The Spy (17 page)

Kay, he meant. Telegraph Cottage, was where.

“Nice try. Is that how you cooked it up, out at MI.5?”

Bloody Blackstone!

Sighing deeply, Mountbatten pushed it forward: it was a gambling chip. “About the mission, Dwight, be a good chap with me now and let's put it to rest, shall we? The Prime Minister, himself, is of the opinion—”

Ike looked on his console. “Who do you think you are talking to?” He pressed a button.

So much for the Prime Minister.

With Eisenhower collecting, he would have to buy time. Mountbatten's best credit was himself. A frustrated Windsor, he answered as one: “This mission, not launched, yet one in which we seem to find ourselves being judged, as though after the fact, is not the issue. There is just the one issue, you see: whatever brings the war to a close. I therefore ask that you give serious consideration, as we have, to the possibility that such a decision on our part, admittedly at risk, be looked at in the light of responsible motivation, and by that I mean, in our hopes for an early peace!”

“What
is
this... a private war?” An orderly entered, Ike motioned for coffee.

“Come, man! We are not talking breach of faith here. Merely a few weeks, as I have told you—” Logic of the Realm, often that of the Allies themselves, this cousin of the King had made it his own. “You see now how that is, don't you?”

“Hell no, I don't,” Ike snapped, uncomfortable with this one-on-one. The Supreme Commander's job was victory, not peace. Mountbatten, an intellectual, had just tried to outflank him. Without the facts, it was not Ike's habit to pick up the phone to the Potomac; but one thing had emerged as clear as China. In Mountbatten's argument those facts were hiding as surely as if they had been admitted. “I don't see the point of spending any more time on this,” Eisenhower said, “unless it's—hold on, will you?” An Aide had entered, bearing papers. He put them on the desk. “Hold a minute, Louis.” They were stats for the Portsmouth meeting, more for Tedder than himself. “Thanks, Major.” He pushed them aside; the door closed. “Louis? Stay on the line, will you? About a minute...thanks.”

“Right-o.”

Ike needed this minute, to think.

Lord Louis had pointed a finger. During the electrical storm, materializing between lines, news of an outside Operative had emerged: Mountbatten seemed to have been accusing Ike of sending him. As a golfer, in a game he was still learning, it was as though Eisenhower had suddenly seen an invisible man enter, moving his ball in the rough with black-gloved hands. Mountbatten's allegations, real enough, were not those of a man who didn't believe them. Louis, mentioning a civilian, the man in the trench coat, had seemed resentful about it. Ike shook his head, he reached for the phone. Wasn't
theirs
, that was damned sure!

“Lord Louis, please”

On the Fairway, dark clouds had appeared. Wind was rising, blowing across the grass. Something was forming...it was in his mind.
Familiar noises on the line... a clicking
. Ike held his wrist up, he looked at his watch. The players were moving up. Following behind them, hidden by the trees, and closing like a cloud, The Spy was watching. On the Greens, birds fluttered down.

They didn't know why.

“—amazing,” Lord Louis was saying, “how clear the connection is. Envy you, old boy, being in England.”

Bull Durham was thundering towards him.

“As far as I'm concerned, so let me just say it now, and be done with it—friends who are friends, do not
do
this to friends. Suppose you think about it.” Both men knew if the war were over tomorrow, each would relish nothing better than to tell the other to go to hell.

“Through, are we?”

“Let me put it this way, Commodore,” said General Eisenhower, whose voice had a fluted rasp to it, as though he had a cold, “this isn't over by a long shot!”

Mountbatten coughed, it was on a golfer's backswing.

“Ho! Just like in polo, what?”

Eisenhower listened, it was in disbelief. All the way from Peredynia, a wooden ball had landed on his fairway. Like polo, golf had its own rules, and men who played fair and square didn't cut across the 18th hole, into another man's play, with a wooden mallet.

Eisenhower hung up.

The man on the horse, he considered, had just made an unfortunate swing. Not an American problem? He had been keeping his next card palmed, for a rainy day. Beyond the high windows, humid as hell, the early-morning sun was blaring. It being a Friday, the General started to ring for Tex. Instead, Ike pressed a button and spoke into a speaker. “You there?” He lit a cigarette.

