The Poison Tide (28 page)

‘And the cigar bombs, tell me about those, man,’ demanded Gaunt, the springs of his chair groaning as he crossed then uncrossed his long legs. He was unsettled, he wanted to ask the questions.

‘They’re ingenious.’ Wolff bent to light his own cigarette. ‘Simple, inexpensive, easy to hide. They leave no trace – ingenious. The inventor is elderly, Bismarck whiskers, Prussian I would say. Got him to say a few words in English – he speaks it well and with an American accent – New York, New Jersey – so he’s been here a while.’

‘Do you have a name?’ Gaunt was fumbling for a notebook.

‘Only a false one, Ziethen.’

‘You’re sure it’s false?’

‘Not one hundred per cent . . .’

‘Von Ziethen was one of Frederick the Great’s commanders,’ Thwaites explained.

‘“Correct”,’ as friend Rintelen would say. And the code word for the operation was one of Frederick’s battles:
Leuthen
.’ Wolff drew heavily on his cigarette. He was apprehensive about the ship and impatient for Gaunt to leave. ‘Is there any tea?’

Wiseman was watching him from behind his fingertips, as inscrutable as a plaster saint. ‘It’s not very warm;’ but rising from the couch, he stepped over to the table and poured Wolff some anyway. ‘Sugar?’

‘Two, thank you.’

‘Heard any word of this fellow,
Delmar
?’ he drawled, handing Wolff the cup.

‘No.’

‘They’re worried in London. The Admiralty has a source . . .’

‘I know.’

‘You do?’ Wiseman raised his bushy eyebrows. ‘London thinks the fellow’s important, wants to know what he’s doing here.’ He sat down and took a pipe from his jacket. ‘Inspiration, anyone?’

‘Wolff needs to take a look in Rintelen’s office,’ replied Gaunt with quarterdeck confidence. ‘It’s all in there.’

Wolff would have liked to disagree; the ‘Wolff needs to’, he didn’t appreciate. Irritatingly, it wasn’t an unreasonable assumption. Contracts, accounts, receipts, the business of war in America expressed as a balance sheet; that Dr Albert was a meticulous record keeper he’d witnessed with his own eyes. Was there a securer repository available to him in New York than the
Friedrich der Grosse
? ‘Our piece of Germany,’ Rintelen called her.

‘Do you think you’ll be able to take a look?’ Wiseman enquired, pulling at strands of tobacco.

A number of thoughts flashed through Wolff’s mind as he considered his answer: that Rintelen would never trust him to be alone on the ship; that no one but the crew would hear the crack of a revolver in the cabin, and if they dropped him from the stern the tide might take him to Coney Island – he’d always meant to visit. He wondered how sorry Laura would be and resolved to ask her to dinner, and he remembered that the cabin door was secured with a basic mortise, the filing cabinets with something simpler, but there wouldn’t be time to do more than glance through the files and some would be in code. And if he was caught he would shoot, and he would make a particular effort to finish Hinsch because that would be a genuine pleasure. He thought also that for a Bureau new boy almost ten years his junior, Wiseman was asking rather a lot, but that he managed it so graciously he was probably accustomed to getting his way.

‘It’s a question of opportunity,’ he said flatly.

‘Believe me, I’m sensible of the risk,’ Wiseman observed with what at least sounded like humility; ‘and we can’t leave it all to Lieutenant Wolff.’

‘It’s his duty,’ replied Gaunt.

‘You know, I have some ideas . . .’ Wiseman held a match to his pipe. The tongue of flame rising from its bowl reminded Wolff of the detonator, and with a frisson of anxiety the smell of rotting vegetables, a crate six up and six along the stack, and fifty Empire sailors.

‘I have . . . some . . . some thoughts . . . I might share, Captain,’ Wiseman puffed. ‘Shall we leave these fellows and sort a few things out by ourselves?’

There wasn’t anything more to discuss – it was a Navy show, Gaunt grumbled. But Wiseman persisted, oiling his ruffled colonial feathers with a charm that demonstrated perfectly why C had put his faith in a Secret Service rookie.

‘Americans are dewy eyed about English aristocrats,’ Thwaites observed when they’d gone. ‘Sir William will be a great success here.’

Wolff got to his feet and wandered back to the window. ‘I think that’s what Gaunt is worried about,’ he muttered distractedly. A motor car had broken down in the middle of the street and a plump lady in a preposterously large hat was standing in front of it with a crank in her hand, waiting for a gentleman to do the decent thing. ‘He’s careless,’ Wolff remarked. ‘You saw the naval uniform’.

Storm clouds were rolling in from the Atlantic, towering grey and shifting in an awkward image of the city. Different faces in the windows of the restaurant, a police officer strolling along the sidewalk, more cars, more people moving with purpose. There would be rain. Hard rain.

