The Poison Tide (4 page)

He’d had many affairs. Short, intense, unrestrained and blinding for a time. He had told two women that he loved them but when it was over he couldn’t be sure. He cared for his mother. The thought made him smile: the spy and his mother. His father had died when he was five and his mother and paternal grandfather had brought him up, a little foreign boy, an only child in a lonely place – always running.

Violet stirred beside him and he craned forward to kiss her hair. It was damp with perspiration and smelt of her perfume and their sex. He traced the graceful curves of her body beneath the sheet with his fingertips. Would it be different if they were in love? He was sorry he’d upset her at the restaurant. He had wanted to protect her from scandal but all he’d succeeded in doing was inviting more. One day soon the post would travel up the line and there would be a letter for Major Curtis.

‘Letter for Major Curtis.’

Wolff could see him there, knee deep in Flanders mud, preparing to lead a raiding party, or in a funk hole under shellfire. There’d be a big smile on his face – there was always a smile on Reggie Curtis’s face. He’d tear the letter open with a dirty fingernail.

Overcome with grief, he would lead a suicidal charge into no-man’s-land and be blown to small pieces by a Jack Johnson. Reggie could be the most obliging of fellows.

Wolff shuffled down the bed until his face was close to Violet’s, then leant forward to kiss her lightly on the lips. She smiled but didn’t open her eyes, and he felt a surge of tenderness for her. ‘Shameless hussy, I’ll miss you.’ He’d drunk deeply of her, intoxicated by her beguiling smile, the scent of her and the way she seemed to glide through life with effortless grace – those things and more. But it wasn’t enough. It was an illusion. He leant forward to kiss Violet again. He would go to Germany and, for as long as he could stay alive, he’d pretend to be someone else, someone who hadn’t broken and screamed in agony and begged them to stop. Wasn’t that his patriotic duty? Didn’t he owe his country that much? C had blown his whistle and he would go over the top with the rest.

T
HE TEMPERATURE FELL
to freezing at dusk and by the time the ship was close to Christiania the mooring ropes were stiff with ice. Wolff watched from the promenade deck as the pricks of light on the banks of the fjord closed into the solid band of the city. The port was quieter than he’d known it before the war, with fewer vessels in passage or waiting at anchor for a berth. The enemy had been pinched out of Norwegian waters. The
Helig Olav
came alongside the pier beneath the curtain wall of the medieval fortress. Although it was late, there was a crowd at the Scandinavian America Line’s office to meet her and taxicabs and tradesmen’s vehicles were idling on the dockside road, their lamps winking a secret signal as people scurried between them on to the quay. Ropes made fast, stevedores began to swing gangways in place along her side. Wolff peeled his glove from the frozen rail and joined the queue of passengers shuffling towards the companionway.

‘You’re Mr Jan de Witt,’ C had informed him the day he accepted his assignment. ‘A Dutchman with a grudge.’

‘An Afrikaner?’

‘The same thing,’ he joked. ‘You crossed the Atlantic on an American passport – one of our chaps made the journey for you.’

‘You were certain I’d do as I was told then?’

‘You’re a naval officer, yes,’ he’d replied matter-of-factly. Rank and the service he dropped and raised with the incontinence of a tart’s knickers. ‘Our Mr de Witt works for New England Westinghouse and poses as an American, an engineer adventurer if you like, but on the wrong side. You’ll spend a week in Amsterdam visiting business partners – meetings have been arranged for you – then you’ll travel to Norway.’

The Norwegians were ‘our neutral allies’, C had said. It was possible to ‘arrange things’ in Christiania.

From the second-class crowd at the top of the gangway, Wolff watched an officer in the Norwegian border police examining the papers of passengers disembarking at the bottom. The elderly constable beside him had shrunk inside his greatcoat, his face frozen in an expression of complete indifference. Wolff paused to allow a young woman with two small girls to step in front of him, then followed them closely down the gangway. By some small miracle, the steward he’d entrusted with his case had fought his way off the ship and was negotiating with a cab driver.

The police officer demanded Wolff’s passport in perfect English, and turned its pages deliberately, holding the red State Department stamp to his eye. He was older than Wolff, with an intelligent face but the complexion, the small broken veins, of a heavy drinker.

‘Your name is de Witt?’ he asked at last.

