The Poison Tide (27 page)

Wolff looked at him scornfully. ‘Pull yourself together, man, it isn’t that sensitive.’ In the space left, he placed two cigar detonators side by side.

‘All right. Help me put it together.’

‘What do I do with this?’ McKee lifted the shell.

‘Put it in the sack, of course.’

They slid the crate back into place and were looking for another when they heard raised voices in the passageway. The mate was plainly in no mood to accept the brush-off a second time. McKee looked rattled.

‘I’ll deal with it,’ Wolff assured him.

Jaw set, feet apart, seamen at his back, the mate meant business.

‘The captain, where is he?’ Wolff commanded before he could speak.

His mouth opened then snapped shut like a fish expiring in a net.

‘Well, man? Where is he?’ Wolff removed his cap and slapped it against his leg, stroking his hair back in exasperation. ‘You know you failed, don’t you? You,’ he said, directing a finger at the mate’s chest, ‘you failed.’

Why? Because the mate had allowed three strangers into a hold full of TNT. The badge? Anyone might wear a badge. Saboteurs might wear a badge.

The Dark Invader approved. Wasn’t de Witt’s performance proof of his own fine judgement? He heard the story from Hinsch, who’d listened to McKee’s breathless account with something like grudging admiration.

‘You enjoyed your adventure, Mr de Witt?’ Rintelen enquired with boyish enthusiasm.

‘Not especially,’ replied Wolff tersely; he’d hated every bloody minute.

‘So, you earned your money.’

They were sitting side by side on Martha Held’s couch, his arm draped round Wolff’s shoulder – like a couple of
Schwule
.

‘We will wait for the dust to settle,’ he said, leaning forward to pour the wine. ‘Next week, perhaps.’

Wolff’s glass chinked against the neck of the bottle. ‘Next week?’

‘Another ship, Mr de Witt.’

‘I thought you wanted me to instruct your men?’

‘Correct. You will. But it would be a shame to waste your talent.’

Wolff sipped his wine.

‘More? Naturally, I will pay you for this too.’ He shifted to the edge of the couch so his little brown eyes could dance about Wolff’s face. ‘Are you unhappy with this arrangement?’

‘Not if the price is . . .’ Wolff smiled wryly ‘. . .
correct.
’

‘Then that is agreed. Good. Now you must excuse me.’ He got to his feet, smoothing the same imaginary creases from his perfectly pressed trousers. ‘I have something I must attend to. No, stay,’ his small hand hovering above Wolff. ‘Please, there is one thing more . . .’

‘It’s after midnight,’ Wolff complained. He’d been wound so tightly all evening. ‘Can’t it wait? I’m tired.’

‘I am afraid, no, it cannot.’ Rintelen smiled shiftily. ‘I will be back. Soon.’

But he didn’t come back. Half buried in the couch, eyes closed between sips of wine, the time ticked into the early hours. Clara, the girl he’d paid for nothing, found him again. Why wouldn’t she? It was the easiest money she’d earned in a long time. She sat with her head on his shoulder, sharing his glass of wine, and he was too tired and bored to care; too tired to get up and leave; too tired to resist when with a fragile smile she led him by the hand to her room. And although his mind was befuddled, he recognised he’d been played like a fool. The ship, the instruction to sink more ships, Martha Held’s at midnight – why hadn’t he rung Gaunt? – he’d been played the whole damn evening. And now the girl. I should be more afraid of Rintelen, he thought.

She folded his clothes and placed them neatly on a chair. Then she took off her silk dress and put it carefully on a hanger on the back of the door. Naked on the threadbare rug before him, a little spindly, a little knock-kneed, with gooseflesh on her arms and thighs, and an uncertain, almost innocent smile. Perhaps that was his imagination.

‘I’m to look after you,’ she said, avoiding his gaze. ‘There’s more wine – if you want it . . .’

‘No. No. Thank you.’ Someone should protect her, comfort her, offer her some tenderness.

‘Lie back.’

Her burgundy bedspread smelt of cheap cologne, but not enough to mask the stale sweat.

‘No. Lie beside me,’ he said softly. ‘Here. Just here.’

But she didn’t lie beside him because it wasn’t part of her routine. Instead she fucked him, bumping him like a German horse.

‘Good?’ she asked, collapsing beside him at last.

He brushed a strand of hair from her small face. ‘Fine. Thank you.’

He didn’t need to pay, she said – unless he wanted to offer more. His friend Gaché had settled everything.

T
HE FOLLOWING MORNING
he woke with a wooden mouth and an agonising sense of self-disgust. He was still nursing it and a strong coffee in his spartan sitting room when the telephone rang.