‘Prickly customer,’ Thwaites declared. ‘Thinks we’re taking over his patch.’

‘Aren’t we?’

‘I suppose we are. But it’s time to get on the front foot here.’

Thwaites had friends in America. He’d spent ten years in New York, most of them as a foreign affairs adviser for a newspaper. Charming, self-deprecating, the sort of upper-middle-class Englishman who went down well with everyone from millionaire steel magnates to State Department secretaries; a cocktail-party regular, a particular favourite on the Long Island summer circuit, a guest and special companion of the celebrated beauty, Edna May Lewisohn. How special was a matter of speculation because Thwaites’ American friends knew him to be the soul of discretion – and in affairs of the heart at least he could be. Wolff had met him in Washington before the war and was so impressed by the ease with which he worked the room that he’d mentioned his name to the Bureau. If that meant he was responsible for drawing him into C’s web, he was heartily sorry.

‘I think we should work with the people here,’ Thwaites continued. ‘Get them onside. Sir William feels the same. Your Captain Gaunt seems to wants to do it alone . . .’

‘He isn’t my captain, Norman.’

‘No, of course not, sorry old boy.’ He waved his cigarette at Wolff apologetically. ‘Damn fool nonsense. Look, there’s a chap called Tunney in charge of the Police Department Bomb Squad; might have a word with him. Keep your name out of it, of course. Any objections?’

‘Koenig . . .’ Wolff had forgotten. ‘I think the police are watching him already.’

‘I’ll ask old Tunney, he’ll know.’ Rising with the help of his stick, Thwaites limped across the room to a drinks tray. ‘I’m having one, you? Know it’s a little early but, well . . . whisky all right?’ He was perspiring with the effort.

Wolff said that whisky was fine. For a while neither of them spoke. Thwaites was taking his time with the drinks. Across the street a storekeeper was rolling his awning, the wind had taken a little girl’s hat and it tumbled along the sidewalk with her mother bent almost double in pursuit. Sharp splashes on the window.

‘They let you down rather,’ Thwaites said at last, his back still turned. ‘Turkey, I mean. We all thought so.’

He glanced over his shoulder at Wolff, then hobbled back to his chair with both glasses, his stick hanging from his arm.

‘Leaving you in the hands of those savages all that time. Here . . .’ he placed Wolff’s whisky on an occasional table, almost obliging him to take the seat opposite.

Wolff didn’t want his sympathy, he wanted to forget – at least, he wanted to try.

Thwaites persisted. ‘Made all of us angry,’ he observed with a shake of the head. ‘There but for the grace – what? Didn’t think they’d leave you high and dry – not the old man, not Cumming.’

‘Drop it, would you.’

‘It’s just – but if you say—’

‘Yes,’ he interrupted emphatically. ‘Yes, I do. Yes, please.’

Thwaites nodded slightly. ‘All right.’

Wolff stared at him for a few seconds longer, then walked to the chair and sat down. ‘What was Gallipoli like?’ he asked to fill the silence.

‘Well, you know Johnny Turk.’ Thwaites frowned and studied his glass for a few seconds before taking a long pull of whisky. ‘Don’t care for your Mussulman. Never have.’ Thwaites didn’t ‘care for’ anyone with a skin darker than his own and assumed other gentlemen felt the same way. ‘A shambles, a bloody shambles,’ he muttered disconsolately; ‘the Dardanelles. Damn fool idea. I was lucky to escape with this in May,’ he said, slapping the stick against his boot. ‘The boys in my battalion say it was worse in the summer – hot as hell . . .’ He took a little more whisky and swallowed hard. ‘It isn’t any better in France, is it?

The front had settled on the city and gusts of rain were rattling the window like bursts of gunfire. They sat in silence, Thwaites twisting his glass distractedly on the arm of his chair. The memory of that fly-blown foreign field where bits of Englishmen were left jigging on the wire had drawn the light from him.

‘What a pair we are,’ he said at last, lifting his glass and his chin. ‘Another?’

‘No, thank you, Norman.’

‘I think I will,’ he said, struggling to his feet again. ‘Sure? No, well . . .’ He poured himself another stiff one, his hand a little unsteady, then hobbled back to his chair. ‘We’ll win the war – with the Empire, with our friends here in America. Salute,’ he said, raising his glass to Wolff. ‘Trouble is, a lot of chaps are going to die before we do. We’re too good at it, aren’t we?’ He slumped heavily into his chair and settled his leg in front of him. ‘Killing, I mean.’

Wolff took another cigarette, tapping it lightly on his case. ‘I don’t know if we’ll win,’ he said, bending over the flame from his lighter, ‘and I can’t remember why it’s important, can you?’

Thwaites may have said something about little countries like Belgium and international law. He may have said something of democracy and an end to autocracy. Then he said nothing for a while, sipping the question in the gathering gloom of the room.