‘That’s what it says.’

‘What is your business here?’

‘I’m visiting a client. Paulsen Shipping.’

‘And then?’

‘And then a meeting in Copenhagen.’

‘I see.’ The police officer folded the leaf with the stapled photograph of Wolff carefully into the passport and offered it back to him: ‘It seems in order.’

But when Wolff tried to take it he wouldn’t let go.

‘Where will you be staying in Christiania, Mr de Witt?’ There was something in the way he spoke the name
de Witt
that suggested he had heard it before, something in his frown and in his little bloodshot eyes, a crack in the veneer of cool indifference that is the part of the experienced minor official everywhere.

‘I have a reservation at the Grand Hotel,’ Wolff replied curtly. ‘So, if you’ve finished . . .’

The policeman stared at him suspiciously for a few seconds more, then released his passport: ‘Thank you, Mr de Witt.’ And the mask slipped back into place.

The Grand Hotel was the place to be noticed in Christiania. It wasn’t handsome or especially grand but it was on the city’s main thoroughfare, a stone’s throw from the parliament, palace, National Theatre and university. The hotel of choice for well-heeled travellers and businessmen, and now Europe was at war – for the gentleman spy. Its façade was in the French style and reminded Wolff a little of the Bureau’s offices in Whitehall Court. A letter on Westinghouse headed paper was waiting in reception with instructions for his meetings in Christiania and Copenhagen and promising a further communication in Berlin, and Wolff noted that the reservation had been made for him by someone at the company in America. The Bureau hadn’t cut any corners. The porter carried his bags to the room and was rewarded with a gratuity generous enough to be memorable. Wolff unpacked his own clothes. They had been bought for him in America but were too crisp and new to risk handing over to a valet. It was just the sort of small thing that might arouse suspicion. There was always someone happy to sell information in a grand hotel: perhaps the maid who emptied the wastepaper baskets of well-to-do guests for only a few krone a week, or the pageboy who delivered their correspondence for even less, or the concierge who summoned the taxicabs and spoke to their drivers later. Policeman or spy, British or German – there was money to be made from everyone in a neutral country. Wolff poured himself a whisky from the bottle he’d brought with him, ran a hot bath and lay sipping and soaking in a cloud of steam.

He’d spent six weeks growing into Mr Jan de Witt’s skin.

‘I know it isn’t long,’ C had observed. ‘But I’m confident we’ve thought of everything. You’ll need a legend the enemy can follow. Mansfeldt Findlay at the Legation in Christiania can help you with footprints. He’s a good fellow. Done this sort of thing for us before. We have him to thank for the informer.’

Wolff lifted a soapy hand to his beard. Jan de Witt’s little Dutch beard. It took time to get used to. A beard always changed his appearance markedly; it made his thin face fuller and intensely serious, like the photograph of his father that hung in a thick black frame above the fireplace in the parlour at his mother’s farm.

‘Damn good thing your beard, you know,’ C had teased. ‘Traitors have beards.’

‘Oh? I thought it was a monocle?’

C had chuckled like a fat schoolboy. ‘Makes you look a little like Casement.’

The following morning, Wolff took breakfast at the Grand Café with an old copy of the
New York Times
. At a little before nine he visited the front desk to ask for directions to Paulsen Shipping. It was his intention to walk the short distance to the harbour, he said, and when his business was over he hoped to walk a little further. Taking Baedeker from the pocket of his overcoat, he let the porter trace a route on a map to the city’s notable sights. A stiff north-easterly was shaking the hotel’s broad awning like the mainsail of a ship, force 6 fresh to rock the steamers anchored in the bay but bright enough for Wolff to step out with his coat over his arm. He walked briskly along Karl Johans gate towards the parliament, then on to the East Station, stopping from time to time to glance in shop windows, and even dashing between trams to a newspaper kiosk on the pavement opposite.

Paulsen Shipping occupied a modest two-storey building of the sort that was being pulled down all over the city to meet the requirements of the brash new century. Its granite-faced neighbours had been built in the ten years since independence and were indistinguishable from many of a similar age in the City of London. A clerk led Wolff from its tiled hall to a large office on the first floor and asked him to wait, with the assurance that Mr Paulsen would be pleased to welcome him soon. It was a large mahogany-panelled room, smoke-filled and gloomy, with only two small windows overlooking the narrow street. A dozen or so brokers and clerks – young men in their twenties for the most part – sat facing their managing director’s door like children in a Victorian schoolroom. On the wall behind them, the severe grey countenance of the man Wolff took to be the company’s founding father.