It was Laura. ‘Mr Devoy has taken you at your word.’ Her warmth made him feel worse. Of course he betrayed her every day, that was his job, but going with one of Martha’s tarts, well, he felt terrible.

‘The leaflets, silly,’ she prompted. ‘I can meet you at the Hoboken ferry terminal at ten.’ The line crackled expectantly. ‘It’s to be our largest meeting so far.’ She was willing him to say, ‘See you there,’ but he was glad he wasn’t obliged to. Something out of the blue, a business meeting, he explained, not Gaché, no, ordinary work of the sort he might mention to the neighbours. It wasn’t his best performance because he found it harder lying to women he admired, although he had had plenty of practice. Laura didn’t disguise her disappointment and he admired her even more for it and felt another intense pang of regret.

Tired brown eyes in the mirror, struggling with a tie, it was a morning for reflection, a morning when the heart didn’t seem quite tough enough. Men learn to live with suffering and adversity until it breaks them, often suddenly. Sometimes it is the same with lies. Judgement is swift, his mother used to say with her scrawny forefinger raised, and he’d almost come to believe her in the impenetrable darkness of a Turkish cell. Every new lie a stone in a sack – like the one he’d carried on to the ship the night before. Sometimes he wasn’t conscious of its weight, sometimes he staggered beneath it – one day it would crush him. This morning his burden was a heavy one, and he was sure that was how it should be.

‘For God’s sake, man, you’re doing your duty. If you can’t love yourself more, learn at least to forgive yourself,’ C had chided him once.
Pro Patria
. Behind his desk, C was able to draw a thick straight line between the man and the lie. In the field it was easy to lose the line. The soldier stares down the barrel of his gun at a nameless face but the spy laughs, calls his enemy ‘friend’, makes love to, then betrays, his enemy
.
Wolff was glad there was enough left of who he used to be to feel sick about it, or was that simply the drink and the image he couldn’t shake off – of Clara counting her gratuity?

At a little before ten o’clock he caught a taxicab as far as Madison and, thankful for the clear air, walked the last few blocks to the Prince George. Satisfied he didn’t have company, he crossed the lobby to the elevators and took one to the fifth. The doors opened on a bellhop balancing half a dozen pieces of luggage. Wolff nodded to him, stepped from the elevator, stopped, patted his jacket for a key, sighed heavily, then turned on to the stairs as if intent on returning to the first floor. On the third, he set off along the corridor to Mr Ponting’s
suite.

‘You’re late,’ growled Gaunt. The room was full of tobacco smoke and for no obvious reason the curtains were drawn conspiratorially. Rising from the couch, a dapper young man he didn’t recognise, and from the seat opposite, an old Secret Service Bureau lag he did.

Wolff looked Gaunt up and down pointedly. ‘Mr Ponting is a businessman.’ The damn fool had come to their meeting dressed in his naval attaché’s uniform, medal ribbons, all the trimmings.

Gaunt flushed angrily. ‘Clearing the mess you left us last night . . . Impertinent,’ he blustered. ‘There wasn’t time to change.’

‘There would be if it was your life at stake,’ replied Wolff coldly.

‘Lieutenant Wolff, isn’t it?’ interjected the young man, stepping forward sprightly to offer his hand. ‘William Wiseman. Expecting me, I hope.’ He smiled engagingly, his thick brown moustache bristling like a squirrel’s tail. ‘Cambridge, wasn’t it? Before my time; I was up at Jesus in ’03.’ Excepting his moustache, he didn’t look old enough to have been at university in ’03. Very English country house but with the quiet authority of one familiar with the world beyond its gates. He must have paid a good deal for his clothes. ‘You weren’t a boxer, were you?’ he enquired, with just the suggestion in his inflection of time spent in America.

‘A runner.’

‘I’m a boxer.’ Small and plump, he was no more than a hopeful bantam weight, but with a certain swagger. ‘Well, I used to be,’ he added with a regretful smile, the moustache twitching again. ‘Just a scrapper now.’

‘Yes, well . . .’ Gaunt wriggled his shoulders as if he could hear the echo of the same ringside bell, ready to square up to all-comers. ‘Sir William’s setting up shop here, Wolff. Reporting . . .’ he paused for particular emphasis ‘. . . to me.’

Wiseman raised his right eyebrow a little but said nothing.

‘Officially, Sir William will be our man from the Ministry of Munitions,’ Gaunt continued.

‘Unofficially, we’re Section V of MI 1(c). That’s what the War Office chaps are calling our bit of the Bureau. Everything has to be a number or letter, don’t it?’ observed Wiseman smoothly. ‘You, me, old Thwaites here,’ he turned to his companion; ‘we’ve become a traditional two-finger salute to the Hun.’