“Yes, sir!” The voice was young. It was his private switchboard.

“Round up Captain Bernstein for me. Tell him he's got some calls to make.”

“Captain Bernstein. Yes, sir!” At the Command Relay Board, the older WAC looked up. “Something good?”

The breakfast bell rang.

In Southwick, in the classiest part of the war, hallways echoed to the sharp click of footsteps. The senior WAC, who looked like Betty Grable, got up and closed the door.

“Well?”

“Chief wants his lawyer.”

The call went through. Doors opened. Coffee came. Ike felt better: he was talking, between swallows.

After listening, Captain Bernstein said, “Right. You got it.” Morris Bernstein made a few notes, they were on a legal pad. Lighting a cigarette, he reached for the phone. One of his calls, to Martin Seymour, was interrupted: trouble on that line. Seymour called him back.
Parker
? When Bernstein hung up, he kicked in his scrambler, and called Ike.

“Looks like you're right. Whatever it is, it's
big
and they're after it. I'd say the Germans have it—
technology
, it looks complex as hell. What?... No. No, they don't want us to know about it!... That's right. Their British girl is specially trained...has a photographic memory. No, a
photographic
memory! Looks like...sir? Yes, sir! That's why they're sending her.” Ike asked him something and Bernstein laughed. “Well, you could call it an SOE mission if you
want
to...yes, sir, I agree with you.” The lawyer was sketching in his case:

Kick some ass
.

“Yes, sir, we will want to talk to her.”

“Take care of it.”

“And if they won't?”

“Then that's their decision, isn't it?”

“On my way.”

In the fanged and viperous world of the truly old, Ike's young heart beat with hope. His Jew, in this hot summer of 1944, did not pretend to worship a bank that called itself a church. Using his lawyer as a hammer, Ike would pull the British nail that had him pinned.

Within the hour, Bernstein's briefcase would contain a letter to a man whose face he had never seen. Just returned from the can, he was stubbing out his cigarette when the phone rang.

Betty Grable answered it. Whoever it was, knew the right words. “Why, thank you! It's so sweet of you, to say that.” She looked up, impressed: “It's a Mister Bridley.”

Bernstein grabbed it.

In the background, outside the King's Pavilion built for Victoria, warm rain was falling. “Morris?” came the familiar, deal-making voice, on the other end.

“Jimmy,
baby
!”

It was a Sidney Greenstreet kind of day with a Casablanca fan droning dully overhead and tessellated shadows from the French windows forming pools of reminiscence from beams of the late afternoon sun. It reminded her of Malta, and the hot winds of the sirocco. Rose-colored trees of Sliema, dripping with water...

Life without a heat wave, she concluded, was like David Hamilton without a secret. The Commander, who appeared to have an inside track with the weather, must be getting it from
somebody
—and very high up! Could that somebody be the someone? Hamilton, of course, would be hiding his weather secrets behind the clouds of security.

Were those same clouds hiding The Spy?

Following the briefing in the cave, she had spent the afternoon strolling about the peaceful seaside town staring into the shop windows and wondering about boats, knowing she was a part of something, yet feeling on her own. It was difficult to realize that just fifty miles across the Channel, Englishmen were fighting; and that many of them, at this very moment, were fighting for their lives. She had returned to the hotel along the beach, ducking flying things buzzing up from steaming mounds of seaweed and trudging ankle deep through dunes as white as salt.

Arriving back at her room, she washed her hands and emptied her shoes off the veranda. The stream of sand brought an indignant shout from a fat man in a chaise lounge one floor below who was staring with horror at his drink.

Sinclair looked down.

She went back inside. Throwing her shoes in the comer, she pulled off her stockings and returned with a chair. Propping her feet up, she assembled paper and envelopes, along with a pen she had swiped from Carrington's office. He wouldn't miss it. She began to write:

Dear Brian
...