‘Why?’ he muttered at last. ‘Why?’ Bent forward, elbows on his knees, holding his head and his gaze to the carpet somewhere between his boots. ‘Why? For a boy called Roberts out there in no-man’s-land who will always be crying for his mother; and for Lowe, the little Durham miner whom I brush from my jacket every morning; and the baker’s son, Rees, who gives me a startled smile if I jostle a stranger on a train. Yes, Private Brown – he was so very sorry for the trouble he put me to, dying in the piss and the mud far from home. Yes . . .’ he raised his eyes to Wolff. ‘That’s why it’s important to me.’

Wolff gave a little nod and drew deeply on his cigarette.

‘A thinking chap should wonder, yes,’ Thwaites continued, settling back in his chair. ‘Bound to have a few doubts, and you’ve been ploughing a lonely furrow here,’ he smiled weakly. ‘Still, have to avoid self-pity.’

Wolff leant forward to grind the end of his cigarette in an ashtray. ‘I probably deserve that rebuke.’

They spoke for a time of the new arrangements: Thwaites was to take over the contact, run things the Bureau’s way, with dead drops, a postbox, a safe apartment, and new names. ‘I thought Mr Rogers would suit you. I’ll be something German – Schmidt.’ From time to time, his man would make deliveries. ‘Not a good valet but a stout fellow and very discreet. With me at Gallipoli,’ he explained. Gaunt and the Service politics they would leave to Wiseman.

‘And I almost forgot this,’ he said, as they were standing at the door. Bending awkwardly, he removed a large envelope from the bag at his feet and offered it to Wolff. ‘Letters from home, courtesy of our chief,’ he smiled sardonically. ‘You see, he has your best interests at heart.’

Wolff paid off the cab a few blocks short, conscious that someone watching his apartment might find and question the driver. The rain bounced on the sidewalk and seeped insidiously through his mackintosh, running round the brim of his hat into his face, the rumble and flash of the storm loosed like that black tide on a distant shore. Kinder. Splashing softly on his neck and hands. Thank God I’m alive and in New York, he thought. He felt an urge to run, sploshing with abandon through puddles, but he didn’t because he was a spy and even small steps he took with care. The East Street gutters were washing across the sidewalk and the stallholders had abandoned their barrows for the shelter of doorways and the tables at Mr Romeo’s Diner. From time to time a motor car crawled by with its driver hunched over the wheel, and a sad-looking shire horse was shivering between the shafts of a cart at the grocer’s. As Wolff approached his apartment building he took in the opposite side of the street with the ease of one who has learnt to see everything but look at nothing. Five workmen were standing beneath the eaves of the library, their backs pressed to the wall as the rain cascaded from the roof in a curtain. Twenty yards further on, a short man in a derby hat and smart overcoat was conspicuously failing to make himself inconspicuous. Back half turned, peering furtively at the name above a tenement bell, blind or inept or both, he was breaking the first dark commandment:
The good spy will hide among the ordinary brethren.

Nothing was out of place in his apartment; there’d been no uninvited guests. The maid lit a fire while he changed into dry clothes, then he settled in a chair beside it to read his letters. There was a note from C, thanking him and commending Sir William Wiseman; a long letter from his mother, and a small damp one from the Honourable Mrs Lewis in Violet’s wispy hand.
A whirlwind romance
,
the
sweetest man,
she wrote,
an old school chum of Reggie’s.
Her breathless sentences made him smile. The Honourable James had swept her off her feet – a position, Wolff reflected wryly, she was quite accustomed to – and he’d married her within the month. The Honourable James wanted so desperately to volunteer but unspecified health problems kept him at home, serving King and Country in the City.
I know dear Reggie would want me to be happy. You do too, don’t you, darling? Only, I haven’t told James we used to be friends, he would be awfully jealous. We did have fun, didn’t we, darling.

Wolff closed his eyes and tried to recollect their lovemaking, but could conjure only opaque images of a sort that hardly did her justice. Was it ever possible to recall more or was that particular pleasure like a tiny bird with brilliant feathers that hovers for a moment in the sun before it flutters away for ever? Turkey was the sort of shit-brown memory he would never lose. ‘Fool,’ he muttered to himself as he bent to stoke the fire. He didn’t love her, he wasn’t jealous, but there would be no finer way to spend a wet afternoon than to share a bed with the new Mrs Lewis. ‘Goodbye, Violet.’ He kissed the damp paper, then cast it on the fire and watched it shrivel to ash. Later, he read his mother’s letter, the one she always wrote; dutiful, patient, pious. Bent low over the escritoire in her Sunday room, her face framed by stray grey hair, her brow creased in concentration, the pen tight between her thin dry fingers; this, Wolff could imagine with the ease of a gallery Vermeer. And after, into the fire too, because Jan de Witt had neither lover nor living mother.