‘Glad you’re still alive, Wolff.’ Thwaites limped a few steps to greet him with a handshake and a slap on the back. ‘My leg?’ he asked, following Wolff’s gaze. ‘Gallipoli. Lucky they left me with it.’ He looked ten years older, thinner, his skin yellow like a smoke stain.

‘A couple of crocks,’ Wiseman joked, hand to his chest. ‘Touch of gas at Ypres. But the brain still works, eh, Thwaites?’

‘Can we get down to business?’ Gaunt grumbled.

First Wolff wanted to open the curtains, and yes, it was possible, perhaps because he asked so humbly. It was a dreary November day and cold on the street, the hotel doorman blowing vapour into his balled hands, a baker unloading warm rolls in front of the restaurant opposite, the faces of passers-by bent into their scarves; no parked motor cars, no one loitering, no one where they shouldn’t be.

‘Your ship, the
Blackness
– she sailed this morning,’ Gaunt called to him from a chair.

‘Christ!’ Wolff spun away from the window to face him. ‘Rintelen said she was leaving tomorrow.’ His heart fluttered like a tiny bird.

‘Then he lied,’ replied Gaunt, with something very like relish. ‘I got your message but it was too late. Late again . . .’; even this opportunity to score points he took without shame. ‘I couldn’t get my people aboard her.’

‘That’s why he made me visit him at the club, and . . .’ Wolff hesitated, his conscience pricking him hard, ‘. . . kept me there.’ Lie back, he thought; goodness, he’d fallen over.

‘I thought he trusted you.’ Wiseman was gazing at him intently over his fingertips.

‘No one trusts anyone in this sort of enterprise. He was making sure.’

‘Three to four days before they detonate, you say?’ enquired Gaunt. ‘There’s still time to get them off.’

‘He may have lied about that too,’ Wiseman noted, smoothing his moustache thoughtfully with the tip of his right index finger.

‘Yes.’ Wolff felt obliged to acknowledge the possibility. He loosened his tie a little, his collar slipping between damp fingers. Suddenly the room felt close.

‘Look, there’s time. My people are onto it,’ said Gaunt empathetically.

‘And they know . . .’

‘Yes, yes. Hold number two. Six along, six up.’ Gaunt sounded very Australian suddenly, a sure sign that he was losing his temper again. ‘Sit down, Wolff, for God’s sake.’

‘You did the right thing, old boy;’ this from Thwaites. ‘No choice but to plant the things. As they say here in America, you’re the ace in our hole. Can’t risk your cover.’

Wolff nodded gratefully. He walked round the couch to join the circle. Gaunt was holding court at its centre in the only comfortable armchair.

‘The real question is, how on earth is he doing it? Can you tell me . . .’ Wiseman glanced sideways at Gaunt, ‘. . .
us
how he’s smuggling these bombs aboard the ships?’

Of course Wolff could explain. Hadn’t he just planted two of the damn things on the
Blackness
? The same unholy alliance: Irish and German. A spark from Roger Casement in Berlin, fanned to a flame by the presence of a prodigiously energetic man, the self-styled Dark Invader.

‘Dark Invader . . .’ Thwaites guffawed. ‘That’s a bit rich, isn’t it?’

‘He’s an actor certainly,’ replied Wolff, running his fingers through his hair reflectively. ‘There’s a little of that in all of us who do this work, isn’t there? He knows what he’s doing. Firstly, forcing up the price of ammunition to the Allies – that’s through a cover company . . .’

‘Gibbons. Cedar Street,’ interjected Gaunt. ‘My Czechs are watching the place . . .’

‘Dr Albert made me sign one of the company’s contracts,’ continued Wolff. ‘Albert’s the paymaster. Then there’s Clan na Gael
–
Rintelen is encouraging the Irish to organise strikes in all the East Coast ports we use. Thirdly, the sabotage network – taking the war to us here in America;’ and he told them about the envelope Koenig had passed over his greasy plate to the man from Green’s. ‘Koenig used to organise the security for Hamburg America, knows all the agencies I shouldn’t wonder. I turn up like Santa Claus with my sack and a Green’s detective gives me a badge. Result, two packages in the hold.’ He frowned pensively. ‘I expect Dr Albert is paying detective agencies at the other ports too.’

‘
Quis custodiet
, what?’ observed Wiseman. ‘Who guards the guards?’

‘The thing is,’ Wolff leant forward to offer him his cigarette case, ‘someone with a badge and a lot of balls can do whatever he damn well pleases.’