The Spy (19 page)

Blackstone had said,
one of them
.

“No, I don't,” Hamilton answered, his jaws tightening. “We're just betting on the safe side, that's all. Unfortunately, not all of our agents come back. In the present case, however, I am fully expecting that you both will. Still, one must sometimes take these risks, no matter how deeply it may affect one personally.”

Valerie looked at him.

Hamilton blushed.

“I understand, sir. That information we're after—?”

“Yes?”

“—it's as good as in the bag, sir!”

“Good show!” The Commander expected as much. “Now, where will you hide the pill? Once you have obtained it, of course.”

Valerie began to think.

Hamilton moved from one spot to another, then back to the chair. “There are other hiding places, naturally, used by women of British Intelligence—but not for you, my dear.”

“Why not, sir?” Would it melt? If they could do it, so could she!

“Because it's—
confidential
, you see.”

“Consider it forgotten.”

Hamilton beamed, he was feeling tired; this SEX thing, Blackstone's insistence. Or maybe it was the cyanide. From somewhere, he seemed to have a memory of a bad dream, turning itself off.

“I know where!” Sinclair cried, turning it on. “See?...right here. If I tuck it into my bra, next to my skin, I am sure the pill will be safe.”

“Ummm...?”

She offered to demonstrate it for him. He handed her a coin. It fell out, rolling under the bed. In retrieving it, the front of her gown dropped.

Hamilton looked.

Her breasts were driving him crazy. He couldn't bear the thought of it, those Everest breasts in enemy hands, that would be the first thing the Germans would grab for. The brassiere was out, at least the one she was trying to get back into.

Sinclair faced the mirror. She smiled at the glass, for identity. Hamilton had her blocked. He stepped aside, his feet were killing him. He yearned for a place of tranquility and peace. Also, he could use a drink. “Now then!” said Hamilton politely. “Where was I?”

“The pill, sir!”

“Oh, yes.”

“What about the inside of my thigh, Commander? Some tape? Surely the Germans would not look there. If they captured me—” If they did, the phone would ring down the road.

An American sergeant would answer it.

The Commander stared at her, then shook his head, as if to clear it. “With the Germans, Sinclair, nothing is sacred. How could you possibly have thought of your thigh?”

She didn't know.

“Your shoe might be a better idea,” he offered, casually. He moved to the foot of the bed. His own feet hurt. The chair was empty. Gratefully, he sat down. She kicked off a slipper. Hamilton, lunging, saw it sailing past him. It whanged into the fan, which threw it into the blackout curtain. “What
is
this?” croaked the Commander, walking over to get it, “a bloody cricket match?”

Sinclair, who had grabbed the chair, was looking at her other foot. Perplexed, he looked at what he was holding.

“My
fuzzy
, sir?”

Hamilton returned to the center of the room, the place where it all started. He was holding the...‘fuzzy.' “Here you are, Sinclair.” He leaned over, and placed it in front of her chair. Her face was in her feet.

All he could see was hair.

“Well now! We seem to have had a most instructive go at it!” He would have
words
, for Seymour. As for the mission: “All hands on deck, ship ready for sailing, would you say?”

Sinclair looked up. “Yes, sir. I couldn't have said it better myself, sir. Speaking for my own person, sir, if I may be so bold—”

“Get to it, Sinclair!”

“Yes, sir! Things may turn out ruddy well, sir!”

“Right-o. Well then, let us surely hope so,” said Hamilton, glad to be leaving, “in this line of work, one can never be too cautious.”

“Got it, sir.”

“Tomorrow, the studios at Elstree, hmmm? Fitting you out as a student, sort of thing. The latest French fashions, Sinclair! Even your bra, although no doubt, we have found a better hiding place.”

“We have?”

He clasped her hand tightly. Then he was gone.

She took off her robe, looking into the long mirror, on the front of the wardrobe. The turquoise gown, thin-woven, Egyptian, was certainly flattering. A better hiding place? She stepped forward, and opened the front.

“Oh my!” she said.