‘Jacob the First. My grandfather.’ The managing director had slipped out of his office and was standing above Wolff with a broad smile on his face.

‘I’m the third. Jacob Paulsen the Third,’ and he offered Wolff his hand. ‘Isn’t that how you Americans style it, Mr de Witt? As if you were kings. This is my kingdom,’ he said, opening his arms to the room like a music-hall doxy, ‘until I’m swallowed up by Olsen or Knutsen Shipping or one of the others. Please . . .’ and with a flamboyant sweep of his hand he invited Wolff to step into his office.

‘My grandfather was a friend of Henrik Ibsen’s, you know,’ he said, pulling the door to behind them. ‘Helped him with a little money. Sit down, please.’ He pulled a red leather armchair away from his desk. A log fire was spitting in the hearth and dancing warmly on the polished panelled walls.

‘Peculiar, really, he didn’t care for the theatre. All my grandfather cared about was ships and money – we were quite a company in his day.’

His English was perfect but drawled in the languid manner of an undergraduate aesthete. Early fifties, tall and thin, his straw-blond hair streaked with white, the same light-blue eyes as his grandfather, the same thin, almost colourless lips, a smile hovering constantly at the corners. Mr Jacob Paulsen the Third was an easy fellow but not a foolish one. There was a wariness in his glance, in the deliberate way he walked to the drinks cabinet in the corner of the room.

‘A celebration,’ he said, lifting two small glasses. ‘Have you tried our akevitt?’

‘Is there something to celebrate?’

‘Of course. Always. But our arrangement in particular,’ and he placed the glasses and a bottle on a tray and carried them back to his desk. The bottle in his left hand, he opened a drawer with his right, took out an envelope and slid it across the desk to Wolff. ‘It’s from the minister at your Legation, Mr Findlay . . .’

‘Do you know what’s in it?’

‘Arrangements for your meeting.’

‘Do you know where?’

‘No.’

Wolff ran the tip of his forefinger along the flap to check the seal. Satisfied, he tore it open and unfolded the note. There were just two lines.

‘Have you been to our country before, Mr de Witt?’ Paulsen had poured the akevitt and was settling into his chair with a glass.

‘Are you sure you know your part?’ Wolff asked impatiently.

He frowned. ‘Perfectly. Unlike my grandfather I love theatre and I’m a consummate liar. Your people in London must have spoken to you about me? I have been of service in the past. Now, your very good health.’ He raised his glass in salute, then drained it in a gulp. ‘Please,’ he said, a little hoarsely, and gestured with his glass to the one he’d poured for Wolff. ‘Please.’

‘They’ll send someone to you. He won’t be German. One of your own countrymen, probably someone you know. A businessman, perhaps a family friend or a policeman . . .’

‘I have everything,’ and Paulsen rested the palm of his right hand on a large leather-bound ledger, ‘correspondence, invoices. My staff know your name and that you work for Westinghouse but I’ve handled everything and that will have made them curious, even a little suspicious.’

Wolff nodded approvingly.

‘Look to your own part, Mr de Witt; rest assured I know what I’m doing. Now another . . .’ and, half rising, he reached across the desk for the bottle. ‘And this time I hope you’ll join me.’

‘Are there references to the rifles in the paperwork?’

‘Do you read Norwegian? No, well . . .’ Paulsen put down the bottle and picked up the ledger. ‘Let me put your mind at rest.’ He flicked through it lazily in search of a suitable page. ‘Here’s something:
The shipment will be hidden in a large consignment of electrical equipment and stamped by the Westinghouse Company
. . . And here: . . .
the client’s agent will board in Darwin . . . he will make his own arrangements for unloading
. . . You see. Clues. Only clues. But lots of them.’

‘Good. To our arrangement then,’ Wolff replied, leaning forward to pick up his glass. ‘To the success of your performance, Mr Paulsen. Skoal.’ He drank the spirit in one and banged the glass down emphatically on the edge of the desk.