of my client’s associates prefer to be paid in cash, of course, but he thought a professional man would need . . .’ he paused again, searching his lexicon for a legal euphemism.

‘An alibi?’

‘A more formal arrangement.’

Wolff pushed the contract back across the desk. ‘No.’

He stared at Wolff coldly for a moment, then put the file back in his drawer. ‘As you wish.’

They did agree on terms. A payment of four hundred dollars into the account of a Mr R. Curtis at J. P. Morgan on Wall Street. Albert pressed him to sign an invoice and he agreed, writing a false address and another false name. Every dollar had to be accounted for, Albert insisted. ‘It’s a process, you see.’

And when the process was over, his secretary escorted Wolff down to the lobby where half a dozen Hamburg America clerks sat twiddling their thumbs. At a desk a few yards from him was the fat man whom he’d seen slinking away from the strike meeting in the park. He looked just as guilty, perspiring with the effort of being alive. The clerk pushed a piece of paper towards him and he bent to sign it, resting his weight on his outstretched arm. Wolff guessed it was one of the fastidious Dr Albert’s receipts for cash-in-hand associates. Conscious that the fat man would see him if he glanced to his right, Wolff turned and fastened on a clerk for the address of an uptown restaurant. From the corner of his eye, he saw the fat man pick up an envelope and slip it into the pocket over his heart. Then, head rocking, he lumbered towards the door and out on to Broadway.

He was a surprisingly difficult man to follow. He moved warily in the shadows, his shoulder almost brushing walls and shopfronts, forcing sidewalk traffic to his left like a boulder at the edge of a fast-flowing stream. Catch me and the game’s up, Wolff thought; Dr Albert would write him off as a bad debt. But instinct and the envelope suggested it was something he couldn’t ignore. He didn’t expect a man that size to walk far. Sure enough, after a couple of blocks he hauled himself up the steps of the elevated at Fulton Street. Wolff held back for a few minutes but it was a busy station and he couldn’t afford to leave it for as long as he would have wished. He bought a five-cent ticket for the line, dropped it in the chopper, then drifted on to the platform. There were a dozen or so people waiting for the next train.

The fat man had wandered a few yards off but was still uncomfortably close. Wolff ambled in the opposite direction until he found a map of the elevated train network posted on the wall of a shelter, which he pretended to consult. He was considering what he should do next when the track began to sing. It was a Line 3 train all the way to Bronx Park with a score or more stops on the way. ‘Christ!’ He’d forgotten some of them pulled only a single carriage. ‘Lucky for once,’ he muttered under his breath: this time there were three. He watched the man climb into the first, then joined the last. At the next station he hovered by the door to confirm that the man was still on the train. The second stop was busy Chatham Square. For a moment he was distracted by an old Polish lady who pressed him to be a good citizen and help her from the carriage. The platform was crowded with commuters waiting for an express to take them across the Harlem River and it was not until the guard had blown his whistle and the train had taken up the slack that he noticed the fat man’s head swinging towards the barrier.

‘Hey buddy,’ protested the guard, as he stepped from the moving train.

Wolff followed the big man down the steps and waited in the gloom beneath the rumbling iron arches of the elevated as he crossed the square to a dingy café. It was a neighbourhood of cheap saloons, flophouses and hucksters’ stalls at the edge of the old Five Points slum: crowded brick tenements and alleys hung with grey washing; shoeshines, rag pickers and beggars. The first stop after Ellis Island for families without a dollar to their name and for those who weren’t particular how they made their money; as squalid as the old-world streets they had left in search of liberty from poverty. Too good now for Germans and all but a few of the Irish, it was the jetsam of the new century who lived, copulated and died in this babel, the Italians and the Poles, Jews and Chinamen. The sort of district, Wolff reflected, where it was possible to find any number of men who would be ready to stick you in the back – or blow up a ship. Was that the fat man’s business?

There was a small Italian market in the corner of the square only a few yards from the café. It wasn’t an easy vantage point; he was too well dressed, a little too Anglo-Saxon. Fortunately, the market was restless with late-afternoon trade, the stallholders in duckbill caps and boaters, barking out their bargains in the Sicilian dialect, while young women in brightly coloured shawls queued for a few cents’ advantage and local urchins joked and shouted insults from the tailboard of a passing cart. From beneath the canopy of a boot store, Wolff could see through the confusion to the fat man in the café, his shoulder pressed to the grimy window. In no time at all he’d ordered a plate of something and was devouring it mechanically.