Rigid as bullets, they stood at attention. If she glued the pill to one of them, would they notice?

Another Friday night, and no date!

Her simple needs, so long repressed, so long imprisoned at the bottom of a class society, now rose to the surface, bobbing along on secret currents of desire, trapped in a too-small room, beneath soft cotton:

Keen for love.

She stood and looked, transposed on a sea of glass. She knew he would have liked to see her without her robe—she wished that he had. The best hiding place of all was her heart.

Nobody ever went there.

She sighed, uneasy at the ending of Hamilton's visit. She turned off the lights, opened the blackout curtains, and climbed into bed. The night was hot and her body pulled at her. She threw off the covers, kept the sheet, and fixed her pillows. Hamilton, inseparable from British interests, lingered for a moment in the middle of her thoughts. He had seemed so worried about de Beck. Not a word about
Marchaud
. Why was it she felt the girl was still alive? She did so wish to help her. To return her safely to France. There seemed no one else to protect her. She wanted to see her before Hamilton did.

What was the weather like in France
?

Her eyes had closed.

Beyond the harbor, across the breakwater where it joined the Channel, iron buoys tugged tautly on streaming chains. Below the surface, falling away into the open sea, the muffled creaking of metal and the rubbing of sounds wailed like a gnashing of bones.

On the sea road, at the outskirts of town, covert as the cat who listened to it, the motor of a limousine was idling. “
Sunday,”
she heard him say, and she knew it was him. Late from his travels, gaze directed to the wall of the hotel, he stood alone atop the high dime, driver waiting.

Sunday
...

Lights in her bedroom suddenly went out! She arose from her bed, and she was in the Camera Shop. All around her, pitiless and unretouched, were the pictures of her life. She was at the vicarage.
Inhabitants
pulled at her, but they wouldn't listen. Trying to talk to her, they were causing the night to cry. Sinclair looked up, and into the eyes of time. Staring back at her from across the bridge of life, they revealed the new voice rising. Stamped on her brain, like a schema, it was hers:

She was screaming!

The Camera was useless, ringing metal split...it was because of the missing face. Terror clawed like a wingless bird, flopping helplessly at his feet. Peering up, a dreamer's glimpse of his wide-brimmed hat. Now, too late, his cold eye counting, she felt herself rising and standing straight at the tunnel's mouth where the trapdoor yawned. There, coming to claim her, and extending a black glove—The Spy was standing!

She backed away. He raised his hand...

The wind was blowing.

It was increasing.

Sinclair was running!

She tripped, sought desperately for balance, and found herself staring into the face of Marchaud, coming back the other way and who was fighting to arrive. The Spy flew at their heels! Into the entrance of the cave, through the trapdoor and down. Hurry! We must get there before the mission
!

Turn loose! I'll catch you!

We can't take any cameras. No, not even reminders. You must leave all your memory in your body. Yes, leave it there, with the night that will have passed without us. This way, quickly, we have to go back:

Back.

All the way back, to when time was, before dreams. Arranged by The Spy, an evolutional duplication of the accelerated regression of her life, and of all the lives before her, Valerie Sinclair had just been swept away on a tide of terror; and whether she dreamt it, or would even be able to convince herself later that it actually happened, for this moment, for the longest moment of her life, she would not be able to say. Chased by the man without a face, the wall of what she had been taught to believe was reality, had cracked. Spilling through it, already spinning through her past, she had slammed into the surprised Marchaud along the way; and had grabbed the girl, to keep from falling herself.

“
Est ce L'Espion
?”

“
Oui! Allons-y!”

Black is the air that claws about them in the physical tunnel of time. They move, and are moved, as if swallowed by a snake, whose bones are made of rock and timbers, worming under the sea-drowned land somewhere above them. Half-crouching and resting on knuckles, not knowing or seeing—departing from human, before there was human, before language; now limping and feeling, and before love:

Velocity was coining
...