She finished the two letters as Hamilton had instructed. Her family would believe her because they believed anything. The one for her son, she addressed to the Commander. Checking the letters and tossing them on the dresser, she hauled the chair back inside, placing it under the Casablanca fan. Wanting it to go faster, she got up on the chair and stretched but she couldn't reach the cord. Belly-flopping on the bed, Valerie flipped the pillow to its cool side, and closed her eyes. No matter how dark it got, inside it was darker: the curtains that were drawn in her head. Iotas were dancing back of her eyelids, squiggled geometries that floated slowly away across the dark blue concaves of space, jumping up again, veering off to the side, clottings of spiderweb. Her breathing became still.

Distant, a clock chimed.

It must have been a troubled dream. When she awoke that evening she discovered that the chenille, upon which she had slept, was soaked in sweat. She got up, pulling the curtains and clicking on the lights. Stripped to her panties, she hit the floor for push-ups. Hedging at the forty-first, she faked her way to fifty, her boobs banging on the rug. She straightened up and went into the bathroom and brushed her teeth. Flashing through a bath, she toweled off, taking care to protect the love note on her thigh: her Sergeant's name and phone number.

What if they canceled the mission?

She stared at it like some mysterious hieroglyphic, it was upside down. She walked back to the mirror, and looked closer. She would have the devil of a time trying to decipher it.

It was a two-man job
.

Valerie put on her face, got dressed, and went downstairs—into the mauve world of night. The lobby hummed with war's sweet urgency, muffled in the thick carpets of other years. Black curtains draped the front glass. Cigar smoke drifted about the desk. The dining room was packed; she would wait for it to clear. Sitting in an overstuffed chair, her feet barely clearing the floor and leafing through a magazine, she gave the appearance of waiting for her mother. From the mezzanine, low laughter and the velvet thrumming of music: a private party.

Not invited, she would seek her own.

Entering the dining room, she ordered a proper supper on Hamilton's credit: sipping demurely on soup before wolfing down roast beef and strawberries, topped with apple pie and American coffee conned from the waiter; and a cigarette from his private pack.

“Name's Clive,” he said. As part of the deal, signified by fluttering eyelids on her part, he would be expecting a date with her, on Tuesday.

It was just ten o'clock.

Stubbing the cigarette, Sinclair went to the bar and ordered a double Scotch, her favorite! She sat off by herself, drinking it and wishing for Sergeant Blumensteel; but the Americans who had come to the dance were not in tonight. Their barracks were distant, and they had come by bus. She didn't know how the Sergeant got back.

She hoped he got back happy.

Sitting quietly, she fingered her glass. Neither Pierre nor the Commander were on hand. Perhaps Hamilton had dined earlier. Pierre, no doubt, was already on his way to London: which seemed to be his favorite hangout.

As though peering into a crystal ball, she stared into her drink. The future lay in France... a tall-dark-handsome stranger. Pierre? Why were they always tall-dark-and-handsome? Why not fair, broad-shouldered, and free? She could see it: she would hand her lover the letters. She thought of the vicarage and of her father's cruel joke, paraphrased from sailors, comparing her mother to Australia:
We all know where it is, but nobody wants to go there
.

She glanced up.

The kitchen was closing, and the music had stopped. She was relieved then when the barman called time. “Time, Gentlemen, Time!” There was a rush of orders for doubles. Valerie read her watch. She would have an early train to catch. She thought of Basil. “
Ge' on with it
,” her dead husband chided gently, “
n'stop muckin about
”

Stay out of it, Basil
.

No wonder she couldn't get a date! Sinclair slugged her drink, pushed up from the table, and hurried out of the bar. At the rail, heads had turned. One of the locals, who had been sitting there rehearsing what he would say to her, nudged the fellow next to him.

“Haw'd you like t'take 'er 'ome tonight, mate?”

Valerie Sinclair, in panties and bra, having hung up her uniform and brushed her hair, was just climbing into bed when the knock came. Two knocks, to be precise. Turning on the light and struggling into her robe, she opened the door a crack, leaving the chain on. Seeing it was Hamilton, she let him in immediately.

“Ah, there you are! I am so sorry to disturb you, and I hope you will not get the wrong impression, but I felt it best to come at once.” The Commander was looking worried. “Important to go over a few things with you privately, as it were.” He surveyed the room, then found a chair. “May I? Thank you.” He glanced up at the fan. “We covered most of it this morning, cave and all that, but there are still certain personal matters that we need to address.”