Someone jogged Wolff’s elbow: ‘Shine, miss-ter?’ It was a swarthy-looking boy in a grubby shirt and braces, his trousers hoisted a foot from his boots.

‘Can you do it here, in front of the shop?’

He gave Wolff a toothless grin. ‘Is my uncle’s store,’ he lisped. ‘Sit yerseff.’

Wolff was particular about placing the chair.

At a little after five, the fat man was joined by a cheap suit, short, with a dark complexion and a thin waxed handlebar moustache. Hungarian perhaps; he might have been a waiter in a small-town
Bierkeller
somewhere in the Habsburg Empire. They shook hands, a little reluctantly on the small man’s part, Wolff thought. He refused the waiter’s offer of drink or food and appeared anxious to get on with whatever business he was there to transact.

‘Finished!’

‘Here.’ Wolff flipped another dime to the shine. ‘Do them again, will you – and another coin if you don’t ask me why.’

But Rintelen’s man wasn’t in a hurry. A second plate of food was placed in front of him and he polished it off with the same ugly relish. His contact watched in distaste, fiddling impatiently with a knife. Replete at last, the fat man wiped his mouth on his sleeve, then fished the envelope from his jacket. It rested beneath his heavy hand as he leant over the table confidentially. For a couple of minutes he spoke in what must have been a whisper while his companion made a note in a pocketbook. Business concluded, he slid the money across. With just a curt nod, the contact left the café and drifted through the crush around the market stalls to the kerb. After a few yards he stepped from the sidewalk and turned across the square in the direction of Wolff.

God, he’s seen me, he thought with a surge of anger and disgust.

‘All right!’ He jerked his shoe savagely from the shine’s hands and got to his feet. But he was wrong: the little man with the waxed moustache slipped between an empty cart and a stall selling straw hats and crossed to a door just three down from the uncle’s boot store.

‘Here.’ Wolff tossed the shine a quarter. ‘This is a good day for you, yes?’

The boy flashed his toothless smile. ‘Again?’ he asked, glancing down at Wolff’s shoes.

‘No, no, bravo. Just one thing . . .’ and he held up another coin. ‘Can you read?’

‘Multo bene,’ he replied indignantly.

‘The door there, the green one, run over and tell me the names on the bell.’

He chuckled. ‘There justa one.’

‘Oh?’

‘G-r-een’s Dee-tect-if A-gen-zee,’ the boy enunciated slowly.

‘Green’s Detective Agency?’

‘Si, signore.’

Rintelen’s man settled the check and left a few minutes later. It was almost dark, a sharp October chill in the air, and the streetlamps glowed soft with the threat of rain. On evenings like this the city ticked a little quicker. Manhattan pulled down its hat, turned up its collar and lengthened its stride for home; and those travelling further, uptown or across the East River, were grateful for the fug of a smoke-filled carriage. The fat man walked only as far as Bowery, then caught a tram to East 2nd. Little Germany. So they were neighbours. Wolff tracked him from the opposite side of the street, just another Joe trailing home from a factory or department store to a plump wife and children, bills, boiled potatoes, and that day’s
New Yorker Staats-Zeitung
. Two blocks down only, across from the city’s Marble Cemetery, the fat man let himself into a tall tenement of the sort common on the Lower East Side – black iron fire escapes clinging to its brick face like a cancerous growth. Wolff waited in the shadow of a doorway for a few minutes to see if a light came on at the front. No such luck.

The caretaker took his time to answer the door. He was an old man, bent and grey. His shirtsleeves were rolled up and he was holding a kitchen knife; he must have been cooking his supper. Wolff thought he detected the faint whiff of incontinence.

‘Yes,’ he asked suspiciously.

‘There’s a man, a fat man who lives here,’ Wolff replied in German. ‘Short black curly hair, grey suit, lots of chins,’ and he held his hands to his neck to demonstrate.

The old man blinked at him but said nothing.

‘I have something for him.’ Wolff paused, inviting a response. ‘Well?’

‘Not here.’

‘You’re Swabian?’

‘What of it.’ He began to close the door. Wolff reached out to catch its edge. ‘Just a minute . . . look, he dropped something.’

‘Are you police?’

‘No, didn’t I just say – he dropped some money. I want to give it back to him.’

The caretaker stopped trying to force the door. ‘How much?’

Wolff took five dollars from his wallet. ‘It may have been more.’ Then, after a pause, ‘You understand?’