They had changed their hides and burned their hair with fire; and their weapons were metal, found, no one knew where, from the gods in their passing, for caves came before the world was, from the shattered plantations of stars. It would be a hundred million years before time would hint that they might count; up from the round bore hollowed for living food, rearing and reaching, deserted by rats that were yet to evolve.

Distance claimed, devouring, runic litter
...

Past the passageways of graves where no one dies and no one lives, stooped loping on haunches, and cringing and waiting, because the floor made their muscles for growing but their bones were compressed from the crouching, and they ascended.

They were not supposed to be here
...

The magnets of their bodies pulled them forward, and faster, and up to the Top, where the flatlands were; for in the timeless gulches that had cleaved around them, the Bipedal Block had formed; leaving ruts behind where life could crawl; and stand, at last, to seek among the killer stars the greater prey of war.

Two girls came bursting through
.

A nightbird shrilled across the flats, an eerie coda to their skills, and spilling from the tunnel's mouth, their clothing scorched, suspicions born, the earth released them from its grip. Tourists from the dark terrain, they stood on the shores of Brittany. They were in the future. Cones of light shone down upon them, aligned with the horizon, compressed below a distant river of stars.

Sunday
, he'd said.

Had they landed undetected?

“Over here!” It is Pierre's voice, uncertain. Something shimmers, moving through the trees. Framed as children, shadows emerge from the hedgerow. Whispers come, friends are parting, trading girl-things; and de Beck does not hear it. Nor does he know:
Marchaud, escaped from the Gestapo, has been hiding in its future. But The Spy has known, that is why she is here
. The girl approaches. De Beck, her partner, thinking her Sinclair, motions her over.

The French girl listens, she gathers close.

Pierre will leave for the farm. She is to stay, and hide. First contact, behind enemy lines, is a man's job. Intending to kiss her, instead he grins. “
Bonne chance, cherie
.” He turns, and disappears into the darkness.

The French girl was home, in France. Could her English other find her way back
?

Marchaud was twelve—
n'est-ce-pas?
—and she hoped to graduate. It was all right to travel—wasn't it—she had all her papers.

A cloud scurried across the moon. The moonlight paled, and was gone. A darkness had come over the girl, and fear. The white cross with the gold chain, given her by Hamilton, was missing from her neck. Had he not given it to her yet? Was it not yesterday evening, on Saturday? Was it not the Cross of Lorraine?

She would put it on, and feel safe.

Dreaming
...

Would the cross given her by Hamilton prove enough to protect her from the Bram Stokers of Hitler? Spawn of ghost and goblin, iron ghouls who tramped by night:
Les Nazis
, bobbing like Jack-o'-lanterns, across the graveyards of France.

Soldiers, smelling of rotted kelp
.

Fiddler crabs were marching in blue moonlight, gliding in crackling swells of bone and claw over rocks as sharp as razors. They'd come pouring out of their holes, alerted by, and running from, the dark-eyed creature's smell. It was the smell of bath powder, ferociousness, and sex: menacing spoor of the she-killer, who'd invaded their territory.

In the high reeds, Marchaud closed her eyes.

Valerie's dream, her fevered sleep, was preceding against the background of what it would become. She stared at the Casablanca fan, and wet her lips.

Sinclair went back to sleep and had a second dream.

There were bluebells in Brittany, but they were brown.

France, she remembered, had changed.

She, too, was a part of that change, some insignificant mote of its memory. She looked up at the stars. Before, missing wonder, had she taken the world for granted? She loved it so. She looked about, evaluating, tongue wetting dry lips. Her hand flexed. She wished for a gun.

She had been following Pierre.

Dreaming, frightened, she thought of Hamilton. His words, like those of an owl, cut through the beams of sleep, bringing wisdom:
to do what Pierre did
. What he had told her, less than moments ago.

Pierre stopped!

Valerie did the same. Had something made him suspicious? She jumped behind a tree. Pierre listened. Protected, biting pillows, she watched him. What was he doing? Weren't they partners?
Anything he could do, she would do! If he turned, she would turn. If he ran, she would
—

He was shaking the leg of his pants.

—
run
.